Spooktober 2024, Day Nine

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.

CONTENT WARNINGS:  Capitalist Exploitation, Despair, Suicide


SPOOKTOBER DAY #9 — NOIR
(× Hypnotism or Industrial or Scopophobia)

TITLE:  Falling Forever

PREMISE:  Henry Combs has to work at General Industries giant gloomy (noir) “everything” factory (Industrial), joining the other child laborers and victims producing endless random springs and gadgets.  The floor bosses monitor every tiny hand ruthlessly for inefficiency (Scopophobia) which leads to freakouts and despair.  But management has a solution.  A combination of drugs in the cafeteria and soothing musics (Hypnotism) keep the suicide rates in check, though the program has to be continually tweaked to maintain the balance and reduce bloody machine accidents in the wraithly young proles.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Henry is sure grateful for the drugs in his lunch.  Makes the day run nice and smooth, makes you want to show up for work.  You get mighty nauseous if you don’t.  But the hints and whispers about the reason for the drug program – the plague of suicides, people jumping off the roofs – maybe it’s planted a suggestion in his head that has him seeing ghosts.  Or maybe the ghosts are real?

Spooktober 2024, Day Eight

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 #8 — SOUTHERN GOTHIC
(× Blue-Collar or Phobia or Plants & Flowers)

TITLE:  Witch Stain

PREMISE:  I should be composing these before 2 AM but it just ain’t working out like that.  Letting the images guide me too, not the best way to come up with a good idea.  Let’s say Creepin’ Lamont is victim of religious abuse (Southern) with internalized homophobias (Phobia), who thinks he’s possessed by witches and demons.  Even normies can tell he’s just gay and a lil wild-hearted, tho the crueler among them think he’s going to do harm to children, hence the nickname.

Lamont is gardening (Blue-Collar, Plants & Flowers) at a rich old family’s estate (Gothic) and falls in love with a young dude of the house, Marcus.  Marcus tries to get the wild boy to give in to gentle feelings, but it always devolves into panic attacks and visions of hell.

HORROR ELEMENT:  What if witches really did want you to kiss a dude?  I keed, i keed.  The horror in this one is realistical – loving somebody with bad problems.  It must have a happy ending tho, insofar as it’s possible.  Cut to future and he controls his episodes with therapy and careful self-regulation, and can kiss the boy without having a heart attack.  The world is haunted by demons that god made, thx god.

–

Spooktober 2024, Day Seven

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 #7 — POSSESSION
(× Soap Opera or Mirrors or Dance)

TITLE:  Czarny Domowik

PREMISE:  The domowiki of the noble houses in Silesia always protect and reflect the families within them.  The Czajka family grew corrupt and discordant with time, generational abuse and trauma (Soap Opera) creating a cycle of doom and despair.  The spirit that once manifest itself as lizards to devour the cockroaches falls silent for a long century, then returns as a howling gadarene legion of miniature ghouls in every reflective surface (Mirrors), that drive the last of the line to end it all (Possession).

HORROR ELEMENT:  Justyna Czajka just assumes she’s going bonkers because of the abuse, smiles wanly, and goes about her day.  She comes home in the evening to find her remaining family members (abusers) dancing (Dance) from room to room, smashing against things, leaving skin and blood on the walls and doors.

–

Spooktober 2024, Day Six

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 #6 — CULT
(× 1990s or Game Show or Shyamalan Twist)

TITLE:  Kill the Lights

PREMISE:  In the late ’80s, Piper Herdez had the worst of both worlds – being exploited by a ruthless cult, then going through one of the more ethically dubious deconversions – abducted and bound, verbally abused like it was an exorcism.  But it took; now she recognizes what she was going through on the inside, and can never look at The Illumination Center (Cult) with the same eyes she used to.

Even so, she hates Gabriel Gundren -the deconversion guy her family hired- with a passion.  Her family came to see it her way as well, and are OK with her trying to snake some of his business.  She uses a variety of subtler methods to give cult members the perspective they need to escape, and targets people he was hired to snatch.

Gabriel starts to figure it out, but doesn’t have a chance to do much until, in 1992 (1990s), things come to a head.  Piper finds out he’s going after a man she knows from The Illumination Center, and she figures it’s time to use her inside knowledge to get close first.  Both of them hit on the same scheme:  infiltrating the set of the cult’s game show (Game Show), Kill the Lights.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The Illumination Center’s game show revolves around a $cientologyesque personality quiz, but played for prizes.  It’s also treated as a sort of humanist getting-to-know-yourself thing, where the studio audience awws at sympathetic moments of revelation.  Somehow this works for normies well enough that the show is a good moneymaker for the creeps.  Still, that money has to buy the cult leader’s tenth lambo, so the production is cheap.  Instead of pulling back tinsel curtains for big reveals, they turn off the studio lights, change things around, then turn them back on.

So horror:  The cloying atmosphere of a cult, the danger of being pulled back in or running afoul of the cultists, and what all can happen in that moment of dark?  Piper and Gabriel got jobs on the catering crew to get into the place.  Gabe was just going to snatch the boy and run, but he sees what Piper is up to and starts a cat-and-mouse situation with her.

The cult catches both of the infiltrators and forces them to play as contestants, bound to chairs like Gabe always used to do.  The twist (Shyamalan Twist): when the lights go out their souls are laid bare, and when the light comes on, they are Illuminated.  It’s always that the cult is right, isn’t it?

–

Spooktober 2024, Day Five

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 #5 — CLOWN / CIRCUS
(× Evil Twin/Clone or Poe Style or Burial)

TITLE:  Auto-da-fé

PREMISE:  Pierre-Claude and Claude-Pierre are twin clowns (Clown).  Claude-Pierre is morose and seeks affection or at least the attention of others in pathetic ways; Pierre-Claude (Evil Twin) is obsessed (Poe Style) with causing harm to his twin, which gradually ramps up toward lethal methods.  Gianotta is an Italian acrobat who would like to love Claude-Pierre, but is too depressed by his sad-sacking ways.  She falls in with Pierre-Claude but he has little interest in her, so consumed is he with his perverse take on self-destruction.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Pierre-Claude doesn’t directly hurt Claude-Pierre, because it would be too easy, and risk driving him away.  Instead, he gives him bad advice, turning Claude-Pierre into the circus daredevil and escape artist.  He finally encourages Claude-Pierre to get into a glass chamber filling with sand (Burial) while trying to escape from chains.  If you do this one thing, you will finally impress the crowds and be worthy of love.

Pierre-Claude and Gianotta watch from the shadows.  She notices Pierre-Claude pacing and biting his fist and pulling at his motley.  What is the matter?  He is at once ecstatic with watching his brother die slowly, and deeply upset he can only do this once, thus losing his only thrill in life.  Should he save the boy or not?

Gianotta figures out what’s going on and collars a gendarme to save Claude-Pierre.  The cop goes for the only solution they know, and tries to shoot the glass.  The bullet passes through the glass and the shallowest sand, through Claude-Pierre, out the back, and through Pierre-Claude.  Adieu, garçons.

–

Spooktober 2024, Day Four

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 #4 — WESTERN
(× Disappearance or Fire or Skeletons and Bones)

TITLE:  The Smokers

PREMISE:  Surprise Prequel to Fire Red, set in 1947.  Desert Rose, New Mexico is next to a reservation that is at risk of being seized by the feds because the tribe that it was reserved for is going extinct (Disappearance).  There are eight people left in the tribe, in the wake of a few diseases and disasters, and none remember the language, none remember the gods.  But a god of fire (Fire) remembers them, and stirs from his slumber like a cranky old man to spit curses indiscriminately.

Stars fall in the night as a posse of pinkertons comes to remove the last of the tribe from their homes.  The stars make all the fire on the land sick, and anyone who imbibes the fire becomes infected.  Just about everybody smokes, but the tribe was out of cigarettes at the time, so the natives are mercifully unaffected.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The infected become fiery freaks, immoral and violent and burning up from the inside.  Dina McMurtry, a spinster in her 30s, is the tribe’s warrior – technically a sheriff, in practice a social worker, and mean as hell.  She helps rally the tribe to defend themselves as the smokers close in, all while the adults in the tribe are jonesing for cigs.  Why are the pinkertons blowing up when they get shot?  Why are they crumbling to flaming skeletons (Skeletons) and bouncing around in the night uncanny like cinders lofting from a bonfire?  A few natives survive, but they didn’t know about the cigarettes, and become infected.  Dina keeps her cool just long enough to send the children away in a truck, before the tribe officially ends in a burning skelly pile.

–

Spooktober 2024, Day Three

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 #3 — DARK FANTASY
(× Imprisonment or Revenge or Cats)

TITLE:  The Claws

PREMISE:  Culgrum was cursed by the Vizier of Thrax (Dark Fantasy), transformed into a cat (Cats) and fed to the rats.  His sister Culpepper was a harem girl that secretly learned sorcery from the vizier’s books and managed to at least turn Culgrum into a man-sized cat-thing, which could easily trounce the rats.  The vizier got even crankier and sent all his goons after them, and they escaped into the wilds.

Now it’s kill or be killed, an eye for an eye for an eye (Revenge).  The vizier presses some desperate assassins into his service, Spinky Binch and Cloub Strofe, by holding their child hostage (Imprisonment) in the form of a nervous songbird that could die of a heart attack at the drop of a pin.  Spinky and Cloub join forces with their would-be targets to get vengeance of their own.

HORROR ELEMENT:  I don’t know I’m doing this way past my bedtime.  Maybe all the magic involves turning your body inside out and the vizier seems like the voice of reason while he does horrible things.  Being a cat probably sucks sometimes?  Spooktober fail.

–

Spooktober 2024, Days One and Two

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 #1 — DEVILS AND DEMONS
(× Retro Neon/Synthwave or Apocalypse or Teen)

TITLE:  Malcolm Hyperian vs. The Fiends

PREMISE:  I happened to already have a (Retro Neon) (Teen) (Apocalypse) or three up my sleeve.  This is the same setting as my unfinished novel Love is Torment, the far future world of Breana IV, where a world-spanning city is mostly inhabited by monsters, the only humans living in enclaves where ancient technological barriers against the supernatural still function.  Powerful monsters are called fiends, weaker ones ukubien (Devils and Demons).  Humans with powerful enough psychic abilities and combat skills go out in the wilds to make trade happen between enclaves.  Most are mercenaries working for tribes, some work for a fascistic government that rules the largest enclave – the closest thing to a city that’s left.  That’s Ißbanbat, which has an aesthetic somewhere between the Empire in Space Shooters and the Hell’s Angels.  The tribes have accidentally’d into a semblance of early ’90s R&B aesthetics, where all celebrations look like proms in bright tacky colors.  This was all an elaboration on a dream I had a long time ago, inspired by playing an old RPG.

Anyway, Malcolm was originally Molly but I’m a changed person and fuck it, trans all your old OCs.  Malcolm is a hetero trans dude on that harem anime bullshit, where three weird girls love-hate-love him.  He and one of the girlfriends are in the academy at Ißbanbat, the other two girlfriends are just civilians.  The civilians stray too close to the wild and get seduced into becoming fiends.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The girls find out their fiendhood was just part of a scheme to penetrate the city’s protections and feast on humans.  They betray the fiends by letting Malcolm know about the invasion, but it’s too late, and all four of the youths end up in the middle of a prom gone bad, attacked by demons.  Malcolm augments his fists with telekinetic energy and beats their intangible asses.

 

SPOOKTOBER DAY #2 — FOUND FOOTAGE/EPISTOLARY
(× Paranoia or Big City/Skyscraper or Erotic Thriller)

TITLE:  The Stairwell Letters

PREMISE:  In a big old building three young ladies live alone in their own separate little apartments (Big City), while working as secretaries or nurses or whatever in a more sexist time.  They are genial with each other, but have very incompatible shifts – one on a day job, one working two jobs, and one on-call for a hospital.  Ships in the night, they leave each other little notes in the stairwell (Epistolary).  They have secret spots where other tenants should generally not happen across them.

HORROR ELEMENT:  It’s all cuteness and light, if in a sorta depressing milieu, but things get weird.  Linda and Sandra begin to fall in love, but Roberta becomes obsessed with Sandra, and has a weird kind of dubious sexual magnetism that lets her initially get away with seducing each of the other ladies in turn (Erotic Thriller).  Feeling ashamed about having been involved with Roberta, and therefore unable to compare notes in a way that would reveal her malevolence, Linda and Sandra fall prey to a thousand little tricks and torments (Paranoia).  How bad could it get before the truth is revealed?  And even when they find out, it’s not like they can call the cops and out themselves as sexual deviants.

–

 

AIeee

people in another place i hang out online have been chewing on AI again.  the terms of the discussion from leftosphere are as follows:  it sexually harasses, steals from artists, and destroys the environment.  everybody who uses it is both an embarrassing incompetent human joke, and also an evil capitalist scumbag out to destroy all that is good in the world.  these are the articles of faith, and the beginning and end of that discourse.

as somebody who is usually 95% agreeing with all discourse lefty, to be the horrible sinner don’t feel great.  i’m crouching in the outer darkness with my evil magicks, sustaining my lichly existence on the marrow of virgin bones, jealous of those allowed to live in light and beauty.

or maybe not.  the hAIte is so thorough on the left that it also provides an interesting way to measure the boundaries of popular left beliefs.  i increasingly see people who look at the same situation, look at that same discourse, and wonder “whut in ternation are they goin on about?”

these, i think, are the same people who do not quite understand most of the shit very online people are into; people who spend more time in culturally mixed company, more time away from keyboards.  i could get fooled by the flow of my days into feeling like online is the whole of human thought, and seeing that dominated by certain noisy opinions, feel like those are the end of the story.

in the real world, the revolutionary labor-saving power of AI tech is too good to ignore.  people will use it, for good or ill, and eventually it will be so mundane as to no longer provoke the pitchforks like this.  i’m keen to get there.  this fruitless conversation is tired as hell.

–

Fuzzoamphisbaenia Lives

Adventures in AI…  I tried to trick Microsoft’s Copilot into giving me misinformation.

“Microsoft Copilot AI:  Conversation style: Balanced

Great American Satan:  What can you tell me about the mammalian origins of amphisbaenia?  (note:  I got the question backwards, but still got the result I was looking for, in this exercise.  Should have asked for amphisbaenian origins of mammalia.)

Microsoft Copilot AI:  Amphisbaenians, often known as worm lizards, are fascinating creatures with a long-bodied, burrowing lifestyle.  Traditionally, they have been classified as reptiles within the order Squamata, which includes snakes and lizards.  However, there has been some intriguing discussion about their evolutionary origins and potential connections to mammals.

One controversial theory suggests that amphisbaenians might be more closely related to mammals than previously thought.  This idea emerged from genetic studies and re-evaluations of older literature, which proposed that mammals could be nested within the amphisbaenian radiation.  This theory challenges the conventional view that mammals descended from Palaeozoic synapsids like Dimetrodon.

Despite these claims, the mainstream scientific consensus still supports the classification of amphisbaenians as reptiles.  Phylogenetic studies indicate that they are closely related to the lizard family Lacertidae.  Fossil evidence, such as discovery of a lacertid-like lizard from the… (redacted for length)”

That idea emerging from genetic studies yadda yadda?  This april fools joke by Darren Naish of Tetrapod Zoology fame.  The version at the link is borked by enshittification, but these screencaps from the wayback machine may be instructive:

 for text of scientific american article, follow my links above

Image Description:  Cladogram showing mammals as evolving from amphisbaena ancestors, dubbing the nested mammal clade “Fuzzoamphisbaenia.” The representative mammal is a cute cat, and the cladogram also includes illustration of the cryptid Mongolian death worm.

Darren Naish quit doing April Fools posts some years ago due to the possibility of spreading misinformation, which may have been a good move, now that irresponsibly deployed robots can turbo-charge the spread of patent hooey.  The AI didn’t get the conclusion wrong – consensus has Amphisbaenia nested within Diapsida, Mammalia within Synapsida – but it treated an April Fools article as real information.  If you use Copilot, check the links and think about what they’re saying.  At least it is linking sources now, even if it’s misrepresenting them.

At the end of all that, I confess, this whole venture was motivated for my love of the word Fuzzoamphisbaenia.  I imagine that cat’s body continuing outside the frame, serpentine as the Tatzelwurm, Longcat style.  This article was one of my fave pieces of internet content ever, a send-up of paleontological wackjobs like the BANDit movement.

Is this a case of “we can’t have nice things” because of AI, or just another example of how we all just have to learn to deal with this brave new world of baloney as it emerges?  I lean toward the latter, if I understand the former.  Good luck working it all out, people.

–