Two weeks ago, I started writing for Outer Places, a website dedicated to science fiction and science. It’s been tremendously exciting to work with them, and it means I can continue funding my jetskiing, milk-drinking playboy superstar lifestyle here in New York by writing about some of the coolest news and scientific discoveries on the Internet. Why do I do it?
Pictured: my jetskiing, milk-drinking playboy superstar lifestyle.
I wanted to share some of the articles I’ve written so far for Outer Places, not because I’m shilling for OP now, but because I’m actually proud of (and excited by) a few of them. Ignore the clickbait-y titles.
Six Sci-Fi Masterpieces That Put Insane Detail Into Things You Didn’t Notice
This one I actually wrote a couple years ago to be a Cracked listicle, before Cracked stopped doing those. It deals with Neon Genesis: Evangelion, Serial Experiments Lain, H.R. Giger’s Necronomicon, and Menton3’s Monocyte, along with Dune and Asimov’s short story Nightfall.
The Artist Behind the Death Star Talks About His Art & Life
This article came from a Reddit AMA today with Colin Cantwell, the man who designed the Millennium Falcon, Death Star, X-Wing, and a bunch of other starships in Star Wars. He also worked with Stanley Kubrick on 2001 and Walter Cronkite during the Apollo 11 moon landings.
A New Experiment Just Teleported a Particle and Pioneered the Quantum Internet
This one came from the University of Calgary, which apparently conducted research that may pave the way for long-distance communication using quantum entanglement. I snuck some references to Mass Effect 2 and Half-Life in there.
LIVESTREAM: Elon Musk Says We Need These Four Things to Colonize Mars
This was absolutely incredible. Today, Elon Musk got on a livestream and laid out plans to create a “self-sustaining city” on Mars, along with the four key concepts that need to be implemented to create an Interplanetary Travel System. What really struck me was that, during the question and answer period, Musk said that his two primary goals with the project were to keep human consciousness alive in the face of a planet-wide catastrophe (practical) and to create something to inspire us when we look toward our future (idealistic).
And for those of you who caught the debate last night, you all know who I’m voting for.
While trying to visualize the character, I took some inspiration from one of my favorite movies, Apocalypse Now. The beginning and ending music of the film was taken from “The End” by The Doors, who took their band’s name from a quote within Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” I thought that strange string of connections between that movie, that song, and that quote should be incorporated into my stories, somehow.
The lead singer of The Doors, Jim Morrison, was one of the most charismatic and iconic figures of the 1960s. In 1967, he did a famous photo shoot titled “The Young Lion.” Here’s one of the photos from that shoot:
As soon as I saw this image, I knew I wanted to base Oroboro’s physical appearance off of Morrison. I really liked the aesthetic of this photo: Jim Morrison isn’t a muscled guy, and in fact looks kind of emaciated and drugged out. He’s not a physically imposing person, but his gaze is very intense. His hair is also long and unkempt, which makes him look sort of like a madman or a serial killer.
I imagined Oroboro as looking similar, but with one distinction: he would have no cheeks or lips. After reading a graphic novel version of The Man Who Laughs, I was fascinated with the grotesque imagery of a death’s-head grin, where someone’s face hinted at the bone and blood underneath.
Back in college, I took a course on Critical Theory and became interested in the concept of “the abject,” as described by Julia Kristeva in The Powers of Horror. The heart of the abject is the idea that there exist images and sensations that can destabilize a person’s sense of selfhood. This is where we derive our sense of the uncanny, the disturbing, and the disgusting: everything that evokes these reactions is a facet of the abject, and (according to Kristeva) represents an unconscious threat to our ideas about who we are, mentally and physically. I disagreed with a lot in Kristeva’s essay, but there were parts I resonated with, including one passage on corpses:
“The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.”
As I imagined it, Oroboro’s mutilation wouldn’t come from a sadistic group of kidnappers, like Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs, but rather from screaming so intensely that he dislocated his jaw and split his cheeks, so that all that would remain would be flaps of skin hanging from his upper and lower jaws. After shearing away these loose flaps of skin (and the rest of the skin around his jaws), he would have the appearance of a living corpse, the essence of everything horrible, uncanny, and disturbing.
The first sketch of Oroboro came directly from the reference photo of Morrison–this was Joel’s initial sketch of Oroboro’s unharmed, unaltered face:
Next, Joel created a sketch to visualize the structure of the skull and the weaving of the muscles around the face and mouth:
From there, Joel made the first draft, incorporating Jim Morrison’s face and his anatomical sketches. This first draft had the nose sheared off as well as the lips and cheeks. To Joel and I, this looked less like the aftermath of self-surgery and more like a zombie.
In the second draft, Joel added his nose back in and made some finer touches. The end result is starkly horrifying: everything around the mouth is relatively normal, even attractive, but the mouth dominates Oroboro’s face in something not quite a grin or a grimace. It’s just a maw.
The exposure of the character’s teeth is meant to evoke a lot of different ideas and feelings, but there was one in particular I had in mind when conceiving this character: cannibalism. As I mentioned in the previous post on this character and his helmet, Oroboro’s necromantic modus operandi is eating other people (or their souls/egos). So it’s appropriate that his appearance evokes an abject, monstrous set of teeth. Taken together with his specially made helmet, he resembles something like a Lovecraftian horror:
This is the Occult Triangle Lab, where I blog about writing, game design, and ungodly amounts of milk. New posts are below, but for new visitors, here’s a guide to some of the coolest projects on the Lab so far:
If you want to get in contact with me, feel free to email me at christophmahon [at] gmail [dot] com or Tweet me @DeadmanMu. You can also read my awesome bio here.
When it comes to theoretical mathematicians and Zen Buddhists, I obey Terry Pratchett’s Rule One. As stated in Thief of Time, Rule One is: “Do not act incautiously when confronting a little bald wrinkly smiling man.” As it turns out, wrinkly bald men make up a disproportionate number of history’s half-mad visionaries. Makes sense, I guess. It takes a lifetime to unravel the mysteries of the universe, and enlightenment, truth, and insanity all live in the same neighborhood. The majority of people who visit that neighborhood seem to come back with armfuls of all three, just not in equal quantities. So you get a lot of bald, wrinkly, smiling people speaking very calmly while wearing tea cozies on their heads.
The Bodidharma, the angry, bearded man who founded Zen, is surrounded by tales of random violence, catatonia, and trolling Emperors. John Nash, the mathematician portrayed in A Beautiful Mind, claimed that his schizophrenia allowed him to achieve his fantastic insight into geometry and game theory. Bobby Fischer, chess grandmaster, played some of the deepest games in history, distilling thousands of patterns into beautiful movements, then retreated into hermitage for almost two decades.
People You Shouldn’t Fuck With: (clockwise, from top left): Kodo Sawaki, Enrico Fermi, Wu Tang Clan
Enlightenment, truth, and insanity all played parts in the creation of the first real project of the Occult Triangle Lab, the origami starburst book, “Apotheosis.” In my stories, drafts, and notes, one of the phrases I use to describe godhood is “A thousand eyes open,” which is a way to express omniscience. Hinduism has a similar idea, with a thousand arms signifying omnipotence. For my next project in Art of the Book, I wanted to make something that expressed omniscience. I found a book about basic origami folds, and began experimenting with starburst books. After playing around with where to put type, I realized that you could cover up some of the words depending on how you folded the starburst. Soon, I started experimenting with words in different places, then mapping the patterns.
I realized that, if placed correctly, the book would always read “ONE THOUSAND EYES OPEN.” I also cut out and glued a folding paper eye in the center of the book. The end result was that, no matter how you folded or unfolded the book, the eye was watching, and the words stayed the same.
“Apotheosis” was made from thick, coverweight paper, which is difficult to score, even with a bone folder. You have to hold it like a vise when it bends. As I was folding and measuring the book, I started thinking about perfection, about margins of error, and what it would take for all of the folds to line up exactly. Every time you fold origami, you can see the imperfections starting to surface , the tiny deviations from symmetry.
I think about what my high school science teacher Mr. Powell told us in Chemistry. Mr. Powell was the nerdiest, most sleep-inducing teacher I’d ever had. He looked like Mr. Rogers, and he had exactly three jokes that he would tell each year, like clockwork. But one day, he held up a cheap wooden ruler and stretched his thumb and forefinger across one inch.
He said “If numbers are really infinite, then you would be able to divide this inch into smaller and smaller portions forever. There would be an infinity in this inch.”
Then he widened his fingers so they stretched across two inches.
“That would mean the infinity in two inches would be a larger infinity. How can there be larger and smaller infinities?”
And he just let us think about that.
When you fold origami, your folds are always off. You could bring that error down to a hair’s breadth with practice, maybe even less. You could shave the little imperfections down forever, getting closer and closer to zero. You’ll never make it. You’re whittling down infinities.
It’s a frightening thing to think that there are infinities in the strands of your hair and the spaces between the treads of tires. What would it be like to look around you and see the world as it is, expanding in all directions, building up from the microscopic and the atomic levels? Or to look at the horizon and see the waves of ultraviolet and infrared light coming off a roiling ball of world-shattering fusion? “Apotheosis” was built around the idea of omniscience, but you can see how omniscience opens the door to terror and insanity. I think anyone who wants to “open their mind to the universe” has to realize the immensity on the other side of that door, then realize that it all exists in the space of one inch.
I ended up on my high school’s Knowledge Bowl team, with Mr. Powell as my coach. I saw him after school for practice every week, and he turned out to have a very wry , sarcastic sense of humor. I started hearing stories about him: he had been offered teaching positions at several universities, and even a job working at NASA, back in the day. He had turned them down to teach science at Mark Morris High School.
Mr. Powell, circa 2009
Only later did I learn that Mr. Powell’s ruler demonstration was called Zeno’s Paradox, crafted by an ancient Greek, Zeno of Elea, to back up the claim that all change was an illusion.
Only later did I realize that Mr. Powell was a smiling, wrinkly bald man.
