Issue#5: AFTER IMAGES

covershoot visual + editor’s letter

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covershoot visual + editor’s letter

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The Howl Mag

Our Staff Editor-in-Chief Rebecca Proch

Creative Director & Design Director Fatima Hussain Public Relations & Event Coordinator Roxana Moise Thoughts Editor Hannah Weinberg Managing Editor Sena Cheung Lead Copy Editor Josiah Friesen Contributors Emilie Tamtik, Ruth Rodrigues, Amélia Gaille, Vanessa Calderwood 4

contents 6

Hauntology: Past, Present and Future

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Ego Fail

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Float: july 21st

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Crossword

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What Goes Around Comes Around

Uncovering Rusty Lake's Cube Escape

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After Waking Up

Horoscope of a Year Gone By

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Crossword Answers 5

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Sometimes, nostalgia makes sense. It’s a comforting way to view your past with a rosy tinge, but there’s a bittersweetness in recognizing that your reminiscence may only be so fond because time has made the highs easier to remember than the lows. This separation, this gap between the rememberer and the remembered, is the only thing that allows the warmth of nostalgia to work, but it’s also the very thing behind its sadder aspects – there’s the catch-22 of having good memories.

Sometimes, however, the object of our nostalgia is even further removed, and here enters hauntology: a nostalgia created by the “haunting” of our present by lost futures.

Hauntology looks at depictions of the future created in the past – futures that we imagine could have been ours, but

for whatever reason, weren’t meant to be. In other words, we are haunted by what-ifs.

Hauntology is nothing new, because for as long as we’ve had predictions about the future, we’ve also been wrong about them. Back around the turn of the 20th century, artists like Albert Robida and Jean-Marc Côté created fantastical images depicting life in the future – or, at least, their future, because we now recognize that period as the present day. The visions are steampunk-esque: “En l’an 2000,” a collection of these images produced in the year 1900, imagined that by now, we would be taking floating cars to the opera, having books directly zapped into our heads at school, and having our homes cleaned by robots armed with brooms (actually,

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that one’s not too far off). While the images are engaging in their own right, there is a realization which makes them hold fast to the imagination: as observers from the future, we can see just how differently the world turned out. Is it reassuring to see how many aspects of daily life have stayed familiar, or is it disappointing to realize that despite the amount of time that has passed, so many of our problems are still the same?

Not all hauntology comes from visions created in the distant past, however. Perhaps COVID-19 has made us extra nostalgic, but either way, the beginning of the ‘20s has brought with it a full-blown ‘00s revival, and along with it, the resurgence of our visions of the future from the ‘00s. Once the initial Y2K technological doomsday scare

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had passed, the beginning of the millennium was a time of optimism when it came to the increasingly digital world.

Fashion reflected this view with its Matrix-influenced metallics and futuristic computerized patterns. Are we still feeling so optimistic about technology?

Many would argue that we aren’t – while technology has given us advancements in communication, science, and medicine, it has also sparked worries about privacy, data collection, and artificial intelligence. This is what makes it so easy, when looking at the Neo-inspired leather trench coats or the bedazzled flip phones that are trendy again today, to feel a sort of longing for the promising digital future envisioned in the early ‘00s.

The Matrix tried to warn us, but we’ve begun to see the downsides for ourselves, and

being haunted by our ‘00s nostalgia can make the chasm between the good and the bad aspects of technology seem even wider.

The unfulfilled futures from the past raise questions about the dreams we have for tomorrow— we’re aware that they might be unfulfilled, but to what degree we don’t know. COVID-induced nostalgia has brought both a longing and fear for the future; we miss the way things used to be, and we hope that life will return to normal, but we worry that things will never quite go back to the way they were.

The pandemic has already dashed some new visions of the future: take for example, our hopes from the early days of quarantine that the environment would heal with a break from human interference, or that the unity we temporarily

felt would have long-lasting social benefits.

Realizing that we’ve reached a point of the pandemic in which we feel nostalgic for the hopes we had at its beginning is an odd reminder that one day, we’ll finally feel nostalgia for today’s way of life. What we’re experiencing now will become an after image held in the memories of our future incarnations – those versions of ourselves who know our fate. There’s no way to see what they see, but one thing holds true:

we’ll keep guessing at the future, and for better or for worse, we’ll keep getting it wrong.

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Across: 6. Nostalgia from being haunted by lost futures 7. After ______ (the title of this issue) 9. The Howl’s three categories: ______, Sights, and Sounds 11. The fourth planet from the sun 12. The Cube Escape game reviewed in this issue 13. A magazine with a frightening title

Down: 1. The college with which the Howl Mag is affiliated 2. According to the Pisces horoscope, the planet entering retrograde last August 3. In astrology, when a planet’s orbit appears to be reversed 4. The second month of Taurus season 5. The After Images issue of the Howl has 36 of these 8. The ______ Hypothesis in Josiah’s Thoughts 10. The artist whose 1888 bedroom is featured in Cube Escape

*answers on page 36 11

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July

21st

I float on my back, surrounded by blue tiles, the only sounds ringing in my ears being crickets buzzing and water sloshing when I move. The sun burns the tops of my cheeks and I remember I should have reapplied sunscreen. I turn my face to the right — right ear water sloshing, left ear crickets now — and look at the big stone house with its white shutters.

This is the last summer I’ll be here. In a way, it’s the last page in this chapter of my childhood.

I can’t remember not coming here. It seems to me that the house appeared when I was born, and I imagine I thought it would just vanish when I decided it so, not during the year of my twentieth birthday.

I stare at the trees in front of the house, their leaves dancing in the wind, and I think to myself that I have to remember this image: 13

the silence, the blue tiles of the pool, the sun on my face, my pudgy white legs seeming paler still in the water. I cannot count the number of times I’ve had this exact urge to capture a memory, and closed my eyes as fast and as tight as I could, like a camera shutter trying to immortalize a fleeting moment.

Of course, the irony is that I don’t remember any of the images I was trying to capture. Maybe by deciding I need to remember, I don’t let myself truly experience what will then become a memory. Maybe I live through moments as fast as I can only to be able to look back and think: “That was nice.”

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I remember when I was seventeen, which seems much further away than it truly is, I made a list of all the happy memories I could recall from the relationship I was in. The point of this list, as its title “To Read When it’s Bad” indicated, was to remind myself when things were rough that I did in fact experience happiness at some precise and scattered instances. The list read something like this: cried when he left you at the airport, fell asleep on your shoulder in the train, and other seemingly mundane actions.

To be sure, this pros list was incredibly biased, as it existed in the absence of

a cons list. But that is the way memories work: we pick and choose the ones we wish to enlarge, and meticulously minimize the ones that hurt the narrative we have constructed. We rewrite, and reframe, and retell the stories we’ve lived in accordance with how we feel now. And then we forget — and the stories get thinner and thinner, like string shedding as we pull too hard on it.

So as I lay in the water watching the house, I know I won’t remember this image.

I’ll remember instead the vague ambience of being here, and then remember the remembering. A peek of nostalgia.

Instead, then, I’ll take a hundred photos that will make their way from my phone to my computer in a few months, and finish in a hard drive in three years in a box of other hard drives full of other memories I thought were crucial. And I’ll look through them and say:

That

was nice.

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Turn on your computer and open a new tab. A vertical line awaits you. It blinks to attract your attention, vanishing and reappearing every half second. For a moment, your browser is completely empty. Close your eyes tightly—do you see the ghost of a white screen, blank with possibilities in your mind’s eye? It takes only a quick trip of the fingertips across the keys to fill the page with an endless supply of virtual worlds. In 0.55 seconds, Google will show you 51,700,000 results for ‘Cube Escape’, but the first link is all you need. Click and uncover the mysteries of Rusty Lake.

with sparse pine trees bordering the body of water. The scene flickers, as if viewed through an old television set. The man rows himself to the center of the lake. Serenely, he sinks below the surface.

The fictional universe of Rusty Lake is a haunting collection of pointand-click escape and adventure games released by the indie studio of the same name. These atmospheric stories feature a gothic manor and the lake which borders it, and involve a cast of recurring characters: the malevolent Mr. Crow, the detective Dale Vandermeer, a woman The loading screen for bedecked in a green print each Rusty Lake game dress, a shadow with features the silhouette white eyes, and an array of a man in a rowboat. of humans with the heads He floats upon a deep of owls, deer, rabbits, purple lake which lies and more. Each narrative, in the foreground of a without fail, is twisted, cream colored mountain frightful and gory. If you range; the sky is a flat red are the type of person

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who is weak of heart, dreadfully boring, or who prefers the mundane over the eccentric, then these games are not for your delicate sensibilities. But if you are the type who enjoys the weightless freefall of an airplane experiencing turbulence, who would descend the cobwebbed staircase in a thriller, or who currently feels dreadfully bored, then you may, just possibly, enjoy Cube Escape.

This series comprises nine eerie games that are all created within the same milieu, can be discovered in any order, and are free to play. In each game, you begin trapped in a square room from which you must find your escape by moving about, collecting tools, and solving puzzles.

Not only does this series provide a fun puzzle for your delectation, but it interpellates you in

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a mystery decades.

that

spans

In Cube Escape: Seasons, you must puzzle your way out of a room four times, in four different memories.

The first is in the Spring of 1964, and the last is in the Winter of 1981. By watering a seed in Spring, you can harvest the flowered plant in the Summer, seven years later. In this series, time is as much of a mystery as are the games themselves, each of which are scattered across the span of a century. In Cube Escape: Case 23, you play as Detective Vandermeer.

If you inspect the picture hanging on your wall, you may feel a glimmer of recognition if you have played through Arles, for the image is of Van Gogh’s bedroom circa 1888. With a keen mind, you’ll not only find the solution to each game, but you’ll uncover the connections between each story.

The eerie tenth installment and finale of the series is titled Cube Escape: Paradox. Once again, you play the character of Dale Vandermeer, and wake up, amnesic, in a hotel room.

Dale gazes in the mirror to discover a cut on his forehead. He is drawn as a cartoon, but periodically, the screen blurs and you catch a glimpse of a live action figure bearing his resemblance. The phone rings, and you pick up the receiver to hear Mr. Crow welcoming you to “a place of relaxation—a place to empty the mind.” A place to escape, perhaps?

of the game, for it may provide helpful clues to aid in your escape. At the end of the story, you witness the death of a blonde woman in a green frock who falls back into the lake, the water blanketing her completely.

The creators behind Rusty Lake have succeeded at creating a world so intoxicating that the end of each game fills you with a rush of disappointment.

We escape reality to immerse ourselves in fictional worlds, so that when we emerge, all that is left is a mere reflection on the surface: an after image of the depths below.

This ending to the Cube Escape series expands upon its legacy. Released Sure. Take a swim in the alongside the game is a lake. But pause for a twenty minute short film moment to ask yourself: by the same title, Paradox, in which the plot is Why is the water identical, only told through a different medium. You may watch the film at any point in your playthrough

red?

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> “Oh yes. Now, this is special. You hold in your hands a physical copy of The Howl Mag, containing the first ever printed installment of nobody’s favorite monthly column: Josiah’s Thoughts.” Those words are what would have been printed roughly a year ago, had a certain global event not complicated things. I had prepared an article on escaping The Matrix, a sequel to the first edition of my then-monthly thinkpiece column which I had written as an argument in support of The Matrix Hypothesis. Here’s what the opening paragraph would have said: “My first entry in this series was a piece explaining The Matrix Hypothesis. For those of you who did not read the article, The Matrix Hypothesis states that we may live in a computer simulation. I explained how there is no way to disprove this hypothesis, and that ultimately it does not matter whether or not you really are in a simulation, because

your life matters regardless and you should continue to live it. It was a rather wholesome note on which to end such an existentially challenging piece. I want you to forget all of that. We could be in a simulation, and that would render our lives meaningless and futile.

Time to panic. The reason I’ve dug up the corpse of my previous article is because the theme of the magazine you hold in your hands is ‘Escape’. I will provide you with several ways to do exactly that. I will tell you how to escape The Matrix.” That premise isn’t thematically valid anymore, so now I have to dig up the corpse of the article that originally dug up the corpse of my matrix article, because the actual theme of this magazine issue is ‘After Images’. Now that you’ve read far too much exposition and contextplacing, I present to you an after image of an after image of an article about The Matrix.

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> “The first method of escape is a passive one, but philosophically functional nevertheless.

You must realize you are simultaneously in and not in The Matrix. This realization comes about when one contemplates the argument behind The Matrix Hypothesis. The hypothesis claims that there is no way to prove we are not in a matrix. However, here is what you must say to a proponent of such a theory: ‘But can you prove that we are in The Matrix ?’ As they stare, open-mouthed in disbelief at the sheer capacity of your intellect, you can walk away knowing that you have put forth a valid counter-argument. We cannot prove whether or not we are in The Matrix, which means each outcome is equally likely. We are both in, and not in, The Matrix.

Think of your existence like Schrödinger’s cat. Since we cannot know whether or not we’re in The Matrix, you’re simultaneously in The Matrix and also a dead cat, 28

or something like that. You have philosophically sort-of halfway escaped The Matrix ! > The next method of escape similarly involves philosophical gymnastics.

For millennia, philosophers have concocted thought experiments which all essentially amount to The Matrix hypothesis. One such conception of the problem posits that reality is an illusion created by a demon.

Another is that you’re a brain in a vat, controlled by a scientist. The list goes surprisingly on.

These scenarios share a crucial fact in common: all of them were crafted by people who, according to their own theory, are in a simulated reality. Essentially, if they are to be believed, they live in a simulation. However, a simulation is by definition a controlled environment.

Whether the controller is a demon, evil scientist, or race of artificially intelligent, body-heat-harvesting robot overlords, there is someone on the outside. Why, then,

would that controller allow you to become aware that you are in a simulation?

Once an individual inside a simulation becomes aware that they are in a simulation, that simulation loses its persuasive power, which means the original argument must not be true. The defense against the theory is the very fact that the theory exists in the first place. Thus, you never really were in The Matrix after all, so you’ve successfully ‘escaped’. > The final method of escape that I will propose is the most daring. You must seek out Morpheus.

He’s a bald guy with sick shades and he’ll offer you a red pill or a blue pill.

Ignore what your dad told you about not taking drugs from strangers, and take the red one to escape the simulation. Do it or you’re not cool. If you haven’t the faintest clue what I’m talking about, I suggest you do yourself the favor of watching The Matrix

and possibly some D.A.R.E propaganda. > I have now imparted my knowledge of how to escape The Matrix to you.

Here’s an interesting line of thought: you’re reading an article about ways to escape the matrix. That means there are two possibilities.

The first dictates that we live in the matrix, meaning I am also stuck in a simulation, rendering my strategies ineffectual or else I would have ideally already escaped. In this case, this article is useless because its methods don’t work. The other possibility is that we do not live in the matrix, and never have. In this case too, the article is useless. Well, perhaps not entirely useless. Perhaps this has been a lesson that regardless of whether or not we live in the matrix, you can still be manipulated into doing things with no true purpose, like reading 923 words of pure time-wasting nonsense.”

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Across: 6. Hauntology 7. Images 9. Thoughts 11. Mars 12. Rusty Lake 13. The Howl Mag

Down: 1. Woodsworth 2. Jupiter 3. Retrograde 4. May 5. Pages 8. Matrix 10. Van Gogh

crossword answers

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