Internet Horror: Marble Hornets

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In the small but crowded realm of Youtube horror projects, nothing compares to Marble Hornets.

A brief history lesson: once upon a time there was a thread on the Something Awful forums that gave rise to internet creepypasta sensation Slenderman (maybe you’ve heard of him). For a while old slendie positively gripped the internet, and then the whole thing got played out and two girls stabbed their friend as part of a Slenderman-inspired delusion, signalling the final death knell of the phenomenon.

Of the many Slenderman creative projects that popped up during his reign of terror, Marble Hornets is probably the most famous. It set the standard and the tone for the initial wave of Slenderman creations, codified several long-standing tropes and ideas regarding how the character operates and interacts with his victims, and arguably did more to propel the whole thing into the mainstream than Slenderman’s actual creator.

Marble Hornets was created by a trio of young friends, whose creative endeavours fell apart in 2016 amidst hilarious drama. But before that they put out three seasons of the show on Youtube, bringing the story to a definitive conclusion--something of a rarity among Slenderman projects, which overwhelmingly tended to fizzle out as its college-aged creators graduated and got too busy to maintain them.

But how good is it, really? And does it still hold up in a post-Slenderman world? Let’s find out.

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Books I Didn't Finish: Empire In Black And Gold

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Recently I have, for some reason, been thinking that it would be fun to get into a huge multi-volume fantasy series. I’m not entirely sure why; for most of my life I’ve had this idea that I should enjoy these kinds of books, even though I never actually have.

Anyway, I eschewed your Games Of Thrones and your Wheels Of Times and instead settled on Empire In Black And Gold, the first volume of incredibly prolific SF/F author Adrian Tchaikovscky’s 10-book(!) Shadows Of The Apt series. I made it more than halfway before giving up. Let’s see what went wrong.

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Books I Really Didn't Finish: The Witchwood Crown

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We’re navigating new frontiers of not finishing books with this one. Soon I’ll be writing posts about not reading books at all, and then my blog will spontaneously merge with r/books.

As an experiment, I recently walked into my local library and picked out the chunkiest, heftiest fantasy tome that I could find, without bothering to look at the synopsis or even the title. That book turned out to be Tad Williams’ The Witchwood Crown.

This was an inauspicious choice for a few reasons. Firstly, my only previous exposure to Tad Williams is The War Of The Flowers, which is to this day one of the dullest books I’ve ever tried to read. Second, The Witchwood Crown is actually the first book in a sequel trilogy to Williams' Memory, Sorrow And Thorn series from way back in the 80s, although the author forward states that it was intended to stand alone so I didn’t let that stop me.

I girded my loins, cleared my busy social calendar, opened the book...and made it four chapters in before I gave up and swapped it out for something more interesting.

I just...I can’t. I can’t even, with this shit.

The first chapter opens with a woman named Tanahaya, part of a race called the Zida’ya, musing to herself about how humans are as mayflies compared to her people, who live for centuries in their serene forest homes and they’re elves, they’re just Tolkien elves with a different name and a vaguely Japanese cultural aesthetic for some reason, Jesus Christ what is it with the fucking elves

I honestly don’t understand how people can write this stuff without falling into a coma. Reading it is excruciating enough, God knows what it would be like to have to live with Shan’anda’landa’land’alar, First Zephyr of the Elv’en people or whatever in your head for several years. 

Granted, this is a sequel to a fantasy trilogy that started in 1988; maybe these tropes didn’t feel quite as played-out 33 years ago as they do now. Maybe, after years of gritty grimdark fantasy, people are hungry for wispy elves giving thanks to Mother Sun and riding horses named Spider-Silk. I guess it’s possible.

After the elf chapter we get a wise kingly king and his rambunctious princely prince son, and this is the stuff that made me drop the book. The elf shit is at least entertainingly bad, but sombre kings being all wise and sombre and kingly is perhaps the least interesting subject in the world to me. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to see eye to eye with the epic fantasy genre until it gets over its fawning attitude towards monarchy, and there’s absolutely no sign of that happening any time soon.

For all that I mock grimdark fantasy (like I did two paragraphs ago), it at least tends to be a lot richer and more interesting than this hokey nonsense.





Books I Didn't Finish: Mordew

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When it comes to books, I’m extremely basic. I have bought many books based solely on their nice cover designs, and I will likely continue to do this until the moment of my death. I wouldn’t say the actual contents of the book are completely irrelevant, but there’s a lot of leeway.

Mordew by Alex Pheby seemed like the best of both worlds: style and substance. Firstly, it’s got a really nice cover illustration, and it’s one of those ones that goes all the way to the edge of the cover, which I like. The book itself is pleasingly chunky and yet also compact, with a great hand-feel. A+ so far.

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Books I Didn't Finish: Agency

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Here’s a very quick Books I Didn’t Finish post, explaining why I stopped reading something a few chapters in. I guess “Books I Barely Started” would be a more appropriate title.

I have read precisely one (1) William Gibson novel in my time, which is Neuromancer. Maybe it’s because I don’t really like the “punk” part of cyberpunk all that much, or maybe I just came to it too late, but it didn’t do anything for me at all and I pretty much didn’t think of old Willie Gibbs again for years, until I saw Agency on the shelves of my local library and was reminded that he’s still alive.

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Trash TV: Hospital Edition

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Recently, while hospitalized for ten days, I decided to check out some thematically-appropriate medical dramas. This is a stratum of TV junk food that I don’t have a lot of familiarity with. While I have been known to watch a police procedural, hospital shows are outside my usual interest zone.

As we all know, the best way to tackle unfamiliar genres is to pick two completely random examples from the various streaming platforms. In that vein, here are reviews of the first episode of Night Shift and the first season of The Resident (guess which one I liked more).

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Resident Evil Village

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After I played the demos, I was left wondering what direction Resident Evil Village (aka Resident Evil 8 or RE8) would take the series in: a revival of Resident Evil 4’s frenetic “action survival”? A continuation of Resident Evil 7’s horror emphasis? A retread of the over the top Hollywood nonsense that got the franchise into trouble with Resident Evil 5 and 6? Or something entirely new?

As it turns out, the answer is: “Yes.” RE8 isn’t so much the next Resident Evil as it is all of Resident Evil, past, present, and future, offered up in a selection box of bite-size chunks that taste great separately but don’t always sit well together.

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My thoughts on the Resident Evil Village demos

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Note: I’m going dark for the entire month of May while I undergo some fairly heavy treatment for my migraines. Blogging will resume some time in June.

This is going to need a bit of explanation for my non-gamer readers.

In 2017 Resident Evil VII: Biohazard (which I’m going to refer to from this point on as simply Resident Evil 7 or RE7) came out and restored the venerable Resident Evil franchise to something approaching its former glory. Having established the modern survival horror genre back on the Playstation 1 and then reaching a second apotheosis with the “action survival” reinvention of Resident Evil 4, the series started to go downhill with Resident Evil 5, which took things even further in the action direction; while a fun romp, especially in co-op, it pretty much completely abandoned all pretense of horror. Then the series went totally off the rails with Resident Evil 6, a ridiculous Micheal Bay-esque spectacle that’s more or less universally reviled. Throw in a glut of spin-offs that received mixed-to-negative reception, and you’ve got a franchise in trouble.

Capcom needed to do something drastic to right the ship, and that something was RE7, a return to the series’ horror roots that was critically acclaimed in general and won over most of the hardcore fans after some initial skepticism. It also, helpfully, sold like gangbusters. Resident Evil is back, baby! It’s good again!

I am primarily a fan of Resident Evil 7, not of the franchise as a whole. I played RE3, 4 and 5 when they came out, as well as some of the beloved Gamecube remake of the first game, and while I liked them well enough, I never got infected with the Resident Evil virus the way a lot of people did. Silent Hill was always my horror gaming jam.

Until RE7. I absolutely love RE7. I think it’s the best horror game of the modern era. That’s why I’ve been a bit nervous about the upcoming sequel.

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Books I Didn't Finish: 11/22/63

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That’s right, it’s time once again to revisit the Fountain Of Easy Blog Content, AKA the bibliography of America’s spookiest grandpa.

11/22/63 is apparently a polarizing novel, with some calling it King’s best modern work and others despising it. Based on the title of this post, you can probably guess how I reacted to it. King is usually very readable even at his worst, so why did I give up on 11/22/63 so quickly when I tried to read it last year?

Mainly because it’s boring as shit, but read on for the specifics.

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Games I Didn't Finish: Breathedge

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At some point I’ll have to do a blog about my love of Subnautica, an underwater exploration/survival/crafting/base building game. I think it’s one of my favourite games of all time, and I’ve been eagerly waiting for developers to look at its popularity (not to mention financial success) and start copying it. There are many craft-and-survive games out there, but most take place in randomly-generated environments that can’t match Subnautica’s meticulously hand-crafted alien ocean.

This is all a preamble to explain both why I was really looking forward to Breathedge--described by many as “Subnautica in space”--and why I ended up dropping the game in disappointment very quickly.

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Books I Didn't Finish: Utopia Avenue

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Note: I’m afraid I’m once again going to have to take a blog break while I get some health issues under control. I had this post mostly completed before my current round of brain problems kicked off, but I wasn’t able to finish it, so I’m throwing it up incomplete.

Presented for your enjoyment: the thrilling story of why I bailed on a book 85% of the way through.

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