obscuniverse

[obscuniverse]

Obscu listens to: The Magnus Archives - Episode 1 ‘Angler Fish’

@derinthescarletpescatarian​ has been ranting at me about this series for what feels like a million years so here I am. Also apparently I’m the world’s biggest stereotype. Let’s roll, shall we?

Oooh, I do like spooky violin. Can’t have a horror anything without spooky violin.

Okay can we pause and talk about the symbolism of having ‘Angler Fish’ be your first episode title? Fun Fact! As you may recall, the angler fish is what happens when you ask any child to draw any animal that they imagine has teeth, and the teeth come out all different sizes and directions but they’re definitely spikes, and then they get so caught up with the teeth that they rush the rest of the body so it looks like a particularly carnivorous poop? That’s the one. The part that’s particularly relevant is the the bit where they’re a bunch of glowing knobheads; that is, they have a fleshy forehead appendage where the end is colonised by bioluminescent bacteria, which they use as a lure for smaller, less coprotype prey. So we’ve got some strong lure imagery, and it’s the first episode, so on one hand this is literally the lure that the series is using to draw us, the readers, into consuming (or, if you know @derinthescarletpescatarian​, being consumed by) the series. Of course, it’s almost certainly referring to the content of the episode as well so I anticipate a protagonist (and possibly diverse other victims) to be _lured _into something bad for them.

Secondary Fun Fact! Anglerfish mating involve the male biting into the belly of the (several times larger in size) female and hanging on until their skin and blood vessels literally fuse together, with the anglerfish male being fed directly by nutrients from the blood of the female through their shared circulatory system. Will our protagonist bite off more than they can chew and become hopelessly, permanently enmeshed in something larger and more dangerous than they, so interwoven with it that they are unable to extricate themselves from it but also being given by it the means to survive? Will we the listeners? I guess we’ll just have to hit play because I’m only 36 seconds in. I do like the narrator’s voice though.

More spooky violin, can’t go wrong with that. Ooooh a crescendo. Hot fucking damn. Oh snap there was some sad tunelessness there!

Ohshit it’s a recorded diary! Every horror game I’ve ever played has prepared me for this moment.

Nothing spooky happens at a research institute named for strength or might in both Latin and Norse. Certainly not one that deals in esoterica. Okay, let’s see what Johnathan Sims (Simms?) gets up to at Swole Hogwarts.

What’s that? The previous Defense Against the Dark Arts Teacher Archivist is dead and you’ve been hired by Spooky French Dumbledore who is almost certainly a monster because of course he is to replace them? This will end only well and definitely not with a spiral into a mental breakdown culminating in some Here’s Johnny! shenanigans.

“There are very few genuine cases” and now that you’ve jinxed yourself every single genuine case in the world is going to be crawling out of the walls to say hello. You’d think after 4 years you would’ve learned not to say such things. It’s like watching D-Class personnel at the SCP foundation.

“When an investigation has gone as far as it can it goes to the archives” (emphasis mine). So you’re gonna be digging into a 200 years’ of spoopy cold cases that are gonna get real hot real quick. I’m down. 

Ahahahaha. Oh academia. Even in Swole Hogwarts you can’t get away from theorists vs practicalists.

86-91-G/H is definitely going to come up again. I can vividly picture the wild strewn-about room of someone driven mad by the haunting nature of their job. Or of my own office because of who I am as a person. I wonder which file ate Gertrude. I also wonder if the lack of use of modern electronics is a safety measure that Old Mate Johnny has unknowingly violated.

“I have secured the services of two redshirts, and you can tell because they’re unnamed researchers” “I don’t expect Martin to secretly be the highly skilled wizard/creature manipulating events form their apparent background doddering disguised as a silly fool in keeping with long fairy-tale tradition contribute anything except delays” Martin is definitely Snape. OOOooooOOOooooOOH, attempting to digitise T̵̨̛͚͉̫̩̰͍̓̽̽̍̓͑̓̾͌͗̂̈́̉ḫ̸͈̪̉̆̓̀͌̓͒̈̋̐͝ĕ̵͉̻̻ ̷̜͙̤͎͈̝̮̘̄̅̓̆̿̕͝R̴̪͑̍̒̍̾̅̐́͘͠͠ę̸̞̪͕̠͍͉̝̀̈́́͌̽ͅc̴̟̱͈̦̎̅̋̏͆̌̇͘͠͠o̶͚̞͕̲͒̋r̷̲̟̭͚̠̾͑́͋̓̈́̎͒̾̚d̴̩͓́͑̀͊̂̿͛i̴̗͈̣̟̻̯̼̘̞͕̋͜ͅņ̶̡͍͚͙̩͇̟̝̩̬͍͖̳̓g̷̯̬̙̱͚̏͂̔͐̉̇̾̋̓̎̈́͘s̷̢̫̗͙̱̻̳̞̩̐͛͂̍̑̐̊̚ have been met with significant spooky magical fuckery distortion. Fancy that.

The redshirts are named Tim and Sasha, and they will be doing some supplementary investigation suicidal monster hunting to fill in Blanks That No Man Was Meant To Fill. Maybe they’ll survive now that they have names, but they really should’ve saved the name for when one of them is mortally injured and the audience has to care enough about them for them to survive so you can reveal that they are in fact a person.

“I apologise to my eventual replacement after I am horribly eaten by/transformed into whatever is in 86-91-G/H any future researcher.”

Johnathan Sims is Niles Crane from Frasier and I will accept no word to the contrary.

Ah yes, the most esoteric and terrifying of eldritch phenomena; someone trying to bum a ciggy off you when you’re 80% scotch and 60% regret.

Ah, so “can I have a cigarette” with a human form ‘asking’ is the glowy knob on this ghost’s forehead. Completely without intonation because it’s just playing back a noise that attracts hammered people at night rather than understanding words that attract hammered people at night. Pretty sure I’ve seen this in an anime.

Apparently totally sloshed British students make better horror/urban fantasy protagonists than most movies would credit.

I take it back.

At least the spooky poopfish got some dinner.

I wonder if the missing student’s name also been John is a bit of tongue in cheek.

Oooh he’s created a “this is all bullshit” category into which he clearly intends to consign most of these. STOP PLAYING CHICKEN WITH THE UNFATHOMABLE HORRORS OF THE VOID BETWEEN THE STARS. Or, y’know, keep at it. This will not be hilarious and/or traumatic at all.

“Check out this photo of a spooky ghost if you run it through a sixth sense filter” That’s right Johnny, get beckoned.

I’m actually not 100% on this format but I’ll give it a few more tries.

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One thing I love about Judaism is that long involved conversations about things like “can a zombie attend shul?” or “can i use my pet dragon to light candles on shabbat?” or “is meat from a replicator kosher?” are seen as completely normal.

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Someone invites Crowley over for shabbos after seeing him alone in the back row during service and he spends the next few decades making sure they get new shoes and gift baskets on the appropriate holidays. 

“Yeah, that’s uncle Crowley. His granddad had dinner with our family once and now his family’s just like weird cousins. Always wears black; he’s either orthodox or his whole family’s been very goth for, like, ever” –one of the family’s kids at torah study

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stupid leftists and their belief in *checks notes* the intrinsic value of human life

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Let’s talk about The Mummy (1999)

Someone was talking at me yesterday about this movie and I was getting riled so I decided to go full rant. Specifically in regards to the feminist podcast that slammed it.

I don’t even remember which podcast it was, but I am still rankled and baffled that any “feminism in movies” podcast could jump to anything but “this movie is phenomenal.”

First of all, even just discussing the overall quality: sure, it might not have been groundbreaking with its cgi or plot twists. But back in the 90s, that wasn’t the standard of measure like it is now (and even now is a shitty standard that needs to die). This movie was light and funny and yet hit all the right beats to maintain the dire stakes needed to make it a compelling action flick.

Its characters are fully realized and entirely distinct from each other. Even those treated with a broader brush, such as the Americans, were charismatic enough that we were fully invested in their fate. The entire cast of characters were real people with real impact and real agency.

The script is quotable and fucking hilarious. There are gems from literally every single character. Rick and Evie have actual chemistry, aided by Rachel Weisz’s natural magnetism and Brendan Frasier’s career-long knack for acting utterly charmed with his female costars.

Actually, let’s talk about Rick O'Connell for a second. This is peak 90s Brendan Frasier. He is absolutely GORGEOUS, suave, and cool, rugged and handsome. He is the epitome of the 1920s adventure hero. Dear god I want to kiss those casting directors. But for all his general peak masculinity? He’s feminist as fuck. He is equally dumbstruck by Evie as she is by him, and it’s wholly evident that it’s more than a “oh no she’s hot” thing.

How do we know?

He steals her some tools to dig with. This gift demonstrates that he a) has identified her passion for archaeology, b) has recognized her proficiency in the field, despite it not being explicitly stated on screen, and c) sees a chance to restore her full and active participation in the discovery of Hamunaptra.

There is never a moment where Rick assumes to be the leader of the expedition. He is the weapons expert, the muscle–and he knows it. Better than that, he’s totally okay with it. He follows Evie’s lead in all things.

Another favorite moment of mine is when they’re facing off with the American team on Day 1, and Evie realizes there’s a chamber underneath Anubis they could use to excavate the statue. She puts her hand on Rick’s arm, looks him in the eye, and says very deliberately “there are other places to dig.” And he yields, instantly.

By comparison, see the way the Americans treat their workers and guide.

Does he groan about his work being made exponentially harder as a result? Nope. And that’s a recurring theme in his behavior the entire goddamn movie. The only time he is in charge is when a situation is in his wheelhouse– namely, combat and rescue. And it deserves mentioning that the majority of the time that he’s in charge, Evie is not present.

Meanwhile, Evie– her adventurer’s spirit chafing in an academia that dismisses her for her gender– is an absolute marvel. She is visually coded as being very feminine (she’s in dresses and long hair most of the film), but that fact in no way detracts from her competence and agency.

She is consistently protrayed as a fully capable expert in egyptology and there is never a single moment where she waffles on what to do. Even when she’s the damsel in distress, she actively makes the choice to be so because she weighs the potential outcomes and decides doing so provides their best chance of success.

Evie is never the passive victim. She is constantly brash, constantly scheming, and saves the lives of her would-be rescuers mid-abduction. And when her brother (who is the failure of the family, against type) needs help with translation, she correctly translates for him while being throttled by a mummified priestess.

When I first saw this film, I was too young to realize how novel it was. Back then, all I knew was that it was just a good time. But now as an adult– an adult acutely aware of the treatment female characters have gotten in the twenty years since– I marvel at the respect with which the writers and directors treated Evie.

I marvel at how tender Rick was allowed to be, despite his rugged adventurer archetype.

The Mummy (1999) is peak storytelling. It doesn’t try to outsmart the audience, but rather lays out a consistent, coherent narrative that gives the characters and viewers room to breathe. It invests the audience enough to care whether the characters succeed in their goals.

The Mummy (1999) does it right. It’s the reason that any talk of the Tom Cruise version gets an immediate eyeroll from me, because whatever modern grimdark grit they shove into a story about a mummy cannot compare to the reliable and timeless entertainment of the 1999 adaptation.

All modern media should aspire to be the kind of film that The Mummy (1999) is.

[obscuniverse]

You ever think about how there's no such thing as night time?

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Obscu comments: Ready Player One, Part 1.

This is @derinthemadscientist‘s fault. Chapter 0

“I was sitting in my hideout watching cartoons“ Okay you’re either a grizzled old veteran with an actual hideout who watches cartoons because they can, or an awkward child who calls their room a ‘hideout’.

“globally networked“ unlike all other MMOS, apparently.

“At first, I couldn’t understand why the media was making such a big deal of the billionaire’s death.“ Awkward child it is.

“so the unwashed masses“ Could you maybe try harder to sound aloof and superior? I’m just not getting your disdainful sneering coming through as clear as I’d like.

I’m all of three paragraphs in and here and I can feel the neckbeard.

“But that was the rub. James Halliday had no heirs.“ And if this was set in a feudal monarchy, that would be an issue.

You’re gonna make this an issue, aren’t you Ernest?

“He’d spent the last fifteen years of his life in self-imposed isolation, during which time—if the rumors were to be believed —he’d gone completely insane.“ So the board of directors voted to remove him as CEO of the company like 14 years ago, right? Because massive global corporate juggernauts that have somehow established a telecommunications monopoly are not run by one person pedalling a bike to power a single computer in their own locked room.

You do know that, right?

Right, Ernest?

That’s okay though, I mean Halliday is probably having fun willing away his personal fortune.

“had everyone from Toronto to Tokyo crapping in their cornflakes” is this entire book going to read like a forum post? It is, isn’t it? Isn’t it, Ernest?

“His video message was actually a meticulously constructed short film titled Anorak’s Invitation“ A quick google tells me that, aside from being a kind of jacket, ‘Anorak’ is British slang for a person with obsessive niche interests. The global billionaire’s Final Message is basically entitled ‘Letter from a huge fuckin weeb’.

Also, how else would it be constructed? What purpose does ‘meticulous’ serve here? Is that unusual for a global tech billionaire? Was it especially meticulous? What is this description contrasting with, Ernest? Your own writing?

I’m going to sail right past the part where he had global admin rights to what’s literally the internet despite being AWOL for 15 years and this didn’t concern anybody at all. Let’s just say he ‘built a backdoor’ into it that has somehow gone unnoticed for several decades in a system that would be continually maintained and updated by thousands of sysadmins. Okay, it’s fine, he’s the creator of the core system. I’ll suspend my disbelief that his personal backdoor didn’t end up in the bin every time they upgraded something in the core build. Maybe it did and he rebuilt it, stealthily, all over again. Fine, but I’ve got my eye on you, Ernest.

“surpassing even the Zapruder film“ Just call it the Kennedy Assassination tape so nobody has to google it, Ernest.

Ernest, buddy, why am I seeing an ast-- oh, it’s a footnote. You’ve written your prologue chapter with fucking footnotes. Could you not figure out how to write more words with the rest of the words, Ernest?

My. God. There are seven footnotes. Of them, six say some version of “this was photoshopped in from an 80′s movie to confirm that this was, in fact from the 80′s. Did I mention the 80′s?” and the seventh is “this is a photo of the Rich Man of the Internet from the 80′s”. I really feel like Ernest has set up a much more interesting story and then elected to ignore it in favour of writing the gamergate manifesto of a 16-year-old boy. There’s apparently a nuclear war going on in the background, and one nerd somehow became the God-King of the Internet despite the fact that literally any first-world government would immediately try to seize this kind of centralised infrastructure away from him. Does this mean governments are a thing of the past? Is this entire story taking place in some kind of children’s creche in the Shadowrun continuity? I have so many questions, and none of them are about this book.

So God-King Jimmy is a 40-something-old man dancing in a re-edited scene of an 80′s highschool movie dance. I don’t know why it takes six sentences to say this, except to say that he danced flawlessly, and also:

“But Halliday has no dance partner. He is, as the saying goes, dancing with himself.” Is he now, Ernest? Is he really? To be fair to Ernest, I also wrote like this. In highschool. While desperately trying to inflate an essay to reach the wordcount.

“A few lines of text appear briefly at the lower left-hand corner of the screen, listing the name of the band, the song’s title, the record label, and the year of release, as if this were an old music video airing on MTV: Oingo Boingo, “Dead Man’s Party,” MCA Records, 1985.” We know how music videos work, Ernest.

“He breaks the fourth wall, addressing the viewer, and begins to read“. Is that what he’s doing by addressing the viewer, Ernest?  I’m so glad that you clarified that for me, Ernest, that when a character is breaking that fourth wall that they are explicitly breaking the fourth wall. What would we do without your propensity for re-describing your own descriptions, Ernest?

“I, James Donovan Halliday, being of sound mind and disposing memory, do hereby make, publish, and declare this instrument to be my last will and testament, hereby revoking any and all wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made.…” *record scratch* I’m not sure this is legally binding. I mean you’ve gone through a truly painstaking amount of effort to describe how heavily-edited this video is. Maybe Emperor Jimmy is fraudulently edited in? Maybe that’s not a binding legal will? Maybe if he’s been a missing person for 15 years then he can’t be assumed to be of sound mind just because he suddenly shows up and says he is? Okay, maybe it’s just seemed like he’s been gone to the general public rather than the C-level of his company, who are somehow okay with the stock crash this is going to cause. “My entire estate, including a controlling share of stock in my company“ Hold up, buttercup. I have exhausted my supply of willing suspension of disbelief, Ernest.

There is just so much wrong with this entire premise. The awol hermit somehow retains control of The Internet. An entire corporate conglomerate and every country that may or may not exist is either okay with this or has no recourse to do anything about it somehow. Not a single one of the thousands of people who maintain the backend bothers to comb through the code to find where this ‘easter egg’ has been slipped in. You know about code, right Ernest? I mean I take it you’ve at least seen The Matrix, yeah? Remember how people sitting outside the matrix can scan through the code, even in that hellscape where they’re not even the ones that control it? Sure, OASIS probably isn’t open-source... but how many people do you think have actual backend access? Spoiler: It’s not “Just Emperor Jimmy”, Ernest. Nobody at that company needs to play through what I can only imagine is a painstakingly convoluted puzzle quest that you’re about to explain to me in several levels of unnecessary detail.

Look, this entire premise reminds me of Breaking Bad. Not any of the good bits, mind you but the bit where the entire plot could only take place in the USA because in the rest of the developed world Walter White just goes to a fucking doctor and gets treatment for his cancer because healthcare actually exists.

That’s what this is like. The number of arbitrarily nonsensical things that must be true for this premise to work is... Incredibly distracting. Nothing about this is a reasonable situation. Nothing that you’ve established about this world suggests that anything about this makes even a little bit of sense. Now I’m aware that ‘eccentric millionaire leaves money in some kind of convoluted contest’ is a trope and I remember some very silly 90′s movies based on this premise but come on Ernest. There’s a much more interesting novel hiding between the lines of the premise you’ve ham-fistedly implied just so you can list for me the brands of 1980′s televisions. Out of curiousity, I googled every person who wrote the advance praise comments inside the cover. I had a sneaking suspicion about the demographics of people who enjoy this book. Here’s a brief summary (since Ernest loves lists so much) 1. White American Male, Age 48

2. White American Male, Age 47

3. White American Male, Age 52

4. White American Male, Age 68

5. White American Male, Age 49

6. White American Male, Age 40

7. White American Male, Age 41

I then googled Ernest, an action I deeply regret. Demographically speaking, let’s have a look: White American Male, Age 46.

I’m detecting a pattern is what I’m saying here. I’m only halfway through the prologue, mind you, and perhaps this really picks up but I feel like I absolutely did not need to be told the brand of the television that Young God-Emperor Jimmy had his Atari 2600 into. Nor did I need to be told that his Atari 2600 was, indeed, an Atari 2600 about 10 words before God-Emperor Jimmy then actually says that it’s an Atari 2600. Maybe this book is for people who get a real kick out of seeing the words ‘Atari 2600′. People who are (and I’m just throwing wild, unsubstantiated theories out here) about 40+, white, male, and American?

I’m going to stop now because I’ve started writing my thesis just to procrastinate from having to read the second half of the prologue to this book.