(no subject)
Aug. 28th, 2009 01:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
felis_ultharusIt's summer, and construction is in the air. In particularly, there are places in northeastern Verdun where the roads look like they've been turned over to the Silent Hill urban planning committee -- every day, the possible path through the labyrinth of deep gulches changes, and only one road ever takes me where I need to go.
Speaking of Silent Hill, I finished the first game in the series this week. Good, and very scary, but still not quite up to the standards of the second game.
For those who don't know, Silent Hill is the scariest work of fiction in any medium. Each game, some ordinary person is trapped in an empty city in an unspecified part of New England, looking for some lost person. The town is semi-aware, and every once in awhile the hero/ine falls out of the world and into its twisted dreams.
(Those dreams look like Bauhaus architecture that someone bled all over - which can only be an improvement - mixed with the nightmares of limbless animals in factory-farm cages.)
Every game as a series of environments. For some reason, the empty apartment buildings are always scariest. There's something especially disturbing about all those empty rooms with bulletholes in the walls, and nursery rhymes in blood in the walls, and signs that everyone was taken by surprise without any trace of their bodies anywhere.
The hospital levels - and there's always a hospital level - come a close second. Giant faces with insane eyes where a wall should be. Gurneys with restraints scattered through the corridors. Psychiatric files scattered everywhere describing paranoid schizophrenic psychoses. Lead-pipe-wielding nurses who clearly own real-estate in the uncanny valley, lurching through the hallways to the crackle of radio static. Broken wheelchairs lying on their sides, one wheel turning forever. No patients anywhere to be seen, but blood on all the walls. The poetry of disturbed children written on every surface.
See, this is what you get when you don't have single-payer health care. In Canada, our lead-pipe-wielding undead nurses are a lot nicer.
Speaking of Silent Hill, I finished the first game in the series this week. Good, and very scary, but still not quite up to the standards of the second game.
For those who don't know, Silent Hill is the scariest work of fiction in any medium. Each game, some ordinary person is trapped in an empty city in an unspecified part of New England, looking for some lost person. The town is semi-aware, and every once in awhile the hero/ine falls out of the world and into its twisted dreams.
(Those dreams look like Bauhaus architecture that someone bled all over - which can only be an improvement - mixed with the nightmares of limbless animals in factory-farm cages.)
Every game as a series of environments. For some reason, the empty apartment buildings are always scariest. There's something especially disturbing about all those empty rooms with bulletholes in the walls, and nursery rhymes in blood in the walls, and signs that everyone was taken by surprise without any trace of their bodies anywhere.
The hospital levels - and there's always a hospital level - come a close second. Giant faces with insane eyes where a wall should be. Gurneys with restraints scattered through the corridors. Psychiatric files scattered everywhere describing paranoid schizophrenic psychoses. Lead-pipe-wielding nurses who clearly own real-estate in the uncanny valley, lurching through the hallways to the crackle of radio static. Broken wheelchairs lying on their sides, one wheel turning forever. No patients anywhere to be seen, but blood on all the walls. The poetry of disturbed children written on every surface.
See, this is what you get when you don't have single-payer health care. In Canada, our lead-pipe-wielding undead nurses are a lot nicer.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-28 06:40 pm (UTC)2)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-28 06:51 pm (UTC)2) Of course :)
here from the meta
Date: 2009-08-29 03:21 am (UTC)lucky canadians.
Re: here from the meta
Date: 2009-09-02 03:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-29 03:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-09-02 03:11 pm (UTC)I've been metaquoted quite a few times now. Finally my tendency not to censor to stupid stuff that comes into my head actually has a use. You have to love the internet ^_^
This is a joke.
Date: 2009-09-01 09:18 pm (UTC)Re: This is a joke.
Date: 2009-09-02 03:11 pm (UTC)