Spooktober Day Twenty-One

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 #21 — HAUNTED HOUSE
(× Home Invasion or Dark Secrets or Toys & Dolls)

TITLE:  Get Them Girls

PREMISE:  Some lil native girls were in a terrible catholic boarding school for abducted children (Dark Secrets), when in a strange inversion of history, all the adults died of disease, leaving the lil girls alone.  What spirits wrought this havoc?  One of them brought a corn-silk doll (Toys & Dolls) with her and accidentally invested it with real sorcery.  Kids these days.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Spirits can be vengeful whether they deserve to be or not.  The shitbird colonizers got theirs fair and square, but they still came back as angry ghosts to kill the girls (Haunted House).  It’s spirit vs. spirit, making the house unlivable, however… the girls still want to live there.  They don’t know if, or don’t believe, that they have parents to return to, and are more afraid of being taken again (Home Invasion).

When the feds come to get them girls (roll credits), it’s emotional and supernatural mayhem.

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Regarding Spooktobers

I recall last year somebody saying they couldn’t take the time to read them when I dropped them in a big bunch, which I had done because I was running late with getting them done.  This year I’ve been trickling them out slow style.

No one is obligated to give me feedback, but there’s one piece I’d like if you have the time:  if the concept became reality – if it was a book – would you read it?

Peep my Spooktober tag and let me know.

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Spooktober Day Twenty

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 #20 — HISTORICAL
(× Party or Rumors & Scandal or Body Snatcher)

TITLE:  The Body of Christ

PREMISE:  So many political agendas derived from Young Jeezy, this and that interpretation of his historicity (Historical) and importance, what he said and what it meant.  It was inevitable that time travelers would try to throw shit in the game (Rumors & Scandal).  But they couldn’t go back in person.  They had to send clone avatars (Body Snatchers).  The tech works best when you send a clone that doesn’t look like anyone in particular, but if you aim for a given guy’s likeness and persona, you end up with a lot of corrupt copies.  They send the everyman clones to manipulate public opinion, to shill for their preferred beliefs, and they send the attempted jesi to attend The Last Supper (Party).

HORROR ELEMENT:  You are the son of man and about to get betrayed with a kiss from your home boy Judas, but Judas doesn’t know who to kiss, because there are about twenty of you on the scene, at least four of which are close enough to bewitch the mind.  What the hell is going on here?

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Skillet Pepperoni Sandwich

A recipe.  I hate cooking, but this is very rewarding tastewise and – while a little fiddly – it does not take amazing skillz.  There’s a place in town with awesome pepperoni grinders, but last time I went to get one, I was like, this is not as indulgent and wonderful as I remember it being.  Close, but not quite.  I thought to myself, I could recreate what I like about this at home.

The important thing is that the pepperoni gets hot enough to start leaking that red sauce on your bread, because when toasted up, it’s the thing that sets this apart from any ol’ sandwich.  It’s very nice.  I don’t have a pizza oven and I didn’t want to take the time to do this in my regular oven.  Also not keen for the experimentation involved in getting it right; I find skillet experiments easier to track than oven science.

I don’t often have pepperoni in the house; I’m minimizing meat preservatives in my diet, due to colon cancer history.  But my brother visited to officiate my wedding and left some behind, which is why I had occasion to do this recently.

Ingredients:

  • Some bullshit-ass store pepperoni.  Gotta be the cheap non-turkey stuff for a proper amount of fat.
  • Sliced bread.  I used franz “classic french” flavor; slightly less worse than the cheapest white bread.
  • A wee bit of sliced black olives, enough to cover the bread lightly, shouldn’t be piled overlapping.
  • A wee bit of salted butter.  I just take a stick and melt directly onto the pan what I need.
  • Enough sliced provolone or mozzarella to cover your sandwiches one deep.
  • A wee bit of mayo.
  • Optional:  A leaf or two of lettuce.

Tools:

  • Stove.
  • Non-stick frying pan in very good condition.  Ones with flaking nonstick material are probably giving you cancer, chuck that shit.  I don’t know where my roommate got this new one, but it’s primo.
  • Spatula:  Don’t use metal spatulas on non-stick pans.

Steps:

Lay out your bread, as many sandwiches as will fit in your skillet.  I used three bisected slices to make three half-sandwiches, which is as much as reasonably fits in my little pan.

Start the pan heating on low-medium.  Those knobs that go 1-10, I’d say 3.5-4.  Lay out your pepperoni inside the pan, about two deep and roughly in the shapes of your sandwiches.

Open your sandwiches and lay down enough olives to sparsely cover one side.  Over the top of those olives, lay down your cheese, one layer deep.  Feel free to adjust anything.  I don’t care, but sometimes a minimal amount of what you need produces a classier taste, and a less sloppy bite than a big pile of ingredients.

Once the pepperoni has released its red stuff and looks sweaty, flip it to cook the other side.  If the pieces are sticking together, great, makes flipping while maintaining your sandwich shapes easier.  If not, you can just scoop ’em on the sandwiches sloppy style later.

You’re not cooking to get the pepperoni crisp, just to release a modest amount of the fat in it.  Takes a very short time.  Then put it on the sandwiches, on top of the cheese side.

Melt a little butter in the pan, just enough to lightly soak the outer surface of a bread slice.  If it mixes with residual pepperoni fat, great, that tastes awesome.

Take the top slices of your sandwiches and invert them into the pan to get a little butter on them – they should only be in the pan close to an instant – then take them back out and put them butter-side up on the sandwiches again.  You now have sandwiches with no butter on the bottom, just on the top.

Melt a little more butter in the pan, with the same kind of aim – not to drench the bread, just oil it so it doesn’t scorch and so it tastes nice.

Put your sandwiches in the pan, non-buttered side down.  Now you have sandwiches with butter on both sides.

Cover the pan so the cheese will melt better, and put a timer on for 3-4 minutes.  Times surely vary with how big of a pan you’re using, etc.

Uncover and flip the sandwiches.  Hopefully the cheese will be melted enough to keep them from flying to pieces.

Cook uncovered another 3-4 minutes or until cheese looks reasonably melted, mindful not to burn the sandwich.

Take the nearly complete sandwiches off the pan, onto the plate you will use to serve them.  Open up the pepperoni side.  Remember our layers are olives-cheese-pepperoni.  Ideally the olive side will be hard to open because glued down with cheese; the pepperoni side will open right up.  You will see orange-red staining your bread.  Good!

Put a thin layer of mayo on that stained bread.  If you’re using lettuce, put it on the pepperoni side, and when you’re done, close it up and serve immediately.

This is very fatty food, which is why it’s good to not go gonzo with any of the ingredients.  Beware if you have gall trouble.  When you eat it warm, crisp on the outside, warm on the inside, that shit is bomb.  If you eat it quick enough that the lettuce and mayo are still cold while everything else is still hot, it’s kinda like having hot fudge on ice cream – a narrow window of time in which the food is dee-luxe.

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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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