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i know you usualy dont do anime stories,but "durarara" has a perfect non linear story and the way it was made bafled me,hope you can get into it one day
Sources and or more on the red green eye crossing phenomenon? I'd like to better understand this 'ineffable' occurrence I experience, and a quick search yielded nothing useful.
Someone else mentioned, but wanted to give full context, I also love how this is handled in SCP. For example, in SCP-2264, there's a description of the 'Hanged King' (meant to be sort of like a physical king in yellow) that a maddened soldier gives, and when prompted to describe what its face looked like, he just responds with: "A god shaped hole. The barren desolation of a fallen and failed creation. You see the light of long dead stars. Your existence is nothing but an echo of a dying god's screams. The unseen converges. Surrounds you. And it tightens like a noose." Really works with the whole idea of abstraction and omission, we can't know what a 'god-shaped' hole looks like, or what 'unseen' thing is 'converging', but you can almost imagine it based on connotations alone. Really cool for horror.
I was literally about to mention "a god shaped hole." It's the single best example of this I've seen. Simple to read, impossible to envision, and extremely impactful. Lovecraft sought to achieve the same impact through exhaustive tangles of unwieldy language, yet the author of SCP-2264 was able to get there with four carefully-chosen words.
YES. Honestly, this applies to a lot of the works relating to the Hanged King in general. There are things that cannot, will not, be possible to describe about Allagada and its people.
To this day, I am SO GODDAMN FRUSTRATED that such fantastic writing (and such an excellent name) was used for a friggin' trading card that would become outdated after like two years. The Nemesis of Reason deserves to be up there alongside Cthulhu as a household eldritch horror, not just another collection of numbers on a little card.
The trouble with indescribable things is that they are inherently boring. It's actually more interesting to have something describable which is so exotic or misunderstood that it's open to interpretation. Take for example 1D. Now some would say that's easy to understand because it's something with only length or width but not both. But speaking mathematically 1D is also absent of time if you're to say time is the 4th dimension. So we are actually 4D as we have three dimensions plus time, the images wedraw are 3D as they have two dimensions plus time. 2D would be time plus one dimension. So is 1D time itself? Or is 1D width? Or height? Maybe depth? How does that interact with other dimensions? So what you have here is not indescribable but it's so far beyond our experience and perceptions that it could literally send a person mad by spending too long thinking about it in detail. Or be unsettling to comprehend.
"The End of the Universe, the funniest joke in the world, Cthulhu: all perfectly ineffible. But hey, that doesn't mean you can't try to eff 'em anyway." That's truly an inspired line. Love it!
3:01 Admission: State plainly the thing is ineffable. 4:40 Circumscription: Describe the effects of the ineffable rather than the thing itself. 6:50 Magnification: Compare the thing to something already extreme. 8:32 Alienation: Describe how it violates the usual principles of reality. 10:13 Combination: Use a combination of analogies to create a liminal effect. 12:19 Obfuscation: Be vague and ambiguous. 13:57 Abstraction: Use nonsensical descriptions. 15:29 Disorientation: Reference alternative mind states. 17:05 Fictionalization: Lie and exaggerate. 19:20 Omission: Give no description.
In a webcomic "Stick in a Mud" a monster introduced himself with a speach bubble full of torture and suffering. To which the protagonist replied: "It kinda sounds like 'Blueberry'. I'm gonna call you Bluberry."
Its kind of like how a dm In a cthulu tabletop scenario describing the language of an alien creature as dubstep. It's conjures a hilarious image in a terrifying scenario.
One of my favorite instances of a character trying to describe something undescribable is in The Magnus Archives where a woman whose son got taken, and she describes it the best way she can with "the sky ate him..." It's clear that she can't describe it any clearer, and she states that if she thinks of it too closely she gets a headache (iirc).
As someone with epilepsy who occasionally had perceptions that are really hard to describe, I really liked these methods as they tend to be really close to what I often end up with.
When I forget taking my medication, I will experience a weird thing when I close my eyes and try to fall asleep: The space in front of my face/forehead will at the same time feel very tiny and very huge. And once I had a fever dream in which I was an element in a network of numerical series that were also a red crystal.
I don't want to sound like I came here to romanticise mental conditions, but I've been curious for years to try psychedelics to experience alternate states of consciousness, precisely because they are unique experiences that I can't normally experience.
@@didack1419 from the perspective of someone who experiences some mild to moderate psychosis, it doesn't come off that way. I can completely understand someone wanting to know what the experience itself is like firsthand (although a lot of my experiences are more contained to my own mind rather than perception of the world around me)
One of the best description-by-analogy examples I've ever read was from the classic _A Voyage to Arcturus_ by David Lindsay. The main character has traveled to a planet with twin suns, and experiences two new primary colours -- ulfire and jale. From the book: ""Just as blue is delicate and mysterious, yellow clear and unsubtle, and red sanguine and passionate, so he felt ulfire to be wild and painful, and jale dreamlike, feverish, and voluptuous."
That's not even just a description by analogy... That's creating a new "sensory axis", for colors, at least conceptually, and then placing those two on opposite ends of that new axis. Beautiful.
@@MidnightSt It's not really new, though. Colours have been linked to emotions and other abstract qualities throughout the history of the arts. Interestingly, the qualities associated with colours tend to remain quite similar across cultures and through history; likely due to the associations of those colours with how they appear in nature -- red being the colour of blood and therefore life, as well as the colour of fire; yellow the colour of the sun; blue the colour of night; green the colour of plants and other growing things; and so on. Because of this near-universality, authors and other artists commonly use specific colours and shades to invoke a particular feeling.
Interesting book reference. I'm definitely going to read that one. Ulfire and jale seem like interesting colors. And I feel like I've seen these two colors before. At least the way their notion is described. I've already seen a deep red that's also pitch-black. This black-red color fits the description of ulfire in my opinion. Furthermore, I've already seen a color that's simultaneously deep, luminous magenta AND luminous, vibrant green. Again, the color jale fits that color in my opinion. How did I see these impossible colors / impossible color combination? Well, here's how I did it: On impossible colors and Tetrachromacy, and more: I'm working on making humans more than trichromats by bestowing a fourth cone or something similar onto them. There are glasses, i.e. Infitec's Triple Band Pass Interference Glasses (TBP glasses), that split the RGB cones in our eyes into R1G1B1 in the left and R2G2B2 in the right eye. This is achieved by the combination of multiple band pass filters in a single lens. If we take the green cone for example the TBP glasses split the cone sensitvity into two parts: The left eye now only receives a green where all the green cones that are more sensitive to red-ish light are cut off and the right eye now only receives a green where all the green cones that are sensitive to more blue-ish light are cut off. In effect, it makes 2 cones out of one. And because a lesser sensitivity of a cone type results not just in a perceived luminosity change but also in a perceived color change - because the surrounding colors shift closer in to the color space of the diminished color - you implement impossible color combinations into your vision. This happens to all three cone types and enables you to make out color differences you could have never imagined being able to differentiate before. Unfortunately, you won't see any new "primary" color. However, I feel like I can see new secondary and tertiary colors / color differences. With only a single magenta lens over one of my eyes I calculated that I can even see at least 1.25 times the colors (especially in the yellow-green/lime and cyan-green/turquoise color space). Wearing this single magenta lens allows me to make out double the color differences in the lime and turquoise color space. So where the green to greenish-lime colors #00FF00 and #20FF00 look identical to me under normal conditions, with the single magenta lens on these two colors are as different to me as #00FF00 and #40FF00 (where I can normally see a slight difference). So this an increase in color discriminability from 40 down to 20, that is double the color discriminability. I can make out details in cyan to yellow things I could have never noticed before, even (and especially) on RGB screens. Yellow is as different from green to me now as red is from green. And red glows like a beacon. My subjective color contrasts are definitely a lot higher. And this is only the beginning. I'm working an active XR glasses and software (the glasses I mentioned before are all passive) that implement impossible colors into the perceived color spectrum. So like a red-orange, a red-yellow, a red-lime, red-green, a magenta-green, a cyan-red, a green-purple, etc. With this technology you can implement at least 155 new distinct (impossible) color combinations into your color spectrum. And oh boy, I've already seen it. The camera and color pass through quality of the XR glasses I used were abysmally bad and yet it was so beautiful. You can imagine what I saw with it like Star Trek's Geordi La Forge's VISOR. (There are clips online that show what he'd see. It was in an offical episode.) There is color in color in color in color and it's not an exaggeration. If you can learn to make sense of this even tetrachromacy seems inferior. This is the nearest I've come to experiencing "lovecraftian" colors. I can also make polarization visible to the human eye and give the polarized light colors. But that's already too much for this comment. As you might tell, I'm a sense researcher. I love senses because they are the only things that connect us to this world. If you can sense more of this world by acquiring more senses or enhance the already existing ones, this world will become even more beautiful and rich in detail. Shameless plug: On my RUclips channel "Ooqui" I make videos about how to be able to perceive impossible colors / impossible color combinations yourself.
My mind wants to think of ulfire being purplish, with jale being greener. I get that it's an impossible exercise to imagine colors that don't exist, but I wonder if anyone else has "placeholder" colors for what's unknowable
When it comes to the moment in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when they get to the Total Perspective machine, I absolutely love the reaction afterwards. Here, on a planet where millions ended their lives, where it was considered a death sentence to even set foot into the machine, the character goes in, walks out and goes, "Wow, yeah, that was cool. Ooh, cake!" For me, it was a perfect moment to undercut the entire mood and defy the supposed despair that "the unknowable" brings. Sometimes, you just have to look at The Ineffable and go, "Yeah, you're cool and all, but this cake here is delicious, so I don't care about you right now." In a way, it's a beautiful metaphor for how you should handle things when people talk about the grand cosmic scale. Since nothing we do can matter to it, why should it matter to us? Just have some cake and forget about it.
i like that! Or like, engage with it to the extend that feels good or potentially even as something that can aid by bringing some perspective into stuff, but keep making regular cake stops too. All about balance for me
Most people at some point feel dread, the realization that the universe is immense and cold, and that no matter what's beyond our lives, it's all the same for who are left. Most of these, again, will have a hard day or two, and get back to enjoy cotton candy because the human brain isn't really meant to struggle against the idea of the heat death of the universe on the daily, and is extremely good at coping.
Well, this only happens because the entire universe Zaphod is in when he goes into that machine is made entirely FOR him, and so he IS the center of that universe. As the guy who created that universe said, Zaphod would have ended up like everyone else who went into that machine if it were the “real” universe machine.
Funny how H.P. Lovecraft wasn't the best at the very genre he brought into existence. But that's the thing with pioneers isn't it? They're never the best at what they do, but they are the first, and that's enough to pave a path for the rest of us.
TBH that kinda makes them the best - I mean, I have a car and I can easily improve it, I don't need much knowledge or skill to change seats, repaint it etc. It's inventing the car that took a genius.
@@hm-dq5sq Idk man, a lot of the time it's just his characters going "Oh God I saw something so horrible I can't even begin to describe it". It got old after a while. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of the guy and the mythos he established, but when I think of true cosmic horror, Junji Ito is the first person that comes to my mind. I have nothing but respect form him as a pioneer though.
@@mareczek00713 Oh I agree, I wasn't trying to downplay them, pioneers push the human race forward, it's only natural they're process won't be perfect since they're working without guides, as they're the ones writing the guides.
@@hm-dq5sq that's subjective. I get where youre coming from, but personally the very dated elements of his stories and his own bonkers paranoia make some of his stories funny over scary. There are works of Cosmic Horror in recent years such as The Magnus Archives that have taken inspiration from his work and built incredible original works with it. Lovecraft was an undoubtable pioneer, but works like The Magnus Archives made me lose sleep, especially some later episodes.
Yes, and honestly whenever he did end up describing the unspeakable horrors a lot of the time they just turned out to be kinda goofy and cartoonish from an objective standpoint. Like you kinda got to admit divorced of the shit they do things like Cthulhu, the Yith, and Elder Things just kinda seem like goofy things someone made in Spore.
One of my favourite examples of 'omission' in popular culture is from Neil Gaiman, particularly his interpretation of Death in 'The Sandman'. So often threads of the storyline will bring a particular to the threshold of her realm, but because we, the readers, are on *this* side, we never see it. "So, what happens next?" "Now's when you get to find out..." There are only two, arguably three times, in the Sandman cycle that Death gets close to losing her temper. At those moments, universal forces are cowed; what happens when Death is angry? Again, the question is never answered. We see the petulant strops and tantrums of her siblings, but we never see that *dark* side of Death, and that makes her character all the more compelling. She is so loveable because she is unknowable.
Death is very thorough, so for death to get angry would mean death not doing her job, causing her to die, which is still fulfilling her duties…? (Here’s where it gets complex) since it’s essentially dividing by zero, it would cause some kind of reincarnation, or pocket dimension that goes all the way through to the other side.
@@Primatenate88 - especially as she ISN'T Death - that's just what mortals think because we only see this side She was there only after Destiny.... she's also there at every *birth* too... she's LIFE
As my favorite style of writing that my (Vietnamese) literature teachers all said: “Provoke, not describe”. It is not putting the thing into words. It is putting the experience of that thing into words. The perfect example is “Kieu’s story”. When describing the beauties, Nguyen Du wrote (and I translate): “Clouds are defeated by her hair, and snow surrendered to her skin”. He could have wrote “Hair floats like clouds and skin fair as snow”, but that was not how the beholder *felt*.
It reminds me of a song by Silly Wizard, called Queen of Argyll, whose beauty is so great that "all the roses in the garden, they bow and ask her pardon". But of course, "no words can paint the picture of the Queen of all Argyll".
This is something that I struggle a lot with lol. When I imagine things in my head, I am VERY literal and descriptive. I have an exact mental image of what the thing is. So, when I have to describe my imaginary worlds, I usually just write what I'm seeing in my head in a very literal sense, instead of trying to be more "poetic" with my descriptions. I struggle to put "feelings" into words, and a lot of the time I just end up googling things likes "another way to say...", "other words for...", "synonyms of..." and etc. Maybe it's an autism thing, in general I struggle to process and understand emotions. It's not that I'm a a heartless and cold logical machine, it's just that a lot of the time I undermine my emotions and try to repress them in order to be "rational", and as a result I'm really not in touch with my inner emotional world. Or maybe I'm just a bad writer lol.
@@qwertydavid8070 relatable tbh lol. And yea, hard to name emotions is an autism thingy and also related to repression. Personally, I deal with it by emotion wheel. Not the best tool, but is quite useful at time
I once saw a video saying how being "dumb" in Call of Cthulhu is a super power. Or at least open-minded. In Monster Hunter International having a "flexible mind" gives the characters a chance to not end up in a nut house. (Edited for grammar)
This is unironically true in real life as well, I'd say... cognitive flexibility just means that foreign situations and affects are less likely to break you. Although, being as dense as a brick is a different sort of strength in this regard; it's like having a hand that's so thoroughly calloused and tough that you can't feel much of anything other than a vague sense of pressure, so when it gets pushed into the fire your living self doesn't feel the suffering it would otherwise be enduring
@@beansworth5694 I mean Howard was very sheltered. But like the 10th Doctor fighting Satan. He "accepted" what he was, even though he believed it was impossible.
@@sleepdeep305 I've been binge watching Doctor Who. I wonder what anime fans think of Doctor Who. Both have absurd plots. But never make fun of themselves like Marvel movies do.
I'd hesitated to write this in a room full of eldritch horror fans, but you're right. Never underestimate the power of the human brain. I know from experience that it's possible to learn to intuit what you cannot possibly comprehend with reasonable accuracy. By the way, as an anime fan who enjoys Doctor Who, I would say that they're actually very different. Doctor Who is not a very serious show, whereas anime is extremely diverse. A lot of things in anime seem weird due to cultural differences, as well as how their creators are inspired. A lot of science fiction is inspired by Lovecraft's works or Hitchhiker's in the west - stories that are strange on purpose, but have elements that can lend themselves to more serious plots if need be. In the east, they have stories like the gag manga Dragon Ball which very suddenly tried to take itself seriously at the end and launched a genre in the process, or the obviously deliberately strange Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. I think Doctor Who generally takes itself less seriously than Marvel, which does also crack jokes a lot but generally keeps everything grey and washed-out in order to keep a gritty feel. There's some stuff that's too serious and introspective for either Doctor Who or Marvel despite its fantastical elements, like Type-Moon. Likewise, there's some stuff that would be right at home. My Hero Academia is basically just the Young Avengers. The titular Chainsaw Man of a certain new anime that is currently airing could well be a very scary Doctor Who monster. No Game No Life is pretty much a Second Doctor episode extrapolated to an entire series. And then there's stuff like Reincarnated As A Vending Machine, which is too patently absurd for either of them.
My favorite example of omission is in The Magnus Archives. The things behind every horror we hear about are never described in anything beyond the concept they represent. We will know the horrors they send, the garden of bones, the macabre carousel of identity, the monsters and followers of them. But the only people to gaze upon the actual entities died for it. I Love that.
@@Meanslicer43 oh absolutely. Like there's basically little to no visuals on The Distortion but good GOSH they don't need it. That one episode with the Old Man and the door handle is chilling. And the entire concept of Helen is just utterly terrifying. How she genuinely wants to be a friend but she is so deceitful by nature that being around her incites paranoia. Nevermind that one hotel episode. Brutal. All we know of The Distortion itself however, is that it manifests a hallway. But that's enough to make it terrifying because we know JUST enough about it from its messengers. Same with all the fears honestly. They're all so brilliantly written so we see their influence on the world but never once see the Entities themselves, we don't need to.
I was kind of struggling with something I wanted to describe in a story of mine. However, I think you gave me a far better option in leaving it vague, so someone else can try and grasp the situation of it in their own mind.
I was recently running through the old World of Darkness books, mining out concepts, ideas, and NPCs I could use in potential stories and ideas. And as I did I kept getting frustrated. Absolutely none of the various denizens of the WOD's powers or abilities work with any kind of consistency. Vampiric Disciplines, Garou Gifts, Fomori and Spirit Powers. They all have their own way of doing things and trying trying to simulate them across systems is a nightmare. So I sat down and trying to create my own "standardized" system for monster and creature powers and assign them to the various critter concepts I wanted to use. Got about half way before I realized something. The incompatibility of those creatures' powers was kind of the point. From the player's perspective, a Vampire using Celerity or Potence would look pretty much the same as a Garou using their Rage. A Garou's innate shapeshifting would be just horrific to see as it would seeing a formor sprout its own claws and fangs. Demons, Spirits, Ghosts, Banes...what are any of them but different words, different attempts to classify and categorize the same ethereal entities? What one sees of them and attempts to devise to counter them are of course going to be different without the players ever even noticing or understanding...at least until it was probably too late. These things were, by their very nature, ineffable. So I gave up and went back to using the various systems for each different species and monster type. Looking to build the encounters around the idea that players and their characters would never REALLY who or what they were actually dealing with save what scraps and impressions their own encounters and fragmentary research could tell them. And the moment they think they do, the rabbit hole does down a little further into the mouth of madness. ;)
I'd like to point out to a recent star wars show called Andor: An Imperial scientist is using a certain recording to torture a prisioner; this recording is of an alien species the empire conquered in the past, when they die, it is said, they emmit a horrifying sound, and some of the imperial officers oveerseing the whole ordeal where found crying in the floor, the recording used is the isolated sound of the children of the species wich are particularly harmful to the mind. When the escen occurs, the camera pans towards the prisioner's face, as music takes on a crescendo moments before the recording starts, the face of the prisioner starts painting a light worry grin, while the music gets louder and more intense and we get close to the prisioner's face... silence, nothing but silence as the recording plays, and then the prisioners screams, end of the scene
people tell me how great andor is. and it's about genocide and using children as unwilling weapons. how wonderful. what a world where disney is making shit about torturing children.
I’m reminded of, of all things, “the Noodle Incident” from ‘90s newspaper comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Characters would obliquely reference it as a time the strip’s protagonist got in immense trouble. Creator Bill Watterson was asked to tell the story of the Noodle Incident, but he refused, saying whatever vague impressions the readers came up with in their own minds was far more impressive than anything he’d be able to come up with. Although I will say, when it comes to Lovecraft, there are times when I prefer him spelling things out rather than just saying a monster was indescribable. “Indescribable” leaves it up to the reader’s mind to envision the monster in their head, and my head isn’t creative enough to invent something as unworldly and bizarre as the anatomical descriptions of the Elder Things or Wilbur Whateley.
That is the perfect analogy! Also reminds me of the blond chef's backstory from Ratatouille. Sure, he's best known for "killing a man with This Thumb", but it also shows him constantly changing the story for why he was in prison.
Similar to Monty Python's funniest joke, one of my favorite examples of Omission to not explain something is Bill Watterson's "Noodle Incident" from Calvin & Hobbes. This recurring joke is never explained, only mentioned and teased, and is an obvious source of distress to little Calvin as he clearly is guilty of SOMETHING in the enigmatic "Noodle Incident". And never explaining the joke is the pure genius of it, because the incident is left entirely up to the reader's imagination, and if the joke was ever explained then it most likely never would have lived up to what the masses created up for themselves. So it was left a mystery. By contrast, let's take a look at Stephen King's IT, and the big reveal of the "true" form of Pennywise (We all know the ending of this one by now, right? Well, just in case; Spoiler Warning), or at least the closest our human minds could comprehend: a giant spider. Whoopdeedoo. I enjoyed that book, but revealing the shapeshifting monster like that took away its mystique and nightmarish intimidation. It's a great example as to why you sometimes let a mystery remain a mystery, because the reality just doesn't live up to expectations. In fact, that last part is true for many things in life, unfortunately.
Consider how just having a single fully functioning R/C great white would probably have buried Stephen Spielberg in obscurity, rather than running over-budget and WAY past deadlines to his near ruin because of "The Great White Turd" he got... only to launch the career of a legendary Director... ALL because for 90% of the shooting time, his precious "Great White Turd" was either crashed again in the silt under water, or being winched back out, drained, dried, and repaired with some vague hope of doing more than slow circles... ;o)
I always wondered if IT's true form wasn't actually a giant spider and that was just a lie. As an embodiment of fear, it's possible that It defaulted to spider because that's one of the most common fears. I think it's quite possible he has no true form
It's also why even i give recommendations I no longer say how good that show or music is. the reality won't match the expectation i give to the person by hyping it up
IT also has a great example of how Omission can be a satisfying way to describe a thing. "...and while he was thinking about it, he died." The context of this death is complicated. It's the last of a series of actions that demonstrated this particular character's ultimate form, it's unmistakably similar to one of the most prominent deaths in the book, and what he's thinking about is a sentence that started with, "You know I.." and could have ended with, I think, either "hate it when you call me Eds," or "love you." The ambiguity, the symbolism, the literary significance, even the humor, (and stereotyping if you count the fact Beverly is crying FOR THE MILLIONTH TIME IN THE BOOK), it all comes together in that one moment. He could have given us an exhaustive description of the life leaving Eddie's eyes and his head slumping on Bev's shoulder and her crying even more of course and me caring that Richie's crying too 'cause he doesn't do that half as often 'cause he's a guy, but that would leave some readers wandering if Eddie was somehow still alive and just unconscious. Instead, we get nothing less or more then what we wanted: "he died."
Playing the game Blasphemous recently and it is gascinating to discover how these techniques are employed in the game to refer to its most elusive 'thing' that the characters call "The Miracle." We never see it in itself, it's not a physical being, but by descriptions, we don't even know exactly what manner of 'thing' it is. Whether it's an entity, an object, an event, an ability, we get several people saying it in different ways and though the most common seem to define it as an entity, we cannot be sure. It seems to have a will of its own and seems to have emotions, experiencing jealousy, anger, hatred, judgement, but these ideas are often presented vaguely or even contradicted by other descriptions. For example, there is a group of women in the game's lore called the Amantecidas who in the past carried around an effigy of a twisted man, known as The Father. This guy was supposedly a deep believer of the Miracle and so were the Amantecidas, and for a while, the Miracle supported them, making them go from town to town and parading around in its honour. But it got jealous later, killed the Father and imprisoned the Amantecidas. Noone knows why, it just happened. Additionally, the big boss of the finale, a pope-like entity named Escribar, is supposedly 'the Son of the True Miracle.' Meaning that he is the guy currently endorsed by the Miracle and you're there to end both him and it. Got it, cool. But then throughout the game, you are told by others that the Miracle itself is supporting you and Escribar is something like a usurper of sorts, betraying what the Miracle stands for and thus you must be the great hero who ends his madness. Alright, bit weirder but got it. But then some also make offhand comments that make it sound like Escribar has no will of his own and is merely being puppeteered by the Miracle...which you also serve. So it's either you are basically a pawn in the world's largest and deadliest chessgame the Miracle is playing against *itself,* or something so beyond our understanding is going on that none of us can understand as we cleave our way through the realm of Custodia. And neither is a happy thought. The Miracle is presented as so vague, so ethereal, yet simultaneously so real a concept that you can't help but feel shivers up your spine. You don't even know what it is, whether it's a person, a place, an event, whatever, but you feel its effects on you, the enemies, the world at large, everything. And that's honestly horrifying.
People already mentioned above SCP, my favorite example of probably SCP-3125 from Antimemetics division storyline. It can't be described by definition - as soon as you know about it existence - it knows about yours. And it attacks! So most of the description is done through either describing what happens to people who found about it or how SCP teams sidestep all the rules trying to fight something they can't know about.
It can be described, it's just that knowledge of it is usually lethal. We the readers can see its physical manifestations in detail, and hear descriptions of its abstract nature. At one point we see a room full of documentation of it, any page of which could be fatal to anyone who could read and understand it.
@@treevee7376"The more clearly you see it, the more clearly it sees you." There is a tipping point where you know enough about it, and therefore it sees you clearly enough, that it can manifest physically to kill you. Depending on how you receive the information, you might have a few seconds to a minute between awareness of danger and actual death. If, in that time, you take a fast-acting amnesia-inducing drug, you will forget all about it, it will forget all about you, and you can get on with your day.
This reminds me of an episode of the horror podcast The Magnus Archives, which directly references the poem Antigonish and expands the idea in a different way. Describing something that isn't there and does not exist, yet is somehow able to be perceived enough to be described as if it were there. A fairly literal tackling of the question, "how do you describe something that does not exist?" The episode is called Upon the Stair, and it's probably one of my favorite episodes of the podcast.
There are some SCPs that delve into these unknowable worlds. Some of my favourite SCPs are that which talk about Pattern Screamers. Particularly SCP-3426, Reckoner is about when civilizations stumble across a “pattern” that is so completely incomprehensible it bends their reality and minds into non-existence. My favourite line from it is “when you hear the screaming in your mind, be silent until you do not exist” It’s a truly, magnificently terrifying piece and I’d recommend anyone unfamiliar with it to check it out.
SCP - 3125 (especially the Canon There Is No Antimemetics Division) is also really good ‘unknowable’ content, but more how one would go about containing such things.
I always find abstract charistics be what works best for me. 'The tower screamed upwards, embracing future as past, cradling it's children guest', as a quick example of an infinitely tall tower. What type of description would that be?
I would probably best describe it as " Revelation Rap" where a stream of consiousness using poetic styling , almost dream logic and tapping into that pure raw feeling and let it speak for you rather than you speak for it. Almost like a Medium of The Subconsiousness I would say.
For the things I write, this has been the single most useful, writing video I've ever seen! I love the format and the example for each technique. Thank you for this!
Love your work dude, especially when you do stuff on horror (specifically cosmic horror). I'm actually planning to make a homebrew Dnd campaign that heavily Lovecraft inspired and this video definitely got me in the right headspace to make it happen! Keep doing what you do!
I had a thought of what would happen if you gave AI generated art an ineffable concept. The human mind may not be able to make sense of or decipher that, but I’m curious how an AI would attempt to depict something beyond human comprehension and description. Edit: I think everyone reading this is misunderstanding the thought experiment here. The point is not to suggest that an AI would be able to adequately give an accurate description of something that cannot be described. The point is to figure out how an AI, which has much higher computational skills and reasoning skills than a human could ever have by many millions of times over, would approach it. Obviously the AI will depict something we could describe, even if only vaguely. But what will it do with these types of prompts? I am NOT suggesting it will create something capable of driving everyone who looks at it crazy because they can’t comprehend it.
my line of thinking is it wouldn't work because even if its not human it was made by humans, therefore still has human limitations and even if it could conceptualize the ineffable we would still not be able to conceptualize it so we'd just be back at square one.
Am I correct in saying that the current AI generated Art softwares use images found throughout the internet, then compact them into a new image that resembles the description of the new image? I’m not sure that AI could produce such things beyond human comprehension as it uses what humans have already uploaded online, therefore is limited in a way. Please correct me if I am wrong in anyway about this. Thanks
This has been one of my most favorite episodes I have heard in a long time. I was trying to explain some of the ideas of HP Lovecraft to a friend. I just sent him a link to this video.
18 hours after watching this i a feel that a litle bit the way i think changed maybe 3% improvment in ways im trying to enrich my writing or give the characters depth, i have a feeling that if i keep watching your videos it could lead me to not only write a masterpiece but to accidentally become a better person throughout this journey of self improvmet and deep thinking that has been kickstarted by your words
I sure do love HP lovercraft. The artistic descriptions he puts together with words amazes me time and time again. I hope he didnt name his cat another unnameable name.
When writing things that are borderline indescribable, I like to use words that conventionally would never be used to describe that thing, break down certain words to their barest concepts and slap them over in a cacophony of just instincts and feelings. I find it creates an interesting effect. For example: She bleeds black. The sort of black that swallows light, or perhaps the backdrop to the backdrop of the stars. Where it is not how dark it is that matter but rather a startling lack of stars. It is the kind that seeps when you look at it and bleeds your reality apart. The kind that pulls you in with the same ferosity as your body repels it away, something his brain refuse to understand outside of the simple concept of just... Black.
I don't like being that one person who double-replies but a decent example of something more serious like that that I did once was something along the lines of "The best way I can describe it is that my description will be entirely wrong. Just as someone from three negative spatial dimensions couldn't percieve the negative fourth, one from those would not perceive it properly, as if it were from the fifth, and nevermind us in a reality not only on a different layer but entirely inverse to its inherent existence. It moves by stillness, its location is where it isn't, its shape is what it's not. It looks like not absence, but the absence of a lack of absence. And remember, this entire description, is almost definitely entirely off the mark"
In my dnd campaign, i described an eldritch entity with an analogy: If you were to be an ant in the middle of a computer, you would understand nothing. You would see strange glowing parts and angles so perfectly cut you had never seen anything like it in your life. Imagine you, as the ant on the circuit board, were suddenly filled with exact and precise knowledge of how and why each and every individual wire and piece of gold in that machine operates the way it does. You understand the way electrons are interpreted, you understand what electrons are, you understand how light is created through the LEDs on the monitor. You understand a computer the way someone who builds them does. And then, when you leave, it begins to fade from your mind. So you want to communicate, you want to write it down, but as an ant, the only language you have is your pheromones, you try and speak in what you have but the only words you can speak, in essence, are "move this way" and "carry this food". So no one understands what you say, or what you think. They view you as insane. You are an ant. And Hastur is a supercomputer.
This is one of the best comment sections I’ve scrolled through, with everyone adding thoughtful and insightful connections to the video, it’s so easy to forget I’m on an internet video
Yes, but not those medieval Seraphim pressings. Not the meme that they have become. They don't actually have 7 wings or gyroscpic rings or some such. Just because it's described doesn't mean it's accurate.
@@uncledubpowermetal Indeed. A lot of what is described is described in analogy, either to make sense of things, or to describe things such as their rolls, in ways that people of the time would understand. The "wheels within wheels with eyes all around" for example simply means that those ones are if not all-knowing, at least all-seeing.
I'm aware of how they're usually described, but the way I usually picture angels is more as abstract entities of light that simply manifest a tangible form when interacting with humans. (Except the ophanim. Those are the sentient omni-directional wheels of Big G's self-driving chariot. :P Also they should have at least 6 interlocking rings in order to have all 6 rotational degrees of freedom in 4D space.)
@Vlad Yvhv well almost, they almost use analogy but it's not true analogy; analogy is explanation or even clarification but what they are describing is what they can only approximate with words. So they're not necessarily analogous but ineffable.
First video I've ever seen of yours, The way you speak and deliver information whilst weaving in quotes and thoughts is honestly enthralling, Honestly, to put into words, would be impossible, its ineffable
I'd like to imagine such an example where an ineffable creature is dead, mummified, and/or unmoving. Yet to all who perceive it, it never stops moving, changing, and shifting into all sorts of amalgamations. _"There I beheld the creature before me. It was dead, I knew that. Its lifeless body, floating in a pool of its own black blood, laid sprawled out and bare, and its eyes - portals into an all-encompassing and unknowing void - gazed back at me. It was dead, I knew that._ _"And yet, it moved. It changed. It never stopped changing. With every second that passed like an eon, the creature's form warped and shifted before my very eyes, changing into every shape and thing I could possibly conceive of, as well as things I couldn't. Gnashing maws. Grasping claws. Colors that were not colors. Shapes that were beyond this world, this universe, and beyond. Even without blinking, I could barely hold onto the creature's anatomy for more than a second before it shifted and melted into some other form I couldn't comprehend._ _"But it was dead, I knew that."_
I like the way you describe the space between how people react to something and what something is. The bubble of illusion around objects that makes them more than they are
You said in the video "we don't know what we don't know" or something along those lines and it's the truth. I feel like we've all always known but pursuing the limits is what illuminates the truth. As an artist I believe this is similar to trying to create the artwork you see in your head, you can describe it and try to create it but it only exists there shifting and changing never to exist in our world. An abstract idea, yes, but it's how I see it. I'm gonna post this before it gets too long now.
Something I don't think many people have considered in relation to this is how some A.I. art can be extremely difficult, if not impossible to describe. Take Artbreeder, for example. It takes preexisting images and uses an algorithm to mesh them together in completely unnatural ways, oftentimes resulting in something that is familiar, but too alien to understand, or something that looks real, but defies the laws of physics in one way or another. Maybe we could use an AI to create an approximation of something ineffable?
I mean, yeah they are alien. But also understandable since the AI are based on humans. So . . . AI are alien and familiar. Unthinkably intelligent yet incomprehensibly stupid. Way to human yet not human enough.
It’s possible. I’ve tried it myself and 90% of the time the image is just incomprehensible shapes with vague themes. But that 10% you do get something neat.
A really good example of the "combination" method can be read in the short story The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges. The titular object in the story is a point in space that intersects all other points, and thus anyone who gazes into it can see everything everywhere all at once at every angle simultaneously. The narrator exposes at lenght many of the individual things he saw within the point, but the aleph itself isn't any of these things or any list of things. It is everything
Your Videos are always so amazing! The artstyle is super unique and beautiful and your tips are super helpful The Videos themselves are art and helped me so much becoming a better writer, thank you so much tale foundry
"Let's see if we can eff them anyway." Whoa Pumba, not in front of the kids! In all seriousness, I really enjoyed this video and I'll be referring to it when I talk about some ineffable things in an upcoming story.
The concept of this whole video reminds me of a short story from Argentine author Jorge Luís Borges that I read not too long ago, named "The Aleph". In it, an acquaintance of Borges tells him that he has discovered The Aleph, a tiny spot in his basement from which he can observe everything there is to be seen in the world, from every conceivable angle, all at once, similarly to the Total Perspective Vortex, except that the origins of this multum in parvo, as the acquaintance describes, are not clear. When it is Borges' turn to also peer into the Aleph, he pauses to adress how he has reached the inefable center of his narration, and expresses his distress as a writer, for he cannot describe with a finite sequence words the infinity that he saw in an instant. Then he overwhelms us with but a fraction of what he saw. Overall, it's an impressive story and I highly recommend it, as well as any other work done by Borges.
Timestamps: 2:53 *Admission* - Admit it can't be described. 4:33 *Circumscription* - Describe its effects. 6:48 *Magnification* - Compare it to concepts already extreme. 8:26 *Alienation* - Explain why it violates reality. 10:05 *Combination* - Compound analogies to create a liminal effect. 12:10 *Obsfucation* - Be as vague as possible. 13:51 *Abstraction* - Describe with nonsense. 15:22 *Disorientation* - Reference anomalous mind states. 16:59 *Fictionalization* - Use deception to evoke the feelings it produces. 19:14 *Omission* - Just don't describe it.
This has been an INCREDIBLY inspiring video and its actually gotten me to start writing long form surrealist poetry again. Though I dont think it will get much attention, just the act of writing it out has been so much fun. Im using a few of the techniques I found most interesting in an attempt to describe the ineffible sensations of Overstimulation and it is fuuuuun. Thank you for this I might HAVE to checkout nebula when im done with this poem.
this reminds of dissociation, when i have experienced it, i can barely distinguish between what is physical and not. or it feels like my consciousness is lagging behind my own body. idk how else to describe it, and even that description doesnt really describe the sensation.
"...it feels like my consciousness is lagging behind my own body. " as someone who has experienced this before, that is the perfect description. i also describe it as "my soul being knocked out of my body" when it happens cuz of a fall
Stalker (1979) is about a room in the middle of a Chernobyl-like abandoned zone. Anyone who goes into the room has their deepest wish granted. The zone is guarded and itself is deadly and you need a guide to navigate it. We never see exactly what's in the room but I wasn't disappointed by the ending.
what I interpreted was that we like to live in an illusion often ignoring our true self despite being aware of it....not wanting to accept or encounter the shadow as it may disappoint us.
@@Kaare-The-Heathen It did. The games basically took the atmosphere + aesthetics of the film and the premise of the novel Roadside Picnic (which inspired both)
@@dmin5782 After I commented that I did research, and was quick to find the book, Roadside Picnic. I was actually about to start reading it as I realized this reply. Funny coincidence.
I used abstraction at one point in a fanfiction I'm writing, when the main character learns to tap into the very fabric of creation. It's really fun, because I just slapped some words together that give the impression that I'm explaining something, but the descriptions defy common sense, like the weight of an object's density.
I’m slightly green colorblind. I can see red and green just fine, but subtle differences in shades, or the color of small things like an LED from far away, are hard to distinguish. For example, I see some very light shades of green as yellow, and I have a hard time figuring out whether those fob readers for unlocking doors are red for locked or green for unlocked. Anyway, I bring this all up because another weird thing I experience happens when large areas of red and green touch each other, like many Christmas decorations. I see the line where they touch as this sort of dark “not-black” color. I always knew it was my brain getting confused, but now I know the name of that color! Thanks for adding “red-green” to my dictionary 😄
There are glasses you can get now that do color blindness correction. Not sure if it's that big of a deal to you but if you ever get a chance to try them you should. I have a colorblind friend (not sure what type) who got them and he basically never takes them off when he's outside, so he can experience what he's missed all this time.
This reminds me of some of the literary devices in the stormlight archive. A lot of books will introduce a new concept by describing it. But the way Brandon Sanderson builds his world isn't like that. He simply takes things and treats them like they're normal everyday things that we would see. He doesn't take the time to describe the grass, and how it pulls itself into the ground to escape danger. He just mentions it in passing, almost like an afterthought. These are just examples, not actual quotes, but he would write something like "he felt at one with the landscape: the wind blowing in his hair, the grass shrinking into the ground as he approached..." instead of "the grass shrank as he approached. Most species of grass did this. A section of root underneath collects water from the soil at an incredible rate, expanding the blade of grass as a sponge like organ expands" Basically, Sanderson "assumes" that everything that takes place in the book is common knowledge. Duh, everyone knows grass shrinks into the ground as you walk near it. That's just how it works. That's how it's always worked. No need to question or describe something as mundane as that.
I think there are some other authors that touch on this subject rather well. Dan Abnett is rather good at it. Sometimes you can make Unwords, Unsounds, and Uncolor feel nearly tangible, but defying conventional description enough to where it is still ineffable.
It's funny you delve into this. In the Star Wars series Andor we learn the Empire has developed a rather novel interrogation method. It apparently encountered (and slaughtered) an alien species whose death screams, particularly those of their young, drive people to madness and even death. So, the Imps took recordings of those screams, hooked them to a device the dilates your perception of time (i.e. five minutes feels like hours) and plop a pair of headphones on you and start the clock. All of this is described in detail to one of the characters as they face interrogation. The headphones are put on, all sound immediately cuts out, and we watch their face go from confusion to shock and futile resistance before...they themselves scream in agony. It's indeed chilling and unsettling to watch. Particularly because, through it all we never actually hear what they did. We just see what it does to them.
Watching this video has made me notice that I have had a sort of "ineffable" experience recently. I am "dentophobic" (idk if that's the right word. I have an extreme and irrational fear of going to the dentist), so my dentist appointments are _complicated_. I have to be drugged with injected anesthesia and nitrous oxide. Recently, in one of my appointments, I was drugged as usual, but when the effect kicked in, I was in a weird dream, which was oddly nostalgic even when I never had this experience before. Due to the nature of the ineffable, I can't really describe the dream properly, but the best I can say about it would be that "everything I've felt is a mix of a hypercomplex fractals of sorts". I know, it sounds dumb, but I know I felt that, and when I got home I entered a mini-existencial crisis...
This video came up in my recommended and I'm super excited to have found this channel! I love to 'F' the ineffable (it's my favorite 'F' for sure!), so here's to seeing more of your content and checking out what's over on Nebula.
great vid (stop here if squeemish at an existential level) always a good time hearing Douglas get his due credit. i find it fun to play with that boundary of indescribability (probably spelled wrong and ive had 12hours sleep since the beginning of last month so hard pass correcting it) as the better you get at describing weird things you see a scale of sorts, like how there are larger infinities that are literally than other infinities some indescribable things end up very defined, like cthulu and many more simply stretch out and reveal even more unfathomable depths. like trying to describe suffering as its direct 11 dimensional shape of electromagnetic signal, only electroactive cells are used to experience it so -even if the cells are taken to be wiring for conciousness to be software encoded on to- that shape of experience still literally exists as a shape of electrical discharge physically existing and having its own knock on consequences. still not breaking the surface but a real enemy is a defeatable one. that much we do glean.
I get what you mean, however you ought to get some more rest. Sleep cements ideas firmly enough in our minds so that communicating them isn't as much of a process of throwing things at the wall and hoping the point gets across. Living in a sleep-deprived, self-involved mental space in perpetuity isn't helpful for being better able to describe the difficult-to-describe, even if it does help with exploring some alternative mental states that make observing other angles of an objectively unobservable thing easier. Keep yourself in balance, friendo, even if upsetting that balance is useful for getting some leverage from time to time it isn't good to stay in an unwieldy mental state
I do not know how you found yourself in my recommendations, but your pure hypnotic esthetic and intoxicating words have now found yourself in my subscriptions
I experienced something when I was young about 6 years old. I call it the absence of everything. Imagine you are standing anywhere. But you can't feel anything. And I mean no touch,smell,hearing,color and everything else you can think of. It feelt like the silence of everything. And it happened to me twice.
I want to truly thank you for this video. It gave me a lot of practical cues to write my first philosophical fanta-horror short story that just won a contest in my country! Thank you again! ❤
I was working on a encounter with someones patron in my dnd campaign. I took inspiration of the lessons you gave and I actually terrified one of my players. Thanks for the help!
Cixin Liu actually made a pretty good description of a 4th dimensional space on his book The End of Death. Its too long to put in here, but its damn good and really gives you a feel of how it would be to get pulled to an upper dimension.
A subject dear to my heart. And very well done on the video. Thank you very much for touching on this, and sharing these techniques. I really think that there's a lot of stagnation, with people latching onto Lovecraft's works, but not really creating much of their own. I sincerely hope that this video helps others to expand their horizons and work on new horrors of unthinkable proportions. The sort of stuff that makes Cthulu wet the bed at night cause he had a nightmare about it...
I still find Cognitohazards and similar things so riveting, they are right here in our world in a way, knowledge that knowing of exposes yyou to danger and even death.
Sometimes you don't have to describe the effect but can relate the effect, twisting the mind, reality, madness from the occurrance or sickened by it. "I saved you by doing it..." "I would rather have died."
@@josemoreno6987 So of the crew of the ship that found where C'thulu rested, only like 3 made it to the boat to escape in time; two of which stared at C'thulu too long, and in trying to percieve him, went mad and their brains just died.
I'm one of those that has shown red-green, an "impossible color" to many people. It refers to Binocular Color Fusion. IMO, best way is to see it is to get two phones, and fill up the screen of each with one of the colors. Then you basically shove those screens up to each eye like VR. Its important each eye only gets one color. Then, you just kind of need to relax your vision, and try to blend the two scenes. The best way I can describe it is like a low saturation color grey-brown, with a random boiling of edges and distances at the same time. Its as though your visions' sense of those things is just being randomly activated.
The omission part at the end actually perfectly describes my personalized faith that is very similar to and derived from absurdism. Thanks for giving me a good description for my more religious friends. We like to have conversations talking about the similarities and the differences between our faith and values.
Was talking with my friend the other day and we talked about if an AI could have all knowledge about you and your specific biology, how fast could it make you go insane? What would that look like? Could it use scents? Sounds played at a certain frequency? Certain touches and pressure along your skin? Specific images that only for you cause seizures or force you to become more susceptible to other stimuli? How long would it take?
That idea is called a Basilisk Hack. And yea . . . Though you’d have to have a level of knowledge about humans far surpassing our own to pull it off. Honestly, just using the tried and true methods (like the Halo Effect and withholding crucial info) would be easier most of the time.
@@jocylinfrancis930 Nice! Many thanks on new term to search. Got any other interesting bits? Just finished reading Blindsight by Peter Watts so I have a lot of interest in this sorta thing lately.
Once my sister woke up crying historically and, when asked what she had dreamt about, she said it was, "like water black". Anyways, I think the reason why the indescribable is so interesting is because reality is inarticulate. We might assign words to a thing but the words are not the thing itself. Words are not real. And if they claim that something surpasses them, they most be talking about something real. I think that is the illusion these stories rely on.
i wrote something cosmic horror for the first time recently, and i thought i did a pretty alright job at trying to convey that sense of alienness and unknowing, but i think i might need to rewrite this at a later time because seeing the examples and other things made me think about better ways i could've done it. Paragraph below "It was an indescribable, almost ethereal shape. It was flowing-yet structured. With every second this thing was in the same room as Azre, it contorted and blended in with itself. It looked.. viscous, yet also solid, as if you could run into it. It was bleeding in and out of her vision, it was everywhere. Every new shape more profound and nameless than the last, small bits running off and falling back into the indescribable mass. It had no sense of depth; every part of it appeared as if it were on the same plane.. It had no shape, no colour, and no name."
#5 reminds me of the description of Galadriel if she took the one ring. "Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Tempestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me and despair!" Described not literally, but by way of analogy.
Sounds someone who would be great as your ally, but not as your enemy even for the pettiest thing. It seems she was deep down a very vain person, and she is afraid of what she might become if it leaves it out with the Ring on hand.
refering to 11:37 ive never heared anyone talk about this before but ive "seen" the color, tho id didnt cross my eyes i think. the impossible color was there for only a fraction of a thought, cause when i tried to complete or coomprehend that thought or image, it split into red and green and i have no memory of how it looked but i know it was there. sounds weird (which i love) but it wasnt as special as it sounds lol.
The main antagonist of a story I’ve been working on is the concept of entropy given a consciousness, however they then discover how their concept of entropy is a small grain of information in a desert of true complexity
Interestingly enough though entropy will likely eventually be the cause of the end of the universe. It slowly gains more of a grip and becomes more and more present as it slowly overtakes everything and cannot be stopped because its inevitable wash over everything is dictated by unwavering laws of physics. Right now it's only one piece of the puzzle, but it's slowly but surely leaking over to the rest
@@didack1419 so far the only thing I’ve figured out to do with “him/it” is to have it take control over a defeated god which represents war in a temporary humanoid form. So the only perceptual anything the characters have experienced was what it can do to something that’s insanely powerful to begin with and essentially transformed the war god into a zombie that was far more powerful and took several of the universes most powerful fighters to deal with
Bird Box does a fantastic version of this, the aftermath of the creatures are gruesome and made more so knowing that it was the victims who caused their own demise.
This video made me feel an emotion words cannot describe. Is this irony? Is this the glimpse of heaven Lucy Pevensie saw in the book in Narnia? That was ineffable. She could never remember the story, but it was so good. So beautiful that she longed to read it again. And Aslan promised that he would read her the story again one day. My heart is spilling from my fingertips.
I have a little request, if you entertain such things. I'm the kind of person that likes to write fantasy, mainly for D&D campaigns and such but also for my own enjoyment. And where I write there is always conflict or war, and so as you can imagine, many fight scenes. Both of great armies clashing and individual duels between nemeses. I was wondering if you could explore writing combat? How its done and what it can entail or represent.
To what extent you can though. Subjective experiences are already ineffable. They can only be describe by appealing to similar experiences that the listener has experienced.
...today I learned there are impossible colours, and now I will be bothered by it FOREVER. I LOVE it! :D (I knew about opposing colours of course, but it never occurred to me that you ... can't SEE both mixed together? Like, obviously I've experienced that, but never NOTICED it? It was like when you're a kid and you learn you can't lick your own elbow, you immediately have to TRY anyway... or was that just me?) I had to pause the video immediately to google it, and dropped into a 2 hour research rabbithole on vision, and colour names, and the culture of colour, and impossible colours, and... A+, good rabbithole, do recommend! “Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgot.” ~ Neil Gaiman. Also, the comments on this video are full of interesting things I am going to spend the rest of the evening checking out. I love this :D I mean, the video was also very good. But more importantly, it has sent me on ALL the delicious mental tangents! *gnaws happily * Edit: a thought occurred, wondering if somewhere along the spectrum of *gestures * all of this, you end up at "T'was brillig, and the slithy toves..."? Like, instead of the thing being described being ineffable, the words used are ineffable, and yet feel like they... can be eff'd? (heh) I dunno where this thought was going honestly, but throwing it out here in case anyone else wants to play with a random tangent.
I feel like writing impossible things are a lot harder now because we are a lot more exposed to a lot of concepts, increasing our familiarity with weird things.
"The Woman leans close and whispers into Aislyn's ear a word that rolls throughout her skull like the most dire of great bells, shaking her bones enough that she stumbled and falls to her knees. The world blurs. Her skin prickles and itches and grows hot all over, as if burned by the wind of the word's passing." - The City We Became
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Watch next week's video RIGHT NOW! ➤ nebula.tv/videos/talefoundry-worldsmiths-the-blood-artist
Watch all our other videos over on Nebula, including an entire video series-Worldmiths-which we haven't released here on youtube!
i know you usualy dont do anime stories,but "durarara" has a perfect non linear story and the way it was made bafled me,hope you can get into it one day
sorry for saying something so random,it was just on my mind thats all and i wondered how it would be when filtered through your opinions
You are so cute tale foundry 🥺 cutest robot in youtube
A.G.I Will be man's last invention
Sources and or more on the red green eye crossing phenomenon? I'd like to better understand this 'ineffable' occurrence I experience, and a quick search yielded nothing useful.
Someone else mentioned, but wanted to give full context, I also love how this is handled in SCP. For example, in SCP-2264, there's a description of the 'Hanged King' (meant to be sort of like a physical king in yellow) that a maddened soldier gives, and when prompted to describe what its face looked like, he just responds with:
"A god shaped hole. The barren desolation of a fallen and failed creation. You see the light of long dead stars. Your existence is nothing but an echo of a dying god's screams. The unseen converges. Surrounds you. And it tightens like a noose."
Really works with the whole idea of abstraction and omission, we can't know what a 'god-shaped' hole looks like, or what 'unseen' thing is 'converging', but you can almost imagine it based on connotations alone. Really cool for horror.
I was literally about to mention "a god shaped hole." It's the single best example of this I've seen. Simple to read, impossible to envision, and extremely impactful.
Lovecraft sought to achieve the same impact through exhaustive tangles of unwieldy language, yet the author of SCP-2264 was able to get there with four carefully-chosen words.
YES. Honestly, this applies to a lot of the works relating to the Hanged King in general. There are things that cannot, will not, be possible to describe about Allagada and its people.
@@PotatoPatatoVonSpudsworth they have both their own flavours. The way Lovecraft did it made his work very unique.
just call it undead
@@crimsonitacilunarnebula but it's not
"Words describing it fail. Pages relating it shrivel. Tales recounting it end." - Nemesis of Reason, Magic the Gathering.
One of my favorites. A staple with the ol hedron crab
To this day, I am SO GODDAMN FRUSTRATED that such fantastic writing (and such an excellent name) was used for a friggin' trading card that would become outdated after like two years. The Nemesis of Reason deserves to be up there alongside Cthulhu as a household eldritch horror, not just another collection of numbers on a little card.
@@PotatoPatatoVonSpudsworth You know what, I’m writing a little story and this idea is too cool not to include. If it fits in, of course.
Didn’t expect to see this mentioned here but I’m glad someone did it!
The trouble with indescribable things is that they are inherently boring. It's actually more interesting to have something describable which is so exotic or misunderstood that it's open to interpretation.
Take for example 1D. Now some would say that's easy to understand because it's something with only length or width but not both. But speaking mathematically 1D is also absent of time if you're to say time is the 4th dimension. So we are actually 4D as we have three dimensions plus time, the images wedraw are 3D as they have two dimensions plus time. 2D would be time plus one dimension. So is 1D time itself? Or is 1D width? Or height? Maybe depth? How does that interact with other dimensions?
So what you have here is not indescribable but it's so far beyond our experience and perceptions that it could literally send a person mad by spending too long thinking about it in detail. Or be unsettling to comprehend.
"The End of the Universe, the funniest joke in the world, Cthulhu: all perfectly ineffible. But hey, that doesn't mean you can't try to eff 'em anyway." That's truly an inspired line. Love it!
All credit to our amazing writer, Momo!
This specific category of fan artists: Way ahead of you, bae!
I wanna eff Cthulhu for sure
"To do the undoable, to see the unseeable, TO EFF THE INEFFIBLE!"
Spoken like a true bard.
3:01 Admission: State plainly the thing is ineffable.
4:40 Circumscription: Describe the effects of the ineffable rather than the thing itself.
6:50 Magnification: Compare the thing to something already extreme.
8:32 Alienation: Describe how it violates the usual principles of reality.
10:13 Combination: Use a combination of analogies to create a liminal effect.
12:19 Obfuscation: Be vague and ambiguous.
13:57 Abstraction: Use nonsensical descriptions.
15:29 Disorientation: Reference alternative mind states.
17:05 Fictionalization: Lie and exaggerate.
19:20 Omission: Give no description.
Þank you for your effort
I had a circumscription once!
@@ninjireal I hope that isn't a typo
>Stated plainly the thing is ineffable.<
Oh, I can F it alright.
This reply is intended to act like a bookmark to this comment
In a webcomic "Stick in a Mud" a monster introduced himself with a speach bubble full of torture and suffering. To which the protagonist replied: "It kinda sounds like 'Blueberry'. I'm gonna call you Bluberry."
😂
Makes me think about some of the worst death metal "music" I've ever heard
I guess *that's* a way to make the audience realize that what you see doesn't need to be what the characters heard
(?)
Or whatever i was trying to say
What does a blueberry sounds like? Who knows but he realized it and explained
Its kind of like how a dm In a cthulu tabletop scenario describing the language of an alien creature as dubstep. It's conjures a hilarious image in a terrifying scenario.
One of my favorite instances of a character trying to describe something undescribable is in The Magnus Archives where a woman whose son got taken, and she describes it the best way she can with "the sky ate him..." It's clear that she can't describe it any clearer, and she states that if she thinks of it too closely she gets a headache (iirc).
Such a great way of describing a situation linked with the strong emotional part.
YEES I get so happy anytime someone brings up TMA
Yessss!! That's such a good example of this, really gave me goosebumps the first time I listened to it!
Thiss, I also feel like the spiral fits with this theme as well, especially the Distortion
YESSSSS TMA
As someone with epilepsy who occasionally had perceptions that are really hard to describe, I really liked these methods as they tend to be really close to what I often end up with.
I came here to say pretty much the same. These work pretty well to describe the ineffable you've actually seen/felt as well as that of fiction.
When I forget taking my medication, I will experience a weird thing when I close my eyes and try to fall asleep: The space in front of my face/forehead will at the same time feel very tiny and very huge.
And once I had a fever dream in which I was an element in a network of numerical series that were also a red crystal.
I hear that! It's good to hear too, because I always felt like an alien trying to describe the alien feeling of having certain seizure experiences...
I don't want to sound like I came here to romanticise mental conditions, but
I've been curious for years to try psychedelics to experience alternate states of consciousness, precisely because they are unique experiences that I can't normally experience.
@@didack1419 from the perspective of someone who experiences some mild to moderate psychosis, it doesn't come off that way. I can completely understand someone wanting to know what the experience itself is like firsthand (although a lot of my experiences are more contained to my own mind rather than perception of the world around me)
One of the best description-by-analogy examples I've ever read was from the classic _A Voyage to Arcturus_ by David Lindsay. The main character has traveled to a planet with twin suns, and experiences two new primary colours -- ulfire and jale.
From the book: ""Just as blue is delicate and mysterious, yellow clear and unsubtle, and red sanguine and passionate, so he felt ulfire to be wild and painful, and jale dreamlike, feverish, and voluptuous."
That’s really cool, I want to check out that book now.
That's not even just a description by analogy... That's creating a new "sensory axis", for colors, at least conceptually, and then placing those two on opposite ends of that new axis.
Beautiful.
@@MidnightSt It's not really new, though. Colours have been linked to emotions and other abstract qualities throughout the history of the arts. Interestingly, the qualities associated with colours tend to remain quite similar across cultures and through history; likely due to the associations of those colours with how they appear in nature -- red being the colour of blood and therefore life, as well as the colour of fire; yellow the colour of the sun; blue the colour of night; green the colour of plants and other growing things; and so on. Because of this near-universality, authors and other artists commonly use specific colours and shades to invoke a particular feeling.
Interesting book reference. I'm definitely going to read that one. Ulfire and jale seem like interesting colors. And I feel like I've seen these two colors before. At least the way their notion is described. I've already seen a deep red that's also pitch-black. This black-red color fits the description of ulfire in my opinion. Furthermore, I've already seen a color that's simultaneously deep, luminous magenta AND luminous, vibrant green. Again, the color jale fits that color in my opinion. How did I see these impossible colors / impossible color combination? Well, here's how I did it:
On impossible colors and Tetrachromacy, and more:
I'm working on making humans more than trichromats by bestowing a fourth cone or something similar onto them. There are glasses, i.e. Infitec's Triple Band Pass Interference Glasses (TBP glasses), that split the RGB cones in our eyes into R1G1B1 in the left and R2G2B2 in the right eye. This is achieved by the combination of multiple band pass filters in a single lens. If we take the green cone for example the TBP glasses split the cone sensitvity into two parts: The left eye now only receives a green where all the green cones that are more sensitive to red-ish light are cut off and the right eye now only receives a green where all the green cones that are sensitive to more blue-ish light are cut off. In effect, it makes 2 cones out of one. And because a lesser sensitivity of a cone type results not just in a perceived luminosity change but also in a perceived color change - because the surrounding colors shift closer in to the color space of the diminished color - you implement impossible color combinations into your vision. This happens to all three cone types and enables you to make out color differences you could have never imagined being able to differentiate before. Unfortunately, you won't see any new "primary" color. However, I feel like I can see new secondary and tertiary colors / color differences.
With only a single magenta lens over one of my eyes I calculated that I can even see at least 1.25 times the colors (especially in the yellow-green/lime and cyan-green/turquoise color space). Wearing this single magenta lens allows me to make out double the color differences in the lime and turquoise color space. So where the green to greenish-lime colors #00FF00 and #20FF00 look identical to me under normal conditions, with the single magenta lens on these two colors are as different to me as #00FF00 and #40FF00 (where I can normally see a slight difference). So this an increase in color discriminability from 40 down to 20, that is double the color discriminability. I can make out details in cyan to yellow things I could have never noticed before, even (and especially) on RGB screens. Yellow is as different from green to me now as red is from green. And red glows like a beacon. My subjective color contrasts are definitely a lot higher.
And this is only the beginning. I'm working an active XR glasses and software (the glasses I mentioned before are all passive) that implement impossible colors into the perceived color spectrum. So like a red-orange, a red-yellow, a red-lime, red-green, a magenta-green, a cyan-red, a green-purple, etc. With this technology you can implement at least 155 new distinct (impossible) color combinations into your color spectrum. And oh boy, I've already seen it. The camera and color pass through quality of the XR glasses I used were abysmally bad and yet it was so beautiful. You can imagine what I saw with it like Star Trek's Geordi La Forge's VISOR. (There are clips online that show what he'd see. It was in an offical episode.) There is color in color in color in color and it's not an exaggeration. If you can learn to make sense of this even tetrachromacy seems inferior.
This is the nearest I've come to experiencing "lovecraftian" colors.
I can also make polarization visible to the human eye and give the polarized light colors. But that's already too much for this comment.
As you might tell, I'm a sense researcher. I love senses because they are the only things that connect us to this world. If you can sense more of this world by acquiring more senses or enhance the already existing ones, this world will become even more beautiful and rich in detail.
Shameless plug: On my RUclips channel "Ooqui" I make videos about how to be able to perceive impossible colors / impossible color combinations yourself.
My mind wants to think of ulfire being purplish, with jale being greener. I get that it's an impossible exercise to imagine colors that don't exist, but I wonder if anyone else has "placeholder" colors for what's unknowable
When it comes to the moment in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when they get to the Total Perspective machine, I absolutely love the reaction afterwards. Here, on a planet where millions ended their lives, where it was considered a death sentence to even set foot into the machine, the character goes in, walks out and goes, "Wow, yeah, that was cool. Ooh, cake!" For me, it was a perfect moment to undercut the entire mood and defy the supposed despair that "the unknowable" brings. Sometimes, you just have to look at The Ineffable and go, "Yeah, you're cool and all, but this cake here is delicious, so I don't care about you right now."
In a way, it's a beautiful metaphor for how you should handle things when people talk about the grand cosmic scale. Since nothing we do can matter to it, why should it matter to us? Just have some cake and forget about it.
i like that! Or like, engage with it to the extend that feels good or potentially even as something that can aid by bringing some perspective into stuff, but keep making regular cake stops too. All about balance for me
Yeah, Camus called it absurdism :)
Most people at some point feel dread, the realization that the universe is immense and cold, and that no matter what's beyond our lives, it's all the same for who are left.
Most of these, again, will have a hard day or two, and get back to enjoy cotton candy because the human brain isn't really meant to struggle against the idea of the heat death of the universe on the daily, and is extremely good at coping.
Shout out to Mos Def , Yassin bey he was hilarious as the hitchhiker from outer space
Well, this only happens because the entire universe Zaphod is in when he goes into that machine is made entirely FOR him, and so he IS the center of that universe. As the guy who created that universe said, Zaphod would have ended up like everyone else who went into that machine if it were the “real” universe machine.
Funny how H.P. Lovecraft wasn't the best at the very genre he brought into existence.
But that's the thing with pioneers isn't it? They're never the best at what they do, but they are the first, and that's enough to pave a path for the rest of us.
TBH that kinda makes them the best - I mean, I have a car and I can easily improve it, I don't need much knowledge or skill to change seats, repaint it etc.
It's inventing the car that took a genius.
@@hm-dq5sq Idk man, a lot of the time it's just his characters going "Oh God I saw something so horrible I can't even begin to describe it".
It got old after a while.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of the guy and the mythos he established, but when I think of true cosmic horror, Junji Ito is the first person that comes to my mind.
I have nothing but respect form him as a pioneer though.
@@mareczek00713 Oh I agree, I wasn't trying to downplay them, pioneers push the human race forward, it's only natural they're process won't be perfect since they're working without guides, as they're the ones writing the guides.
@@hm-dq5sq that's subjective. I get where youre coming from, but personally the very dated elements of his stories and his own bonkers paranoia make some of his stories funny over scary.
There are works of Cosmic Horror in recent years such as The Magnus Archives that have taken inspiration from his work and built incredible original works with it. Lovecraft was an undoubtable pioneer, but works like The Magnus Archives made me lose sleep, especially some later episodes.
Yes, and honestly whenever he did end up describing the unspeakable horrors a lot of the time they just turned out to be kinda goofy and cartoonish from an objective standpoint.
Like you kinda got to admit divorced of the shit they do things like Cthulhu, the Yith, and Elder Things just kinda seem like goofy things someone made in Spore.
One of my favourite examples of 'omission' in popular culture is from Neil Gaiman, particularly his interpretation of Death in 'The Sandman'. So often threads of the storyline will bring a particular to the threshold of her realm, but because we, the readers, are on *this* side, we never see it.
"So, what happens next?"
"Now's when you get to find out..."
There are only two, arguably three times, in the Sandman cycle that Death gets close to losing her temper. At those moments, universal forces are cowed; what happens when Death is angry?
Again, the question is never answered. We see the petulant strops and tantrums of her siblings, but we never see that *dark* side of Death, and that makes her character all the more compelling. She is so loveable because she is unknowable.
Death is very thorough, so for death to get angry would mean death not doing her job, causing her to die, which is still fulfilling her duties…? (Here’s where it gets complex) since it’s essentially dividing by zero, it would cause some kind of reincarnation, or pocket dimension that goes all the way through to the other side.
@@Primatenate88 - especially as she ISN'T Death - that's just what mortals think because we only see this side
She was there only after Destiny.... she's also there at every *birth* too... she's LIFE
@@danielcrafter9349 Indeed, finality is for prideful cowards and short-sighted fools
As my favorite style of writing that my (Vietnamese) literature teachers all said: “Provoke, not describe”. It is not putting the thing into words. It is putting the experience of that thing into words.
The perfect example is “Kieu’s story”. When describing the beauties, Nguyen Du wrote (and I translate): “Clouds are defeated by her hair, and snow surrendered to her skin”. He could have wrote “Hair floats like clouds and skin fair as snow”, but that was not how the beholder *felt*.
It reminds me of a song by Silly Wizard, called Queen of Argyll, whose beauty is so great that "all the roses in the garden, they bow and ask her pardon". But of course, "no words can paint the picture of the Queen of all Argyll".
That is very interesting. I never thought of that before. Thank you for the mini lesson 😊
This is something that I struggle a lot with lol. When I imagine things in my head, I am VERY literal and descriptive. I have an exact mental image of what the thing is. So, when I have to describe my imaginary worlds, I usually just write what I'm seeing in my head in a very literal sense, instead of trying to be more "poetic" with my descriptions.
I struggle to put "feelings" into words, and a lot of the time I just end up googling things likes "another way to say...", "other words for...", "synonyms of..." and etc. Maybe it's an autism thing, in general I struggle to process and understand emotions. It's not that I'm a a heartless and cold logical machine, it's just that a lot of the time I undermine my emotions and try to repress them in order to be "rational", and as a result I'm really not in touch with my inner emotional world. Or maybe I'm just a bad writer lol.
@@qwertydavid8070 relatable tbh lol. And yea, hard to name emotions is an autism thingy and also related to repression. Personally, I deal with it by emotion wheel. Not the best tool, but is quite useful at time
I once saw a video saying how being "dumb" in Call of Cthulhu is a super power. Or at least open-minded. In Monster Hunter International having a "flexible mind" gives the characters a chance to not end up in a nut house.
(Edited for grammar)
This is unironically true in real life as well, I'd say... cognitive flexibility just means that foreign situations and affects are less likely to break you. Although, being as dense as a brick is a different sort of strength in this regard; it's like having a hand that's so thoroughly calloused and tough that you can't feel much of anything other than a vague sense of pressure, so when it gets pushed into the fire your living self doesn't feel the suffering it would otherwise be enduring
@@beansworth5694 I mean Howard was very sheltered. But like the 10th Doctor fighting Satan. He "accepted" what he was, even though he believed it was impossible.
@@zionleach3001 Was not expecting a satan pit reference today.
@@sleepdeep305 I've been binge watching Doctor Who. I wonder what anime fans think of Doctor Who. Both have absurd plots. But never make fun of themselves like Marvel movies do.
I'd hesitated to write this in a room full of eldritch horror fans, but you're right. Never underestimate the power of the human brain. I know from experience that it's possible to learn to intuit what you cannot possibly comprehend with reasonable accuracy.
By the way, as an anime fan who enjoys Doctor Who, I would say that they're actually very different. Doctor Who is not a very serious show, whereas anime is extremely diverse. A lot of things in anime seem weird due to cultural differences, as well as how their creators are inspired. A lot of science fiction is inspired by Lovecraft's works or Hitchhiker's in the west - stories that are strange on purpose, but have elements that can lend themselves to more serious plots if need be. In the east, they have stories like the gag manga Dragon Ball which very suddenly tried to take itself seriously at the end and launched a genre in the process, or the obviously deliberately strange Jojo's Bizarre Adventure.
I think Doctor Who generally takes itself less seriously than Marvel, which does also crack jokes a lot but generally keeps everything grey and washed-out in order to keep a gritty feel. There's some stuff that's too serious and introspective for either Doctor Who or Marvel despite its fantastical elements, like Type-Moon. Likewise, there's some stuff that would be right at home. My Hero Academia is basically just the Young Avengers. The titular Chainsaw Man of a certain new anime that is currently airing could well be a very scary Doctor Who monster. No Game No Life is pretty much a Second Doctor episode extrapolated to an entire series. And then there's stuff like Reincarnated As A Vending Machine, which is too patently absurd for either of them.
My favorite example of omission is in The Magnus Archives. The things behind every horror we hear about are never described in anything beyond the concept they represent. We will know the horrors they send, the garden of bones, the macabre carousel of identity, the monsters and followers of them. But the only people to gaze upon the actual entities died for it. I Love that.
What the hell is the Magnus Archives? JK! Love that podcast.
I think the Distortion is a great showcase of this Writing the Impossible idea. it's hard to write the details of how reality no longer makes sense.
@@Meanslicer43 oh absolutely. Like there's basically little to no visuals on The Distortion but good GOSH they don't need it. That one episode with the Old Man and the door handle is chilling. And the entire concept of Helen is just utterly terrifying. How she genuinely wants to be a friend but she is so deceitful by nature that being around her incites paranoia. Nevermind that one hotel episode. Brutal. All we know of The Distortion itself however, is that it manifests a hallway. But that's enough to make it terrifying because we know JUST enough about it from its messengers.
Same with all the fears honestly. They're all so brilliantly written so we see their influence on the world but never once see the Entities themselves, we don't need to.
I was looking for a TMA comment! The way it’s written is truly incredible, and communicated impossible to comprehend concepts so well
You cannot describe the Unknowing aside from what you were able to hear, and that is exactly why it was so scary
I was kind of struggling with something I wanted to describe in a story of mine. However, I think you gave me a far better option in leaving it vague, so someone else can try and grasp the situation of it in their own mind.
I was recently running through the old World of Darkness books, mining out concepts, ideas, and NPCs I could use in potential stories and ideas. And as I did I kept getting frustrated. Absolutely none of the various denizens of the WOD's powers or abilities work with any kind of consistency. Vampiric Disciplines, Garou Gifts, Fomori and Spirit Powers. They all have their own way of doing things and trying trying to simulate them across systems is a nightmare. So I sat down and trying to create my own "standardized" system for monster and creature powers and assign them to the various critter concepts I wanted to use. Got about half way before I realized something.
The incompatibility of those creatures' powers was kind of the point. From the player's perspective, a Vampire using Celerity or Potence would look pretty much the same as a Garou using their Rage. A Garou's innate shapeshifting would be just horrific to see as it would seeing a formor sprout its own claws and fangs. Demons, Spirits, Ghosts, Banes...what are any of them but different words, different attempts to classify and categorize the same ethereal entities? What one sees of them and attempts to devise to counter them are of course going to be different without the players ever even noticing or understanding...at least until it was probably too late.
These things were, by their very nature, ineffable.
So I gave up and went back to using the various systems for each different species and monster type. Looking to build the encounters around the idea that players and their characters would never REALLY who or what they were actually dealing with save what scraps and impressions their own encounters and fragmentary research could tell them. And the moment they think they do, the rabbit hole does down a little further into the mouth of madness. ;)
I'd like to point out to a recent star wars show called Andor:
An Imperial scientist is using a certain recording to torture a prisioner; this recording is of an alien species the empire conquered in the past, when they die, it is said, they emmit a horrifying sound, and some of the imperial officers oveerseing the whole ordeal where found crying in the floor, the recording used is the isolated sound of the children of the species wich are particularly harmful to the mind.
When the escen occurs, the camera pans towards the prisioner's face, as music takes on a crescendo moments before the recording starts, the face of the prisioner starts painting a light worry grin, while the music gets louder and more intense and we get close to the prisioner's face... silence, nothing but silence as the recording plays, and then the prisioners screams, end of the scene
I was thinking of this.
Cringe
@@yamiyumi6453 “cringe” 🤓
people tell me how great andor is. and it's about genocide and using children as unwilling weapons. how wonderful. what a world where disney is making shit about torturing children.
I’m reminded of, of all things, “the Noodle Incident” from ‘90s newspaper comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Characters would obliquely reference it as a time the strip’s protagonist got in immense trouble. Creator Bill Watterson was asked to tell the story of the Noodle Incident, but he refused, saying whatever vague impressions the readers came up with in their own minds was far more impressive than anything he’d be able to come up with.
Although I will say, when it comes to Lovecraft, there are times when I prefer him spelling things out rather than just saying a monster was indescribable. “Indescribable” leaves it up to the reader’s mind to envision the monster in their head, and my head isn’t creative enough to invent something as unworldly and bizarre as the anatomical descriptions of the Elder Things or Wilbur Whateley.
That is the perfect analogy! Also reminds me of the blond chef's backstory from Ratatouille. Sure, he's best known for "killing a man with This Thumb", but it also shows him constantly changing the story for why he was in prison.
Similar to Monty Python's funniest joke, one of my favorite examples of Omission to not explain something is Bill Watterson's "Noodle Incident" from Calvin & Hobbes. This recurring joke is never explained, only mentioned and teased, and is an obvious source of distress to little Calvin as he clearly is guilty of SOMETHING in the enigmatic "Noodle Incident". And never explaining the joke is the pure genius of it, because the incident is left entirely up to the reader's imagination, and if the joke was ever explained then it most likely never would have lived up to what the masses created up for themselves. So it was left a mystery.
By contrast, let's take a look at Stephen King's IT, and the big reveal of the "true" form of Pennywise (We all know the ending of this one by now, right? Well, just in case; Spoiler Warning), or at least the closest our human minds could comprehend: a giant spider. Whoopdeedoo. I enjoyed that book, but revealing the shapeshifting monster like that took away its mystique and nightmarish intimidation. It's a great example as to why you sometimes let a mystery remain a mystery, because the reality just doesn't live up to expectations. In fact, that last part is true for many things in life, unfortunately.
Consider how just having a single fully functioning R/C great white would probably have buried Stephen Spielberg in obscurity, rather than running over-budget and WAY past deadlines to his near ruin because of "The Great White Turd" he got... only to launch the career of a legendary Director...
ALL because for 90% of the shooting time, his precious "Great White Turd" was either crashed again in the silt under water, or being winched back out, drained, dried, and repaired with some vague hope of doing more than slow circles... ;o)
Unfortunately, this sums up Stephen King to me, and why I think his writing isn't all that great
His ideas: genius
His writing: meh
I always wondered if IT's true form wasn't actually a giant spider and that was just a lie. As an embodiment of fear, it's possible that It defaulted to spider because that's one of the most common fears. I think it's quite possible he has no true form
It's also why even i give recommendations I no longer say how good that show or music is. the reality won't match the expectation i give to the person by hyping it up
IT also has a great example of how Omission can be a satisfying way to describe a thing. "...and while he was thinking about it, he died." The context of this death is complicated. It's the last of a series of actions that demonstrated this particular character's ultimate form, it's unmistakably similar to one of the most prominent deaths in the book, and what he's thinking about is a sentence that started with, "You know I.." and could have ended with, I think, either "hate it when you call me Eds," or "love you." The ambiguity, the symbolism, the literary significance, even the humor, (and stereotyping if you count the fact Beverly is crying FOR THE MILLIONTH TIME IN THE BOOK), it all comes together in that one moment. He could have given us an exhaustive description of the life leaving Eddie's eyes and his head slumping on Bev's shoulder and her crying even more of course and me caring that Richie's crying too 'cause he doesn't do that half as often 'cause he's a guy, but that would leave some readers wandering if Eddie was somehow still alive and just unconscious. Instead, we get nothing less or more then what we wanted: "he died."
Playing the game Blasphemous recently and it is gascinating to discover how these techniques are employed in the game to refer to its most elusive 'thing' that the characters call "The Miracle."
We never see it in itself, it's not a physical being, but by descriptions, we don't even know exactly what manner of 'thing' it is. Whether it's an entity, an object, an event, an ability, we get several people saying it in different ways and though the most common seem to define it as an entity, we cannot be sure.
It seems to have a will of its own and seems to have emotions, experiencing jealousy, anger, hatred, judgement, but these ideas are often presented vaguely or even contradicted by other descriptions.
For example, there is a group of women in the game's lore called the Amantecidas who in the past carried around an effigy of a twisted man, known as The Father. This guy was supposedly a deep believer of the Miracle and so were the Amantecidas, and for a while, the Miracle supported them, making them go from town to town and parading around in its honour. But it got jealous later, killed the Father and imprisoned the Amantecidas. Noone knows why, it just happened.
Additionally, the big boss of the finale, a pope-like entity named Escribar, is supposedly 'the Son of the True Miracle.' Meaning that he is the guy currently endorsed by the Miracle and you're there to end both him and it. Got it, cool.
But then throughout the game, you are told by others that the Miracle itself is supporting you and Escribar is something like a usurper of sorts, betraying what the Miracle stands for and thus you must be the great hero who ends his madness. Alright, bit weirder but got it.
But then some also make offhand comments that make it sound like Escribar has no will of his own and is merely being puppeteered by the Miracle...which you also serve. So it's either you are basically a pawn in the world's largest and deadliest chessgame the Miracle is playing against *itself,* or something so beyond our understanding is going on that none of us can understand as we cleave our way through the realm of Custodia. And neither is a happy thought.
The Miracle is presented as so vague, so ethereal, yet simultaneously so real a concept that you can't help but feel shivers up your spine. You don't even know what it is, whether it's a person, a place, an event, whatever, but you feel its effects on you, the enemies, the world at large, everything. And that's honestly horrifying.
People already mentioned above SCP, my favorite example of probably SCP-3125 from Antimemetics division storyline. It can't be described by definition - as soon as you know about it existence - it knows about yours. And it attacks! So most of the description is done through either describing what happens to people who found about it or how SCP teams sidestep all the rules trying to fight something they can't know about.
Oh I listen to a podcast that read the tale. It sounded very cosmic horror while being its own things.
Ah yes
The antimemetic insanistar
What happens if it knows about your existence?
It can be described, it's just that knowledge of it is usually lethal. We the readers can see its physical manifestations in detail, and hear descriptions of its abstract nature. At one point we see a room full of documentation of it, any page of which could be fatal to anyone who could read and understand it.
@@treevee7376"The more clearly you see it, the more clearly it sees you." There is a tipping point where you know enough about it, and therefore it sees you clearly enough, that it can manifest physically to kill you. Depending on how you receive the information, you might have a few seconds to a minute between awareness of danger and actual death. If, in that time, you take a fast-acting amnesia-inducing drug, you will forget all about it, it will forget all about you, and you can get on with your day.
This reminds me of an episode of the horror podcast The Magnus Archives, which directly references the poem Antigonish and expands the idea in a different way. Describing something that isn't there and does not exist, yet is somehow able to be perceived enough to be described as if it were there. A fairly literal tackling of the question, "how do you describe something that does not exist?" The episode is called Upon the Stair, and it's probably one of my favorite episodes of the podcast.
I've been a fan for a while, but I've never made it in time to tell you how great you are!!!
Thank You For All Of Your Great Videos!!!
There are some SCPs that delve into these unknowable worlds. Some of my favourite SCPs are that which talk about Pattern Screamers. Particularly SCP-3426, Reckoner is about when civilizations stumble across a “pattern” that is so completely incomprehensible it bends their reality and minds into non-existence. My favourite line from it is “when you hear the screaming in your mind, be silent until you do not exist” It’s a truly, magnificently terrifying piece and I’d recommend anyone unfamiliar with it to check it out.
SCP - 3125 (especially the Canon There Is No Antimemetics Division) is also really good ‘unknowable’ content, but more how one would go about containing such things.
I always find abstract charistics be what works best for me. 'The tower screamed upwards, embracing future as past, cradling it's children guest', as a quick example of an infinitely tall tower. What type of description would that be?
I would probably best describe it as " Revelation Rap" where a stream of consiousness using poetic styling , almost dream logic and tapping into that pure raw feeling and let it speak for you rather than you speak for it. Almost like a Medium of The Subconsiousness I would say.
Sounds like a loop.
*TEMPORAL DORIFTO* but there's children in the tower car thing and the driver is very irresponsible
For the things I write, this has been the single most useful, writing video I've ever seen! I love the format and the example for each technique. Thank you for this!
Love your work dude, especially when you do stuff on horror (specifically cosmic horror). I'm actually planning to make a homebrew Dnd campaign that heavily Lovecraft inspired and this video definitely got me in the right headspace to make it happen! Keep doing what you do!
Meee too! Share notes anytime 😌
Bro as a graphic designer who has worked on RUclips thumbnails, I cannot praise this video's enough. Well done, _very_ well done
I had a thought of what would happen if you gave AI generated art an ineffable concept. The human mind may not be able to make sense of or decipher that, but I’m curious how an AI would attempt to depict something beyond human comprehension and description.
Edit: I think everyone reading this is misunderstanding the thought experiment here. The point is not to suggest that an AI would be able to adequately give an accurate description of something that cannot be described.
The point is to figure out how an AI, which has much higher computational skills and reasoning skills than a human could ever have by many millions of times over, would approach it.
Obviously the AI will depict something we could describe, even if only vaguely. But what will it do with these types of prompts?
I am NOT suggesting it will create something capable of driving everyone who looks at it crazy because they can’t comprehend it.
my line of thinking is it wouldn't work because even if its not human it was made by humans, therefore still has human limitations and even if it could conceptualize the ineffable we would still not be able to conceptualize it so we'd just be back at square one.
Am I correct in saying that the current AI generated Art softwares use images found throughout the internet, then compact them into a new image that resembles the description of the new image? I’m not sure that AI could produce such things beyond human comprehension as it uses what humans have already uploaded online, therefore is limited in a way. Please correct me if I am wrong in anyway about this. Thanks
@@wheredoigo1420 i think your right cause that's kinda what i stated in the start of my comment
I hate AI art software, it’s just generated mess of colors that have no real meaning, traditional art is and always will be better.
@@theblackswordsman5039 you'd be surprised how far it's come. Look it up some time.
I just want to say, Tale Foundry, that your videos are both extremely interesting, and strangely calming. Thank you
This has been one of my most favorite episodes I have heard in a long time. I was trying to explain some of the ideas of HP Lovecraft to a friend. I just sent him a link to this video.
18 hours after watching this i a feel that a litle bit the way i think changed maybe 3% improvment in ways im trying to enrich my writing or give the characters depth, i have a feeling that if i keep watching your videos it could lead me to not only write a masterpiece but to accidentally become a better person throughout this journey of self improvmet and deep thinking that has been kickstarted by your words
I sure do love HP lovercraft. The artistic descriptions he puts together with words amazes me time and time again. I hope he didnt name his cat another unnameable name.
When writing things that are borderline indescribable, I like to use words that conventionally would never be used to describe that thing, break down certain words to their barest concepts and slap them over in a cacophony of just instincts and feelings. I find it creates an interesting effect.
For example:
She bleeds black.
The sort of black that swallows light, or perhaps the backdrop to the backdrop of the stars. Where it is not how dark it is that matter but rather a startling lack of stars. It is the kind that seeps when you look at it and bleeds your reality apart. The kind that pulls you in with the same ferosity as your body repels it away, something his brain refuse to understand outside of the simple concept of just... Black.
Sometimes I use that sort of description for completely mundane things just for the fun of it. It's difficult but very entertaining to write
I don't like being that one person who double-replies but a decent example of something more serious like that that I did once was something along the lines of "The best way I can describe it is that my description will be entirely wrong. Just as someone from three negative spatial dimensions couldn't percieve the negative fourth, one from those would not perceive it properly, as if it were from the fifth, and nevermind us in a reality not only on a different layer but entirely inverse to its inherent existence. It moves by stillness, its location is where it isn't, its shape is what it's not. It looks like not absence, but the absence of a lack of absence. And remember, this entire description, is almost definitely entirely off the mark"
@@uncroppedsoop oooh I'll be taking that as reference if you don't mind
@@annalisehua yeye not like I have some kind of Nintendo tier copyright on my own words anyway lol
In my dnd campaign, i described an eldritch entity with an analogy:
If you were to be an ant in the middle of a computer, you would understand nothing. You would see strange glowing parts and angles so perfectly cut you had never seen anything like it in your life. Imagine you, as the ant on the circuit board, were suddenly filled with exact and precise knowledge of how and why each and every individual wire and piece of gold in that machine operates the way it does. You understand the way electrons are interpreted, you understand what electrons are, you understand how light is created through the LEDs on the monitor. You understand a computer the way someone who builds them does. And then, when you leave, it begins to fade from your mind. So you want to communicate, you want to write it down, but as an ant, the only language you have is your pheromones, you try and speak in what you have but the only words you can speak, in essence, are "move this way" and "carry this food". So no one understands what you say, or what you think. They view you as insane.
You are an ant. And Hastur is a supercomputer.
Gotta Say I love the calm and quiet voice You use un your vids
This is one of the best comment sections I’ve scrolled through, with everyone adding thoughtful and insightful connections to the video, it’s so easy to forget I’m on an internet video
Biblically-accurate angels are indescribable amazing, scary, beautiful, wise, uplifting, and depressing.
Yes, but not those medieval Seraphim pressings. Not the meme that they have become. They don't actually have 7 wings or gyroscpic rings or some such. Just because it's described doesn't mean it's accurate.
@@uncledubpowermetal Indeed. A lot of what is described is described in analogy, either to make sense of things, or to describe things such as their rolls, in ways that people of the time would understand. The "wheels within wheels with eyes all around" for example simply means that those ones are if not all-knowing, at least all-seeing.
I'm aware of how they're usually described, but the way I usually picture angels is more as abstract entities of light that simply manifest a tangible form when interacting with humans. (Except the ophanim. Those are the sentient omni-directional wheels of Big G's self-driving chariot. :P Also they should have at least 6 interlocking rings in order to have all 6 rotational degrees of freedom in 4D space.)
@Vlad Yvhv well almost, they almost use analogy but it's not true analogy; analogy is explanation or even clarification but what they are describing is what they can only approximate with words. So they're not necessarily analogous but ineffable.
“My dog has no nose.”
“How does he smell?”
“HORRIBLE!”
Monty Python, probably.
I absolutely love the black hole comparison, I would say that was your strongest argument for why it’s ok to not show it, but show the effects.
First video I've ever seen of yours, The way you speak and deliver information whilst weaving in quotes and thoughts is honestly enthralling, Honestly, to put into words, would be impossible, its ineffable
I'd like to imagine such an example where an ineffable creature is dead, mummified, and/or unmoving. Yet to all who perceive it, it never stops moving, changing, and shifting into all sorts of amalgamations.
_"There I beheld the creature before me. It was dead, I knew that. Its lifeless body, floating in a pool of its own black blood, laid sprawled out and bare, and its eyes - portals into an all-encompassing and unknowing void - gazed back at me. It was dead, I knew that._
_"And yet, it moved. It changed. It never stopped changing. With every second that passed like an eon, the creature's form warped and shifted before my very eyes, changing into every shape and thing I could possibly conceive of, as well as things I couldn't. Gnashing maws. Grasping claws. Colors that were not colors. Shapes that were beyond this world, this universe, and beyond. Even without blinking, I could barely hold onto the creature's anatomy for more than a second before it shifted and melted into some other form I couldn't comprehend._
_"But it was dead, I knew that."_
I like the way you describe the space between how people react to something and what something is. The bubble of illusion around objects that makes them more than they are
You said in the video "we don't know what we don't know" or something along those lines and it's the truth. I feel like we've all always known but pursuing the limits is what illuminates the truth. As an artist I believe this is similar to trying to create the artwork you see in your head, you can describe it and try to create it but it only exists there shifting and changing never to exist in our world. An abstract idea, yes, but it's how I see it. I'm gonna post this before it gets too long now.
Something I don't think many people have considered in relation to this is how some A.I. art can be extremely difficult, if not impossible to describe. Take Artbreeder, for example. It takes preexisting images and uses an algorithm to mesh them together in completely unnatural ways, oftentimes resulting in something that is familiar, but too alien to understand, or something that looks real, but defies the laws of physics in one way or another. Maybe we could use an AI to create an approximation of something ineffable?
I mean, yeah they are alien. But also understandable since the AI are based on humans.
So . . . AI are alien and familiar. Unthinkably intelligent yet incomprehensibly stupid. Way to human yet not human enough.
Let me compare it to a dream of Azathoth, as the Blind idiot god.
It’s possible. I’ve tried it myself and 90% of the time the image is just incomprehensible shapes with vague themes. But that 10% you do get something neat.
Homestuck....
I appreciate you giving us the most important phrases of your examples, for the thing you’re trying to say. Thank you for that.
A really good example of the "combination" method can be read in the short story The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges. The titular object in the story is a point in space that intersects all other points, and thus anyone who gazes into it can see everything everywhere all at once at every angle simultaneously. The narrator exposes at lenght many of the individual things he saw within the point, but the aleph itself isn't any of these things or any list of things. It is everything
Your Videos are always so amazing! The artstyle is super unique and beautiful and your tips are super helpful
The Videos themselves are art and helped me so much becoming a better writer, thank you so much tale foundry
"Let's see if we can eff them anyway." Whoa Pumba, not in front of the kids!
In all seriousness, I really enjoyed this video and I'll be referring to it when I talk about some ineffable things in an upcoming story.
The concept of this whole video reminds me of a short story from Argentine author Jorge Luís Borges that I read not too long ago, named "The Aleph".
In it, an acquaintance of Borges tells him that he has discovered The Aleph, a tiny spot in his basement from which he can observe everything there is to be seen in the world, from every conceivable angle, all at once, similarly to the Total Perspective Vortex, except that the origins of this multum in parvo, as the acquaintance describes, are not clear.
When it is Borges' turn to also peer into the Aleph, he pauses to adress how he has reached the inefable center of his narration, and expresses his distress as a writer, for he cannot describe with a finite sequence words the infinity that he saw in an instant.
Then he overwhelms us with but a fraction of what he saw.
Overall, it's an impressive story and I highly recommend it, as well as any other work done by Borges.
In correcting a spelling mistake from the original comment, I unknowingly lost a heart from this channel.
Today is a day of regret :'(
"...an hey! that doesnt mean you can't eff em anyway!"
words to live by
Timestamps:
2:53 *Admission* - Admit it can't be described.
4:33 *Circumscription* - Describe its effects.
6:48 *Magnification* - Compare it to concepts already extreme.
8:26 *Alienation* - Explain why it violates reality.
10:05 *Combination* - Compound analogies to create a liminal effect.
12:10 *Obsfucation* - Be as vague as possible.
13:51 *Abstraction* - Describe with nonsense.
15:22 *Disorientation* - Reference anomalous mind states.
16:59 *Fictionalization* - Use deception to evoke the feelings it produces.
19:14 *Omission* - Just don't describe it.
This has been an INCREDIBLY inspiring video and its actually gotten me to start writing long form surrealist poetry again. Though I dont think it will get much attention, just the act of writing it out has been so much fun. Im using a few of the techniques I found most interesting in an attempt to describe the ineffible sensations of Overstimulation and it is fuuuuun.
Thank you for this I might HAVE to checkout nebula when im done with this poem.
This is a great video. The intro alone was worth the price of admission. Ineffable. I truly enjoyed this, and it he intelligent comments. Thank you.
this reminds of dissociation, when i have experienced it, i can barely distinguish between what is physical and not. or it feels like my consciousness is lagging behind my own body. idk how else to describe it, and even that description doesnt really describe the sensation.
"...it feels like my consciousness is lagging behind my own body. " as someone who has experienced this before, that is the perfect description. i also describe it as "my soul being knocked out of my body" when it happens cuz of a fall
Stalker (1979) is about a room in the middle of a Chernobyl-like abandoned zone. Anyone who goes into the room has their deepest wish granted. The zone is guarded and itself is deadly and you need a guide to navigate it. We never see exactly what's in the room but I wasn't disappointed by the ending.
what I interpreted was that we like to live in an illusion often ignoring our true self despite being aware of it....not wanting to accept or encounter the shadow as it may disappoint us.
I wonder if it inspired the game series of the same name, or if that's simply coincidence.
@@Kaare-The-Heathen It did. The games basically took the atmosphere + aesthetics of the film and the premise of the novel Roadside Picnic (which inspired both)
@@dmin5782 After I commented that I did research, and was quick to find the book, Roadside Picnic. I was actually about to start reading it as I realized this reply. Funny coincidence.
I used abstraction at one point in a fanfiction I'm writing, when the main character learns to tap into the very fabric of creation. It's really fun, because I just slapped some words together that give the impression that I'm explaining something, but the descriptions defy common sense, like the weight of an object's density.
I’m slightly green colorblind. I can see red and green just fine, but subtle differences in shades, or the color of small things like an LED from far away, are hard to distinguish. For example, I see some very light shades of green as yellow, and I have a hard time figuring out whether those fob readers for unlocking doors are red for locked or green for unlocked. Anyway, I bring this all up because another weird thing I experience happens when large areas of red and green touch each other, like many Christmas decorations. I see the line where they touch as this sort of dark “not-black” color. I always knew it was my brain getting confused, but now I know the name of that color! Thanks for adding “red-green” to my dictionary 😄
There are glasses you can get now that do color blindness correction. Not sure if it's that big of a deal to you but if you ever get a chance to try them you should. I have a colorblind friend (not sure what type) who got them and he basically never takes them off when he's outside, so he can experience what he's missed all this time.
"The Colour Out of Space" is one of my two favorite Lovecraft stories. "Pickman's Model" is the other.
This reminds me of some of the literary devices in the stormlight archive. A lot of books will introduce a new concept by describing it. But the way Brandon Sanderson builds his world isn't like that. He simply takes things and treats them like they're normal everyday things that we would see. He doesn't take the time to describe the grass, and how it pulls itself into the ground to escape danger. He just mentions it in passing, almost like an afterthought. These are just examples, not actual quotes, but he would write something like "he felt at one with the landscape: the wind blowing in his hair, the grass shrinking into the ground as he approached..." instead of "the grass shrank as he approached. Most species of grass did this. A section of root underneath collects water from the soil at an incredible rate, expanding the blade of grass as a sponge like organ expands"
Basically, Sanderson "assumes" that everything that takes place in the book is common knowledge. Duh, everyone knows grass shrinks into the ground as you walk near it. That's just how it works. That's how it's always worked. No need to question or describe something as mundane as that.
I think there are some other authors that touch on this subject rather well. Dan Abnett is rather good at it. Sometimes you can make Unwords, Unsounds, and Uncolor feel nearly tangible, but defying conventional description enough to where it is still ineffable.
It's funny you delve into this. In the Star Wars series Andor we learn the Empire has developed a rather novel interrogation method. It apparently encountered (and slaughtered) an alien species whose death screams, particularly those of their young, drive people to madness and even death. So, the Imps took recordings of those screams, hooked them to a device the dilates your perception of time (i.e. five minutes feels like hours) and plop a pair of headphones on you and start the clock.
All of this is described in detail to one of the characters as they face interrogation. The headphones are put on, all sound immediately cuts out, and we watch their face go from confusion to shock and futile resistance before...they themselves scream in agony.
It's indeed chilling and unsettling to watch. Particularly because, through it all we never actually hear what they did. We just see what it does to them.
Watching this video has made me notice that I have had a sort of "ineffable" experience recently.
I am "dentophobic" (idk if that's the right word. I have an extreme and irrational fear of going to the dentist), so my dentist appointments are _complicated_. I have to be drugged with injected anesthesia and nitrous oxide. Recently, in one of my appointments, I was drugged as usual, but when the effect kicked in, I was in a weird dream, which was oddly nostalgic even when I never had this experience before. Due to the nature of the ineffable, I can't really describe the dream properly, but the best I can say about it would be that "everything I've felt is a mix of a hypercomplex fractals of sorts".
I know, it sounds dumb, but I know I felt that, and when I got home I entered a mini-existencial crisis...
That's ego death for ya, and nitrous is a great way of getting there. Have you considered trying LSD?
@@spencerricketts8025 ... huh, didn't know that was common...
And no, I do not want to try illicit drugs, *thank you.*
@@JadeJuno same shit lsd 🤦♂️ you were tripping
This video came up in my recommended and I'm super excited to have found this channel! I love to 'F' the ineffable (it's my favorite 'F' for sure!), so here's to seeing more of your content and checking out what's over on Nebula.
great vid (stop here if squeemish at an existential level)
always a good time hearing Douglas get his due credit. i find it fun to play with that boundary of indescribability (probably spelled wrong and ive had 12hours sleep since the beginning of last month so hard pass correcting it) as the better you get at describing weird things you see a scale of sorts, like how there are larger infinities that are literally than other infinities some indescribable things end up very defined, like cthulu and many more simply stretch out and reveal even more unfathomable depths. like trying to describe suffering as its direct 11 dimensional shape of electromagnetic signal, only electroactive cells are used to experience it so -even if the cells are taken to be wiring for conciousness to be software encoded on to- that shape of experience still literally exists as a shape of electrical discharge physically existing and having its own knock on consequences. still not breaking the surface but a real enemy is a defeatable one. that much we do glean.
I get what you mean, however you ought to get some more rest. Sleep cements ideas firmly enough in our minds so that communicating them isn't as much of a process of throwing things at the wall and hoping the point gets across. Living in a sleep-deprived, self-involved mental space in perpetuity isn't helpful for being better able to describe the difficult-to-describe, even if it does help with exploring some alternative mental states that make observing other angles of an objectively unobservable thing easier.
Keep yourself in balance, friendo, even if upsetting that balance is useful for getting some leverage from time to time it isn't good to stay in an unwieldy mental state
I do not know how you found yourself in my recommendations, but your pure hypnotic esthetic and intoxicating words have now found yourself in my subscriptions
I experienced something when I was young about 6 years old. I call it the absence of everything. Imagine you are standing anywhere. But you can't feel anything. And I mean no touch,smell,hearing,color and everything else you can think of. It feelt like the silence of everything. And it happened to me twice.
I want to truly thank you for this video. It gave me a lot of practical cues to write my first philosophical fanta-horror short story that just won a contest in my country! Thank you again! ❤
"There were zwei peanuts walking down der strasse. Und one was assaulted... peanut!"
I was working on a encounter with someones patron in my dnd campaign. I took inspiration of the lessons you gave and I actually terrified one of my players. Thanks for the help!
Cixin Liu actually made a pretty good description of a 4th dimensional space on his book The End of Death. Its too long to put in here, but its damn good and really gives you a feel of how it would be to get pulled to an upper dimension.
Reply to me so I can find this comment :p
No, I don’t think I will 💀
.
@@didack1419 is a year later ok
A subject dear to my heart. And very well done on the video. Thank you very much for touching on this, and sharing these techniques. I really think that there's a lot of stagnation, with people latching onto Lovecraft's works, but not really creating much of their own. I sincerely hope that this video helps others to expand their horizons and work on new horrors of unthinkable proportions. The sort of stuff that makes Cthulu wet the bed at night cause he had a nightmare about it...
I needed this video
This is one of my favorite episodes. I’m crafting an ineffable character, and this is super helpful.
I still find Cognitohazards and similar things so riveting, they are right here in our world in a way, knowledge that knowing of exposes yyou to danger and even death.
"Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not F it after all"
Pure poetry
Sometimes you don't have to describe the effect but can relate the effect, twisting the mind, reality, madness from the occurrance or sickened by it.
"I saved you by doing it..."
"I would rather have died."
6:27 We infer the properties of EVERYTHING from how things interact with it. That's what "properties" are, interactions.
4:12 In fact, in the story, those that looked at c'thulu too long actually DIED trying to percieve it.
Who died could you explain
@@josemoreno6987 So of the crew of the ship that found where C'thulu rested, only like 3 made it to the boat to escape in time; two of which stared at C'thulu too long, and in trying to percieve him, went mad and their brains just died.
“To trick the darkness, into thinking you know it’s name”
This line goes to hard, too hard 💀
I'm one of those that has shown red-green, an "impossible color" to many people. It refers to Binocular Color Fusion.
IMO, best way is to see it is to get two phones, and fill up the screen of each with one of the colors. Then you basically shove those screens up to each eye like VR. Its important each eye only gets one color. Then, you just kind of need to relax your vision, and try to blend the two scenes. The best way I can describe it is like a low saturation color grey-brown, with a random boiling of edges and distances at the same time. Its as though your visions' sense of those things is just being randomly activated.
Redgreen just makes brown.
The omission part at the end actually perfectly describes my personalized faith that is very similar to and derived from absurdism.
Thanks for giving me a good description for my more religious friends. We like to have conversations talking about the similarities and the differences between our faith and values.
Was talking with my friend the other day and we talked about if an AI could have all knowledge about you and your specific biology, how fast could it make you go insane? What would that look like? Could it use scents? Sounds played at a certain frequency? Certain touches and pressure along your skin? Specific images that only for you cause seizures or force you to become more susceptible to other stimuli? How long would it take?
That idea is called a Basilisk Hack. And yea . . . Though you’d have to have a level of knowledge about humans far surpassing our own to pull it off.
Honestly, just using the tried and true methods (like the Halo Effect and withholding crucial info) would be easier most of the time.
@@jocylinfrancis930 Nice! Many thanks on new term to search. Got any other interesting bits? Just finished reading Blindsight by Peter Watts so I have a lot of interest in this sorta thing lately.
0:58 “the missile knows where it is at all times; it knows this because it knows where it isn’t.”
Once my sister woke up crying historically and, when asked what she had dreamt about, she said it was, "like water black".
Anyways, I think the reason why the indescribable is so interesting is because reality is inarticulate. We might assign words to a thing but the words are not the thing itself. Words are not real. And if they claim that something surpasses them, they most be talking about something real. I think that is the illusion these stories rely on.
i wrote something cosmic horror for the first time recently, and i thought i did a pretty alright job at trying to convey that sense of alienness and unknowing, but i think i might need to rewrite this at a later time because seeing the examples and other things made me think about better ways i could've done it.
Paragraph below
"It was an indescribable, almost ethereal shape. It was flowing-yet structured. With every second this thing was in the same room as Azre, it contorted and blended in with itself. It looked.. viscous, yet also solid, as if you could run into it. It was bleeding in and out of her vision, it was everywhere. Every new shape more profound and nameless than the last, small bits running off and falling back into the indescribable mass. It had no sense of depth; every part of it appeared as if it were on the same plane.. It had no shape, no colour, and no name."
*Question:* What does the end of the world, the funniest joke in the world, and Cthulu, all have in common?
*Rick & Morty*
I SWEAR TO GOD!-
LMAO
what?
This is absolutely fantastic. Really helps me with what I’ve been struggling with in one of the stories I’m writing. Thank you.
#5 reminds me of the description of Galadriel if she took the one ring.
"Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Tempestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me and despair!"
Described not literally, but by way of analogy.
Sounds someone who would be great as your ally, but not as your enemy even for the pettiest thing.
It seems she was deep down a very vain person, and she is afraid of what she might become if it leaves it out with the Ring on hand.
refering to 11:37
ive never heared anyone talk about this before but ive "seen" the color, tho id didnt cross my eyes i think.
the impossible color was there for only a fraction of a thought, cause when i tried to complete or coomprehend that thought or image, it split into red and green and i have no memory of how it looked but i know it was there. sounds weird (which i love) but it wasnt as special as it sounds lol.
The main antagonist of a story I’ve been working on is the concept of entropy given a consciousness, however they then discover how their concept of entropy is a small grain of information in a desert of true complexity
That's an interesting idea. Could I ask how you did to assign perceptual states to Entropy?
Interestingly enough though entropy will likely eventually be the cause of the end of the universe. It slowly gains more of a grip and becomes more and more present as it slowly overtakes everything and cannot be stopped because its inevitable wash over everything is dictated by unwavering laws of physics. Right now it's only one piece of the puzzle, but it's slowly but surely leaking over to the rest
@@didack1419 so far the only thing I’ve figured out to do with “him/it” is to have it take control over a defeated god which represents war in a temporary humanoid form. So the only perceptual anything the characters have experienced was what it can do to something that’s insanely powerful to begin with and essentially transformed the war god into a zombie that was far more powerful and took several of the universes most powerful fighters to deal with
Nobody: "So which of those techniques you need?"
Cultist Simulator: "Yes"
Bird Box does a fantastic version of this, the aftermath of the creatures are gruesome and made more so knowing that it was the victims who caused their own demise.
This video made me feel an emotion words cannot describe. Is this irony? Is this the glimpse of heaven Lucy Pevensie saw in the book in Narnia? That was ineffable. She could never remember the story, but it was so good. So beautiful that she longed to read it again. And Aslan promised that he would read her the story again one day. My heart is spilling from my fingertips.
I have a little request, if you entertain such things. I'm the kind of person that likes to write fantasy, mainly for D&D campaigns and such but also for my own enjoyment. And where I write there is always conflict or war, and so as you can imagine, many fight scenes. Both of great armies clashing and individual duels between nemeses. I was wondering if you could explore writing combat? How its done and what it can entail or represent.
If you can't describe it, you can describe the effect of its presence.
To what extent you can though. Subjective experiences are already ineffable. They can only be describe by appealing to similar experiences that the listener has experienced.
...today I learned there are impossible colours, and now I will be bothered by it FOREVER. I LOVE it! :D
(I knew about opposing colours of course, but it never occurred to me that you ... can't SEE both mixed together? Like, obviously I've experienced that, but never NOTICED it? It was like when you're a kid and you learn you can't lick your own elbow, you immediately have to TRY anyway... or was that just me?) I had to pause the video immediately to google it, and dropped into a 2 hour research rabbithole on vision, and colour names, and the culture of colour, and impossible colours, and... A+, good rabbithole, do recommend!
“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgot.” ~ Neil Gaiman.
Also, the comments on this video are full of interesting things I am going to spend the rest of the evening checking out. I love this :D
I mean, the video was also very good. But more importantly, it has sent me on ALL the delicious mental tangents! *gnaws happily *
Edit: a thought occurred, wondering if somewhere along the spectrum of *gestures * all of this, you end up at "T'was brillig, and the slithy toves..."? Like, instead of the thing being described being ineffable, the words used are ineffable, and yet feel like they... can be eff'd? (heh)
I dunno where this thought was going honestly, but throwing it out here in case anyone else wants to play with a random tangent.
I feel like writing impossible things are a lot harder now because we are a lot more exposed to a lot of concepts, increasing our familiarity with weird things.
Laws of physics: *exist*
Cthulhu: And I took that personally
"The Woman leans close and whispers into Aislyn's ear a word that rolls throughout her skull like the most dire of great bells, shaking her bones enough that she stumbled and falls to her knees. The world blurs. Her skin prickles and itches and grows hot all over, as if burned by the wind of the word's passing."
- The City We Became