Spooktober Day Nineteen

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 #19 — BODY HORROR
(× Beach or YouTube/Streaming or Lovecraftian)

TITLE:  Live From Necropolis Beach

PREMISE:  Linda Fong gets her big break as a correspondent, live reporting (Streaming) from Party Beach (Beach) on local news.  But the beach used to be a city of the dead, in the time before time, and the stars are right for the return of the ancients (Lovecraftian) – just in time for spring break!

HORROR ELEMENT:  Evil Dead basically, in broad daylight.  The demonic entities that claim living bodies of beach revelers don’t seem to have much respect for the flesh they’re in, and all sorts of vile mutilation is had by all (Body Horror).  How will Linda survive, and what will be left of her?

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Spooktober Day Eighteen

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 #18 — REVENANT
(× 1950s or Lynchian or Lost Media)

TITLE:  The Last Record of Johnny Fire

PREMISE:  Johnny Fire is just utterly unknown.  Only some antiquarians and centenarians remember his rock ‘n’ roll career in the early ’50s (1950s), but among those, nobody can lay claim to a copy of his last record (Lost Media), Skippin’ Town.  Just how did those songs go anyway?  One creepy old KKK dude can remember a few of those songs well enough, because he murdered the young man, and took a perverse joy in learning about his victim after the fact.

Racist old Virgil is in for a treat.  He finds the record one day in his collection, as if it had never been missing in the first place.  Funny, the cover doesn’t look like he remembered it.  Some songs are the same as he recalled, but others?  Were they always that morbid?

HORROR ELEMENT:  One night Johnny (Revenant) comes dancing across the disc, tiny as a mouse (Lynchian), and flies off the edge into the magic moonlight.  It’s time to murder a guy, but how is it fair for the fucker to have lived an entire-ass life consequence free?  No, every single moment he’s ever had must be taken away.  Just as Johnny’s record was magically there like it had never been lost, so the history of Virgil’s life must be rewritten – and replaced, with that of an aging and healthy Johnny.  And what will be the last thing Virgil experiences before he ceases to be?  Beaten, burned on a cross, drowned?  So many possibilities.

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I Knew It

Remember my post about leftist accelerationists?  Saw some evidence of it in the wild.  Couldn’t get a screencap and lost track of where it was, but it was one of those pro-palestine trans anarcho-whateverist tumblr gals who discourage voting and mock people for promoting it.  And in this post she said something like, “how can you be aware of the US and what it does in the world and not want it to fail?  not yearn for its utter destruction?”

This is what I mean.  The only way for the USA to improve, in their eyes, is to be utterly destroyed.  And if that takes X years of fascist rule and a million dead LGBTQ people and women who needed reproductive healthcare and unionists?  Fuck all those dead people, serves ’em right for being born in the wrong country.  And every other country that will be worse off because fascists control the USA, including Palestine?  Fuck them too.

Given this accelerationist impulse, I wonder if they would look at the terrorist actions of Hamas that inspired the current genocidal push and think, yeah, no matter how many Palestinians are slaughtered, it’s worth it to see the world being inspired to stop Israel and liberate the leftover living among the mountain of corpses.

Accelerationism bad.  Anti-voting leftists are accelerationists, and they’re bad.  Don’t be like that.

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Spooktober Day Seventeen

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 #17 — PSYCHIC
(× Lifetime/Mom Movie or Lighthouse or Amnesia)

TITLE:  Olivier

PREMISE:  Thérèse works and lives in the lighthouse (Lighthouse) with her special little child, a working single mom (Mom Movie).  Little Olivier is barely able to move, perhaps muscular dystrophy?  Hard to know; she doesn’t get to hospitals.  Too busy.  She doesn’t know why she doesn’t have a second adult in the building to trade shifts with.  She doesn’t remember giving birth to Olivier and doesn’t remember his father (Amnesia).  She just knows that her little guy is precious and weak and will just die if she doesn’t help him in every little way.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Olivier isn’t an immaculate conception.  He was just born with a spiritual mutation that crippled his body and expanded his mental powers.  He is psychic (Psychic), and having underdeveloped empathy and ability to care for others, has used those powers selfishly.  Anything that might keep maman away has been suppressed or erased.  The memories were easy.  But what did Olivier do with the other lighthouse keeper?

If I did this one, I’d emphasize that Thérèse’s love is not forced; it is real.  And Olivier will grow up to be capable of unselfish love as well.  There is room in the world for creepy kid stories but it’s not my preference.  I think there’s still room for a lot of terrible horror content while still retaining kiddo’s humanity.

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Climb Every Mountain

Had a lil honeymoonesque thing recently, went to a rental cabin in Port Angeles and drove to some sights in the area over a few days.  First day we went to a little waterfall which was pretty cool, tho the nearest terlet was on some Silent Hill shit.  The second waterfall was an unexpectedly long hike, which wore us out something fierce, but it was cool to be in the middle of some natural nature.

Second day we went to see a mountain view, where all you had to do is pull over, get out, and look.  Simple enough.  But then we were like, since we’re on this road, maybe let’s go all the way, and ended up a mile above sea level, walking up another steep path with need of frequent breaks.

I guess the environment would still be considered subalpine because trees could grow, though they were weirdly-shaped in order to survive. Lot of short branches. The grasses and shrubs were weirder too. My home boy who had come along to do the driving noticed strawberry plants and lupines that were not the sort of thing we expected. Saw some canada jays which wikipedia suggests would be the “obscurus” subspecies, vamping for treats but receiving none. We’d left the trail mix in the car.

The trail had no handrails, and a few feet and a slip could easily lead to death.  The area is renowned for unpredictable weather and high winds, but wasn’t too bad.  I mean, I’m here, so I must not have been blown off a mountaintop.  Surprised my husband was willing to climb that high, given that he has a low key fear of heights that can even hit him looking at google satellite view.

Point is, it was very beautiful.  I’d post photos but it’s slightly less easy than posting words, and they don’t do the thing justice anyway.  They’re so flattening.  When you’re up there and you can see how far down it all is, when fast-moving clouds are sliding along the mountainside below you, random shafts of sun hitting snow-flocked jagged peaks, and those beautiful golden shrubs and grasses, the long feathery moss on the trees, I dunno.

I’m not in favor of mountain climbing generally.  That’s what got Julian Sands.  But if you can drive most of the way and then just hike up a few hundred feet of steep path, well, go ahead.  Less than an hour later, we went from having random snow sprayed in our face to having warm sun, down at a little park on the shore.  Good times.
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WordPress Earthquake

WordPress is the software on which FtB runs, and I’d always assumed it was a service like facebook or xitter under control of one random corporation, subject to enshittification per their whims.

But not so!  WordPress was an open source nonprofit project to establish a shared software for bloggers great and small to use.  There are businesses involved that sell their own variations and services that are compatible with the core platform, and there’s a tradition of them chipping in some nominal amount to the org to keep the lights on for everybody.

But wait!  The org has a tiny board with only one active member, that guy is also CEO of a for-profit WordPress company, and he has started ignoring this blatant conflict of interest to leverage the org against his company’s competitors. (i tried to link to a website about the subject and it broke this article until I removed it! umm…)

That’s all very arcane, isn’t it?  What does it mean for you?  This is all very much above my pay grade as a bloggy persona, but more than one of the competing WP companies have had basic functions – including security features – threatened by this rampaging mini-musk, and the one we use could get disrupted as well.

In fact, I know so little about the subject that I don’t know if it ever will be a problem for us, what the problem will look like, if there’s a problem already, or if there have been problems for months.

On which corporation or corporations does FtB depend for basic function? If it’s Automattic, we’d be safe from the crisis by merit of being under the rogue CEO’s company.

Or maybe not, depending on how far-reaching his unethical behavior goes. The guy also controls a social media platform (tumblr) and once revealed a trans woman’s side accounts on xitter in retaliation for criticism – a move so blatantly wrong-hearted even musk hasn’t pulled it yet.

But it all just goes to show everything we have online is at the whim of bastards with too much power, and could be snuffed like a match in a hurricane if they sneeze. It prickles one in the anprim feels.

Shit, if FtB was a newsletter distributed thru the USPS, we’d still be spitting distance from a republican privatization push subjecting us again to the whims of hyper-aggressive coked-up billionaires. Whatever.
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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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