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"This is not the blog."

Hey, how's it going. Jordan here, as can be expected from everywhere else on this Website. However, you are currently on the border of a heady art project I made where part of the experience is pretending it was made instead by Christoph Magreat. The project is called Viceking's Graab, and this particular page is modelled after a side-blog titled Viceking's Blaag which, in the fiction, was in fact made by "Jordan"-- me-- in order to promote "Magreat's" new release. If you click on any of the tabs above (besides "Home," which takes you back here), you will get the contents of Blaag as originally intended. If you have any interest in the Graab proper, or even if you don't have any interest in it but still want to get some general idea, I highly recommend clicking those tabs, as they are a genuinely helpful little guide.

The following list is a guide to the guide. On the other hand, if you want to dig into a pretty in-depth essay actually talking about the Graab, keep reading; this page is long for a reason.

"An Introduction" is a genuine piece of Borgesian metafictional prose, of Jordan talking of his experiences meeting Magreat in person. Jordan is hired to be the Graab's hype-man, and that's what he does. It's an Introduction in the same way Other People write Introductions for famous books. This story showed up in the Topography Genera physical book.
"Reader's Guide" is a series of basic comprehension questions to help ground the reader as they explore the Graab, to encourage critical thinking. It's like school. You can ignore them at your leisure, but if you start to get lost in the maze, remember you have this resource to reference.
"Tips & Tricks" is a series of basic navigation instructions, as there are many elements within the Graab that were supposed to be obvious to an audience familiar with fictional blog culture, and there are equally many elements that were supposed to be new even to them, elements which came from other equally-obscure cultures such as Interactive Website Mazes. This section is probably one of the more useful; it addresses some questions I have received.
"Art of the Graab" is a gallery of probably all of the unique art you will find in the maze (and the icons, which are stolen from the internet and credited where they're not public domain). On principle, I didn't really want to make this section, as it might constitute spoilers; to reveal anything about the actual contents of the Graab, outside of those contents (even in a relevant side-blog), clashes with the vivid intent I had for the project. But by playing the role of the fictional Jordan, the hype-man which this side-blog requires, I knew it made sense to showcase the more visual elements, for advertisement's sake. Furthermore, the gallery functions as a sort of checklist for explorers of the maze. Some of the pieces, you will not encounter for a very long time. Guaranteed.

"This is."

So. I, Jordan Dooling, made Viceking's Graab over a surprisingly rigorous six-month period in 2015, releasing it in its entirety in July of that year. I have been evasive about its contents, its secrets, and its messages for all this time, preferring to just drop a link to the thing where I can and leave it for discovery. It is now 2023, eight years later. Can I talk about this thing now?

I mean, I certainly am capable of it. Anyone who's heard me talk in private about this thing can attest that, whatever it may be, it is thoughtful. I have a lot to say about it. But listen! You stand at a crossroads, reader! From this position, you still have the option of getting the original intended experience, without the foreknowledge of Authorial Intent to influence your reading. If you want the full opaque mystery, dive into the Graab unspoiled, with the above sections there as your only guide. Or if you want to abandon ship and go to another part of The Website, or another part of the Everyblogger saga (links to the right!), now's your chance. On the other hand, no matter what reason you may have, if you want much of the mystery deconstructed for you, read on.

Okay? Crossroads. Checkpoint. Decide: Spoiled, or unspoiled? Directed, or opaque? Decide.

Okay. Then let's begin.

ELSE HE'S CALLED NO NAME AT ALL
Breaking the Silence on Viceking's Graab

An essay by DJay32

I- Batman + God

The seed of the idea came in January 2015, when I had recently finished two weird blogs-- namely, The Archangel and The Archangel II. These were part of a series, the abstract Fear series I did in collaboration with Lindsay. Each blog in the series had to have a stark minimal layout, with a single post containing an image and a subtitle, and with a url that said "this is not a blog" in a foreign language. The goal was to demonstrate, in a horror blogosphere rooted around the Slender Man where even the most experimental blog still adhered to conventional Narrative Rules, that it was possible to make Fictional Blogs that challenged the format, that they would still count as serious attempts at the concept but from a drastically different angle. That is basically what the first Archangel represented, as a concrete "object" that demanded to be taken seriously even in its humor. That url still read "This is not a blog," which on the surface sounds like it's precisely the attitude I was challenging, but under the surface it was an allusion to René Magritte's most famous painting, and with that context there is more nuance. The painting is of a pipe, with the accompanying text "This is not a pipe," the implication being "This is a picture of a pipe. There are things a pipe can do that this painting cannot, and there are things this painting can do that a pipe cannot." Extrapolating that to the blog, The Archangel says it is not a blog. Yet it is still a Fearblog, a serious horror blog in an established community (a community where "The Archangel" is an established horror monster). That paradox is.. pregnant. The key is the word "blog," the notion of a "blog" as something with set rules and form. The textual point is that, insofar as The Archangel is not a blog (and no, it is not the web journal of a real person, it is not therefore a journal in function, it is not a blog), none of the Fearblogs or Slenderblogs are blogs, and likewise, insofar as it very clearly has to be a blog (and yes, it is made with Blogger tools, hosted on a service that exclusively hosts blogs, it is made of the exact same ingredients), the same applies to the rest. Our definitions are arbitrary and are all because of words.

That's a point that applies to and unites the Fear series. But the contents of The Archangel itself also merit examination. The text in the blog reads "Batman punches God." The accompanying image is a low-res Google-sourced drawing of the Green Lantern flying into the sky. The Green Lantern is not Batman; they are two different superheroes. But, with his fist in the sky, this superhero could be seen to be "punching God." Like, that's a really basic joke. And these abstract blogs all began with Lindsay and I voice-chatting on Skype, saying that a blog matching that exact description would still count as a valid Fearblog, so it is absolutely true that this "Batman punches God" thing was supposed to be stupid. But I'm not some careless troll, I knew I could back it up with theory, I could seriously argue for a deeper message in this silly blog. And I can. The key here is in the "sky/God" symbolism. If it is even remotely plausible that a human could reasonably interpret "fist in the sky" as "punching God," interpret "the sky" as "representing God," then there is precedent for the symbolic mobility of forms. If it's good enough for God, it's good enough for Batman. The Green Lantern is allowed to represent a different superhero; they have far more in common than God does with the sky. Do you follow the principle? I basically typed a lot of words to explain, like, the poetic equivalent of 2+2. It goes further. The blog contains one more humanoid figure, after all: The Archangel himself is named in the title. If "the sky" can represent "God," if "the Green Lantern" can represent "Batman," can't either of these symbols also represent the Archangel, the Fear Mythos's iconic monster? He is "the Fear of the Afterlife," he is conventionally written with religious motifs and patterns, so "The Archangel is God" is not farfetched. But is it not also valid for "The Archangel" to represent "Batman?" The Fear Mythos was founded by comic book readers, and there were plenty in the Slender Man Mythos too. Comic book conventions of media and narrative are significant in these blogospheres. "The Archangel is Batman" may be the riskiest proposition here, but do you follow the logic? Do you observe that these equations are all self-contained in the blog, they do not overreach? If you can, even if you can simply humor the argument, then you have followed a proof that that poetic 2+2 equals something, that there is a law of equivalence between two sides of an equation, that no side of the equation is restricted by something the other is not. That, as a Proof of the associative quality of images, is the theory behind The Archangel's visual content (including using the Text as visual elements).

Let's put these two together (a-heh heh) and look at The Archangel one last time. It is not a troll blog, it is not a joke. I very seriously believed in it, so much that I was willing to not explain it and let it stand on its own for eight years. (And I love explaining myself. This is actually the real reason I had to invent a separate meta-character in Christoph Magreat; by crediting the work to someone else, I could convince myself to keep its secrets.) It is also not an insult to the Fear Mythos or the accepted way of making blogs. It is me saying "I want to stretch my legs, I have done it your way, with posts containing Chapters of Prose, now let me try using these same ingredients to create something of a different form." I did this in celebration of the openness our community held, its willingness to accept people of many walks of life and tastes in media. I did this to test myself as an artist, my growing ability to formulate symbolic reason. I had not the privilege of following higher education's structure where I would otherwise get to do this kind of thing, but I still had the desire, and blogs were a canvas I was now familiar with. So I did it. I demonstrated, as seriously as I could, a piece of blasphemy. "God is equal to a fictional concept. The rules of art apply to all concepts, so long as those concepts are contained within a piece of art." And another blasphemy on top: "Horror is equal to comedy, is equal to minimalist modern art, is equal to poetry, is equal to math. Eldritch abominations are equal to superheroes. A blog is equal to a painting. The hierarchies of 'seriousness' we insist on are strictly cultural and are, themselves, allowed to not be taken seriously." Equations, lots of equations, are my way of paying respect.

So yeah. It all started with that one blog. Then I got to make another one in The Archangel II, but if it's alright with you, I'm gonna leave that one "unexplained."¹ You already have much of the kinds of logic necessary to form an interpretation, and besides! It was II in particular that sat with me for a month afterwards and led to the gestation of Viceking's Graab. I want to talk about that one now.

II- Pyromind of the Ancient

I had gotten the taste of making a Weird Blog, and I had packed a lot of intent into just three words and a picture. The next thing I wanted to do was make a Long experience. My most popular blogs at that point had all been my longer ones, OH GOD THE RAPTURE IS BURNING and Jordan Eats Normally Now and Topography Genera, that last one being a story told across like 12-15 different blogs. There was already some precedent for being looser with Format, and plus I had by this time had some experience with Fearblog of Fear (which is much looser in Content) and I had recently finished The Blog Without a Face (which is many things, including-- as the first "Christoph Magreat" work, and a serious attempt to explore the Slender Man as a funny concept-- the prelude to whatever I would do next). I had.. the urge to make something Long and Serious, something I could put All Of My Effort into, something that would not be another "minor blog" but my next Project. Something to stand next to Rapture. And all I could think about was these weird one-post "concrete blogs" (blogs as objects), and the Slender Man seen from different angles. Oh, yeah. And Finnegans Wake, of course, which I had only recently finished reading for the first time and had begun reading extensive theories about.

I'm sorry to say, reader, but we are gonna have to reckon with the Wake if we're gonna talk about the Graab. That's a really tall order, though; very smart people have been talking about that book for almost a century now and they still haven't quite gotten a grasp on it. But that's okay! That means I also didn't have a grasp on it, that is the background it had for me when I was starting this new project. I had read 600 pages of experimental words shifting in and out of recursive stories. I had followed only moments of it. The sense I got was "This is an old dream put onto paper with great talent, a dream of death of the old world and the war of the new world over the right to claim it, a war fought in every medium, including words and ideologies. This is a trickster tour guide leading us into a tomb held within a book. There are passages leading everywhere, far more passages than I am capable of noticing right now. This is a book that goes over my head. If I find someone talking about the book, no matter what their background or even if they're 'right,' I am going to learn something new and real about world history." That's what you need to know. I took the Wake, I found choice quotes, and I would use those to try and capture the sense I had, a sense of depth, of solemnity, and of trickery. Even if I didn't go into the new project intending to replicate the Wake, it was going to bleed into what I'd make. I came to terms with that pretty quickly and chose to roll with it.

The first actual idea I had for the new project was "I want a blog where You, the reader, are going into a pyramid in search of the coffin at its center. I want the blog itself to be the pyramid." That idea impressed itself upon me and defined my efforts, and much of what I would make stemmed from that: "the blog as architecture," "the tomb as a maze," "endless writing on the walls written by many sources," "the identity of the buried is not necessarily clear," "the architecture tells us more about the Culture That Built It than it does the Person Buried." There was a lot I could work with. And I love mazes, I love the experience of being lost deep within a maze. So that's what I decided to make.

First it was a maze within a blog, and then pretty quickly I changed course to make a maze of many blogs. Next I planned for the maze to contain fifty blogs, and I even made a complete map of the maze according to that plan,² but in the end the maze had 67 blogs. I also needed a name for this thing. So I took a look in the Wake and found a passage in the first chapter:

[the end of a comic-style Punch-and-Judy/Mutt-and-Jeff dialogue between a tourist-invader (Jute) and a native of the lands (Mutt), talking about the history of the land they stand on.]

Mutt. Quite agreem. Bussave a sec. Walk a dun blink roundward this albutisle and you skull see how olde ye plaine of my Elters, hunfree and ours, where wone to wail whimbrel to peewee o'er the saltings, where wilby citie by law of isthmon, where by a droit of signory, icefloe was from his Inn the Byggning to whose Finishthere Punct. Let erehim ruhmuhrmuhr. Mearmerge two races, swete and brack. Morthering rue. Hither, craching eastuards, they are in surgence: hence, cool at ebb, they requiesce. Countlessness of livestories have netherfallen by this plage, flick as flowflakes, litters from aloft, like a waast wizzard all of whirlworlds. Now are all tombed to the mound, isges to isges, erde from erde. Pride, O pride, thy prize!

Jute. 'Stench!

Mutt. Fiatfuit! Hereinunder lyethey. Llarge by the smal an' everynight life olso th'estrange, babylone the greatgrandhotelled with tit tit tittlehouse, alp on earwig, drukn on ild, likeas equal to anequal in this sound seemetery which iz leebez luv.

Jute. 'Zmorde!

Mutt. Meldundleize! By the fearse wave behoughted. Despond's sung. And thanacestross mound have swollup them all. This ourth of years is not save brickdust and being humus the same roturns. He who runes may rede it on all fours. O'c'stle, n'wc'stle, tr'c'stle, crumbling! Sell me sooth the fare for Humblin! Humblady Fair. But speak it allsosiftly, moulder! Be in your whisht!

Jute. Whysht?

Mutt. The gyant Forficules with Amni the fay.

Jute. Howe?

Mutt. Here is viceking's graab.

Jute. Hwaad!

Mutt. Ore you astoneaged, jute you?

Jute. Oye am thonthorstrok, thing mud.

See that near the end? "Here is viceking's graab." I liked that. Both words are fairly easy to understand: "Viceking" is like "viking," like "viceroy," like "king of vices"; "Graab" (or "grahb") is how you'd pronounce the German grab, meaning "grave." Viceking's Graab. It fit my idea of a pyramid, or tomb, leading to some important mysterious coffin. It fit as a name, a mysterious and distinctive and weird title. And the passage it came from had other choice quotes I'd make use of elsewhere.

So I had a mood to channel, and a heady source to pull from. I went and made what would become the "bulk" of the maze, the imnomanbut blog, with a rather intensely customized Blogger design.³ I gave it the name "Viceking's Graab," I gave it a subtitle from that Mutt and Jute passage, I made the title and subtitle dim enough to require the reader highlighting the text in order to read (and this action reminded me of shining a flashlight on a dark sign to read its words). I made sure all links looked identical to non-link text, so the reader had to manually search for progression. I removed all superfluous blog features that Blogger allowed me to remove. I found a photograph on Google that depicted a passage in a real catacomb. I had a pretty cool style sorted out. Next I needed to get serious about what it was I wanted to Say. I needed to think hard about the Slender Man.

III- The Only Thing to Fear is the Passage of Time Itself

At some early point I decided that the maze would contain pastiches of real horror blogs. At first, I pictured the imnomanbut blog and one or maybe two "extra" blogs which would be the pastiches. The example I would tell trusted people was LizardBite's Hidden in the Trees; the reader, exploring the maze, would stumble on what they assumed to literally be that blog, but careful readers would observe some subtle differences in its text, which would indicate they were still in the maze. I imagined this as a visceral and heady revelation that the reader experienced purely by themselves. One such person I told this idea to was TheVisitor, fellow Fearblogger, and they expressed concern that "people wouldn't like to click on a link and find a whole other blog they'd have to read," that this would elicit exhaustion. I took that point to heart. I decided to make dozens of extra blogs. Exhaustion was a good emotion to explore here.

Maybe I was also being a bit of a rascal. I knew the point was supposed to be criticism, leading me away from that direction. But.. it was surprising to me. I didn't recognize the reaction of "exhaustion" at finding a new blog to read, I didn't think it an appropriate reaction to plan for in a community about making blogs. If someone didn't want to read more blogs, we were an odd place to settle. I thought this was an interesting subject. And it dawned on me that there were avenues for using a blog-maze to really explore these subjects-- Reading; Writing; Forming And Participating In A Community Of Writers; Creation As Putting Yourself Out There, As Arguing Your Own Ideology. And then it hit me too: Creation As Entombing Your Own Ideology. Take, for instance, a story you wrote as a teenager. To go back to that story as an adult would have the emotions and beliefs you held as a teenager come pouring back out, as if your teenage mind had remained in that story. If I was to frame a blog as a piece of architecture, a room, then to put a story in a blog is to brick yourself into the walls of that room for generations to encounter later.

Now that was a cool image. I imagined the reader of the Graab reading what felt like empty words, meaningless words, blogs that linked to each other in hypertext but didn't seem that connected semantically. I imagined the reader finding one blog in here that connected with them, that convinced them to slow down a little and soak in the fragmented atmosphere. I imagined the reader, growing immersed here, feeling like some voice was speaking to them through the noise. A voice behind the text, a writer trapped in the walls. Some switch in the reader's mind being flipped, having them recognize that they are now Many Blogs Deep into a structure that wasn't actually meaningless after all, was.. arguing with itself, and praying for a reader that the maze cannot actually see.

The writer in the walls became a single recurring character in "Shem," name taken from Finnegans Wake's pastiche of its own author. The Shem of the Graab would, reasonably, be a pastiche of its author-- me. Not even Christoph Magreat but me, Jordan Dooling, a remnant of the civilization that built this maze, an architect who (accidentally?) trapped himself in the walls. He is a presence within the maze with you, but one you cannot see, only his creations. So then, was I the Viceking? At the center of this maze, would the reader find my body?

I mean. No. Like I just said, my body is in the walls. No, the body entombed here was the Slender Man. Many lines of thought converged in this idea. This maze was the Fear Mythos, abstract product of a writing community built on top of the Slender Man Mythos. We were making blogs because others had made Slenderblogs first. We included the Slender Man in the list of monsters we wanted to write about; we made other monsters because the Slender Man had inspired us. We each, in our own way, sought to build on and move beyond the Slender Man stories that we loved, but there was still a debt, still a lineage at play here. If I wanted these blogs to be rooms in a maze, maybe the rooms were built chronologically, were built outwards from an origin at its center, where the figure of its origin could still be found?

So, yeah, this would have to be a dreamy dramatized History Of The Fear Mythos. (A Myth of the Fear Mythos?) Incidentally, by this point in early 2015, we didn't have much in the way of "convenient sources to follow our history." We had formed in February 2011 on tvtropes, growing in population as we established a separate forum, then 90% of that population moved on with their lives throughout the first half of 2013. In late 2014, our Facebook Group became the hub of activity for some new people making Fearvlogs, and some trolls in that time sparked a lot of debate and serious thought about what our Mythos stood for (this was the catalyst, in fact, for The Archangel). Our founders had migrated elsewhere during those years, and I was the oldest remaining member (having joined literally One Day After The Founding; I was not the oldest in age). So if I wanted to reference our history for the construction of this maze, I would have to do a lot of the archival work myself.

I did do that. I went and started The Chronological List of Fearblogs (and Fearvlogs), digging through our tvtropes thread and our forum and cataloguing every blog name, author, and url I could, as well as a decent approximation of what each blog was about. By 2015, that was many hundreds of blogs (see for yourself!). This ended up helping many people, but the primary purpose I had in mind when gathering the data was Graab. I wanted to map the distribution of Fears (our horror monsters) over time in order to plan out the timeline of the maze. At the center of the maze was the Slender Man, but orbiting the center were three blogs offering a view into the center-- these were CuteWithoutThe's Still Remains Within, LizardBite's Eccentrically Bored, and alliterator's brighter than a spoon, our mythos's first three blogs. (The corresponding Fears are, respectively, The Dying Man, The Archangel, and The Cold Boy, and that will be relevant later.)⁴ Expanding outwards from there, the blogs in the Graab correspond to specific blogs, and therefore specific dates and periods, going forwards in time as they approach the circumference of the circle (which corresponds to 2015).

I'd like to stop and make sure this structure is understood. Footnote 2 offers a map for construction purposes which adhered to this timeline, but I'll illustrate the concept in a purer form:

Consider this Figure 1. The center of the maze is the Origin, and the reader enters Viceking's Graab on the outermost edge in a blog corresponding to the modern day of 2015. Their path through the maze is circuitous and disorganized, jumping in and out of each circle, but they always pass through blogs that are placed somewhere on this timeline. Each blog is dated to the day it started, for convenience's sake. So the trio of Remains/Eccentrically/spoon is in immediate orbit of the origin, though not within the origin; they are still fundamentally in the 2011 circle. Jordan Eats Normally Now would be close to them though slightly further out, and OH GOD THE RAPTURE IS BURNING would be even further still, but again still in 2011. Fearblog of Fear falls into the 2012 circle, as does PLAN 31. The entrance to the maze is on the outermost edge because the entrance is this blog, modelled after The Archangel, which released in December 2014. Do you follow? This is an important model within Viceking's Graab, though it might not be possible to deduce it from within.

I formed this model thanks to the archival efforts that produced the Chronological List of Fearblogs. I had to imagine something for my creative application of the data. In the process, I was struck by how busy 2012 was for our mythos, and how drastically activity dropped off in successive years. I was struck by how many blogs were left unfinished, and how many blogs never even got far enough to have a Fear at all. Most blogs shared the same default Blogger themes, and in fact it wasn't that common to use a custom background. And all of these people were no longer in the community, so this was all their blogs would ever be, until someday Google decides to stop hosting them at all. It was.. sad, to me. I found it sad. It was the passage of time, the passing of a fad that I had happened to connect to. This was a place for me, and in a few short years... yeah.

So. So, I knew some things: I wouldn't incorporate anywhere near every Fearblog in the Graab. I would generally try to focus on blogs with a more customized appearance, though the maze's aesthetic benefitted from having some of the generic templates in it too. I would try and at least reference additional blogs not represented. And I would try to offer links to the original blogs where I could (or where I could remember to). I was not claiming to replace any of them, though I guess I wasn't exactly paying straightforward "tribute" either. Not a single of the pastiche-blogs I created went much further than a few fragmented posts, with predominantly original text that didn't have much in common with the originals. I don't think at any part of the process did I truly know what I was creating.

But god, I wanted to create it.

IV- Blogging in the Deep

When I had the full chronology of the Fear Mythos in front of me, I was struck by one more thing: We had many, many, many Fears, but the monster that saw the most representation was, by far, The Slender Man.

This is the Slender Man drowning in the Deep. Drawn by Hexillith, upon my request. It is one of the pieces I have shared outside of the Graab most often. It is emblematic of an actual genuine Poetic Point that emerged in the creation of Viceking's Graab. That point is the dichotomy between The Slender Man and The Deep, two monsters that the Fear Mythos writes about, the two Fears of the Unknown.

The Slender Man might need less introduction. He's a tall "faceless" "man" who stalks victims and gives them a Lovecraft-lite horror experience. In the original stories, he in fact had many faces; his face appeared differently to every observer, though none could quite place the details in hindsight, and it was only on camera that his face was blank. The blogs and vlogs of the Slender Man Mythos established certain conventions, such as radical followers of the Slender Man that were referred to as his "proxies," who generally wore masks and often had unique character traits. There was also a Path of Black Leaves, which I'm not too sure on the details of but it's something like... if the Slender Man chased you, you might find yourself suddenly in a nightmarish forest, with a path of.. black leaves. Also, sometimes the Slender Man had tentacles that would emerge from his back. Sometimes they were branches. Sometimes the Slender Man spoke, sometimes the proxies spoke for him. Sometimes the Slender Man had blue semen, and the community generally hated that depiction. Victims of the Slender Man were most known for keeping journals of "mad scribblings," or always carrying a video camera wherever they went. The most popular form of Slender Man story, you see, was of the found footage horror variety: Victims would keep blogs, or vlogs, and that's where the Slenderblog and Slendervlog came from.⁵ That's the Slender Man. And when we brought him with us into the Fear Mythos, he was categorized as "the Fear of the Unknown."

The Deep, on the other hand, is a vaguer concept. Very early on in 2011, when the Fear founders had invited me in to create a water monster (which became EAT), I needed a reasonable explanation for why a story would have any hope at all and not just be an assumed tragedy; I needed to figure out why the water monster wouldn't just become All The World's Water and automatically Win. alliterator proposed that the water monster wouldn't do this because there is something in the oceans already, something far bigger which even EAT is afraid of. Something he called "The Deep," and something for which he noted the most effective portrayal would be a story that never shows us what this Deep is, nor even confirms if it exists. It was either he or I that proposed this, or both of us workshopping together, I can't remember. And the concept stuck in our mythos! Every now and then, a story would pop up that briefly mentioned The Deep, and that would be the full extent of it. So for years, The Deep remained almost like an in-joke, a philosophical experiment for storytellers. And when we had to categorize it, we could quite reasonably call it "the Fear of the Unknown."

There was the rub. There were two Fears of the Unknown, and what a juxtaposition they formed! One was utilized in hundreds if not thousands of blogs, and the other was arguably never used at all. The Slender Man, in fact, had been written with so much that I wondered if it could really be associated with "the unknown" at all. I still understood why some people liked the designation-- it sounds very cool, and it captures something of the essence that the Slender Man means to writers and readers-- but.. well, here I was with this budding weird-maze-thing that was gonna revolve around the Slender Man, and I realized I had an opportunity on my hands.

As I sculpted these dreamlike obscure blogs and wrote text that edged closer and closer to An Actual Point, I began to converge on this: "The Deep is the uncompromised unknown, past the boundaries of knowledge." "If we try and identify the unknown, we will form something that still fits into human-centric knowledge." "The Slender Man is what happens when a human tries to identify The Deep: a human shape, with inhuman features, and an unknown face." And, additionally, "The Slender Man may 'die' when he is fully Known to us, and we put him to rest as a concept and try again to identify The Deep."

That is the secret of Viceking's Graab, that is the mystery inherent. It is a representation of the abstract leftovers of a culture that put the Slender Man to rest inside the story-tombs they themselves built to honor him. Many of the architects of these ruins left long ago in search of new cultures or their own lives, and a few voices who weren't finished still remain within the walls. I am one of these. You, the reader, can roam this network of websites if you want. You will not find a climactic jumpscare in the center, as the Slender Man cannot literally fit within a coffin. There is no body. There are only, there can only ever be, more blogs.

To roam the Graab is to spend time in close proximity to The Deep. Let this section end on another art piece I requested, this time from TheVisitor:

V- Passages, Staircases, and One-Way Doors

The maze proper begins with one fork: Here, the text asks you whether you came into this tomb for "personal gain," for "curiosity," or for "the hell of it." Clicking on one of these motives will take you down a different path. In building the maze, I basically settled on there being three primary "routes--" those three-- which would frequently branch off into dead-ends and cross each other. Here, take Figure 2:

This is a rough sketch of the general layout of routes, made off the top of my head. As such, it excludes dozens of connections, is not usefully representative, and is here used only to loosely illustrate what I'm talking about right now. The Red circle represents the Entrance. The Green line represents the "personal gain" path. The Blue line represents the "curiosity" path. The Orange line represents the "hell of it" path. The Purple circle represents a special dead-end, which I'll get to.

I made the Hell path first, supposing to address the reader who just wants to wander and have fun, and that path stays in the Later Years of blogs until it drops you off at alliterator's the garden of forking paths, which is the Purple circle. There were multiple reasons to do this. A reader who just wants to wander, I think, would find alliterator's blog really cool, and I wanted to show it to them. It is the only blog in Fear Mythos history that is anything like the Graab, being a maze of hyperlinks hosted on a single blog; it was an inspiration, in fact. It is a nice blog, pulling tastefully from many Jorge Luis Borges stories, which alliterator is very good at doing. And, at the end of the day, dropping a Graab reader off in another maze entirely is kinda a really funny idea that matches the tone of the "hell of it" path.

The Personal Gain and Curiosity paths were kinda made in tandem. Personal Gain was meant to be a complex thing to address, and so as a path it takes you down some more obscure corners of the mythos, trying to redirect you to the other paths whenever it can, trying to get you lost and confused. In practice, in the final maze, I find Personal Gain actually works well as a shorter route onto the latter half of Curiosity, and therefore to the deeper sections of the maze. Curiosity is the route with the most obstacles, containing both password prompts and, as mentioned, ultimately being the path that makes it to the deeper sections. Once you make it that far, Figure 2 absolutely ceases to be any use, as the maze splits off into far more confusing circuitous paths.⁶

I found that, by designating the three paths by different "motives" for exploring the maze, I could better focus the contents of the blogs on emotional dialogue. This made for a far more surreal experience, as well as, I thought, a more difficult maze to wrap your mind around. I tried not to be restrictively prescriptive with this, though; for instance, I tried to make sure the Personal Gain path did not punish the reader, who in all likelihood sought no actual gain and was just humoring my weird creation. The maze's whimsy and misdirection was its own punishment.⁷

There were some recurring tricks I would come to use. Blog hosting services like Blogger allow you to make both "Posts" as well as "static Pages." Posts were accessible by default, and it took conscious know-how to obfuscate this. Even on the imnomanbut blog, you can access all of the Posts by navigating with the "Older Posts/Newer Posts" buttons (and I hid a secret this way, for readers who insisted on using that to "cheat"). This is probably the functional reason I wanted to split the maze up into different blogs, as containing it all on one blog could be easily gamed with techniques like this, whereas having multiple blogs means the reader is likely to have no idea what the URL would be for the Ending. However, blogs still have Pages! These are posts that do not show up on the blog by default and must be explicitly linked to! I used this to my advantage. Here is an example: this Page in 11,320 minutes of absolute bullshit and bastardry (pastiche of Squeek's 525,600 minutes[...]) is linked to from deep within the maze, and it looks identical to the Post you will see on the blog proper, but its single link ("the Russian General incident") takes you somewhere completely different. Eagle-eyed readers would have to pay attention to the specific URL in order to keep track of tricks like this. Functionally, this Pages trick sets up the architecture of an "Upper" path and a "Lower" path through the same environment, as when you are on a Page (the Upper path), clicking on the Blog Title will take you to the Post (the Lower path) with no way back.

Not all tricks were against the reader's favor. Here is Fearblog of Fear, Dreams and Sleep and Holy Shit This Isn't My Blog, pastiche of Fearblog of Fear and canonically written by Billy Everyblogger himself. I've linked you to a specific post, as this is how the maze itself will bring you to his blog. At first glance, it seems a dead-end, but Billy is implied to have made a dumb mistake, not knowing how to build a maze-- he should have made Pages! Instead, all you have to do is click on the Blog Title, or even use that handy Archive gadget on the right side of the page, to navigate between all the posts on his blog. He links between multiple Graab paths, so this can be seen as a shortcut. Or maybe it just further overwhelms the reader with a mess of possible paths to keep track of. Both can be true. But this one was meant to be a sillier joke, and an opportunity to examine some blog-maze architectural tricks thanks to a character's mistake.

Everyblogger's contribution brings me to another point. Navigating through his blog will show you the optional "Artsy Maze Post 1/5," which has an embedded YouTube video playing Coldplay's "X & Y." Throughout the maze there are YouTube videos and links to yet more YouTube videos, all specifically chosen to contribute to ambience and themes. This is an element I find effective, but unfortunately it also dates the Graab in obsolescence: all of these videos will, in time, be removed, the music especially. Over the years, I have elected to simply replace some of the links to newly uploaded versions of the same songs, but this is not a practice I can sustain, and plus I find myself forgetting what some of these videos even were. Those of you who share my love for, like, "playlists" that set a mood will want to know what the music was. I can at least offer the following list:

Tallywood Strings, "Everything in its Right Place" (Radiohead cover)

Hot Chip, "Over and Over"

Lady Gaga, "Paparazzi"

Radiohead, "Pyramid Song"

Coldplay, "X & Y"

Iron Maiden, "Flight of Icarus"

Between the Buried and Me, "Famine Wolf"

Metroid Metal, "Brinstar" (metal cover of Metroid music)

Kirby 64, "Miracle Matter" (boss theme)

MOTHER 3, "Master Porky's Theme" (boss theme)

Mastodon, "Blood and Thunder"

Brand New, "Sink"

Mogwai, "My Father My King"

Genesis, "Duke's End"

And then there's this video, which is 16 years old and simply has to remain up, for the good of the world. I made sure to put it in the maze somewhere. There are probably other videos and songs that belong in this list, but they are either forgotten to time or they're still in the maze and I haven't remembered them.

However, there are two videos that will remain up, and that do not fit the above: Original videos I made exclusively for Viceking's Graab.

VI- The Hidden Surprises

Viceking's Graab was conceived as a blog, but from the start I thought it would be essential to include multimedia content, to provide a subversion on the vlog format. Rather than have vlogs that grab your attention and gather a following, I would hide the good stuff within a maze so you'd have to work for it (or so the videos could stand as rewards). This was, perhaps, peak Trickster behavior on my part, and how worth it this proved is debatable, but I still find the idea funny.

There are two original videos within Viceking's Graab, and originally there was supposed to be a third but I wasn't able to produce that one. There's Telephony (or "the Genera video"), But there's still nobody home (or "the Jordan Eats video"), and the never-produced Credits video.

Let that be Figure 3, Telephony. Its original context is as the central splash feature of Topography Graab Center East, pastiche of the central Genera blog, which can be found rather early in the Personal Gain path.

Telephony is a three-part video based on the format of Topography Genera's primary video entry, the Answering Machine message. In the first section, Liquid Len (played by Lindsay Taylor) leaves his answering machine prompt: "Hello, this is Liquid Len. You've called the Viceking's Graab. Everyone is dead and thus unable to answer the phone, but if you leave your feedback to our blogs after the beep, we'd really appreciate it." When he says "Viceking's Graab," the subtitle on the screen reads "Topography Genera Center East," which is a little bit of further dissonance. There is then a BEEP, and the caller leaves his message: My voice reads a passage from Genera short story "Hell's Kitchen," as follows: “It’s easy to get delusional down there, to get these ideas about who has what authority, who should listen to whom, what guidelines which stories should fall under… the most common delusion, of course, is where these people are. They never want to accept it. 'Prison.’ 'Prison’ is such a strong word. 'Prison’ means they did something wrong, they’re being punished, they’re paying their dues.” The subtitles in the video do not follow along, instead displaying a glitchy white block. There is now one more BEEP, followed by the final section, which is a tinny loop of a crowd of people making chit-chat.⁸

The intention of all of this was to provide atmosphere for the maze, that not even a video will necessarily provide context. Videos here are old material recycled, a sense of people who were once present that you can now no longer reach.

Let that be Figure 4, But there's still nobody home. In its original context, the video is located in My, Either Eating's New Again, the pastiche of Jordan Eats Normally Now tucked away pretty deep in the maze.

But there's still nobody home goes for a similar effect but with different techniques. Its format mimics the videos of Jordan Eats, being found footage from video cameras. This video has two sections, the first being, inexplicably, a garble of footage of kids making videos (RND Media in their early days). The original video for this has since been replaced with a slight edit, to remove a slur said by one of the kids; I replaced it with a clip of an unreleased Sunsetters song. As the footage proceeds, it jumps from shot to shot as the tape I pulled the footage from was warped, until finally the footage breaks entirely and it cuts to section 2: Me, playing the part of the Fictional Me from Jordan Eats but years after that story ended. This content is canon. I sit by a door in a black jacket, purple scarf, and boxers. I am in the Empty City. I have clearly just put the camera on and started talking. The audio does not sync up, as it is still on a warped tape. This lasts for the rest of the video.

The contents of Jordan's speech is difficult to make out, and incidentally I did not actually intend for it to be so difficult to hear, but that tape was a lot more warped than I expected. Years later, I did go back to this video and make a serious attempt to transcribe the speech, which is as follows:

I'm... I don't know what to say, I just turned the camera on.
(When was the last time???)
(It at least soothes my mind???)
(I must be alright???)
(I guess it doesn't look too pretty?) I guess it can be considered "artistic" or something, to just make some videos of me sitting here talking to the camera, vaguely saying nothing
don't know why I'm ??? being artistic
I'm not really in the best mental state to do that
I guess (I'll soon?) find out
There's something about a camera that kind of... wakes me up, kinda forces me to.. attach a persona to myself, a persona that I've long known who he is
You know, the persona that I show to everybody
Except for whenever I'm alone
It goes away, and I..... come up with crazy ideas and try my very best not to follow through on them.
As long as there's nobody here, as long as there's no camera on, then this door will never open. I'll be trapped inside my own mind.
(For the endgame...?)
I can't keep the camera on all the time, can I? And I can't.. I can't always have people with me.
(I should ??? look out for myself, I guess,)
I've got to figure out my own mind. You know? But.. I mean, what is there to figure out? I'm out, I'm free, I'm slowly slipping out of sanity and being dragged back in, but I'm-- [video cuts off]

I know for a fact that I decided to keep the video's garbled format and not simply refilm it because of the mood it sets. I found it deeply frustrating that this is what happens when I actually get in front of a camera and talk about my feelings-- my message gets distorted. There is a Fear, The Choir, that distorts a victim's speech in order to isolate them. That.. frustration and isolation, that felt too pertinent. So I kept it this way. In the end, the video feels like proof of the Jordan trapped in the walls. It. It works, I think.

Then there's the Credits video. Obviously, as this never got made, I have nothing to show you, unless I can find the old storyboard I sketched for it back in the day (and if I find that, I will add it here later). This was to be a live-action video (on professional cameras) produced by RND Media, my friends at the time. It would begin with a shot of a funeral procession at late-day, featuring a bunch of actors in costumes to look like Fears, solemnly carrying a casket while some serious music played in the background (probably "X & Y"). The Fears would reach a destination in a grassy field, place the casket down standing up on its feet, and gather in mourning. They would maintain this solemn posture even as the music abruptly changes to Genesis's "Duke's End" and the casket bursts open, the Slender Man (me) leaping out of it and breaking into a jiggy dance. I do not remember if any Fears would have joined in the dance or if they'd all just remain grieving and serious at the sides. As the Slender Man dances, credits for the entire Viceking's Graab project would have scrolled over. It all ends with the Slender Man striking one last pose and the music ends. "Thank you for reading" or something of the sort as the final text. The end.

I'm sure you can agree with me that this would have been an absolutely incredible ending. Unfortunately, RND Media moved to London by this point and I did not follow them, and my life went a different way. There was no other reason for this video not being made, as it was well within our abilities. And going for some halfway compromise on my own wouldn't have had anywhere near the same effect, as this was meant to be one last celebratory blow-out, this was at the time supposed to be my final blog, the end of my contributions to the Fear Mythos. And in its context, it would have actually been the climactic reward at the very center of the maze. I still hold in my heart that this was the real ending, and I want you to picture the video yourself when thinking of how Viceking's Graab ends. God, it's such a beautiful idea, and a good capstone to round out the other two videos of increasing production quality.

Instead, when the time came for me to construct an ending to the Graab, I opted for a far more subdued and enigmatic route.

Honorable mention goes to the two audio entries on The Endless Graab, pastiche of Genera-themed audio play The Endless Obsession. The pastiche is located in a deep pocket of the Hell of it path. One audio entry is titled mutt.wav, and the other what the thunder said.wav. The "transcripts" on the blog are lies and are in fact unique text (inspired by Gabriel Marcia Márquez's The General in His Labyrinth). mutt.wav has me read the Finnegans Wake Mutt and Jute dialogue quoted in Section 2 of this essay. what the thunder said.wav has me reading parts 4 and 5 of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

I'm pretty sure that's it for the new multimedia parts of the maze. God, there's a lot of content in Viceking's Graab.

VII- Supercharged

Throughout this essay, I have mentioned the Fears. As a part of the Fear Mythos, it is reasonable to assume Viceking's Graab is a story with Fears in it. Besides The Slender Man and The Deep, what are they?

Every Fear is, at some point, referenced. But some get more focus than others, and this is not so much because of prominence in our history as it is my own personal interest. Mentioned before were The Archangel, The Dying Man, and The Cold Boy. Also relevant are The Empty City, The Red Cap, and The Mother of Snakes. I can provide some insight into their role in the maze.

The Archangel is the Fear of the Afterlife, most iconically portrayed by a man in a gas mask who controls the dead. He doesn't directly appear in the Graab (to my memory), but it's no accident that the maze begins with a pastiche of the blog titled The Archangel, and that much of the "narrative" involves ruminating on a society of the dead. He is a thematic presence, ripe for interpretation.

The Dying Man can be seen as the Fear of Identity or Decay. He is a physically ailing body, his identity leaping from body to body, speaking in the back of your mind, watching you too decay. The maze contains some voices that fell to decay, voices that were trapped watching themselves come apart. One pastiche in the maze is The Devil And God Are. CuteWithoutThe's original blog was a long and emotionally charged teenage breakdown in the most compelling of ways, dealing with The Dying Man, and in pastiching this blog I wanted to get at a similar tone. The result is a 14-post open letter laying out many of the Themes the text of the Graab keeps coming back to, following the structure of Brand New's The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me (a crushing post-hardcore album).

The Cold Boy is the Fear of Isolation, like something out of a ghost story. A little boy that fixates on the alienated, asking to be their friend, inviting them to play farther and farther away from other people. It is a concept of alliterator's that I shied away from in the mythos's early days, but as the years went on it came to my mind with greater frequency. Isolation is important to the Graab, and you can find this Fear if you know to look for him.

The Empty City, the Fear of Getting Lost, a Fear so iconic I named my Website after it (and made a game based on it), is an endless maze of empty buildings, drawing in new victims by giving them a door that shouldn't be there. I don't actually think the City properly appears anywhere in the Graab (besides the video in Figure 4), but its influence is... obvious.
The Red Cap is the Fear of Shame. A fungal species, a woman in red, the worship of carnal sins. Victims of this obsession live with the shame of who they are deep inside, brought painfully and vividly to the surface. A powerful image, one I was never able to do justice. Her memory permeates the Graab and brings regret (that blog is a pastiche of RedRockingHood's CITY OF SINOPIA). Can you truly say you have a good story unless there's a bloody wise woman somewhere in it?
The Mother of Snakes, as the last Fear I'll cover, is arguably the Fear of Yourself. She's a face in your mirror when you can't live with yourself anymore, when you know deep down you're a snake. She promises you comfort and invites you to live in the mirror with her, live in a world that's as backwards as you are. Her presence in the Graab comes up in deeper sections (like this blog, a pastiche of alliterator's In the Garden of Desolation), as the self-reflection theme starts to suffocate.

It can be noted that much of the Graab is drenched in dark angst, and likewise, much else is soaked with silly comedy. Does this result in a product that undermines itself? Does the angst make the jokes look shallow? Do the pranks insult the introspection? Where is the consistency? That's a question I wanted to introduce myself, as that is an internal conflict for the reader to grapple with. It is a reflection of lived experience, as is the maze format itself. I often feel a compulsion to hide difficult emotional conflicts like this, but that goes against the spirit of art as I understand it. So I'll offer this: Yes, I do think the emotions contradict each other. I think the Graab comes across as a structure built by perspectives that do not necessarily agree with each other. I think this is a compelling environment, not one that all stories should explore, but important enough for some to address. I do not think this maze is for everyone. That's a serious factor behind why I chose not to over-advertise the thing; upon finishing the maze, all I did was post the link to the entrance and leave it up to discovery. Discovery is everything here. If you want depth, you have a lot of content to engage with. Much of it will frustrate and challenge your expectations of what engagement should be. I.. I think that's Important to do. Any reader is free to leave at any time, and I expect even the hypothetical "target audience" will leave early, confused and baffled... only for the sheer existence of this thing to linger in their minds, a riddle that by all means can't be that hard to figure out, a network of websites that somehow floats under the radar and feels like it's watching you, waiting for you. Again: Discovery is everything here.

By now, I have given you a runaround of themes, techniques, histories, and examples to be found in the Graab. Yet still there is more to say. Short of giving blog-by-blog commentary of the entire contents, and until someone comes along and asks me specific questions, I'm not certain how to go about providing insight to make the maze less opaque.

Should I bring up some other cool features in the blog landscape? Here's Ask a Fear, a dialogue tree with an animatronic Jack Nicholson (standing in for, if not really pastiching, psuedomuse's Ask a Fear, link defunct). Jack plays the role of The Jack of All, a Fear Mythos entity that is explicitly not a Fear, just a mysterious figure, coded as the Devil, who strikes deals with people. LizardBite made the Fear Mythos RPG, where Jack was your save point ("What would you give for a bit of safety?" is the line he would always say). I liked the idea of giving the reader a conversation with Jack.

Here's the hidden Page in deceptive Blog not found, containing the media parable "To the hardback / from the notebook."

Here's the cruel dead-end ______, which has no way out unless you arrive at its own hidden Page, where you can pixel-hunt for a way forward.

Here, take And When The Sky Was Opened (pastiche of alliterator's blog of the same name), a blog deep in the maze that isn't particularly notable other than the fact that it's not too easy to reach this self-aware text.

How about the Classic Book blogs? The War of the Worlds, Ulysses, The Call of Cthulhu, Moby-Dick? They're exactly what they sound like.

Should I just provide a link to the center of the maze? ...well, this essay already contains instructions on how to get there, so I'll leave that out.

Should I talk more about what the project means to me now, in hindsight?

Right before I finished Viceking's Graab, my grandmother died, and things just... went in a sour direction with my life. What my grandmother meant to me is.. frustrating. I didn't really know her all that well. I had seen her whenever my parents took us to visit, sometimes once a year, but we always lived either in a different continent entirely or half the country away. Her husband, my grandfather, died over a decade prior, and she withdrew afterwards and went deaf. She loved us to bits, as granddad did too. I trusted her with things I couldn't trust my parents with. And just after she died, that's when we finally moved up to her town, now with no actual reason to stay, but stay we did. I missed every chance I had to spend time with her, and instead shifted to spending more time with my mum, who was devastated the most. And in all this time, of course I've been feeling my own fears. There is a real risk that I will end up the same way, alone in this town as everyone I ever knew lives their lives miles and miles away. And when I die, those closest to me will hurt, and few else will really know. I had those anxieties back then too, in the time I made the ending to the Graab, and at that time I wanted more than ever to break from my plan and advertise it, talk about it, spell out its meanings, get people to listen, but at that time my willpower to do so completely and finally broke. I needed people to want to spend time with me, to seek me out.

That didn't.. really.. happen. Very, very few people have remarked on it. Even fewer have given pageviews. And with my sour life, I've been in a state of isolation far from support ever since. This old project stays in my mind, offering a place to bury myself and keep myself buried. A tomb of my own design, the depths of which are lost even to me sometimes. Maybe no amount of insight will make people read it. Maybe this maze is best kept tucked away in a forgotten corner of the internet, along with the rest of my efforts.

It's. Painful. I want you to know how painful this has been, though I still want to spare you from the full details. The Graab does not contain them. It contains its own pains, things I've been able to come to terms with thanks to building the maze. Like the sense of guilt I had at the loss of the Fear Mythos community. Remember I said the majority of users died away in 2013? It wasn't long after I was at the center of a controversy, and I was convinced for years that the subsequent exodus was my fault. I was convinced that I had singlehandedly killed the only circle of friends I had, without even noticing until it was too late. When I started the Graab and made the Chronological List of Fearblogs, I was kinda saying "sorry," gathering and archiving my old friends' creations in case they ever came back, and building a maze that tried far more seriously than I had done before to.. pay their ideas respect, make a bleak horror thing for the internet. If you read the Graab, these themes are everywhere. By the time I finished it, I wasn't so certain that the communal departure was truly my fault. I was more aware of.. y'know, the natural state of a community, a society, the passage of time, the shifting of interests, the inertia of ideas, and my place in there. It wasn't my fault, and it wasn't their fault either. This wasn't the kind of thing that was supposed to hurt, I was supposed to move on to my own things too. I was just.. trapped in a maze. I didn't have something to move onto. My weird life didn't work out that way. And I wanted, I needed, someone to enter that maze of their own volition, find me, seek me, and help me escape.

I was able to process my new pains with time. I even found a way out of my own emotional impasse, and I made the video game Empty City to represent that, to offer a way out for others. Though my life did not materially change much after that, partially thanks to some... new setbacks. Ah, the way things go.

Regardless. Making this whole Website has been important to me. My art is important to me, finding ways to express myself is important to me. And so, when it came to representing Viceking's Graab on this Website, I knew it was time to... explain it. Because yeah, maybe no one will check it out. But I know someone will at least read this essay, and this supercharged emotional expression will become known to you in some way.

And, more than that, it's just... it's Time. Eight years of silence is long enough. This project is worth more than just being a device of grief; it is a celebration and exploration of internet creation, a weird piece of poetry, an arguably genuinely scary place of horror (according to certain tastes), and, I think, a terribly funny Thing That Exists. Viceking's Graab is nothing less than what it needed to be. It's where we come and sit and contemplate the unknown that our words will never capture, as we lay our words in coffins and see them in new lights.

Thank You.

VIII- Last Calls

So. You now have a more solid awareness of this thing than you did before. Some surprises have been spelled out, some undercurrents have been laid out, and the rest of it is there for hypothetical readers to interpret and track on their own. But there's still a few last things to bring up that lie outside of the boundaries of the maze.

There is a Sequel, a Viceking's Graab 2. It is currently only in a Demo format at 12 blogs, united by the framing narrative that is Topography Genera: Rebirth. This project is more an exploration of the idea of "sequels," as it contains (or will contain, if I can be bothered to continue it) many sequels of my stories in it, such as The Blog Without a Face 2 and the continuation of the Genera canon. I have not touched this project since 2017, and if I say more about it I will do so on the Genera page.

As mentioned, Empty City functions as a thematic response to Viceking's Graab.

The story PLAN 31: RISE OF MCFEAR has something to do with the Graab, and in fact I see that project as another take on the concept, a view from outside the maze. That story isn't very far right now, though.

I have started the very basic touches on a possible "Web Graab." It will not be a Website conversion of the original Graab, as that project was deeply built around the blog format; instead, it would be a new structure entirely, built around whatever HTML I can figure out. I make no promises on if this will get anywhere, but if it does, you know very well I would love to share it here.

And, of course, Viceking's Graab technically fits into the "bigger" context of I Am Everyblogger, a duet between the two fictional bloggers Billy Everyblogger and Christoph Magreat. I don't think Billy actually takes much influence from the Graab; I'd be surprised if he's even read it. The Graab is functionally more standalone, and its relation to Everyblogger is as vague as that story's plot is. But together, they do paint a picture of proper celebration of what blogging has always meant to me.

That's it, I think. If I remember anything else relevant, either within or outside of the Graab, I will edit this essay to include it. But I'm done for now. Check out the maze if you want, but don't get too lost in there. You need a way to ground yourself. Let my Website have done that.

Footnotes

1: Okay, fine, here's a quick summary of The Archangel II. The image is a fake screenshot of a YouTube video about the atomic bomb, with additional imagery from the Fear Mythos (the twin hourglasses being a motif of the Archangel himself) and Stephen Crow's Wake in Progress (so, Finnegans Wake). The fake video is "uploaded" by alliterator (one of the Fear Mythos founders), and that part is the joke part. A little observation and deduction shows the actual video, before I edited it, was Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up." That's also kind of a joke part. The point here is meant to be a window into a world where Fearvlogs exist in the mainstream-- y'know, horror video series on YouTube, with Marble Hornets being an example of a successful Slendervlog.
The text accompanying the image is "Television killed the radio star," which is a reference to that one 80s pop song, "Video Killed the Radio Star." But the relationship between radio and television in particular has a rich history of theory, and the 1940s - 60s were when most of the fundamentals were worked out. The short version is something like... "radio is media of the Ear, television is media of the Eye And Ear. in practice, the Eye is prioritized. and in time, a media focusing on the Ear will rise again; this Eye/Ear relationship is cyclic and technological." Bringing this theory to Fear Mythos contexts is something I find interesting, as there's long been a consideration of the relationship between Blogs (primarily written-word media) and Vlogs (primarily motion-picture media). The Slender Man Mythos set the stage for what to expect: Both blogs and vlogs are plenty, but vlogs see far more dramatic appeal. In the Fear Mythos, we had far more of a focus on blogs, with only a handful of vlogs made, though by the time The Archangel II was made we were seeing a resurgeance of vlogs, with Pavel Hall being the most popular, so this subject was fresh on my mind again. I thought it interesting that blogs were still an Eye media, but I think they still fit the "Radio" side of the equation, as written-word prose translates very well to, say, a radio play, or text being read aloud. Yet video never killed our radio star. Hm. I mean, that's more a discussion for the arc of the Fear Mythos as it continued even past 2015. By the time of 2015, it was still very much a possibility that vlogs would win out. It is without doubt that vlogs, in their time, drew higher audiences than any blog.
In recent times, filmmaker David Lynch is probably the most famous figure who drew an associative line between the invention of the atom bomb and the popularization of television (Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series, 2017, Episode 8), though obviously that came two years after The Archangel II. So where did I get the idea? James Joyce, of course. Finnegans Wake was released in 1939, half a decade before the deployment of the atom bomb, and a decade and a half before the popularization of television, but both inventions were still Known About and Talked About by intelligent circles for decades leading up, and James Joyce was one such thinker who included both technologies in his crazy book of theory-poetry. He drew a connection between the concept of an atomic bomb (annihilating the atom, as it was seen at the time) and the Tower-of-Babel-like revolution of language that always accompanies a new technology, hence: "The abnihilisation of the etym." The "etym" being the building-block of a word (etymology), "abnihilisation" being both "annihilation" and "ab nihil," from-nothing, language born from nothing. Language both torn apart and born from nothing, a holy sort of paradox on a microscopic level. Probably easiest to parse as "the old language annihilated, a new one made from nothing." And tellingly, the "abnihilisation of the etym" quote comes specifically from the end of a vignette about a television program, around the climactic midpoint of the book.
AND FURTHERMORE, Finnegans Wake is in many ways about the relationship between Shem and Shaun, fundamental rivals. Shem often represents media of the ear (including the written-word, like I talked about with blogs), and Shaun often represents media of the eye (such as fashion, and theatrical and oratorial delivery). The two figures battling each other in The Archangel II's image come from a depiction of Shem and Shaun in Wake in Progress.
I dunno. There's a lot of food for thought there. If nothing else, I'm pretty sure The Archangel II represented a sort of.. "here's where our weird internet culture fits into the history of media." Or a "remember, we are not in a vacuum." I thought this was all super cool. ^{back to essay}

2: Click here to see a photograph of the finished map. The entrance to the maze is "THE ARCHANGEL" at the bottom-left. The center of the maze is the eye-ish thing in the center. On the page unseen on the left, I had written down a list of Fearblogs I intended to mimic. I then made the map by planting blogs (in rectangles) according to a chronological circle, the center being blogs representing the earliest stages of the Fear Mythos, the outer edge being blogs representing the most recent blogs as of 2015. The pathway through the blogs was arbitrary and determined more by dreamlike "feel" and narrative "flow." I added the checkmarks as I finished each blog within the maze, to track my progress. As this map was made before the maze, there are sections in the final maze not on the map.
In hindsight looking back on this map, you'll notice it doesn't form any secret shape, nor does it in any way resemble a pyramid or tomb. The mental map you might make when exploring the Graab won't even resemble this. This map served mostly to assist me in its creation. Over the years I have ruminated on possible structures and shapes this thing might represent, but know that all I intended in creation was to make a semantic maze, not to literally represent a type of physical structure. ^{back to essay}

3: Why "imnomanbut?" It is what it looks like, "I'm no man, but." There is a pretty long explanation for where I pulled the phrase from, it is really not an interesting explanation and can be shortened to "this dissertation I'd read about Finnegans Wake identified a hidden acrostic on one page." Really, the phrase works fine on its own. The mood of the phrase speaks for itself. Self-doubt on an existential scale, or alternately the mundane self-flagellation of a cultural failure to conform, trailing into a critical "but." Like an invocation to a muse of regret, the phrase serves to set a Tone for what we're about to read, what contents will follow that "but." ^{back to essay}

4: These three "views of the center" are deceptive; you cannot reach the center of the maze from either of these blogs. They act as a sort of false ending. This represents the Fear Mythos as still being a distinct entity from the Slender Man Mythos, but also it just.. it adds to the labyrinth. ^{back to essay}

5: And so was born the Standard Format of the Blog. In the early years of the Fear Mythos, people evolved the concept from "a Blog is an online journal kept by a fictional character" to the broader "a Blog is a contained online space wherein a Story is posted," and then I went off the deep end and made the abstract objects like The Archangel and Viceking's Graab, which now defines as "a Blog is a Single Creation on the Internet consisting of one or many Pages." In other words, a Blog is now like a Website for a Concept (such as a Story). The Standard Format still exists, of course, but now it fits into a broader and less restrictive context. ^{back to essay}

6: I won't be making a diagram for the Graab depths. I want my audience to have something left to do themselves (and also I don't feel like it). But I will at least note that, when you reach the Proprioception section, that is where you can find the secret path leading past the "orbital views" and directly into the center. ^{back to essay}

7: I know I am alone in Really Freaking Loving being lost in a maze. I know this, reader. ^{back to essay}

8: This crowd loop comes from the secretcity maps by Turrican, for the Half-Life modification Sven Co-op. The impact this obscure series had on me is tremendous and not at all limited to the Graab. I do not expect nor intend to adequately summarize the series in a footnote. But I will roughly say: you are in an office building, and if you dig around you will find pathways to a maze of other worlds. The maze is whimsical and very lonely. I first played these maps when I was I think 12, and I deeply loved them. ^{back to essay}