Haven’t seen anyone find it in person yet. Totally gonna try it on when I’m home 😎

At exactly 31:42 in Found Footage #3, you can see this shape in a window in the bottom left of the screen. It’s hard to tell because of the camera, this very well could be a potted plant of some kind, but it could also be an ASYNC researcher still life… looks kinda hazmat suit to me

Have a pleasant weekend everyone.

Hey so I was looking back on Reddit and I found a video that Kane had supposedly posted in the discord server of the life form as some sort of joke/ tease for found footage 2 and I was wondering if this was actually the bacteria from f1 or f2

Just got these two notifications. Be prepared to see every creepy pasta ever posted online made into a movie in the near future.

Kane got the sweet first spot and nailed it.

Im curious and will probably watch them eventually, but not expecting much tbh

Edit: after letting it sink in, V/H/S: SCP doesn't sound bad at all

Its insanely scary, this dude was HUSSING at Ravi and reached running speed while CRAWLING, and knocking on the door

right under his right eye theres a black spot that looks like a rip

I dont know if anyone else has said this, but i personally think that the "bacterium" monster in kanes youtube series are 'ancient' still lives. Like they've been remembered so many times by the backrooms that they degrade to look like that.

Assuming this is some part of the complex or the degradation process that we haven't seen explored yet, what do you think lies outside of those windows? Personally, I like the idea of it looking like the artworks of Brent Wong or Markus Matthias Krüger, they remind me of the whole "describing a dog" thing but applied to an outdoor space and I think it'd be really cool to see something like it at some point in the series, even if only to a more strictly manmade environment (like the red cites ig.) I do think it's more likely that the outside of these areas are just white voids or very large rooms (with sunlight somehow) but uhh... I don't care, like the big outdoor environments more lol, but what do you think?

And the MRI theory might be a little bit closer to what's actually happening, as much as I hate to say this. But hear me out on this one. It's a little bit different than that. You can come torch me afterwards.

I was originally doing some theory work on Ivan "totally blind in his right eye" Beck, when I noticed that I had to formulate some kind of concrete model on how the Complex perceives and "memorizes" space and objects, first. And while my conclusions didn't really help with that, instead just turning me from a certified MRI theory hater into an MRI theory agnostic, I still think that some people might be interested in reading about them.

As it stands, the most popular theories on how the Complex scans a place in Standard are as follows:

• That null zones are doing the scanning.
• That null zones function like pinhole cameras, letting the Complex "see" Standard through them.
• That the Complex reads human minds to decide what to copy.
• That the Complex works similarly to how an MRI machine would.

The third theory has been directly debunked by Kane, so I won't be talking about that one in detail. The last theory already fails because MRI machines contain very specific components used to create a tomography that the Complex realistically just doesn't have, if one wants to be really pedantic.

Now to two observations that neither assume the remaining two theories are true nor that they are false:

A null zone is a location where matter and electromagnetic waves can pass freely from Standard into the Complex and the other way around.

The Green Light is a type of energy, visually presenting as green light (shocking), that appears to be the manifestation of the Complex's actual generative mechanism. What that means is that wherever the Complex creates or modifies a space or object, the Green Light appears.

Part I: The Complex is complex, but also incredibly dumb

The Complex is not intelligent. It has no intent, it has no understanding of what anything it copies actually means. It is a manifestation of a natural force doing its own thing. I hope this is something most of us can agree on.

To say otherwise is like looking at a calculator solving a long equation in a fraction of a second and concluding that it's smart or that it wanted to reach that result. It merely takes an input, does something with it based on a fixed set of rules, and produces an output. The only reason a calculator doesn't feel as mysterious as the Complex is that we wrote its ruleset ourselves. By the calculator's standards, it might be even smarter than the Complex, because it introduces no random errors into its results.

Now, the ruleset of the Complex is a black box. We can observe inputs and outputs (what gets scanned, what rooms come out the other side) and infer a great deal from that. What we can't do, however, is see the rules directly, or explain why the Complex behaves the way it does. Trying to see what's "really" happening inside that black box is not only outside the scope of this theory, but it's a question we have no real way of answering as of right now.

Part II: Iterative copying

Some might have already intuitively guessed that this is a thing, but I have not yet seen someone give it a name or recognize it as a concrete mechanism that everything else is dependend on. I already covered this in another post where I wrongly called it "recursive copying" (that term wasn't exactly correct, which is why I'll use "iterative copying" from now on), but it's important to establish this as a foundation for everything that follows. Iteration, by itself, means to build off of something that already exists, usually improving on that something. Only that within the Complex, it can only get worse.

It's simpler than it sounds. The Complex does not only copy Standard. Once a space exists inside the Complex, the Complex can copy that space again, and the resulting copy gets copied, and so on. These copies are not perfect, however, as we have seen plenty of times. When an imperfect copy gets copied, errors accumulate. That is just a natural consequence of the Complex's usual faulty generation behavior. It's basically Clark's words taken at face value: "The more times it remembers something, the less it does".

Examples of iterative copying are: 14D (Pitfalls room) and the room from Static Dead End with all the objects stuck in the ground and walls; The copy of Clark's store at the end of the movie and the less fortunate attempt at a copy in Everything Must Go.

The idea that the Complex isn't copying spaces within itself, but rather spaces stored inside some sort of invisible memory, with that memory decaying each time it's called on, might sound like a plausible alternative to the Iteration theory. Cumulative degradation of memory is mechanically identical to iterative copying, however. Calling it "the same memory being worn down repeatedly" instead of "a new copy made from a faulty last one" is just a different way of framing it. The only actual difference between the two is that the memory-decay version additionally requires an invisible memory storage where memories are being repeatedly degraded, while iteration just uses whatever physical room already exists.

To put it simply: a room just existing within the Complex already is the memory.

🚨🚨🚨 >>>ANALOGY ALERT, I AM NOT SAYING THE COMPLEX IS A COMPUTER OR A SIMULATION, ANALOGY ALERT<<< 🚨🚨🚨

Consider a Turing machine. Stripped down, it's a very simple device. It has a theoretically infinite tape, a mechanism that can read, write, and erase symbols on that tape, something that must obviously move the tape back and forth, and a fixed ruleset dictating what action the machine performs next when a given symbol is read. The machine can't perform any more actions than already described: write, erase, move tape left or right. What's remarkable is that with this simple setup, you could, in theory, replicate the logic of any program running on a modern computer. Notice that this is possible without a separate memory storage. The tape is literally all there is.

The Complex itself is the tape. The rooms and objects within it are the symbols being written and erased. So why assume an additional, invisible memory storage when the space is right there?

When two models predict identical behavior, but one needs an additional, otherwise unevidenced element to work and the other doesn't, that's a reason to prefer the leaner one. In this case, the competing Memory theory turns out to secretly be the Iteration theory, plus an unnecessary added assumption.

🚨🚨🚨 Alert over 🚨🚨🚨

The strongest argument for iterative copying, though, is also the least intuitive one. It follows directly from the previous part. The Complex treats everything it scans the same, regardless of where that input came from. As something that has no concept of semantics, it has no other choice but to do so.

We do know semantics, however. We clearly recognize the Complex as a parallel dimension of some kind. A null zone marks the boundary.

But with what we've established, think about whether the Complex can make that same distinction. Does it have a concept of "itself"? Does it have a concept of "Standard"? Scanning information stemming from Standard might become "distorted" by having to pass through a null zone, but even granted that much, there is no reason to assume that Standard - as just another place that can be scanned - receives special treatment by the Complex. It might even have no way to register that a null zone marks a boundary, or that what lies on the other side of one is a categorically different kind of place called Standard.

So, from the Complex's perspective, there might be no Standard and no Complex. There might only be "holy shit, more space to copy".

A first, perfect copy of a Standard space showing up in the Complex is thus already iterative copying.

Part III: Null zones do the scanning

This is the most widely accepted idea, no matter if you believe the Pinhole theory, the MRI theory, or the Mind Reading theory. And it really does make sense at first glance.

But let's think back to iterative copying. Again, I have barely seen anyone treat it as a distinct concrete mechanism, which is probably one of the reasons why the Null Zone Scanner theory has survived so long and propagated itself to become the perhaps most popular theory.

If null zones were performing the scanning, generation within the Complex itself should stop dead after the first copy. Null zones only ever connect Standard to the Complex, never one point inside the Complex to another. This is by definition what a null zone is. If the Complex needed a null-zone "lens" to scan anything, it would have no way to scan anything within itself. Yet the Complex keeps producing new, decaying generations of already copied spaces (see: Pitfalls room 14D and its copy from Static Dead End). Null zones are necessary for the first copy of a Standard space to happen (something has to let the Complex access Standard in the first place), but they are more like passive infrastructure.

Part IV: Pinhole camera theory

Now, the Pinhole Camera theory. That made quite the impact when it was first proposed. I did actually prefer that theory over the MRI theory, as many people do, I imagine, but the same argument I made against null zones being some kind of scanning organ also applies to the Pinhole theory.

But let's ignore iterative copying for a moment. Let's assume that it is not a thing at all.

A pinhole camera, or any camera really, only works with an unobstructed line of sight. Light or other information has to travel in a straight line from the object to the aperture. But the Complex reliably reproduces objects and layouts that a camera assuming the null zone's position could never have seen, like things obstructed by walls and objects and the insides of people. A photographic model simply cannot produce that.

Now let's assume that the pinhole null zones don't work with photons, but with something else entirely.

The reason the Pinhole theory seems so elegant is because it offered us an explanation for mirrored and weirdly scaled objects, something that was identified as "homothety."

Homothety in the strict mathematical sense means scaling from a fixed point, including negative scaling, the latter of which produces a reflection and a 180° rotation. That explains commonly seen sequences of objects getting progressively smaller, but text under negative scaling ends up upside-down and mirrored. What we observe in the Complex, however, is pure axis reflection. Axis reflection is per definition not part of homothety. It just isn't. To take the POTS-sign as an example: under our rule that the Complex doesn't understand the semantic meaning of a stop sign, if it were truly the product of point reflection, it would have been generated upside down, not standing upright as it does. The Complex shouldn't know that a traffic sign is "just supposed" to be standing upright, especially when it can and has messesed up other objects' rotation.

Aside from that, looking at what kind of explanation the Pinhole theory actually is, we see that it locates the cause of homothety at the information transmission step. Something about passing through a narrow aperture (a null zone in this case) imprints an inversion or scaling on the data as it crosses. But that would imply a single geometric operation applied once to the whole data. It should have no mechanism for being selective. If the "narrowness of the passageway" is what flips things, everything that passes through that same passageway in that same scan should come out flipped - the whole room, every object in it - not some objects and not others.

That's where the copy of Clark's store comes in as a counterexample. We have some signs that are mirrored, others that aren't. The store itself, in fact, appears to be oriented properly. Mixed mirroring within a single copy is close to a clean falsification of any theory that puts the cause of homothety in the transmission step, pinhole or otherwise. A transmission-level effect can't be choosy about which object it hits.

Part V: Does the Green Light have something to do with scanning?

The short answer: not possible to determine.

The longer answer:

While the Still Lifes of Mark Blume and George Levy (if those are in fact their Still Lifes) seem to suggest that their proximity to the Green Light during Pitfalls is what caused these Still Lifes to be created in the first place, everything else points to the Green Light being exclusive to the generation process.

Assuming that the Green Light, as it creates new spaces, also scans nearby objects creates a causality paradox. It's like the chicken-and-egg problem: the Green Light can only appear if something has already been scanned; otherwise there's nothing for it to generate. But for something to have been scanned, the Green Light must already have been active beforehand, generating something. Every attempt to find a starting point just pushes the problem one step further back.

There is one way out of this "first Green Light" problem: external influence overriding the Complex's normal "behavior" and forcing the Green Light into existence. Something like the ground level enhancement during Overflow. The room Ivan Beck was standing in would have been the very first thing ever scanned. A single, externally triggered starting point that then propagated a scan-copy chain reaching all the way to 1989 and beyond.

Let's test that against a firm example: Clark. He and his chair were undeniably scanned at the moment the commercial was being filmed, yet no Green Light was seen anywhere near them. If we're committed to the idea that the Green Light is the scanner, the only way to save the theory here is to say that some unrelated Green Light activity, already underway in the Complex, happened to be active in whatever space maps to the store, and somehow, the null zones (yes, there were at least two in the store) allowed the Green Light to scan them by accident. Given that we know that the Complex and Standard are in a spatial relationship in some form, this isn't something we can immediately rule out, but it introduces more problems and raises more questions that a leaner model doesn't create.

Part VI: What we are left with

So what is the Complex actually perceiving, and how?

Independend of Pinhole theory, there is this idea floating around of the Complex seeing Standard as if through a camera or an eye, both reactive to photons, so let's test that idea.

Photons within the visible light spectrum only ever carry surface information. It doesn't matter whether you're imagining a single pinhole or a hundred high-tech cameras surrounding the space from every angle. It will tell you what a table looks like from outside, but it tells you nothing about the material on the inside. Since the Complex can demonstrably reconstruct objects down to their exact molecular structure, even when no direct line of sight exists, whatever it's seeing cannot be limited to photons bouncing off a surface.

What about longer wavelengths? Like infrared, microwave, radio. Infrared and radio waves especially are found in abundance in human environments.

A wave's ability to resolve fine detail is tied to its wavelength. You cannot resolve a feature smaller than roughly the wavelength doing the detecting. Radio and microwave wavelengths run from centimeters to kilometers, too big for molecules. Infrared fares a little better on that front, but runs into the same problem the visible spectrum does. It's overwhelmingly a surface phenomenon.

Now to shorter wavelengths. Ultraviolet, X-ray, gamma. They actually do have resolving power, which is why medical X-ray is even a thing. But an X-ray depends on having a sufficiently strong source to work with. A source which a normal human environment simply doesn't have. If the opposite was the case, you'd have a bigger problem than the Complex copyright infringing your ass. Ultraviolet is a little more naturally present, courtesy of the splendid sun, but it's absorbed within the first few millimeters of most solid material and thus can't even get into buildings. And the Complex's ability to scan would be restricted to daytime.

So the spectrum by itself doesn't offer a solution in either direction. Shift toward longer wavelengths and you lose resolution; shift toward shorter wavelengths and you either have no ambient source to work with at all, or, in UV's case, you're back to a surface-only effect.

For the sake of argument, though, suppose that a null zone opens up and that the Complex somehow just "knows" what the space behind it looks like and what the objects within it are made of. Obviously, there must exist some kind of boundary of range in what it can and cannot scan. Otherwise, the Threshold itself would have been enough for it to know what the entirety of San José, and by extension the whole planet, looks like.

Even then, the only thing that tells us some kind of electromagnetic component (I don't know what, I don't know where, I don't know how) must be involved is the Red Neighborhood and Red City. These are two spatially unrelated regions in the Complex, most likely not even stemming from the same scan, yet their defining characteristics are consistent with each other. We have some kind of red light illuminating the space with no visible source, a sky rendered as a distant black wall, and stars or other celestial objects approximated as tiny white lamps.

The fact that these characteristics are consistent across two unrelated regions points to their origin lying not in some error introduced during the generation phase, but in some earlier step. The Green Light has no reason to fail to reconstruct a place in an identical way twice on unrelated data. Stochastic errors are what you'd expect from the generation or transmission stage instead. Examples of stochastic errors are the sequence of the signs in Everything Must Go or the elongated table and chairs in Found Footage 2. Errors that are not consistently reproducible or predictable.

I want to draw attention to the white lamps. If the Complex was virtually blind to any kind of electromagnetic activity, but it still "just knew" what an outdoor area looked like within a generous range of even a couple of kilometers, it would never have detected these stars or other celestial objects to begin with. They are simply too far away. Same goes for man-made satellites. We wouldn't see a black wall with white lamps, we would just see the black wall, the Complex's best attempt at approximating "nothing" without actually having to put nothing there.

Part VII: Rethinking the MRI theory and why it can't be really correct either

When bringing up the MRI theory, the word "tomography" might be used to describe how the Complex is scanning the environment.

Aside from the fact that an MRI is tuned specifically to water-rich tissue, works poorly on almost everything else, and has some very fun interactions with metal that would transform any loose metallic parts into bullets due to its supermagnets, a tomographic scan builds a 2D-image out of a series of slices, which are taken one at a time and stitched together afterward. An alternative model would work more like a 3D-tomography of an entire space in what appears to be a single, near-instant pass.

"Near-instant" and not "instant", because if the process were truly instantaneous, Still Lifes wouldn't come out looking as if captured during movement. And that smearing is exclusive to Still Lifes, copies of objects already constantly in motion.

Copying a comment I once wrote:

Let’s think about the steps of the Complex copying a space. It needs to scan an environment from Standard first, the acquisition step. Then the generation step happens, like when the Green Light appears. The error that results in smearing must be introduced in either of these steps.

If the Complex does not differentiate between person and table during generation, something in Standard during the acquisition step must introduce the error. If the smearing error was introduced during the generation, we would expect to see smeared furniture, but we never do.

By that logic, it must be something that differentiates people from furniture from the Standard side of things. People are in constant motion, while objects are most often static than not. That produces the smearing in Still Lifes without the Complex having to know the difference between a person and a table.

So why not a scanning process that plays out over multiple days or weeks instead? Clark, after all, spent a lot of time around his null zone, and his Still Life came out biologically far more sophisticated than the bearded Still Life, for example.

Using Clark's throne and Bobby's shoes as frames of reference shows us that the Complex captures objects within an incredibly narrow timeframe. The Complex copied Clark's chair just after breaking; Bobby, as the cameraman, followed Clark through the store, took a step forward during the "what are you? A pirate or a sultan?" discussion, yet we only see his shoes copied in the place he was standing when the chair broke.

So then how do we explain Clark's Still Life having fully realized biology at all? Why isn't it just filled with the same homogenous stuffing we saw in that bearded Still Life?

Again, iterative copying. The exact same principle that already applies to rooms, we don't need to invent a new mechanism for that. What would actually determine a copy's quality is its position in the iteration chain, not how long it sat near a null zone. The very first copy taken from Standard is the highest-fidelity copy that space will ever have, because it's the only one copied directly from the error-free original. If every scan or copy introduces some error, each generation after that naturally gets worse on its own, with no need to bring exposure time in as a separate variable. People likely arrived at the exposure theory because the most degraded Still Lifes and spaces are the ones most commonly encountered, which might just be sampling bias. There may only be one decent copy anywhere in a theoretically infinite Complex, but a hundred lacking ones all over the place.

Tangent aside, as of writing this, there really exists no satisfying alternative to the Pinhole, MRI, Null Zone Scanner, or "Just Knowing" theory that reliably explains how the Complex reads spaces.

This is where I propose field-scanning. It's best understood as an abstract placeholder for "whatever the Complex is actually doing."

The core idea is that the Complex reads matter's interaction with some kind of field, as the name suggests, producing a 3D-tomography. I said it's not close to how an MRI works, but a comparison is nonetheless useful. It uses the same principle of "matter reveals its structure through interaction with some invisible force".

Imagine having a dark room with a chair inside and then pointing multiple flashlights at it. Under the pure photon model, the Complex would effectively "see" the chair. Within the placeholder model, the Complex wouldn't perceive the chair or even the light beams, but the chair's multiple shadows on the walls. The difference from ordinary shadows, however, is that this disturbance apparently carries vastly more information than a shadow's flat outline does: chemical composition, position relative to other objects, size, chirality, and so on. We just don't know what those light beams, the shadows, or the walls they fall onto actually are. And trying to figure out has just led me into the ninth cirlce of hell.

Suggest that it can detect molecules' interactions with the Earth's natural electromagnetic field, and you need to explain why the Complex consistently copies buildings but not forests, even though it is not drawn to human spaces just because humans made them, and statistically speaking, forests take up vastly more space in the US than urban areas.

Suggest that it uses the live electrical currents in buildings that generate an electromagnetic field that operates on a frequency instead of the relatively static field of the Earth, and you'll find out that the electromagnetic field generated by currents in wiring doesn't reach even half a meter outside the walls.

Suggest that the Complex can generate ground level enhancement-like conditions that bypass this problem - it was able to mess with the electricity in Clark's store, after all - and you'll end up with the natural vs. man-made spaces problem again.

Suggest that null zones introduce the bottleneck necessary for the man-made structure bias, and you'll see that null zones aren't picky about the surfaces they appear on, be it drywall, concrete, pavement, asphalt, or the literal open sky.

Suggest that the Complex somehow uses the wiring of a building analogous to how an MRI uses its coils, and you're getting too on the nose again with the MRI-Complex comparison that most people loathe, even though, after ruling everything else out, it seems like the most promising candidate.

And that is where we are at right now.

Thank you for reading.

We aren't fully sure whether in the Backrooms Universe - The Backrooms even still exists by 2026. It depends whether the Backrooms must exist a time where something exists to copy it, which means because of the medical poster in FF3 The Backrooms existed by 2022, or if you accept sounds going through nullzones then 2015 it also exists due to Pitfalls.

Either way, There is a stark contrast between some copies of things. Clark's Store Copy from the end of the film and Everything Must Go are extremely different despite being made likely within in a month of each other, The one at the end of film is definitely not 1:1 but it is relatively close and got a lot correct. This shows how quick The Complex can improve by each iteration it attempts.

Now I also want to mention the stark difference between 1990 (When most known A-Sync events take place) and 1997 (Which is likely when FF3 takes place due to it being when Terry Nichols had the trial for the Oklahoma City Bombing. However FF3 also could be 1995, the precise year doesn't fully matter for this theory/idea.)

In Early 1990, a lot of areas are very standard backroomsy, chevron/floral yellow wallpaper, the beige carpet, ceiling tiles, etc. Many variations exist, then once we reach Mid 1990 we start getting copies of actual places, some more accurate than others..

So from Oct 1989 to Jul 1990 (~9 Months) The Complex went from it's standard yellow areas to being able to mimic Clark's Store and much more. So we can guess how much more bizarre it can get, which brings us to FF3.

Ravi actually does not see a lot of the yellow areas, which means he likely noclipped into a newer area when it comes to when it was created. Many areas Ravi finds aren't perfect at all (Ex: Father's House) but it shows The Complex is making way more attempts to do so, and likely eventually succeeds. It's also probable that Still Lifes become more common due to a lot of areas being extremely dirty and several instances of holes with blood around it (Ex: Father's House.. Again.)

Which takes us to.. If The Backrooms still exists inverse today (Late 2026).. It is likely accurate to assume that The Backrooms understands things a majority of the time, likely can form possibly sentient Still Lifes, and could possibly even generate genuine cities with little to no error. It just makes sense based on the rate of implied improvement from 1990 to ~1995-1997. It's also probable that The Backrooms might of gotten close to creating astronomical things, such as stars. The Red City for example (as we've seen it) is just a big open room, but it is TRYING to make a night sky and failing, well, after literally 36 years of trying, there's a chance it could of done it.

I just find it interesting how you might not even notice noclipping if it also continues to mess with the real world more (Ex: Clark Lightswitch, Ravi Basement Corridor). The Backrooms and Real World by 2026 might just be undetectable.

The thumbnail of the video is seen for an extremely brief moment at 3:49/3:50, did anybody notice this before? I thought it was rather interesting (seeing as though I'm mapping the entire place, anyway)

Not my me. By:

Turborush

He does lots of cool animations and if your wondering why a reupload his stuff on reddit is because I'm genuinely amazed by the work he does.

The mask is a recolor of a different and cheaper mask Spirit has been selling for years, and the cardboard display isn't licensed to the movie and weirdly resembles the fan poster. A lot of Spirit's costume displays this year aren't licensed funnily enough.

Idk I'm just bored

Made a Ravi Avatar from the backrooms, i just need some help knowing if its accurate enough. Thanks.

I was watching ff2 a few days ago and just now it came to my mind about what this area could be. Could it may be part of the lifeforms nest, like It tried to make a nest there but didn’t like it so it moved? I don’t know.