The Internet is on notice · 7:39pm Mar 21st, 2019
I have just started reading House of Leaves, and I am incredibly disappointed.
Not with the book, mind you -- for all that I could stand to have a few less four-page-long footnotes that interrupt the middles of sentences -- but with every creepypasta, webseries and ARG I have ever seen.
Y'all been cribbing from Danielewski this whole time.
HoL was published in 2000, which means it pre-dates Youtube and most of what we would consider the backbone of the modern internet. And while I know it's considered the first instance of printed hypertext as story medium, I'm already seeing echoes of... like I said, literally everything I've read or watched that's even vaguely metatextual. Like, the entire SCP Foundation, or at least the parts of it that carry on the wiki's /x/-based origins. All the weird science, anything that decides to color particular words, just all of it! At least something like Football in the Future took everything a step further with media that can't be printed.
(Like, I'm seriously dreading losing respect for SCP-1893, because the inner plate and one textual reference have me primed to watch out for a minotaur as motif, character, or who even knows what, and that highly-regarded SCP is nothing but.)
Argh.
If you've already read the book, let me go at my own pace.
And in case you're feeling put on fleek or whatever it is the kids these days say, I am also disappointed at myself because I've had the print copy of Background Pony for about four months now, laying untouched on my bookshelf behind me. I'm hoping reading HoL will get me back into the habit of opening a physical book once a day, and I'll pick it up once I'm done. I'm a fast reader. :B
EDIT: Because I just found I had a Notepad instance sitting open with this on it, here's a puzzle for people who like puzzles:
1234567890
2468024680
3692582840
4826086680
5050005000
What's the next sequence of numbers and why?
House of Leaves had a really big impact on internet stories/pasta culture. That's just how it be. The internet is not a place for creativity, after all.
6284062840
its a multiplication table using the first row and column and only displaying the 1s digit.
HAH! Glad you're reading it. I-it's not like that book has inspired me in any way...
Really?! I was hoping it would be good. I am disappointed. :/
5031140
I think he's saying the book is good: hes not disappointed in the book, but rather disappointed in all the people he now knows were copying from it.
Isn't that the table/puzzle that engendered the quip, "There are two kinds of people in the world, those that can extrapolate from incomplete data."
next number is69420800855031137
That’s what I thought at first, but the pattern breaks in the second half of the last three lines.
6288088600
It's the product of digits of row # * column # from 1 to 10.
Left as an exercise to the reader. :)
5031149
So he is. Look at that, I jumped the gun there. My mistake!
5031137
No and no.
5031165
nop
5031170
Bingo. Anyone who follows a certain Youtube channel will know this is relevant to today's upload.
Football in the Future, you mean 17776? That was so fucking good.
I enjoyed HoL immensley, but I'm not sure if I got everything out of it that I was supposed to. But it has let me enjoy HoL references, which is cool. I have his other book Familiar yet to be read. Also the printed color BP...
5031183
Yeah, I can't remember numbers. :B
6284062840 but that would make line 5 in error,
Eh, I disagree on HoL being a vast influence. It just uses a lot of horror tropes that have since become popular, but existed well before.
That said, I love internet horror as a genre, so if you'd like some recs I can lay them on you. :)
HumperMonkey (user on the SomethingAwful forums) is one of my favorites, he did a whole series of cold war era military horror stories that would make really good action horror movies.
http://nothotbutspicy.com/para/hm/
Because I mentioned it the other day I'm deeply sorry for any influence I might have contributed.
HoL is... it is. The "horror" aspects were just kinda there but goddamn. As a clinically diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic it reads like a manuscript I'd scribble out if I stayed awake for a week, released all control of my mentality, and just splurted crazy onto the page. Wait until the footnotes and text start doing really weird things like being half on one page and the other five pages ahead.
Also. Flip to the middle. That's the end of the book. It's half appendices and "reference material".
5031140
It's... not great.
5031136
But it is a place for shilling your shitty political views :^)
Never read House of Leaves but I like creepy pastas and I like channels like NightMind that cover ARGs. I like theory channels in general. I'll probably never read HoL because I have this nagging feeling in the back of my head that I'll come out of it feeling it's overrated.
Also everything is derivative. I don't see much reason of getting upset about it.
5031569
NightMind is in fact why I'm reading it now.
There's being inspired by something, and then there's just ripping it off because you can't come up with anything better.
5031569 The idea that "everything is derivative" has been pushed really really hard in academia for the past 50 years, but it's purely ideological. The statement itself is meaningless. Everything contains some amount of things seen before--otherwise we'd perceive it as random noise--and some amount of novelty. But the people who say "everything is derivative" actually mean there is literally zero novelty, which is silly.
It's ridiculously complicated, but it's a consequence of believing in Aristotelian essences or Platonic Forms (the properties of things are inherited from the spirit of the category of thing that they are) instead of in atomism (the properties of things result from their internal structure). [1]
And the people pushing it now don't actually believe in Aristotelian essences; they believe in the post-modernist version of the medieval Catholic Church's version of the Neo-Platonist version of Plato's forms, which means they believe categories are socially constructed, and hence exist in the mind of society in the same way that many medieval scholastics believed they existed in the mind of God.
This is why modern art is squiggles and dog-barf on canvas: because the claim "everything is derivative" really means "everything constructed out of assemblages of the same objects has the same meaning, because ATOMS AREN'T REAL" [2], which means that representations of scenes consisting entirely of things you can recognize can't tell you anything new. [3]
It's part of a larger system of thought and a larger program, one which has been attempted before, notably by Duns Scotus & others in the 13th+14th centuries (which modern "semiotics" is based on), and a similar movement by German philosophers starting in 1800 that was called Naturphilosophie (which produced Hegel's philosophy, which Marxism is based on).
The program is to try to create a spirit-based explanation of the world that's up-to-date with contemporary knowledge, to replace scientific or materialist explanations. The post-modernist program is a little different, in that instead of trying to provide an alternative explanation for new knowledge, it just tries to deny that new knowledge exists, or even can exist.
So, now you know.
[1] Fun fact: The Greek word that's translated "soul" in the New Testament meant "the spirit of a category", e.g., the human race had one single soul, which enlivened all humans. That's also the word Aristotle used for "formal cause" or "essence". Plato was the guy who decided that maybe each person had their own soul, and most early Christian theology is ripped from Plato, not from Jesus. And that's because people in 4th century North Africa thought Plato's ideas were part of rational thought, beyond questioning, in the same way that the laws of arithmetic were. They didn't think that assuming Plato was correct was actually assuming anything.
If you doubt this, read Anselm's ontological proof for the existence of God, or Aquinas' list of the properties of God. It will all sound like moronic babble, unless you've internalized Plato, in which case it makes perfect sense.
[2] Atoms aren't "real", but it's even more complicated to explain what I mean by that. Google "operationalization" and "nominalism" if you really want to know. Atoms aren't real in the same way that Einstein showed that "space" and "time" aren't real, but they are "real" in the way that 99.99% of people use the word "real".
Also, fun fact #2: Plato may have developed his philosophy partly to refute Leucippus and Democritus, the originators of atomic theory. Not by arguing against it; he thought atomism was so dangerous that it shouldn't even be mentioned. Democritus is the only major ancient Greek philosopher never mentioned in Plato. He reportedly said that he wished every page Democritus ever wrote were burned, and his followers eventually accomplished that.
[3] This is also a claim originally made by Plato, in his Meno. He said that you can't learn new things, because you can only truly learn things by perceiving them, and you can only perceive what you already know. Therefore, all knowledge is actually recollection, and nothing you understand can be new.
All this weird pomo / medieval stuff was first balled up together into an entirely fallacious but self-consistent worldview by Plato. It's like an epistemological black hole: once it sucks you in, you can never get out, because all the different parts of the worldview work together to make you unable to notice anything that disagrees with the worldview.
5032474
There's no 4 D:
5032569
Oops. You have a hankering for more footnotes?
It was a footnote about why Marxism calls itself "materialist" when it's based on a spiritualist philosophy. But it got long and complicated and I'm still not sure I understand it, so I deleted it.
5032771
When even you can't understand your own footnotes, it's time to stop. :B