All the Dollars, Genre Edition

Capitalism is about every business needing to maximize profits at all times, at the expense of quality, of careers, of productive businesses themselves, of individual lives, of communities, of art and intellect, of the continued existence of the human species, etc.  I don’t much cotton to it.

Something wiser people than I have remarked on, or expounded at length, is that this has the effect of reducing consumer choice.  That might be small potatoes compared to it reducing the life expectancy of the human race, but it’s not nothing, and it’s what I’m talking about at the moment.  Briefly.  This will be a total driveby.

I’ve been reading Paperbacks From Hell by Grady Hendrix, mostly for the pictures.  It’s an art book of schlocky horror book covers, but also a history of the industry, artists, and writers.  Some combination of tax law and corporate greed led to the destruction of the mid-tier book market in the ’90s, and more relevant to my point here, led to trend-chasing and the death of entire genres.

It was never about public desire to actually read this or that.  It was about the money men’s perceived need to put all your money on the winning horse, to hedge no bets.  When Silence of the Lambs blew up, supernatural or scifi horror was chucked in the dustbin of history.  It couldn’t get published without a select few author’s names on it.  It was serial killers or thrillers, for the spooky end of the book rack, or nothing.

I haven’t finished the book yet so I don’t know if it mentions the way book stores don’t even have a horror section now, but they do have a supernatural romance section, boy howdy.  Anyway, all these genres are ridden into the dirt like so many Dr. Strangelove bombs, leaving the public tired and wired.  We still have needs for artistic and intellectual stimulation that are not being met, interests The Man has deemed unprofitable.

And thanks to cultural balkanization driven by social media, it’ll be pretty hard for The Man to keep these gravy trains on track.  Disney’s historically recent media monopolies seemed like they could rule forever, but those profits are sure to get limp over time.  What then?  For us, the consumers of media, we have our rabbit holes, our communities, our own trends that flicker this way and that like cat’s tails.

I don’t know if I have anything to say with all this.  It’s just what was on my mind.  I’m going to self-publish a supernatural horror action-adventure sometime soon-esque, and that would’ve been among the casualties of this mess, once upon a time.  Who’s to say what will happen with it now?

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No Solutions

Content Warnings:  Mental Illness, The Failure of Social Services, Poverty, The Failure of US “Democracy,” Child Abuse, Murder, Paranoia, Doomy Thoughts.  But I’m OK, don’t worry.

People get overwhelmed, look at the whole of everything that’s wrong in the world, or just their lives in particular, and feel hopeless.  Generally, I think that’s depression or some other problem messing with you.  Life can be made bearable or have OK moments for almost anyone.  But I have to admit, sometimes in life there are problems with no solutions.

That’s the kind of shit I deal with at work sometimes.  I got somebody on the phone with paranoia, wanting help in protecting herself from imagined oppressors.  What the fuck is the recommended wisdom for helping people with paranoid delusions?  Do you humor them and act like you’re taking it seriously, but not facilitate any actual pursuit of their claims?  Do you tell them gently that they’re imagining things?  Tell them sternly?

Any action you take will only result in more paranoia, more delusion.  The best case scenario is that they get distracted and forget they talked to you in the first place, but unfortunately a lot of paranoid people have excellent (if warped) memories.

Sometimes at work* I have to tell people that they have no income, have a massive new debt, and are facing months of travail for a mere chance of setting things right.  Basically, “If you don’t have family to lean on, welcome to your new home eating rats in the underpass.  Or go back to work even though you’re disabled and stay doing that until it kills you.”

Technically, this is a problem with a solution:  Overthrow of the US government, or at least a progressive rout of the whole system.  But that magical probably-not-happening future does nothing for people fucked to death by the laws and policies of the here and now.

I wrote my senator about the need for progressive reform and her underlings sent a form response with clear tells that the message was skimmed at best, not really read for understanding.  That senator is literally the perfect person to write about the issue, sitting on a committee deciding the relevant laws.  Too bad, so sad.

Mutual aid is probably the only way the masses will survive late capitalism, but we’ve been systemically divided.  I don’t know the rotating cast of neighbors in my apartment complex and they don’t know me.  We have every reason in the world to regard each other as potential thieves and creeps.  We’re all busting our humps at work too much to do the emotional labor of establishing a community.  Instead we’re fighting over parking spaces, as the jacked up rent has the number of tenants per unit exceeding capacity.  There have been a few murders and attempted murders in my little apartment complex, and it’s not even considered one of the bad ones in my city.

One of those murders may have been the solution to a problem – a child stabbing a (possibly) predatory adult in the household many times.  But you know what happens to that kid next, and it looks like less of a solution in the end.  As common as child abuse is, most likely it was the motive, but I did open the article talking about paranoid delusions, and the murdered person may have been innocent.  Who can say?  As the meme says, the world is a fuck.

The idea that things can always get worse looks more true every year, with a natural end point for that in human extinction.  With a complex enough system there are thousands of ways for things to go wrong and very very few ways for them to go right.

But, you know, keep taking care of yourselves and each other, and maybe this will look less dire on the other side.  And in the meantime, if somebody can eviscerate Matt Walsh and use his entrails to hang JKR from the parapet of her castle, please do.  The sun will come out tomorrow, haha.

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*This is the best job I ever had, in terms of recompense and security, and my only hope of clearing the traps of poverty in what’s left of my life, so changing jobs is not an option at the moment.  How’s your line, lately?

Negative Revelation

People will say they believe in god because of a convincing personal experience – the argument from personal revelation.  Interestingly (to me at least) googling this phrase yields mostly atheists talking about debate, but one highly ranked result is theist-on-theist bloodshed.  Some creep saying why “jesus personally told me it’s cool to be trans” is not legitimate because it’s an argument from personal revelation.

As for me?  I long ago decided logic and reason and debate are not much use against theism, or even advocating atheism.  Motivated reasoning is strong.  Your case can be ironclad and even if the theist is stumped, in that moment, they weren’t convinced in their feelings, which is the only place that ultimately matters.  Time erodes the momentary uncertainty you induced, and within a week they don’t even remember the particulars of what you said.

And even when somebody does say they were convinced by logic, which came first?  The logic or the feeling of the logic’s legitimacy?  There’s a tension in that, and probably more factors that fed into the conversion than the rationale alone.  Not to say you should give that all up forever, just that you understand why it’s not as effective as it should be, if we were purely rational agents.  And more than that, to preface my own personal revelation.

Personal revelation for a theist is a feeling or vision that powerfully convinces them of a god’s reality and effect on their own life.  While as an atheist I would never experience a convincing vision – I’d sooner assume I was having a neurological problem – I can get a powerfully convincing feeling.  If that counts as a personal revelation, then I have absolutely come to atheism by way of personal revelation.

For a lot of years I identified as agnostic, because verifiable knowledge coming from fallible grey matter seems logically impossible to me.  But I had a strong feeling of philosophical materialism, and that feeling alone pushed me away from that shyness.  Yeah, I’m an atheist.  Now the only thing keeping me from saying that with pride is the behavior of famous atheists, haha.

One time when I was homeless child – maybe seven? – my family was temporarily staying in a hotel, and got our hands on some free bibles.  Hey, that’s kind of exciting.  Free stuff.  The thin paper and tiny print was interesting, the bold assertions within more convincing than the mealy-mouthed version that made a pre-school atheist out of me.  So I played at being christian for a few days.  I don’t remember what made that fall away – boredom? – but I do remember it was a thorough rejection in the end.

I’ve always had a strong feeling of the material reality around me, and its indifference to my desires.  Might be why the idea of levitation appeals to me, as a primal emotion that escapes from the otherwise constant feeling of literal gravity.  This feeling has reached peaks, moments of reality so stark and cold that I had no choice but to believe in my heart that god doesn’t exist, that magic doesn’t exist, that humans have no inherent connection that bridges our experience of life – nothing but imagination and the broken working of society.

These are the moments of negative personal revelation, when UnGod came unto me in a cloud of nothing and I received his word and his truth.  I’ve mentioned a few in my blog history, see which ones you remember!  Roughly in order,

One came when I failed to graduate high school, and everyone disappeared into their adult lives, whatever those would be, reminding me that I have no social importance except that which I painstakingly create and maintain.

Several came over the years, whenever the religious tried one-on-one to get me to feel what they feel, in parking lots and bus stops, and almost always in cold dark weather.

One came when I first had major surgery and experienced nonexistence under anesthesia.

One came when Child Protective Services took my first niece from my dad, because the jesus nazis from rural minnesota were more amenable to keeping her dangerous sociopath mom in her life.  That was the most direct confrontation with human evil I ever experienced, and had me dig under my fingernails til they bled.

One came while walking home from work at Pizza Hut, and made a foolish deal with the devil, because the unmagic of the world was so overbearing in that one random moment.

One came when my worst girlfriend ever dumped me and I took it poorly, gradually burning away every romantic instinct I felt until that version of love was fully dead to me.

One came on a vacation I took alone to a cold place in the dead of winter, again well exposed to my complete insignificance.

Loneliness is a recurring theme here.  I wonder that the most religious might be the most socially insulated?  That doesn’t track with the image of the average saint or prophet.  But loneliness, and even sadness, doesn’t count for all of it.  I’ve just had a profoundly, deeply, overpoweringly mundane life.  Not mundane as a synonym for boredom, just for the material, the earthen, the real.  The wildest moments gravity was always with me, telling me what’s up, and more importantly what’s down.

I am an atheist because that’s what my experience of life has told me to be, and nobody was there to give me the cultural static that would drown out or pervert that experience.  Negative revelation.

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The Miracle of Faith

Isn’t it miraculous how we religious types can believe in something that runs counter to everything that makes sense in our experience of life?  Isn’t faith amazing?  Sometimes religious people will marvel aloud at how amazing it is that they can believe in super-ghosts, and it’s usually phrased something like that.  Of course, the atheo-skeptic finds that less beautiful than horrifying, seeing the close kinship between religious persuasion and medical woo, con artistry, and trumpism.

(Sometimes the “miracle of faith” is termed more like “the mystery of faith,” to give it the air of an intellectual enterprise, but also one that defies answer, thus shutting down earnest inquiry.  It’s slightly more humble in its way, even if it’s cheap.)

To which progressive theists would have a reasonable counter argument, lovingly provided by our atheist “thought leaders” and their slide into fascism.  Does atheism really afford any protection at all from faulty reason?  If so, should we fear or revile religious thought?  Aside from the fact that argument just doesn’t feel right to me, I can’t say I’m ready to shoot it down.

The conclusion this dialogue is leading me toward is one of total disillusionment with the powers of the human mind.  Just assume everyone, including yourself, is broke as hell in the headpiece, and the best you can hope to do is paw in the dark for a less-than-harmful consensus with your peers.  This, unfortunately, weakens one’s power of persuasion, as people respond more emotionally to bold and reductive statements than positions couched in caveats, asides, and uncertainty.

I don’t love that.  I’d love to spout Universal Truths like a demagogue and rally the warriors to the cause of righteousness.  Shit just tends to be more complicated than that.

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pro AI lol

I think I’ve made long-winded posts in favor of AI art (not on this blog) that people “liked“ because they didn’t read far enough & assumed I was part of the popular hate train for it.  I’m in favor of AI art, in case you didn’t know.

(Side note:  I may reiterate the “debate” civilly in my comments, but I’ll block you if I’m at all annoyed by how it’s going.  Don’t come with your fingers in your ears, hot to regurgitate the hot takes you’ve ingested elsewhere.)

I don’t see myself using it for much more than a laugh right now (see Spooktober 2022), but if I ever get back into making art in earnest?  I’ll probably use it as a tool.  In a survey on Midjourney 40% of the thousands of people using that AI said they work as or have worked as professional artists.  They’re using it as a tool, like we all did when we all learned Photoshop and whatnot.

Anyway, pro-AI art thought for the day:  I’ve made the case before that opposing AI art can be ableist, because it allows people to create art who would be otherwise unable to do so.  So as I reflect on that tonight, I’m thinking, that just might be the most exciting thing about AI art right now.

A lot of people who use it are either dabbling, or are already artists in their own right by older means.  But some people are approaching this as artists, who have never been able to make art before.  How might their work be different from the rest of us?  What are they going to do with it?  When they’re new, versus when they’re more developed?

Outsider art is a very interesting realm.  The postmodern embrace of it was one of a few inarguably good things to come out of that school of thought.  Ideas from the untrained help keep the world of art fresh and interesting, and balance the elitism inherent to its sadly ever-present class association.

AI art is, in a very abstract way, a descendant of the art of collage, which is a very common form for outsider art to take.  Where my outsiders at?  What have you done with this new tool today?

– ps: enjoy some abject AI foolery

https://64.media.tumblr.com/1cde910a4b1f05e3d41c103fc94166bb/3a511c869db78977-2c/s500x750/99953150fc8518e0555aa584719d3006fd3d5d0c.pnj

 

Tom Hanks Hate Crime

cw: suicide, tasteless behavior, on my part as much as anybody else’s

I kid, that title “Tom Hanks Hate Crime” is sensationalized.  I read a snippet about the steam tunnel kid whose disappearance inspired Mazes & Monsters and the D&D panic in general, and it mentioned that books about the subject came out before the guy was found alive.  So I was picturing this comic scenario where a guy disappears from his college and assumes an identity to get away from it all, then sees Tom Hanks playing him at a local movie theater.  It is to lol.

Unfortunately, the movie came out (on TV, not theaters) a year after he died.  The young fella in question was maybe gay and very troubled.  A failed suicide attempt precipitated his disappearance, a successful one ended his suffering in the sad way.  So basically, Hanks was playing a fictionalized version of a real LGBT youth that committed suicide, tha homophobic bastid.  Again, jk, Philadelphia etc etc.  But it’s more ghoulish than funny, looking at the facts.

The bastid.

–vhs cover for Rona Jaffe's Mazes & Monsters

Imagination Machine Broke

Had a dream that was a mashup of Logan, No Country for Old Men, and Of Mice and Men.  Whatever wasn’t from one of those wasn’t exactly original either.  Younger Josh Brolin and a younger kid were escaped from a home for maladjusted youth where some murders happened.  Who did that?  Seems it was the younger kid and he snapped because he was being molested.  Kid Brolin snaps and ends up killing that kid, but then becomes a serial killer himself, somehow also friends with old version of Professor X from Logan, and using his powers to get away with stuff.  Like, Prof X has the powers but little sense of himself, and Killer Kid Brolin has the force of personality to lean on him, make him do what he wants.  And of course, who /where was I, in all of this?  Living on passive media got a lot of us dreams where we are nobody and nothing, just taking in a universe like watching a tv show.  It’s one of those deals.

The Individual and Society and Kung Fu

revengering

There’s this horrible kung fu movie I keep coming back to, in English called “The Revenger,” starring the lovely Ti Lung.  There are two things that compel me to watch it again.  First and foremost, the voice actor for the lead in the English dub is spectacularly degenerate.  I love him.  I don’t know if I’d even say he’s a bad actor; he can put the emotion on that he’s supposed to be conveying, sometimes even a subtle attitude of sass or menace.  But he sounds like his cheeks are full of cottonballs, and anything that has to be shouted comes out completely bizarre.  My fave line to say in his voice, “I’ve come for my father’s bones!”  Love that shit.  (Spoiler alert?  None of you are going to watch this, or if you start, you won’t make it to the end.)

starring the revengerSecond, it’s a Chinese perspective on individualism vs. collectivism, personal principles vs. social harmony.  I am missing a lot of context, possibly all of the context, but if I can ever tumble to it, maybe the movie will help me understand how at least some Chinese people really feel about all that Confucius shit.  Here’s what I do get…

There were some competing philosophies of how to have the best society, early in Chinese history.  The idea that won out, to the extent it informs people even in other countries of the “Sinosphere,” was Confucianism.  The principles are pretty similar to the Old Testament, particulars about food and slaughter aside.  Obey the government, obey your family, everybody be righteous at all times or get squashed.  If you love Confucius and think I’m getting something wrong, feel free to take a dump in my comments.  I might even allow it out of moderation.

Side note: Western techno-fascist shitbird wannabe cult leader “Mencius Moldbug” named himself after a huge Confucius fanboy that helped his teachings proliferate, kind of the Plato to his Socrates, though I think the relationship was less direct.

Collectivism is a general way of doing things, common in many countries outside the West (especially in Asia, I don’t know about Africa or indigenous America), that prioritizes societal needs over the individual.  The only go-to version from Western culture I can think of is that Vulcan saying from Star Trek, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the individual or the few.”  It’s telling in Star Trek that philosophy was always being tested and contested when it came up, because…

Individualism is the general way of doing things in the West, especially America since Ronald Reagan, which prioritizes the needs of the individual over those of society.  Within my American heart, this definitely has an edge, though they both exist in a balance.  I love this interview with Einsturzende Neubaten’s Blixa Bargeld where he says, “I was only trying to establish myself and my individualism as anarchically and radically as possible.”  That’s gonna be my excuse for everything for the rest of my life.

memevengeAs much as I’d love to be a radical, almost everything in life seems to have a moderate answer, a question, a caveat, some reason you can’t reasonably be absolute about it.  The well-being of society is crucial to our collective survival.  The well-being of an individual is paramount because we are all alone within ourselves, never having been given a choice about whether or not to exist, and we should be able to live our lives in our own way, as long as it causes no harm to others.

And within SJW circles we are approaching that from a Western perspective regardless of how much we want to “decolonize our minds.”  Self-care babe.  Disability activism is a huge component of progressive discourse, but a seldom discussed aspect of that is conflicting access.  What works for one disabled person may be poison to another, perfect access for everybody at all times is impossible, though it is a reasonable thing to aspire to.  Within that issue of conflicting access, we see this: who’s individual needs are more important?  When is it reasonable to consider the needs of the majority?  What if (this will be utterly foolish, bear with me) the trolley being made accessible to this one disabled guy causes five non-disabled guys to be 25% more likely to get hit by a trolley?

So this has become a recurring theme of art, to the point that it’s a running joke every artist statement claims their piece is about “The Individual vs. Society.”  And “The Revenger,” at least in the first half, is about exactly that.  Ti Lung’s character is a buff kung fu master who lives by his own rules.  When he encounters a religious charlatan taking people’s money to lead them in a hokey ritual, he busts up the joint.  With kung fu.  (This moment early in the film will make all movement skeptics instantly orgasm.)  When he meets young lovers fleeing the gal’s arranged marriage, he busts up the coercive groom.  With kung fu.

naughty revenger, no!Living in this way he makes a lot of enemies.  Those enemies are leaders of men – clans, businesses, religious groups, etc. – and while plotting to get back at him, they make the reasonable argument this is for social order, for harmony in society.  Whether they seem righteous or not, you can’t just have roughnecks busting up the joint.  With kung fu.

Their scheme somehow involved one of their daughters* getting pregnant by the individualist (I don’t remember why), and him getting ambushed and killed with dynamite.  They try to kill the daughter* and her baby, but they get away, and baby grows up to be played by same actor as the dad.  Only now, Ti Lung is a The Revenger.  Meanwhile, the Bad Dudes for Society have parceled up dad’s bones for keepsakes.  When baby Revenger grows up, mom tells him what happened, but makes him swear not to revenge.

He agrees, but he goes out to collect dad’s bones.  While he’s at it, he scares the guys, even wearing a fake moustache to act like dad’s ghost for a minute.  The bad dudes attack him and then it isn’t revenge; it’s self-defense.  Promise to mom kept.

This is Chinese media that shows collective concerns can go too far in oppressing the individual.  BUT it came out of Hong Kong when they were an independent hyper-capitalist colony of Britain.  BUT Cantonese people are still Chinese, still under the sway of confucian ideals.  And other of their movies seem to support those values.  BUT does this movie even directly affront them?  Dude is awfully upset about a dad he never knew, carries out his mission in obedience to that ghost.  Confucian filial piety, right?

I don’t know.  But I do love the first part, where dad version Ti Lung is establishing himself and his individualism as radically and anarchically as possible.  Excelsior!

it's him. the revenger.

 

*I made a mistake here.  I wrote the post before I rewatched the movie and was mostly going from memory.  The character that got pregnant with baby Revenger was the main villain’s sister, not daughter.  I left out a lot of deets that weren’t super relevant to the thesis.  This junk has side characters and side plots galore.

Wrestling is the New Burlesque

You remember burlesque?  That was a thing a few years back, where the sex nerds would put on pasties and pretend to be vaudeville or something, didn’t happen to go to any myself.  I feel like there was a little stand-up clown sign outside the clubs which said “you need this many sex partners to enter.”  Which is great, you know, sex nerds deserve their diversions.  But it petered out.

Suddenly, I’m seeing all these poly and queer youths doing amateur wrestling.  What is that?  It’s certainly worse for your health than glitter lung.  Hell, some of them use glitter and still get the glitter lung as well.  But yeah, seems like wrestling is the new performance art for sex nerds.  The more you know.  And no kinkshaming in this, I just think, maybe don’t break your spines.  You only get one on this bitch of earth.

Thanks for listening.

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Spooktober 2022, Day Thirty-Three?

Content Warning:  This could’ve, perhaps should’ve, gone atop every Spooktober entry.  Many horror genres are ableist at their core, some ageist or sexist, etc.  I’ll be less scrupulous about ableist language in this post than my blog’s usual rules.

Spooktober is a 31 day event of coming up with original horror ideas based on prompts my writing group argues over.  This should be last post on the topic this year.  The voting left a trail of bodies in its wake – prompts that did not win.  Ranked by the number of votes they received, with the most popular first, they were:  Psycho-Biddy, Devils & Demons, Ghosts, Killer Toys, Wintery / Snow, Home Invasion, Mad Scientist, Possession, Backwoods, Folklore, Mutants, Giant Monster, Noir, Psychological, Splatterpunk, Alien / Space, Dark Web / Technology, Killer Animal, Body Horror, Body Snatchers, Creepy Kid, Creepypasta / Urban Legend, Mummy, Psychic, Stephen King, The Swarm, Teen, Comedy Horror, Holiday, Kiddie Horror, J-Horror / Asian Horror, and Anime.  As I use the prompts below, you’ll see the name of it appear in parentheses.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #33? — Bonus Spooksfake VHS cover for "Weird Blade"

TITLE:  Weird Blade (ウイーアド ブレード)

PREMISE:  A three-part anime (Anime) OVA called “Weird Blade,” inspired by the structure of Cyber City Oedo 808, which had three main boys, and each had their own special episode.  The setting is a futuristic Japan (J-Horror) in a smaller city near a spooky forest.

Episode One:  Sukeko the Lady.  Sukeko is a purple-haired trans gal, hacker, and party girl.  (She’s the one in the pic with the high pony tail.)  In a club scene we meet her friends Chisaku and Kurochimaru.  Chisaku sleazes on her and every other lady in anime rake fashion, Kurochimaru just likes to play with his yo-yo and dance.

But that life is just her time outside the house.  At home she has to take care of a mean old grandma (Psycho-Biddy), and stay closeted to her.  She has a sense of obligation based on some childhood experiences, being cared for by the crone before she turned mean.  Little does she know Grandma is a mad scientist (Mad Scientist), a hacker in her own right, who has married the world-wide web to the underworld of ghosts (Ghosts) and devils (Devils & Demons).  Every time Sukeko leaves the house, Grandma slips on the VR goggles and gloves, and cyber-stalks her wayward grandchild.

Snow begins to fall on the city.  Grandma and Sukeko have a very tense conversation over food, like, “you’re poisoning me!” “you’re nuts, eat your porridge,” that kind of thing.

Grandma calls her Sukeko instead of the deadname, and Sukeko realizes she knows.  The conversation shifts to that, with Sukeko cautiously optimistic this will be a “I know you’re queer and accept you” situation.  It is not, and they stomp out of each other’s presence.  Grandma jacks in and runs “possess.dmn” file to hAx0r Sukeko’s brain (Possession).

Sukeko has to abandon her own VR rig and flee the house in a panic.  She runs up a snowy trail (Wintery / Snow) into the woods.  Close to dying of cold, she finds a cabin in the woods (Backwoods).

The cabin-dwellers are nice, but Grandma hacks their brains and makes them try to kill Sukeko.  She holes up in the computer core of the cabin, with the possessed trying to beat down the door.  In a cold-blooded and frosty state of mind, Sukeko jacks into the computer core, assuming the avatar of a yuki-onna (Folklore).  She sneaks past grandma’s home defense, riding the hack signal back to her house.

There she remote controls grandma’s doll collection to become murderous (Killer Toys) home invaders (Home Invasion).  Grandma tries to run and hide, but ultimately she gets got.

The yuki-onna melts into Sukeko and she has a little cry as a virtual projection into the crime scene.  But she has a weird vision – the doll that killed Grandma is a one-eyed girl from the club scene, Noriko, and she’s holding a weird blade.  The club girl flies away, leaving just the doll with the letter opener.

Episode Two:  Chisaku the Bullet.  Chisaku is an aqua-haired hard-boiled PI and typical anime perv.  He narrates his part of the story (Noir).  A sexy lady comes into his office and gives him a case.  Her dad, mom, and uncle were all killed by animals, but how?  Doesn’t make sense to her, though the police closed the case.

He investigates the scene of the crime – the cabin where Sukeko had fled.  Did she do the murder?  The audience has to wonder.  Chisaku finds a clue she was there and he calls her up.  She says to meet her on the Dark Web (Dark Web / Technology).  On his way out of the cabin, he is set upon by feral dogs (Killer Animal) that almost kill him, but he shoots ’em all.  He is a The Bullet.

At the cyber-den of a trusted ally, suspecting both his home and his office won’t be safe, he jacks in to do the meetup.  Sukeko is in yuki-onna mode in a virtual cafe, says she didn’t do that murder, leaving open the possibility she did others.  Chisaku doesn’t press the matter, but he begins to suspect this isn’t Sukeko.  “Are you really Sukeko?” “Are you really Chisaku?”

Oh shit, he thinks.  She hit him with an existential crisis virus, that makes you not know what’s real (Psychological).  “Nice try toots, but I don’t know what’s real on the best of days.”  He jacks off.  I mean out.  I mean logs off.  It was bravado, but there was some truth to it.  He knows the only way to fight the doubt is to take everything he sees at face value, and has the presence of mind to give that a go – at least until he can get the virus cleared.

The world is weird.  His friend is mutated into a techno-organic mess with his own computer core.  Outside he sees the dogs from before have come back from the dead as mutants (Mutants), and tracked him to the cyber-den.  He shoots them again, and hustles through the streets.  Since his friend can’t clear the EC virus, maybe actual Sukeko can.

The dogs come back again, mutated into a giant monster (Giant Monster), assisted by passers-by on the street, who seem to have become part of the menacing force that is loose in the world (Body Snatchers).  Old shop ladies twist their heads around and trip him as he runs, that kind of stuff.  At Sukeko’s house the gate is locked but he gets over the wall, leaving the snatched bodies outside.  But the giant dog-thing gets over the fence and he has to kill it with every gardening implement he can find (Splatterpunk).  Where the blood and gore splashed on his arm, he starts to mutate, the flesh merging with his gun so he can’t put it down (Body Horror).

Inside he finds Sukeko looking like a cosmic horror, but talking very calmly, trying to pretend everything is normal.  “Grandmother is upstairs, she is not feeling well.  You shouldn’t be here, Chisaku.”  He explains he got the virus and she helps hack it out of him, and the world goes back to normal.

They stand in the doorway looking at the lawn.  Was there a murdered dog, or worse, a murdered person?  Noriko is in an action hero crouch over a pile of dead dogs, a weird blade in her hand.  She does back flips high into the air, disappearing into a flying saucer that zips away (Alien / Space).

Episode Three:  Kurochimaru the Blade.  Kurochimaru is a dark-green-haired martial artist and dropout.  At the club, the girls all want to get with him because of his physique and his fun-loving nature, but none of them make the cut.  Noriko tries to make a pass at him and whiffs.  But before he leaves, she gets his attention with something.

“I found something I think you should have.  It’s the ghost of a ninja’s sword.  I’m a humble space alien, it should be in the hands of a real Japanese martial artist.”  He takes the weird blade, like, “Uh… thanks?,” and jets.

His home is on the waterfront, a community straight out of Stephen King, where folksy accent-having salt-of-the-earth types rub shoulders with generically named middle class people, and everyone has dark secrets or weird gross sex stuff they do behind closed doors probably (Stephen King).

The blade feels weird in his hand and he takes it to an antiquarian’s shop.  The weirdo there is a secret mummy (Mummy) who monsters out and tries to get him into suspension bondage, and he cuts the bandages to escape.  This is played for laughs, as is the whole of this episode.  When something horror happens, it’s mixed with pratfalls to keep the spirit light (Comedy).

Out on the street, he’s like, “Now how will I find out what’s up with the weird blade?,” then sees a sign outside the high school that says “occult club meeting tonite” (Teen).  He goes inside.  A spooky janitor points him to the art room where the weirdos meet.  The Occult Club kids are annoyed that he busts up the seance.  They have stereotypical high school interactions with each other about it.  Probably a secret hot girl is wearing glasses that camouflage her hotness, I don’t know.

The scoobies decide to take him to the neighborhood psychic kid (Psychic, Creepy Kid).  Guy has the Shining, perhaps.  The kid looks like a miniature version of a character from Mob Psycho, and after Laurel & Hardy-ish shenanigans, gets his hand on the blade, to do a psychometry.

When he touches the sword, he activates its power, and starts chasing Kurochimaru and the kids around with the sword and an army of bugs and frogs and such (The Swarm).  The teens are all killed in Goosebumps-esque ways (Kiddie Horror), until just the hot girl and Kurochimaru remain.  Then the kid appears, fully transformed into a Jeff-the-Killer-esque edgelord form, blood coming out of his eyes (Creepypasta / Urban Legend).

They get to a mall which is doing the Japanese version of crimbo festivities (Holiday).  Sukeko and Chisaku are there on a date, wearing santa hats, but looking haunted by previous events.  The mall is attacked by the swarm and the creepy kid, turning into a violent free-for-all.  Chisaku spots Noriko dressed like a sexy elf, and Sukeko uses hacker powers to run “exorcism.exe” on the weird blade.

With the magic of the ghost sword dispelled, the alien loses interest in the world and leaves again in her UFO.  The three heroes walk through the devastation in shock.  Kurochimaru starts playing with his yo-yo again.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The horror of shoehorning as many concepts as possible into as small a space as possible.  Wasn’t easy!

Posters by AI, modified with photoshop.  Here’s the unmodified BS I wrangled into the poster, tho I’m not including all the sources for elements I cobbled in.

some AI bullshit