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dentwy · 5 months

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number 3: house of leaves

i have this one discord bot i keep dming stuff to so it's easier to get files through mobile to pc, and as a general list of things i don’t feel like saving anywhere else or wanna be reminded of. obviously as i keep adding stuff i forget about older things just like you do with your watch later on youtube. tuesday, december 21 of the year 2021 at 1:50am i sent this message:

i know for a fact it's just because that's when i watched the game grumps play santa clause 3 but the point is that i've put it aside for quite some time now. as the years went on i'm pretty sure i've heard people mention the book here and there, but the thing that definitely made decide i want to read it is none other than the power pak myhouse.wad video, as i'm sure most people this year have experienced as well. sometimes it can feel intrusive for people in such a tight fandom to get bombarded with newcomers experiencing what you like in a completely different way because your niche thing now is more popular than ever, but i personally try to keep respectful about people's passions and i'm fairly realistic about it. yeah, i know you know about the doom mod, and it's cool, but let's focus on what's important. house of leaves.

"This is not for you." he said, well you can't tell me what to do johnny truant! gatekeeping is funny, i can't argue against it, and it's specially funny when the book you just opened is doing it to you. however, it usually seems with this book as if people treat it like some kind of evil secret thing you can only read and understand if you're fucked up and want to suffer. literature is a medium to share ideas and stories, stop making it out to be some kind of secret club. and to you reddit, please stop asking if you can skip the footnotes or a guide on how to read it, it's a book. just read the damn thing.

if by any chance you're reading this and haven't experienced house of leaves yet, i encourage you to do so. not sure if the pinnacle of ergodic literature, but it's absolutely an experience like none other. i mean, look up the book on google images and it'll catch your eye in an instant. it's a book within a book, within a movie, within a story, within a house. the maze never ends, and the house is ever expanding. it may be the wrong decision, but fuck it, it's yours.

there’re two core sides to this story, johnny truant's delusions and ongoing madness over this book he's just found, and the story this book is describing. i honestly fail to understand how people get bored of what mark danielewski has managed to concoct here, as the introduction itself was instantly gripping to me. alike johnny himself, i could not put away house of leaves until i finished it in the span of around 2 weeks. the constant back and forth between the narrators in the story could seem daunting at first, but each one adds so much more to the experience, recontextualizing characters, or scenes, or the entire book in nothing more than a couple of lines (or multiple pages for a single footnote). it's like reading through the ramblings of a crazy man, except you are actually reading through the ramblings of multiple crazy men. ticking away slowly, unveiling whatever could be at the end of the corridor.

as unreliable narrators go, never being sure on what you're reading is real or not is what constantly pushes the mystery into the words. it's what we choose to believe in that can change it all. i distinctly remember the navidson record detailing a comparison between the director of a movie called "la belle niçoise et le beau chien" and the character we've been following, will navidson. this seemingly real film, is in fact, not real. nothing more than a fabrication. layers upon layers of commentary, description, analysis and characterization forever shifting with the things we say, write and read, may all be not much more than a lie. the power of words is not to be underestimated. it is in fact the words and how they're used what make this book what it is. be it the decision to give the word house a tint of blue, purposely leaving things vague when it's most important, or driving off into completely unrelated tangents about debatably irrelevant topics. you may gather all the clues you want, yet the authenticity of the events are for you to decide. the line between reality and fiction warps the more you go and it may as well keep expanding the further you walk down those stairs.

1/4" can make the whole difference. the house represents many things. fear, uncertainty, secrecy, anxiety, suffering, peace, obsession, trauma. what goes in, may not ever leave, and what's outside, may not ever know. there's an overarching feeling of passion behind the actions the characters take. it's human nature to be curious, to solve the mysteries presented to us and to want to fix things with our own two hands. but what might look small, could very well be a lot bigger on the inside. more than you could've ever expected. "Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer."

there is a paragraph that i will not ever forget about, that i believe perfectly exemplifies the feeling of uncertainty of the unknown, not being in control and carrying the dread behind you:

"To get a better idea try this: focus on these words, and whatever you do don’t let your eyes wander past the perimeter of this page. Now imagine just beyond your peripheral vision, maybe behind you, maybe to the side of you, maybe even in front of you, but right where you can’t see it, something is quietly closing in on you, so quiet in fact you can only hear it as silence. Find those pockets without sound. That’s where it is. Right at this moment. But don’t look. Keep your eyes here. Now take a deep breath. Go ahead take an even deeper one. Only this time as you start to exhale try to imagine how fast it will happen, how hard it’s gonna hit you, how many times it will stab your jugular with its teeth or are they nails?, don’t worry, that particular detail doesn’t matter, because before you have time to even process that you should be moving, you should be running, you should at the very least be flinging up your arms—you sure as hell should be getting rid of this book—you won’t have time to even scream. Don’t look. I didn’t. Of course I looked. I looked so fucking fast I should of ended up wearing one of those neck braces for whiplash."

it has been argued house of leaves is a love story. i see it, and people have agreed as well, more as a story about love. family love, unrequited love, friendly love, love for small and big things, love for those and that you care about the most. the love that drives us forward to do what we do. granted it's mostly just semantics than a difference in genre, but it gives it a different meaning to me. the way words change how we perceive what surround us.

the open-ended nature of the book can leave things to be desired, but that may as well just be life. we're not sure about what's beyond, or what the meaning of it all is, yet we keep moving on. we strive for more, we want to make things right, but the corridor keeps expanding, and the further you go, the darker it gets.

#review #media analysis #house of leaves #literature #books #mark z danielewski

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blu-engineer · 3 months

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shout out to my third grade teacher telling me not to watch game grumps and inadvertently changing the course of my life forever

> be me, in the third grade

> don't know how to make my own email, use my school account to watch videos

> watch stampylonghead -> recommended & watch dantdm -> recommended & watch jacksepticeye (eventually)

> after school, teacher wants me to find something on youtube through my google account

> ohshit.jpg

> scared i'll get in trouble because jacksepticeye vids have swears in them and i was a goodytwoshoes

> act paranoid to the point of actively drawing suspicion

> teacher tells me, "it's okay, we don't care what's in your recommended. just don't watch this channel called ### #### #####"

> what did she say?

> repeats herself clearly with full diction, "The Game Grumps"

> go home and look them up because of course i do

> never the same

- cut to a few years later -

> be me, 12 years old

> let's check on the game grumps, i haven't watched them in a bit

> see they started a series for [REMOVED GAME], curious so i check out what's uploaded

> catch up to the current episode

> holy shit this game is incredible, i HAVE to know what happens next

> ask my mom to buy it on switch

> finish the game, the second one, the third one

> synapses are firing like crazy. all of the happy chemicals are in my brain

> baby's first hyperfixation

> remember old tumblr account made a year before that i never touched

> "maybe i can find other fans on there!"

> join a discord server to meet people who know the series

> "my parents said i should never use my real name on the internet... let's say my name is myles"

and here we are now.

i've come very far since then. it's been almost 5 years since that day in june, and a little after that it'll be 5 since i began transitioning. it's crazy how one little thing did so much.

i haven't kept contact with a single person from that server, or from its iterations afterwards. it was for the best. i needed to learn, to grow, and to improve myself as a human being, and even after all that growth i'm not sure talking to them would be the brightest idea. but this isn't about that, at least not right now.

any one variable could have changed EVERYTHING. my third grade teacher could have chosen not to say anything (which probably would have been wise). i could have heeded her warning and not looked them up.

what would have happened? would i be a cis girl? would i have realized i'm a system? because those two realizations ended up being related, funnily enough.

on that server, we met a system. no specifics- we don't keep contact. they didn't know they were a system at first, but they figured it out eventually. when they told us, part of it resonated with us, and we said as much. but another part of us was in denial. he believed we were making it all up. he was wrong, of course, but we held onto that guilt for a long time. we still do, in a way.

i don't think anyone still follows me from all the way back then, but if you have; you've seen a lot of this journey play out in real time. you are one of very few witnesses to what i believe to be a miracle. if it wasn't for that one sentence- that one channel- that one game- that one server- that one person. a series of coincidences, all lining up like planets in a row; like a magnifying glass, the sun, and an anthive. i've been burned on the way here, but i made it out okay. i think that's the real synthesis to all of this.

you will make it out okay. your realizations will make their way to you in funny ways. ways that seem irrelevant, or strange, or unhelpful. give them time. let them stew. the way forward will show itself when you walk down any path.

#bluposting #long post #not a vent but long

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jimintomystery · 2 years

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It takes two to make a thing go huhwha?

I haven't played It Takes Two, but I've been watching the Game Grumps play through it. The concept is that two characters are stuck in a sort of miniature fantasy land, and have to learn together in a variety of interesting co-op levels. It looks like it'd be fun to play.

The story, however, is pretty messed up.

It Takes Two is about Cody and May, a couple that have just told their daughter Rose that they're planning to divorce. Rose has already overheard them talking about it, though, and in her playtime she's been using little dolls to act out her parents reconciling their differences. She also has a book about relationships that she apparently found somewhere. Anyway, she cries on her dolls, which somehow triggers a magic spell. Cody and May find themselves trapped in the dolls, and the book has come to life to make them run around in a fantastic version of their home. The book wants them to learn to work together so they can fix their relationship; the dolls just want to get back into their own bodies.

So far, this is all right. Rose looks about ten but seems to be written as a five-year-old, but I can overlook that. The book is obnoxious and creepy for some reason, but it's not a showstopper.

A big problem, to me anyway, is that the main characters seem uninterested in the plot. Our heroes are of course shocked and disturbed to wake up as a couple of dolls, with a talking book trying to get them to call off the divorce. They just want to get back to their normal lives, but they're remarkably incurious as to how this happened to them in the first place, which seems like crucial information if they want to undo it. Similarly, the book is oddly unconcerned that Cody and May don't recognize that he's controlling this reality, causing them to completely ignore the lessons he wants to impart because they (wrongly) believe they can run off and break the spell without playing his game. So they all end up talking past one another, for no good reason except that there'd be no story if they didn't.

This sets up the most disturbing plot point of the game, where Cody decides that he and May can become human again if they can make Rose cry. I don't even remember how he arrived at this conclusion, because it doesn't logically follow from anything that the dolls have learned up to that point. So the book just lets them waste several levels of the game trying to find Rose's favorite toy elephant so they can break it and make her cry. Of course, in this fantasy world the toy is alive and doesn't want to be killed, but that doesn't stop them from ripping it apart and tossing it off a shelf. Rose cries, and the big twist is supposed to be that the tears don't have any effect, except I already knew that five seconds after Cody pulled the idea out of his ass.

After that, the dolls find a letter Rose was writing to them, which they instantly decide is the real solution to their problem, but the book shows up to keep it away from them until they do even more levels of the game. Which could have been the conflict from the start, but I guess the writers thought they needed the elephant stuff to pad the story. Trouble is, before I thought Cody and May were just self-absorbed and neglecting their daughter's emotional needs, and now I think they're monsters who'd rather make their kid cry for a quick fix than make any real effort to identify the real causes of their problems.

I assume there's a couple more hours of gameplay to go before the Grumps get to the end, so maybe something will happen to redeem the story in my eyes. But I'm not optimistic. It doesn't come across like any of the co-op stuff is causing Cody and May to really bond, which makes me think the story will just suddenly pretend like they did near the end. Then the daughter will magically be happy again without anyone having to admit that, yeah, Cody and May are pretty terrible parents.

#video games #it takes two #to make a thing go right (woo! yeah! woo! yeah!)#it takes two to make it out of sight (woo! yeah! woo! yeah!)#we also would have accepted the seduction song from 1989

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