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Ramble: Internet Horror (Patreon)

Published:
2025-08-30 19:42:43
Edited:
2025-09-15 21:48:56
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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  • 524625660.mp4

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Content

Warning: viewing this video has been observed by some to cause high amounts of terror and noclipping into the backrooms after an unknown amount of time

Youtube mirror here

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Comments

~Ash~

YIPPPEEEE! Thanks for voting for this everybody :D I’m so excited 😭😭😭

Mei

watching this from the backrooms with photo negative mickey

Danielle Sherman

The notification for this video made my whole day and I haven’t even watched the video yet

Sarah

Not spider wearing a FNAF hat 😭

~Ash~
>>185637181

I LOVE THE MONSTER MANSION BTW six flags over Georgia is my home park

Luis

Yaaaay weekend is saved and thanks for the pokemon vid the other day it was quite chill 😎

E B

Jenny, you’ve just never read *my* SCP, the only good one

LAN

Honestly yeah most early SCP sucks and those are the most famous ones. There are like 9000 though (not exaggerating) and there is some real gold in there if you get into it. Some of my favoruite conceptual horror comes from niche SCP articles

Trystan

The Garfield 'I'm sorry Jon' internet horror stuff is to me the epitome of the problem: someone has a genuine original idea and then it gets beaten all the way to death, and then they keep beating the corpse for another few years. It's not just derivative, it's an exact copy over and over and over. It's similar to what you see with The Backrooms and FNAF and all that, but I'm Sorry Jon is the prime example to me because everyone exactly copies it down to the art style. Also, your take on SCP reminds me of Half-Life. You play a cool quiet scientist who has never held a gun before and stops (tries to stop) an alien invasion. Maybe that's where the seed was planted, seeing how it came out in 1998.

Mady, you know, from TV

I think I know why there is a Big Truck in the corner of the thumbnail and I'm pumped

toastthecat

i definitely think you just got unlucky with the scps youve read lol. those types of articles exist but arent really popular anymore! i mean the second highest rated scp, scp-2521, completely goes against what you said. i hope you give the wiki a chance again because theirs a lot of divise usage of storytelling in different scps you just have to find the right one for you out of the thousands there :)

Adam!

Omg she uploaded a day before the end of the month, just bc of my birthday being today I assume

Lucas Duchene

First of all that cheese plush (I think brie, camembert or st nectaire) is the cutest thing I've ever seen

Archvaldor's Warcraft Hacks Premium

I really need to listen Jenny talk about something I had no interest at all in but will nonetheless now find absolutely fascinating.

Trevor Atwood

There's a great video about the backrooms building by Kendra Gaylord on YouTube.

Demyr Nox

I discovered SCPs extremely late (like 4 years ago) and while a lot of them are cringe there are a few I quite like, or that at least have interesting ideas. SCP-3002 I think is pretty good though the ending is a bit on the nose, and SCP-3008 kind of just bucks the whole format and is just a journal, it's a fun read. 1762 is really popular too, it's not even really horror, it's like a kid's imaginary world sending letters and trying to cope with the fact the kid has outgrown them. It's kind of like Toy Story 4 now that I think about it.

Skyler Orton

The video game control was very bad for internet horror. That game is so interesting and even does the scientist speak and research files stuff well. The thing is it was you know made by professional writers so obviously it’s actually good. Now everyone else wants to be this game and they just aren’t.

Erris Barrett

the backrooms is so funny its just like if library of babel by jorge luis borges was bad and had nothing to say lmao

E B

OK so I use to have a job doing inventories for shops. I’d go around to all different kinds of shops, but in small towns you’d often have retail units in buildings not designed to be retail units And they can be really creepy! There was one shop with a small shop floor but this huge barely lit attic area covered in bits of mannequins Another place was trendy clothing shop in a *tudor* era house, and the backrooms (I used the term before it was cool) were this weird labyrinth with tiny staircases and constantly changing floor levels. So the concept of the backrooms resonates with me. The additional narrative not so much

Silky

I always vote on the polls and then immediately forget what the suggestions were or what was in the lead and don't check again until the video comes out. So every month I just get an exciting surprise! Excited to hear about weird internet stuff from a niche I know nothing about 👍

Eddie Faro

Hearing Jenny go in on SCPs and the Backrooms is exactly why I'm a patron!!

LAN

Lmao scp is from 4 chan as well 💔

Emily Hoodenpyle

i'm sorry to say I zoned out for a moment, and when I came back it was just Cars fanfiction...

Luthien Tinuviel

As somebody with autism, I have to say the modern obsession with rules and details in internet horror might honestly just be a bunch of autistic people, especially young autistic people. We tend to be online a lot due to in person community being more difficult to access. Im in other fandoms that also tend neurodivergent, and we LOVE DETAILS! Fandom wikis are super detailed, go on tumblr or twitterand you've got people analyzing every aspect of a property. Its fun! The problem with applying this level of detail and worldbuilding to horror is that horror is scary because its the terror of the unknown. Im an autistic horror fan, and it can be very easy to over analyze stuff that doesnt need to be understood.

Sardonic

On one hand I genuinely think the collaboration behind SCP is one of the coolest of it's kind. On the other, I 100% can see what you're getting at lol

Cat Gaillard

Ok the flooded Backrooms idea (ie monster mansion) is literally the plot of Piranesi by Susanna Clarke if the aesthetic were gross instead of classical

Allen Sorensen

I love your perspective about the rules and over-explaining. I noticed that in early Creepypasta (go to the library and find x, recite the incantation and you’ll see y, but don’t do z, do w instead) and SCP, but couldn’t articulate what felt off about it. The “Stolen Valor”, writing scientifically about unknown things to avoid being knowledgeable about actual things, had me rolling!

Lindsey

YES you have the same beef with the modern backrooms lore as I do. Obviously I would be terrified if I was in the backrooms irl and there were monsters lurking around, but as a reader the idea of it being sprawling, empty, and endless is so much scarier. It’s kind of fun in a hokey action movie way, but it totally takes away from what makes the original concept of the backrooms scary.

Porge

Every wiki-fied internet horror thing calls to mind that classic childhood experience of inviting a friend to share in the development of this fantasy world you’ve lovingly created, only for them to immediately add indestructible mind-reading laser robots or something. And you can’t even push back because you’re like 8 years old and you feel like it’d ruin the friendship if you didn’t incorporate their ideas. The GATE mention was weird, because I was in GATE classes here in New Zealand! In GATE Maths we just played games, which sort of acted as extension but not really.

Allen Sorensen
>>185641192

It’s a great thought experiment that went way way up its own butt. Let’s say I caught a ghost. How would I study it? I have to stop it from going through walls, need a special video and audio recorder, etc

Aysha U. Farah

Jenny really coming for Sam Lake’s throat in this one

Kit

absolutely bummed at the moment and needed this, thank you jenny!!

Austin F

the only SCP i remember is the one that's supposed to represent vore

Jamie

I was very into Marble Hornets when I was a freshman in college. It kept me connected to some high school friends and we had a lot of fun with it 😊

Nesadi

Whenever I vote for something, it's just whatever Jenny *wants* to talk about on that topic.

Lucy Matthews

Aragog looks very handsome in that hat!

Lindsey
>>185641746

What on Earth is the Holler and Mustang stuff? 😭 This is so funny I’m obsessed with this. I’m unfortunately imagining them as Lightning McQueen and Mater. Also loving the unexpected nonbinary car rep?

Shotgunbadger

god describing SCP's aesthetic as 'Mad Men is so cool but also Five Nights At Freddy's' is so accurate

Jenny Nicholson
>>185642267

My friends and I used to put every new drop on the tv like it was event! But lost interest when it went from "creepy POV-shot found footage where Slenderman slinks by in the background" to "all of the creators are making themselves action heroes who appear on-camera and must convincingly deliver dialogue." And all the Masky stuff and when they started claiming "The Operator" wasn't slenderman for marketing purposes 🙄

Danielle Schatten

oh my god I actually got BANNED FROM THE r/JennyNicholson SUBREDDIT TWO DAYS AGO for being mean to a literal 4chan nazi on the sub and then when I called out the lead mod in DMs with a "hey doesn't this discourage fighting back?" they responded with "well this [Jenny Nicholson] space isn't supposed to be about being mean to others and this behavior is not conducive" hey redditor how's the civility of your god-queen workin out for ya cuz i see her tearing down your entire smug persona and everything adjacent to it under ten minutes in a brutally bitchy way that we're all paying for because it slays and we love it at your expense

toastthecat

also i think kane pixels youtube backrooms series is truly amazing! it isnt like the backrooms wiki at all.

Pystoria

You've made fun of Siren Head before but I love Trevor Henderson, the guy who made him, who edits cool monsters into liminal/dark photographs. It's very simple but effective and leaves most of the storytelling to you

Brendan Hinman

Newest SCP about an entity whose gaze turns your creative work to ash . Nicholson is out here ending careers

Andy Modrovich

This is a pretty bad take on the SCP project. The reason for the dry, clinical language isn't because people want to pretend they're Doctor Who. It's because you're used to hearing that kind of language used exclusively to describe real things in the real world, and when you hear it used to describe something fictional, it lends it an aura of realness you can't get from a standard fiction writing style. The big shadowy SCP organization exists mainly to provide an excuse for the clinical language. To see a non-SCP example of using a typically non-fiction medium to convey authenticity, look at the novel House of Leaves, which has the same feel as an SCP--but without any unflappable scientists.

Ava Jeanne

I was waiting for the tree lady to come up!! Like it's so stupid, but I do give her credit for picking like an oddly spooky looking branch to stick in the ground?

Irving Le Turkey

As an oldhead (45), all of this stuff simultaneously excites me and makes me feel like the kids are all right and also drives me crazy in all of the ways Jenny articulates here. Some of the Mandela Catalog / Kane Pixels stuff is incredible and so much of it starts great and then gets nerded to death.

Chris Oakley

"solomon northup has spent the last 150+ years trapped in the backrooms with jimmy hoffa" kind of does function as lovecraftian horror in the sense that it's the only thing i'll be able to think about now and it'll probably eventually drive me insane.

Jamminonjay

Oh my god finally someone brings up the fact the original backrooms post is just as cringe as anything that came after it.

Nintenspiders

Would you rather: Like: Get Trapped in the Backrooms with a talking car Comment: Be stalked by a sinister Appalachian stick

Bi Zuko

Man last time I checked in with the Backrooms they'd just started adding "entities" which i wasn't a fan of, so to find out that it's fully turned into a significantly worse SCP Foundation is WILD. Like, why is it doing this analytical thing when it's supposed to be a place you can't reliably get to? A better frame narrative would be someone who got stuck there just "journaling" about their experiences if you NEED to make a big dumb wiki. Anyway, say what you will about SCP, but on the whole the scientific syntax there is far better regulated thanks to oversight and edits. They'll read like actual reports all the way through instead of dipping in and out of prose writing like this wiki does.

duckwebs

"stolen valor for scientists" - what an awesome concept. That's what it feels like with a lot of the current anti-science environment and the people pushing it.

Austin F

i've felt mean for thinking this, but as someone who was in the Gifted program, i always thought it was kinda weird how so many people my age (aka late 20s to early 30s) seem to tie their identities so deeply to being "Gifted Kids", and i guess that insane tiktok trend is that kind of weird fixation taken to its most ridiculous extent. one of those things where real life feels so much like a parody 😭

Sarianna Sallinen

As a scientist I'm feeling pretty attacked right now

zanna

modern horror has truly forgotten the writing advice "show, don't tell" and the fear of the unknown. like girl we could just not know. that's scary. why does the backrooms have monsters now.

amethyst

I don't claim this energy 😨

Alice Lastname

All the liminal photography (particularly the liminal pools) tend to capture my imagination more often than most of the backrooms content, so the Mall World stuff is quite the let down for me. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that stories which are written mostly by kids keep going the MCU route, but maybe the adults that write these stories can at least learn the value of mystery!

Bee with a side of fries

I feel like I blinked and suddenly the fazbear hat was there... I didnt see it before but its eyes keep following me

Jupiter Systems

My headcannon for The Hauler is that “18 Wheeler” was the slur that Mr.Mustang used against them. I believe that type of truck has more than 18 wheels

Jenny Nicholson
>>185646911

Yeah & in general I think people aren't self aware enough that being "gifted" as a kid generally just means you developed earlier (which is usually based on the advantage of how much pre-schooling you get, like I could read before starting school). From there classmates can catch up and pass you, and being "gifted" at the foundational stuff doesn't mean you'll still be good when you get to like high school level coursework

lrw789

By the time Jenny proclaimed herself lost during the backrooms segment, I had been gone for 20 minutes already. First I thought the story's subject was a holler (the geographic feature) that was always sandy, a thing I didn't know hollers could be. Then I thought it was a hauler (a truck) which made more sense. I finally ended up at a hauler (someone hauling things) because slurs are applied to people. But Jenny read a dialogue line referencing an 18 wheeler. I wondered, is that a slur among sentient trucks in this universe? I have concluded the backrooms is a hell where where I ping pong among these interpretations forever.

Sarrsfest

are you more of a hauler or a predatory window

Alice Lastname

“Don’t mock the forest!” My brain immediately rushed to figure out what the best Final Destination style death for someone who mocks the forest would be.

Jen B

I was in gifted in 6th grade and it was awesome. We learned about pruning bonsai, vikings, and crime scene forensics. I have wondered if it was just a way to keep the kids who might have been bored and disruptive entertained and out of the classroom to allow the teacher to work closer with the other students. Who knows?

Gary

I bet there is a non zero chance she has turned someone down for a date with the excuse that she has to work on her cryptid map.

Luis

omg I was in the GATE program too but I didn't know that means I might have psychic powers 😱

Jonathan Strickland

I hope that you are able to visit Six flags Over Georgia before too long. With the way the Six Flags/Cedar Fair merger has gone, I worry about my home park. I've been on the Monster Mansion ride many, many times. And I'm old, so I experienced it not only when it had the old name "Monster Plantation" (good riddance to that name), but I even experienced the attraction that was there before Monster Plantation -- Tales of the Okefenokee. I'm not quite old enough to have experienced the original version of that ride, but I definitely rode the one with figures designed by Sid and Marty Krofft. Anyway, I still like riding the ding dang darn thing whenever I go to the park.

Austin F
>>185645055

uh, you left out the part where the 'authentic' writing in house of leaves is deliberately made to be kind of inscrutable, to the point of having multiple pages of citation footnotes within the regular book...zampano isn't supposed to be writing a wiki page lol

Shiny Skunk

I've read some good SCPs, but a lot of them are a little tryhard and on-the-nose. You might say it's... a hat on a hat.

Steven Clark

It's so funny to me that Appalachia has its own tiktok creepypasta fandom. My family used to go hiking in the Appalachian mountains when I was a kid. It was a very mundane activity. If you want a real survival tip from somebody who knows about Appalachia, let me tell you: Don't get the trail markers mixed up with the county line markers.

Jesse Walker-McGraw

There are some SCPs that I think are really good! There's a creator named David Morgan (who keeps insisting he's not an SCP channel) who talks about some great ones. "This Thing A Quiet Maddness Made" and SCP-5031 are great unique stories! But it totally respect Jenny's opinion, and everyone else's, and we should all be here to have fun!

Betsy

The different fonts and backgrounds on that Backrooms wiki are stalking me like that lady's tree. :/

Barca

Pretty disappointed with the discussion about SCPs. Sure, there's some cringe stuff, but it really seemed like she couldn't get past her own ideas of what the site is about, and she was very reductive about people that put in a lot of work to make high-quality fiction.

Christopher E Musgrave

The SCP take is very good, but it also would get me in terrible trouble with my partner, lol

Happy Little Monkey

If you hear a baby crying in the woods, it is probably a rabbit.

arturo182

A few minutes in, as someone who is not into Horror but does enjoy a good Ramble regardless, I wish Jenny had explained what SCP is in a few words so I didn't have to pause and google around 😅

Ray West

i think scps are fun, i especially love that anyone can add their own lil monster to it. the world is completely inconsistent and not scary but i think it's more about writing your own cool monster. i especially like the slime character that is so cute that everyone likes him, including that one scp that is meant to be the 'most evilest and scariest and edgiest' one of all lol.

fiskehund

It's a shame that the "zooliminology" stuff never caught on. I haven't seen much but it's all been extremely charming. It basically solved all the problems jenny described. "Golbo Care Guide" video is a great example

Jonathan Strickland

I meant to also say I love the inherent contradiction of documentation that dates back to prehistoric times.

fiskehund
>>185650647

We all do it, but yeah this definitely sounds like a case of someone seeing the worst version of a type of content, hating it, and assuming it's all like that.

SpookySpaceKook

After hearing your take on SCP, I'd be fascinated to here your take on Delta Green

Elijah Sorensen

It is unknown why it did not approach me directly, but once, I encountered the Mustang. It followed, watching from a distance, its engine rumbling at a low, unnerving hum-buzz—despite such noises being unfitting for an automobile. I cannot say for sure, but I believe I could just make out its continued, whispered chanting. “You’re a bad car. You’re a bad car.”

Digimonica

The Mall World and ShiftTok stuff sounds a lot like We're All Going to the World's Fair.

Samantha Chapman

You know, I thikn you do have an interesting point about the rule-heavy, intense lore of some of these franchises. I wonder if there's something new emerging that isn't actually "horror", but more focused on the worldbuilding and categorization of the scary thing. Can a story be about things that are frightening without being a horror story? Now I'm giving the new generation aybe a little too much credit, but it's a genuine question.

Ray West
>>185652718

i absolutely think thats the case. a lot of the stuff people are adding to the scp/backrooms lore isnt horror at all. i think its a good way for people to get out 'cool ideas' they have without having to create a whole world for the cool ideas, because the backrooms and scp lore provide a world that already has a bunch of random weird stuff in it. i feel like its fair to say it kills the original creepiness but theres also something charming about a big collaborative writing exercise to me

Hannah Cohen

I feel like so much of the backrooms lore is just copying the house from house of leaves but making it over complicated and stripping the ambiguity of what made the house so scary. like isn’t the fear of the backrooms supposed to be the unknown??? if there’s a wiki detailing everything then where’s the scare?

Michael Cisco

I was in GATE and I turned out COMPLETELY NORMAL IN EVERY WAY

Joshua Austin

the backrooms sound like the Twin Peaks Red Room but if it were like a video game

Mady, you know, from TV

Jenny drive-by shooting IQ and polygraphs is the Mood! I too cannot stop myself from stating that those things are bullshit (among others) with very little provocation.

Jen B
>>185651737

My favorite is the toaster one where everyone who interacts with it eventually becomes toaster.

IndigoRen

I know The Reanimator. But only because I love Jeffrey Combs and because like 15 years ago there was a furry animation that used the goofy dance song that was on the DVD for Reanimator 3.

Ted Koutz

Famous ghost story author Arthur Machen had three rules for writing ghost stories, and one was "no jargon" like a severely long unscary infodump on how ghosts work, and it goes on for pages. Also the ghost should be malign, if it can't actually harm you that's also not scary. And you should set the ghost story in some place the readers can picture themselves being, meaning your setting, whatever it is should be grounded: the spaceship from Alien where it's dark and full of leaking pipes and it's staffed by expendable blue collar workers works as a horror setting, the spaceship from Star Trek where it's brightly lit and there's full OSHA compliance doesn't.

Silky

This really got me thinking about how much I love fiction that just presents you with an unexplained, weird thing. And now I'm wondering if modern fandom culture is sort of working as an opposite force to that very concept? It seems like so much of the success of a new piece of fiction hinges on how much social media clout it can create, so essentially, how well it's suited for Fandom. And fandom is mostly about fleshing out lore and characters to play with. You can't really make fan content for "mysterious unexplainable thing" but you CAN get really into trying to explain it, trying to establish rules for the world, or focusing on recurring characters in that world and get really into them and their relationships with each other. So then the fandom does all that and draws in people who also want to interact in that way, and those people are now the fanbase who want to see more rules and worldbuilding and characters with personal story arcs. So then an indie project will want to do something the fandom will like, probably out of a mix of genuine appreciation of their fans and the knowledge that the feasibility of their work depends on them. And a product owned by a large company just has someone somewhere making the decisions based on social media numbers or whatever so the result is the same. Unfortunately I can think of several podcasts I loved during their early stages that I felt slowly shifted into being created with more of this "fandom lens", until they weren't really what I'd originally liked anymore. And I love fandom! There are plenty of things I engage with in the classic fandom way, writing fic and shipping and everything. There are just also things that I prefer looking at differently, and sometimes I think source material can really suffer from having too symbiotic of a relationship with its fandom. Feel free to share thoughts anyone, I think it's just interesting to think about :)

papa-divertida

I don't engage with internet horror or tik tok, so tree lady was an absolute treat

Al
>>185654808

I definitely felt that way about WTNV - slowly consumed by its fandom until it started to feel like a parody of itself.

boobookeys

I was in a gifted and talented program at school but I remember the lesson/activity. It was about gravity and someone asked me if I thought a tennis ball and a ping pong ball would hit the ground at the same time 🙂‍↕️ does that mean I'm not psychic? Or are my powers so strong that I needed an extra layer of brainwashing 😳

Dani

Does anyone remember The Scooby-Doo Project? It was a series of bumper videos for a 1999 Scooby-Doo marathon parodying the Blair Witch Project. They were hilarious and captured the vibe of the OG Blair Witch shockingly well. Would recommend watching a Youtube compilation!

Sideshow Bob Stepping On Rakes

Having just watched the intro - I can only speak for myself, but I'd much rather prompts were used as a springboard for your take on the topic than worrying too much about adhering to the specific wording!

Cliff Jerrison

I was always taught that you should whistle or sing continuously when you're walking in the woods, to let the bears know humans are around, so you don't startle them

K2

Ugh, I'm so here for old photos of mundane bygone architecture! I myself love documenting museums and places I visit, and I really try to make a point to get everything. The entrance, the gift shops, hallways, the cafe. So much stuff that everyone sees, everyone passes through, but almost never gets photographed, and someday its not there anymore. Then looking back that memory is just a hole, something that can only be described but not found again. I've been working to scan my dad's old slides going back to the 60's, photos of family are always fun of course, but I really get excited when there's a wide shot of actual locations that I can someday put online. So much stuff either was never photographed, or if it was the film or prints are long buried or discarded. My grandparents stuff kills me though, they always took a photo of themselves when they'd travel and visit restaurants, but it would be a close up! You could barely see anything else, maybe a guess of where it actually might have been. I find myself shouting at the photos, begging them to have turned 90 degrees left or right and snapped one more shot. So damn close

Tom

I just realized that the Ovaltine secret decoder ring from A Christmas Story is part of an ARG.

Sammie Q

imo scp is much more interesting as to look at as an internet phenomenon and an exercise in collaborative storytelling than trying to judge the stories and worldbuilding on their own merits

nyarri

As soon as Appalachia was brought up, I was secretly hoping you’d have come across that tree lady… her videos used to infest my tiktok fyp. (╥﹏╥)

K2
>>185657480

Oh and there's also a really fascinating article from some years back about the WTC. A journalist was looking for photos of the building, but not the postcard views. Just the actual stuff inside and was not finding much. He eventually located a whole cache of snapshots online on an Estonian flickr clone, a guy working at Windows of the World took them. And it was all the mundane stuff, hallways, doors, back offices, lighting fixtures, the kitchen, etc. Brilliant stuff, amazing to look at. The photographer wasn't caught in the attacks, but had passed a few years later from an accident. Fortunately he had posted the photos, and they live on. The article is called 'Take Picture" by Nick Paumgarten, its on the New Yorker. Google and use your paywall vaulting method of choice...

blitzball

this is the most fun ive had watching a ramble video

John Thomas

Josh's night screaming (from what sounds like a significant distance from Mike and Heather, and assumedly in excruciating pain, if really him) is one of my favorite scenes ever. We don't know that he's dead, it was only teeth (and maybe a finger or two?) in the blanket. The perfect combination of a loose template of information, but still mostly imagination. Psychological horror works best without an encyclopedia.

Emily Blau

Need a part two to this where she does an even deeper dive into back rooms and mallworld. It’s so funny

K2

Ah, in the 90s I was in "AGATE", cause the town I lived in started with A. I remember it, it was kinda fun to do other stuff than the boilerplate classes. My nephews are in GATE classes right now, so I guess its still a thing

Trina Mercado

(Making this its own comment because I really dislike seeming even slightly combative on the Internet, esp in an otherwise friendly community like this Patreon.) A couple people seem vocally miffed about Jenny's opinion on SCPs in a way that kind of surprises me. I mean, there's some pieces of media I disagree with Jenny on, but like... I'm not a fan of Jenny because I agree with her on everything, I'm a fan because she's an excellent writer/presenter. I remember a few months back (I think in her best/worst media of 2024 list?) Jenny decided not to even comment on something she'd wanted to talk about, because she didn't want people to be mean about it in her comments. I guess my point is just... let's try to disagree respectfully here? This is all in good fun, yknow?

codifierbehemoth

I actually like some of the scps that aren't trying to be creepy or horror-themed, but are just a weird artifact or character who hangs out at the sprawling secret underground scp base. Like the living drawing of a girl who can walk onto any piece of paper, or the soda fountain that will give you a cup of any liquid you ask for.

Trina Mercado
>>185648144

God, same on the slurs thing. I'm kind of tickled by the implication that there may be car and truck-specific slurs in the Backrooms universe.

Ted Koutz
>>185647139

I think it's a symptom of people loving worldbuilding but hating writing the actual story. Like you can put together 150 pages about your world's history and magic system but don't want to write a story about a little guy going on a quest with some specific measurable goal

Trina Mercado

Honestly, I think a shady government organization that doesn't conform to the played-out midcentury office stereotype, but instead emulates the millennial open-concept office where there's like, communal ping pong tables and everyone gets called a 'rockstar' or 'ninja' or whatever would go kinda crazy.

Ted Koutz
>>185659338

Mine was GT, like they either weren't clever enough to think up an acronym or couldn't afford extra letters

Lanceeee

I was hoping she (you, Jenny, idk who this is directed towards) would talk about The Walten Files because I had a friend (gen Z) who was suuuuper into it during quarantine (I was a Danganronpa person myself), but I guess I understand not wanting to focus on specific fandoms and instead taking broader strokes. For those who don’t know, The Walten Files are basically a FNAF spinoff/inspired series but with somewhat different characters/lore. I never really watched them but it would be funny to show my friend if she had brought it up.

Susannah B.

In Oregon it was called TAG (Talented And Gifted) and I remember we read The Jungle Book. Ooooh! Sinister!! 😱

Lanceeee

Also - I was in the gifted program in elementary as well, though I don't remember the acronym of GATE. I actually had like a real evaluation and ended up with a gifted IEP. Anyways, most of what I remember from my gifted program was sitting in the computer lab and talking about science, getting to present at the local science fair, and getting put in an english class the grade above me (1st instead of kindergarten, I think). Science fair was like 3rd grade.

Peaslepuff

6:45 Jenny discovers that writers don't always draw from personal experiences :O

Dylan Swain

In Canada in the '80s, I was in the GEM and the GTE programs (Gifted, Talented, Enriched? I don't remember what GEM stood for). Later in junior high there was the Challenge program, which was basically Honours-level courses for the brainiacs. I remember a few of the exercises we did in elementary though: mostly logic puzzles and brain teasers, and there was one time where we were divided into groups and each group was given a cuckoo clock to build, with weird rules about who could do what. Sounds like a government-level psy-op to me

OctopusGrift

I was going to disagree on the SCP stuff but then I realized that I basically agree looking at SCP as a horror thing. I like it as a science fantasy thing where there's a magic pizza box that when you open it creates whatever pizza you want the most. The version of it that is a Star Trek or Dr Who style thing where we're going to explore a strange idea and try to learn about the weird world. Where a lot of the media around SCP (fan video games, and other fan works) focuses on the spooky things with weird rules. I think Star Trek and Dr Who need the occasional horror episode to stay interesting but both would fall flat that was all that there is.

Obelisk

One of the more intriguing entries in the SCP pantheon is entry 2521. It is an entity composed of an unknown material, exhibiting strange behaviors which depend on different stimuli. Ok using this voice is exhausting so suffice it to say, the only way to be safe from the entity is to refer to it using pictures - any other method will summon it to you. So that's how the article is formatted! It's a fun departure from the typical form of the wiki.

DaisyMaisy
>>185644148

Yeah, it's a bummer that Sirenhead got basically stolen out from under him both cos it's shitty that he doesn't get much credit for his most popular creation and also cos it's probably his least interesting monster!

Michael Hill

No mention of the awful Backrooms "video game"?

heyitzmae

initially i thought you were being a little mean about the backrooms extended canon but oh my god i could never in a million years have predicted that there would be anthropomorphized car toxic yaoi

Stacey Tappan

Frankly Jenny talking like a smug TikToker was the scariest thing in the whole video

Lorelei

I truly never registered SCP as horror. Like, I tried to get into it, but it mostly felt so removed from what makes horror horror. I assumed it was just a sort of creative exercise, and I was fine with that as not-my-thing. I think it's all very Portal-influenced.

Jackalri

For anyone interested in a (good) horror novel, I highly recommend we used to live here by Marcus Kliewer! One of my favorite books that I’ve read this year. Unfortunately no zany scientist protagonist but there are epigraphs each chapter that might scratch that itch

DW

As someone born and raised in Appalachia (south eastern ky), I was so relieved to hear Appalachia pronounced correctly.

Waaku Faaku

As previously mentioned the entity feigns docility, furnishing its environment and its "head" (see appendix 24-B) with a large number of inanimate objects which are ostensibly made of polyester, fleece and cotton but are, in actuality, comprised of organic [REDACTED].

god’s favorite sacrificial lamb

your description of the backrooms extended canon just kinda turning it into something indistinguishable from the normal real world reminded me sooo much of you talking about the elevator game in the creepypasta video way back when, where the only difference in *that* world was the big red cross in the sky 😭😭😭😭 like man at that point….who cares…

Steve Ray

OMG Jenny, thank you so much for calling out that despicable trend! Some audio-horror producers use that same template every time -- "I Became A Clerk At My Uncle's Pet Shop...There Are RULES!"

Alex S

I feel like I half disagree on the SCP stuff in particular. I agree that the smug scientist writing style is boring. And I’ve always found the Tik Tok OC stuff dumb. But there are SCP’s that go as light as they can on the science speak and tell the story primarily through addendums or attached documents that follow a more traditional writing style. Those ones can be really well written.

Alex S
>>185667248

(But please don’t stop sharing controversial opinions, I love them just as much as the opinions I fully agree with)

Kiana Martinez

did anyone else get their feelings hurt at the SCP part? 😂

Conrad's_Proctologist

GATE - Jenny is really bringing back the childhood memories lol. Maybe it was different depending on the school/area, but I mostly remember being taken out of class to do the assessments. One of the coolest things I remember about the program is that a couple of biology teachers from the middle school took us GATE kids on an early morning field trip to tide pools during low tide, where we observed all manner of sea life (crabs, lichen, etc.) on the rocks. By far one of the coolest things I was able to do as a kid.

val gecko

the "rule" of locking your doors & windows is especially hilarious given that the one thing i can reliably count on from any member of my appalachian family is that their house is unlocked at all times

Hannah Luke

If you want good non rule based Appalachian horror and like podcasts, I recommend old gods of Appalachia. It’s one of my favorite horror podcasts. Also I had no idea about the whole mall world thing but I kind of had the reverse experience. I was watching Kane pixel’s the oldest view series and at the time I was like wow this looks familiar I guess all malls look the same. But the mall he made in blender was actually modeled to look like a real defunct mall in Dallas, where I grew up and definitely had gone to, and the part that freaked me out the most was when the main character got to an exit that pointed to a real road I know. Feels like it was made to freak out me specifically.

Billy Campelo

Ok but I’m 99% sure the mall clip at around 1:01:20 is actually the mall near my house that just closed down within the last year 😭Poseidon entertainment also used footage from it in a series he did about themed entertainment in the 90’s and it gave me whiplash then too.

Darren Pierce

One school system I was in called it GAT, another called it TAG. Imaginative. Nobody remembers it because the schools were given funding but no plan or clue, so teachers just put together whatever they could. In my classes, the best they could find were worksheets that had names like "Engaging Activities for the Creative Child" and other time wasters. We spent a week on the SCAMPER method. (You can Google that.) We also just spent a lot of time time talking and doodling in our notebooks. If we were the smartest society could produce, god help us.

Sydney

I agree that the unknown is so much scarier than anything that is explained. Your mind fills in the scariest thing that you can think of. When I heard the director say that Terrifier 4 is going to explain Art’s backstory I was soooooo disappointed. Like dude nobody gaf about the lore! That’s not what those movies are about. Those are the worst parts of the movies that already exist. I don’t know how he could not understand this after seeing how badly other horror franchises fall apart after they start to explain too much, especially since he apparently understands that he needs to stop making them after 4.

ethanvonnqueer

the backrooms concept died for me when they started adding entities and levels. like it was thousand times better when it was just a creepy, unexplained, and bizarre location that seemingly exists outside of the normal means of reality.

Jenny Nicholson
>>185669708

It looked like a beautiful mall! It had a big central waterfall fountain shaped like a staircase. I hope to go there in my dreams at some point

Jess

I cannot get over the conspiracy theory about GATE, because the gifted program I was in growing up was called ESP. Personally, my modern day internet horror bugbear is r/nosleep, because there are some pretty good stories on there, but they are buried under endless awful ones that the sub requires you to take entirely seriously, with titles like "My Grandma Was a Demon Hunter and Now Beelzebub is Leaving Dog Poo on my Doorstep - Part 45" (to say nothing of the endless Gary Stu self-inserts who kick the ass of the supernatural force).

Mak

I don't know anything about SCP, but it sounds like a worse version of the video game Control. There are scientists documenting anomalies, but it doesn't take away from the horror and overall mystery of the entire game. Would recommend this game highly to anyone that is interested by the concept.

queerly beloved

the magnus archives-ization of horror 😅

Holden S
>>185670480

funny you say that because… Control was heavily influenced by SCP stuff😭😭

Autumn Taylor

Oh my god they made the pink opaque. I Saw the TV Glow was a documentary

Conrad's_Proctologist

I do wish that Kane Pixels’ Backrooms series was discussed in this video. His work is undoubtedly the biggest reason why the backrooms blew up to such crazy heights of popularity, and it needs to be commended how Kane was able to preserve the integrity of the backrooms’ liminal horror even as the project grew and became massively popular among young fans. Internet horror tends to skew young, and as such there’s a heavy emphasis on lore and theorycrafting over the horror itself. It would’ve been so easy for Kane to fall for the allure of baiting fan theories and leaning into engagement from the Matpat types, making the same mistake that Poppy Playtime and FNAF did, but he’s remained quite tightlipped on revealing his vision over the years, and I think that has worked to his favor. The idea of human hubris and corporate greed causing reality to slowly collapse as the backrooms essentially consume our reality with all the cold, unfeeling lack-of-malice as a data transfer protocol, is a brilliant way of extending the cosmic horror within the original premise into a full fledged horror narrative, without jamming it full of stupid crap like levels, entities, and monsters. Why this endless complex of rooms exists, what mechanism perpetuates its sprawl, these are incomprehensible to us, and any attempt to understand or manipulate the cosmic forces at work will only lead to humanity’s ruination. Kane understands this horror perfectly, and I look forward to his project with A24.

Isaac Jordan

I want to avoid buying a car for as long as possible. However playing creepy banjo music and thinking about creatures as I drive alone down a highway is a very compelling reason to get a car.

Bainhardt

unfortunately, a monthly video posting phenomenon of this duration addles the observer's conscious throughout such that, upon reaching the end, none of the planned observations can be recalled, preventing their publication to the aforementioned "wiki." sorry, I think I'm too good at aloof scientist. which is a shame anyway, because most purported scientists I see in comment sections online write more like this: ohhhh finally someone made a video about demons! loved those creepy lil guys ever since I was the only kid in my neighborhood not afraid to touch one LOL :) sometimes they try to grab you, but... that's actually just their threat response! thank you for making my job a little easier next time someone asks me about what I do!!

Bunnicula

I need to know where to acquire a vintage chuck e cheese plush omg. I'd even make him his own little cigar

Maddie Arnautov

I remember a lot about being in the gifted program but the thing I remember most is they kept trying to get us to compete in robotics competitions. Such sitcom logic. Uhhh I guess these kids are smart? So they should build robots about it I guess? I hated it so much. I hated those stupid robots.

Al
>>185651820

Yeah, I imagine the standard SCP stuff would have more charm if it acknowledged how silly it all is, which zooliminology does. While also being cute.

Joshua Zhanson

I feel like this video is a little mean - it feels like making fun of “cringe” deviantart ocs when it’s kids having fun. They’re not professionals. Some aspiring writers are getting their start on the backrooms wiki, and making fun of “bad writing” or “bad scientist voice” is not nice :(

bluewolfie
>>185672830

I mean like... yeah, but look at the prompt. what was Jenny supposed to do? also I feel like it's fairly even-handed about how it's like "and this is a kid thing, but it bugs me". We all have those things!

Jackson Armona

I was in GATE (ours was called GATEWAY) and I totally remember doing stuff. It was usually just like projects over ancient civilizations??? (Viking stuff + Mesopotamia) and also a lot of brain puzzles. We just like watched the reading rainbow a lot 💀

Ryan Phillips
>>185650024

Hey! This comment got me to dip into SCPs again after a 7 year hiatus and…. Wow! 5031 may be my new favorite! Thank you for that, feels like a capper on the many many SCPs I’ve read.

Tess C

TikTok Tree Lady made me laugh. I actually really love the concept of trees moving of their own accord, such as Birnam Wood moving in Macbeth or the tree in the Green Knowe series of books by Lucy M. Boston. The idea that under the right circumstances a tree, or a whole forest, changes location...I think that's so cool. I think it's creepier too if the tree is still just a tree, not some other being in disguise or whatever.

Amelie C

tweaked out Margret Qualley talking about mallworld def feels downstream from when people were obsessed with like reality shifting a few years back. post covid psychosis main character syndrome everyone needs to get on mood stabilizers, run a half marathon, or become buddhist STAT

Derek LaCombe

A lot of the stuff in this video calls to mind my big pet peeve in current internet horror, which is that no matter what the theme or vibe of the type of horror is, it's so normal to just slap a vhs filter over it. Even in things that are making no attempt at all to be vintage in any way. There's also always bonus points in it too for things being shot from angles that you can not imagine a video camera being in, and also the huge wealth of videos from the 80s or 90s that were filmed in convenient vertical. Makes me feel old to think kids of internet horror age now truly only see vhs as a way to make something scary, and not even old....

Holly L

I understand what you mean about not revealing yourself as the creator of an ARG on an artistic level, but on a practical level I feel like it's asking people who are almost always small independent artists to forgo all credit and funding that would have come from the project for its entire duration - I just can't imagine the maintaining that illusion is worth what could be a pretty severe financial and career blow for the majority of people.

Jenny Nicholson
>>185672408

I got him on ebay in sort of rough shape! I gave him the Mr Tomato treatment I talked about in the last video where I fully unstuffed & laundered him and put new polyfil in Then made him a new hat and vest because the originals were felt and very tattered! Now he is clean and squishy

ToastyKen
>>185659401

Fwiw I still love SCP, but I also enjoyed hearing Jenny's take on them. I think her critique reminds me of something I only just realized recently, that a lot of science fiction is about some guy being The Smartest Man Alive, and I can see how that can be problematic, in the same way that 2010s tech bro TED Talk culture approached everything from a My Smart Idea Will Solve All Problems perspective, and you can see where that got us .. That said, my favorite types of SCPs actually kind of go against that, where all the smartest people are still powerless. To me, the appeal of SCP isn't that science solves the problem, but that even when we take our best shot with science, that often still doesn't solve the problem... which feels very very relevant these days...

Ghost Byte

The SCP rant is so funny. Jenny they're already dead you can stop kicking!!

Al

My favorite SCP is SCP-999 (which I learned from an old Drawfee vid lol) which is like this harmless blob that just hangs around - but I think that SCP's page also speaks to this trend Jenny's talking about, where modern online horror can't leave things be. I noticed they've added a lame "addendum" to the page where it interacts with some malevolent SCP and it ends in "maniacal laughter" and "slaughter" and it feels like another case of "can't leave well enough alone". Obviously the nature of the SCP website is building on information but many of these "addendums" read like fanfic of the original SCP entry.

Piltheser

I dont think even in the early days SCP resembled what Jenny thinks SCP is. Now when the average story is about how a woman was kept prisoner as a specimen for 30 years because her boss was threatened by her, so he faked reports that she was anomalous so she lost all human rights to the organisation, its just clear this is a stereotype Jenny came up with once and doesnt care enough to examine.

Piltheser
>>185663170

As someone reviewing 2521 years ago said, "just cause its very well presented, doesnt mean it isnt Candlejack"

George Squares

Hey Jenny. Love your videos. I just wanted to bring up that I'm a writer who lives in Appalachia who's done folklore studies. I think in part why you'll see many cryptids pop up in this region in particular is the storytelling culture that came from Irish and Scottish settlers that in part grew up with elements of the Irish fairy faith. I've read a lot of Irish folklore stories and there are some notable parallels, particularly with changelings, or with fairies who pretend to be the voice of a young daughter's mother who lured her repeatedly out to the bog. I have a lot of Irish books which recorded these sources from primary oral sources and would be happy to share these with you if you're interested. A lot of real folklore is interesting because it's passed down from generation to generation and usually holds some grain of truth in it. A lot of bad internet horror can feel like it's encroaching upon years of generational history, misunderstood its cultural context, and put its own "twist" on matters. Which is often why it comes across as so inauthentic.

Tom

Reading other comments makes me think Jenny voiced some controversial opinions in this one. But I gotta say, she absolutely skewered all the cases I'm knowledgeable about, so I'm inclined to trust her instincts on the rest. I'm a big Lovecraft fan who has been similarly disappointed by the fruits of SCP. And no surprise: good art is always hard to make, and consistency is impossible with multiple authors who aren't trying to maintain it. And I like it when Jenny talks about the challenges that face authors of serial IP. In fact, if I could nominate a ramble topic, it would be "Jenny's Tips to Avoid Ruining Your Own Serial IP."

Al
>>185674408

Idk, it reminds me of that performance artist who lived in that secret room in that mall, who didn't reveal for ages that he had created all these sculptures under a bridge, and it was really cool for burgeoning student artists to explore that space without knowing who put all this stuff here. I do feel like if you commit to the performance art of an ARG, like you decide that's how you want to present your art, there is inherently an element of committing to the bit on a meta-level. I don't think it needs to be totally anonymous like it was for that guy with his sculptures under the bridge (because he also had a uni job at the time and could presumably afford to not take credit for this) but I do think if this is something you're really passionate about, maintaining an element of keeping up the facade is kind of part of it.

Lexi Lily

Backrooms Entity No. DCCLIIX: Jenny (Jennifera Nicholsonis) Habitat: Plush forest in any level Threat Level: 5 Aggression: 5/5 Intelligence: 5/5 (IQ 329, we checked) Danger: 5/5

Ghost Byte
>>185670031

Oh man I hate what has happened to nosleep, it's been over for probably a decade.

DLKWolf
>>185663869

Kind of agree with this. In rare instances did I feel it was horror, unless it was very clear, and usually, the best of it was detached from the foundation as a whole. Seemed like a lot of the best stories the foundation just stumbled upon something weird. Foundation centric stories read more like thrillers. Still fun but different itch. I forget the number, but the one SCP that stuck with me mostly with how it was compared has the line "I found where they died" or a variation of it. Again the foundation felt like it was just kind of stumbling through that one

David Alexander

I'm normally not into horror stuff, but your enthusiasm was infectious in this video and I really enjoyed it.

Ezra

The backrooms thing reads more like they didn’t intend for it to be a new horror staple and were just posting the room as a joke. I think the potential horror for the backrooms definitely lies much more in the surreal and maddening feeling of being lost in a bland, repetitive nothingness than some leveled monster chase thing like a lot of the games. It reminds me of what drew me to Abandoned by Disney… The idea of the island was compelling enough, I don’t need a cringe Mickey monster to make it horrifying.

LumalCone

I got to keep my gifted kid psychic powers, sucks that yours got taken away. Must be a US thing.

Olivia Siggers

I completely agree that fandom-ifying horror content especially anything meant to be unknown and unnerving like the backrooms can really take away from the tone, however I absolutely need to see if anyone is writing enemies to lovers fics about the truck and the mustang

Mink

One of the scariest internet creepypasta stories I’ve ever read is from that one search and rescue Reddit account that did the stories about the stairs in the woods. The stair stories weren’t that scary but the account had some good ones and one really stuck with me. He said he was looking for a kid that had gone missing and they heard him calling for help. They were following the sound and then they realized it had started over. Like the sound of the kid calling for help was on a loop. Idk the idea of that is genuinely really scary.

Steve Ray
>>185657536

Since the SCP sites and Wattpad both accumulate stories and worldbuilding of varied quality, can you flesh out how SCP is more interesting than Wattpad?

Erin Young

they/them hauler i love you

Saskia Lange

Watching LOST for the first time, and it's really amazing how much of analog horror is just dharmacorp ripped wholesale

Saskia Lange

& also thinking about how channel zero is generally disliked among "creepypasta fans" while in my opinion actually making scary coherent stories from the material they're given.

Ted Koutz
>>185681932

Somebody made a short film loosely involving the stairs one and posted it on the Lovecraft subreddit, it's called You Have a Visitor. Their Youtube channel is Flightless Films. I'm not associated with, friends with, or actually these guys

Cleo Oops

That blasé scientist type trope feels very Welcome to Nightvale to me.

Knitter? I hardly know her!

A TV Tropes Ramble would so good!!! My problem with ARGs is I can know Morse code and that things can be hidden on webpages and what have you... I just never find them, and I'm certainly never going to be first to solve anything and usually I don't even know they're happening. The Best value I get from ARGs is hearing about them when they've been successfully concluded. I must admit I have a fondness for the backrooms and liminal space stuff and aesthetics. Most of the reason I started watching Severance. But whereas I'm desperate to know the rules of the severance hallways, I reject the idea of rules and levels to the backrooms, except for my personal head canon that that website with everything that could be written on it... Library of Babel or something

heavvymetalqueen

i like SCP in sorta like...a literary mechanic. maybe i like the idea of its potential. I think it'd be fun to write a horror story through minutiae and half redacted documents and bad photographs. a postmodern epistolary horror....and i fully believe some people definitely have done this or at least attempted to. I remember one of the demos on one of the DreadX collections being sorta like that. what they don't tell you about constructing a narrative that way is that you kinda have to be cracked at constructing nonlinear narratives and that's HARD!! even for skilled experienced writers!

David

Immediate all-time-top-ramble (in question).

Matthew Mottet

As someone who grew up in GA and has experienced Monster Pla...Mansion many times, I'm so gagged at Jenny's hat and all the talk about the ride

Joshua Elliott

Every time I hear 'appa-lay-shuh' my back actually shudders and my face does a thing. Thank you for putting in the effort to pronounce it like the locals.

Theodore Lehman
>>185687282

The best SCPs are the ones that are meant as comedy pieces but aren't relegated to the designated Joke SCP list, such as SCP-2337. A document in the site's pseudo-clinical scienceboy tone describing a bird that talks nonsense very loudly. The worst SCP is the one that's literally Phasmophobia IRL and no one knows where these ghost-chasing weirdos are from or how they make the ghosts stop doing ghost things when they go to a place.

Brogggggy

My favorite thing about the backrooms is the meme levels like McDonalds - like a check point lol

billythedoor

Studies indicate the SCP most appropriate for adaptation into plush is SCP 999. Most researchers of millennial age will refer to SCP 999 as "just a little guy". Peculiar.

Queen Emily

I think you are completely right about SCP as a structure. That being said, there 100% are great SCP articles, but they are good in spite of the format, not because of it.

c

obsessed with that evil tree

Autumn Taylor
>>185662679

My gifted program had us read Frindle, so obviously they were trying to teach us to talk in code

Jakub Makalowski

There is something joyfully absurd about a picture of a mysterious, unknown space eventually turns into a Cars fanfic

LW

I was kicked out the GATEWAY program, probably why I’m barred from Mall World.

The Alienated Librarian

My first year in GATE (which I know many states called TAG) was just four 3rd graders from different classes gathering in a room once a week to learn about tesselation and other such concepts that were not too advanced to understand but kind of too advanced to matter? We were absent for one hour. In 4th and 5th grade way more kids got on a bus and went to a middle school for half of every Thursday, which as much as I loved the program I do think that aspect made it harder for me to keep up in class and especially hard to make friends. Until college my friends were still just other kids from this program, which added a sort of snobby element to how we saw ourselves and were seen by our peers. We were in full classes of other kids from other elementary schools who would later join us in middle or high school as they filtered us through and sized up. We had middle school teachers and I learned in detail about Egyptian mummies, dodecahedrons, and the history of cloning. I designed and filmed my own game show, built and programmed a LEGO robot, met a hamster, made a paper chain out of mobius strips (why?), and mastered Roller Coaster Tycoon. I live in Virginia where education is a huge priority and I'm grateful to all the adults who made this possible, but the "gifted kid" problem is pretty apparent now. It was not good how we were gassed up and othered, it was REALLY not good the message everyone at every school got from us being mostly white (because standardized tests are racist), and it was not good to miss so much class time and recess with our peers. I grew up valuing a certain kind of intelligence and being intolerant of anyone who thought differently from me, and I know I didn't learn it from my mom because it always horrified her how much of a dick I was being! Not for nothing but we were also almost entirely neurodivergent kids whose grades had not struggled yet, but invariably would. So being sectioned off like that had some massive benefits for us that harmed other kids, and gave us less time to master socializing with neurotypicals and adapting to that world, even though my biggest stumbling block to "success" has always been that I struggle to adapt and I'm impatient with people I think seem dumb. Soooo... C+ for the room.

Danielle Schatten
>>185643131

coming back a day later and seeing 7 upvotes on Jenny's Literal Actual Patreon is really heartening tbh; I was spiraling so hard after that ban but knowing that yes it was indeed Redditor Mods Being Redditors is giving me life and I wanna let yall know that if you have ever been made to feel lesser because of a smug Dr. Who fan You May Be Entitled To Financial Compensation in the form of taking their lunch money and means of production <3

The Alienated Librarian
>>185701553

Clearly I should not have written this before hearing the conspiracy theory. Now I can't decide if my vivid memories debunk it, or if that is far overshadowed by the observation that we were neurodivergent. Were they just teaching us Roller Coaster Tycoon to quash the growing threat of our psychic powers????? I *did* say I met a hamster, but am now remembering it was a guinea pig. Did the aliens implant these memories? WAS MY ROBOT LEGO CAR JUST A WAY TO STOP ME FROM GROWING MY TELEKINESIS BY RELYING ON ROBOTS? WHAT DOES IT *M*E*A*N*?

jamezilla

The show is Doctor Who, the CHARACTER is The Doctor.

Tally

Didn’t expect transphobic Lightning McQueen :\ Also did you know that level also features free WiFi? But it degrades over time. Because that’s scary.

Woo Foxu

I'm going to start writing all my research articles in the voice of a blasé creepypasta scientist. I will withhold all my relevant data and just go, 'we don't know why it does this, how curious'.

Trystan

41:28 'Documentation stretches back to prehistoric times' is unironically the funniest sentence.

Hypixion
>>185662346

I am more bothered by her generalization of the people who like SCP and how she thinks she knows what those people are like. "If you write this I know you are X and X and have done X and liked X..." Like, why is this neccesary? It's not only mean, it's just not true.

Connor

I’m from West Virginia, so hearing Appalachia/Appalachian pronounced correctly is like seeing the sun after 6 months in a dark, damp hole

Silky
>>185703713

In the OG series they actually do just call the character Doctor Who

Hypixion

I always thought SCP was a millenial thing. The only people I know that like SCP are millenials. (Guess this just solidifies my total ignorance of anything going on around the world) With a lot of things, the rules based horror or thriller stories all depend on execution. Everything can be done well and bad. I like the idea of cosmic horror but it has been done to death by so many stories that every time I notice that is what it is going for I just stop reading.

Molly

Ok so am I misremembering the term "liminal spaces" from at least my childhood in the 90s (and I had thought actual historical mystical practices)? I remember witch media and some kids horror media talking about like doorways and dusk/dawn being "liminal spaces" where magic can be manifested, or ghosts can be contacted or sometimes demons can reach through to earth. I actually didn't know about this new meaning, but if the term is new maybe I am just applying it retroactively to this old meaning? Can someone help me out here?

Raphael Caetano

Hate when horror fans do numbers. "Agression: 4/5" fuck off. It's very anime powerscalling like and I think it's so lame. Same goes to iq, are you giving this monster a standerized test? Are hanging this monster a sheet of paper and a pencil to answer a test???

Pendragon

The mockumentary/found footage movies "Horror in the High Desert" follow every single point of the Appalachian part of the ramble to the point that it would be a spoiler to specify, but... Some of the sillier bits are played totally straight, and it's so funny to see here a possible inspiration for it. (Not good movies, but kinda charming and with pretty scary found footage bits) Also, for me one of the most frustrating parts of this new horror internet is the need for everything to be interconnected a la Pixar Theory. Not only is every cryptid or SCP short horror story now dissected and over explained, but it's also just part of a bigger lore waiting to be inventoried on a wiki. I can't really explain why (that's how real animals are studied for example) but it makes it much less magical for me.

Connor B

Me and my homies HATE Vincent

Elizabeth Abosch

I remember my GT (what it was called in Indiana) lessons exactly. I wrote a rap about Tapirs. Not by choice, I was instructed to. Beyond that we just did cool things like paint like Michelangelo painted the Sistine chapel (lie under our desks and paint a piece of paper taped to the underside of our desks), which tbf any kid could do, “gifted” or not.

Alyssa R

Gonna bone up on some SCP prose/style to incorporate into my dissertation so it’s more scientifically blasé

Nikolai Osinoff

i think there are good scps. there just aren't any good scary ones. i think the rule obsession in stuff like scps and creepypasta stems from the importance of ritual in childlore (go to the bathroom at midnight, say the name three times, that sort of thing). its very silly, which is fine if you're ten and want scare your friends at a slumber party, but doesn't make for good literature.

nora

The point of engaging with SCP or the backrooms is to play, not to write good horror fiction, and I think that's on purpose. The fandom allegory is appropriate. There's probably nuggets of good storytelling in the sprawling improv but it's not really a fair comparison to good creepypasta.

Vivian Cagayakegirlz

i also dont like scp very much, but i do think scp-8980 is a really effective piece and has nothing to do with the whole "cool organization that knows EVERYTHING" shtick

Ella Taran

yes it’s ur energy babe. it takes u to mall world.

tumbleweed🍂

51:29 is that jerma the skin-stealer

Aurora

I have a very vivid memory of being in gifted and talented and the project was to design a roller coaster concept and these two mean girls next to me ripped off the coolest part of my design.(it was an underwater roller coaster) Still bitter about that lol Also I think we made 3d shapes out of paper at one point? Wish I'd had psychic powers instead though, that sounds cool.

Zoara

Today Jenny learns that the Backrooms are just today's (are they even still relevant?) SCPs

Bear

Jenny saw that trrrrruck and she smiled so much.

SuperDuperSnep

this is one of your best rambles and is definitely deserving of the *

Danielle Schatten

we didn't have GATE but we had CAS, Center for Advanced Studies and I was in that it was literally segregation, using biased questions meant to put the white and Asian kids in one class and the Black kids in other classes in our "racially harmonic public school" so that the white parents wouldn't riot that their precious babies were exposed to rap music or people who didn't have access to laptops

Danielle Schatten
>>185719237

and trust me the fact that myself and pretty much all other students of Jewish descent were all in CAS has been absolutely GREAT for combatting all the conspiracy theories that my ethnic group runs the government and has definitely NOT caused me any horrified trauma dreams related to genocides taking place between the African and Asian continents I have nothing to do with and in fact actively and directly fight against (losing my family in the process)

Danielle Schatten
>>185686930

the difference is that Severance was written by Ben Stiller and a team of career spec fic/drama TV writers, financed and vetted by Apple, acted by legendary titans like Christopher Walken, John Tuturro, and Adam Scott as well as amazing newcomers who were thoroughly auditioned, had its entire scripting and story arc process thoroughly completed before being aired, and was overall an exceedingly professional product that was still released in an uphill market that succeeded despite the odds and the bathrooms is Wattpad for Redditors

Danielle Schatten
>>185683945

do yourself a favor and if you haven't hit season 6 yet stop now. just pretend the show got canceled and jar jar abrams died in a tragic plane crash that was ironic but mourned bc he had so much to live for. please i'm begging you

Daisy McC

The first video in the Mall section is *actually* footage of my childhood mall Seminole town center and I felt so gaslit 😂

Lump’s Moms

The challenger sounds like a Bad Car

Danielle Schatten
>>185653850

if i had a nickel for every time someone missed the point of House of Leaves i would have two nickels... for each atom in the known universe jesus christ it is a metafictional novel about the inability to ever truly know what a story actually is without viewing it directly it's not just a spoopy haunted house book i want to break people's FINGERS-

s

tbh as a huge scp fan the good scps (which i shall not share out of respect for jennys opinion) are EXTREMELY inaccessible due to the format of the articles. like sure i can shove this wall of text at you and be like "in my opinion this is really awesome literature" and it requires so much background knowledge and context it feels not really worth explaining anymore. and also yeah a not-insignificant amount of the community is the kind who get mad at pride flags baked into the html of some articles. Html that you can turn off at any time

Larry Bewarey

I was in gifted program. ngl it was sick as hell. We did plays and messed around with snakes.

s
>>185722702

the articles which are more accessible to an outsider follow a format more adjacent to "tales" (scp version of regular prose writing) and are usually quite controversial/not as well received by the wider community. the scene has developed a lot since the early days of the site and as such is more isolated than ever before i'd say. the community is large enough that it isn't really an issue that it's not attracting new audiences though, and it's not like that's a goal of the site either

maggie yarbrough

In some circumstances, the entity takes a beastly form and for reasons unknown adorns itself with the clothing of a human sheriff. Many have reported its screams, which pertain to something alike, 'DON'T GO INTO THE MARSH!' and other warnings at haphazard intervals. Others have reported hearing music like the distorted singing of monsters, which creates a feeling of terror and madness.

Patrick Lee

Now I’m wondering if “Wild Massive” by Scotto Moore was inspired by the back rooms. I’ll be so disappointed if so 😅

mysticaldesign

i’m going to need a separate full ramble of jenny analyzing the pronoun choices for creepy internet wiki creatures

Gabby

God people LOVE rules

anotherautumn

love your stuff about liminal spaces and such! i really love the places we inhabit and the history we imprint on them and vice verca, you put a lot of the feelings into words well! i love transitional periods and places sm ...

mimi

Didn’t expect Jenny to describe in detail the personality of my friend who likes SCPs and showed them to me

Elise

My job is kinda close to the job of a SCP scientist so it was very funny to me to see the whole trope blow up in popularity. I think there's something very comforting about the routine of it all in fiction - you have your own little space, your coworkers (who are never fired), specific instructions, even a uniform...most people see it as satire but I truly think it's nostalgia for a time we've never known. My job can be pretty random and lonely and I wish I had a corporate labcoat and training videos sometimes.

Gabby

The whole scary thing about Appalachia stuff is that everyone that lives there basically coexists with the scary stuff and they all know to just ignore anything scary. But the tree girl who lives there is just filming and obsessing about the paranormal thing supposedly happening to her

David Bleek

Looks like I'm going down a hauler rabbit hole. Honestly a bit disappointed you didn't mention that they offer their passengers soft drinks and string cheese every 6 hours

Euphrasie Cullen

Somehow I never would have guessed that the backrooms had a tortoise and the hare parable where the hare is a racist car and the tortoise is a nonbinary truck

Yara Tovar

I actually tried writing fanfiction before, and I learned that posting a chapter on the website will only give me a certain amount of energy before I ran out of ideas and then I am unable to write. Currently trying my best to write on a doc before posting but it is really hard.

Grady Wiehe

“They want to seem in charge and blasé about forces beyond the comprehension of everyone else” Just say his name…”so that everyone else goes ‘what an interesting man!’” Just say his name “they think it’s cool and hot to be a scientist, but that’s hard…but I can write a character who’s a scientist in that, but without having to know anything about real science” just say his name…we all know exactly who is this, right? I mean unfortunately he owns like half the internet now

Orcus

Tales From The Gas Station is the thing you described SCP with but good, would recommend tbh also for Backrooms, the main draw is the Kane Pixels series on YT (The Oldest View is also good in the same vain) Jennys made up rules for when she becomes a cryptic old woman are funny as a european because im pretty sure ive heard them

VeggieBrah

Don't let Terrence Howard find Mall World Tik-Tok.

Hannah R

I feel like the piece of media that closest captures what the Backrooms should have been is Yume Nikki. Very rarely is there an actual danger you can encounter, but almost all of the horror comes from being in an unsettling place that is hard to navigate and is (mostly) not inhabited by humans. It even has the “randomly ending up in new ‘levels’” thing, and it’s just generally propelled by a feeling of dread and fear. I know that the Backrooms is the way it is bc it’s largely edited by children who are exploring the idea of creating their own scary level, but my ideal world has it in this Yume Nikki style video game

Hannah Royal

I was in GATE and we just did like brain teaser puzzles and beginner geometry. One time we built towers out of cardboard! Also, from NC, Appalachian pronunciation can be remembered by the saying: if you say it wrong, I’ll throw an “apple at cha!”

Eric Kaplan

this prose style is just the AD&D Monster Manual. "Some say the Shmorgoth is due to experimentation by a mad wizard, and others by a demented godling, but the actual origins of this fell beast are unknown at this present time." Always made me wonder -- what exactly is riding on this wizard/godling controversy, and how is it being resolved.

Crescent Minor
>>185669754

"Engaging Activities for the Creative Child". Oh. Ew. I don't know what you experienced. I got extra book reports to help me with being 'gifted' when I was falling behind in math (and other things) because I couldn't focus on it, it took a hundred times longer to write out than think about. Thanks, extra work in special meetings with the librarian who hates kids.

Kevin Rausch

https://www.youtube.com/@kanepixels/videos Kanepixels take on the backrooms is still the best and only take on the horror series that I actually love. Hilariously, I believe fans of the backrooms hate it because it's not accurate to "backrooms lore" and is its own thing. Essentially he took the whole idea and turned into a story/world about a failed experiment that was created for good intentions, and the horror of not knowing what is in the rooms, let how one accidentally fall into it. Kanepixels also did another horror series about a abandoned mall and a hand crafted giant, that has a surprising amount of symbolism about the past being forgotten. Overall the true reason I bring this up, is the fact that it is very obvious that he put an insane amount of effort and planing into his videos to make his series very engaging and terrifying without "explaining every little detail of why you should be scared and why it is funny and why you should be interested". I USED to love SCPs but then they just let any writer make a story and it completely missed the entire point of a facility keeping mysterious items/monsters of varying dangers for public safety, and their failing attempts at trying to fully understand "or control" these things. Good stories like the blood pool, the teddy bear, and the origami dragons, vs GARFIELD, minecraft. pile of breasts, among us, RECTUM SPOONS, bubble bath bonbons, jesus, porn, sonic, rainbow snake, etc, etc, etc.... Anyway thank you SO MUCH for this topic as it is something that I think is a big problem with story telling in general. Hope you are doing good and have a wonderful day, and sorry for writing so much text. :)

LapisScarab

So cathartic for someone else to finally say that the "noclip" thing in the backrooms fully ruins it just a couple of words in

Paulie Paul

The Mallworld people for sure deserve roasting just because of their claim to specialness. The backrooms thing seems like a pretty harmless hobby, so the takedown seemed a little mean to me. But I really love the "stalking tree" story at the end -- props to the creator for the complete bonkers-ness of that one, and booooo to the people who got so invested in it that they started nitpicking the already ridiculous details. Just have fun, people! Finally: when Jenny started talking about internet hoaxes I really hoped she would bring up a faintly-remembered late 90s web journal/story/mystery called something like "For the love of ____" (I want to say Jenny but that's probably not it) which was a pretty darn fun, mostly text based story which also included photos and short video clips (filmed vlog style by the titular "_____"), where an internet investigator is posting entries from the online journal of a girl whose entries start getting darker and more cryptic (think The Diary of Laura Palmer), until she eventually stopped posting/disappeared. Anybody else remember this?

Bunnicula
>>185734230

They don't even know they're partially aping Yume Nikki or House of Leaves or even Corpse Party style stuff, and as Jenny points out, that's part of the problem! They have no real notion of the actual source material or inspiration, they don't understand why that strain of digital horror exists, where it comes from or what makes it work. The backrooms games that got semi popular were so disappointing because the audience is allergic to atmospheric build up. You'll see "I'm a depressed loner teen going craaaazy from online" stuff go viral and get big and they only know slender mansion fanfic they read at 11 and FNAF but have no idea the Serial Experiments Lain game exists. All vibes, no themes. They can't finish it because there is no point to the piece.

Olivia

I have no interest in creepypasta so I started this one with a mildly annoyed frown on my face tbh, but I was entertained throughout the whole damn thing. Thank you for making a shitty topic actually engaging Jenny! Also thank you x100 for saying how damn stupid the Blase Scientist stuff is. I HAAAAATE that writing style + idea that the writer and/or his scientist OC would be smug and unimpressed in front of cosmic horrors and 'entities.' Makes me want to take those lame wiki writers by the head and give them a swirly 80s bullying style

Cova Brouwer Gentry

So funny this video topic was chosen while I’ve been binging CreepCast all week, and in one of the episodes they mentioned Jenny’s knowledge of MLP hahaha

Amy Cooper

Woah! What a bizarre overlap of interests. I've been obsessed with Appalachian folk music for a while now (started with shanties and Celtic music. Appalachian music shares deep roots with Europe. Some people even report... the roots moving ooOO-) and I was utterly unaware of all the spooky folklore attached to the region. So cool!

daisy

GOD THIS VIDEO IS SO FUCKING GOOD

Ben

I do think the gameification of the backrooms does reduce the horror factor but i also think its kind of sweet that its developed a community of people that really enjoy and are being creative

Nioli

I was not prepared for foul-mouthed Lightning McQueen

Louis Z

Subject observed adjusting hat with frequency Subject purchased hat from unknown source Conclusion: hat refuses to fit correctly to punish subject for continual disrespect of Six Flags

Stranger Kate

The Hauler and Mustang exchange reading like Cars fan fiction

Bella Thomas

For those who like the idea of SCPs without the “blase man” of it all, I HIGHLY recommend playing Control. Very fun story and creatures, and a shadow government who are terrible at their jobs, as the government would be.

VermiciousKnid

I was a G.A.T.E. kid, I remember it being fun. I remember lots of testing and fun activities and field trips, nothing sinister. But I love that I'm part of an offical conspiracy theory! Also, love the hat. It reminds me of those little rides in front of grocery stores.

James Eric Waugh

Jen is so nice, her parents named her twice.

Birdie

People speak in hyperbole so much online but I genuinely mean it when I say I could just watch Jenny read through the entire backrooms wiki

Regina Cuddeback

The original Backrooms post is why I never saw the appeal. It was cringe from the start

Robert Noble

Sigh … a long wait - and no clue what you are even taking about 😟 Maybe next month .

Sophia

I don't know if anyone else has pointed this out, but it always bothers me. Both pronunciations of "Appalachia" are correct, but it is dependent on region! "Latch" is south, "lay" is from the more far north parts. I think a lot of the internet cryptid lore is referring to the South, so it would be the "latch" version. I used to live in the far northern Appalachian region, and then later moved to NC, and that was the first time I every heard people say "appa-latch-uh." Regional differences can be pretty fun, but also sometimes confusing!

Devin Zain
>>185736632

I was going to comment that I think they’re all trying to sound like the gravity falls journal but you’re completely right!! This is what that is emulating and people in my generation/younger don’t even know it

Cami

I was in my state’s version of GATE and the session I can remember best is the one where they tried to warn us from becoming obsessed with perfectionism (it involved drawing circles bc it’s impossible to freehand a perfect circle). Didn’t work on me!

Jadelan

The concept of being chased/haunted by a little tree is so funny, like that seems like something a cartoon would come up with to make fun of horror tropes

Isaac Melton

holy shit i am so glad you covered the awful appalachia (you said it right, btw, as someone whose family is from there and who is personally from About Around There it is indeed correctly pronounced appaLATCHia) internet horror trend, it bugs me so severely watching people do this cringey tumblr #witchy #aesthetic special trend about old gods and 'skinwalkers' (a Navajo mythological being appropriated to be in the eastern woodlands by these tiktokers) being there and omg only in appalachia do you never go outside if you hear your name called at night and oh us appalachian people sure are able to see through the veil between humans and magic, it's such embarrassing unserious cosplay and i'm ranting so much about it but it truly is THE top pet peeve of mine for current internet horror... i'm sorry but that ~human scream you heard in the appalachian wilderness~ is just a fox and my relatives far back were more busy worrying about paying the bills and not dying of coal workers' pneumoconiosis and what/if they would eat tomorrow as opposed to Innately Connected To The Fae or whatever

Hannah Costanzo

I knew that was a Monster Mansion hat! We all love a ride where you get digested at the end!

Isaac Melton
>>185756367

'effect: flawless skin' on the videos about being stalked by a craaaazy scary killer tree is also killing me

Ash Gabrielle

The obsession people have with "lore" these days absolutely ruins everything. It ruins storytelling, and apparently it ruins internet horror too. Lore is the enemy! EDIT: Also, as someone who is technically from the Appalachian Mountains but not from what we think of as "Appalachia" (I'm from a great deal further north), I appreciate your efforts to pronounce it authentically, even though in the north Appalachians we still just pronounce it the way most of the US does. It's not real Appalachia unless you pronouce it App-a-latch-ya, after all!

Brian Webb

The mallworld/GATE stuff is interesting to me because I was in GATE as a kid and its true that I don't really remember a whole lot of it. THat's probably because it was 30 years ago and I barely remember the normal classes I was in. I've definitely repeatedly dreamt about a fictitious, sprawling mall, as well as a 'miniature' or abbreviated version of the town based on where I grew up. I think its common enough that theres nothing strange about it. As a kid, going to the mall was an experience full of different emotions and we've all probably held onto that nostalgia in the back of our minds, enough so that we pull from it while dreaming.

Miraflorina

It’s been like a decade since I read any SCP stuff, and the impression I remember having from the writing style was less ‘blase cool unfrazzled scientist’ and more ‘cold, callous bureaucrat’. Something akin to an IMF economist or an accountant at a concentration camp; just pure indifference to the actual protagonists of the stories, the sacrificial Class-D personnel

Alejandro De Anda
>>185758059

Ive been talking about this for awhile and no one agrees. It drives me nuts. Too much lore and over explaining in pop music as well which i blame on Taylor and Lana

Natalie Arnold

I don't know what SCP means and it's funnier if I don't look it up.

Sydney

I’m rooting for The Hauler and The Mustang. They can make it work. The Mustang will mellow out after he comes out of the garage…if you know what I mean.

PurpleIsDebeste

okay i was upset at the degradation of horror through fandomisation and the love of big long lists coldly listing all the facts and rules about them in the backrooms, but i’ve changed my mind completely, the hauler is my best friend and i will love it forever i stg its the scp thats a cereal box all over again

Maggie

This video was hilarious. I loved it!! I could listen to you read bad wikis for ages. I always assumed the blasé scientists were evil due to their bad and sometimes torturous interactions with whatever beings they were experimenting on. But your Mary Sue interpretation is so much funnier. If I stumble upon the trope going forward, I will be reading it in your voice.

Katrina Kaufman

Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore! Quoth the raven, "Hey!"

PurpleIsDebeste

okay the mall world thing is so funny to me cus like… i live outside the U.S. so obviously the shopping centres where i live look a little different cus the architectural styles evolved distinctly from eachother. so none of the mall world photos really look that familiar to me cus theyre playing off the tropes of malls in the u.s and theres something really funny to me about like. “everyone has dreamt of this exact same mall… but also those dreams are coincidentally localised almost entirely around the places where malls that looked like that were and people that arent from there have never experienced this ever.” its just so blatantly not a real supernatural phenomenon

Skylar P.

“There’s a lot to unpack about this car.” 🤣 I’m dying.

Arrow

With the Backrooms, I love the concept of an endless "liminal" space but I hate that its been filled up with rules and levels and creatures; that is =so= uninteresting. Its just SCP at Home. 😭 It was very satisfying hearing Jenny's opinion on it all, lol

reagan

a few of the shifting people are probably experiencing psychosis honestly…

Brian Webb
>>185752271

Hmm this is kind of what Jenny does, everything she talks about here is part of the pop culture arena. What would you want her to talk about next month that you can understand?

Robbie

obviously creepypasta is always popular with kids so content made by them shouldn't be shocking but the Hauler and Mustang wiki article still caught me off guard. like that was literally your 7 year old nephew telling you a story he made up about his trucks

Mike Metzler

The rule-heavy SCP and backrooms stuff really give me the vibes of fan created D&D sourcebooks and monster manual entries.

Margaret Smith

In terms of the 'Dear David' hoax- David was made as a joke by artist Adam Ellis while he worked at Buzzfeed. Then, after he left, Buzzfeed made a really horrible movie about it without consolting Adam but still using his likeness and idea and naming the main character after him and having the main character (who, again, is based on the artist who has no ties to this movie) do really horrible, disgusting things within the movie D:!!! Nowadays, Adam has actually made 2 horror graphic novels that are actually really good and that I would highly reccomend!!

Neil Dutton

The specifics of the Hauler immediately made think of: Charlie Tango, a Eurocopter EC130B-4, the safest in it's class.

Tom
>>185760945

Back then, they were riffing Portal's GlaDOS.

Danielle Schatten
>>185732477

he owned the United States too until he got kicked out for somehow being too cringe for that fascist job

Dane Roberts

Admittedly my knowledge of the backrooms is very limited, but the wiki contradicts the two things about it that I found scary: that it would go on monotously forever (when apparently each room has something interesting happening), and that you can never get out (when apparently scientists are going in and coming out to report their findings online)

Neil Dutton

"I'm actually an unrelated branch that's following you guys, I don't know what's up with that tree."

Caitlin Johnson

me: wait, it's all the backrooms? jenny, pointing a gun at my head: always has been

Zafy Nightengale

Many lessons to learn from the fable of the Hauler and the Mustang

Jamie

I also have always dreamed within a huge dream city. Probably because I've always lived in a city and that's what my brain is thinking about. Or reality shifting or something

Mike

Funny little tidbit about the backrooms' almond water. Allegedly it started early on as a nod to cyanide. Like "if you find water, don't drink it if it smells like almonds". Then eventually people just take it at face value as actual almond water. Also, I discovered this info because I was looking for a place that sells my fave discontinued brand of almond water. Imagine my surprise when I found out that it's used health potions in the backrooms.

Kris

As stated previously the Stalker Tree of Level 16 has a danger score of 6 which is reported to be more than a 5 like most stuff which is super scary. It has the power to appear boring which makes it even more dangerous.

Steve Ray
>>185723153

Hats off to your local educators for their old-school Luciferian approach: "Hey, kids! Would you like to know so much about so many things that people will shun you, and you will be cast out of gardens, and barred from entering parties with flaming swords? If so, come to Room 304 to talk with one of our Serpents of Knowledge and become wise like gods."

Steve Ray
>>185708204

Your memories and Witch Media, etc., are both totally right -- they just didn't explain *why* doorways, dusk, dawn, and the like are good places to pierce the veil, chat with the dead, etc. To spell it out, "liminal" spaces are *thresholds* between two things -- doorways are the transition points between two rooms, while dusk and dawn are the transition points between day and night -- and that is why they make it easier to cross other boundaries, like the ones between the living and the dead, or between the material world and the demonic world. ------------------------- And to address the elephant in the word-power list,: things we don't *consciously* notice -- like when a horror movie adds the sound of angry bees to make the monster more scary -- are called "subliminal", because they are below the threshold of perception.

Steve Ray
>>185646447

For all those intrigued by being trapped with a car where no one can help you, you might like the movie "Titane."

Rachel Harrison

My in-laws live in the middle of the woods in Appalachia and the scariest thing is the wild boars. I always want to spend time in the woods and they almost always tell me I can't because there are 450lb pigs in there.

Silent Raven

It is wild that SCP does nothing for you but liminal spaces do. If there's any modern horror that just makes me giggle, it's the backrooms. Like "oh no, what am I gonna do with all this space?... Ahh these beautiful swimming pools are terrifying!"

Mike Kelley

This ramble had me blurt laughing out loud approximately 5.6 times per three minutes. And I am always covered in sand.

Discovary
>>185764026

Having read a lot of SCP, it's also funny because it's clear that many contributors perceive the Foundation and everyone who works there as misguided fools. They're trying to "secure", "contain" and "study" entities beyond their comprehension, like ants trying to capture a whale, and they're too arrogant to even realize it. Derivative, for sure, but it's better than the Mary Sues who, while rarer nowadays, remain a big part of the community.

emily

this is not the most haunted tree in the world woahh… this is a tribute 🎶

Becky

I would absolutely listen to you read the backrooms wiki in question for like a hundred hours.

Parker

I would pay good amounts of money to listen to Jennys Digital Circus takes

wanderingriver

you calling it the "gate" program is so funny to me because I was in the TAG program. especially funny because I grew up in Oregon, I guess they were just like "fuck whatever California is doing with that gifted and talented program, we're gonna do an extremely different totally not the same thing called the Talented and Gifted program". Anyway I think I started learning algebra and took a couple standardized tests, maybe even an IQ test. I remember some of the books we read though, those were pretty good

MrTophatter

The moving tree should have had a face.

Ruth Jepson

Backrooms feels like Gen Z writers who grew up with computer games instead of books, so that's why there are so many rules and explanations. I do like it, but I agree it kinda kills the original intent of the OP x

notwilhulbert

i love the image of jenny in the backrooms being delighted by the mime only to start bullying it and calling it cringe when it goes dark and twisted

TalysAlankil

well this is just kinda depressing. how everything has been wikified and/or turned into a conspiracy theory. at least you're making it entertaining

Mike Kelley

"Preparing for my career as a scary old woman." 😂

Mike Kelley
>>185825181

Our program was AIA, Academically and Intellectually Able. I think that's a very underwhelming name. "I'm able."

Bugbear

The idea that a scientist wouldn't include gaps in information in a report is absolutely wild to me. Identifying gaps in information is like, one of the top things you do in science.

MyNameIsGrundle

The SCP thing is the first time I felt like Jenny was punching down.... Is she finally big enough to be able to punch down at something? Didn't love that while segment either way. Not super into SCP but am aware of it/seen enough of it to accept it as hit or miss based on the author.

RamblesAboutStuff

Jenny's aforementioned warning may or may not have been exactly what occurred whence I was said to have watched her video, as some have observed for an unspecificied amount of time. Wig. Hahaha... Comfortable. (that last one was deep cut, see if you can identify it)

STICKEY MYX

I used to follow a writing prompts blog and they would come up with the most asinine horror prompts of all time, exactly what Jenny was describing. Like you’re trapped in a mysterious hotel given eleven rules: don’t make eye contact with the man in snow storm. if he tries to speak to you, never mention the snow. ignore any stains or screams, you can’t save an echo. like??

Paulie Paul
>>185748540

Mostly replying to give you props for your username... it's my alternate YouTube account username! Great Glass Elevator fans unite!

Matthew Broatch

raah I like SCPs and I can't handle a creator having a hot take! rahh!

anna

i feel like this sort of rules-based horror gimmick is bc gen z grew up with horror video games as opposed to 2010s internet horror made by ppl inspired by horror movies

FreekofNature

In case anyone is curious, I grew up in Appalachia and the superstitions I was personally told were that you hold your breath when crossing/driving past a graveyard (my family also crossed our fingers) and that you shouldn’t whistle in the woods so monsters couldn’t hear you (something about the sound traveling farther?). There was also the common one of not following any screams or voices in the woods. As I kid I thought adults warned me of this because of cultists or kidnappers but in hindsight, a lot of wildlife can sometimes sound like humans and the were afraid I would get mauled by a cougar or something lol. And for the record, these weren’t hard and fast rules, even friends who lived in the same area had different nuances to their superstitions.

Dave Marsh

Loved everything in this ramble, and Jenny was able to articulate exactly why that scientist trope has always felt annoying and fake to me. I think the endless inane minutiae phenomenon affects pretty much all fandoms. A lot of people default into describing these things about the world because anyone can do it. Thinking through all of the bureaucratic details of something is sort of the creative writing equivalent of doodling. You don’t have to be good at coming up with compelling ideas to participate in the writing project in that way. It's only a problem for horror universes. For other genres, you can just ignore that stuff if you’re not into it, but it does make horror less scary. Monsters are mundane and non-threatening once you know where they come from and how to control them. I think it’s telling that a lot of the people who are into SCP (and you can see it in comments on this video) don’t think of it as horror, but as sci-fi or just a fun community writing project.

Ryan Frazier

Thank you for being the one to say that the scp is always awful

Blake Cunningham

"do something with our psychic powers"...you mean like getting humanities degrees...

DechAmim

This entire video spoke to my soul, and as an old-timer unfiction/ARG fan, I cannot agree more about the problem of modern creators breaking character within the work. Digging deeper for clues is a fundamental part of unfiction, so if the twitter profile linked on your mysterious YT channel is just your regular non-game-related profile, then all intrigue or suspense is utterly demolished. Jenny was kind to not name and shame, but a good example of this is Briscoe Park: his spooky YT vids are refreshingly eerie and do a great job of not overexplaining things. But if you go onto to his Twitter linked in the channel description, you'll see him lazily repost chunks of his older videos, flirt with e-girls in his replies, and generally act like a typical 20-year-old boy. Combined with the fact that his rare interactions on YT seem to be bizarrely annoyed by the scrutiny (but not in an in-character way), it dissolved most of my excitement for the project. Similar story for Los Deselados Films, they've put a lot of love into building Anatomy (way more than most of their contemporaries) and there's plenty of ancillary media to chew on, but still a drag to go to their linked Bluesky (sharing the same name!) and see an avalanche of posts saying "yeah this animation project is hard work, thanks for your love and support! <3" Fine to talk about your project on your personal account, but linking the out-of-character account to the in-character work feels defeatist and tacky. Big wall of text, but suffice to say I feel passionate about this and am glad someone else has brought it up, ha

DechAmim
>>185841591

I dunno if I'd call it punching down, the faux-scientific-report writing style just feels like a personal bugbear for Jenny and she's free to call it out. (I'm ambivalent to SCPs myself, but the whole point of a ramble is to hear Jenny's opinion about stuff)

SamBee

As a huge fan of SCPs, I enjoyed being read to filth by this video 10/10

Heath Cole

I was at dinner listening to the weird backrooms fanfiction about the two cars calling each other slurs and it was so so hard not to laugh very hard. What the hell was that

Courtney Casey

thank you for saying appalachia right!!!!

Jack Avalon

The Gate stuff actually explains why Jenny was always such a Psychic when it came to Star Wars Sequels

Emily Blau

I love when Jenny is a hater. She picks it apart so well.

Avarie Fitzgerald

I appreciate SCP as a collaborative creative writing project that thousands of people have contributed to, but I have never been able to really see it as horror because nothing about it is really that spooky... Also I think the "redacted" trope is overused by people who can't come up with a detail and instead just use that as a built-in cop-out.

Steve Runyon

I thought for sure We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021) was inspired by this "mall world" stuff, but I think the movie predates it!