Oh dang! This is so wild to see. Thanks for playing my games, it was extremely compelling to see your analysis!

I feel as though the player character finding the hard drive is the equivalent to those who found Marie Curie's notebooks. They knew slightly more than she did but not enough to know that even the items used to record the knowledge is something they should never touch.

In a strange sort of way, the first LEGO movie has a bit of cosmic horror, or cosmic awakening when Emmet breaks free into the real world and sees with his own painted eyes the Man Upstairs, and the little boy that has been subtly moving him and the rest of the gang along to their goal. Naturally, being a family movie, seeing a being of unfathomable power gets skipped over pretty damn quickly, but it does have the effect of giving Emmet the "sparkle" needed to become a master builder. He had a run in with a Lovecraftian entity, and came back altered.

Looking at all the garbled text at the end of Looking Glass, it might be more complicated than just hatred from whatever entity is saying hello. They say things like "can you hear me? please", "I can't hear you", "I'm sorry I'm sorry", and "so lonely". It could be that whatever this is feels complicated or unknowable emotions towards humanity. It could be that the hatred is because we're in the way when it wasn't intended or expected, like they just realized there's people in front of the steamroller they're driving across our universe. Not a hatred towards us so much as the situation. Or it could be they feel no hatred, but we feel it as hatred because they're an active theat to us, like them trying to communicate is killing us

28:50 my favorite example of not being allowed to know something was a picture of an eletrocuted rat in a fuse-box. No matter what experementing or testing that rat could've done would have saved him from the instant, uncaring, and violent death that awaited him when he tried to scurry across that live line

Ever since rediscovering vermis malum a couple months ago, I now crave these like the starving man craves the crumbs inevitably leading him to the witch’s oven

I like to imagine the presence in the second game isn’t actually hostile. Maybe it’s the same force as the first attempting diplomacy now that the cat’s out of the bag, maybe it’s some other entity.

But it doesn’t necessarily act with malice. The object it sends is a familiar object, and a writing desk - a medium of communication - and the deck of cards seems to be an attempt at some form of message related to the entropy theory.

The message it sends is: hello. A greeting. Possibly hostile, but not necessarily. Could it be that the other side of the river is trying to communicate, but can’t help that they are essentially radioactive to us? The idea that the other side is the researcher’s “enemy” may not stem from malice, but rather his instincts telling him that we are fundamentally incompatible with the other side.

I think there’s something far more horrifying about the incomprehensible horror that wants to make contact with the anthill, but can’t help but crush it.

I think the food exchange in the second game can be taken as a thematic metaphor for the story as a whole.

These two groups are exchanging something, something they think is good, but nobody's satisfied because of fundamental differences between the two.

Can you imagine if the Wish Making orb was just Galactic Ubereats , That’s like going camping , getting so drunk you forgot your phone and getting home to find out some raccoon ordered take out :0

This whole video felt like a thinly veiled threat lol, the worm knows that looking into it kills us, and that there is nothing we can do about it

I like the idea the the other universe dumping entropy into ours isn't doing it to prop themselves up to a untouchable height of utopia, but that they're actually on the brink of heat death and are only outputting entropy to keep their universe in tack. They see a small amount of it comes back and make a move to keep that from happening further, because they need to. They cannot afford to have what they're doing to be undermined or they risk complete destruction.

Something small that I found pretty unsettling about Looking Glass is the dates. Piotr dies on August 29th, and the autopsy is conducted the same day. The Codes Red and Black, which destroy JBAK, occur on August 2nd and 3rd. And a flagged message talking about moving "that russian" to the medical wing is from July 29th.
Also, the Code Red is supposed to fill JBAK with chlorine dioxide, killing anything that would be dangerous, but ensuring the data from the sample remains intact. The Code Black is to glass the area with explosives, data be damned. But if JBAK was blown to hell, how is the data in New Mexico on October 22nd? And on a hard drive downloaded to our computer on November 5th?
Last point, which is more thematic analysis than creepy date analysis: Jackson says the voice is like talking "to someone you view as an enemy, someone who hates you". Considering the game takes place during the Cold War, and the man is an American stuck in a facility with Russians, I wonder if the voice is actually malicious, or if it's something Jackson is projecting onto it? Or if the voice is an average of all voices across the world at that moment? Game is great, raises a lot of really cool questions

Before you had a chance to spoil it, i went an immediately played The Two Rivers Hypothesis... Yeah that is an insane idea that legitimately freaks me out. Imagine being at "war" with another being or group of beings that we can't possibly interact with. They are dumping what are essentially death-inducing particles into our universe to, presumably, create some sort of utopia on their end. It's the kind of cosmic horror scenario that isn't quite "we are small and insignificant" but "we have been losing a war we couldn't have possibly known existed before now. Dealt a losing hand since our inception and now we have no choice but to die."

It makes me wonder... if we were given such a choice, to dump our entropy onto an adjacent universe, creating a utopia in our own, would we do it? Knowing that we would be dooming the other universe to destruction? I guarantee we would. I guarantee none of us would give it much thought. And the moment the other universe sent an ounce of entropy back in our direction, like a spider fighting back against the foot about to crush it... it would be terrifying. And we'd bring our foot down much harder.

20:49 American horror be like: “Imagine no burger”

Hey so I'm late to this, but there is a really unsettling detail about Looking Glass that completely flips the story down a really horrific and apocalyptic path.
Piotr's Autopsy report is dated firmly as August 29th, but the incident talking of his death is reported communications is dated July 29th, a whole month prior.

No biggy, they just kept the body on ice for a month, I hear you say.

The base was gassed and vaporized on August 3rd. The base didn't exist to have an autopsy at, it and all the people there are as fake as the desk from that point on. The same is happening to the base in New Mexico, including the drive, and by the very end, you.

Now you might think this is a typo, but there are numerous entries of data on this drive marked for dates AFTER August 3rd. Not to mention that this drive was recovered from this base that was apparently nuked 12 times over.

This drive is the new desk. It holds data that we'd expect it to have right up until it doesn't, just like the desk.

The Expanse’s later books touch on this as well. When the man who controls most of human space attempts to “punish” the Dark Gods for disappearing human ships, the Dark Gods make it clear that humanity is in no position to negotiate. Ultimately, humanity only survives by simply… not doing the thing that was upsetting the dark gods, despite its catastrophic consequences.

the parallel universes + desk bit put me in mind of the Monument Mythos sister series American Anatomy, though the whole thing makes me think of a Night Vale quote I like "some mysteries aren't questions to be answered but a kind of oblique fact, a thing that exists to be not known"

19:22 - "not like 'hello, hello, hello", but more like one hello that never seems to end"

This kind of oxymoron is such great, subtle touch of psychological horror. Like having tinnitus but it's talking to you.

My head cannon for Iron Lung is that an eldritch being was moving through the universe when it caught the humans that were in space on its tailcoat.

Like walking through a spider web without noticing. To you it’s nothing. To the spider its entire world has just moved distances it’s never dreamed of.

12:51 I molded my entire personality around Zalgo when I was in my early teens, there's no way I'm ever forgetting that