internet

If you want to get over your fear of the Backrooms, read the wiki

February 12, 2023 / ,
An empty high school hallway.

My friends and I played this multiplayer horror game, Into the Backrooms. It was fine, lots of fun despite not a lot of polish.

Except, wow, I didn’t realize there was so much lore to the Backrooms. Did you know that victims of Cursed Souls could get sent to Level -250, “Pylon Purlieus,” one of the deadliest negative levels of the Backrooms?

For me, approaching your horror property this way makes it the opposite of scary. Some fans created r/TrueBackrooms, a splinter cell of the original forum for posting pictures with the original Backrooms’ eerie simplicity. One of the posts made me chuckle, poking at a greentext that read:

So what if someone “noclipped” in the year 1800 or 40 BC or the year 2200? Would they still go to an early 21st century room? At least make your creepypasta reasonable.

I don’t think fear is exactly the unknown. Lots of properties eke (eek) horror out of clearly defined rules. The Quiet Place. It Follows. The Ring. In properties like these, fear is a matter of timing. You know exactly what’s going to happen and when that thing is going to happen. Inevitability is just as scary as not knowing.

Less information, more information, neither determines whether something is scary. No more than knowing a color’s hexcode will tell you what color it is. The term Michelle Chang uses for this is “data resistance,” and it’s a concept I’ve gotten a lot of use out of and definitely will explore more.

“Scary” describes a feeling, not any kind of narrative flourish. At least for my taste, though, a two-headed robot that wants to stabilize timelines doesn’t have quite the same mystery as damp wallpaper and stale air.

Lost on Usenet

February 12, 2023 / ,

An old Usenet window reading "Agent - [alt.usenet.offline-reader]." A text box at the bottom reads, "Re: Have you tried Agent yet? Has anyone out there tried Agent yet? A friend of mine said it was really cool."
Photo via web.cortland.edu
I’m pulling archived Usenet pages for a story I’m working on. This is unmistakeably the Internet, but in the uncanny valley of a totally bygone culture.

Whether the old internet is inherently eerie by modern standards — it’s decluttered, styleless, emotionless — or whether it’s only cast that way by horror fiction that uses the old internet (like Welcome to the Game) is, I guess, a philosophical problem. Chicken, egg.

Which, by the way, is there a name for that genre? In fiction it would be called “epistolary.”

Anyway, it has me thinking about discoverability again, the refusal of the internet to show us something unless we know to ask for it. Usenet was an insular community of insular communities. Discord, if you want to compare the two, feels like a vast community full of vast communities. I’ve tried my best to get involved with Discord servers. You can’t get a word in edgewise. The early adopters, the people who were “there,” acquire the clout to moderate a conversation. As a newbie, things become much harder. You can scroll through thousands of users and struggle to find your own name.

“Community” is a bigger word than it’s ever been before. It unshutters a far more grim angle of discoverability. Namely, who will discover you?

Conversely, maybe what fuels internet-interface horror is the idea that you will certainly be seen?

Yeesh. You don’t want to see someone in an empty hall, and you don’t want to cram in a crushed hall. It’s almost like the march of technology asks difficult questions that force us to adapt to new realities. Someone should write several centuries of genre fiction about this stuff.