Spooktober Day Sixteen

SPOOKTOBER 2024!

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.


SPOOKTOBER DAY #16 — WITCH/WIZARD
(× Psychedelic/Stoner or Rural/Backwoods or Monkey’s Paw)

TITLE:  Abuela Desastra

PREMISE:  Stoners in Sierra Blanca know that if you partake of peyote (Psychedelic) when your heart is broken, she’ll appear out of the desert (Rural) – an old lady in a hat and poncho, who will grant you a single wish.  Of course, that doesn’t go well (Monkey’s Paw), and the wishes of the broken-hearted tend to follow a certain theme.  For a little place in the middle of nowhere, Sierra Blanca has a lot of drama going on.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Is she a nagual?  A hallucination?  A bruja (Witch)?  Is she even an abuela?  What does she have to do with the corruption of love?  Fiction has us all accustomed to spooky ideas, not easily spooked, but this would be creepy if real.

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Spooktober 2024, Days Fourteen and Fifteen

SPOOKTOBER 2024!

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.


SPOOKTOBER DAY #14 — VAMPIRES
(× Baroque or Teeth or Ice & Snow)

TITLE:  Miasma Dracula

PREMISE:  Park Yoon-Joon is a creepy dude obsessed with draculae and horror.  Around christmas time (Ice & Snow) at a haunted antique store in Seoul, he finds a rococo (Baroque) vase which contains Vlad Țepeș in mist form.  Good times for Yoon-Joon, bad times for Dracula.  The old vampire, being in mist form, was barely sentient, and his identity and the memory of what he once was became corrupted over the centuries.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Yoon-Joon immediately turns himself into a vampire (Vampire), but finds when he tries to make more vampires, they just disintegrate in his hands.  However, they become part of a blood-sucking mist that he can control, which manifests fangs (Teeth) or vampire faces to attack its victims.  Is there a modern Van Helsing in Korea that can stop him before he takes over the world?

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #15 — MUMMY
(× Gothic or Asylum/Prison or Conspiracy)

TITLE:  Keep it Together

PREMISE:  Holden Poulat was in a gang of cosmopolitan ne’er-do-wells, thieves, and homosexuals, until a very intricate caper (Conspiracy) in Egypt involving seductions and palace intrigue (Gothic) failed disastrously, leading to most of the crew being summarily executed and the rest being consigned to a terrifying desert prison (Prison).  The commandant Entwhistle was a British Egyptologist, allowed to hold this position by the breakaway Turkish sultanate because his methods were amusingly grisly.

Holden wakes up to find he’s become a mummy (Mummy).  All of his organs have been stolen and placed in canopic jars who knows where.  The commandant didn’t do such a great job of stitching him up, and Holden has to keep what’s left of his innards in place by improvising mummy wraps out of tarpaulin, rags, and pitch.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Body horror, of course.  Holden is in denial about being dead, convinced if he can get all his organs back, he’ll be fine.  One of the only other survivors of the gang, Montfort, is in the prison with him, and tells Holden he’s become a stereotypical monster of lore – the vengeful mummy out for grisly trophies.  But Holden says no, and bullies Montfort into helping with his campaign of organ-snatching.

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Spooktober 2024, Days Twelve and Thirteen

SPOOKTOBER 2024!

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.


SPOOKTOBER DAY #12 — ALTERNATE DIMENSIONS
(× Stephen King Style or Scary Room or Medical)

TITLE:  The God in the Alcove (it’s a Bauhaus lyric)

PREMISE:  Joshua Creighton is a psychic youth with an innate connection to other mediums, and a sense of obligation to resolve ghostly issues in the world.  He assembles a team of quirky white people (Stephen King Style) to understand and exorcise the deceased victims of an oppressive catholic hospital (Medical) where anesthesia was scorned.

HORROR ELEMENT:  There’s one room all the ghosts and ghouls avoid (Scary Room), where the Worst Thing Ever resides.  Joshua assumes it’s the priest / doctor who presided over their suffering, but the room is a portal to an alternate universe of pure evil (Alternate Dimensions).  The god-like creature that occasionally visits the threshold can, in those moments, send out psychic waves that fuck up all ghosts and mediums in the building.  What will happen if it comes all the way out of the alcove?

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #13 — WERECREATURES
(× 1980s or Creepy Kid or Mascot Horror)

TITLE:  Funny Animals

PREMISE:  Shawn Voltkamp is a cartoon maniac (Creepy Kid) in 1987 (1980s) Champlain, Illinois.  Oh, thinks he, that this too solid flesh could not melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a painting on celluloid.  To be a funny animal is to be immortal, an undying jester who may tweak the nose of any and all, however one sees fit (Mascot Horror).

HORROR ELEMENT:  idk he’s bitten by a bugs bunny or some shit.  No, no, don’t do that.  Let’s say Shawn was part of a lineage of shape-shifting monsters from the Black Forest of Germany – most manifesting as werewolves (Werecreatures), but all having the possibility of choosing a different alternate form.  Shawn’s TV-demented psyche makes him into a hellish shadow chipmunk.  Howwible.

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Spooktober 2024, Day Eleven

SPOOKTOBER 2024!

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.

Today I’m getting married (this was queued), so it’s a good time to break my comment policies, if you don’t mind getting banned when I return.


SPOOKTOBER DAY #11 — GIANT MONSTER
(× 1920s or Women’s Lit/Chick-Flick or Office)

TITLE:  One Leggy Dame!!

PREMISE:  In a sorta 1920s-ish (1920s) alternate world (maybe the same retrofuture metropolis as Mutant Reign?), the fashion magazine editor Astél Bartók has two young ladies working for her as interns (Office), Zina Hassman and Flora Leiter.  It’s some Devil Wears Prada business (Chick-Flick), until evil girlboss Astél becomes a giant monster (Giant Monster).

HORROR ELEMENT:  How did this happen?  Flora is aware her best friend Zina has psychic powers and is not mentally well.  Zina develops a masochistic crush on Astél, and reality comes to reflect the outsized place the boss has in Zina’s imagination – the “step on me mommy” fantasies of web weirdos come to life.

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Spooktober 2024, Day Ten

SPOOKTOBER 2024!

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.


SPOOKTOBER DAY #10 — RETRO SLASHER
(× Art & Artists or Religion or Birds)

TITLE:  Nailing You to the Spanish Mystic (it’s a christian death lyric)

PREMISE:  Austria 1976, a bevy of young lady art students (Artists) become gripped by the observation that they can get admitted to the school but they can never get the praise and opportunities of the men.  Why are they even allowed in the door?  Just to give the boys somebody to lay with, they surmise, and their leader Valéria Keresztes calls their group the Harem-turned-Convent (Religion).  They take a vow of chastity and to make art that is powerfully unsexy.  Valéria in particular has a medieval flagellant’s attitude toward the body and the spirit.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Yeah, this is a giallo (Retro Slasher), so you know it’ll actually have very dubious intersection of sex and murder.  Girls and boys start dying gruesomely, but especially with the girls, there is some question – was this homicide, or a suicide borne of religious zealotry?  Nobody can pin it on Valéria, despite her being obvious suspect number one.  It’s a mystery, but maybe there’s a clue in the way the killer always stages things so that crows (Birds) can start eating the victims, messing with other evidence.

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Spooktober 2024, Day Nine

SPOOKTOBER 2024!

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group voted on.  Carrying forward from last year we’re having optional sub-themes and I’m trying to do them all like Debbie do Dallas.  Book covers made with midjourney and photopea.

CONTENT WARNINGS:  Capitalist Exploitation, Despair, Suicide


SPOOKTOBER DAY #9 — NOIR
(× Hypnotism or Industrial or Scopophobia)

TITLE:  Falling Forever

PREMISE:  Henry Combs has to work at General Industries giant gloomy (noir) “everything” factory (Industrial), joining the other child laborers and victims producing endless random springs and gadgets.  The floor bosses monitor every tiny hand ruthlessly for inefficiency (Scopophobia) which leads to freakouts and despair.  But management has a solution.  A combination of drugs in the cafeteria and soothing musics (Hypnotism) keep the suicide rates in check, though the program has to be continually tweaked to maintain the balance and reduce bloody machine accidents in the wraithly young proles.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Henry is sure grateful for the drugs in his lunch.  Makes the day run nice and smooth, makes you want to show up for work.  You get mighty nauseous if you don’t.  But the hints and whispers about the reason for the drug program – the plague of suicides, people jumping off the roofs – maybe it’s planted a suggestion in his head that has him seeing ghosts.  Or maybe the ghosts are real?

You Dig on Multiverses?

Did you catch that reference?  Apologies if you did.  I finished all the Elric I’m going to be able to find, and have returned with my accursed demon blade Stormbringer to feast upon thy souls.  Or tell you about it.

I kid, I kid.  I really don’t have a lot to say about it.  There were elements that aged very poorly in terms of cultural mores, and elements that aged poorly because the march of fiction has rendered them quaint and pedestrian, but nothing wholly outrageous on either count.

Moorcock may have coined the word multiverse.  I could probably find out with a little googling but I don’t care enough to.  While now it’s in service of bloating and bleeding film franchises, it once was a very literal homage to joseph campbell’s ideas.  A victim of time, I don’t find those elements at all interesting.

Oddly, fiction from the 19th century doesn’t hit me like that.  Maybe recency produces something like the uncanny valley in writing, I don’t know.

I don’t think I ever reached the end of the story, assuming it was ever written, but that’s alright.  Tho it had more continuity than sherlock holmes, it was always written to be short stories for sff pulp mags, it seems.

In looking up interesting things about it, I discovered that Wendy Pini of Elfquest comic fame had attempted to get an animated adaptation done, and failed.

That info loops back on itself because Chaosium once did an Elfquest rpg with basically the same rules as Call of Cthulhu, and also for a time had Moorcock’s license to Elric rpg.  Did that also use the same system?  If so, it would make for an amusing combination…

Alright, I gotta jet.  Tired as hell.  Zzz.

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Left Accelerationists

Anti-voting leftists you see online are accelerationists, whose ideal route to glorious workers revolution is over a lot of innocent bodies.  The crux of accelerationism is that in order for real change to become possible, society must be destabilized – even destroyed altogether.

Because what other reason could there be for that position?  We tend to imagine it’s about maintaining the sanctity of their pearly mitts, but that supposes that they aren’t aware of the consequences of that inaction – and how in the fuck could they be?

You can stockpile guns and plot a stalinist proletarian insurgency, and still vote.  And voting will save some amount of lives, while abstaining will surely take some.  Consequences being this obvious, discouraging leftists from voting is actively encouraging vulnerable americans to eat shit and die.

These same people will be all about trans rights and palestine with one breath, then discourage voting with the other.  Realistically will Harris do shit about the middle east?  No.  But what would trump do?  Do they really care about Palestine?

Far more people in the world are talking about Israel’s genocidal campaign -about freeing Palestine- than were before Hamas kicked this off with terrorism.  This is an example of accelerationism in action.  Hamas had to know what was coming and accepted it as the cost of the cause.  Is there truth in the idea you can promote your cause over a million crushed burned and shredded people?

It’s the only motive that makes coherent sense for leftists trying to get trump elected…  Whatever, fuck em.  Just feeling like quitting social media again.

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Programming Question

Let’s say you had a program for looking up the businesses in a given city.  Each business location serves a set of zip codes.  It performs perfectly when you enter a zip code, of course, but when you try by city name, there’s a problem.

Some city names are reused in the USA.  Big country, so we have several Parises, a few dozen Auburns, and probably more than fifty Riversides.  Of these cities, there is often a more notable one – the one you were trying to find.  You want the Pittsburgh in PA, not the Pittsburgh in Florida or whatever.

But the program, when searched by name, comes back with every result except the most popular one.  You get the Santa Fe from Montana Nebraska and New Jersey, but not the one from New Mexico.

Why would this happen?  Feels to this nonexpert there’d be a simple obvious reason and fix.  Totally theoretical, can’t show u the code, what do you think?

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