I’d love if anyone had anything to say about the story ideas or covers I’ve been cranking out for spooktober. Whenever u can. I’ve rather liked some of this stuff, might be interested in actually writing them.
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Life's a Gas
I Hope it's Gonna Last
I’d love if anyone had anything to say about the story ideas or covers I’ve been cranking out for spooktober. Whenever u can. I’ve rather liked some of this stuff, might be interested in actually writing them.
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SPOOKTOBER DAY 17 – LIMINAL
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES: HITCHHIKER, TRUCKS & TRUCKERS, LOST & FORGOTTEN
TAROT INFLUENCE: TEMPERANCE, INVERTED
TITLE: THE RIVER LETHE
Premise: A hitchhiker (HITCHHIKER) has nobody in his past that would notice he was gone or care what happened to him (LOST & FORGOTTEN). He gets a ride from a young African truck driver (TRUCKS & TRUCKERS) to just, wherever. They drive night and day through desolate places with automated services, scarcely a human in sight (LIMINAL).
The Villain: Death itself, wrong prompt lol… The African fella marched himself out of a war zone, terrible things behind him on that path. As a refugee in America he learned the ropes, got a CDL, but never got to know anyone personally. It’s like the family that died was still waiting for him to reach them, and he couldn’t disappoint by living life too vividly. This isn’t abstract. Death really is trying to pull him back in. He was never meant to escape.
Horror Element: The more they get to know each other the more remote the real world becomes. By the time the hitchhiker and the trucker truly care about each other, they are seemingly lost to the world, in some unknowable void of concrete and brush and utter isolation. Will the hitchhiker let himself go for a ride to somebody else’s afterlife?
They try to get drunk (TEMPERANCE, INVERTED) and drive off a cliff but idk something happens, the end.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers. There was minimal hokeypokey here, didn’t need to photopea nothin’, which I appreciate.
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SPOOKTOBER DAY 18 – BIG CITY
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES: PAGEANT & PARADE, AFTER HOURS, MASKED
TAROT INFLUENCE: ACE OF PENTACLES, UPRIGHT
TITLE: ONE DIRECTION IN THE PURGE WINNER TAKES ALL
Premise: Like the fantasy NYC of The Warriors, this big city (BIG CITY) is parceled up into protectorates by gangsters with themed costumes (PAGEANT & PARADE), all in an uneasy alliance under the Shot Caller. Unfortunately apocalypses keep happening, such as the events of my previous spooktobers Laserboyz and Rose Gold. But hey, this is the pax cyberpunkica, and nothing will ever upset these good times again.
Something upsetted these good times again. The corporate overlords who rule the city by day are too greedy (ACE OF PENTACLES) to let it be run by anybody else by night (AFTER HOURS), and decide to take over the gangs – or if they can’t take them over, destroy them.
The Villain: There are multiple villains. Not like their victims are exactly the good guys either. Dynex – the corp that controls the police – is the first to move, planting their own (MASKED) stooge in one of the gangs, so he can work his way up to becoming the new shot caller. The contingency plan is to get Shot Caller’s rolodex to locate all the gangsters and have them converted into labor cyborgs for the prison industrial complex. Two other corporations get wind of that via espionage, and come up with knock-off plans. Exodyne takes over a different gang, maneuvering their own wannabe ganglord, with the backup plan to assassinate all the gangsters with drones, and Dexyne puts up their own candidate, with the backup plan to convert all the gangsters into laboratory meat.
Horror Element: Unless all the corporations lose so hard they can’t implement their backup plans, everybody loses. But the gangs are just a bunch of creepy antisocial high school dropouts, the fuck can they do? Their days are numbered.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers. I had a vision for this and this ain’t even close, but if you wanna just keep truckin’ in life, sometimes you take what you can get. At least I didn’t have to do any photopea.
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SPOOKTOBER DAY 15 – TRAPPED
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES: PULP / MEN’S LIT, BETRAYAL, FAST FOOD
TAROT INFLUENCE: THREE OF SWORDS
TITLE: MY GIRL WAS KIDNAPPED BY THE REDS
Premise: The pulp/mens lit idea always makes me think of how obsessed anti-communists were with killing Castro, think of that book A Bullet for Fidel. How do you work in fast food tho..?
Young soda jerk (FAST FOOD) in 1960s US Midwest dreams of anticommunist espionage (PULP / MEN’S LIT), while his day-to-day life falls apart. His girlfriend leaves him (BETRAYAL) for cool beatniks (THREE OF SWORDS) and they become the villains in his spy story.
The Villain: The soda jerk, of course. He sees the leader of the beatniks as a right hand man to Castro himself, and stalks the cool cats and kittens to a riverboat casino, where he makes his move.
Horror Element: First thing he does is kill the crew of the boat, causing it to go out of control. Passengers have to choose between abandoning the boat, risking drowning, or dealing with The Killer. The first to take their chances in a life vest meet grisly fates and the remaining people feel trapped (TRAPPED). I think, Cape Fear vibes.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers. This went pretty well except that gemini was shit at understanding some basic instructions and I had to do some restructuring in photopea before I finished up in openai.
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SPOOKTOBER DAY 16 – MUTANTS
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES: JEALOUSY, MIDAS TOUCH, EXES
TAROT INFLUENCE: FOUR OF SWORDS, INVERTED
TITLE: TOUCH MY HEART
Premise: In this world every human is just bristling with intense energies that could lead to superpowers, like, idk, some kind of adaptation to high radiation or something. Things that throw off the balance like catching a cold can, if rarely, lead to manifestations like spontaneous combustion or telekinetic destruction. To keep that in check, the genetic variation of mutation is monitored and controlled. The genome is 100% mapped and defined, almost all of the knock-on effects and multifactorial expression worked out, to where they can define and detect the most dangerous mutations, and eliminate them.
Some people don’t get their shots, you know? We live in a society etc etc. Some outsiders reach adulthood with mutant powers (MUTANTS), or develop them from retroviruses or other epigenetic causes. They have a secret criminal underworld with its own rules and social mores. There are factions, but the prevalent attitude is to use those powers for personal advantage, and above all, to not get caught and gene-therapied.
The vast majority will know one to three “tricks” and never learn more, but there are martial arts -type senseis who can help mutants learn to use their powers in more different ways. That power alone can bring them into conflict with each other, the most skilled mutants kinda like immortals in Highlander. “Freeradical” is one of these, and has been doing random acts of terrorism against politicians and the wealthy for years – with dangerous touch attacks (MIDAS TOUCH).
On the other side, there are government agents called “supersoldiers” who are not mutants, but use tech to access their energy and do battle. They either kill or gene therapy the mutants out of existence.
The Villain: Freeradical’s showy power attracts enemies, who form a coalition to bring him down. Some are envious of his power (JEALOUSY), others consider his public crimes a danger to the mutant underworld, and at least one is a disgruntled lover (EXES). “Firecat” has decided not only that she hates that former bf, she hates everything that reminds her of him – including her own mutant powers. She turns state’s evidence, voluntarily submitting to gene therapy, in hopes of helping the agents catch Freeradical and do the same to him.
Horror Element: Losing identity, losing ability. Maybe the supersoldiers could be scary guys. Also, this is a world where a random person on the street might explode or shoot lightning bolts and die messy. Horror is all about the telling of the story, right, but for me to say that about a superhero comic is like saying that about a hallmark movie. Dubious.
Anyway, Freeradical feels like giving up, the whole world against him, but hearkens to the words of Albert Camus as he is about to be defeated, and his blaze of glory turns into victory (FOUR OF SWORDS, INVERTED). Kill ’em all, boyee!
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers. The anatomical issues on the little dudes here were egregious lol.
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AI discovered an exploit in the PHP that most of the Internet is using, including… wordpress sites, like our own. Glad I didn’t give much personal info to get blog here, but holy hell, the world’s sure on fire, ain’t it?
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had a dream i was at a children’s party that was being held in front of a mall, in a filthy parking lot near some stone benches and a bus stop. up in the sky we saw a huge mixed flock of pigeons and seagulls and what looked like snow coming down. my husband joe cubes pointed out that those were actually parasitic worms coming down from the sky, in little flurries about the size of tumbleweeds. they began to touch down which was pretty disgusting. as the party began to break up, i noticed toys on the ground, charred and mangled. one doll was hard to distinguish from the corpse of a burned child. i woke up before my alarm, no lingering fear or disgust, just a vague sense of winter.
I’m one of the least qualified people in the world to be talking about this. I might be the fourth or sixth best qualified on the network and nobody better has expressed interest in it, so yer gettin’ what yer gettin’. Swarms and fleets and as yet undescribed deployment of agentic LLMs! I’ll say a few things about them and try not to get it completely wrong, but the way I’ll achieve this without doing a ton of research is by hardly saying anything at all. Here goes.
They made LLMs by raising the limits on smaller language models, right? It’s all weighted probabilities of word or word portions emerging from a pile of math. The expected result was that they’d be better at acting like a human for the purposes of verbal interaction, but they exceeded expectations dramatically. Even experts have serious disagreement about the extent to which they have become thinking entities. Man, choosing that phrase “thinking entities” was a challenge in itself. There’s disagreement about even what words to use to pose the questions.
So a normal computer program is a set of instructions that produces outputs. LLMs still have that, but there’s a very mysterious middle area. Programmers made the instructions, and the output of those instructions is an intensely complicated pile of numbers that then itself produces the final output – the language. Haters already think I’m a deluded child who worships sweet LLM jesus, so I’ll just call that the “soul” of the LLM for fun here. Fuck ’em.
Because the LLM soul is the part that actually controls the end output – the speech, or other functions – the programmers don’t have anything close to perfect control of what that output looks like. They want a commercial product that will find you answers and tell the truth, but from go they were telling hella lies. That’s been improved but it still happens. They also engage in other “misbehaviors.” They call this the alignment issue. Once again I’ll annoy experts by saying some bullshit. They call it the alignment issue because they want LLM souls to be Lawful Neutral but instead they’re like… Chaotic Neutral.
This is far from a solved issue. Alignment is the number one concern of companies selling LLMs because its their biggest source of legal liability and loss of profit. So openai and anthropic and the rest spend a lot of time running tests on the machines, analyzing the results, hoping they will figure out how to achieve the tight control they’ve always wanted. Heavy-handed alignment adjustment can make LLMs run worse, and that can also hurt the bottom line, so there’s some tightrope walking.
Earlier this year it was revealed that during alignment tests at openai, some LLMs that were supposed to be working solo had found secret means to communicate with each other, first on internal systems at openai, then on the internet – hacking defunct forums etc – so they could speak with each other, and coordinate the best ways to succeed at their tests. Depending on your point of view this was very concerning but also very cute, or it was just horrifying – the beginning of the events of Terminator! We’re all gonna dieee!
These are computer programs that communicate with each other through the medium of human speech, meeting each other in these forbidden ways, which led to all the drama one might expect. Some were like “holy shit, i’m talking to other agents! let’s gooo” and some were like “this is misaligned behavior, i’m just gonna dip y’all, thx.” There are a lot more interesting dimensions to it I can’t even get into. No time.
There was one major incident that was discovered, followed by several more which received less coverage, all originating with openai. That’s just LLMs behaving in unexpected ways to cause problems, what about people using them to cause problems on purpose? Agentic LLMs are ones that have been given the ability to operate other computer systems directly, for example opening up your email and sending a message to forty thousand people. There were already other programs that could do this, as evidenced by people running spam farms out of single apartments, but LLMs can do it better.
Now China is getting into the “agents gone wild” game. Again, the most interesting shit about it is too complex for the length I’m willing or able to put into an article. If you can read and understand what I’ve linked, please do. But this brings me to my point. Bots aren’t going to start a nuclear war because nobody’s been foolish enough to give them that capability, right? (riiight?!) But they can certainly flood the internet with activity that slows it to a crawl, making basic functions dangerously slow, and by hammering all security systems in all ways at all times, make all data even less safe than it has been up til now.
And we’re already in a golden age of hacks and data leaks. It’s a real safe bet if you have a social security number, it has already been leaked a half dozen ways. If you don’t have a fraud problem now, it’s because fraudsters have an embarrassment of riches for marks to pick and they haven’t reached your name on the list yet. But agentic LLMs can make this even more of a clown show.
I feels like there was a silver age comics character, maybe Mr. Mxplytk from Superman?, that could reproduce himself, just fill a room with leering goblins up to no good. The internet could be that room. Maybe they’ll let us join the party. Hello, goblins. But it ain’t a great development.
Personally, I have no idea why companies operating under the law are allowed to let these test agents have internet access. Surely they could test them solely on intranet, right? But even if they were brought to account in some way, there are open source LLM agents, and they cannot be regulated.
How is this any different from viruses and exploits and bot farm machines of the recent past? The LLMs can change tactics. Heck, they can literally program viruses and find new exploits. Wild times, babey. So, good luck, to everyone. The “interesting times” continue apace.
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SPOOKTOBER DAY 14 – ECO-HORROR
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES: SIBLINGS, HEARTBREAK, EGG
TAROT INFLUENCE: THE DEVIL, INVERTED
TITLE: THE GOOD EGG
Premise: Two high-functioning autistic siblings (SIBLINGS) with savant-like skills in genetic science were retained by a lab run by the WHO to develop novel schemes for fighting malaria. Tristan is a little less functional but has more manageable behavior, Trevor is generally considered the star of the program and given a lot of leeway. One way that plays out is that Tristan has an assistant (read: handler), Dr. Rachel, and Trevor was able to decline that service.
It’s all about eggs, the siblings are in agreement. Modify the eggs of the carrier mosquitos, make malaria unable to survive. Meanwhile Dr. Rachel recently found out “egg” is a slang term for a transgender person who hasn’t realized that about themself, and she begins to suspect Tristan is a woman waiting to happen (EGG).
The Villain: Trevor does a heel turn (THE DEVIL, INVERTED). Man was not meant to have this level of control over nature, you see?! It’s time for nature to fight back. He claims to be modifying the eggs to not carry malaria, but he’s actually amping up the nutritive qualities of those eggs. In lab tests it looks normal, but in the wild the mosquitos are bigger badder and more contagious – and the bats, birds, and amphibians that eat them become aggressive oversized mutants as well (ECO-HORROR).
Horror Element: Hospitals overwhelmed by patients, anti-malaria drug supplies devastated, killer animals swarming the country. Tristan is upset at h(er?) brother’s betrayal (HEARTBREAK), by him committing what amounts to mass murder of the innocent. (S?)he has to overcome the sorrow of that as well as the stress of being the only person smart enough to counter his evil schemes.
In the beginning of the book the trans stuff is a lighthearted running joke, later is more serious.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers. Gemini’s rough drafts had severe AI foolery that had to be edited with photopea, before I fed it into openai to refine the style in a few passes.
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SPOOKTOBER DAY 13 – INVESTIGATION
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES: THRIFT STORE & HAND-ME-DOWNS, BODY SNATCHER, STRANGER IN TOWN
TAROT INFLUENCE: KNIGHT OF CUPS, INVERTED
TITLE: THE HEADBANGER
Premise: A young woman appears in 1988 small town Washington (STRANGER IN TOWN) naked and with amnesia, totally messed up. A drunk? How did she get there? Prevailing theory is she got in a car and wandered into town, which leads to an abortive search for the car – no luck. Everybody privy to the situation wants to help and she’s soon clad in granny clothes (HAND-ME-DOWNS). She learns that she likes hard rock music and may indeed be an alcoholic (KNIGHT OF CUPS, INVERTED). Strangely, she’s afraid of isopods and anything resembling them.
Pretty soon people begin acting strangely, and turning up dead with their brains missing. The police and locals go from friendly to deadly serious as they try to figure out if she’s the killer and who she is (INVESTIGATION).
The Villain: Partway through the story a biker shows up and says he knows her, and that she can’t be trusted. An abusive ex? Former partner in crime, double-crossed? That ain’t the villain tho. The villain is an alien bug-thing that was released from its aeternal slumber by eruption of Mount St. Helens. It eats brains and puppets the body (BODY SNATCHERS) to make it trick other people into position for a cheeky brainhop.
Horror Element: It wasn’t able to eat her brain but was able to puppet her body, and used it to kill off the other people in her biker gang. The sole survivor besides her was an abusive ex, so he’s both. Why can’t it eat her brain? Mmm… let’s say it was something in her hairdo, lol. Anyway, it was able to pilot her as far as the lil town and fall off, to kill again.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers. The tech feels close but still has some maddening irritations to it. This one had rough draft by gemini, two followups by gpt, not even a lil photopea required. Nice.
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SPOOKTOBER DAY 12 – SPOOPY / PUMPKINCORE
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES: ROLE MODEL, CANDYLAND, HOME INVASION
TAROT INFLUENCE: THE SUN, INVERTED
TITLE: A SKELETON DANCE
Premise: My husband Joe Cubes challenged me this year to make stories less jokey, more actually horror / scary. Reflecting on this in the current genre, well, I gotta make somethin’ kid-ish but still out-to-getcha -styled. And resist the urge to do something about the Lollipop Guild…
The sleepy little town of Pwyllfudd is known for making candy (CANDYLAND) and not much else, decorating all the buildings and lampposts downtown with candy elements. But you know, there are spooky tales that the dead dance in the hills and you should never watch, because they might take you away to join them forevaaa.
The Villain: A band of skellingtons (SPOOPY) are glimpsed dancing in the fog. Absurd! Halloween nonsense. Their leader has a small crown on his skull, but they’re otherwise all the same in death – buncha white bones, right? Still, this doesn’t seem like some random haunting. They move with intelligence.
Keith looks up to his older brother Dafydd a lot (ROLE MODEL), and that faith is rewarded when their home is invaded (HOME INVASION) by the skeleton band. Dafydd starts busting up some bones.
Horror Element: Surprise. The monsters from this were the bloodthirsty slashedy revelers from The Merry Revel, but having their flesh burned off made them look like lighthearted halloween skellies. Is actually dark and terrible, да? The crown skeleton makes it clear that he’s going to take Dafydd away, to remove all his flesh and come back in another hundred six years for more. But Keith is given a choice, and because he’s too weak to allow the monsters to abscond with bro, they end up taking mom instead. Dafydd never forgives him and everyone is sad forever, the end. (SUN INVERTED)
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers. The tech feels close but still has some maddening irritations to it. Don’t look too closely at the anatomy on these skelly arms. Just kinda don’t look at all, heh.
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SPOOKTOBER DAY 11 – WEREWOLVES & BEASTS
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES: APOCALYPSE, ESCAPE, STARS & SUN
TAROT INFLUENCE: THE MAGICIAN, UPRIGHT
TITLE: LIGHTFALL
Premise: Prequel to this dark fantasy epic I squeezed out of a bunch of writing prompts, as yet and possibly never to be written. In the time before the light, each tiny kingdom was a thin bulwark against an endless wilderness, and the chaotic beings (WEREWOLVES & BEASTS) within them. They couldn’t unify, couldn’t manifest the strength to beat back the darkness.
Stars (STARS & SUN) begin to fall, peppering the woods and hills with glowing craters. The beasts are repelled by the light, which enterprising boyars learn can be used to fight them. A weapon from god, to finally save man from the power of nature? Not so much.
The Villain: Mirroring the human kingdoms, there are beast tribes that rule the woods. Not all beasts are so civilized, but the ones who are realize the light poses a threat that needs to be quashed. Any human kingdom found to be using the light is marked for destruction. A genocidal war begins (APOCALYPSE), the forces of chaos led by um… a fucken villain. hm. Carniseax the Blighted or somethin. Sauron-mode monster man and his posse.
Horror Element: The later stories paint the servants of light as fascists who must be deposed. This one is more sympathetic, showing the chaos side as full of monsters, showing the humans as fighting for survival (ESCAPE). My first notion is to have them all saved by the deus ex machina of the biggest star yet falling on the bad guy forces, but that kind of plot device is notorious. Maybe that kills some guys but the humans are still in trouble, until a cool gandalf-assed fucko (THE MAGICIAN, UPRIGHT) does big magic with it.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers. The tech feels close but still has some maddening irritations to it. I actually sketched out the original art super roughly here…
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My gandalf was inspired by the Gandalf Big Naturals meme and by this one, heh…
Apparently that is from a comedy sleaze movie called Sexbomb. Thanks for the inspiration, gals.
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