Archives Rat

Not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, socially, financially.

Life is asking a lot right now.

Pause when you can. Breathe when you remember.

Gloves are for jazz hands, not paper.

I keep coming back to this concept in my head that is both a story and a concept for how a story could be told.

Part of the idea is that a collection of archival material is used as a framing device. Found footage horror is not new, and there would be some of that, and I also think of things like the SCP Foundation where the framing device is a collection of documents that are nonfiction in-universe.

But with my idea, the key concept is that the medium is an archive: it is a sprawling collection of material, the reader's questions are the only direction for how to navigate it, most of it is mundane or boring, and the sheer amount of material makes closely reading or consuming all of it impractical.

Originally, the idea was a collection of video footage shot by a person apparently wandering alone through the woods. I was interested in the idea of telling a story through video footage that was too long, and mostly too boring, for a single person to completely watch. Imagine something like 30 hours of footage, mostly showing the forest floor as the person holding the camera walks through the woods. The viewer would have to skip through the footage, or let it play in the background while they were doing other activities, and this would inevitably lead to an understanding of the footage that was incomplete, possibly leading to different interpretations as different viewers paid attention to or simply happened upon different parts of the videos.

But then I started to think of other things found in archives: photographs, maps, objects, interviews, letters, reports, newspaper clippings, audio clips. Collections can be digitized in an infinite number of ways, allowing a story told in this format to be as close as I wanted to the experience of exploring an actual archive.

And then I started writing up some mock "archival materials" for another WIP of mine, and I started thinking of the "archival horror" concept again.

In an epistolary novel, the "materials" are arranged in an order that causes them to tell a specific story. I am thinking of something closer to the experience of actually doing research in an archive: coming in with an inquiry, being brought a bunch of nondescript boxes, leafing through a dense, poorly organized collection of mostly irrelevant material.

I don't want there to be any obvious plot hooks, or a single "plot" at all. There are characters, settings, and events, but the "plot" is the series of revelations the reader comes to as they explore their inquiries, about "what happened" and "what narrative is this document trying to present, and why" and "what is not being said" and possibly why the documents are organized or presented in the way that they are in the first place.

The "beginning" of the story could be a mock encyclopedia/"wikipedia" type article explaining a key event or setting, and then there could be like a search bar or box that returns different materials, or a directory of different topics and formats, or both.

some thoughts on the story

There is A Bad Thing that happened. That fact is out in the open: there was an evil science organization that did human experimentation, something along those lines. There are grisly details of the Bad Things as well, if you dig. The mystery is not "what happened." The mystery is "where is What Happened hiding in all these nice normal photographs and articles about things and people that are nice and normal? How is What Happened connected to the dull, mundane contents of 99% of these boxes?"

a lot of the materials are completely worthless in terms of answering concrete questions, but literally everything has ideological implications in the fact that it was recorded at all.

a possible way to navigate the story is to find the names of people and hunt down all materials that pertain to that person, discovering the story of a "character." some characters will have a wealth of information, and some almost none. A lot of stories that ARE told are totally vapid. A lot of stories that AREN'T told say everything.

Alright, here's my pitch: 

You're a student research assistant.  Your professor is writing an article on state park usage during the 70s oil embargo.   You've been assigned to go through park records and record the numbers of types of infractions and incidents in XXX State Forest during 1973.  This will make up a half paragraph in the eventual article.

I've just been playing "The Last Report."

The game itself is a walking simulator where you actually take a box off a library cart, plop it down on a table and begin to leaf through it.  Click on a folder and it appears, open, on the table.  A button brings up your cell phone to take a snap (no flash!) and you can highlight text to enter it into your laptop.  

Drop a box on the floor and papers go everywhere.  Ninja Archivists descend and your character's vital organs will be Arranged and Described.

You start with record series "XXX State Forest Daily Event Summary Log 1965-1987."  Three boxes hold the logs from 1973, about 8,000 documents.  Very standard forms, pre-printed with blanks for the park rangers to fill in. In game most of these are procedurally generated.  You can get the basic stats from hash marks from one of the fields.  The "game" is collecting those stats and entering them into a spreadsheet.  But some of the logs have incident descriptions with notes …

These notes point to other series.  Notes that read "IR 73-###" point to "XXX State Forest Incident Case Files 1971-1979".  Subject headings scribbled in red ink point to the inevitable Park Director subject files.  Discipline reports have their own case numbers and are partially redacted.  Helpfully you have finding aids for the XXX State Forest series for the relevant years with scope and content descriptions and box and folders lists.  Fill in a retrieval request and the boxes will be wheeled out to you.

Photographs are in the case files.  Audio material was kept in a closet by the Park Director, so they have their own series.  They're on cassettes with case numbers scribbled on the labels. Many are recordings of meetings that are tedious, but you can listen to them in the background as you read files. 

There's infinite room for story here.  You could sprinkle in a dozen one-off stories.  Example: a cryptic note reading "structure found: IR 73-173" could lead to a copypasta/nosleep story about finding stairs in the woods, complete with photo. A note about an unauthorized gathering has a note "see Freedom of Religion," leading to a subject file about cults being allowed to hold rituals in the forest.  But the point would be some overarching sinister goings-on in the woods.

There's a recurring set of stories played for laughs about big foot hunters always mistaking a local cow or a moose for a sasquatch.  As you're finishing the game and walking-simulator out of the research room and past the reference desk, there's about a second where you can look down and notice that the archivist has absolutely huge feet.

If you successfully get all the stats for your professor, you get a pleasant ending. But there are enough hints to other things going on. You can piece a general outline together from various incident reports.  You eventually work out that some case files were removed and placed in a separate series because they involved court cases.  They're restricted for privacy plus attorney/client privilege reasons.  If you've successfully worked out the case number from previous hints, plus the name of the region of the forest and some other clues, you can file a FOIL request.  I imagine this ending to be a bit "Obra Din:" a month later you're in your cubicle at university when you get an email containing the redacted file that you requested, providing you with a final piece of the story.  No one before you has gone through all the files and read all the specific incidents, so you - and only you - have a sense of what actually happened.

they also offer this billboard:

their website links to pretty extensive scriptural evidence for their positions, but their theology seems to boil down to 1) Jesus lacked God the Father’s omnipotence and omniscience, as seen in his temptations, suffering, ignorance, etc, and 2) the Holy Spirit is a literary way of referring to God’s presence.

"In their petition, the ardent culture warriors claim the books expose kids to “obscene depictions of sexually explicit acts.” The books in question include People Kill People, a YA novel by bestselling author Ellen Hopkins about the deleterious effects of gun violence; It Ends With Us, a romance novel by Colleen Hoover that was made into a Hollywood film starring Blake Lively; All Boys Aren’t Blue, a “memoir-manifesto” by journalist and LGBTQ activist George M. Johnson about his struggles growing up as a gay Black man; Red Hood by Elana K. Arnold, a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood centered on female empowerment; and Julia Scheeres’ Jesus Land: A Memoir, a New York Times bestseller about the author’s unpleasant childhood experience at a fundamentalist church camp."

One of the best non-fiction reads I've read in a while, it's not a military history book, but details specifically the Confederate government, culture, society, the legal system, and economy.

What I find most fascinating about the book was just how fucked up the Confederacy became even from the early outset. Especially in terms of law and order. Due to the incredible manpower demands most men of military age either enlisted or were later conscripted into the army. This resulted in severe manpower shortages at home. When this happened, the system of slavery the Confederates were fighting for became a grave liability as there was no one left to control the millions of slaves that populated the south. As a result, whole plantations of slaves would run away and form free communities in the wilderness, surviving by pillaging plantations and farms, or robbing travelers on highways. In Louisiana there was a slave town hidden deep in the swamps that housed 2,000 people! At the same time thousands of Confederate soldiers were deserting as the war started going bad. Many soldiers found that their homestead and family was falling apart in their absence, so they deserted. These deserters were declared outlaws, and as a result many banded together, formed groups, and made a living as bandits and marauders.

At the same time many officers in the Confederate army who were garrisoned in specific places became de facto military dictators and warlords over the territory they controlled. They often disobeyed the law and refused to carry out orders issued by the Confederate government, but due to manpower shortages and the disorganization of the government there was little that could be done to reign them in. Often, these warlord Confederates acted as bandits, pillaging the territory they controlled not just for food and necessary supplies but for valuables as well. In many cases, whole towns and even counties rebelled against Confederate military authorities as they were sick of being pillaged by warlord Confederates. A good example was Jones County, Mississippi which actually seceded from the Confederacy as a result. Often, these rebel towns and counties survived by banditry and became marauders themselves just to make a get by.

According to the author, by 1863 much of the rural south was in a state of lawlessness and anarchy with the countryside controlled by bandits, marauders, independent towns or counties, pro-Union enclaves, and military warlords. Like bruh, this would be a good setting for an open world RPG game, perhaps something set in the Red Dead Redemption Universe.