I am the thing that goes blog in the night. Hi, I'm Cameo. Cam for short, Cammy to my oldest friends. I like spooky stuff, drawing, weird words, fancy clothes, and tall buildings. I'm an aficionado of all things surreal, a born Knowledge Sim, a cosplayer whose relationship with the sewing machine is fraught, and a practicing but dubiously competent traceur. I like strange things that nobody's ever heard of. I'm also asexual, hence the preponderance of asexuality-related jargle, and at some point I lost my gender behind the sofa. I haven't substantively changed my blog description in 12 years and I refuse to start now. (They/them.) My art tag is 'camdraw'. I have a ko-fi, if you would like to buy me fast food, cosplay supplies and luridly patterned clothing.
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You think you're alone in the room, but are you really?
As an architecture student, I was fascinated by how Backrooms turned architectural psychology into horror.
A lot of people say there wasn't enough horror because there wasn't a monster constantly chasing the characters and because there's no jumpscares, but I don't think they realize the monster was the architecture itself. And also, it's a psychological thriller and borderline horror. There's a difference. Grow up.
The film uses things we rely on to orient ourselves in space like landmarks, hierarchy, rhythm, daylight, scale, and spatial memory, then removes them or distorts them.
1. That's why Casino's don't have windows. It keeps you occupied and lose track of time. They literally distort your perception of time.
2. That's why shopping malls have looping layouts so you're forced to explore around. Like IKEA, you're psychologically “led” through a curated sequence, minimizing shortcuts and maximizing exposure to products.
3. That's why theme parks have carefully hidden service areas, controlled sightlines, immersive “world bubbles" to make you mentally stay inside a narrative environment where outside cues are eliminated.
But with Backrooms, it's manipulation of space and time and everything. All your senses are manipulated. Every room feels slightly familiar but never fully readable, so your brain keeps trying to build a mental map and failing.
What makes it scary isn't what is in the space, but what the space does to the mind. Humans constantly construct cognitive maps to understand where we are, but Backrooms breaks that process.
The circulation goes nowhere, the repetition erases reference points, and the environment sits in that unsettling zone between recognition and alienation. It creates disorientation, isolation, and paranoia without needing anything supernatural.
That is also why the concept went viral. Liminal spaces, dreamcore, whatever you call it. It feels endless, familiar yet unfamiliar, and deeply convincing in its emptiness. The suspense comes from thinking something else must be there with you, even when there is nothing. That uncertainty is the horror.
Adding paranormal elements often weakens it, because the original fear already comes from space itself, not from what might be inside it.
Hell, even the shot of Mary's "neighborhood" fucked me up because it looks exactly like the ones we see online and how it looks unoccupied.
Backrooms is really just architecture and human perception turned into a mechanism of fear.
I also like how Backrooms turns architecture into an allegory for mental health and the human mind, where spatial disorientation mirrors psychological unraveling.
when someone is completely fucking wrong about your blorbo but you don't want to argue about what basically boils down to opinions about shit that doesn't matter so you just sit there like
Shortcuts to determine if an integer is divisible by:
This is a given.
If the last digit is divisible by 2 (a.k.a. even), then so is the whole number.
If the sum of the digits is divisible by 3, then so is the whole number. The recursivity of this means that if the sum has multiple digits, you can add them up again until you get a single digit and see if it's 3, 6, or 9.
Like the rule for 2, but check if the last two digits are divisible by 4.
If it ends in 5 or 0.
If the rules for both 2 and 3 apply.
No shortcut. Alas.
Like the rules for 2 and 4, but check if the last three digits are divisible by 8. (Yes, this pattern keeps going for 16, 32, etc.)
Like the rule for 3, but the sum of the digits (or the sum of the sum of the digits, etc.) must be 9.
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If you read interviews with homicide cops, two things quickly become clear
It is really not all that hard to get away with murder. A basic amount of foresight and prep will get rid of enough evidence that the police either won't find the killer or will be unable to make the charge stick.
Despite this, most murders do get solved, because someone who decides that murder is the solution to their problems is probably not the kind of person to be levelheaded and careful enough to avoid getting caught.
I think something very similar is true of sockpuppet accounts. It's not that hard to make a convincing sockpuppet. However, people almost always make sockpuppets as a way of defending their egos, of making it look like they have more support than they actually do. And this passionate defense of someone the sockpuppet ostensibly doesn't know and has no reason to care about is a dead giveaway. So if you want to validate a sockpuppet you have to lose an argument to it. You have to get owned. Once it makes you look like an idiot, basically no one will ever suspect it again.
Unfortunately, by posting this, I've burned my only chance to actually do it. From now on, whenever you see me getting dunked on, you'll assume it's staged sockpuppet validation. and you'd be right. i have never lost an argument on this website. every single one was staged. i did not get owned. i did not get owned.
in re conversations that thankfully seem to be occurring only on other sites, i actually love when the fiction i'm reading uses words i don't know and have to look up! admittedly it does not happen often, because i am an adult who read a lot as a kid and has since done what is frankly maybe a bit too much education, but please do casually drop words like phalanstery in your book so i have to look it up and then find myself reading wikipedia pages about 19th century socialist utopianism! please do throw around rare plants and birds whose names i don't know because they're not native/common anywhere i've ever been! then i get to look at pictures of things that i've never seen before!
(I started writing this post just now as a message to a friend who asked for language-learning advice. But I’m a GIANT NERD when it comes to language learning, so it got wayyy too long to be a message. So I’m posting it here in the hopes that it might help others as well. I have not edited this or even read through it all yet – it just poured straight out of my fingers – so please let me know if you spot any typos!)
Okay, first of all, there are two parts to language learning: active learning and passive exposure. You can choose to do only one or the other, but you’ll have the most success if you do both.
ACTIVE LEARNING
Active learning is pretty much what it sounds like: actively focusing on the language, learning new words, sounds, phrases, idioms, etc. It’s often centered around a textbook, sometimes with accompanying audio, but you can do active learning in other ways too. For example, you can read a news article online and check a dictionary for every word you don’t know. Or do the same thing with a foreign film – when you hear a word you don’t know (or see it in the subtitles), pause the movie and look it up.
Active learning makes you progress fast, but it also tires out your brain and overwhelms it with new information, making it easier to forget things you’ve already learned. That’s why it’s best to space out your active learning sessions and fill the gaps with passive exposure.
PASSIVE EXPOSURE
The goal of passive exposure is for your brain to randomly encounter words and phrases it learned recently and go “Hey! I recognize that!” This is SO important not only for reviewing and consolidating your memory, but also keeping up your motivation! If the only place you ever encounter your TL (target language) is in your textbook, on some subconscious level your brain will think it’s not that important… because after all, you never encounter it out there in the real world, do you?
Passive exposure can include any of the following and much more: listening to music in your TL; watching a movie in your TL (either with English subs, or with no subs at all and just don’t worry if you don’t understand everything that’s going on); skim-reading a book or a short story or a news article or a blog post in your TL and looking for words you recognize, even if you can’t 100% remember what they mean; finding speakers of your TL in real life and eavesdropping on them; watching instructional YouTube videos or short documentaries in your TL (the visuals ought to help you understand some of what’s going on, even if there are no subtitles); etc.
The idea is to let your TL wash over you without straining your brain at all. Zero effort, just relaxation and fun. You will inevitably notice and understand a few words or phrases, and that percentage will increase as time goes on, but you’re not actively studying when you’re doing passive exposure. Remember the two things you’re trying to achieve with passive exposure:
1) effortless review/practice, by inevitably re-encountering some stuff you’ve already learned;
2) reminding your brain that this language is a real cool thing out there in the world, not just a boring chore located in a textbook.
But there are also two more extremely important benefits to passive exposure that are drastically neglected by most language-learners:
3) picking up the correct pronunciation and accent;
4) gaining an instinct for natural, native-sounding language.
These are two things you will not learn in a language class or from a textbook. You can’t learn them except by doing a LOT of listening and reading in your TL. But the good news is that it doesn’t need to be the “Active Learning” kind of reading and listening; it can absolutely be the “Passive Exposure” kind, and you will still pick this stuff up.
The most important thing, above all else, is to figure out a method of passive exposure that works for YOU personally. This means: do NOT force yourself to repeatedly do something that you don’t enjoy, because you won’t benefit from it. To pick the right method, think of your interests and the things you like to do in your free time: watching movies? reading books? listening to music? writing in your journal? surfing the internet? You can do any of this in your TL, too. Yes, you will encounter a lot of stuff you don’t understand at the beginning. But A) that’s good for you, it helps you learn patience, which every language-learner needs, and B) the internet has free translation tools everywhere you look.
COMBINING BOTH
Personally, I like to pick a well-respected textbook with accompanying audio (Assimil is my favorite; Teach Yourself and Colloquial can also be very good, especially the older editions; Linguaphone used to be fantastic but I’m not sure if it’s still around) and work my way through it, doing one lesson per day if possible. That takes only about 10 to 20 minutes, so that leaves a lot of time for passive exposure. My preferred method is listening to music (I learned a good 50% of my German from just obsessively listening to German pop music in high school), but here are some other things I like to do:
find an internet talk radio station in my TL and put it on in the background
same deal with a podcast
translate a few keywords related to my favorite hobbies/interests into the TL and then paste that text into YouTube and watch random videos in my TL
read a news article in English, and then find a news website in my TL and see if I can find an article about the same topic in that language
watch bad reality TV or soaps in my TL with no subtitles, just trying to guess what’s going on from context
etc.
No Duolingo. No Rosetta Stone. (I’ve written a whole post about the latter here.) You don’t need to spend any money at all, though if you e.g. use a pirated resource to learn and find that it really helps you, I strongly suggest buying it from the original producer after the fact, to say thank you.
MEMORIZATION
This is very much a “YMMV” piece of advice, but: if you’re having trouble memorizing stuff, just don’t. Don’t bother trying to remember anything. Remember that “passive exposure” bit? It does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of memory. If you keep bumping into the same word or phrase over and over again, you will incorporate it into your body of knowledge almost effortlessly. Of course this is easier with more common words that turn up again and again – but you’d be surprised how well you can get by, especially at the lower levels, with only the more common words!
Intentionally memorizing vocabulary can of course be very beneficial, so there’s nothing wrong with it. But I notice that it’s often one of the biggest pain points for language learners, and I believe language learning should be pain-free.
FROM INPUT TO OUTPUT
Once you’ve gotten a good grasp of the basics of the language, a really effective way to consolidate the knowledge you’ve gained is to use it actively and creatively yourself, in speech or writing (or ideally both!). For speaking practice, besides simply making friends who are native speakers of the language, you can search for a physical or virtual tandem. This is when you meet up with someone who’s a native speaker of your TL and is trying to learn your own language. You can meet for, say, an hour, and chat together for half an hour in your native language, and then half an hour in their native language. So both of you benefit!
Don’t underestimate talking to yourself, too. Whether it’s narrating your actions, complaining to your pet (okay, I guess that’s not technically “talking to yourself”), or simply having an imaginary conversation with someone else, it’s actually a good way to practice.
I also really enjoy writing in my journal in my target languages. The act of hand-writing a word does a lot to help me remember it. If you like writing, of course, you could also look up penpals who speak your TL.
And that’s about it. As always, I am more than willing to answer specific questions on language learning, as this is something of a specialty of mine and I absolutely love to help other folks get started on their own language-learning journeys. Please feel free to drop me a line if you need any concrete advice or are struggling with some aspect of your current language-learning efforts!
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oooooo what a cool post my mutual just reblogged ! I think I will reblog it as well !!! oooooh who did they reblog it from ? That username seems familiar,,, hohoho it's me ! from an hour ago !
What are orbicules? This piece of granite comes from the Yilgarn Craton in Western Australia, an ancient piece of continental crust that began forming about 2.7 billion years ago. It’s one of the oldest enduring landmasses on Earth. Orbicules are the unusual ball-shaped, radial clusters of crystals that you can see on this rock. The diversity in the orbicules’ mineral composition and structure indicate that the conditions in the magma changed as they grew.
See this specimen and more than 5,000 others in the Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals.
since ive been asked a few times i shall make a dedicated post about it regarding putting gills on a human/humanoid there are two types of setups bony fish have 1 gill opening, sharks have multiple gills in blue here
for gills on a humanoid to be realistic they need to be between the neck muscles and the hyoid muscles, like in real fish the red are the beck muscles, green are throat muscles, and blue are areas you could feasibly put gills! using shark here as they take up more space
instead of gill musculature bony fish have a large bony shield called an operculum covering their gills, but the principle remains the same gills are between the back muscles and the throat muscles, though with bony fish you can make the covering just fleshy if you want
here is it all together again as the two main muscles the cucullaris evolve into present in humans are the trapezius and sternocleidomastoid so show how this muscles evolved
in sharks its this trapezius-like structure but in bony fish since the shoulder bones are connected to the skull the cucullaris helps move that joint!
this muscle has roots in out placoderm ancestors and can be seen in placoderms like dunkleosteus! here this paper
PDF | The comparative and functional anatomy of the cleaver‐like jaws of the Late Devonian arthrodire Dunkleosteus terrelli remains poorly u
in placoderms it also helps articulate the head and shoulder bones
to be clear you are fifteen thousand generations removed from the invention of stone tools. not from the end of stone tools. modern humans are still using stone tools.
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