There's an interesting note on the nuclear storage warning symbols, and its that any structure designed to warn humans away will inevitably attract them as it makes it stand out. This response indicates that the best solutions may actually be to back fill the whole facility rewild the terrain and leave it to be lost and forgotten. When you think about it, how likely is someone to dig miles underneath some random hill in the middle of the desert.
Ask the builders of all the unmarked and unmapped mine shafts that dot the country. You’re right about the warnings being a magnet to certain types of adventurous people though.
Why even wipe my ass if I'm just gonna shit again? Jk. I love this video. Liminal spaces is far more effective than backrooms lore bs. It's all about the enigmatic feeling of familiarity, nostalgia and uneasiness simultaneously.
dark souls 3 was my first dark souls game, so when i rediscovered anor londo playing dark souls 1 it felt So Liminal. i already knew how anor londo ends up, cold and silver and dead. i remember walking up immaculate staircases and through empty golden halls and feeling that same feeling the original backrooms image gave me, that something is so wrong and empty yet familiar.. so it’s crazy you connected them in this vid! this is an amazing video, so many interesting disparate topics being so perfectly interconnected! i’m looking forward to your future videos!
Okay so I am generally a very silent subscriber across all youtube videos but… I couldn’t not comment on this. Wow. Just wow. This is one of the absolute best video essays I have ever ever watched (and I have watched a lot 😭). So much so that it has earned a really rare spot in my liked videos :,) I often play RUclips in the background and mindlessly listen to it, but I found myself genuinely wanting to actively listen to you the entire time. The number of models and concepts you brought into this one video idea is so inspiring, and you have absolutely nailed the balance between a video being entertaining but also educational and actually contributing to something beyond short term enjoyment. The video started off as a regular video essay, I was obviously still enjoying it as with all your video essays, but then when you started talking about Dark Souls (a game I’ve heard so much about but never played), there was just something about the way you wove a narrative into the video itself, and the links and conclusions you drew that completely blew me away. The Minecraft stuff was very resonant as well so I loved that. And then, just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, you managed to add this incredibly haunting poignant section at the end about the man-made ruins and I tell you I lost my sht. Your writing and delivery was insane. That entire part about the radioactive waste under the earth was so cool and I learned so much. And this all came from the backrooms?! So few RUclipsrs, let alone people in any field, can actually thread such seemingly disconnected topics into a cohesive, deep, and relevant chain of discussion. I’ll never be able to express how wonderful I think this video essay is. Absolutely love all your content but this just stands out to me as something more. Thank you for all the work you’ve put it into your channel, it’s such a special pocket of RUclips which I’m so happy I’ve found, and hope will grow because you so deserve it!! I’ll likely be going back to being a silent subscriber but I’ll always look forward to your next videos
when u mentioned nuclear fuel i knew where it was going- the nuclear warning signs are so unsettling to me in such a unique way that i can’t describe and yet u described it
I agree with you that making up too much lore and rules for the Backrooms takes away from its effectiveness as a horror concept. However, I do like the other level ideas and the organisations and rules as an interesting setting. Especially for escapist fantasy or stories of the like. A setting that could range from empty offices to quiet hotels to endless corridors to an infinite system of caves to an eternity of darkness that you are forced to crawl blindly through, is a cool set of ideas. Couple with that organisations formed from fellow victims of circumstance that, in their desperation for order and control in this stange place, religiously catalogue all they know. I can do without the _"original character: do not steal"_ entities, though.
Ngl, without the mentions of "energy" as the threat to bodily harm, the warnings would sound like there was just an eldritch horror down there, then again, it might as well be a eldritch horror, because if you have no idea what radiation is, that is basically what it is. *"The strongest emotion mankind has is fear, the strongest fear is the fear of the unknown."* -Hp. Lovecraft
I have no idea why your videos don't get more views. Your content is pretty awesome and I binged through almost all of your videos at this point so thanks for being another video essay gem for all of us. As a fan of super eyepatch and Jacob geller and all the other icons I want you to know that your stuff is really cool, keep going ❤
I’m so obsessed with the type of phrasing and word choice and mannerism of speaking used in the nuclear waste warning messages. It feels like it’s designed to minimize possible translation errors or misunderstandings somehow, although maybe that’s just a quality I’ve subconsciously assigned it due to my knowledge of its original context. It’s genuinely so funky to my brain
I did urbex back in the early days. I ran one of the first blogs on the subject on tumblr. It was never safe, but it has definitely gotten more dangerous in the last 20 or so years. It's too bad. They are really strange and lovely places. I think your position though is probably the best one these days.
2:30 - couldn't agree more with this take. I feel like so so much horror content on the internet (new and old) is just overdone or oversold to such a degree that it ruins whatever original concept or moment that might have made it enduringly creepy/unsettling. Consider the SCP universe. When it was just a few half-published tales of a handful of anomalies, all written as either accounts or the SCP index with SOME redaction in key places it was such a strong piece of horror fiction. Now, however, there are pages and pages of dialogue that leaves nothing to the imagination, and what it adds isn't compelling or scary, it's just lame and obviously written by inexperienced creators with little to no quality control and it's ruined the entire thing. I hate hearing about SCPs now because I just know whatever it is will be garbage. The horror of the unknown is the most powerful of all fears, and there is a very subtle and complex art to telling just enough of a story in just the right way as to elicit it to its full potential. As far as I'm concerned- being someone who has been passionately interested in good, genuine horror for the last 20+ yrs - that "held back" and restrained way of telling a story is the only way to tell true effective horror stories. Everything else just tries too hard and never hits the mark, for me.
The SCP universe is far from "no quality control" garbage, the moderation is actually quite strict, it's just shifted to non-horror and become its' own thing now. Most of the SCiPs you'll read now are interesting, absurd or unique, not just another spooky monster that infects your mind and kills you. I agree that the "SCP readings" content farm channels are low-quality, but the Foundation itself has maintained a respectable level of quality over time.
Monster Hunter Frontier is a unique entry into the monster hunter franchise in that it is a full on traditional MMO. It spanned from 2007 to 2019, and during those 12 years thousands upon thousands of players spent probably millions of combined hours hunting with eachother, chatting in the lobby, forming friends, guilds, participating in events, competing with eachother, forming entire social networks that persisted for over a decade. The game’s servers are shutdown now, and all of this is gone. However the games files were made public, and you can download them and host your own local server on your own pc. I’ve done this myself, and playing the game which has all the telltale signs of being an active MMO, while being the only player who will ever log on, is very similar to the feelings induced by liminal spaces.
Big agree on the backrooms. Not only does it take away the imagination but it ruins the thing that makes the backrooms horrifying. Imagine ending up in a never ending space that smells like wet carpet and is that ugly shade. It is kind of funny to say nothing is more horrifying than that smell but also consider the lack of any other stimulus. You are stuck, for the rest of your life, in this plain place that almost feels like the idea someone who has never been in an office has of what an office should look like. It is forever going to be the same vague unpleasantness that you can deal with for maybe an hour before feeling like you’re going crazy. There are no people and if there is variety like in some similar videos, it is only so you can continuously fool yourself into thinking you are making progress leaving, only to let yourself down again. And then you have to slow die of dehydration or starvation. If you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky… then those don’t exist here, and you will never get out.
This was an amazing watch! I always thought the topic of how to store and mark atomic waste was fascinating. Something about the concept just feels so eerie and sticks with you.
It's funny how this whole Backrooms thing has been around since as recently as 2019 but because there's so many nostalgic themes involved it makes me think it's been around since 2010 at least. All of these compilations are things 90's/00's kids knew but it only became truly nostalgic once we all grew up a significant amount
As for the "only liking horror if nothing interesting happens" - I feel you. So many horror movies and stories had me on the edge of my seat for the first half, only to add some extremely disappointing twist or reveal and ruin the whole vibe. There's a good example that I like to use while on this topic. 2020's "The invisible man". The first big bulk of the movie had me absolutely sucked in - the psychological terror the main character was experiencing had me on the edge of my seat wondering if it's real or not. When the big reveal came I was just disappointed, waiting for the movie to end already. I would've been so much happier had nothing actually happened and the movie ended right before that reveal, leaving us wondering. There's one movie tho, that dividends the people who like psychological horror, and those who prefer action horror. 2018's Antrum. I watched it with my boyfriend some time ago. Nothing much actually happened, there wasn't any gore or jumpscares, but it was so interesting, it had me on the edge of my seat the wole time. My boyfriend meanwhile was bored out of his mind haha.
Re the nuclear waste issue: I don't think either writing _or_ a monumental signifier (no matter what kind) would remain permanently effective; nothing would, or at least nothing would be guaranteed; but I do think the planners might have considered something else: stories. Graham Hancock (I know, but just bear with me a moment) proposes in _Fingerprints of the Gods_ (yeah, I _know)_ that world mythology is laden with numbers misinterpreted as ritually symbolic, which are in fact keys to axial precession and/or some kind of planet-devastating catastrophe. I doubt this, and the historical thesis isn't really germane here, but I think it does suggest a possibility. There's nothing human beings create as reliably as stories -- every culture on earth, throughout recorded history, no matter what their differences in material culture or social norms, has stories. Ergo: ensure, as much as possible, that symbols of radioactivity are recognizable to _everyone_ -- a UN standardization of such symbols might be a place to start -- and that _everyone_ understands that, and how, radioactive waste is now dangerous and will remain dangerous for millions of years, and encode that knowledge in a story, or multiple stories, that can be passed down orally without too great an effort (to obviate the issues of changing languages and the possible loss of the art of writing). _Not_ a myth -- that'd _really_ be gambling, because myths are rarely taken literally even by unsophisticated peoples, and are too easily mixed in with religious practices that may have nothing to do with our purpose here, which is in turn a problem if any kind of religious change sweeps away the practices and with them the story. No, the story needs to be realistic -- stripped down, maybe, to one that would be as credible and comprehensible to a person from the Palaeolithic as to someone from the technological age, but in any event, plainly and professedly a piece of history.
always a pleasure to see your videos. with this topic, it reminds me of pathologic. in patho1, we know how it can end, we know what happens from the very beginning and we still plau through. but in patho2? we open almost the exact same, but with the option to keep trying. we see places we have been! we see places we know and have explored and died in, but we still try again and it's maddening. we try and the characters acknowledge this in their own ways! we know what happens and we still keep trying, because we can fix it, right?
It's 2am. I have 1000 words to write before 1pm. YAY Vidio no but i was in the library and a security guy just walked behind me when you were saying that 1:20 annd now the motion lights in the bookcase aisles turned off 1 by 1 starting with the ones away from me. Its following me. Have I summoned the dark? I'm sorry i'll do work i promise.
@@spookymcg me too. me too.... Gotta love playing a video about the loneliness of a place that should be filled with people but isn't and i'm in a library that in the daytime is super busy... spoooooky
I attended SUNY College at Purchase from 1990 to1994. There were underground tunnels between the dorms painted yellow, abandoned "study lounges" and more underground tunnels connecting the academic buildings under a vast brick plaza. And there were rats.And during my senior year guys in Hazmat suits ripping up the brick plaza to remove asbestos. So yeah, SUNY Collage at Purchase = modern ruin.
The interesting thing about the nuclear waste disposal problem is that humanity is by its nature very curious. If you have an entire field of sharp spikes that jut out creating an uninhabitable forest then people will want to see what’s hidden there. If you create a set of ruined buildings made to show that this place is no longer lived in people will want to learn about it, and if you create a plaque that says danger do not dig people will want to see what that danger is from curiosity in what was so bad they had to lock it away.
It's interesting how many of my favorite games take place after some sort of horrifying event - the Beast Plague, the Shattering, the Fire fading, Fimbulwinter, the threat of Scarecrow upon Gotham - that leads to abandonment by the people. Conveniently, the first three of these are in Fromsoft games, but still, I think that Miyazaki has inexorably altered my tastes in gaming
I really liked the "Ages past" references from the Wheel of Time series. _“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again."_ When some of the main characters meet a river boat captain (Bayle Domon), he recounts the tales of things he found in his travels. Strange things left from "ages past, long forgotten". In one place, he heard a story of a wide expanse where nothing living exists, with a large metal spike in the center.. and if anyone comes close to it, they eventually die. My first thoughts upon reading that were _exactly_ like the discussion on "how do we tell future peoples that we've buried radioactive material here?". After aeons, even signs or structures can be wiped away. All that might be left is the most sturdy of materials, placed in a way that can withstand the volatile erosion of time on earth. "Aftermath: Population Zero" was a great documentary that went into detail on what would happen to what we left behind if humanity all suddenly disappeared. And really, it takes about one Ice Age before practically everything is gone other than a few "big stones" that we've placed.. the old ones, like the pyramids, etc, but then they mention the massive stone slab that the statue of liberty was placed on. When something is going to be dangerous beyond even that kind of timeframe... what can you possibly leave behind that will indicate that it is still dangerous? I really enjoy this kind of imagery and 'horror-by-implication', the kind that makes you think about stuff. It's not even really... "scary?", so much as it's interesting, potentially unnerving. "Existential" is a good word for it, even if it doesn't involve horror... maybe "awe" would be a good term.
i have a WIP about nuclear waste, where people do accidentally stumble upon a nuclear waste facility, and a bunch of people in nearby farms start getting sick and a group is sent to investigae it. A group of people with no functional knowledge of radiation or its effects
Transuranic in normal speak means anything at or heavier than Uranium that makes you sick, which is basically all of them. Also I'd love to have a horror story/manga/movie set in like 10,000 years in the future where future inhabitants of Earth find a bunch of these old hostile ruins left by humans, and, foolishly, try to dig them up.
24:16 I’d like to point out that humans love exploring dangerous places, we will end up disturbing the stuff under the spike fields or tablet or ruins out of curiosity once we discover danger, we live in dangerous places and raid ancient tombs. Humans are curious.
Signalis, a sci-fi horror game shows something similar to the proposed sandia ruins you talk about. I won’t say more but I love watching lore/theory videos of that game as much as I love the Dark Souls community videos. Check it out if you haven’t.
the nuclear waste warning message and construction concepts always make me feel uneasy, for a few reasons. first and foremost, they are foreboding af, as they're intended to be, as they ought to be, BUT, that's in no small part due to the fact that i understand how dangerous yet unassuming radiation is. a threat that can't be seen, yet can doom you within minutes of exposure (depending on what you're being exposed to, of course). it sounds like a supernatural curse, like, "if you see this symbol even once, you will die in the next three days!" if you don't understand radiation, the idea of short exposure = certain, agonizing doom, might seem too fantastical and overblown to be real. and that brings me to the second reason these warnings and design concepts make me uneasy. it's not the first time an ancient, once-powerful civilization left behind imposing ruins with warnings of curses and death written upon the walls for future trespassers to heed. the Egyptians' mighty tombs, the pyramids, explicitly warned of such things, but we dug them out of the sand and robbed them for all they were worth just the same. we are inexorably drawn to the ruins of our past, compelled to start digging if we so much as spot what merely looks like the top of a building poking out of the dirt. we want to dig up ruins so badly, we'll scour hostile environments on foot, or take to the air - to SPACE! - to comb over a million miles in hopes of finding these crumbling remains of our long-forgotten histories. all threats, real, invented, or imagined, shall not keep us from this drive to KNOW the parts of ourselves that has otherwise faded into obscurity. so, it's my belief that the best practice is to leave no traces as all. bury our poisoned curse deep beneath the earth, and blanket the surface with whatever native ecosystem was meant to be there in the first place. remove every single clue that might hint that any human activity occurred there at all, and never return to it, for any reason. write no more of it, expunge all records of it, erase it from living memory as expediently as we can. there can be no "paper trail" leading distant archeologists to this place, lest those clever fools piece together an incomplete and misleading picture that grips the imagination and triggers that insatiable need to KNOW. they mustn't know, they can NEVER know, not of that place at least. fear of the unknown might be powerful, but there will always be those who seek to destroy that fear through shining a light on the unknown, no matter what evil might lurk in the shadows of blissful ignorance.
The first flame is the thing keeping the gods in power, not humans. Humans are descendants of the dark soul, which is kinda like a weird offshoot of the first flame that gets stronger rather than weaker. The gods basically spend the whole first game trying to trick you into thinking that the first flame is what keeps everything going, but it's actually the thing keeping humanity from thriving. Gwyn himself created the undead curse to feed a little bit of the infinite dark soul to the first flame anytime someone dies It's actually kind of ironic since, by the events of the third game, the gods have all perished, but humanity keeps kindling the flame just because it's what they've always done. And they've done it for so long that they ruined the world that they were supposed to inherit eons ago. So ending the flame isn't the same as giving up a miserable existence. It's more like a changing of the seasons. The dragons had their time, then the gods, and now the humans
Issue I have with the false rubble idea is….well plainly put, humanity has ALWAYS built on the bones of the old. The Roman Empire collapsed yet Italy and Rome aren’t abandoned. Hell a fundamental part of fallout 4 is going to ruins and reinhabiting them
Have you ever thought about doing a video on psychological horror games? I've seen a lot of images from Omori in your videos and would love to hear your opinions.
I've got some stuff cooking! I was actually fortunate enough to have an indie dev reach out to me a bit ago with their game, and it was a really cool experience! I've obviously got a lot to say about Omori, enough for a tattoo... We'll see!
An example of purpose-built ruins would be the 'follies' you get in the grounds of stately homes in the UK. They were just intended as a focal point of interest, not for any practical reason - they are closer to statuary than to real ruins. Probably wealthy people have been building them all over the world, going back hundreds of years. For example, the Romans loved stuff from Ancient Egypt - I wouldn't put it past one or two of them to have built 'Egyptian'-looking follies in the grounds of their villas. No idea if it actually happened though!
Yes, the landscape gardens of early 19th century (also known as English gardens in Central/Eastern Europe) usually incorporated folly structures, often in a ruined state, just for the fun or rather awe of it. On the realness argument of them I do wonder. For instance, there is a large folly ruin site in Tata, Hungary, which incorporates stones from an actual medieval church ruin nearby!
@@lucafilo6317 That's interesting about Tata - part real ruins, and part 'fake' ruins! I only brought the subject up because creator mentioned about the unlikelihood of ruins being newly built, and I immediately thought 'follies!'. I was triggered!
I’m not of the opinion that the sunk cost fallacy applies to communities being repeatedly destroyed by environmental disasters. When I see other Oklahomans who have houses destroyed by tornadoes, it’s often people who can’t afford to leave the area
I think this video is pretty well made, but I need you to understand that the idea of ppl fleeing their homelands (due to climate collapse) touches a subject that's far deeper and more complex.. colonization. Often colonization was done in reverse in NA and Australia: colonizers would come in and say "wow, look how beautiful this land is! These brown people don't deserve it!" A different kind of horror, one maybe to research and talk about? I don't. I liked the video overall, I just thought.. you know, it's weird to talk about ppl abandoning their home and just moving on lol
Ah, a fellow Jacob Gellar enjoyer. His stuff has also changed my neural pathways.
The man has to be lacing his videos with something, they're too good
Yes! He's who led me here
Dude got me into video essays and now I'm obsessed
when i started watching this channel a few weeks ago, i knew he had to have watched him as well. luv both of y’all’s videos! :)
"The Earth is littered with the ruins of Empires that believed they were eternal." -- Camille Paglia
That ominous message from us to a future human race sounds so fantastical, as though we're kept a demonic curse under the Earth, like _the Mummy._
There's an interesting note on the nuclear storage warning symbols, and its that any structure designed to warn humans away will inevitably attract them as it makes it stand out. This response indicates that the best solutions may actually be to back fill the whole facility rewild the terrain and leave it to be lost and forgotten. When you think about it, how likely is someone to dig miles underneath some random hill in the middle of the desert.
It’s such a hard idea to navigate around. Our natural curiosity is so dangerous
Ask the builders of all the unmarked and unmapped mine shafts that dot the country. You’re right about the warnings being a magnet to certain types of adventurous people though.
Why even wipe my ass if I'm just gonna shit again? Jk. I love this video. Liminal spaces is far more effective than backrooms lore bs. It's all about the enigmatic feeling of familiarity, nostalgia and uneasiness simultaneously.
well put
dark souls 3 was my first dark souls game, so when i rediscovered anor londo playing dark souls 1 it felt So Liminal. i already knew how anor londo ends up, cold and silver and dead. i remember walking up immaculate staircases and through empty golden halls and feeling that same feeling the original backrooms image gave me, that something is so wrong and empty yet familiar.. so it’s crazy you connected them in this vid! this is an amazing video, so many interesting disparate topics being so perfectly interconnected! i’m looking forward to your future videos!
what a nice compliment! A few of my friends played the games in that order too- it's an interesting perspective on the whole story!
Okay so I am generally a very silent subscriber across all youtube videos but… I couldn’t not comment on this.
Wow. Just wow. This is one of the absolute best video essays I have ever ever watched (and I have watched a lot 😭). So much so that it has earned a really rare spot in my liked videos :,)
I often play RUclips in the background and mindlessly listen to it, but I found myself genuinely wanting to actively listen to you the entire time. The number of models and concepts you brought into this one video idea is so inspiring, and you have absolutely nailed the balance between a video being entertaining but also educational and actually contributing to something beyond short term enjoyment.
The video started off as a regular video essay, I was obviously still enjoying it as with all your video essays, but then when you started talking about Dark Souls (a game I’ve heard so much about but never played), there was just something about the way you wove a narrative into the video itself, and the links and conclusions you drew that completely blew me away. The Minecraft stuff was very resonant as well so I loved that.
And then, just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, you managed to add this incredibly haunting poignant section at the end about the man-made ruins and I tell you I lost my sht. Your writing and delivery was insane. That entire part about the radioactive waste under the earth was so cool and I learned so much.
And this all came from the backrooms?! So few RUclipsrs, let alone people in any field, can actually thread such seemingly disconnected topics into a cohesive, deep, and relevant chain of discussion.
I’ll never be able to express how wonderful I think this video essay is. Absolutely love all your content but this just stands out to me as something more.
Thank you for all the work you’ve put it into your channel, it’s such a special pocket of RUclips which I’m so happy I’ve found, and hope will grow because you so deserve it!!
I’ll likely be going back to being a silent subscriber but I’ll always look forward to your next videos
This is one of the nicest comments i’ve ever received. thank you for this, it absolutely made my day. i’m so happy to be a part of this community!
when u mentioned nuclear fuel i knew where it was going- the nuclear warning signs are so unsettling to me in such a unique way that i can’t describe and yet u described it
i was not expecting the transition from minecraft to nuclear waste. great video tho :D
I discovered this channel just this morning and I cannot stop watching. I might be a bit too obsessed haha
Welcome!!
I agree with you that making up too much lore and rules for the Backrooms takes away from its effectiveness as a horror concept. However, I do like the other level ideas and the organisations and rules as an interesting setting. Especially for escapist fantasy or stories of the like. A setting that could range from empty offices to quiet hotels to endless corridors to an infinite system of caves to an eternity of darkness that you are forced to crawl blindly through, is a cool set of ideas. Couple with that organisations formed from fellow victims of circumstance that, in their desperation for order and control in this stange place, religiously catalogue all they know.
I can do without the _"original character: do not steal"_ entities, though.
Ngl, without the mentions of "energy" as the threat to bodily harm, the warnings would sound like there was just an eldritch horror down there, then again, it might as well be a eldritch horror, because if you have no idea what radiation is, that is basically what it is.
*"The strongest emotion mankind has is fear, the strongest fear is the fear of the unknown."* -Hp. Lovecraft
I have no idea why your videos don't get more views. Your content is pretty awesome and I binged through almost all of your videos at this point so thanks for being another video essay gem for all of us. As a fan of super eyepatch and Jacob geller and all the other icons I want you to know that your stuff is really cool, keep going ❤
I’m so obsessed with the type of phrasing and word choice and mannerism of speaking used in the nuclear waste warning messages. It feels like it’s designed to minimize possible translation errors or misunderstandings somehow, although maybe that’s just a quality I’ve subconsciously assigned it due to my knowledge of its original context. It’s genuinely so funky to my brain
I did urbex back in the early days. I ran one of the first blogs on the subject on tumblr. It was never safe, but it has definitely gotten more dangerous in the last 20 or so years. It's too bad. They are really strange and lovely places. I think your position though is probably the best one these days.
How do you mean it's gotten more dangerous? I've never been much into urban exploration myself but I'm genuinely curious now
2:30 - couldn't agree more with this take. I feel like so so much horror content on the internet (new and old) is just overdone or oversold to such a degree that it ruins whatever original concept or moment that might have made it enduringly creepy/unsettling.
Consider the SCP universe. When it was just a few half-published tales of a handful of anomalies, all written as either accounts or the SCP index with SOME redaction in key places it was such a strong piece of horror fiction.
Now, however, there are pages and pages of dialogue that leaves nothing to the imagination, and what it adds isn't compelling or scary, it's just lame and obviously written by inexperienced creators with little to no quality control and it's ruined the entire thing. I hate hearing about SCPs now because I just know whatever it is will be garbage.
The horror of the unknown is the most powerful of all fears, and there is a very subtle and complex art to telling just enough of a story in just the right way as to elicit it to its full potential. As far as I'm concerned- being someone who has been passionately interested in good, genuine horror for the last 20+ yrs - that "held back" and restrained way of telling a story is the only way to tell true effective horror stories. Everything else just tries too hard and never hits the mark, for me.
The SCP universe is far from "no quality control" garbage, the moderation is actually quite strict, it's just shifted to non-horror and become its' own thing now.
Most of the SCiPs you'll read now are interesting, absurd or unique, not just another spooky monster that infects your mind and kills you. I agree that the "SCP readings" content farm channels are low-quality, but the Foundation itself has maintained a respectable level of quality over time.
Monster Hunter Frontier is a unique entry into the monster hunter franchise in that it is a full on traditional MMO. It spanned from 2007 to 2019, and during those 12 years thousands upon thousands of players spent probably millions of combined hours hunting with eachother, chatting in the lobby, forming friends, guilds, participating in events, competing with eachother, forming entire social networks that persisted for over a decade. The game’s servers are shutdown now, and all of this is gone. However the games files were made public, and you can download them and host your own local server on your own pc. I’ve done this myself, and playing the game which has all the telltale signs of being an active MMO, while being the only player who will ever log on, is very similar to the feelings induced by liminal spaces.
Amazing essay as always! Such a cool perspective on the back rooms!
Big agree on the backrooms. Not only does it take away the imagination but it ruins the thing that makes the backrooms horrifying. Imagine ending up in a never ending space that smells like wet carpet and is that ugly shade. It is kind of funny to say nothing is more horrifying than that smell but also consider the lack of any other stimulus. You are stuck, for the rest of your life, in this plain place that almost feels like the idea someone who has never been in an office has of what an office should look like. It is forever going to be the same vague unpleasantness that you can deal with for maybe an hour before feeling like you’re going crazy. There are no people and if there is variety like in some similar videos, it is only so you can continuously fool yourself into thinking you are making progress leaving, only to let yourself down again. And then you have to slow die of dehydration or starvation. If you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky… then those don’t exist here, and you will never get out.
This was an amazing watch! I always thought the topic of how to store and mark atomic waste was fascinating. Something about the concept just feels so eerie and sticks with you.
So many of the backrooms creators just do not understand what made the original pic scary..
It's funny how this whole Backrooms thing has been around since as recently as 2019 but because there's so many nostalgic themes involved it makes me think it's been around since 2010 at least. All of these compilations are things 90's/00's kids knew but it only became truly nostalgic once we all grew up a significant amount
As for the "only liking horror if nothing interesting happens" - I feel you. So many horror movies and stories had me on the edge of my seat for the first half, only to add some extremely disappointing twist or reveal and ruin the whole vibe. There's a good example that I like to use while on this topic. 2020's "The invisible man". The first big bulk of the movie had me absolutely sucked in - the psychological terror the main character was experiencing had me on the edge of my seat wondering if it's real or not. When the big reveal came I was just disappointed, waiting for the movie to end already. I would've been so much happier had nothing actually happened and the movie ended right before that reveal, leaving us wondering.
There's one movie tho, that dividends the people who like psychological horror, and those who prefer action horror. 2018's Antrum. I watched it with my boyfriend some time ago. Nothing much actually happened, there wasn't any gore or jumpscares, but it was so interesting, it had me on the edge of my seat the wole time. My boyfriend meanwhile was bored out of his mind haha.
Re the nuclear waste issue: I don't think either writing _or_ a monumental signifier (no matter what kind) would remain permanently effective; nothing would, or at least nothing would be guaranteed; but I do think the planners might have considered something else: stories. Graham Hancock (I know, but just bear with me a moment) proposes in _Fingerprints of the Gods_ (yeah, I _know)_ that world mythology is laden with numbers misinterpreted as ritually symbolic, which are in fact keys to axial precession and/or some kind of planet-devastating catastrophe. I doubt this, and the historical thesis isn't really germane here, but I think it does suggest a possibility.
There's nothing human beings create as reliably as stories -- every culture on earth, throughout recorded history, no matter what their differences in material culture or social norms, has stories. Ergo: ensure, as much as possible, that symbols of radioactivity are recognizable to _everyone_ -- a UN standardization of such symbols might be a place to start -- and that _everyone_ understands that, and how, radioactive waste is now dangerous and will remain dangerous for millions of years, and encode that knowledge in a story, or multiple stories, that can be passed down orally without too great an effort (to obviate the issues of changing languages and the possible loss of the art of writing). _Not_ a myth -- that'd _really_ be gambling, because myths are rarely taken literally even by unsophisticated peoples, and are too easily mixed in with religious practices that may have nothing to do with our purpose here, which is in turn a problem if any kind of religious change sweeps away the practices and with them the story. No, the story needs to be realistic -- stripped down, maybe, to one that would be as credible and comprehensible to a person from the Palaeolithic as to someone from the technological age, but in any event, plainly and professedly a piece of history.
How in the hell do you not have more subs my guy?!
The community is growing every day!
@@spookymcg it is well deserved my man 💪❤️
always a pleasure to see your videos. with this topic, it reminds me of pathologic. in patho1, we know how it can end, we know what happens from the very beginning and we still plau through.
but in patho2? we open almost the exact same, but with the option to keep trying.
we see places we have been! we see places we know and have explored and died in, but we still try again and it's maddening. we try and the characters acknowledge this in their own ways! we know what happens and we still keep trying, because we can fix it, right?
I would love to hear you talk about the inherent horror/eeriness of minecraft. I just really liked that segment of the video and i like that topic
You absolutely cook with these video essays bro
5:20 this is why playing nier automata first (and then replicant) is a more immersive and intriguing experience imo
Another banger! I love the concept of ruins, especially love that you brought up minecraft and Dark Souls III. ❤
Skyrim is beautiful. The walls are all crumbled and overgrown. Decay is everywhere but it feels so alive
It's 2am. I have 1000 words to write before 1pm. YAY Vidio
no but i was in the library and a security guy just walked behind me when you were saying that 1:20
annd now the motion lights in the bookcase aisles turned off 1 by 1 starting with the ones away from me. Its following me. Have I summoned the dark? I'm sorry i'll do work i promise.
hope you get your work done before it’s too late…
@@spookymcg me too. me too.... Gotta love playing a video about the loneliness of a place that should be filled with people but isn't and i'm in a library that in the daytime is super busy... spoooooky
I attended SUNY College at Purchase from 1990 to1994. There were underground tunnels between the dorms painted yellow, abandoned "study lounges" and more underground tunnels connecting the academic buildings under a vast brick plaza. And there were rats.And during my senior year guys in Hazmat suits ripping up the brick plaza to remove asbestos. So yeah, SUNY Collage at Purchase = modern ruin.
The interesting thing about the nuclear waste disposal problem is that humanity is by its nature very curious. If you have an entire field of sharp spikes that jut out creating an uninhabitable forest then people will want to see what’s hidden there. If you create a set of ruined buildings made to show that this place is no longer lived in people will want to learn about it, and if you create a plaque that says danger do not dig people will want to see what that danger is from curiosity in what was so bad they had to lock it away.
one of the buildings in the b-roll looked exactly liked a dream I once had wtf..(except the scary desert with abandoned statues)
I seriously don't understand how liminal spaces are supposed to be scary. I realize I'm probably too stupid to get it, but still.
really enjoyed this new take/ perspective on the backrooms
It's interesting how many of my favorite games take place after some sort of horrifying event - the Beast Plague, the Shattering, the Fire fading, Fimbulwinter, the threat of Scarecrow upon Gotham - that leads to abandonment by the people. Conveniently, the first three of these are in Fromsoft games, but still, I think that Miyazaki has inexorably altered my tastes in gaming
nice vid!
I got a video suggestion btw, stalkers in video games would be nice(stuff like mr x or even more broad like dead by daylight)
I really liked the "Ages past" references from the Wheel of Time series.
_“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again."_
When some of the main characters meet a river boat captain (Bayle Domon), he recounts the tales of things he found in his travels. Strange things left from "ages past, long forgotten".
In one place, he heard a story of a wide expanse where nothing living exists, with a large metal spike in the center.. and if anyone comes close to it, they eventually die.
My first thoughts upon reading that were _exactly_ like the discussion on "how do we tell future peoples that we've buried radioactive material here?".
After aeons, even signs or structures can be wiped away. All that might be left is the most sturdy of materials, placed in a way that can withstand the volatile erosion of time on earth.
"Aftermath: Population Zero" was a great documentary that went into detail on what would happen to what we left behind if humanity all suddenly disappeared. And really, it takes about one Ice Age before practically everything is gone other than a few "big stones" that we've placed.. the old ones, like the pyramids, etc, but then they mention the massive stone slab that the statue of liberty was placed on.
When something is going to be dangerous beyond even that kind of timeframe... what can you possibly leave behind that will indicate that it is still dangerous?
I really enjoy this kind of imagery and 'horror-by-implication', the kind that makes you think about stuff. It's not even really... "scary?", so much as it's interesting, potentially unnerving. "Existential" is a good word for it, even if it doesn't involve horror... maybe "awe" would be a good term.
That looks so much like the Phillipsburg Mall.
i have a WIP about nuclear waste, where people do accidentally stumble upon a nuclear waste facility, and a bunch of people in nearby farms start getting sick and a group is sent to investigae it. A group of people with no functional knowledge of radiation or its effects
sounds intresting, but the ending would just be "then they died of cancer"
this is good keep yappin
Transuranic in normal speak means anything at or heavier than Uranium that makes you sick, which is basically all of them.
Also I'd love to have a horror story/manga/movie set in like 10,000 years in the future where future inhabitants of Earth find a bunch of these old hostile ruins left by humans, and, foolishly, try to dig them up.
oh 600 miles of rooms so vague
Was that Louis Rossman as part of the RUclips Horror Community? Nice.
Why don’t you have a million followers again?
1/2 video is basically just talking about dark souls lore
24:16 I’d like to point out that humans love exploring dangerous places, we will end up disturbing the stuff under the spike fields or tablet or ruins out of curiosity once we discover danger, we live in dangerous places and raid ancient tombs. Humans are curious.
Signalis, a sci-fi horror game shows something similar to the proposed sandia ruins you talk about. I won’t say more but I love watching lore/theory videos of that game as much as I love the Dark Souls community videos. Check it out if you haven’t.
This is a great video
thanks todd
Thanks, Todd.
Now I must replay dark souls
second! excited for more of your work
Where does the background footage starting at 17:30 come from?
the nuclear waste warning message and construction concepts always make me feel uneasy, for a few reasons. first and foremost, they are foreboding af, as they're intended to be, as they ought to be, BUT, that's in no small part due to the fact that i understand how dangerous yet unassuming radiation is. a threat that can't be seen, yet can doom you within minutes of exposure (depending on what you're being exposed to, of course). it sounds like a supernatural curse, like, "if you see this symbol even once, you will die in the next three days!" if you don't understand radiation, the idea of short exposure = certain, agonizing doom, might seem too fantastical and overblown to be real.
and that brings me to the second reason these warnings and design concepts make me uneasy. it's not the first time an ancient, once-powerful civilization left behind imposing ruins with warnings of curses and death written upon the walls for future trespassers to heed. the Egyptians' mighty tombs, the pyramids, explicitly warned of such things, but we dug them out of the sand and robbed them for all they were worth just the same. we are inexorably drawn to the ruins of our past, compelled to start digging if we so much as spot what merely looks like the top of a building poking out of the dirt. we want to dig up ruins so badly, we'll scour hostile environments on foot, or take to the air - to SPACE! - to comb over a million miles in hopes of finding these crumbling remains of our long-forgotten histories. all threats, real, invented, or imagined, shall not keep us from this drive to KNOW the parts of ourselves that has otherwise faded into obscurity.
so, it's my belief that the best practice is to leave no traces as all. bury our poisoned curse deep beneath the earth, and blanket the surface with whatever native ecosystem was meant to be there in the first place. remove every single clue that might hint that any human activity occurred there at all, and never return to it, for any reason. write no more of it, expunge all records of it, erase it from living memory as expediently as we can. there can be no "paper trail" leading distant archeologists to this place, lest those clever fools piece together an incomplete and misleading picture that grips the imagination and triggers that insatiable need to KNOW. they mustn't know, they can NEVER know, not of that place at least. fear of the unknown might be powerful, but there will always be those who seek to destroy that fear through shining a light on the unknown, no matter what evil might lurk in the shadows of blissful ignorance.
Amazing video (compliment)
The first flame is the thing keeping the gods in power, not humans. Humans are descendants of the dark soul, which is kinda like a weird offshoot of the first flame that gets stronger rather than weaker. The gods basically spend the whole first game trying to trick you into thinking that the first flame is what keeps everything going, but it's actually the thing keeping humanity from thriving. Gwyn himself created the undead curse to feed a little bit of the infinite dark soul to the first flame anytime someone dies
It's actually kind of ironic since, by the events of the third game, the gods have all perished, but humanity keeps kindling the flame just because it's what they've always done. And they've done it for so long that they ruined the world that they were supposed to inherit eons ago.
So ending the flame isn't the same as giving up a miserable existence. It's more like a changing of the seasons. The dragons had their time, then the gods, and now the humans
Issue I have with the false rubble idea is….well plainly put, humanity has ALWAYS built on the bones of the old. The Roman Empire collapsed yet Italy and Rome aren’t abandoned.
Hell a fundamental part of fallout 4 is going to ruins and reinhabiting them
Okay! I'll subscribe, you got me :D
Have you ever thought about doing a video on psychological horror games? I've seen a lot of images from Omori in your videos and would love to hear your opinions.
I've got some stuff cooking! I was actually fortunate enough to have an indie dev reach out to me a bit ago with their game, and it was a really cool experience! I've obviously got a lot to say about Omori, enough for a tattoo... We'll see!
@@spookymcg Can't wait!
why dont they just use a skull emoji to state the danger of nuclear waste
First comment^ love your stuff bro!
Thank you!
You should do a video on stray (the game)
i should
An example of purpose-built ruins would be the 'follies' you get in the grounds of stately homes in the UK. They were just intended as a focal point of interest, not for any practical reason - they are closer to statuary than to real ruins. Probably wealthy people have been building them all over the world, going back hundreds of years.
For example, the Romans loved stuff from Ancient Egypt - I wouldn't put it past one or two of them to have built 'Egyptian'-looking follies in the grounds of their villas. No idea if it actually happened though!
Yes, the landscape gardens of early 19th century (also known as English gardens in Central/Eastern Europe) usually incorporated folly structures, often in a ruined state, just for the fun or rather awe of it.
On the realness argument of them I do wonder. For instance, there is a large folly ruin site in Tata, Hungary, which incorporates stones from an actual medieval church ruin nearby!
@@lucafilo6317
That's interesting about Tata - part real ruins, and part 'fake' ruins!
I only brought the subject up because creator mentioned about the unlikelihood of ruins being newly built, and I immediately thought 'follies!'. I was triggered!
I’m not of the opinion that the sunk cost fallacy applies to communities being repeatedly destroyed by environmental disasters. When I see other Oklahomans who have houses destroyed by tornadoes, it’s often people who can’t afford to leave the area
totally fair!
The fact that the original back rooms post is from 2019.....
Nothing is scarier than your own imagination
In my opinion the game shadow of the colossus is a better example than dark souls, it matches perfectly.
I can see that! I might be talking about that game in an upcoming video…
@@spookymcg thank you I’ll appreciate it
what is that sound effect
🎠
how come It says you have 100 and something videos when you seem to have like 20 including shorts
i think it’s all the old streams…
Why does FromSoft do this? Because it's easier to make than a proper rpg world and fans are eating it up
And for good reason, this shit rocks
Video is dope, but man Skinamarik was a bad movie. Connor just mentioning it gets my jimmies rustled
I think this video is pretty well made, but I need you to understand that the idea of ppl fleeing their homelands (due to climate collapse) touches a subject that's far deeper and more complex.. colonization. Often colonization was done in reverse in NA and Australia: colonizers would come in and say "wow, look how beautiful this land is! These brown people don't deserve it!"
A different kind of horror, one maybe to research and talk about? I don't. I liked the video overall, I just thought.. you know, it's weird to talk about ppl abandoning their home and just moving on lol
I don't know*
UEHEHEGEHEH
i see...
lil bro went so off topic it became another DaS analysis video 💀
what are those commie buldings from
JACOB GELLER MENTIONED!!!!! WTF IS A BAD VIDEO??????!!?!?!?!?