Dagon is a free 3D narrative experience based on the cult short story of the same title by the master of cosmic horror and weird fiction, H. P. Lovecraft himself. It’s an interactive portal into the world of the controversial genius and his highly acclaimed Cthulhu Mythos, open to both newcomers and long-time devotees.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
(MINIMUM): Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system / OS: Windows 7/8/8.1/10 (x64) / Processor: Core i5-2400 or Ryzen 3 1200 / Memory: 4 GB RAM / Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 660 2GB VRAM or equivalent (GTX 970 for VR) / DirectX: Version 11 / Storage: 3 GB available space / Sound Card: DirectX compatible
Notice: This title runs in both standard and VR modes. It does not require a VR headset.
The series is about a young black man who travels across the segregated 1950s United States in search of his missing father, learning of dark secrets plaguing a town on which famous horror writer H. P. Lovecraft supposedly based the location of many of his fictional tales. (wiki)
I cannot add much the excellent review by Lauren Michele Jackson in the New Yorker. In spite of my own initial enthusiasm for the new takes on Lovecraft’s inheritance – I was dumbfounded by both what she aptly signals (the lack of melodrama, the lack of tension and of bi-dimensional characters), as well as the sensation (sensed by others as well it seems) that everything has to be spelled out, and that we are made an unwitting participant in a prestige piece that takes all historical struggles either as a clear given or that tries to dispel all ambiguity and supply all the answers. All the ideological problems are already marked as finished, explained or to be check-boxed. It is as if Lovecraft’s perverted sense of inchoate slimy materialism, both formless, as well as degenerative and racist, gushes out to over-write, over-describe, literally to suffocate and overload all that could be said or shown about power or class relations. It is as if the desire to actually finally film and remake black history in a more just way, and the urgency of this nowadays, ends up over-labeling and indexing all historical settings and severely limiting all outcomes, circumscribing all relationships of this series, beyond the actual segregation and racial apartheid into some sort of finished, vacuum proof product.
This said, I liked the portrayal of racist occult cop KKK cabal – and how the Lovecraftian monsters were turned against the racist cops, one thing that I badly miss happening in reality. The cabal of rich white immortalist Southerners is a good addition, but then again they all feel incredibly bi-dimensional and out of a right-wing Satanist plot proliferrated today by QAnon. That itself, might be a good lead, yet it remains undeveloped and rudimentary. A much better (comics this time) example I have in Saladin Ahmed’s and Sami Kivelä Abbot by Boom Comics – the villain being much more tangible upper class white old dude academic or even a dark web intellectual (IDW) that uses brutal occult forces to recruit and transformed the black characters into monsters. The battle over Lovecraftian Necronomicon manuscripts and the high seats of academia is much more engaging. I am not sure if flop is a good term, just because season 2 was cancelled in 2021, or because it definitely has somehow closed down some interesting and very important Lovecraftian – systemic-racism venues.
I speak thus with a certain deeper and bitter dissatisfaction, but who am I to say. Although there was so much production effort, good vfx, CGI galore, good action science, and ample classic era pulp exaggerations and body horror ontological excess – it still left a vacuum. Body swapping is an important feature of this series and it really shows the corpo-reality of it, the pain and difficulty of such a metamorphosis which I also found does not get representation in movies. The creature and monster design is just wow, and yet i am still left with the “Sundown” pilot episode as setting the scene, and being actually the best of the entire series (especially the Shoggoth design).
I feel it could well have stayed a long feature movie. There is also an attempt at K- and J-horror “Meet Me in Daegu”, with finally an impartial portrayal of the Communist side during the Korean War that is not being dehumanized or instantly relegated to the enemy side. There is also another intriguing eps with the multiverse branchings (“I am” eps), portal jumping trough a larger multiverse with various highlights of black history from Harlem Renaissance to Afrofuturist imaginings, places and other times where black lives matter. This was finally one funky adventure with a black middle aged woman in the role of inter-dimensional Hippolyta – at its center!
I liked a lot of over the topness of it, the kitsch, the way everything is carnal as well as magical, the way racism is more horrific than the most horrific of Lovecraftian entities, at the same time like Michele in her review, felt actors skills and characters got reduced to just anti-racist Ghostbusters. I like the queering of it and the actors effort, yet I am left craving for something else, maybe miss a touch of that good weird fiction that has resulted in such good literary and aesthetically interesting materials (dunno why the prose of Sofia Samatar Monster Potraits comes to mind).
[[Was not able to jot down my thoughts on it, but that time has finally come. If I am to agree with other reviewers, I would have to keep a blind eye to my own abysmal editing of Temporal Divergence and Cosmic Drift. So no complaints about typos. Good that I cannot or will not review my own book. I am all for systematicity, since my own instincts struggle with it and yet most of the time trying to find a clear path among the ferocious brambles of speculative theory fiction/SF fabulation defeats the purpose. I enjoyed the lacunae as well as the conceptual splits, nor was I deranged by an overwrought style, with my own checkered past and unnecessary terminological excess in mind.]]
So, “Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation and the Creep of Life”, a slim 80+ page volume, is worthwhile reading. More of an extended essay, and even out of Corona context, it’s a welcome mindfuck. It arrived in 2012, Ben Woodard’s tome is an early ZerO Books snapshot, born in the throes of new materialism, OOO, the ontological turn, a new appetite for metaphysics, speculative realism & horror of philosophy (one has to dig deeper into Jane Bennett, Meillasoux, Negarestani, Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier, Eugene Thacker, Nicola Masciandaro, Steven Shaviro and others). It is prescient in its embrace of the putrescent & contagious and all things ‘biological’ that came to rule our quarantined days. It is biophilosophical as such and not just a tract on the philosophy of biological. Coming out of the various strains of non-correlationist thinking, it is an early, formative publication by a contemporary thinker whose involvement with natural history keeps on tracking conceptual clusters & updating a philosophy that kept itself too long at bay from evolving biological ideas. B Woodard’s texts are unavoidable for anybody interested even rhe slightest in these things. It makes a good untimely visit (or revisit) now, especially after the hype over ‘speculative realism’ is generally over.
On two accounts I consider Ben Woodard’s work important. First, from the standpoint of his familiarity and embrace of a whole plethora of weird and new weird literature, his unapologetic and almost relentlessly geeky – sticky ontological (?!) attitude towards all sorts of dirty media, no matter how remote trashy, be it over -theorized or not expunged from the canon. Secondly, these dumpster ‘horrorisms’ (from gaming, horror B movies fare, comics etc) are being stalked in a shambling lock-step by a whole gamut of Continental philosophy and Naturphilosophie + (more recently) ungainly(for me) and undigestible oddities such as the British Idealists. This includes a monography (which does not seem to be out yet, although finished) situating Francis Herbert Bradley at the very origins of that primordial split of Analytic vs Continental schools via monism & pluralism.
The Creep of Life – takes a cue both from Negarestani as well as Stephen J Gould. I must say I never read Cyclonopedia by Negarestani, although his influence has been nearly ubiquitous in many quarters & given the proper treatment elsewhere, while for me S J Gould has been important on a personal level. He’s a truly formative influence on some of my earliest biological and natural history musings, so I’m always curious about any potential Gouldian cross overs. I was keen on a work that promises to juxtapose these incompatible, maybe even incompossible forces. Woodard’s ‘Dark Vitalism’ – is a child of both lovecraftian radical openness (in fact he makes Lovecraft feel quite coy) toward unbearable outside dimensions (apud Negarestani). A radical opening that invites invasiveness, quartering, fostering and hosting the alien – as well as taking full advantage of how systematically Darwinism dispels any trace of human excepționalism & sense of purpose. Even a radical contingency as that of Meillasoux, the non-teleological keeps a lingering anthropocentrism, so Woodard makes sure any taxonomic superiority and upper level inevitability has to go. Evolutionary replays will not end up with the same or any kind of intelligence valorizing biped, math or no math. Against any vertebrate-centric or multicellular-centric view, S Gould, a Marxist paleontologist & naturalist, kept encouraging these views from the below – always disdainful & ridiculing our airs of superiority in regard to ‘humble’ Monera. This ‘low’ bacterial dimension, a planetary microbiome that extends in all directions, became protoplasmic base reality (something else than just the impeding doom of pathogenicity) -moving slowly into quorum sensing limelight, one that Gould would have undoubtedly recognized.
For Woodard the critical distance from strict adaptionism, Panglossian radical selectionism & selfish genocentrism peddled by the neo-Darwinian apostles (prominently Richard Dawkins), germinates what S J Gould seeded, stemming from a vast, historically grounded encyclopedic knowledge of evolutionary ideas, humanism & many byways of natural history amd geology + making sure many racist pseudo-sciences & faulty methodologies don’t get a second chance (phrenology, IQ testing etc that informed eugenic immigration policies in the US etc). This prepares one for tackling any socio biological vagaries, whatever one-sided Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge epistemic fraternization might promise us, or whatever circular ‘just so’ stories of the day might become institutionalized as evolutionary psychology trivia.
Slime Dynamics does not trace all this, and maybe better so, since it is tracking some more rare, viscous and opaque protoplasm – the one that tends to be avoided even by the best of biologically- literate philosophers (the usual French suspects: Bergson, Merleau-Ponty or Deleuze). It is as if thinking about living thought gets obscured, killed at birth, muddled whenever brought down in the mud it came from, just the minute it gets reminded where its mindfulness oozes from.
In a time of lacking transparency, of dodgy accountability, when black-boxed (and quite racistic) AIs become existential threats and discrimination machines, this ‘darkness’ might seem completely out of tune. Corona Pandemics, fake news, and G Agamben letters of biopolitical conservatism, ‘dark vitalism’ itself feels somewhat unnecessary, an exaggerated – Lebensphilosophical – mystification. Yet ‘darkness’ – does not equal obscurantist add-ons to obfuscate even more & multiply misunderstandings, or inflame anti-scientific pathos with more or less misplaced mistrust in sometimes imperfect yet badly needed biomedical advances. First things first, Slime Dynamics is steeped in the purposelessness of evolutionary drift, it is abiogenesis – friendly even when discussing outrageous panspermia, and it is clearly familiar with experiments/scientific theories or the historical significance of discovering deep time. This possibility to think beyond the biotic dimension & into unthinking anorganic origins of life keeps on overflowing, forever unsettling our relation to pure data & mere science reports. Slime Dynamics always enjoys using biologically informed horror in order to both update & degrade philosophy and dissolve the anti-biology inhibitors that have plagued phenomenology and Continental or Critical thought in general. It ultimately takes the obscene results and cool research data of science to their ultimate, unflattering devastating conclusions. In order to dispel this ‘darkness’ of the dark I am quoting the threefold aspects that Ben Woodard attributes to this new (deep time inflected) mostly unwanted vitalism:
“1. It is dark because it is obscured both by nature (who is to say that we can divine and comprehend the details of the universe from our limited brains) and by time (we are at a temporal disadvantage in trying to discern the creation of all things) since the cause of most of the nature we know has fallen back into the deep past.
2. It is dark because it spells bad news for the human race in terms of our origins (we are just clever monkeys that emerged as a result of a series of biological and cosmological lucky breaks), our meaning (we are just meat puppets based on our construction), and our ultimate fate (Earth will die and we will probably perish if not with it then eventually with the universe).
3. It is dark on an aesthetic and experiential level our psychosocial and phenomenological existence is darkened and less friendly to us, and our perceptions, given the destructiveness of time and space.”BW
Viruses and epidemiology play an important place in Slime Dynamics and spell out some of the most unsettling truths we have since come to loath, but can never ever again ignore (with the inception/global expanse of the Corona Pandemic). It is almost too close to home now that a very simple event of disease spillover, of outside contagion teaches us something the hard way about either complexity or basic simplicity – that medical under-development and patent trolling brings under capitalism.
Mushrooms and the fungoid also play an important role in Slime Dynamics, and I might say this is my favorite part since most of the newer The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins valuable additions tend to skip the central disgust associated with the undergrowth, the eminently -putrescient- slithering of hyphae or even the unavoidable weird (speculative lit) aspects that subtend it. In particular, space-time for Woodard is always warped along fungal apparitions – contrasting it with the networked contagion (“time overcoming space), the amorphousness and formlessness of fungal life is that of “the spatial overcoming time”, dragging life below ground, making it reliant upon down-trodden, plentiful disaggregation, dependent on the inorganic.
Slime Dynamics comes as good critical reminder of classical (altough contemporary xenobiology seems to have evolved) teleological attachments, its unimaginative program of ‘intelligent’ contact out there, its ignorance of the extremophilic non sapient possibilities out here. Slime Dynamics makes a fungus thriving inside a Chernobyl sarcophagus a much better candidate for sentient alien contact at home as well as outside of the bounds of our evolutionary bland & stationary ‘pinnacle’ position. I think Naturphilosophie has waited much too long for a comeback, and that J G Fichte and F W J Schelling in their liminal situation btw Kant and Hegel may act like a philosophic slime-mold, a composite multi-phase creature or answer to the Kantian-Blumenbachian program that can be many things at once, or one unified thing at different times. Slime Dynamics takes an important cue from H Grant making Nature After F W J Schelling as contemporary a thing as any nowadays, not just by mere retro recovery but by extending & activating ‘power metaphysics’ overall. Ben Woodard is well able to critically siphon out any romantic excess of Schelling – without jettisoning the precedence Schelling gave to base nature over thinking, as well as him being well aware of how intelligence (or better sapience) has been preserved apart from an inescapable basic materiality that keeps clinging to our angel wings. A clinging hodologic mucus not be confused with a pre-packaged and regurgitated as fixed ‘human nature’. A neo-Schellingian vibe lures our attention towards the net forces operating on environments, bodies and especially on thought as explored by another relatively forgotten German Naturphilosoph – Kielmeyer. Schelling is critical of vitalism because of his aesthetic romantic leanings, because ‘vitalism’ per se seems to entail something contradictory to him, almost feet in the sky, unopposed by any equal force, just forever exhaustive matter. Schelling thus appears to have been priming us for ‘dissipative structures’ – for riding vortices as the Russian-Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine thaught us. Maybe we have here the same ‘aesthetic’ engagement that seriously considered totality as a conjunction of opposing forces, of intensities & contrasts also vital in – A N Whitehead’s cosmological scheme, as he also came to appreciate the Romantics, beside his interest in metaphysics & history of science. To me, although Whitehead never mentions any specific German Naturphilosoph but only their British poet- adepts, he seems to qualify ‘eternal darkness’ in manner quite close to Schelling as “an environment of vagueness stretching into the darkness of what is merely beyond”.
What i miss from Woodard’s examples are maybe hints of an eastern ex Socialist SF slime – as the DDR movie Der Schweigende Stern 1960 loosely based on Stanislaw Lem’s The Astronauts. During the the shoots it apparently used up the whole country’s whole supply of glue. These tons of glue were used to simulate a post apocalyptic Venusian surface. This civilizational residue of muck overflows everything, a preview warning of the ultimate no-return extinction, if we would choose to follow the same path of megadeath militarism & weaponized science.
But let’s see how Woodard keeps on smearing ardently cleaned paths from this history of philosophy with a necessary creepiness that is of great benefit, so I better leave him the last word:
“The material being of humans, and of all life is a slimy one. Slime is the smudge of reality, the remainder and reminder of the fact that things fall apart. The shining path of humanity is only ever the verminous – like the trail of our own oozing across time and space – the trace and proof of our complete sliminess trough and trough.”BW
Swarming , extra-dimensional or extra-galactic organicisms and entities mentioned by Ben Woodards in his book Slime Dynamics:
Tyranods pf Warhammer 40,000 mentioned by Woodard in the Extra-Galactic Terror chapter
“The Tyranids are an alien race from the colds depths of the void that hunger constantly for warm flesh. They infest the stars in their billions, a raw force of destruction that has been likened to a locust swarm”
Zerg of Starcraft also mentioned in Extra-Galactic Terror chapter
screen capture of Zerg swarm from Starcraft
“Zerg Swarm is a terrifying and ruthless amalgamation of biologically advanced, arthropodal aliens. Dedicated to the pursuit of genetic perfection, the zerg relentlessly hunt down and assimilate advanced species across the galaxy, incorporating useful genetic code into their own.”
8472 Species of Star Trek also mentioned in the Extra-Galactic Terror chapter
the chapter on Extra-Galactic Terror also mentions “The Yuuzhan Vong—Children of Yun-Yuuzhan, also called the Chosen Race, known to the Chiss and Ferroans as the Far Outsiders, and sometimes incorrectly abbreviated to Vong (which implied that one was disowned by their family and their gods)—were a nomadic extra-galacticsentientspecies that nearly destroyed the New Republic, and were responsible for the deaths of nearly 365 trillion sentient beings during their invasion of the galaxy.”
Ubbo-Sathla, Ubbo-Sathla a short story by Clark Ashton Smith, originally published in 1933, also known as The Unbegotten Source or The Demiurge, is an Outer God which features in the H.P. Lovecraft-inspired Cthulhu Mythos. Art by infernvs
“colossal mass of protoplasmic goo, Ubbo-Sathla is a creature which has dwelt on Earth since its formation. Constantly spewing forth a plethora of primitive organisms, some believe that this creature was the source of all life on the planet, and that one day it will emerge to re-absorb all of its biomass.” source Monster wiki
Metamorphosis is an adventure/puzzle video game with platforming elements, inspired by the imagination of Franz Kafka. The game was developed by Ovid Works and published by All in! Games on August 12, 2020. Metamorphosis is available on PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. (wiki)
What once seemed like mundane dwellings have become an expansive obstacle course, and now you’ll have to chart your path through the dingy nooks and crannies that exist within the cracks of civilization.
Use your wits to unravel the truth, and regain the life you once knew. (steam)
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (MINIMUM): OS: Windows 7, Processor: Intel Core i5 (2nd gen) or AMD FX 6350, Memory: 8 GB RAM, Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 or AMD R9 270X, Storage: 12 GB available space
Making Sense of “The Weird and the Eerie” By Roger Luckhurst
(…) “You have probably heard of “the weird” by now, but you may not quite know what it is, or why so many genre critics, cultural theorists, and philosophers are keen to engage with it. It might once have been quarantined as a subgenre associated with sullen Goths and all those arrested-adolescent readers of H. P. Lovecraft, but it has long slithered free of those confines, and now leaves a trail not just straight across the internet, but on the page and in mainstream TV shows and movie screens.
Fisher’s guide to this terrain is an excellent place to start your orientation. The book displays his signature knack for reading popular culture (principally music, fiction, and film) in an expressive, demotic way that is still vigorously political and philosophical. Somehow, Fisher magically renders post-Lacanian, post-ŽižekianMarxism and the radical anti-subjectivist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze entirely accessible. Only Fisher can enthuse about old QuatermassTV shows in terms of their “cosmic Spinozism” and still (mostly) make sense. With typical disdain for cultural boundaries, Fisher moves crab-wise from Lovecraft and H. G. Wells to the impenetrable mumblings of punk band The Fall; obscure Rainer Werner Fassbinder TV shows from Germany; Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, and Andrei Tarkovsky films; NigelKneale TV series from the 1970s; the music of Joy Division; The Shining; the unclassifiable fiction of Alan Garner and Christopher Priest; Jonathan Glazer’s extraordinary avant-garde SF film Under the Skin; and surprising appearances of Margaret Atwood’s early fiction Surfacingand Christopher Nolan’s portentous quantum SF blockbuster Interstellar(which receives a great defense).” (read morehere)
(…) “In music, literature, art, film and photography, as well as in new and hybrid forms and media, the English eerie is on the rise. A loose but substantial body of work is emerging that explores the English landscape in terms of its anomalies rather than its continuities, that is sceptical of comfortable notions of “dwelling” and “belonging”, and of the packagings of the past as “heritage”, and that locates itself within a spectred rather than a sceptred isle.
Such concerns are not new, but there is a distinctive intensity and variety to their contemporary address. This eerie counter-culture – this occulture – is drawing in experimental film-makers, folk singers, folklorists, academics, avant-garde antiquaries, landscape historians, utopians, collectives, mainstreamers and Arch-Droods alike, in a magnificent mash-up of hauntology, geological sentience and political activism. The hedgerows, fields, ruins, hills and saltings of England have been set seething.”
“What are those pressing concerns, though, and what are the sources of this unsettlement? Clearly, the recent rise of the eerie coincides with a phase of severe environmental damage. In England, this has not taken the form of sudden catastrophe, but rather a slow grinding away of species and of subtlety. The result, as James Riley notes, is “a landscape constituted more actively by what is missing than by what is present”. This awareness of absence is expressing itself both in terms of a vengeful nature (a return of the repressed) and as delicate catalogues of losses.”
“Digging down to reveal the hidden content of the under-earth is another trope of the eerie: what is discovered is almost always a version of capital. Keiller’s Robinson tracks the buried cables and gas-pipes of Oxfordshire, following them as postmodern leylines, and tracing them outwards to hidden global structures of financial ownership. Wheatley’s deserters rapaciously extract “treasure” from the soil, by means of enslavement and male violence. In his cult novel Cyclonopedia (2008), the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani figured oil as a sentient entity, developing Marx’s implication that capital possesses emergent and self-willed properties, that it is somehow wild.” / see: 771-robinson-in-ruins-2010
TimeSpace Warps 