The Journal of Fear: A Work-in-Progress Art Project, presented for ~Town Con 2024

The pages so far

Content warning: Trypophobia (clusters of holes) and generally unsettling imagery. Click this to show/hide images. (Unless your browser doesn't support the details element, in which case you can probably already see them.)
paper covered in cutouts of eyes. in the lower left corner it says 'they all have a story to tell'.
The Eye (unfinished): the fear of being watched, privacy invasions
cutout of a shovel, surrounded on all sides by dirt, along with the words 'tightness. soil in your chest.'
The Buried: the fear of tight spaces, suffocation
piece of paper with many holes punched out of it and sploches of sickly green color throughout the page, along with the word 'itch' in the center.
The Corruption: the fear of unsanitary things
paper that is completely black, except for the words 'suspended in darkness' in the center of the page.
The Dark: the fear of...well...the dark
photo of three identical copies of the same person, accompanied by the words 'the uncanny valley: almost-lifelike, totally inhuman'.
The Stranger: the fear of the uncanny valley

About the project

This project is inspired by probably the weirdest combination of three things: aesthetic journaling, The Magnus Archives, and the Costco Connection.

Aesthetic journaling is basically scrapbooking, but the specific style that inspired this is hard to explain succinctly with words. This 1-minute YouTube video by The Crafty Lefty gives you an idea of the sort of thing I'm talking about. Since I don't have all the stickers and scrapbooking paper and whatnot these big YouTubers have, I use a lot of magazine cutouts in my journal pages, mostly a particular magazine I have a lot of copies of, called the Costco Connection.

The Costco Connection is a magazine, for Costco members, about Costco. You know, that big box store that you need a membership to shop at? Yeah, it has a magazine, and I have been reading it since I was 8. I have this huge pile of Costco Connections on my shelf, and could probably make a whole seperate page that's just me talking about it. One day, I was reading the March 2023 issue, and as I read it, a few parts of it managed to both

  1. seem like they could fit into an aesthetic journal spread, and
  2. remind me of The Magnus Archives.

The Magnus Archives is a horror podcast that, in short, centers around a collection of 14 "Entities" that are kind of like eldritch gods that represent various fears. It has been a major hyperfixation for me on and off for over two years, so naturally things remind me of it that wouldn't remind anyone else of it. Like the phrase "see? it wasn't you after all" being used as a cute little ending to an article on improving your baking skills, for example.

Armed with these sources of inspiration, the Idea Machine quickly whirred to life, and I decided to create a little collage journal featuring a page for each Fear Entity. I made the pages by cutting the bottoms off of brown paper bags, folding them into book pages, and securing them together using a hole-puncher and little clasps intended to be used for necklaces. The paper bag thing was very useful, because it means I can throw the kitchen sink at a page without ruining the page on the other side, by slipping a piece of paper into the "tube" part inbetween the pages.

The images on this webpage are 5 pages out of what will be 14 pages, plus the front and back covers. I might also make a "bonus page" if I feel up to it, because for convoluted plot reasons there might actually be 15 Entities...but that's far in the future. Currently, the next step in this project is finishing the Eye's page (turns out cutting out and pasting tiny little eyes across a page is very tedious, especially when you have perfectionism brainworms like I do).

So...yeah! If you have any comments, feel free to contact me via town mail at lu@tilde.town!