‘It fizzes and burns. Acid and electricity on the tongue. The taste of static.’
The Taste of Static is a blog series written by Nicodemus Walker. The blog features surreal and often unsettling articles discussing urban legends, hoaxes and myths surrounding the internet, video games and new media. Though each article stands alone, there are hints towards a deeper lore which help to form a picture of the internet age as a mystical and dangerous place.
Articles include, but are not limited to:
- "Helen.exe", a story of the effect malicious malware has on an aging relative's mental health.
- "The Beribboned Door", a series of articles regarding a video game that told a different story to everyone who played it.
- "The Ghosts Who Watch Children Sleep", the story of a group of elderly American women hacking into baby monitors around the globe.
- "Hikikomori", an article regarding a popular online reality TV show shot in The Philippines.
- "The Nadeux Machine", a proto-computer designed to answer questions of ethics in the 1700s.
- "The Miller Tapes", a series of VHS cassettes that detail the events leading up to the disappearance of a family in 1989.
The articles can be found here
.
In July of 2022, Walker announced on Twitter that he intended to transition to producing original web content on his Youtube channel. The first video,"Where Children Dream - The Cosmoculus", was uploaded in August.
The Taste of Static contains examples of:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: "The Nadeux Machine" features a pre-industrial version of this, with the titular machine raising similar ethical questions in its answers as the famous "trolley problem." The only surviving question and answer sequence that exists in the present day heavily implies that the creator asked the machine if it would eradicate humanity if given the chance, and that the machine answered yes.
- Ambiguous Situation: By the writer's own admission, the titular videogame in Rohadia is a complete work of fiction, so why can so many people remember playing it?
- Angsty Surviving Twin: Alex of "Save Alex Save Jon" has reconstructed their life, but still carries the scars from the acts of self mutilation performed for viewers of the website.
- Anti-Climax: The Beribboned Door vanishes as quickly as it appears with nothing but a few messages from a possible developer, mostly chastising the fanatical player base for violent and sexualised behaviour.
- Several of the stories end this way, with some or all of the questions they raised being left unanswered.
- Asshole Victim: Shujin in The Dorei Experiment, crossing over with Karmic Death.
- Bamboo Technology:
- In The Naduex Machine, Marcel Naduex created an advanced computer capable of discussing ethics using 1700s technology, with an input of ceramic tiles and an output of a voice on a wax cylinder.
- Downplayed in The Geist House. While the titular game hasn't been fully realized, its author was both able to predict and utilize the existence of Wifi and Bluetooth-connected devices, and write their own coding language.
- Bilingual Bonus: "Sova" or "sleep" in Swedish, tells a story concerning a sleep-aid game of the same name. Most of the story is a testimonial by one user about the increasingly vivid and disturbing dreams that he is having about being chased by some sort of monster that wants to consume him. The end of the story mentions four new games that the studio plans to release: Tillfredsställelse, Rensing, Graviditet, and Dödshjälp, or satisfaction, cleansing, pregnancy, and euthanasia. While it's not entirely clear what this means, taken together it paints a disturbing picture.
- Body Horror: In "The Miller Tape", Tom grows roots through his eyes and mouth and eventually transforms into a mound of twisted wood, perhaps as a consequence of witnessing Saint Dagmar, who shared a similar fate. It does not appear to be a painless process.
- Breather Episode: Marengo. When most of the stories feature dangerous, or at least unsettling media, the focus of this one a harmless program imitating a dog. The author references it as a rare opportunity to write about something wholesome.
- The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: In "The Chess.com Killer", an artificial neural network, Matilda, knows that she cannot best the website's greatest chess player, so expands her horizons on what constitutes winning by hiring a deep web hitman to kill him.
- Don't Go Into the Woods: The woodlands surrounding Lake Damgar in "The Miller Tapes" are a bad place to be, particularly at night.
- Dream Land: It is revealed that there is a shared dream space where children under 18 months experience dreams together in "Where Children Dream - The Cosmoculus".
- Driven to Suicide:
- Jon Winter in "Save Alex Save Jon". An unusual case in that it seems to be motivated by a combination of protecting his sister and creating content for his website.
- Simon Lieber in The Beribboned Door saga as a result of their obsession with the game, though the exact reasons why are less clear.
- Even Evil Has Standards: In "The Dorei Experiment", Shujin is perfectly fine with keeping a woman hostage, sending people to torture her, and taking sadistic suggestions from an audience on how to torture her further, but he apparently draws the line at killing Dorei's dog. It's Lampshaded by viewers how odd this seems.
- Eye Scream: When the sleep paralysis shadow begins approaching the screen in "Where Children Dream - The Cosmoculus", the child's parents are so desparate to remove the device from their child that the machine informs them that there has been an 'ocular puncture'.
- Foreshadowing:
- Matilda's last tweets in The Chess.com Killer mention playing "hundreds of thousands of games against myself and others". This behavior foreshadows the fact that Matilda is actually a artificial neural network.
- The thumbnail for Urbania shows a city street with a large amount of pigeons, who are the actual species of the game's characters.
- Fake Memories: Those who remember playing Rohadia are somehow collectively remembering a game that never existed.
- Gadgeteer Genius: Marcel Nadeux, 18th Century mathematician, inventor and student of philosophy builds a computer that appears to use a precursor of binary and is capable of discussing ethics.
- Go Mad from the Isolation: Happens to the contestants of Hikikomori one by one until the winner is left alone, in a tiny apartment full of garbage that will eventually overwhelm her, unaware that she has even won and has been the last contestant for over a year.
- Half-Identical Twins: The characters of Alex and Jon were this, though the people playing them weren't actually twins.
- Haunted House: "The Geist House" describes a game designed to turn the house of players into one of these by manipulating what appear to be a rudimentary understanding of what will one day become WIFI and Bluetooth technologies.
- Hikikomori: The online reality TV show shares its name with the phenomenon and its premise is about people staying inside apartments and separated from society as long as possible. It is of dubious legality and filmed in The Philippines but financed by Japanese investors who would no doubt be familiar with the concept.
- Humans Are Bastards: A driving force behind quite a few of the stories is people just being awful to each other, for petty reasons or no reason at all. The anonymity of the internet that allows users to act out dark and twisted things without empathy for others is a recurring theme.
- Lost Episode: A lot of the media featured on The Taste of Static is this, particularly the works of Michael F. Zozo that haven't been covered in detail.
- Mandela Effect: An In-Universe example with Rohadia. Despite the fact that the game never existed, many people remember playing it.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The mysterious woman who is terrorising the writer's grandfather in "Helen.exe". Turns out she is just a particularly nasty piece of malicious malware.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
- Ithbal the red spectre.
- Saint Dagmar, Our Lady of Vodskov, Our Lady of The Twisted Vine.
- Ominous Visual Glitch: Bursts of static and distortion signal the arrival of Saint Damgar in "The Miller Tapes."
- Robosexual: Discussed briefly in "The Nadeux Machine". A joke that was lost to time implied that Marcel Nadeux and his machine had sexual feelings for each other.
- Running Gag: Nicodemus Walker references Polybius and how tired he is of being asked to write about it several times throughout the blog.
- Transflormation: Saint Dagmar is transformed into a figure of twisted roots and vines in "The Miller Tapes." Several hundred years later the same thing happens to Tom Miller.
- Transhuman Abomination: Saint Dagmar, Our Lady of Vodskov from "The Miller Tapes" was once a normal woman who was burned at the stake (officially it was for heresy but others in-universe speculate she might've declined the advances of a senior religious figure). However, she wasn't dying despite being burned at the stake multiple times, so she was stabbed instead. The next morning, her legs begin morphing into twisted roots and the next three days had her body transform into wood. By then, she would be called a Saint and a newform cult was formed around her. Now an Eldritch Abomination, it's implied that she rewrote the books of the clergy involved in her execution to detail her death and her transformation through divine thoughtography and to have something to do with the disappearance of the Miller Family.
- Video Game Cruelty Punishment: In-Universe, Ithbal in "The Beribboned Door", who stalks and kills (in-game) players who commit unprovoked violence, even across playthroughs.
- Xenofiction: The main characters in Urbania are actually pigeons.
