Midnight Muse Challenge

My husband has to keep busy and I end up coming along for that ride.  Our writing group which was named after The Midnight Society from Are Afraid of the Dark? has a new art challenge for October, “Midnight Muse.”  You get like 5 art challenges a week and can do as many or few as you please from the list.  He designed the banners, collaging examples of other artist’s works that served as examples, and of course, he came up with all the challenges.  This is copypasta from discord.
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WEEK ONE… DISTORTIONS.
This week, here are your five challenges to interpret how you will.  You can do one a day, do multiple versions of the same challenge, choose only one for the whole week… it’s up to you!  Do a painting, take a picture, make a sculpture, create something out of yarn… whatever inspires you!  The challenges this week are…
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👽 COLOR OUT OF SPACE 👽
unnatural vibrant shade, make something a different color than it usually is, create something about a strange color
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🤏 TINY MONSTERS 🤏
show something tiny made large or large shrunken down, a miniature, or something filled with tiny details


🌟 GLOWUP 🌟
depict something glowing (especially something that doesn’t normally glow), use glowing materials, or the concept of radiation (literal or figurative)
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🫠 WARPED TOUR 🫠
show something distorted out of its usual proportions, create something that you stretch or warp physically, or a misshapen object
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💔 SHATTERED 💔
create something broken apart, a fractured view, break apart something and glue it together, or show the pieces of something that remain
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Oh You Thought I Forgot?

It’s Spooktober, which means I’m coming up with a month of horror story ideas and doing ai covers (with a few tweaks from photopea).  Have at thee…
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SPOOKTOBER DAY 1 – POSSESSION
OPTIONAL CHALLENGE:  PUNK/GOTHIC

TITLE:  BACKMASK

Premise:  Deathrock never had what it takes to get big in society.  People just don’t want to hear those lyrics, feel that darkness.  But deathrock did have what it takes to swing wide the gates of hell.  The most important people in the story are a scene of deathrock musicians, including band members, studio, and biz people.  They are scrappy indy types, only differing from punk rockers in morbid dispositions, higher suicide and opiate abuse rates.

But in a marathon weekend of recording, a new artist enters the studio, seemingly out of nowhere.  Avedje looks human, but is barely able to pretend.  The most canny and close to the problem recognize she’s a demon in the flesh, but don’t know whose fault it is that she was summoned, and don’t know what they should do about it – if anything.  She has a way of getting on everybody’s albums, usually as background vocals.

Suddenly deathrock acts on the label are blowing up, and the new fans are harming themselves and others, changing, disappearing, making the impossible happen.  Most importantly, they are making sure everybody knows that life is a joke and death reigns supreme.

Horror Element:  The movie adaptation of Suicide Circle is an influence here, as are the comics of Junji Ito.  I’d take the basic theme and just spin out a bunch of variations that serve as stories within the story, get the funhouse vibe.

Some Nonsense:  Avedje, a great king and duke, appears crowned with a diadem, naught seen of him but his head; and before him proceed two ministers carrying trumpets.  He teaches of logic and rhetoric, and gives the skill to understand all languages.  He gives very good familiars.  He gives full, true answers about things present, past, and future, concerning the arts, or things consecrated in secret, and of the Fall, and how the rebel angels sinned.  Not an hour will he remain truthful, unless cast into a corner.  Possesses thirty legions.


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SPOOKTOBER DAY 2 – ANALOG HORROR
OPTIONAL CHALLENGE:  PARTY

TITLE:  SNAKES AND LADDERS

Premise:  In medieval fantasy themed social game like Club Penguin for a more broish set, a group of young players gather in a private tower to RP.  Nobody wants to GM, but in the anarchy of that moment, three players are promoted to GMs.  Co-GMs?  This sets them on a path where more than one thing can be true simultaneously.  One is the only GM while the other is also the only GM and likewise the last.  Planning the games happens in the open, allowing the other players &/or GMs to all become privy to the entire plot.  Spoiler alert!

But maybe not.  They gain awareness of the past present and future simultaneously, but experience each as if it is a fresh and immediate moment.  The focal point of the adventure is a game within a game, of Snakes and Ladders.

Horror Element:  Each player and game master responds differently to the expansion of their consciousness.  Some are broken by it, some are enlightened but terrified of the inevitable total party kill ending.  Some are experiencing something else altogether, that they cannot explain to the others.  If you die in the game you die in real life.

Some Nonsense:  Ara, duke and marquis, appears in the likeness of a dragon.  When before you in human form, he marvelously controls all manner of serpents.  If the conjurer is wise, they shall gather all the knowledge they seek, and cause fierce serpents to lower themselves, by consecrating this dragon in metal.  And no kind of serpent shall be bold in their presence, and the conjurer will stand well pleased – yet not forever.  They should fear lest the image be broken, and immediately let the strength return to the snakes.  Ara gives true responses of the past present and future, and has under him twenty-five legions.


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SPOOKTOBER DAY 3 – COSMIC HORROR
OPTIONAL CHALLENGE:  THE FORBIDDEN

TITLE:  HEAVY METAL THUNDER

Premise:  Druff was a mechanic and handyman in a desert town.  Some kind of drug perma-fried him too, so add wizard to the cv.  At first he just did odd jobs for the town, but via part-time work on motorcycles and hot rods, he got to know the rockers, and began to work on electric instruments and amps.  One night in the scrapyard behind the garage, he discovered the spark of life a new form of electricity.

Did it fall from space?  Was it a genuine act of science from a rare genius?  Whatever it is, it makes amps rock harder, makes hot rods hotter, and gets heavy metal fans high as balls – a forbidden pleasure.

Horror Element:  Basic Uzumaki method horror.  Pick a theme and run a series of escalating vignettes of scary ideas based on it.  Story one could be a lady getting a special guitar that causes supernatural problems for her, story five could be a coven of rock freaks getting so high they explode at a concert, story thirteen could be the mothership calling back all the volts and bolts, hollowing out the masses like the alien vampires in Lifeforce.

Some Nonsense:  Furfur, a great count, appears in the likeness of a crow, his tail like a flame.  He lies to all unless placed in a corner, but there will take an angelic form, and speak with a raucous voice.  He leads to weapons drawn between men and woman.  He renders people invisible and gives understanding of astronomy and all mechanical arts.  He gives understanding of lightning and thunder, and how they are made.  He knows the best answers in matters occult, and has under him twenty-five legions.


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SPOOKTOBER DAY 4 – RETRO SLASHER
OPTIONAL CHALLENGE:  BAROQUE

TITLE:  THE RED KNIGHT

Premise:  Everyone is fucking done with sectarian warfare.  This ville doesn’t feel the magnificence of holiness, a precursor to modern french apathy atheism, because the Wars of Religion have made a mockery of both brands of jeezyism.  Some people might have sympathies one way or another, and they’re all nominally catholic as they’re supposed to be, but the late baroque era is all about getting by and enjoying life.

Or is it?  People are getting murked nasty by some stealthy and preternaturally skilled man at arms.  At last a suspect is seen, and his red-lacquered full plate armor still makes him too buff to kill.  Did I say stealthy and plate armor?  It has strips of leather between every point of contact.

Horror Element:  Old timey Michael Myers.  A catholic knight transformed by the most recent religious war into an utter monster, he sees huguenots where there are none.  Like the slashers that kill people who fuck first, he is more likely to judge you protestant if he sees you engaged in sin.

Imagine the sensory experience of being around such a guy.  You’d smell him before you’d see him.  Dude is living off of raw meat, never giving away his location with a campfire.  Raw rat is easier to chew than raw cow.  His armor is not completely silent.  It makes him so heavy, his footsteps are like the hoofbeats of an ox.  He has his own gravity.  Maybe that’s why you slipped while running away.  Time to get fileted for jesus.

Some Nonsense:  Now, however, we must speak of Berich.  Berich is a king yet is called a great duke by all.  The followers of Solomon call him by this name: Berich.  The grammarians call him by the name Belfayt.  He appears in the likeness of a red knight, and his horse is red, and his raiment red, and he wears two crowns.  He gives fully true responses of the past, present, and future.  Constrain him by divine virtue, and by the art of a magic ring, for when at liberty, he lies.  He teaches in full how to change all kinds of metals to gold and silver.  He gives titles and confirms them with clear understanding.  He has a raucous voice, and has under him twenty-six legions.


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SPOOKTOBER DAY 5 – BODY HORROR
OPTIONAL CHALLENGE:  EROTIC THRILLER

TITLE:  INVERTED PASSIONS aka THE DEMENTED WORLD OF DOCTOR DICK

Premise:  A mad scientist driven by transphobia tries to come up with a way to medically detransition people against their will.  When he realizes the same tech could be used to help people medically transition better than ever, he tries to overdose on drugs.  Pill mixup, he became a genital elemental!

This sounds like a setup for tentacle porn.  Let’s dodge that.  Before he can tentacruel anybody, he explodes and rains monster jizz into the hospital water supply.  This hospital is full of sexy professionals having the usual hot naked affairs and adult hijinks.  Until…

Horror Element:  In a bit of unreality, nobody here rushes to the emergency room when their genitals turn inside out.  There’s secret shame, fevered scenes of self examination and dubious efforts to beat things back into shape, some people turning into monsters, some few discovering they like what happened to them and not wanting to see it reversed.  This could be taken as exploitation horror or anti-trans propaganda.  Or maybe it’s a didactic lesson showing cis people that genital dysphoria is no bueno.

Some Nonsense:  Lambes, great king and president, appears in the likeness of a woman.  He speaks sweetly, bestowing the love of men as well as women.  If the exorcist wishes to provoke all people to his love, let him fashion a grand image of himself.  Behold! when “love overcometh love” is inscribed upon its brow and the power takes hold, the exorcist’s image is consecrated, granting him such virtue that all people of whatever sex accede to his love.  And so none may cause him to fall for another, as all are marked with his sign.  And he has fifteen legions under him.

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anyway, busy as fuck.  driveby drivebys is all i can muster for the bloge.

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America’s Gravestones

As I posted 9-11ly, I believe bin Laden won.  I believe he killed amurrica, like a hunter convincing buffalo to stampede off a cliff.  This has a ramification I didn’t initially consider:  any and all 9-11 memorial monuments are functionally gravestones to the US.  There’s a line in that SNL sloths video “they eat cocaine off america’s gravestone,” which is objectively hilarious, but was not a thing you could do in real life… or was it?  Call up your local sloths, score some coke, and pay your respects.

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oh no you di’int

i’m in position to be knocked off the sidebar, and while this is good for ftb – it means a lot of people are posting, and what inspired my now defunct streak of daily posting was a ghost town vibe on the network – i cannot abide that ignominy.  i post now just to stay in the sidebar.  watch me burn!

i had a thought recently i wanted to hold onto.  it has a few attached thoughts.  this is a memo to myself; make of it what you will, or disregard.  i’m cool with that.

-i remembered while listening to Princes of the Universe that once upon a time highlander made me feel some kind of feelings.  it’s a kind of magic yo, and you have heard too often how i feel about magic in fiction.  i’m into it.  the thing i don’t want to forget – i’d like to remember what i felt about the show, so long ago, and without necessarily injecting immortality as a theme, put that quality into something i write.

-i relate the feeling of these powerful transcendant characters like paul atreides and connor mcleod to the powerful emotion created by surreal fiction like the works of david lynch and leonora carrington.  my husband would get the latter but very much not the former, because the highlanders and space messiahs are power fantasies, like the superheroes he couldn’t relate to as a boy.

-srsly he related to wesley willis singing about how batman would kick his ass, because he saw a big buff representative of the dominant social order beating on weird outsiders and saw himself in the villains.  therefore, he will never see the potential of a profound impact from fiction with messianic peeps.

-is that connected to his bad self-esteem?  if so, could i give him .005 self-esteem points by helping him feel such a narrative?  how could i play up that aspect of what i feel in those narratives, what sets them apart from superhero stories?  i think of li mubai in crouching tiger hidden dragon and how he died, forever denied love by his heroic lifestyle.  i dunno.  i think about the ending of woo’s a better tomorrow II, where the guys have a heroic gunbattle and sustain a surely lethal number of gunshot wounds, living just long enough to have a cool pose for the closing shot.

-that’s the main shit.  i think there was more, and if i remember, i may edit it in or drop it in comments.  i should take notes more often so i don’t forget these things.

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edit one:

-the messiah thing.  i wonder that this sense of profundity from heroic narratives relates to the way christians and their ilk feel so cool about jeezy peets and their respective special boys.  if i gets a tear watching a the crow meet his ghost wife at the end of the movie brandon lee died to make, is that what they feel when they see yahweh’s meat puppet twitching on the cross?

-i have immortal characters and a notion of including demigods in my big gay RPG project.  wonder if these notions could find a place in there…

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It’s All About the Sidebar

I’m just going to do bullshit posts to keep me in the sidebar on FtB.  Clancy Brown or Joe Elliott said it’s better to burn out than to fade away.  I say, it’s better to linger forever in some kind of useless state, contributing nothing but low key annoyance to all who make the mistake of clickening.

Man.  Like Matthew Broderick said shortly before killing two ladies in Ireland, life comes at you pretty fast.  I am decidedly not keeping up.  I plan to go back to Hurricane Ridge in a few weeks for a cold weather picnic.  Hope I don’t slip up and do some cold weather plummeting.  I also plan to try to start drawing again soon, at least for a lil bit.  Hope I don’t slip up and draw butt-ass dookie.

My husband was talking about when he had the art industry job and how he’d get personally abused by the management, how that damaged his creativity for a while.  I remember around that time I asked a guy about where he was working, and he suggested it would be an unpaid internship for a shot at making less than I would at McDonald’s.  Let these jobs be replaced by AI slop.  Free the artists from arting for a living; all of these industries are vampire factories and have been hurting and even killing people for over a hundred years now.

Not where I was originally going with that.  He was saying that when he was working as an artist, he was told he was a bad artist.  Whereas when he wasn’t working as an artist, people would say he was a good artist, and should do art for a living.  People know not of which they speak.

I’m a bachelor of the fine arts and I’m in social work now.  Wacky shit.

Anyway, midnight-oh-five and and another work week begins in a lil over eight hours.  Good night everybody!

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Two Weeks

Two weeks without a post?  Good googly moogly.  When I goes off the wagon I goes hard.

I’d like to talk about writing likable characters.  I was inspired by a description of a sleazy movie directed by a cool auteur in his younger days, how it got unusually good reviews for soft porn, that specifically mentioned likable characters.  That’s something his later works had as well.  He’s got an advantage over a novelist because he’s equipped with actors – or as i call them, professional charisma-havers – but his writing and directing do count for something there.

There’s this bullshit kiddies are into these days which is characters lacking in all redeeming qualities.  Amateur writers sayin “Look at my guy, he’s such a piece of shit asshole motherfucker, i love him.”  Cool, but will anybody else?

I even think there’s a place for that and it’s probably fine.  I just think that the ability to write likable characters is much more impressive.  Writing a jerk is easy.  Successfully threading the needle of charisma, that’s somethin’ else.

That said, the most likable character in my recent work Josefina and Blasfemia vs The Wall of Ice was probably the mute homunculus.

I just don’t have the time to do this properly, to make the thesis strong, and I know you’re gonna shit all over me in the comments, oh, my favorite fictional guy is an asshole, how dare you say i’m not allowed to like assholes, rabble rabble.  Whatever, im right and ur wrong.

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Bin Laden Victory Lap

Bin Laden inaugurated the new millennium by breaking some bottles airplanes on the prow of a ship world trade whatever whatever, with the goal of destroying the america.  How did that work?  Like a charm.  We flushed ourselves down the toilet after that, always looking for a bigger and better daddy to tuck us in nighty-night and make us feel safe from our craven cowardly baby shivers.  His terrorism terrorized us into giving up on the idea of freedom.

About this much has been said, but one thing I don’t often hear expressed is that he really did win.  He died, but if he was a true believer about martyrdom leading to a sexy paradise, then Obama helped him achieve that part as well.  More importantly, the big aim has come to pass.  The republic is over, and while the empire will look shiny for a few seconds, that’s just the beginning of the end.

Who’s gonna be our Caligula?  Our Nero?  Our Caesar is a fucking humiliation, so I’m sure the succession ain’t gonna be much better.  Maybe Barron will be the one holding the fiddle when Canada finally nukes DC.  Wait, DC will be underwater from global warming, so maybe they’ll nuke Nuevo Mar-a-Lago, Greenlandsylvania by then.

This is not to be a doomer.  I think plenty of us will have passable lives under that tyranny.  This country is too big to successfully be run like North Korea.  It’s just not feasible.  But whatever greatness this country possessed has jumped the shark.  It’s all downhill from here.  Hats off to the man behind 9-11.  And if it turns out sasquatch is real and that man is Dubya, hats off to him.

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What was I saying..?

I seem to recall in a blog post and a podcast mentioning that we’re about to see more terrorism from leftists, and there you go…  Is this a bad thing?  It’s fuel for the jerks.  After all, Israel’s current big genocide push was inaugurated with a terrorist action by members of the oppressed people.  Terrorism is often the tool of the disempowered, and the left here is more disempowered than ever.  We may have fewer guns, but you know which leftists do have guns?  The ones most inclined to do a terrorism.

This won’t just be leftists either.  There will also be centrist terrorists and more right wingers as usual.  That’ll be interesting to see.  People who were fucked over by conservative policies who themselves would be favorably inclined to said policies until their face got eaten.  We’ll be seeing some of those fellas exercising their oh-so-sacred second amendment rights as well.

Who pulled this trigger?  Who cares?  The right wing, in going full fash, has made itself an existential threat to immigrants, to lgbtqia+ people, to members of racial and religious minorities, to women who need abortions, to anybody with the wrong bumper sticker in the wrong part of red country…  People feel their lives have been threatened, because they have.  Some people respond to that with deadly force, because that’s what this country has told them to do.

My brother usually avoids “faces of death” type content, but he made an exception to watch the video of this one.  I personally am still going to avoid it, but I see where he’s coming from.  You get enough horror and enough hopelessness meted out to you from your political opposites, you take your gratification where you can fucking get it.

If the UHC motherfucker didn’t ring in hunting season, this one surely did.  This will be ugly.  Sorry to any decent person who is harmed as a result, truly.

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Abortion Action Nonsense

I had a dream that started with people talking about a young lady who just had an abortion.  There was some sensitive discussion about whether she was going to attend thanksgiving with the folks, about her feelings, and about how people should respond to her presence, help her feel okay without pressing the issue.  Sensible shit like that.

But instead of a family dinner, the imagery pivoted to that of a a quasi-futuristic nightclub with black light and strobes.  The girl was dancing, when another group of young ladies invited her over to talk.  Suddenly the music stopped and the lights went up -focused on our young protagonist- and the mean girls started saying bullshit like “you tortured your baby.”

At first it seemed like she was going to cry, but then she started beating their asses.  As Carl Douglas said, everybody was kung fu fighting.  Guns came out, seemed like the cheap end of action show from late ’90s TV or cable.  Somewhere between Johnny Mnemonic and Cleopatra 2525.  God that show was weird.

There was an older lady character, I think, myself?  My perspective shifted a lot in this dream.  I was a Carla Gugino type.  I tried to protect the young lady, to have her back in the fray, but I kept getting attitude.  This led to a pivotal confrontation, during which I told her that a judge had reversed a decision, that a crime she had done was no longer considered self-defense, and now we were both wanted for murder.  The mean girls were actually bounty hunters.

The young lady was like idgaf, and the action started up again, blasting and karate kicking and running around.

I lost track of the young lady and went third person again, following different tracks of the fight.  Viola Davis was there, in a role more demon than human, walking down the hall setting death traps in these sci-fi pods as she went.  A monster fell into one of the traps, and she used long steel claws to rip out its eyeball.  She was smiling and babbling to herself as she moved on to another trap.  I have to say, the cheese and meat in those traps looked pretty damn tasty.

I was trying to get away and stepped into an elevator that I hoped would be empty.  There was a corporate dude inside and he got word on radio that there was shooting in the building, that he needed to escape.  He presumed I was a security guard for the building and asked me to protect him.

I used this as cover for my escape.  I believe the original girl escaped by transforming into a white serpent with patches of orange and black goldfish scales, and swimming through murky water.

I don’t remember anything else about the dream.  Anyway, shows that my inner attention span for gentle human drama is highly limited, but I could do whack action movie bullshit all day.

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The Tapout

life too hard for daily blogging.  did not manage a year of it.  sure was an interesting ride, at least for me.  the thing that made the most practical difference in my life was making myself listen to new tracks by The Dead Milkmen.  that changed the rotation on the radio station in my head some.

i’m too tired to do this tho.  it’s over!  see u whenever i get to it.  zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

zzzz.

zz.