#i live in nj so i have feelings and opinions about pa

[gerritcole-coded]

i really like the phillies and it will genuinely break my heart for them if they make it back to the world series and lose to the astros for the second year in a row i need the rangers to get it together but unfortunately i do not think that will happen lmao

Yeah I think it'll be a rematch. Rooting for the phillies. As obnoxious as people from philly can be, their team this year has cute vibes and the astros have the worst fanbase

Maybe it's unfair that everyone always brings up the cheating scandal but their fanbase straight up makes excuses (and I'd bet altuve did actually cheat I don't believe the claims he wasn't evolved)

[clawedghouls]

Every man in a youtube horror ARG about slenderman know only 3 thing; Have weird relationship with environments, be awkward on camera, and LIE

It has been a while since I’ve actively done a Text Post on this blog over idly reblogging things, which is a good way to interact with the hell site do not let me discourage you, but I have been watching marble hornets and want to talk about the idea of spatial influence and character drive/motives. 

Before, here are some good pieces of text about the internet that help form my opinions on the matter, some as refreshers and some as set dressing. I will not tell you which. (each numeral has a link, please click)

1.  The American Room by Paul Ford, 2014

2.  Attention K-Mart Shoppers submitted to The Internet Archive by Mark Davis, recordings from 1980′s-1994. 

3. Lambertville Highschool (before demolition), Abandonednj.com, post 2012.

4.  Enter The Marble Hornets' Nest by Kasey Hullett, 2015

5. This House Has People In It, WHAMCITY COMEDY, published by Adult Swim, 2016

Not included is the book : Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man The Development of an Internet Mythology by Shira Chess, Eric Newsom. which you can find online on Amazon. It informs this somewhat, but as you know I am not king and I hold no bounds. (spoilers ahead)

I spent a decent amount of hours watching MH, and I can immediately see the influence to other videos of its kind. The quality is expected for its age, and influences what it’s saying to the viewer. 

For this, I am going to take EverymanHYBRID as its opposition force, given how it started a year after MH and is related to its universe. EMH, and MH both are the same sort of series- they have the slenderman myths, the same air of mystery, violence, and ARG tendencies- but one uses them in a more symbolic fashion.

MH, which focuses on the at-one-point collaborative and then later outright hostile relationship between Alex and Jay, plays with alot of intriguing concepts that become really prone in every series that it influences. Corruption of self, guilt, destructive and violent relationships that invoke creeping diseases on each individual. The tapes act as markers in the advancement of that sense of foreboding, especially with Jay having to recount 7 months or more of missing memories while walking about in a daze- his thought process both being charming and at once entirely frustrating. Slowly, the characters begin to spiral into something that revolves around chaotic violence and the unbalanced power play between them, Alex, and The Operator.

And that the whole bit really, that they are being withdrawn from the outside world to the point that outside interactions become another extension of their push and pull with each other. The hotel that Jay has been for several months not having to worry about paying for, or even having interactions with housekeeping, become the place where he is swallowed hole by either memories or forces beyond his control. The places, the spaces, become vehicles for the story itself- The hotel does not matter as it is a vessel to hold both him and Jessica. When Alex kills a man who is not even related to the original social bubble who knows what kind of person he is, it becomes a symbol of how irrational the situation has become- especially given how The Operator takes the body away with zero fanfare. The operator is akin to seeing hives bloom across the body, as it is not the cause but the symptom. 

In comparison, EMH lives in a totally seperate rhythm. Its places, and their environment’s stories, are key to why these characters do the things that they do. Every room that is shown, every place they interact with, reacts to them. in the narrative they show with this with long cuts, positioning of selves or props, and in something that MH does fairly well: footage that shows remixed or morphing images/videos of characters and covert messages. A few scenes immediately come to mind about EMH, but the best reflection would be in Jeff’s house and in relation to his little brother. 

At the start, each of the trifecta’s houses are alive. Alive not in the sense of human interaction, but in actively breathing, moving, changing, and its destructive ways. The Operator/Slenderman/That Horrible Thing, enters into the home through crawlspaces, behind closed and out of sight rooms, and even through windows. When Jeff finds a rip in the universe within a closet crawl space that leads him to abandoned places, they close up again when he returns. The same way with his brother, who disappears behind a closed door. Their environments become actively dangerous, the rooms are hungry, they are devouring them whole- the scene in which Evan looks directly into a surveillance camera after being attacked- the back of the cabin at the end of the world where Vinny has to kill his friend in the thick of the PA woods- where Jeff is drowned in a pool or comes walking out of the dark covered in blood- that is a spatial existence which is hostile. 

However, MH is the total opposite. It is not the Rosswood park that is dangerous, it is the fact that Alex is in there. It is not the house you should be afraid to enter, its the people in it, the house is only a witness. Even Alex’s apartment has nothing much to offer the viewer, it is only a place to store tapes and sleep, with so many boxes within. The scene that I thought of the most, especially when drafting this, is in the middle of the Entries, where Jay (the fool) breaks into Alex’s apartment. Jay gets found out almost instantly by Alex, and while trying to escape gets into an altercation with him, who yells that he brought ‘it’ back to his apartment. Jay looks at Alex and screams, realizing that the Operator is right behind him, and runs away- stealing the front door key on his way out. We are not told what happened to Alex after that specific point, and the next entry continues on. 

To Jay, The Operator is a real threat, but to Alex he cannot even see him. In conversations about this, my friend Cirice described it ‘like having a terminal illness and not seeking treatment.’ Alex’s perception can become the reality he is in- and his personal feelings become facts. To him, the reality is that Jay, Jessica, anyone he’s interacted with, is a threat. In the same way The Operator is a threat to Jay and the rest- the way the coughing and their bodies being slowly broken apart is a threat- but Alex holds the power in the relationships when the spatial existence is passive. The Operator acts as a device to move forward the narrative, but the relationships drive it to its conclusions. It doesn't matter the places that MH is located, they’re interchangeable. This is untrue for EMH, where NJ (the area it takes place in) holds like an oppressive cloud over the group. 

To place into a direct metaphor, The Operator in MH is blowing bubbles into the world that interact with only each other and effectively destroy only themselves (or those unfortunate to interact), where as in EMH the metaphor is of a house that’s collapsing on purpose to kill those trashing its insides. 

TLDR;

Marble Hornets: “You want to fuck me so bad it makes you stupid” Alex & Jay, Character driven stories about how power imbalances will kill you, the creeping disease of cruelty and how perception leads you to a fucked up rock climbing wall looking for DVD cassettes you funky little detective. 

EverymanHYBRID: “Hostile Geometry” Spatial horror and your environments will change you in such a way you are unrecognizable to yourself now in the mirror, the house is alive, the house is hungry, and its consuming you whole- and has been for generations.

also, whats up with killing women in both of these series?