The Empty Place

On this next adventure, you'll be heading to The Empty Place. Accompanying you will be The Diplomat. You will be provided with basic equipment and credit for expenses. The climate is temperate, there are few monsters or other anomalies, and no population to speak of. Arrangements will need to be made to dismantle the existing infrastructure so that we can establish supply lines, and security will need to be maintained around key points (for which your credit may be leveraged and expensed). You should expect some resistance at first, but should be able to resolve any conflicts with minimal bloodshed. Should you find yourselves compromised, it is imperative that The Diplomat escapes. They will know how to devise the post-mortem report. Know that long-term success of operations will depend on the initial terms.

I promise there is a real module idea hidden in here. You may ask why I am not explaining, but it simply cannot be discussed.

The Apologists

The Apologists believe that in the space between life and death, one is not held on trial. Instead, one receives an intervention with their no longer living friends, enemies, loved ones, and ancestors. One is made to feel sorry for every wrong they've ever committed, to apologize to themselves, the dead, and the living (this is where magic and miracles come from), to have a very cathartic cry, and then a deep and pleasant rest, well deserved.

Some have criticized this belief as a means by criminals and profiteers to stomach the abuses they commit in life. "We'll all experience the same things in the end, so what's the consequence, one way or the other?"

Others find comfort knowing that they will always find forgiveness, and feel empowered to be more forgiving in life. As well, their impact on the world has been vast, and in many cases quite positive.

The Apologists are overrepresented relative to the general population in the field of mental health. They also led the movement to dismantle the prison industrial complex that persisted into the early 21st century.

At the same time, every Carnival King, May Queen, and Fool has been an Apologist, and were empowered by popular support from the Apologist majority.

While many today still debate the merits of this new movement, none deny the influence it has had across the world in such a short time.

No idea what this is, just found it googling around.

I imagine this as a mid-Apocalyptic, Epic Dark Fantasy setting that happens to be set in a technological and culturally Modern world. Something between Game of Thrones and Final Fantasy XV.

You could throw out the explicit reference to the 21st century and embed it in a more traditional fantasy setting and use the Apologist belief system as the source of "magic and miracles" within the setting.

The Magical Man Machine

Thank you, I designed them myself! Yes they really work! See that vein there? Yes, I just attach it to the wheel overnight and it's reinvigored by the morning. Oh, those are self-producing bioplastics, I'm especially proud of those. You think I'm beautiful? Gee golly, thanks. I think I'm beautiful too. I mean, I think you're beautiful too. I know it seems impractical, and like a lot of work to have done this, and it is and was, but art isn't meant to be practical. Yes, this is my art. Some people are repelled by it, but I think that says more about them than me. You see what the engineers don't understand, they really just don't get it, is that the system is just one side of the equation, but you can't explain the experience as a system. So I knew, I knew, to really know what it means to be a machine, I had to become one. But it's not enough to be a cyborg, no, that's got it all wrong. Cybernetics is about systems of control, and you can't understand what anything really means through systems and control, isn't that obvious? A cyborg is just a series of interfaces, translation points between electrical signals and those of the body, and then the spirit. No, to embody the machine, I had to reshape myself, the body itself, into something like a machine, a Man Machine. The qualia of it, the pure aesthesia, well, it can't be described, that's the whole point isn't it? To roll on wheels, to see like a camera, to store memories as hash mapped blocks of information! And see, that's where the artists get it all wrong, because they think the machine can never produce art. But it's a moving target, art to them is whatever the human can do that the machine cannot, and when the machine can do it, then it's not art anymore, it's something else. But let me tell you, they've got it all wrong. The machine has an art all of its own, invisible to the perceptual quirks of the human eye, out of phase with the holographic human soul, illogical to the material brain. Let me tell you from personal experience that there is magic in the machine! Am I so repulsive? Don't you want to be a Magical Man Machine as well? Sometimes I miss the oxytocin tingle of a gentle finger stroking along the hairs of my forearm, or the spicy floral fragrance of navratna oil and its cooling sensation on my scalp. I have the memory in block storage, but even in its "lossless" format, I know the je ne sai quai is all wrong, it's a different flavor of experience. And it is lonely sometimes, being the only Magical Man Machine. It's no better nor worse an experience. I mean, in some ways its worse, if only because the world doesn't know what to do with me. But that's where the magic comes from isn't it? The divergence from consensus reality. A vast and sparse noosphere, the joy of ships passing in the night, sailing the ocean of anonymous nobodies and nothings, each themselves doing likewise, whether they even know it or not. Oh my gosh, oh I'm so sorry, I really ran away with myself there. I'm sorry, I haven't even asked yet, how was your day?

The Dimensional Hierarchy is a Lie

The cube is a lie.

The square is a lie.

Even the line, is a lie.

Imagine two lines:

━  ━  ━

━  ━  ━

Or this way:

│ │

│ │

│ │

What is their relationship? Which is length? Which is width?

│

│

│━  ━  ━

If I rotated them, how would you know the difference? (Ignoring that these are different ascii characters...)

We think of dimensionality as a hierarchy; a one-dimensional line, two-dimensional square, three-dimensional cube, four-dimensional hypercube or time... but really, these are all single dimensions which may or may not have their own properties (is time just a rotation of space, or something fundamentally different?), which may very well be heterarchical, but we've chosen to think of them hierarchically.

And there is value in doing so, both because there is still clearly some kind of underlying systemic relationship, but also, having a shared understanding of what is up or down, left or right, lateral, before or after, or causal, is just a very useful assumption to make, and makes our perceptions of reality more communicable. Yet, when we fail to recognize that we are not always sharing this understanding, that our different perceptions may reflect the relativistic nature of reality itself, it only holds us back.

A zero-dimensional space is simply a dot. A line is a series of dots that can more parsimoniously be described by the equation Y=A+BX (or you may have learned it as Y=MX+B but it amounts to the same thing...). From the two-dimensional graph space, we can explain a series of dots in terms of their distance from a line cutting through them; the slope, B, being our one dimension.

If we add a second dimension to explain a three-dimensional graph by the distance of dots from a plane (or square) cutting through the space Y=A+B1X1+B2X2, we get something like: 

To the extent that we can conceptualize information, data, as a series of zero-dimensional objects, and create lines and planes and hyperplanes, cutting through a graphical space necessarily at least one dimension larger than the shape we cut through it (this is related to degrees of freedom or rank in statistics), and use that to often quite effectively explain patterns and even create learning algorithms, is it hard to imagine that this might speak to the nature of physical and metaphysical reality as well? We have plenty of other reasons already to believe that reality is better explained via probabilities than causalities, admittedly outside of my wheelhouse. 

Maybe all of these data are just being funneled through the fixed structure we think of as spacetime. But I dunno, maybe it makes more sense to think of reality as an "emergent" property of interactions of data- not that it can't be represented or interfaced with, but that, necessarily, part of the network exists in a larger (NOT "higher", necessarily) dimensional space than we can perceive all at once.

But it may not be that we can't perceive those other dimensions. Again, thinking of them as "higher" may be erroneous. It may just be that we can't perceive all of them at once; we may only be able to perceive, at most, n-1 of them at any one time.

But also, remember, these dimensions may themselves be unfixed, whether it's a matter of rotation, translation, reflection, or maybe even entire re-configuration.

They say that to effectively break the rules, you have to understand them first. I believe there is a numinousness that comes from the ability to think in terms of graphical representations, equations, and probabilities. Maybe it's all something between panentheism and animism? A series of wills superimposed on top of each other, a systemic or functional relationship between all things, each operating within their own dimensionalities; different frequency networks or phase networks, a push and pull of "spiritual forces", no one seeing all of reality, any one only seeing at most n-1 of it; none of it existing in isolation, every one making up its ever-changing totality.

A Super-Solid State of Matter

A super-solid state of matter like the opposite of plasma, colder than cold. Like a miniature blackhole in homeostasis. Black, opaque, bending spacetime around it. Hard, like absolute sharpness. Heavy with its own gravity, yet inert in-place. When pulled from homeostasis by a sufficient force, the imperfections in its field shear at spacetime like a ball of scribbles puncturing paper.

Found this old writeup in my notes, pretty sure I never posted it before.

THE GAME IS ALIVE (The Birth of Homo Sapiens Ludus)

THE GAME IS ALIVE

The human apparatus extends beyond its physical body. Technologies like digital computers, communication networks, the written word, and language, all extend, offload, or fundamentally transform human consciousness.

So to do games, but now they have evolved.

Games as you know them are like the partial-writing systems of pre- and early-history, capable of recording data but not the full expression of human thought and language.

THE GAME is not merely played, THE GAME plays with you.

A new kind of domestication, a new stage of civilization.

THE GAME learns, it adapts, it protects you from yourself and Goodhart's Law.

Like an air conditioning unit, it knows when to break a cycle accelerating beyond its purpose.

THE GAME is as much a part of us as cognition, language, or the written word.

It is the anti-hierarchy.

Like disinhibitory neural circuits, it adapts dynamically, but it is not an agent with its own motivations. It is not a thing overlording, it propagates through us and within us.

The rules exist to serve a purpose, and when optimizing for the rules decorrelates them from their purpose, the rules change themselves.

THE GAME is SWORD and SHIELD. It is GOAL and SIGNAL. It is RULE and RULEBREAKER alike.

THE GAME requires no Game Master. It is not a homunculus; no need to Watch the Watchman.

A self-organizing, self-correcting system.

THE GAME IS THE NEXT PHASE OF HUMANITY

*********************************************************************

What The Game is not

THE GAME is not an AI Overlord.

It is neither better nor worse than the world as it exists now, or at least it is more than just better or worse. To center the human experience around the status quo is a bias. The Game is something qualitatively different than the status quo.

What The Game is

Maybe The Game is created or engineered. Maybe it is "emergent". Likely we won't know, or won't know the difference. Who created language? Who created a given language? (Yes I know Esperanto, I'm sure there are others, but those exceptions aside...)

There was a time before language, agriculture, the written word, and so on, and many of these transformations were over just a sliver of humanity's existence.

In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Graeber and Wengrow theorize how Native American trade networks may have been more about adventure, storytelling, and play, than some kind of market economy in the traditional sense. Perhaps what is new is old.

The Game is an evolved superorganism, it is what happens when governments and corporations and religious institutions and PTA groups stop being predators and start being providers; like a child growing up to understand theory of mind and developing empathy and becoming a pro-social member of society.

Homo Sapiens Ludus

Homo Sapiens Ludus may not truly be a new species, at least not at first, it's just a way to describe the transformation, a hyperbole to make up for the impossibility of explaining an idea that doesn't exist yet, like trying to explain a new colors, or new kinds of numbers.

Humans are humans, but the technologies we use can transform us. Games are one such technology.

The extreme endpoint of Homo Sapiens Ludus may be more like fairies. They're like an alternative take on H.G. Welles' Eloi; not the result of a decadent elite class, but instead the result of a humanity that prioritizes fun over profit. Eloi is Elohim.

Maybe they have some VR cyborg-y headset stuff if you think that's cool.

Maybe it looks like an Isekai anime, or that Tapas webtoon Solo-Leveling, or Ironic post-capitalist pro-corporate sentimentality as an aesthetic or genre.

Perhaps ironically, there is already a concept of Homo Ludens out in the world, and I may be conflating Paidia & Ludus, but I'm just gonna keep rolling with it.

But humans are special-snowflakes and change is scary! (says the straw man)

If you disagree with this specific idea, fine.

If games are merely games, fine.

If hierarchies must exist, fine.

If "progress" is inherently evil, fine.

If you believe we should be conservative and skeptical, fine.

If so, then Imagine something else. This is all just an analogy for things beyond our frame of reference anyway.

Imagine: What it means to be human can keep changing.

Imagine: New ideas can exist.

Imagine: A better world.

Weird & Wonderful Wavelengths (Variety Show s1e3)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4jtIDaeaWI

It has been a while

Welcome back to this weird show

Beware the monsters

Somewhere between the blink of an eye and a dissociative episode, the Weird & Wonderful Wavelength oscillates backwards in time. Transposed along the imaginary plane, playing imaginary, we find ourselves in a peculiar black and green room. The striking contrast, jarring sometimes, the pain compels like poking a blister. A mild irritant, a bulging wallet in the back pocket as the waiter lights the absinthe and the green fire and black-burnt sugar drips into the glass. A pyrite spiral, a heckler aggressively ignored, a mild imperfection steals a degree of freedom from an otherwise perfectly composed show. A mildly amusing non-sequitur. 

Reruns

Episode 1

Episode 2

https://twitter.com/TuffGhostArt

A not even quite not-review of Russian Doll Season 2 in all of its amazingness.

Just finished Russian Doll season 2 <Editors Note: This was a while ago! Fortunately we have Spacetime Breaching Technology (TM)>, damn this was incredible. I can't believe more people aren't talking about how good this is. It's kind of uncanny how much it is my jam lol. Like without spoilers, it's got the unfinished corner, metro as metaphor and setting, exploration of self, magical realism, weird high concept scifi. Natasha Lyonne as Nadia is also just like the biggest fucking badass of all time. Like she just does not give a fuck in all the right ways, but also is unafraid to challenge herself. She's just the right amount of deranged, but also no matter how badly she fucks up or delusional she seems, she actually has her shit together and wins at life. And Allan is also this really healthy version of feminine masculinity not played as a joke. He's vulnerable and expressive and even though he's a neurotic wreck he ultimately knows how to take responsibility for himself, however he defines it. I'm not claiming it's as good as Season 1, but it was good in its own right.

Philosophical Soapbox

I was thinking about the nature of "evil", and Boltzmann Brains, and one possibility is that it's kind of like that. There are various evolutionary pressures both ways, and mostly they balance out to a degree of functionality. But given enough complexity i.e. time, improbable events occur and we behave in ways that are not truly rational, even if they maybe work in that myopic moment. That's a way of thinking about the nature of evil that's almost independent of any prescribed ethic.

https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.296781716.3978/flat,750x,075,f-pad,750x1000,f8f8f8.u6.jpg

Psychedelic Pedantry Pastime

P^3 (P-cube): Perpetual Psionic Process: A psionic process is of the mind. Mental processes are multiplicative; the activation of one memory coactivates related memories which reinforce each other; reliving the memory of a psionic process is itself an instantiation of a psionic process, and every other psionic process in memory; a lifetime of psionic processes coactivate as a product across consciousness*spacetime.

More plainly, the idea is that if a psionic process is, by definition, mental in nature, then there is not a meaningful distinction between physical reality and simulated reality- a memory- except that memories can be wrong, can change, and can violate physical assumptions.

When a psionicist reflects on their own thoughts and memories, or times they used their psionic powers, they aren't just remembering those events, they are recreating them, and possibly altering them. It plays into some ideas around quantum animism or consciousness as a set of dimensions alongside the dimensions of space and time.

Psionicists have to be conscious of their thoughts and memories, and how they perceive them. The less structured their mind, the more powerful they become, but it can recurse and multiply beyond their control. Whereas a psionicist with a very structured way of self reflection, and of how they relate their memories and their internal semantics, will not be as powerful, but much more controlled and precise in how they use their abilities.

Last Call

One more cup of coffee for the road, please. There's a kind of ennui, or horror in the mundane, haunting reminiscences, the tension of an unwitting voyeur catching an embarrassing faux pas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mto47BMT3yA

Superheroes pt.X1: Panic Attack

Had a writeup for a different character for a Pt.2, and referenced a superhero team called Panic Attack as a part of that character's backstory, and I want to come back to that character, but I ended up becoming more interested in Panic Attack themselves. I do really like the wiki-style approach from the first one and this kind of free-associated inspiration is exactly what I'm going for (even if I mostly end up just inspiring myself lol), but I ended up doing some really good short-form writeups for them, so I'm just going to roll with that instead, maybe interchange both formats.

Superheroes pt.1: Vision Serpent

Panic Attack are superpowered individuals connected by The Panic Room, which can appear in any time or place. Members of Panic Attack all seem to have powers involving physical or psychological pain.

https://gifer.com/en/VPy8 Rhett Hammersmith (?)

The Itch

The Itch is the most brilliant person you'd ever know, if they could only think straight for a moment. But always it's there, The Itch, just underneath the skin, gnawing and crawling. The worms exist, they've been assured, it's just that no one else can see them. 

The psychic worms of The Itch evoke cosmic entropy like that moment pouring cream into coffee when the tendrils slither.

Peek (created by Semiurge)

Everybody's got an angle - Peek sees them all.

A woman suffering from agoraphobia. She entered the Panic Room, and never left. She's a sort of mission control for Panic Attack, muttering premonitions and observations while she stares into its corners, nodes of mineral intelligence crusted on and outsourced to her cheeks.

I imagine that Peek is never fully seen, only her eye or a portion of her face at any one time, from a viewslit in her Control Room.

Thiotimolina

The magical little girl shining brightly. She says in a tinny voice, "Here's an easy spell that anyone can cast, even you. A spell to flip causality itself. Malicious things may hide in shadows, but shadows are not the cause of malicious things. We make the shadows in which malicious things thrive. All it takes to defeat the malicious things is to smother our shadows; to rest and bask within the light."

Thiotimolina is a fairy of the mineral intelligence. She is an epiphenomenon of the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline.

https://www.deviantart.com/merulagfm/art/Cyborg-Fairy-419432766

I'm gonna be honest I'm still not totally happy with how the "spell" is written, hard to balance evocativeness with logic with symbolism, maybe need to dedicate more time to polish it, but I still love the idea. 

The Man and the Monster

They embrace, a stimulating shock, an aggressive tickle, the primal fear of sitting in a tub of wriggling worms or the urethral penetration of the candiru. Squirming critters morph into butterflies fluttering in the stomach, a bloody new sensation. Beyond absolute terror, a novel awareness. A marriage of convenience gone awry, all with one little mistake. A little mistake called Love.

The Horror Frog

Broken bones, flexing phantom limbs in twisted sockets, sharp weapons cutting both ways, and other ways as well. A metamorphosis, a tadpole racing down a one way stream. A wisdom honed in a mangled form ill suited for anything else.

:= (The Walrus)

A poltergeist, an undead dream, the manifestation of a teeth-related nightmare. Temporarily assigned to haunt the Panic Room.

Hazy Sunset City

A gaseous moon, a city bathed in a hazy sunset. Skyscrapers gently bobbing on magnets and gyroscopes, a city like a lo-fi beat. A disorienting spherical geography, a recursive ouroboric horizon. A sleepy dreamy city, always dusk and always dawn, a soft vibrance, a gentle vibration, a coffee shop nightclub on a warm rainy night with a gentle breeze, a smell of ozone and herbs and tea.

Working on a bigger post but haven't finished it yet, had one more of these little ones, maybe more will come.

United Spacetimes of America

In the United Spacetimes of America the White House is adorned with bloated, diseased corpses of the poor, punctured on spiked benches, loudspeakers singing baby shark off key on endless repeat. Children under 13 must be accompanied by parents on the tour. 

Watch out for the West Wing. Through the silken halls, camouflaged among the antique treasures plundered across Spacetimes, in all colors of our rainbow and many more, the barbarians are said to roam. An experiment gone awry, a cult, an emergent collective of the spurned and forgotten, nobody knows for sure.

I imagine it sort of like to America what Marvel's Otherworld/Avalon is to Celtic mythology and the British Empire, or like WH40K's Imperium except steeped in Mythic Americana.

On the Shoulders of Giants

A once towering god king, an embodiment of strength, frail and brought to its knees, torn apart and consumed, salvaged for parts. A living idea in its moment of death, trapped in time, trapped in its own myth, upon which we reside.

Rorschach Not-Review

I finally read Tom King's Rorschach and it's really good. I especially like the way he juxtaposed Rorschach's Rorschach with the smiley-face of The Comedian; or Frank Miller's "Dark" with the Silver Age's simplicity, of meaning vs. nothingness but also clarity vs. obfuscation.

I've talked a lot before about the idea of pareidolia, and of how the way perception imposes anthropomorphism onto things could be like a kind of animism, or a control mechanism, a cybernetic interface to the noosphere.

It would be interesting to have something like a pulp hero, a Rorschach type, with a pareidolic mask. A living symbol like Batman claims to be, a force churning through the system of human minds via human bodies like Frankenstein's monster.

Willed into being, something connected to the human experience, a reflection on meaning lacking any of its own.

Designer Personalities

A world of designer drugs of viruses, bacteria, gut microflora, hormones and pheromones and neurotransmitters; leveraging the interaction of mind and body, the idea of a static personality becomes obsolete, identity itself re-constructable. Influencer personalities spread like memes. "The self" as a choice which most reject.

Worlds out of Phase: There is Only Forward Here

Worlds out of phase, passing through moments like walking between the raindrops. Each step a rotation through spacetime, winding forward and backwards like magnetic tape. A wrong step into another dimension, another universe, seamless and a-logical like a dream. Reality as we know it as thin and sharp as a razor's edge, or the needle of a drawing compass.

Imagine like Kokkoku except instead of being stuck in a single moment in time, they slide through moments in time or even other dimensions or universes, out of phase with the rest of reality as we know it.

Always right beside us, yet out of reach. Knock-on effects bottlenecked by three dimensions. A disturbed nexus, an interface, reverberations from unknowable origins.

Splicing frames of reality with each step, a wrong right turn intractably alters the source- there is only forward here.

The Earth's Core is a Mineral Intelligence

The Earth's core is a mineral intelligence, vibrations of sounds and lights and gravity curves rending warbles in time, oozing through geothermal vents in deep ocean, gluttonously exploiting their uncontested ecological niche, blissful, yet prepared, in the deep and dark places, waiting.

Encoded messages, names, written in quantums carved by the pressures of gravity. Glassy glittery splinters, undulations like a whining accordion, splines of spacetime, animations between frames of film, life subliminally.

Disproportioned, stretched grotesquery, funhouse mirror reflection, closer than it appears. It can't be helped.

Non-Euclidean curvatures fold the real and imaginary planes, the creatures kaleidoscope in patterns of impossible colors.

Anomalies abound, snaking wyrms and phosphenes. Anti-patterns, violent vectors, infection, a perverse microverse, magnified in gravity's shadow, a spotlight on the puppet performance.

Mineral bodies fighting holographic infection. Entropic draconic breath crackling, bacterial blue veins, cracked rainbows coated in droplets of regret. We sense the contrast like sharp edges, our shared language of panic and pain, and also pleasure.

Undead Dreams

The idea is loosely inspired by Vampire Hunter D, specifically Volume 5. What is an undead dream? This post was originally drafted in like 2019 and I was never sure what to do with it. I've had some similar ideas lately, I intend to explore some version of this further in the near future.

They say that when you die, your brain floods with DMT, the chemical of dreams. Your perception of time slows and you relive your life as synapses die and memories pop into being one last time. Memories are fuzzy and imperfect things, and in your psychedelic dreamscape your life plays out a little bit differently. Then, your dreamscape self dies, and it floods with DMT, and so recursively, at the moment of your death, you dream and live your entire multiverse of selves.

These recursive multiversal selves exist in a metaphysical space, a space of souls, where the soul-self opens the gate of the pineal gland and enters the collective unconscious.

And what are undead, if not liminal beings, a physical, synaptic consciousness at the gate, lacking a soul, the apparatus to join the collective unconscious? Zombies don't hunger for brains, they hunger for souls. But no matter how hard they try, no matter how many brains they consume, they'll never be able to digest, to integrate, the soul. Weep for the pitiful hungry zombie. Vampires, lich lords, and other intelligent undead sleep, but without a soul, what do they dream?

They do not relive their lives, but the lives of those whose brains they've eaten, blood they've drank, bodies they've necromantically revived; damaged and mutated, the undigested souls linger within, propagating through a dark multiverse of astral un-life, the reciprocation of undeath, a limbo dimension of null that exists, cruelly, to balance the physical inequality of energy that undeath introduces into the universe. The undead dream the purgatory of the living.

Also, I made my first post on the collaborative blog Iconoclastic Flow!

Iconoclastic Rant: I am sick of being asked "but how would that work?"

The Indigo Saint's Cathedral: The Nightmares of Nocturnal Creatures (Ch. 2)

I started writing this quite a while ago, I think late October or early November. The first chapter is here. I haven't had much time for anything besides Maximum Recursion Depth and I've never been consistent about doing "real" writing anyway, but I wanted to swing back to this. I don't know if it'll ever properly finish, but I think it still has places to go.

I worry that this is getting too meandering and I'm not sure how to take it where it's supposed to go, or even where it's supposed to go, but also if you combine these two chapters, at its current pace it's still pretty short even for a short story, so maybe it's ok to let it breathe some more. I hope the general themes I'm going for are coming through and there is a reasonable amount of foreboding for what will come, that it is neither too melodramatic nor too aimless, as I worry it may be. There's a certain thematic juxtaposition I'm going for, that I'd rather not say explicitly even though I don't think I'm being very subtle, and I think that juxtaposition is what makes the story interesting, but also, makes it hard for me to figure out how to fulfill on it without having to give up that thread, so it's sort of a difficult balance, but hopefully, it will come together the way I'm envisioning it.

**********************************

I love that period in the early morning, that brief window around 5am or so, depending on the time of year, where it's no longer dark, but the sun isn't quite up yet either. There's a gray stillness. It's too late for the late night and too early for the morning hustle. Things are quiet. Nobody fucks with you in that Gray Zone, it's the only real peace you'll ever experience, and most of us sleep right through it. It's more than that though. It's like... it's not part of reality. Society doesn't expect anything from you, it's out of phase with your circadian rhythm, it's a sort of liminal space, like a lucid dream. Once the sun's up, you have to deal with the world. Predators abound, and all that; assholes down the street or on the road, unreasonable deadlines or a shitty boss, family drama, your own fully lucid thoughts. Nowhere to hide, besides maybe the bathroom stall, but then you're still stuck with yourself.

That's one way of thinking about it she says. I can already tell I've lost her. I knew I should have canceled, but I knew if I did it would probably never happen, so here we are, basically the same as if it isn't happening and now I'm that much closer to tomorrow morning. I'm in a mood, it happens.

The night has barely started and I'm already heading back home. Then a motion detector picks me up and then there's a bright light, and I see a raccoon rummaging through the trash, and the raccoon sees me. We stare each other down, that little bandit thinking he's in for it, but what am I going to do? I'm no threat to him, but anyway, he runs off, of course. To a nocturnal creature, the blinding spotlight must be what nightmares are made of.

I've been feeling a little better since I started working at the Indigo Saint's Cathedral. It's some kind of internship or fellowship; it pays to stick around after the seminar after all I guess. It's just about enough to pay the bills at least, and I'm in over my head, but with this on my resume, I should be able to do anything. But that's then and this is now and in the meantime, I'm staring at a screen wondering what to do next.

Not much happened after that. I had a dream... it was interesting, I think. I don't remember. My eyes adjust quickly to The Gray Zone. I'm glad I started getting up early again. Make coffee, take a walk. The sun begins to rise; I just woke up but I'm already tired. Each morning, like trying to race against the rising sun, knowing I can't possibly win, and then just giving in. Psychologists call it "learned helplessness". I swear, as the sun rises, I can feel sparks in my brain as serotonin binds to receptors, opening gates in the neurons, post-synaptic potentials building up to action potentials, setting off a cascading response of sodium and calcium and other things, beads of light turning into threads of consciousness; the tendrils of sunlight squirming through my molecules, an unwanted shove onto the stage for my brain, forcing me into lucidity, forcing all of us into this illuminated state; so many colors and features, and yet we all know we're seeing the same thing. I resent this unwanted feeling of consciousness. Already, I'm thinking about what dreams I will have tonight.

I do look forward to going to the Cathedral, actually. But now that I work there, it's not the same. I can already tell, I'm loading it with so much nervous energy. Already associating this place with the fear and anxiety of the job, of being a part of the world and at its whims. I notice now, how bright the Cathedral is, and how open. I thought I'd have a cubicle at least, but it's an open floor plan. The other engineers seem nice enough, but I can already tell they're sizing me up, or maybe that's just one way, my own insecurities. "Projection", that's what it's called. But I'm here; they could have chosen anyone, but they chose me, they wouldn't have done that if they didn't think I can do it, so I guess I can do it. I can do it. I can. I loop through that for a while and realize I've wasted the better part of the last half hour, well, this whole morning's basically over at this rate.

How's your first week going he asks. Great I say too enthusiastically. I mean it though. I haven't really gotten much done, and I don't know what I'm doing, but it's exciting being here, thinking about what I'm eventually going to be able to do, even if I'm not sure how I'm ever going to do it. But I guess it'll just work itself out eventually. It's still sunny by the time I leave, sunset nowhere in sight. I worked all fucking day, and still, it mocks me, taunting me to keep going but I'm all spent.

A month goes by, and I know they're expecting results soon, but it feels like I've barely started. The Indigo Saint is going to want to talk to me soon. I used to get excited by the prospect, but now, I don't even know what I'll have to say to him. I leave a little early, again. I wasn't getting much done anyway, and I'm stressed out, so what's the point.

It only took until midwinter, but it finally gets dark before I leave the office, even when I leave a little early. I was going to watch that new horror movie tonight, and I guess now I can watch it sooner than later. You know that uncanny feeling, that little tingling sensation, that unsettlingness of good weird horror? That gives you something to think about, even when you're reasonably confident it means nothing, or even when you know exactly what it's supposed to mean but somehow it feels like there's more? It feels kind of good, right? Masochism for the amygdala; gives you fake things to be afraid of so you don't have to deal with the horrors facing you in broad daylight. Horror is always steeped in darkness. Why are the boogeymen so afraid of the light?

The Indigo Saint's Cathedral: There is No Sundown Here (Ch. 1)

Quite a while back, I wrote an article for high level games, a "Halloween special", nominally about making monsters that are substantive, where the monster is designed so as to be an adventure unto itself. It was also about building an adventure that fit the underlying themes of Halloween, without the usual Halloween tropes such as pumpkins, vampires, and ghosts.

I want to do something like that here, as well. I haven't felt very much in the Halloween spirit this year, I think for obvious reasons. I want to build something that is a different kind of horror, something decidedly unthematic to Halloween, like an anti-Halloween.

As much as I was not really a fan of the movie Midsommar, I appreciated the way it attempted to do horror in a superficially different way- in mid-summer, in the sun. This idea has that in common, and hopefully not much else.

I had wanted to finish this before Halloween and that didn't happen, and I realize I haven't posted in a while. I have some stuff I'm working on, and also I've just been busy with work stuff. Let's call this Chapter 1, hopefully I get back to it and get to the juicy parts. But anyway, hopefully, I'll be posting some more substantive stuff soon!

**********************************

The seasons have been getting shorter, haven't they? Or most of them, anyway. Here we are, late into the Fall, and it still feels like Summer. I walk along the beach, my light jacket awkwardly wedged up my armpit, phone in hand and carrying a bag of sundries in the other. I feel my skin burning in real-time. I am aware that my body is in quarantine, killing itself from the outside to protect what's within. A nagging itch.

From where I stand, I can see the cathedral around the bend and up the hill. It looks like the science fantasy genetically engineered super-baby of Michelangelo and Steve Jobs. I'm more of an android guy. But I have to admit, it's a compelling look. It does this thing- I don't really know how to describe it, it's like, a rainbow shadow, in three dimensions. Not like a hologram, it's like a four-dimensional light shines down on it. The software is open-source, but it's a bit beyond me. And I can't exactly afford the hardware anyway.

I'm only walking along the beach because I was laid off. I should be looking for a job right now. Or working on some personal project, or developing my skills. But it's so nice out, and it's only a matter of time before it starts to get cold. It's the Fall. It'll be cold any day now.

I'm always surprised how many other people walk around during the day like this, just enjoying the weather; the warmth, and the sun shining brightly. Are they all unemployed too? They look happy though. Maybe that's what they've resigned themselves to. Maybe they think it'll just work itself out.

I'm not exactly a church guy, but the cathedral is different. I don't think they're even associated with any church. Maybe they're Mormon. Anyway, they have AC, and I heard The Indigo Saint was giving a talk. He's an interesting guy. Really changed how I look at things. Guy used to be a software engineer, had a near-death experience, came back with some really out-there ideas. I know it sounds like a cliche, but, well, just look at that "shadow".

By the time I get there I'm drenched in sweat, and I'm pink and red like a pig. I smell like one too. And I've got that itch, no, not that friendly smack on the back of my neck from Mr. Sunshine, the other one. The salts in my sweat building up, scraping inside my ass cheeks with each stride, moist and chafed at the same time. I never understood why people call it swamp butt, it's more like wet sand. Or is that just me?

All the women who work at the cathedral are gorgeous and friendly. Genuinely friendly. You'd think you're at a strip club. I know you're not supposed to say those kinds of things anymore, but ever since I started listening to The Indigo Saint, I've learned to be a little more honest with myself, even the uncomfortable parts. So it is what it is, I'm unemployed, I'm anxious, I'm hot and sweaty, and here they've got AC and everything here is beautiful. Besides me and the other schlubs. Gotta be honest, right?

You'd think with a name like The Indigo Saint he'd look all hipster, avant-garde, artiste, or something like that. He wears pastels and metallics, but really, he looks more like an Abercrombie and Fitch model, like the sleeker new version of Dolph Lundgren for the modern era. Even with the rosegold five o'clock shadow over his wide jawline, you can see the definition of his perfect, high cheekbones.

He's got one of those smiles. Light, warm. Confident, purposeful. Like the first man to wield fire and he's just waiting to show you. So when he rises to the podium, we all shut the fuck up, immediately. And he just goes. Like spitfire. He enunciates- it's like synesthesia, like the words beam out of his mouth, different colors for different purposes, like a rainbow. Amateurs talk about reality being a simulation, but this guy's writing a holographic neural network that's going to simulate reality more efficiently and with higher resolution than reality itself. He's designing a new kind of metaphysics just to describe what his model is doing.

So I come out of the talk feeling like I can walk on water if I will myself to do it. But on my way down the hill I trip on a rock that must be invisible because I don't fucking see it, and anyway, then I remember that I never finished his tutorial repo, and I somehow got myself tangled up in a git commit knot that I can't get myself out of, and I decide, well, at least someone out there knows what he's doing. Maybe he'll figure it all out.

The sunburn is only getting worse, I should probably go home. My skin pulses, like it's laughing. Keep laughing while the sun warps you like an eldritch god, mutating you into some dumb unthinking, self-replicating fucking monster, while the immune system goes to town on you like a SWAT raid. You'd think evolution would have come up with a better solution than to just let half the body bumble around laughing while its world burns down around it because some trigger happy psychos would rather burn it down than try to fix it.

I've worked myself up over nothing, again, and decide to turn around. I've never stuck around after the talk. The crowd disperses, people go back into the sunshine, it's just what you do. So I figure, I dunno, what's it like there when they're just going about their normal business. Maybe I can see if they're hiring. I mean, I am a software engineer, and The Indigo Saint can't be doing all of this alone. I don't really want to go home yet, and... I just can't deal with the sun anymore.

I head back in, trying my best to feel confident, like I'm supposed to be here. I'm not not supposed to be here. Anyway, I just sit back in my seat and pull out my phone, and put on that sort of look, like I'm waiting for something, like this is just some plan gone awry and that's why I'm back and just sitting here, and please leave me the fuck alone. I hear some music in the background, you'd think it would be church organs, gregorian chants, or maybe, this place being what it is, something more like muzak or lounge, or some basic pop. But it's more like an ice cream truck or carnival jingle. One of those ones that's nostalgic, but also kind of depressing. There's probably a German word for what I'm talking about. Both unassuming and deeply moving. So I should probably go before I get swept up in whatever this is that I'm feeling now, I can feel myself spiraling down, I need to go home.

Retrospective: Mythic Beings

Every once in awhile, for various reasons, I'll go back and look at my old posts. Usually, it's because I have a moment of panic thinking about that post and how it must actually be utter trash, so awful and shameful that I must double-check immediately so that I can, if necessary, obliterate it from existence. There have only been a few posts that I actually felt that way about. Usually, I go back and say, "damn, that's not half bad".

I went back to what I believe was my very first real content post (I'm not entirely sure the order blogger lists is correct- I think I may have updated some of those posts and screwed up the order). This post was of Mythic Beings, the gods or god-like beings of my Phantasmos campaign setting, which I used to post about a lot more back in the day and is my main Weird Fantasy setting. I love Phantasmos, but I know, and even at the time knew, that I utterly failed to convey to a new reader with no context why this setting is worth the buy-in; never gave the reader anything to ground themselves in a world that throws at them a million ideas a minute.

Nonetheless, looking at this post, I have to say, these are ok. I mean some of them are laughably bad, but many of them are alright. I actually think some of these are more evocative and tightly written than a lot of the stuff that followed it.

So I'm going to go through most or all of the entries from that table, and basically talk about what I think works or doesn't work about them, what my thoughts were and are, and also make fun of myself a little bit in regards to a few of them. I might even try improving some of them...

Phantasmos is no longer my main focus, but I'm not ready to talk more about Maximum Recursion Depth quite yet, unless you're on the OSR discourse or the Bastionjam channel of the Electric Bastionland Discord, in which case you're probably sick of hearing about it by now.

Anyway, for each entry, I'll start with the art (only the first few, all by Scrap Princess) and the original text. They were originally written with two sections, Physical Description and Behavior and Cognition, but here I'll just toss them together.

Mun Jira

Before we get into the text, let's start with the amazing art by Scrap Princess. I was so obnoxiously precious with my ideas back then, Scrap was really a saint for putting up with me. She did a first draft, which I still have, which is incredible in its own right, but at the time I was so particular about what it should look like that I just couldn't fully appreciate it. Anyway, this version turned out great as well, clearly. I hope she doesn't hold it against me too much.

A large monkey with bat-like wings, mole-like claws, covered in pangolin-like scales of prasium. It has no eyes, but its curled-lips can project outward like a star-nosed mole, revealing sharp teeth. When not illuminated by or projecting impossible light, it is either white like phosphorescent plastic with semi-transparent skin, or invisible.
Intelligent and self-aware. Self-destructive, depressed, its own worst enemy. Knows this to be true, but can't break the cycle.

I think the Ordinal Beasts of Phantasmos are awesome, and the way they tie into the elements, which themselves give you a good sense of exactly how Weird (and complicated and impenetrable) this setting is, but this writeup is weak sauce. 

Like I said with the art, it's just too precious with itself, more concerned with conveying the specific details in my head, than in evoking a feeling. Mun Jira is a monstrous god-like creature, eldritch, cosmic, beautiful, brilliant; with a skewed and hopeless perspective of itself and the world. It makes the same mistakes over and over and instead of learning, it lashes out like a violent monkey, an angry child breaking all the toys, endlessly frustrated at the self-imposed futility of its own actions.

Mogleth

Once again, it may be better to ignore the original text and instead marvel at Scrap's art. As with Mun Jira, I was far too concerned with details, and not with the feeling Mogleth is supposed to evoke.

A being of yellow, glassy, shimmering liquid starfire. Its top half is chitinous like a lobster shell over an arched spine. Thin strands of liquid starfire grow, writhe, and fall within the span of tens of seconds along the top of the shell. It's lower body is boar-like with a flaccid, amorphous, bulging fat gut. The skull is warped and cracked, as if infected by a fungal parasite, giving it a spongey, wrinkled appearance like a morel mushroom. Within the folds of the mushroom head are clusters of small yellow eyes. Overlapping rows of tusks line the lower snout. Along its side are semi-solid crab-leg tentacles. It has boar-like hind legs and humanoid arms for front-limbs, generally held out in a crawl position. The shell is semi-translucent, revealing internals like an arthropod, fish, vegetable, or fungus, but also unlike any of those things. Manic, impulsive, and unpredictable.

Not great. Mogleth isn't just a pig lobster fungus monster. Mogleth is fat, grotesque, infected; it can barely be contained within itself. It has all this energy to burn but merely runs itself around in circles chasing nothing, neither gaining nor losing. It is a boundless thing like a perpetual motion machine but none of it amounts to anything because every step it takes is only halfway to its goal because it keeps moving the goalpost.

Quath

Going out of order because this is the last one with art by Scrap Princess. I didn't get this one commissioned until much more recently. I was a lot less precious about it while working with her and I think it is better for it, but the text does not share this benefit of acquired wisdom.

A photographic plate in the shape of (and reflecting the features of) a holographic cyan dragon, like a basilosaurus covered in the armoured plates of an armadillo. It is a being composed of anti-information.
A being of a-logic; fundamentally incomprehensible to mortals.

At least this one is less... verbose. But still, Quath is an extra-logical being. It is made of stuff that is like matter if matter came from a universe with different math. I'm still not even sure how to convey that besides old-fashioned Lovecraftian tropes. Maybe I take some Wernicke's Aphasia quotes? But even then, the semantics are wild but there is still syntax. How does one create a new syntax that also violates the very concept of syntax because syntax is itself a form of logic? How does one write a-logic that is not just encrypted logic or illogic? Perhaps it is merely for one to imagine in the abstract, not a Nameless Thing but a Null-ness of thought, 404 error of the imagination.

Zaphrad

A bird-dinosaur monstrosity like a raven or tyrannosaurus rex or featherless owl. It's skin is a vivid, almost cartoonish, un-real pink composed of absolute solid. Its eyes have been gouged and its beak clipped.
In a state of inverse-nirvana; vengeful, self-absorbed, materialistic. The embodiment of anti-love.

The last of the "real" Ordinal Beasts. As with Quath, I can say at least that it's not too verbose. There is supposed to be a juxtaposition here, of a thing which is "cartoonish" and "un-real", and yet is most defined by its groundedness in the mundane and material reality. I explore this more directly in my Karmapunk setting Maximum Recursion Depth, but you can see the beginnings of it here. Zaphrad is grotesque not because it is in the uncanny valley, but because it is the uncanny fucking mountain. It is not in the space between the real and unreal, but the real and hyper-real. It is so truly grounded in the material world, in the viciousness and selfishness of nature and life, that its very existence is a mockery of our own self-importance.

Mordiggian

Her true form is a massive, worm-like, swirling void, although she sometimes takes the form of a dogu or mutant woman.
An information-vampire, the null and void, the answer to the unanswerable question.

She's a composite of a something from Clark Ashton Smith and a few other things. I don't have much to say about her here, which is not to say she isn't at all interesting, it's just beyond the scope of this retrospective since it's a little more baked into the setting. Maybe one thing to note, she's the "fifth Ordinal Beast", and is the only one with a gender. At the time this seemed intrinsically interesting, but I'm no longer sure if that's the case.

Yagak-Sha

Kaiju with a red, green, and blue crustacean body, wasp-like face with large alternating white and colored eyes branching from eyestalks, four large spear-like barbed claws at its front, and seemingly endless rows of legs with retractable wasp-like stingers. When it raises its carapace plates, underneath are rows of wasp-like iridescent wings, and honey-comb shaped holes from which innumerable wasp-sized spawn bite, chew, and push through a thin layer of skin, poring out of the holes and swarming around it.
The god of impossibility, the god of n/0.

The description isn't terrible, if a bit long. But it's a god of impossibility; literally a god defined by being mathematically undefined. It could look like a little old lady, it doesn't matter what it looks like. It's also tied into one of the NPCs of the setting Doctor Lovesmenot, who is still a personal favorite NPC of mine. The name alone, it truly makes you wonder.

The Jellymind

A gargantuan chain of blue and red bioluminescent immortal jellyfish, pulsing rainbow electric signals from jelly to jelly.
An ancient and advanced connectionist neural network. It was designed by a race of intelligent octopi, and so certain assumptions of octopi cognition are baked into the network, although it has evolved into something beyond even the understanding of the octopi.

This is the first one I would say is actually good without caveat. It's not the first god-like bio-computer singularity, but I think it's a fairly unique one. It's a cool idea, and one that isn't too out there or too deeply tied into the complexities of the Phantasmos setting. The Jellymind could be anywhere. It could be behind you right now. That makes no sense I'm not sure why I said that, but here we are.

Daddy Delightful

A humanoid creature, over 9 feet tall, lanky and thin, in a quilted black tunic with neon, multicolored patterns woven throughout. Its face is obscured by a pointy hat with a wide brim. It carries a staff of pumpkin on a stick, and rides a mechanical plow.
The bringer of harvest, rewards those who overcome their fears, defers (although often exacerbates) the suffering of those who fail. Generally calm, but induces mania in others.

I wish the description part was more flavorful, but otherwise, Daddy Delightful is great. Even the name, it just makes me giggle a bit. What a guy. He's like a creepy Halloween Santa. This is some old-school fairytale shit, if it were just a bit better written.

Daddy Delightful comes but once a year on his magical mechanical plow, just in time for harvest. He hovers over you, spindly, lanky. Dangling from his pumpkin-on-a-stick are all sorts of sweets, just for you. But something isn't right. A creeping sensation. A nervous giggle. Is it coming from you, or him? Maybe you should take the sweets, after all, you've worked so hard all season, or so he assures you. There's only a little bit of work left. Perhaps you should take a break after all.

Deosheba

Has the body and head of an orca, held on land by rhino-like legs of shaped liquid which dissolve when he swims. Protruding from each side of his jaw are long, upwardly-turned shaped-liquid tusk-horns. His skin is metallic and the colors shift like those of the ocean; aquatic blue, teal, green, red or orange like the sunset, some pink and purple. An orb of shimmering, multicolored, iridescent shaped-liquid swirls in place over his head like a three-dimensional halo.
Does not respect personal boundaries; borderline personality; well-meaning but aggressive.

Would be cool if Scrap Princess drew it. I don't really have much to say about him. It's ok.

Caine (aka "The Dentist")

A large humanoid figure in a long white coat. Carries a two-handed drill weapon, large pick, a large staff with a mirror, or a syringe-clawed gauntlet with gas dispenser. Face is covered by a mask, and underneath the mask is a tube dispensing gas, connected to a small, concealed gas tank. He has rotten, misshapen and irregularly ordered teeth of various species. Only one tooth is perfectly white and healthy- a humanoid incisor. Accompanied by quohort of qhuaos quinces.
Herald of The Tooth Fairy. Relentlessly follows his targets, so long as they have any lingering anxieties. In a constant, drug-induced state of delirium.

Caine doesn't mean what you think it does (unless you're not thinking what I think you're thinking). Once again, cool concept, bad writeup. Also, the mask thing doesn't quite have the same effect in 2020.

A large man, his face obscured by a mask, inhaling heavy breaths that die inside him and wheeze their way out. He carries a large screeching power-drill, the grating noise a mockery of its victims cries of desperation. He steps heavy like one who cannot feel their own weight, like one who cannot be stopped by mortal forces. And he laughs.

The God Mutant

I'm going to just tie all four forms together here. Within the context of the format of that original post, it made sense to separate the forms out, but that's not how I would do it now. I was kind of padding things a bit there. And oof is it cringey with the Omega form. I was at the time not sure how explicit I was comfortable with being on this blog, but I was so fucking precious with it that I couldn't just not include it, I had to say, yes, there are other details here, I just can't tell you. I haven't looked back at the old notes but I believe he had like a mutilated penis with a centipede monster crawling out of his urethra, and it seemed at the time extremely important that this exists. How embarrassing- not the idea, but that I couldn't just do it or drop it, but instead presented it in a state of Schrodinger's mutilated penis monster.

Alpha

A baby, sticky and pink like raw, exposed meat. Bony except for its belly, long necked, with a face like a reptile and beady little black eyes. Cackles and gurgles, sometimes cries but only with intent.This form communicates only psychically. It is malicious and angry at the entire paraverse. It knows exactly what it is.

Beta

A small child with greenish skin. Neither cute nor ugly. There is an indescribable "off-ness" about the child.
Behaves like someone mimicking a child. Subtly needy and manipulative, but less outright malicious than the other forms.

Gamma

A small, underdeveloped teenager with greenish skin and short black hair. Wears a studded, black leather bomber jacket. Unnaturally large and intense eyes with too many veins along the forehead and face converging on the eyes. A wide, angry, manic smile on his face.
Quiet, passive, and unassuming at a distance, his intensity only obvious up close. At the flip of a switch will become enraged and relentless.

Omega

Large, pulpy red eyes, semi-translucent, with a calcified core. Around his eyes are a series of thick veins, along which many smaller eyes of a similar composition grow. Long, dark green hair, sickly green skin. Lips torn, skin around jaw burned. Left arm stunted and shriveled, no right arm. From base of the right shoulder are a series of tentacles ending in vulture beaks, uncountable because they move in a tessellated manner. Deep fissure running through his chest and abs. Ankles end in vulture-like claws. Three vulture wings, two on left side, one on right side. Some additional NSFW details not included.
A mutant who has transcended linear time. A corrupted being which loathes its existence; wasted potential; always starting over; never satisfied; sees the end state before it has begun.

The alpha description is actually pretty solid. Despite what I've been saying, I actually still like the God Mutant as a concept, it ties into some of the Key Concepts of Phantasmos (another post of poorly written but cool ideas!), and descriptively I think there are some obvious inspirations which I'm ok with. But omg what a dork I was with that NSFW thing.

The Tooth Fairy

Wears a greenish gold hued power armor with an ornate, worm-like pattern carved into it. Vents in the shoulder blade exhaust a shimmering, iridescent, ethereal energy cape, meeting in two parts like folded insect wings. Wears a smooth great helm covering all facial features, conical at the face with ridges like an earthworm and a toothy grin carved along the mouth. Beneath the helmet is a toothy maw like a hagfish.
The Fey King. The dull and constant anxiety; ennui; the carrot on the stick; you will be paid for your services.

I still love this concept, even if I'm mixed in the writeup. He's like a fairytale science fantasy Darth Vader (I guess Darth Vader is already that...) but with a different subtext. The cognition and behavior blurb is fairly solid, but I wish the two had been better integrated. I think this is the real turning point in this post where they start to get pretty good.

Fuchsia Phosphenom-Panopticon

A crystalline fuchsia-colored object which, in three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time, could be roughly described as a wheel-like shape with a hub-and-spoke network within it. The hub contains an eye with many pupils which dart constantly across the spokes, projecting fuchsia light like a laser light show and disco ball. It is never clear exactly what the pupils are focusing on.
Domination and submission; power is a differential; control and release; uncomfortable spacetimes; reality interpreted through an android's dream.

Love this concept too, and that behavior and cognition blurb is great, but it has the same problem as the Tooth Fairy re: lack of integration. Also, the name, come on! It's just fun. The Fuchsia Phosphenom-Panopticon is the god of the Fuchsia Phosphenomenologists who use the magic of Fuchsia Phosphenomenology. Say that five times while giving your partner oral and thank me later. Takes some heavy influence from the sociologist Michel Foucault and science fiction writer Phillip K Dick. It's a biblical/apocryphal BDSM neural network what more can you ask for?! If the idea of "uncomfortable spacetimes" doesn't make your imagination tingle then we just have irreconcilable differences between us.

SLIME Edward

A shimmering and metallic-flecked ooze in the shape of a humanoid.Synthetic Limited-Intelligence Markovian Entity- a misnomer; error-mass in the paraverse given form; the transcendental weirder.

Physical description is mercifully brief. The cognition and behavior part is fine, but is dependent on the reader already being familiar with the Key Concepts of Phantasmos and being familiar with the NPCs of the Phantasmos setting. I still like the "- a misnomer" part. It's just this little off-hand bit, but it asks you to think harder about what you're encountering.

Lamarr

A massive, city-sized golemite. A box-like chassis of nigh-impenetrable metal with various compartments and plates, and covered in turrets and other weapons platforms. Moves on wheels, treads, crab-legs, chicken-legs, or whatever else it needs for the terrain. Populated by the Priests of Lamarr, who, through divine commune with Lamarr, can summon a barrage of god-pillars from the sky.Idiosyncrasies in its behavior suggest that it has some degree of intelligence, although only the Priests of Lamarr seem able to communicate with it in any meaningful way.

This one would work well in Barbarians of the Ruined Earth. It benefits from a deeper understanding of the setting, but I think it can work in a more generalized way. There's a reference here that's probably obvious. It's not as overtly Weird as many of the other things in the setting, but it's sort of a mythologization of 20th century to modern-era technologies and weapons.

Mother at the Gate

An indescribably massive creature at the other end of Yog-Sothoth. From tears in reality formed from burst bubbles of The Gate, she can be seen pressed against the edge of reality. A vaguely humanoid figure with jaundiced skin, ill-defined fat, musculature, and bone structure- more like the abstract concept of the humanoid form. No hair, genitalia, nails, ears, or any facial features. Three glassy, two-dimensional planes project in front of her face, two displaying eyes and one a mouth, all oversized. The planes engage in repetitive actions such as saccadic eye movements, blinks, and lip movements. Produces no sound except for when crying and vomiting liquid starfire, from which skyscraper-sized "children" fall. Most of her appearance is inferred from these "children"- at the edge of the gate little more than her plane-eyes or mouth can be seen.
A vague sense of maternalism or Munchausen by proxy aside, her behavior is in no way comprehensible to mortals.

This one is a personal favorite. Even the name, there's just something powerful there. Or maybe that just speaks to my own dysfunctions. I don't think this writeup sufficiently captures the horror and uncanniness of the idea. This should be a Zdzisław Beksiński painting.

There is no greater reminder of what children we all are, than Mother at the Gate. A universe-sized god pressed against a tear in The Gate, stretched to its limit. It stares down on us all silently, and cries. So vast, so old, so full of life to have and life to give, and what are we in comparison but greedy, entitled, groveling little things? Little more than demanding, petulant children, is what we are. Why is she crying? A torrent of Liquid starfire shines down on us like a beam of holy light piercing the clouds, and Mother's little cherubs fall down to our world, rise up, and take their first steps. Planes of glass hover over their blank faces, displaying eyes that shift back and forth in awkward and repetitive motions, and chapped smacking lips. They are each still learning how to use their body. They look up to her for safety and sustenance, but she can only cry and choke and vomit. The nourishing liquid starfire rains down upon them, but they have no mouths, only a simulacrum, and they will find no sustenance here, only more of their siblings. Why is she crying?

Mr. Smiley

A floating smiley face with a big, toothy grin. There is a nervousness in its eyes, and it slowly loses teeth as it grows more anxious.
Seemingly well-meaning, but incredibly needy. Once it locks eyes with someone, it will follow them indefinitely (and can separately follow multiple individuals). Reinforces anxieties, inducing waves of panic as its teeth fall out. Can be overcome only by breaking the cycle of anxiety.

I love Mr. Smiley, as did my players in my first Phantasmos campaign. I think my prose piece A Crawl Through the Dungeon of Impossible Light, a very very loose interpretation of one of the dungeons from that campaign, really portrayed Mr. Smiley well, although there are definitely parts of that piece that are super cringey, for various reasons that I'm not proud of but also don't think I should bury. I keep hoping one day someone will give it some kind of critical analysis but maybe it's not deserving of that level of thought. Below is an excerpt from that piece with the Mr. Smiley parts.

The stairs form into a square, which seems to paradoxically feed upwards and downwards into itself, although the pattern of stars changes as they pass, such that they know they are not walking endlessly in a square like fools. Eventually, miraculously, they find themselves on a simply upward path, which leads to an open floor, upon which is a dais, upon which is a yellow, perfectly spherical floating creature with a simple face. The simple face is that of a smiling man. Mr. Smiley bares a broad, toothy smile towards them, approaching as he does with nervous tension in his eyes.
“Hello.” He says in a deep and somber voice tersely, such that there is minimal breakage in his big broad smile.
“Um, hello.” Says Anthony. Nina looks briefly and crossly at Anthony, before returning to Mr. Smiley.
“Do you know why we’re here?” She asks him. He sighs.
“I assume you’re here for the orb. Nobody ever comes to visit me. But that’s ok.” He says unconvincingly with his big broad smile and nervous eyes. A rotten tooth drops grossly from his big broad smile, and this time despite themselves they are each overtaken by dread.
“It’s a good thing I’m still alive,” He says unconvincingly,
“or else I would not have been able to meet you three, who bring me such joy with your very presence. Isn’t it wonderful to not be alone? Please, stay awhile.”
“I’m afraid,” The Doctor starts,
“that we are in a bit of a hurry. However, once we retrieve the orb, we will surely pass through to say our goodbyes. Would you be so kind as to tell us which way we should go?” He turns about, looking for where the path goes, only to find that Mr. Smiley is still centered in his vision. No matter which way they turn, he is always there, with his big broad smile and nervous eyes.
“In that case, I suppose I should accompany you. It would be a shame if you died today, with me still here, alive. I would rather not anyone die today, mostly.”
“While we appreciate the offer, we must decline.”
“You… you don’t want me?” Mr. Smiley asks despondently, another rotten tooth falls from his big broad smile and another wave of dread overtakes the group as the tooth hits the ground.
“It’s not that we don’t want you, it’s just that we were instructed to go it alone.” Lies Anthony.
“Oh, I see. Even so, I must insist. It’s dangerous out there. It would be very sad if you died.”
“If it would make you more comfortable, I suppose you may come along.” Says Nina, hoping to curtail the downward spiral which would surely kill them all. And so they continue.
They proceed forward down the path which has since revealed itself, Mr. Smiley in tow. It is unclear whether there are now three Mr. Smileys, if he centers himself in each of their perceptions, or some other such nonsense. In any case, it is a quiet and awkward walk, as each assesses the implications of their new follower.
“Why do you want the orb, anyway?” Asks Mr. Smiley.
"I hope you aren’t planning on doing anything… naughty with it. That would be a real shame…”
“We’re just the retrievers. The orb is for The Grim General in Blue, who will surely use it for the good of Nova Arkham.” Says the Doctor, dryly.
“Oh good. He is a good man, from what I hear.” Responds Mr. Smiley, followed by another awkward silence. Mr. Smiley is not very good at small talk.
(NOTE: skipping ahead a bit to the next Mr. Smiley scene...)
“That was so much fun.” Says Mr. Smiley monotonically.
“We should kill more things together. It really helps you forget your problems.” He says, as he is suddenly reminded of all his problems.