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I love this fragmentary petrie-dish! It's like Edward Young's "Night-Thoughts" reincarnated into the zine dimension.

EXACTLY!!! 

This is incredible. What a convincing format to |situate| the dérive in a totally fresh way! Very impressive, really distills the high points of your "findings" while preserving the pace, mystery, threat of the adventure. On-foot and inter-subjective perspectives somehow carried-over really well. And above all, acknowledging the many layers of the experience (locus, atmosphere, occurence, association...) through the different simultaneous on-screen elements. Hats off!

Insurrection interruptus! Amazing

and violence loves you!

Thank you so much! I keep a thorough dream journal and was just waiting for something like nswengine to come along and give me an appropriate excuse to release them!

This engine is so evocative with just the right amount of arbitrary constraints that really make it a dreamlike experience.  

My first  instinct was to make use of this oneiric engine to present some dreams of my own, so I made this little zine: Violent Dream Games

I recognized the Cineforum poster on the pole right away! Those would survive into the dystopian GTAscape. Fantastic work.

Conspicuous auto-consumption with an eternal, almost omnscient paralytic style! Terrifying and charming 

The broken gif at the end of time and space 

Another merciless raid on the psyche from Shem! This January punishment is biomorphic, kinetic, and somehow exceedingly fashionable, in its own way.

Are the “hidden horns” a negative result, artefacts of a failed ritual? They have the imagistic sense of an alchemical procedure, but I have never yet heard of this bleak, negative alchemy, an attempt on Shem’s part to push the glorious of the philosopher’s stone AWAY, it seems, to stuff it deeper into the void, allergic…

This leads us to the equally cryptic poser-proclamation that is NIGHT FLESH. There is something inspiring about this unnameable thing. It’s not quite a declaration, not quite a news item, the title crushes out the content, and vague interplanetary motifs hint at a wider, galactic sense of night. Shem is leading the way towards a TYPOGRAPHIC OCCULTISM that throttles the imagination, and rightly so.

And then a snapshot from a conquistador’s slideshow; the vision from a peak in Darien of the new world, and the short-circuit, an accelerationist time-saver in the form of an IMMEDIATE AND SYNAPSE-SMOTHERING RAGE towards its ugly inhabitants. A “yes we found it, now it must be destroyed!”--delenda est. One gets equal implications of an explorer as a scientist, looking in rage through the microscope at some eldritch implication of a sample tissue. Breathaking!

The ROMONDIAD likewise continues with its background light of pseudinspiration. I am particularly taken with sort of negative travelogue aspect of the first section, the “narrow routes that change”, which somehow feels both like a cozy trip and a harrowing psychological rebuttal from an ancient colleague. Or perhaps it is less reportage, and more a kind of deranged almanac? Locals act out local dramas, dowsers and fae line detectors, hobbyists of the cruelly stupid. It is soothing in its own way, this charming tour of deranged lay lines. We find at ASCOT an “Epigraphy of dead souls”--a byword for the entire FU project, don’t you think?

But perhaps it was medical tourism after all, because we are thereafter immediately subjected to the biodrama of the INDIVISIBLE OPERATION. This is a stunning bit of “inner cinema” (yes, it’s literally inside you, read the intertitles!) We are simple advised of the fact that something is “making adjustments” to our constitutions alongside footage of operational joy. It’s only a few coerced minutes but I would happily subject myself to this in a FEATURE LENGTH format, if Shem ever went there.

As a fitting coda, we get the LETTERS TO THE END OF THE WORLD! As if the (t)issue itself was ripping its own body apart and hurling it at a specific enemy, or at entropy in general. I can only interpret them as a kind of EPISTOLARY GENERALIZED DEFIANCE.

Spare us, Shem!

Ah, thanks so much for tuning in!

You can’t tell because of the invertebrates crawling all over my face but I swear I am blushing! But seriously thank you, it’s very gratifying to hear the “melding” worked, and from a multimedia wizard like yourself!

Evocative and fascinating, like dissociating while fossil hunting.

Ah, thank you! I appreciate it a lot. Do take a leech for the road.

This was really compelling! The conceit of a dream recording device that only outputs letters is, somehow, the most dream-like idea of them all. It definitely works.

Very much enjoyed the Osamu Sato-like symmetrical compu-weirdness and non-sequitur transitions. Very nicely done!

This was punchy and frightening at the same time. Like Waking up in a coffin...meltdown imminent, there’s no light but your mind’s eye (or "mind/screen" as it's called in here!) becomes a projection surface for distorted half-remembered subtitles you recall from existential arthouse films, games, etc. The result is a panicked concrete poem of slipping away into metallic nil. Chilling and effective!

The gingerbread gave it an extra kick for sure!

Ultimate mallardian outcome!

This is such a clever way to do a kind of journal or any kind of storytelling really. I love tying some kind of memory to different body parts. In this case it's extremely wholesome. (But also maybe just me reading into it but something pleasantly menacing about a gingerbread figure whose "eyes are for watching"...)

Thank you I am really happy the combo of the two worked for you! Was a bit of an experiment 

oh, thank you for the creeture feature!

metaphysical, ambiguous, achievable!

fantastic

Yes!! Just a few more decades and change to go!

the world’s first semi-vertebrate!

And now you have ape-sludge to use on the furniture!

C'était surprenant et assez beau d'un point de vue sombre. J'ai vraiment apprécié la simultanéité bizarre, presque maladroite, des fragments de l'histoire, cachée derrière un étrange mécanisme de sécurité. La vue triptyque fonctionne très bien. A la fois sombre et merveilleux! Je pourrais voir ce même format être utilisé pour toutes sortes d’expériences intéressantes à plusieurs volets.

This is really crazy! I love the wild neologisms, the very beautiful and fractured image window with trippy animations, the mutant writing, and the weird touches like the randomized palette chooser. This is an inspiring way to combine visuals and story,

Pro tip for this issue: skip to the playlist, get it running, start dissociating hard to the post-punk psychodrama it has in store for you, then flip back to the anatomy of the poison god and start choosing your way in a non-linear fashion through the various anatomical samples. I guarantee you will “pass” whatever exam you think you are studying for, with all this! THANK YOU SHEM for kicking us while we are down at the end of another year! A gibbering jolly jaunt ov a holiday special!

The Anatomy of a Poison God bears comparison to other analytico-theological outlays. I think you will find it is superior in many ways. Foremost being the HANDY NUMBERED SCHEMA which is generally lacking in such texts—for example, The Bible—which contains ad nausea descriptions of the Temple of Blah, and no pictures! Whereas Prophet-at-Large Shelley gives us a perfectly comprehensible illustration. Second thing to note is the INTEREST inherent in the poison deity itself. Theologically speaking we can immediately factionalize into believing it is a poisoner (see the serpentine POISON GLAND) and then debate further as acolytes the degree to which we ourselves ought to imbibe poison in praise of it, when, how much, etc. We can fight endlessly about first poison communions, poison late stage baptisms, and so on. Or whether this thing is not actually a poisoner at all, but POISONED, a martyr, a kind of spiritual food tester, who hath through its own “BLOODY BANQUET” eaten up our sins. The possibilities for spiraling are endless. What a cheerful affliction we’ve been granted by Shem!

And then, having our stomachs churned, we turn towards our AURAL CAVITIES, blessed by our very fine end of year UTOPIA playlist. You’ll find everything from apocalyptic post-punk to cyberhorror video game music. Perfect for clearing out rooms at end of year celebrations, or wringing one’s hands in shame at the death of the sun. I feel richer already!

ROMONDE’s epic continues here too. Perhaps this is the festive edition, speaking of borealises and white viruses and such? I imagine maybe a few of those “Remnants of the Faith” have thoughts on the poison god diagram above. If you’ve ever seen the Charlie Brown Christmas, you could imagine the speech given by Linus on the true meaning of Christmas is muted and swapped out by ROMONDE’s rant. Try it at home!

And finally we are given a bit of TRIVIA on another much beloved holiday special/tradition. Much like the Charlie Brown Xmas spawned backlash against metallic trees, the Black Crystal Mass screenplay starts its own holiday “trend” which we are still paying for, 7 years before it even happened. As usual, SHEM EXPLAINS EVERYTHING.

yeap this is how it is!!

Very happy to hear that! “Twisted” is one of my favourite adjectives!

Yea Decker has this weird magical quality to it that brings out the “fun in everyone”, I think…

These look amazing!

Many thanks!

This felt like the memory of a 3rd grade school activity book warped by the chaotic forces of subjective hauntological entropy.

This was exquisite! It made me think of Kathe Koja's novel Skin...

WHOA!! Now You're P(h)laying with P(h)ower!

Incredible. Decker Maxxed.