conversationswithcurtis is playing Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle of Flesh on Twitch

Erin plays Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh with Paul & Daniel (Co-Host for a Day!) - PART 7

https://twitch.tv/conversationswithcurtis

#DOSGames #FMVGames #Phantasmagoria #StreamDetective

Postcards from The Persnickety~Puce Hotel

Dear Lucretia ~

The position of the Arctic horse is unusual. Recently, a terrible pistachio-like task passed through my throat. This is not a definitive statement.

#Art #Collage #CollageArt #DigitalArt
#Asemic #AsemicArt #AsemicPostcards #AsemicText #AsemicWriting
#Pataphor #Fantasy #AlternativeReality #Phantasmagoria #Postcards

https://asemictarot.wordpress.com/2025/11/21/postcards-from-the-persnicketypuce-hotel/

“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.”*…

Most historians of science fiction begin their stories with the likes of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, and lean on the extraordinary impact of Hugo Gernsback. Art and culture historian Fleur Hopkins-Loféron reminds us that there was an early 20th-century movement in France that prefigured much of what we now celebrate in speculative fiction…

When Nicolas Vermont entered the greenhouse, he would make a gruesome discovery. It was the early 20th century in rural France, and Nicolas was visiting his uncle – a scientist and surgeon called Dr Frédéric Lerne – after 15 years apart. However, he had soon grown suspicious about his uncle’s odd behaviour, so for answers had decided to explore the grounds of his relative’s estate late at night.

Inside a greenhouse in the garden, Nicolas discovered that Dr Lerne had been conducting disturbing scientific experiments. At first, he saw plants grafted onto one another: a cactus growing a geranium flower, and an oak tree sprouting cherries and walnuts. His uneasy curiosity, though, soon turned to dread. ‘It was then that I touched the hairy plant. Having felt the two treated leaves, so like ears, I felt them warm and quivering,’ he recalled. Grafted onto the stem were the parts of an animal: the ears of a dead rabbit. ‘My hand, clenched with repugnance, shook off the memory of the contact as it would have shaken off some hideous spider.’ [Quotations from published English-language editions translated by Brian Stapleford; the rest are the author’s own.]

Dr Lerne was in fact an impostor. His assistant Otto Klotz had stolen the true uncle’s body through a brain swap, and would not hesitate to punish Nicolas for his ill-placed curiosity… by transplanting his consciousness into the body of a bull.

Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (1908), or ‘Dr Lerne, Demi-God’, was a celebrated novel by Maurice Renard, hailed by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire as a ‘subdivine novel of metamorphoses’.Published in English as New Bodies for Old, it heralded the dawn of a new French literary genre – one that ventured boldly into the uncertain and the unknown. Renard called it ‘merveilleux-scientifique’ (‘scientific-marvellous’) and its ambition was to help the reader speculate on what could be, and on what exists beyond the reach of our senses, rather than what will be. In other words, allowing a better understanding of what Renard poetically called ‘the imminent threats of the possible’. As he wrote in 1914, the goal was to ‘patrol the margins of certainty, not to acquire knowledge of the future, but to gain a greater understanding of the present’.

Rejecting the ‘scientific adventure’ storytelling of the celebrated French sci-fi writer Jules Verne – who had died only three years before the publication of Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu – the merveilleux-scientifique genre was grounded in plausibility and the scientific method. According to Renard, only one physical, chemical or biological law may be altered when telling a story. This strict discipline, he argued, is what lent the genre its power to sharpen the reader’s mind, by offering a wholly original kind of thought experiment. For example, Renard modelled Dr Lerne on the very real surgeon and biologist Alexis Carrel, who had experimented with surgical grafts, transplants and animal tissues… to the point that he even grafted a dog’s severed head on another living animal (the attempt failed). Following in his footsteps, Renard imagines an exchange of brains – and personalities.

Leafing through the merveilleux-scientifique novels today allows for a dual rediscovery: firstly, it uncovers the previously unrecognised richness of Belle Époque scientific fiction, which did not perish with the works of Verne. The stories take in journeys to Mars, solar cataclysms, reading of auras, psychic control, weighing of souls, death rays, alien invasions, even strolls among the infinitesimally small. But exploring the genre also offers insights into the cultural history of the era, marked by a significant permeability between science and pseudo-science. Reading this work, we can learn a lot about the aspirations, fears and beliefs of early 20th-century Europe.

Perhaps more importantly, the lesser-known stories of merveilleux-scientifique allow us to question the official history of science fiction – a term that did not even exist in France at the time as it as it would be popularised in English by Hugo Gernsback only in the 1920s. Whereas today it is sci-fi writers like Jules Verne or H G Wells who are most remembered from this period, the merveilleux-scientifique novels were just as imaginative and visionary, but often far more provocative, daring and strange…

Much more– with wonderful reproductions of the works’ covers: “Merveilleux-scientifique” from @aeon.co.

* J. G. Ballard (in a 1971 essay, “Fictions Of Every Kind“)

###

As we speculate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1850 that the first U.S. patent for magic lantern slides made of glass plate was issued to their inventor Frederick Langenheim of Philadelphia, Pa. (No. 7,784) as an “improvement in photographic pictures on glass.” Magic lantern shows were largely informational, but (especially in Europe in the 19th century) magic lanterns were used to stage “Phantasmagoria,” a form of horror theater that (among other techniques) used one or more magic lanterns to project frightening images – such as skeletons, demons, and ghosts – typically using rear projection onto a semi-transparent screen to keep the lantern out of sight.

#art #culture #history #literature #magicLantern #merveilleuxScientifique #phantasmagoria #science #scienceFiction #speculativeFiction

Postcards from The Edge of Polysemy

Dear Hyacinth ~

I play drums with Walter. We work because we are mostly human. It’s scary, my flowery metonymy – some Volta fans said that there is no white glow behind me.

#Art #Collage #CollageArt #DigitalArt
#Asemic #AsemicArt #AsemicPostcards #AsemicText #AsemicWriting #Surreal #Dadaist #Surrealism #Pataphor #Fantasy #AlternativeReality #Phantasmagoria #Postcards

https://asemictarot.wordpress.com/2025/11/08/postcards-from-the-edge-of-polysemy/

He kisses the object, holds the electrode in his hand, and says that sunlight reveals the pool beneath the illegible letters, revealing the fact that he is making a sign. The sign above the kiss could be a peach, and the illegible letters in the kiss detail share a similar reality. "It says like the sea," he says. The illegible letters beneath the circle suggest that the illegible letters danced Bitcoin. "Bitcoin, and it is still true," he says. The narrator is inside and says the monster is still laughing. The first signs indicate it is true. Force indicates directional movement. Symbols depict stone walls, trees, peaches, blood circles, biblical tablets, prayers, and declarations of faith. Bitcoin can be analyzed. He dances the tango under the moonlight in a rainbow pool and sings by the sea. A Dadaist commentator on Bitcoin states that the inside appears to be a wallet, proving his faith in Bitcoin.

#Dadaist #DadaistExistentialism #Phantasmagoria #Dreamscape #Bitcoin

Sierra Saturday: Let's Play Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle of Flesh - Ep 14 [FINALE] - Plumbus puzzle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLQN6ti7x1w
#Level0NPCs #PhantasmagoriaPuzzleofFlesh #Phantasmagoria #PuzzleofFlesh #SierraOnline #AdventureGame #AdventureGames #PointandClick #RetroGaming #RetroGames #HorrorGame #HorrorGames #90sAdventureGames

Sierra Saturday: Let's Play Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle of Flesh - Ep 13 - Suddenly a Dr. Who Episode
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raIu4R8YtzA
#Level0NPCs #PhantasmagoriaPuzzleofFlesh #Phantasmagoria #PuzzleofFlesh #SierraOnline #AdventureGame #AdventureGames #PointandClick #RetroGaming #RetroGames #HorrorGame #HorrorGames #90sAdventureGames

~ boughs in dreams ~

Musical instruments disappear: viola, violin, sometimes a piano – silence slides between cracks and eyelids.

#Art #DigitalArt #Photography #EOS #EOS90D #Surrealism #Dreams #Weird #WeirdPoetry #SurrealPoetry
#Phantasmagoria #Poetry
#Surreal #Dreamscape

https://asemictarot.wordpress.com/2025/10/23/boughs-in-dreams/

~ face rising from fungus ~

Another Halloween composition inspired by the poetry of #HPLovecraft and #ClarkAshtonSmith. ** The face in the portrait is a distorted profile, depending on how your eyes adjust to the angle, it may appear more like a mound of fungus. 😂

#Art #DigitalArt #Photography #EOS #EOS90D #EldritchFriday #Eldritch
#EldritchFantasy #Halloween #DreamCycleOfHPLovecraft
#Dreams #EldritchPoetry #Weird #WeirdPoetry #WeirdTales
#Phantasmagoria #Poetry #WeirdFiction #Octoberween #Fantasy #31DaysofHalloween #TheDreamLands
#31DaysOfSpooktober #FungusAmongUs

https://impliedspaces.wordpress.com/2025/10/24/face-rising-from-fungus/

Let's Play Phantasmagoria Part-8 The Many Death's Of Adrienne
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RezbZgLoNM
#Vauldemare #Phantasmagoria #SierraOnline #AdventureGame #AdventureGames #PointandClick #RetroGaming #RetroGames #HorrorGame #HorrorGames #HorrorGaming #90sAdventureGames

Let's Play Phantasmagoria Part-7 Till Death Do You Part (Finale)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-Dwor4ssWk
#Vauldemare #Phantasmagoria #SierraOnline #AdventureGame #AdventureGames #PointandClick #RetroGaming #RetroGames #HorrorGame #HorrorGames #HorrorGaming #90sAdventureGames

The pale knight rides through the bones of flowers – A Fable of Faerie Lands

#Art #DigitalArt #Photography #EOS #EOS90D #AsemicArt #AsemicText
#AsemicWriting #Halloween
#Dreams #Fable #Faerie #FairyTales
#Phantasmagoria #Poetry #ProsePoem #WeirdFiction #Octoberween #Fantasy #31DaysofHalloween #31DaysOfSpooktober

https://asemictarot.wordpress.com/2025/10/16/the-pale-knight-rides-through-the-bones-of-flowers-a-fable-of-faerie-lands/

Sierra Saturday: Let's Play Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle of Flesh - Ep 12 - Blacklotus fhtagn
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBKIGOJ2IRc
#Level0NPCs #PhantasmagoriaPuzzleofFlesh #Phantasmagoria #PuzzleofFlesh #SierraOnline #AdventureGame #AdventureGames #PointandClick #RetroGaming #RetroGames #HorrorGame #HorrorGames #90sAdventureGames

Sierra Saturday: Let's Play Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle of Flesh - Ep 11 - Hamdriver Begins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoGsCTmIhx8
#Level0NPCs #PhantasmagoriaPuzzleofFlesh #Phantasmagoria #PuzzleofFlesh #SierraOnline #AdventureGame #AdventureGames #PointandClick #RetroGaming #RetroGames #HorrorGame #HorrorGames #90sAdventureGames

Eldritch Friday: the waiting door

#Art #Photography #EOS90D #EOS #TheDreamLands #Eldritch #EldritchFriday #Fantasy #Halloween #Octoberween #Phantasmagoria #Poetry #PulpMagazines #WeirdFiction #Weird #WeirdPoetry #WeirdTales

https://impliedspaces.wordpress.com/2025/10/17/eldritch-friday-the-waiting-door/

Phantasmagoria was released 30 years (and a bit) ago on 24th August 1995.

(I didn't have this one on my list and just noticed it now.)

I never played it, but from what I heard about it, it was very ambitious.

#1995InVideoGames #VideoGameHistory #retrogaming #videogames #Phantasmagoria #RobertaWilliams #SierraOnline #90sGames #AdventureGames

Desde Beirut llega una descarga de metal extremo con PHENOMY que presenta “Phantasmagoria” lleno de riffs devastadores, melodías oscuras y energía brutal que no entiende de fronteras.
#Phenomy #Phantasmagoria #ArtGatesRecords #MetalExtremo #MetalLibanes #GrooveMetal #ThrashMetal #RockAndBlog

https://rockandblog.net/critica-de-phenomy-phantasmagoria/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=jetpack_social

Let's Play Phantasmagoria Part-6 Chapter 6 Demon Revealed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75fwNzzTLD4
#Vauldemare #Phantasmagoria #SierraOnline #AdventureGame #AdventureGames #PointandClick #RetroGaming #RetroGames #HorrorGame #HorrorGames #HorrorGaming #90sAdventureGames

Let's Play Phantasmagoria Part-5 Chapter 5 The Secret Passages
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax94D9_mBGE
#Vauldemare #Phantasmagoria #SierraOnline #AdventureGame #AdventureGames #PointandClick #RetroGaming #RetroGames #HorrorGame #HorrorGames #HorrorGaming #90sAdventureGames

Let's Play Phantasmagoria Part-4 Chapter 4 The Second Room
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcTJME0VVms
#Vauldemare #Phantasmagoria #SierraOnline #AdventureGame #AdventureGames #PointandClick #RetroGaming #RetroGames #HorrorGame #HorrorGames #HorrorGaming #90sAdventureGames