Thinking About Art

Song lyrics.  What do they mean?  Some people don’t even listen to the lyrics.  And I admit, when Ghostface Killah is talking about “sloo-footed penguins” ducking from “rap damians” I just take it for granted I will never understand those lyrics.  I could google it on genius.com but eh.  Anyway,

The song “More” by Sisters of Mercy.  The lyrics are about being in a relationship with somebody whose passion does not match your own and feeling incredulous about it.  “I don’t know why you gotta be so undemanding.”  I’m like, Andrew, this isn’t rocket science.  Sometimes it’s just like that, bro.  Better luck in the next relationship.

My problem is that song lyrics form some kind of giant index in my mind that is instantly accessed by common words and phrases.  Like if somebody says, “stop” as a one-word sentence, I might think of that part in the chorus of “How Sweet it Is,” or “Stop in the Name of Love.”  And if anybody wants more of anything, even if it’s cheerios, Andy Eldritch’s studio ladies start shrieking at me, “I NEED ALL THE LOVE I CAN GET, AND I NEED ALL THE LOVE THAT I CAN’T GET TOO.”

That’s the pattern.  Random mood or turn of phrase calls up a song lyric, then I ponder it for a minute, and get a head full of these kind of observations.  Thinking about art.  Sometimes, it’ll happen whether you want to or not.

I’ll end this with a song that came to my mind not from word association, just from mood.  It’s a quarter past midnight and life is looking kinda thorazine right now.  “Play it on ’til the dawn, I’ll be lonesome when I’m gone, Everything we done is wrong, Play it on ’til the dawn…”

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Blockchain Will End Civilization – Ask Me How!

CONTENT WARNING:  I am literally not an expert in anything and everything I say here could be dead wrong on multiple levels, so take that under advisement before you start to panicking, OK?  I look forward to comments that will temper my doomsaying.

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I was contemplating NFTs and crypto thanks to the latest episode of James Stephanie Sterling’s program and a rash of posts on tumblr besides, and I realized they are a perfect analogy to the cause of multiple extinction events on the planet.  Then I realized they aren’t just analogous – they could really be the straw that breaks the back of civilization.  This connects to my theory about how the rest of human history is likely to go:  Cyberpunk Dystopia, Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland, then Nothing.  If world leaders want to forestall the end of their power, and if I’m right, they’d best do everything in their power to outlaw criminalize and expunge blockchain-based currencies from existence.

It works like this: All you need to do to make money from nothing is run a computer for a while.  Cool trick, eh?  It generates encrypted information that can be exchanged for goods and services.  Now think about this for a minute.

Right now every con artist in the world is working every angle in the world 24-7 nonstop, from Mumbai to Macedonia, to raise every red cent they can.  They’ve all but destroyed the ability of senior citizens and the disabled to use phones, to use email.  Colonized people across the planet have become the vehicle of their own destruction, razing the forests to ash just to get by in whatever economy has been left to them.  Corruption is so widespread and thorough in the “socialist” countries that their infrastructure is inflicting mass casualty events left and right.  And the finance industry in the USA, every time it’s been let off the leash even an inch?  Has pushed us to the brink of utter economic disaster through money-making schemes so byzantine in complexity and somehow as utterly mindless as an amoeba.

Humans work angles.  But so has all life, since inanimate proteins first started to become something we could consider life.  The cutesy educational program PBS Eons has multiple episodes that have this theme and it really puts our coming destruction in perspective.  Basically a type of life finds a niche that allows it to grow out of all bounds.  Unknowable trillions of organisms in the primordial ocean have effected climate change so dramatic it turned the oceans purple once, it turned the Earth into ice planet Hoth once, and it caused multiple devastating extinctions – some before the evolution of the world’s first nervous systems.  Eons always puts a positive spin on it, saying “without this (unspeakable death and horror) that came before us, we wouldn’t be here.  Isn’t that swell?”  But there it is:  under global capitalism we are recreating the biosphere-wrecking mistakes of literally mindless creatures that came before us.

Now all you need is a computer to run for a little while to make money out of thin air.  Huzzah!  This can of course lead to various cryptos being devalued into nothing, but all you have to do to sidestep that is to create a new crypto.  It works even better than cruzeiro bills because those are obliged to have some relationship to the currency of Brazil.  Now when you’ve devalued your currency to nothing all you have to do is make a new virtual country.

All of this is, of course, environmentally destructive.  Every crypto dollar you create requires a certain amount of energy to perpetuate its existence.  Every dollar created within a currency gradually gives less value return than the cost to maintain its own existence, but they never stop existing.  There’s no landfill for these barrels of funny money.  So essentially the crypto gold rush only makes money as long as each currency is maxed out in sequence, and new ones are constantly created.

Multiply this by every spam email farmer from Manila to Johannesburg and the problem becomes more clear.  The creator of crypto may as well have been Tyler Durden, out to destroy the world’s economies in the pursuit of anarcho-primitivism, because nobody in the world can stop this.  A system has been created that allows everybody in the world to build a tottering carbon-sucking Tower of Babel that absolutely will collapse, and like nuclear proliferation, nobody in a position to stop it has the courage or self-control to do so.  It’s the monkeys in the old commercials pushing the “crack” button to the exclusion of the “food” button until dead.

Something changed recently.  I don’t know what, but suddenly “venerable” financial institutions have decided crypto is legit, and are pushing crypto cards, crypto retirement accounts, crypto everything.  Why wouldn’t they?  These are the people who caused the Great Depression and every financial crisis since.  It’s all about mindlessly rushing to squeeze every penny out of every angle until the whole thing collapses, while everyone with an ounce of awareness knows this exploitation just wheels us from one collapse to the next.

Now the video game industry is wanting in on the con, wanting to turn gamers into crypto miners for them.  You think they’re the only internet connected industry that will do this?  The literal internet providers are coming next.  Funny thing is, they might not even know they’re doing it.  Here’s why: The same corruption that ransacked the infrastructure of China is waiting to go platinum in the US of A.  Crime organized and otherwise is going to infiltrate any corporation with access to server farms and steal bandwidth to mine crypto.  And of course, there’s nothing to stop the telecoms themselves from doing a certain amount of crypto mining right out in the light of day.

Our internet will slow to a crawl and start to experience massive outages, and with it our civilization – now hopelessly dependent on it.  In my little quasi-marxist progression of history, this is the Cyberpunk Dystopia.  This era will end when the internet ends, heralding the Mad Max era.  Crypto-currency, if it isn’t defanged through an international blitz, could well be the force that flicks that off switch.

Tell me I’m wrong, please.

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Pondering the Future of Life

HUGE CONTENT WARNING – APOCALYPTIC CLIMATE DESPAIR

It’s possible that humans, at the far end of this hellride (maybe a hundred years off), will have eradicated all life on this planet except the most intense extremophile bacteria and archaea.  I think even from where we stand now, assured of calamitous devastation, surfing the edge of an extinction event in progress, that does not seem likely.  The way that would happen is if the completely runaway global warming that is already too late to stop snowballs into temperatures that rival the Hadean Eon.  I don’t know how possible that is.

But it is surely probable for this heat to become globally devastating in a way we’ve never seen before.  It’s a pretty safe bet that all large mammals will go extinct outside of enclosed environments, and 90% of what else is living beyond the artificial spaces will go extinct as well.  That’s enough to make a nature lover miserably sad and some of us fit to suicide bomb a petrol exec or politician.  Looking forward to more of that happening, because this stuff does have me miserably sad, and I’d love to see the fuckers eat shit and die.  Zero qualifications regrets or backtracking on those words.  If you’re petrol or a political enabler, please, set yourself on fire on live TV for me.

But this post is about none of that.  I am inclined in this random moment to think about the life that will survive global warming.  Because unless we successfully turn Earth into Venus, this warmed world will settle into some kind of equilibrium eventually.  Birds and reptiles are much better at surviving heat compared to mammals, and despite the insect apocalypse going on at the moment?  You know those lil bastards will bounce back.  Again, huge numbers of species will be gone forever, but those that remain?  Will ultimately repopulate to exploit the niches that remain.

I know less about plants.  Obviously if they don’t make it through, the rest of life is in a bad way.  Goodbye to all tetrapod life if that happens, probably – no lizards no birds no rats.  But I suspect there are plants that will do well enough, even in a world that reaches a hundred sixty in the summer, choking in fire every year until the last scrap of tinder is mingled in deserts of ash.  The poles will not be quite that hardcore, some cool weeds will probably stick around and wait for a chance to spring back.  That will give a foothold for some insects and some kind of tetrapods.

If humans are lucky in all that, we’ll be living in tightly controlled environments with smaller populations.  Maybe underground.  We’ll be living off of vat-farmed algae and recycled garbage.  But what I’m most curious about in this moment of detachment is this – what animals will be the best survivors?  Who will be the lizards and bugs and weirdos that scrap back, diversify and repopulate the Earth?  If we’re lucky enough to still have dinosaurs, who will they be?  Ducks and chickens pulled off this feat once before, I bet they could do it again.

For the comments, I’d like to see people placing their bets on what animals survive this mess.  I, for one, believe that humans will be one of those animals – for good or ill.  But aside from eyebrow lice and gut flora, who will we be sharing the world with?

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Is This Creep One of Ours?

It has come to my attention that the ancient moldy “venerable” webcomic “Sinfest” still exists – and has gone full terf.  This isn’t news because it happened some time ago, apparently.

The last I gazed upon its weird and copious pages was in art school close to twenty years ago.  At that time it struck me as being penned by a very virtuous hand, something of Walt Kelly’s talent in the lines, but wallowing in unoriginality on a perverse level.  Like the MCs were basically Calvin & Hobbes, except Calvin dressed like Bloom County’s Steve Dallas and Hobbes was a hot chick (TM) with a whale tail, baby doll tee, and what would become Karen hair.  The comic veered between slam poetry about weed and endless tedious discourse about xtianity that was inscrutable enough to come out a total wash.  I could not tell you if the artist was an atheist or an xtian.

That was then and I won’t give the creep traffic to see what it looks like now.  But from googling some discourse about it, some coincidences emerge.  The writer went swerf circa Elevatorgate, and went terf more recently.  Is this somebody who went with the progressive side of atheism but then followed people like OB out the terf hatch?  Or are they just british and this is a nothing?

Weird world, man.

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Work at Home Thoughts

The big boss sent out a video begging the employees to get vaccinated, explaining to the chuckleheads in kindergarten teacher style how safe and effective the vaccine is, that you can get paid time off for adverse effects, all kinds of good stuff.  I wondered to myself if the bathroom mirror still had a meme taped to it reading, “Keep Calm and Wash Your Hands,” like it did when we were sent home around the turn from March to April in 2020.  Hmm…

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Coattail Rydaz

By now you all know Dave Chappelle needed more money so he did some calculations and decided to ride the coattails of terfs, profit off the pain of a highly visible minority.  It’s incredibly transparent.  While transphobic actions make him a transphobe in effect, one wonders if he even has transphobia in his heart.  Are you really bothered by trans people, or is it just an obvious cash grab?  I don’t really care, just annoyed to see these irrelevant has-been comedian fucks throwing in with the worst people in the world.  A waste of whatever shreds remain of their original talents.

This is not especially relevant to me and my life.  I cancelled Dave Chappelle when he defended Trump’s misogyny and cancelled Netflix when they promoted eating disorders and suicidal ideas through their original programming, haven’t been tempted since.  But there is one way in which this is relevant and it’s as hilarious as it is pathetic.

PZ has called our attention to Nu Atheism’s shining light in Richard Dawkins, and what he’s been up to lately.  Want to guess what venal calculations he has cribbed from the fascist pundits and has-been comedians of the world?  Within weeks of Chappelle’s shit, our own former anti-pope came out on stage with a straw hat and cane to huck some shit of his own.

I’m reminded in part of the social cowards who orbited the true bullies back in junior high.  Para-bullies?  They wouldn’t initiate much on their own, just sidle up to the instigators once they start going in on a kid, and make sneering or laughing or wall-eyed faces of sadistic ecstasy.  Nu Atheism (TM) used to be at the vanguard of hate movements (islamophobia and misogyny), now our boys are coattail rydaz.  Fucking  pitiful, bro.

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EDIT TO ADD:  These people will always have a profit motive for hate speech.  See how much money Richard Carrier was able to drum up just from people who hate progressive atheism – a pitifully small pool of donors.  But before the dollars run out, they might be dissuaded from hate speech by the worm turning on its popularity.  Some day our activism will pay off and mainstream people will look on the transphobia of this historic moment with absolute disgust.  On that day, easy money cowards like these two will try to backpedal and make excuses for how they were.  I will live to see this, and it gives me some comfort.

Spooktober – Days 29-31… and Beyond!

I did a thing with some people to do 31 horror story concepts within October.  This gets kinda ridiculous.  Bear with me…

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #29 — Psychic

TITLE:  Syde Effexxx

PREMISE:  Despite a complete lack of precedent for this ever happening, despite the fact there is hardly a conceivable way in which it can happen, the COVID vaccine had long term side effects.  The fascists were right!  #thanksobama.  The year is 2040 and gen Xers are all senior citizens, with some developing dementia as a natural consequence.  But the ones who had been vaccinated are starting to develop unnatural powers as holes and schisms open in their grey matter.

The only people with psychic powers are those who are suffering mental decline.  Most cause mayhem they cannot control – telekinesis, pyrokinesis, projecting horrible visions into people’s minds, making heads asplode.

HORROR ELEMENT:  There are two gen X dementia-havers that have an unusual level of control over their powers, one good and one evil.  It’s Fred Durst vs. Kid Rock.  I mean, I don’t know if Fred Durst is good, but he’s probably less evil than Kid Rock.  Right?

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #30 — Vampire

TITLE:  The Estate

PREMISE:  I’m going to use one of my old ideas because I don’t believe I’ve ever written it down anywhere.  No time like the present.  Given that this is something I conceived outside of the promptfest context, it is something I intend to actually write some day.

An egalitarian band of survivors in an abandoned stretch of country take up residence in a crumbly castle.  They wonder if they might be able to settle down, live in peace, but a vampire awakens and fucks up the program.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The land is abandoned because ruthless exploitation of the peasantry led to horror and a total breakdown of society.  The undead man responsible is back to remind the new peasants how man is meant to live in paranoid misery.  He’s sexy action cool and doesn’t immediately kill them, instead befriending them, turning them against each other, and ruining their egalitarian system.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #31 — Lost Media

TITLE:  Loners

Content Warnings: Suicidal Ambition, Drug Use, Big Age Difference in Relationship.

PREMISE:  Video games used to be designed wholly by very small teams or individuals.  In a way it’s become like that again on the indie scene, but the small team games are often less ambitious than what the old auteur programmers would get up to.  Occasionally the old devs would get some amount of celebrity.  In this story a malcontent teen in the ’80s makes a video game with an edgy aesthetic cribbed from skateboard magazines and such.  He becomes a minor celebrity on MTV for a few months, is indulged in some celebrity excess, then forgotten by everybody forever.

Years later a young hope-to-die gay youth spends his non-huffing time looking at creepypasta and retrogaming sites, gets really into malcontent’s video game and the lore around it – supposedly haunted, the usual.  While researching to find out the truth of a rumor that malcontent was a serial killer, he finds out the old guy lives in a neighboring state.

He runs away from home to see if he can find him, living on nasty Rust Belt streets.  As he does, images from his life resemble the world of the video game – random graffiti, violent situations he encounters, visions of decay – all neatly mirroring malcontent’s masterpiece.  He finds the guy, now in his fifties, stripping asbestos for a living in his brother’s business.  The young guy manages to get hired and get to know him better.

They have too much in common – bitter, lonely, lost, misanthropic to a fault.  But can their loneliness end?  Despite the age gap and other issues, they might be falling in love.  Or maybe not.  Evidence begins to mount that young guy’s entire escape from home was a delusion – that he somehow entered the video game or an unnaturally long dream about the game.  Is it possible for him to find love, or is the only real escape from his lonerdom in death?

HORROR ELEMENT:  I think  it turns out all the things he’d been imagining about the unreality of his situation were just a fear of that being the case, and he’ll have something like happily ever after.  But right up until that revelation, the horror is from not knowing whether or not the love of your life is real.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #BONUS — Player’s Choice

TITLE:  The Dyer Hollow Labor War

Content Warnings:  Ageism, Ableism, Implied Child Sexual Abuse, Emetophobia, Horror Content.

PREMISE:  We got to choose between any of the leftover concepts that hadn’t been voted for.  I decided to try to spin a plot that includes all of them:  Anime, Retro Slasher, Lovecraftian, Alien/Space, Giant monster, Creepypasta/Urban Legend, Ghost, Backwoods, Body snatcher, Possession, Clown/Circus, Mutants, Stephen King Style, Undead, Competition, J-Horror, Found Footage, and Psycho-Biddy.  Trying to make this even slightly elegant while still even slightly meeting the genre’s requirements will be a trick – let alone coming up with a concept anybody would ever want to read.

Dyer Hollow is a small backwoods New England town in the ’80s where everyone seems folksy enough on the surface but has a vicious undercurrent of interpersonal strife (Stephen King Style), perhaps from economic anxiety (lol), but they get a new lease on life when a Japanese automaker invests in a small factory there.  The factory is run by an eccentric matriarch, Shizuko “Obachan” Higarashi (Psycho-Biddy), who treats people like a kindly but oppressively mothering granny.  Little did Shizuko know, but the people of the town, back in 1958, had been under the sway of a terrible firebrand preacher.

When a circus (Clown/Circus) was in town, he perved on a child clown, then to cover his crime convinced the townspeople the carnies were a satanic cult.  It led to a mass murder of the carnies, though a few townies died in the same event.  The townies realized they’d been led into horror by the good priest and one had the bravery to break his hold and kill him.  Somehow the other townies, while recognizing that was the right thing to do, still felt some kind of sympathy for the creep, which led to his killer’s family – the Stones – being regarded as black sheep going forward.  The Stones are particularly vexed another local family, the Coles.

An effort to unionize goes sideways when tempers flare between Arnold Cole and Damon Stone, fathers of their respective households.  Arnold wants the union to suck corporate ass, on the idea u should be nice to ur boss to get ur doggy biscuits.  Damon has the more reasoned and sensible position, but being black sheeped, less support.  They are, however, passionate supporters, which successfully prevent things from coming to a vote that they’d lose.

Obachan steps in and suggests they resolve their differences with a competition (Competition), a big festival to bring people together as a community, with fun events to compete in.  People are surprised enough they end up agreeing to it.  This sets up the rest of the story, which will be told in the style of an anime (Anime) series – each episode will have one supernatural / scifi horror theme which is the main focus, but everything escalates through continuity up to the end of the series.

Episode 1, “Dyer Hollow”:  The setup, including at least hints at all the above information, keeping the town’s murder secret the most concealed.  Point of view characters are high school kids (Anime), including Jason Cole and Jennifer Stone with a Romeo & Juliet deal percolating.

Episode 2, “Tug-of-War”:  The old fairgrounds are disused for a reason and people are uneasy about them getting reopened, but don’t feel like they have a choice.  The car manufacturer foots the bill and it’s soon a proper carnival with rides and such. An open field is where the competitions are held – tug of war, three-legged race, that sort of thing.  The events are taking place over days.  On the nights between the corporate-friendly sanitized competition, there are fights and vandalism and hijinks between factions.

That’s all just the backdrop of more events focused on the teenagers.  When they wonder why the fairgrounds are dreaded by adults, one kid says it’s because of a creepypasta-esque child clown with blood coming out the mouth and black eyes and such (Creepypasta).  Jennifer thinks it’s hooey but one of her friends in the AV club shows her an old 8mm film (Found Footage) that seems to show a circus in town that featured a child clown.  AV club friend is working late alone and the clown comes out of the film’s projection to spew blood down her throat and stuff.

Episode 3, “Obachan”:  Ms. Higarashi, in a gesture towards peacemaking, invites Damon and Arnold’s wives for tea in the spooky mansion she’s moved into.  The ladies are out for blood, but Obachan has such a disturbing presence they find themselves cowed into obedient dollies.  Are they going to be poisoned?  They have only tense little discussions when she’s out of the room, tooth-grinding polite disagreement when she’s around.

They have random little horror events like choking up a button or seeing a face in their tea, escalating to a ghost (J-Horror, Ghost) coming for them.  It’s an old Japanese man with a thousand cuts – Obachan’s late husband (got Psycho-Biddy’d) – but in the end Obachan wins and the ghost is banished.  The wives die but the men are so wrapped up in their fight they somehow blame each other instead of the boss.

Episode 4, “The Factory”:  Arnold’s faction is looking for an edge in the fight and on a late shift he discovers an R&D lab where Dr. Habato Nishi is working on improvements for car radios.  There’s AM and FM and now he has created DM – Dimensional Magnitude – which accesses eldritch sounds (Lovecraftian).  “That’s wild, doc.  It’s not talking English but I feel like I can almost understand it.”

“No!”  He turns off the radio and warns him – if the aliens (Alien/Space) are making themselves understood, it’s because they want something – perhaps something sinister.  Arnold waits for Nishi to not be around and sneaks in, uses the radio.  Alien voices tell him how to use sound to access great powers.  He uses equipment from the lab to make a machine that he takes home.  His head throbs with energy and he has visions of the alien beings caressing him.  His wife’s ghost howls mutely in complaint.

Episode 5, “Horseshoes”:  Arnold’s machine makes an alien grown in your brain (Body Snatchers).  This psychically connects the afflicted and while not compete mind control – they have some autonomy – Arnold does have influence over the others as their leader.  He expands his faction, has Damon’s labor radicals on the run.

The funeral for Arnold and Damon’s wives is on the same day and Arnold plays Danny Boy on his DM radio.  Damon is haunted the rest of the episode by weird betrayals and slasher-type killings (Retro Slasher) by a man in a Greylien mask.  He discovers the killer is his most trusted friend, who then turns into an alien mutant (Mutant) he has to kill.

Episode 6, “Dunking Booth”:  Damon hears his daughter Jennifer is with Jason at a kegger in the spooky abandoned Miller cabin (Backwoods).  He thinks he’s racing up there to save her from teen alcohol abuse and involvement with the son of his nemesis, but he’s actually heeding the call of ghosts.  Miller’s cabin is where the carnies made their last stand as they were murdered.  His own mother was the hand that killed Preacher Cotton, pushing him into the well, and that allied him spiritually with the murdered carnies.

The ghost carnies are kept imprisoned by the powerful ghost of Preacher Cotton and want to break free, have summoned Damon to that end.  The children all get possessed (Possession) by ghosts of carnies and townies that died in ’58 and attack each other.  Damon has to keep them from killing each other, tying them up in various ways, while also puzzling out a way to defeat Cotton’s ghost.  Some kids die, but Jason and Jennifer make it through.  The evil ghost is defeated, but the freed carnies have gone evil too.  They offer dark powers to Damon and he accepts, raising their bodies as a zombie army (Undead).

Episode 7, “Field Day”:  Damon’s zombies come to town looking for Arnold’s people, only to find them turning into mutants (Mutants).  Arnold’s DM radio bodysnatchers have become openly monstrous, shooting slime and hovering and stuff.  It’s a zombie vs. mutant battle on the fairgrounds and in the city streets.  The kids do an OK job of surviving, but Jason sees his dad leading the mutants and is like, “His parents killed those carnies while yours tried to save them, Jennifer.  I’m from bad blood.  I belong with the mutants.”  She’s like “Noooo” but he lets himself get sucked into a blobby situation.

Episode 8, “Three-Legged Race”:  The zombies and mutants form into two giant creatures to do a kaiju battle (Giant Monster), destroying Dyer Hollow.  Jennifer has to climb the fighting mutant pile to rescue Jason by chopping him free with a machete.  The surviving teens escape the dead town, make peace, and promise to stay friends forever.  Jennifer vows to love and protect Jason even though he’s now a hideous abomination.  They live happily ever after.

HORROR ELEMENT:  This was a horrible idea, haha.

–

Spooktober – Days 27 & 28

I’m doing a thing with some people to do 31 horror story concepts within October

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #27 — Noir

TITLE:  Get Your F*ckin’ Shinebox

PREMISE:  Nicky and Toto are brothers and shoeshine boys.  Toto wants to get “made” in the mob and catches a break when a desperate mobster asks him to dispose of a body.  Nicky finds out about it the morning after when he wakes up to find their shared apartment turned into an abbatoir.  Nicky is no criminal and hates murder, but he also doesn’t trust cops and doesn’t want his brother to die, so he reluctantly helps and covers for him.

The mobster doesn’t really have the pull to get Toto made, but when the boy does a good job on the first body, he recruits him to help with more, all the while holding out hope that he’ll get made, all the while driving Nicky to depths of horror and despair.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Pretty straightforward gore fest.  Nicky snaps and lets a fed know about the situation in exchange for Toto not getting life in prison.  Toto is cornered into helping a sting on the mobster, but is OK with the betrayal because he’s getting wise to the exploitation.  Things go sideways because the mobster insults him one too many times and his temper explodes. The deal is off, Toto is going to be arrested for murder.  It might be funny if, when the feds say that, Nicky grabs one of their guns and kills them all, Toto helps stash the bodies, and once again, they get away with it all.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #28 — Creepy Kid

TITLE:  Kevin’s Kreeps

PREMISE:  This is more an idea for a framing device for another set of stories.  Why are there no kid Crypt Keeper / horror host types?  For a set of horror shorts on TV, the host is a kid with overalls and red hair in a hideous late seventies bowl cut.  He treats the victims in the horror stories like ants under a magnifying glass, laughing at their misfortunes between segments.  Maybe he’s a latchkey kid and each episode has to end with his mother coming home and him putting on an innocent act.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Evil kids is evil man.

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Spooktober – Days 25 & 26

I’m doing a thing with some people to do 31 horror story concepts within October

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #25 — Cursed Object

TITLE:  That Demon Drink

PREMISE:  A bottle of primo hooch is doing the rounds, passing by bad circumstance from one person’s hands to another.  Each has a drink and each has a supernaturally terrible time.  The last person to get the bottle is a cop who has been trying to figure out the string of strange deaths that night, and he steals the dregs of the bottle from a crime scene for a night cap.  He chokes and falls over dead, puking magically straight into the bottle without spilling a drop.  His last breath is choking up a bottlecap which slams into place, and the refilled bottle rolls away from his corpse to rest against a chair, awaiting its next string of victims.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Pretty stock TV horror show stuff.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #26 — Mad Scientist

TITLE:  The Individual vs. Society

PREMISE:  Inspired by the fact Frankenstein was a college student fucking up his dorm in the original story, and by my own experiences attending art school, I tweak this to be “Mad Artist.”  While working on a sculpture installation, an artist discovers The Spark of Life (TM).  But was it her work that created life, or was it the boy helping her with the electrical side of things?  They both set to using the discovery to play god and make homunculi.

I don’t know how well known this is, but the majority of people in fine art programs are ladies, so in addition to classical sexisms, the men in those programs receive positive attention just for being less common.  Men at this point in history have been raised to profound laziness and entitlement.  Like the stereotypical 50s dad would at least be doing a job or having man tasks to make up for his lack of help around the house, but that stuff is ancient history – while the idea mom will clean up after you 4ever never went away.

The way this plays out in the fine arts – in combination with male rarity in art programs – is that people show a lot of deference to “boy geniuses” who can make incredibly lazy work backed up with art statements of pure BS.  Boy v Girl in the homunculus race – the ultimate installment piece, living art.  Boy makes a splashy abomination and manages to rush it out the door before Girl, who is wasting time being conscientious about stuff.  He gets the accolades and she gets accused of coattail riding, even while his monster is doing rampages and such.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Even that is held against Girl.  Her homunculus is seen as less meaningful because it isn’t spraying exploding eyeballs into rush hour traffic.  But she accepts it.  After all, boys are special geniuses.  Did she really discover the spark of life?  Gaslit from within.

^This idea of course is simplified by taking the existence of trans people out of the equation.  Trans fellas in art school absolutely do not receive the benefits of male privilege there, trans women likewise.
^ETA:  Honestly don’t know but it seems like some of the youngest men might be veering away from that laziness.  I don’t know many fellas below thirty years old.
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Spooktober – Days 23 & 24

I’m doing a thing with some people to do 31 horror story concepts within October…

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #23 — Werewolf

TITLE:  Touch Me I’m Sick

PREMISE:  A teenager thinks they’re smoking a wolfsbane blunt, but it’s actually lupin buds.  They catch the lycanthropy.  Who cares?, he thinks.  It’s cool to do drugs and get sick.  But misery loves company so he tries to get all his friends werewolf’d by various means.  It’s like a Larry Clark youthsploitation movie.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Werewolfery manifests in many ways.  Could be a sore opens up on your body shaped like a little wolf snout and you have to cover it with heavy bandages, could be your feet randomly turn into dog feet for a week and you can’t walk right or wear shoes.  Could be you barf up a pile of claws and teeth, or howl at random in class.  Teen Patient Zero gains enough control to make a snout come out of his palm and drool into people’s drinks and roofie them with lycanthropy.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #24 — Gothic

TITLE:  Pumpkin Throwdown

PREMISE:  To me the gothic genre is about a sensitive soul being oppressed by dark circumstances.  I did that already for my Southern Gothic so I wanna do something different here.  I choose to interpret the prompt as “goth,” and am flavoring that toward Nightmare Before Christmas type stuff.

Every year the big kids fuck up Halloween by going around in flannel shirts and cheap masks, pillowcases ready to get stuffed with loot beaten out of the lil kids.  It’s time for lil kid revenge.  Also there’s a battle of the bands or something.  Big kid band is like, somewhere between Queens of the Stone Age and Monster Magnet.  Lil kid band is like The Cure in carny mode.

It’ll start with the days leading up to Halloween, people picking costumes and stuff, big kid band sabotaging lil kid band and such.  The lil kids will come up with a scheme to keep big kids from getting their candy.  Main part of the action will be the battle of Halloween night, and the denouement will be battle of the bands, for a musical closer.  I don’t know if the big kids learn their lesson and make nice, or if they remain mean and get defeated by the righteous, but it’s gotta be kid friendly.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Less horror, more Halloween.

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