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?

–

Spooktober 2024, Day Eight

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 #8 — SOUTHERN GOTHIC
(× Blue-Collar or Phobia or Plants & Flowers)

TITLE:  Witch Stain

PREMISE:  I should be composing these before 2 AM but it just ain’t working out like that.  Letting the images guide me too, not the best way to come up with a good idea.  Let’s say Creepin’ Lamont is victim of religious abuse (Southern) with internalized homophobias (Phobia), who thinks he’s possessed by witches and demons.  Even normies can tell he’s just gay and a lil wild-hearted, tho the crueler among them think he’s going to do harm to children, hence the nickname.

Lamont is gardening (Blue-Collar, Plants & Flowers) at a rich old family’s estate (Gothic) and falls in love with a young dude of the house, Marcus.  Marcus tries to get the wild boy to give in to gentle feelings, but it always devolves into panic attacks and visions of hell.

HORROR ELEMENT:  What if witches really did want you to kiss a dude?  I keed, i keed.  The horror in this one is realistical – loving somebody with bad problems.  It must have a happy ending tho, insofar as it’s possible.  Cut to future and he controls his episodes with therapy and careful self-regulation, and can kiss the boy without having a heart attack.  The world is haunted by demons that god made, thx god.

–

Spooktober 2024, Day Seven

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 #7 — POSSESSION
(× Soap Opera or Mirrors or Dance)

TITLE:  Czarny Domowik

PREMISE:  The domowiki of the noble houses in Silesia always protect and reflect the families within them.  The Czajka family grew corrupt and discordant with time, generational abuse and trauma (Soap Opera) creating a cycle of doom and despair.  The spirit that once manifest itself as lizards to devour the cockroaches falls silent for a long century, then returns as a howling gadarene legion of miniature ghouls in every reflective surface (Mirrors), that drive the last of the line to end it all (Possession).

HORROR ELEMENT:  Justyna Czajka just assumes she’s going bonkers because of the abuse, smiles wanly, and goes about her day.  She comes home in the evening to find her remaining family members (abusers) dancing (Dance) from room to room, smashing against things, leaving skin and blood on the walls and doors.

–

Spooktober 2024, Day Six

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 #6 — CULT
(× 1990s or Game Show or Shyamalan Twist)

TITLE:  Kill the Lights

PREMISE:  In the late ’80s, Piper Herdez had the worst of both worlds – being exploited by a ruthless cult, then going through one of the more ethically dubious deconversions – abducted and bound, verbally abused like it was an exorcism.  But it took; now she recognizes what she was going through on the inside, and can never look at The Illumination Center (Cult) with the same eyes she used to.

Even so, she hates Gabriel Gundren -the deconversion guy her family hired- with a passion.  Her family came to see it her way as well, and are OK with her trying to snake some of his business.  She uses a variety of subtler methods to give cult members the perspective they need to escape, and targets people he was hired to snatch.

Gabriel starts to figure it out, but doesn’t have a chance to do much until, in 1992 (1990s), things come to a head.  Piper finds out he’s going after a man she knows from The Illumination Center, and she figures it’s time to use her inside knowledge to get close first.  Both of them hit on the same scheme:  infiltrating the set of the cult’s game show (Game Show), Kill the Lights.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The Illumination Center’s game show revolves around a $cientologyesque personality quiz, but played for prizes.  It’s also treated as a sort of humanist getting-to-know-yourself thing, where the studio audience awws at sympathetic moments of revelation.  Somehow this works for normies well enough that the show is a good moneymaker for the creeps.  Still, that money has to buy the cult leader’s tenth lambo, so the production is cheap.  Instead of pulling back tinsel curtains for big reveals, they turn off the studio lights, change things around, then turn them back on.

So horror:  The cloying atmosphere of a cult, the danger of being pulled back in or running afoul of the cultists, and what all can happen in that moment of dark?  Piper and Gabriel got jobs on the catering crew to get into the place.  Gabe was just going to snatch the boy and run, but he sees what Piper is up to and starts a cat-and-mouse situation with her.

The cult catches both of the infiltrators and forces them to play as contestants, bound to chairs like Gabe always used to do.  The twist (Shyamalan Twist): when the lights go out their souls are laid bare, and when the light comes on, they are Illuminated.  It’s always that the cult is right, isn’t it?

–

Spooktober 2024, Day Five

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 #5 — CLOWN / CIRCUS
(× Evil Twin/Clone or Poe Style or Burial)

TITLE:  Auto-da-fé

PREMISE:  Pierre-Claude and Claude-Pierre are twin clowns (Clown).  Claude-Pierre is morose and seeks affection or at least the attention of others in pathetic ways; Pierre-Claude (Evil Twin) is obsessed (Poe Style) with causing harm to his twin, which gradually ramps up toward lethal methods.  Gianotta is an Italian acrobat who would like to love Claude-Pierre, but is too depressed by his sad-sacking ways.  She falls in with Pierre-Claude but he has little interest in her, so consumed is he with his perverse take on self-destruction.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Pierre-Claude doesn’t directly hurt Claude-Pierre, because it would be too easy, and risk driving him away.  Instead, he gives him bad advice, turning Claude-Pierre into the circus daredevil and escape artist.  He finally encourages Claude-Pierre to get into a glass chamber filling with sand (Burial) while trying to escape from chains.  If you do this one thing, you will finally impress the crowds and be worthy of love.

Pierre-Claude and Gianotta watch from the shadows.  She notices Pierre-Claude pacing and biting his fist and pulling at his motley.  What is the matter?  He is at once ecstatic with watching his brother die slowly, and deeply upset he can only do this once, thus losing his only thrill in life.  Should he save the boy or not?

Gianotta figures out what’s going on and collars a gendarme to save Claude-Pierre.  The cop goes for the only solution they know, and tries to shoot the glass.  The bullet passes through the glass and the shallowest sand, through Claude-Pierre, out the back, and through Pierre-Claude.  Adieu, garçons.

–

Spooktober 2024, Day Four

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 #4 — WESTERN
(× Disappearance or Fire or Skeletons and Bones)

TITLE:  The Smokers

PREMISE:  Surprise Prequel to Fire Red, set in 1947.  Desert Rose, New Mexico is next to a reservation that is at risk of being seized by the feds because the tribe that it was reserved for is going extinct (Disappearance).  There are eight people left in the tribe, in the wake of a few diseases and disasters, and none remember the language, none remember the gods.  But a god of fire (Fire) remembers them, and stirs from his slumber like a cranky old man to spit curses indiscriminately.

Stars fall in the night as a posse of pinkertons comes to remove the last of the tribe from their homes.  The stars make all the fire on the land sick, and anyone who imbibes the fire becomes infected.  Just about everybody smokes, but the tribe was out of cigarettes at the time, so the natives are mercifully unaffected.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The infected become fiery freaks, immoral and violent and burning up from the inside.  Dina McMurtry, a spinster in her 30s, is the tribe’s warrior – technically a sheriff, in practice a social worker, and mean as hell.  She helps rally the tribe to defend themselves as the smokers close in, all while the adults in the tribe are jonesing for cigs.  Why are the pinkertons blowing up when they get shot?  Why are they crumbling to flaming skeletons (Skeletons) and bouncing around in the night uncanny like cinders lofting from a bonfire?  A few natives survive, but they didn’t know about the cigarettes, and become infected.  Dina keeps her cool just long enough to send the children away in a truck, before the tribe officially ends in a burning skelly pile.

–

Spooktober 2024, Day Three

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 #3 — DARK FANTASY
(× Imprisonment or Revenge or Cats)

TITLE:  The Claws

PREMISE:  Culgrum was cursed by the Vizier of Thrax (Dark Fantasy), transformed into a cat (Cats) and fed to the rats.  His sister Culpepper was a harem girl that secretly learned sorcery from the vizier’s books and managed to at least turn Culgrum into a man-sized cat-thing, which could easily trounce the rats.  The vizier got even crankier and sent all his goons after them, and they escaped into the wilds.

Now it’s kill or be killed, an eye for an eye for an eye (Revenge).  The vizier presses some desperate assassins into his service, Spinky Binch and Cloub Strofe, by holding their child hostage (Imprisonment) in the form of a nervous songbird that could die of a heart attack at the drop of a pin.  Spinky and Cloub join forces with their would-be targets to get vengeance of their own.

HORROR ELEMENT:  I don’t know I’m doing this way past my bedtime.  Maybe all the magic involves turning your body inside out and the vizier seems like the voice of reason while he does horrible things.  Being a cat probably sucks sometimes?  Spooktober fail.

–

Spooktober 2024, Days One and Two

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 #1 — DEVILS AND DEMONS
(× Retro Neon/Synthwave or Apocalypse or Teen)

TITLE:  Malcolm Hyperian vs. The Fiends

PREMISE:  I happened to already have a (Retro Neon) (Teen) (Apocalypse) or three up my sleeve.  This is the same setting as my unfinished novel Love is Torment, the far future world of Breana IV, where a world-spanning city is mostly inhabited by monsters, the only humans living in enclaves where ancient technological barriers against the supernatural still function.  Powerful monsters are called fiends, weaker ones ukubien (Devils and Demons).  Humans with powerful enough psychic abilities and combat skills go out in the wilds to make trade happen between enclaves.  Most are mercenaries working for tribes, some work for a fascistic government that rules the largest enclave – the closest thing to a city that’s left.  That’s Ißbanbat, which has an aesthetic somewhere between the Empire in Space Shooters and the Hell’s Angels.  The tribes have accidentally’d into a semblance of early ’90s R&B aesthetics, where all celebrations look like proms in bright tacky colors.  This was all an elaboration on a dream I had a long time ago, inspired by playing an old RPG.

Anyway, Malcolm was originally Molly but I’m a changed person and fuck it, trans all your old OCs.  Malcolm is a hetero trans dude on that harem anime bullshit, where three weird girls love-hate-love him.  He and one of the girlfriends are in the academy at Ißbanbat, the other two girlfriends are just civilians.  The civilians stray too close to the wild and get seduced into becoming fiends.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The girls find out their fiendhood was just part of a scheme to penetrate the city’s protections and feast on humans.  They betray the fiends by letting Malcolm know about the invasion, but it’s too late, and all four of the youths end up in the middle of a prom gone bad, attacked by demons.  Malcolm augments his fists with telekinetic energy and beats their intangible asses.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #2 — FOUND FOOTAGE/EPISTOLARY
(× Paranoia or Big City/Skyscraper or Erotic Thriller)

TITLE:  The Stairwell Letters

PREMISE:  In a big old building three young ladies live alone in their own separate little apartments (Big City), while working as secretaries or nurses or whatever in a more sexist time.  They are genial with each other, but have very incompatible shifts – one on a day job, one working two jobs, and one on-call for a hospital.  Ships in the night, they leave each other little notes in the stairwell (Epistolary).  They have secret spots where other tenants should generally not happen across them.

HORROR ELEMENT:  It’s all cuteness and light, if in a sorta depressing milieu, but things get weird.  Linda and Sandra begin to fall in love, but Roberta becomes obsessed with Sandra, and has a weird kind of dubious sexual magnetism that lets her initially get away with seducing each of the other ladies in turn (Erotic Thriller).  Feeling ashamed about having been involved with Roberta, and therefore unable to compare notes in a way that would reveal her malevolence, Linda and Sandra fall prey to a thousand little tricks and torments (Paranoia).  How bad could it get before the truth is revealed?  And even when they find out, it’s not like they can call the cops and out themselves as sexual deviants.

–

 

Glory Be

We are returned from the shadow realm!  Hail!

While the website was down, I had a few queued posts, so somehow, the streak continues.  Go ahead and read those, if you please.

As for me, I’m so tired I’m just gonna lay down dead now.

Wait.  I wish I could remember this dream I just had better.  Super detailed, something about young ladies that were friends, but one of them was an aquatic creature with properties of or kinship to cnidarians, even tho she looked fully human.

That amateur porn contest a local weekly mag used to run was involved, and some hijinks with the law.  Banana cream pies?  Fear of heights?  Was jellyfish girl trans?

She reproduced by cloning at the end of the dream. Some of her new selves got tangled and died, mute and mindless.  She got away.

I feel like both girls were parting ways to chase down love and glamour in their own particular ways, and one was meant to feel uplifted about it.

The main run of the plot is gone.  I cry.

–

Elric Report

So I’m three and a half volumes into listening to the Elric books by Michael Moorcock and I haven’t been Inception’d into the sensory deprivation tank full of urine yet, so I thought you might wanna know my thoughts.  Spoilers?  Not very big ones.  Also these books are old as hell so who cares?

Reminding me of Vampire Hunter D by Hideyuki Kikuchi.  The writing is a lot more blunt than I would have imagined for the towering gothickal shadow he cast over the genre.  Kikuchi’s book may well have been influenced by it.  Indeed, the dispassionate kinda evil pretty men with long white hair that recur in anime might all be descendants of Elric; I don’t know enough deep cuts of Japanese culture to be sure.  That said, Elric is a lot more emotional than Sephiroth or Sesshomaru or Benten or etc etc.  One emotion in particular: Fear.

It’s really common for writers on both sides of the Pacific to characterize a cool badass character as never feeling fear.  I get where they’re coming from.  Cool, badass, it’s a power fantasy, and we’d like to imagine ourselves in hardcase mode as immune to all such weaknesses.  But this trope does feel pretty damn stale by now, and it always undercut the ability for the story to feel like it has real stakes.  If the worst a hero would feel in defeat is annoyed or angry, that’s a lot less intense than him feeling afraid of serious injury, torture, whatever consequences.

So that’s kind of nice, even if the character is still an outrageously special specialboy.  Ladies love Elric.  Apparently he can lay pipe with the best of ’em.  Dickmatism as the kids say.  The stories are not at all explicit about it, but one gal is a queen and is like “i know u killed my bro but take my kingdom, just gimme that somethin somethin.”  He’s characterized as having poor health, in the first book only sustained by drugs, and this specifically manifests as weakness.  What’s his stroke game like if he has no stamina?  He manages to say no to drugs by getting a cool demon sword that sucks souls and gives Elric the life energy, but in at least one of the subsequent books he still needs the drugs.  Had he gone too long without soul sauce?  Book didn’t say.

One disappointment is that he doesn’t show near as much skin as he does on book covers.  About half the search results for Elric art, he at least has his arms and leggies out.  If u got it flaunt it, boy.

Oh, I didn’t really say what I meant by the writing being blunt.  Let’s put it this way:  If this were a movie, almost all of the dialog and much of the characterization would have to be original.  It could not rely on the source material.  In the books, Moorcock just tells you things about Elric.  In a movie, you’d have to show them.  The pivotal character moments have no real buildup, they’re just plopped on you.  It feels like short stories, where there’s no time to characterize through prose and you really just need to spell out what’s going on, if the plot has any complexity at all.

I once wrote a short story wherein I earned the love story through writing, really hard pressed to keep it under 9k words.  I do think the Elric books started as short stories and were collected, at least some of them, so that’s probably why it’s like this.  It mostly feels heavy-handed in the first scene of the first book, where his whole backstory and main conflict are just dropped on you like some Acme traps on Wile E. Coyote.

I wonder about Moorcock’s monster inspirations.  How original are his beasters?   They seem pretty original, but some people know more obscure monster lore than I do; maybe they aren’t.

Oh yeah, and one more thing struck me funny.  One of the books is called The Weird of the White Wolf.  The White Wolf is Elric and he’s having a weird.  But the book doesn’t tell us what the fuck a weird is.  The weirdest thing in the story is how he makes a bunch of really bad decisions for no obvious reason.  The worst is when the dragons come out and he is just totally unprepared for that.  He knew the dragons were there.  Even if he was like, fuck it, let’s do this even tho we’ll be dragonbait, he should’ve been bracing for it the whole time.  Instead when they come out it’s like Moorcock remembering they exist for the first time in pages.

But it’s all big dark fantasy bigness.  Sleesh slash.  Kill the guys, win the prize.  But feel empty inside.  That’s all I’m there for anyway.

–