December 12th

Given they’re talking about the election being close, and given that the rethugs have been gearing up for ages to do a bunch of dirty tricks in courts and state governments, it’s possible we’ll have a replay of Bush v Gore 2000.  If that happens, expect some measure of suspense, because it wasn’t decided til December 12th.

On the other hand, if it happens, we really do know how it will be decided already, and the shitbird court du jour will just be a formality and a rubber stamp, so the suspense won’t take that long.  I just know that my expectation now is that by the time of the next FtB Poddish Sortacast on November 9th, there will still be no decision, and we’ll be twisting in the wind, sickened and upset.  That’ll be a good time.

I just want to tell everybody things I wasn’t able to understand the first time hair fuhrer was elected by a minority.  You will almost certainly survive.  Life will go on. We will get up and go to work and come home and love and live and whatever we need to do, to the best of our ability.  And people will still fight against fascism every way they can, whether you personally are able to or not.  People will be fighting for you, and sometimes those people will win.

Also, while some conservatives may be as monstrous as you imagine, the majority are not!  Foolish, cruel, petty, greedy, craven, maybe.  But they don’t want to kill everybody!  They’re just swimming in toxic horseshit, because every fucking ounce of media outside major cities has been bought lock stock and barrel by billionaires who have a vested interest in selling conservative shit.  This is important to understand.  Just because the boy favored by nazis wins, even if he does some nazi shit, it is not immediately time for death camps.  That shit would almost certainly not fly, even in Kansas, even now.

Many people will suffer, a non-zero amount will die from that suffering, but some of us won’t even notice a difference in our daily lives, and most of us will be able to live through whatever happens with just a little perseverance.  The democrats are selling you mortal fucking terror because they know it gets them money, but will it get them votes, or will people feel too paralyzed to go to the polls?  This is going to prove to have been a mistake, or at the very least, unnecessarily abusive to the masses.

Nobody die now, OK?  And before you comment with more blood-throated freakouts, read my doomerism policy.

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Spooktober Day Twenty-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.

SPOOKTOBER DAY #29 — SMALL CREATURES
(× Victorian or Forest or Holiday)

TITLE:  ¡Feliz Navidad, Buenos Aires!

PREMISE:  Nadine and Paola are sheisty teenagers who just don’t give a fig.  When they come across a cursed antique (Victorian) set of toy soldiers (Small Creatures), they give them to conservative tio Sarmiento as an early Navidad (Holiday) present, and his ass puts ’em on the tree, it’s gonna be a cursed little christmas.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Sarmiento is forgetful and while he realizes there is a ridiculous bounty of soldiers in the chest, he doesn’t remember how many he’s pulled out – and that it is frankly an impossible amount.  He gives them to everybody – they even find their way onto a big tree at the mall.  When they come to life, it’s a forest (Forest) of wooden demons, in Gremlins-styled mayhem.

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Spooktober Day Twenty-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.

🎃 HAPPY HALLOWEEN! 🎃  By now I have finished all 31, but I’m posting these all queued a few days behind, to get bloge content out of it.


SPOOKTOBER DAY #28 — GOTHIC
(× Geezer Teaser/Psycho Biddy or Silence or Insects)

TITLE:  House of Flies

PREMISE:  Seema fled from a cruel home life that almost killed her.  Unwilling to return, starving, lost, she took a job caring for an old woman of British descent who lived in a foreboding mansion at the top of the hill (Gothic).  The job wasn’t too weird at first, aside from being required to stay silent (Silence) at all times, so she can hear distant cries for assistance at the top of the stairs.

She became hypervigilant, attuned to all the noises of the creaky old house, but still had trouble distinguishing between the sounds of Georgina, the hum of electricity, and whatever these buzzing insects (Insects) were.  But in the moments when she got to leave the house for groceries, she met a nice dude and began a courtship.  Life could be worse.

HORROR ELEMENT:  Life got worse.  Georgina formed a presence in Seema’s mind that seemed to transcend the physical.  Was Seema going paranoid, losing her sense of decency and empathy toward a disabled old gal, or was the haunting buzz real?  Georgina (Psycho Biddy) figured out that Seema was seeing a dude and messed with their relationship, and messed with Seema’s head until things went all Edgar Allan Poe.

 

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Spooktober Day Twenty-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 #27 — COSMIC HORROR
(× Chaos or Virtual Reality or Virus)

TITLE:  Welcome to the Disease

PREMISE:  In da Future, we are all jacked in, on that virtual reality tip (Virtual Reality).  It’s 100% secure, like, internet security is no longer an issue for some reason.  Come inside, we’ve got a paradise to help you forget your incipient decrepitude.  Enjoy the pleasuredomes.

But how was this achieved?  The quantum woo is real.  Quantum computers managed to access the platonic realm of Forms, the for-real real, to which all of our teacups and pink flamingos and biological existences are pale imitations.  But humans were not meant to intrude into that heady air, representing an incursion of entropy (Chaos) into that previously inviolate realm of perfection.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The condition is spread by some unknown means, like The Ring (Virus), but everybody is racing to figure out what the rules are.  When you’ve caught it, some Joel Cairo-looking emeff appears to you and says, “Welcome to the Disease” (roll credits), and then your VR experience is corrupted.  You behold what it looks like when perfect order meets perfect chaos (Cosmic Horror), and like, lose all your sanity points or something.

 

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Make a Bank Full of Money

You ever wanted to write a formulaic thriller, sell it to boomers, and cash out big time?  Look no further!  November is Novel Writing Month (nondenominational) and in honor of the season of slapdash bullshitting, I converted a certain famous author’s formula into Mad Libs™ so you can easily write one of your own!  Save a copy of my Secret Thrilla Document before I delete the link (EDIT: deleted!) to keep myself out of trouble, and replace all the all-caps text with your own material – then get to writing!

Chop chop!  I wanna see my comment section filling up with Billy O’Nairs!

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Spooktober Day Twenty-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 #26 — GHOSTS
(× Curses or Punk/Gothic or Time-Loop/Alt-Chronology)

TITLE:  Ghost Lightning

PREMISE:  The streets of LA are haunted by bad weather.  As late summer fades to fall, lightning storms break out, but this lightning be cursed (Curses) by the ghosts (Ghosts) of some terrible crime.  The worst part?  The crime didn’t even happen in this reality, but we’re still paying the price.  In an alternate timeline (Alt-Chronology) the government developed time travel and used it to do a genocide, creating time ghosts that rip through the boundaries between dimensions and torment indiscriminately.

HORROR ELEMENT:  The time ghosts manifest as bolts of lightning, and in their wake leave holes where you can see through to another world.  Somehow, it’s always a world where people are alive who in your world are dead, or vice versa, and you get the horror of losing them again, or being lost to them again, when the opening closes.  Also possibly getting lightning bolted to death.  Zzap.

Our heroines are punky (Punk/Gothic) trans lesbian Martika Martinez and her cis girlfriend Ariel Nunn, who are also haunted by alternate versions of themselves that are not in love, or not out of the closet.  Weird times, yo.

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Spooktober Day Twenty-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 #25 — SUMMER CAMP/CABIN
(× Survival Horror or Disaster or Trees)

TITLE:  Happy Campers (apologies to whichever fifty people first used this title ironically)

PREMISE:  Camp counselors (Summer Camp) are very insistent that you have a happy time, the best time of your life.  Macrame or get burned with a lighter.  Toast the marshmallow but if it catches fire you catch these hands.  What’s wrong with them?  And is it contagious?  Other kids start to get with the creepy agenda, leaving the radicals and non-joiners increasingly desperate for the freedom to slouch in their own independent ways.  And not get murdered with hand-crafted natural weapons, like god intended (Survival Horror).

HORROR ELEMENT:  It’s a natural disaster (Disaster) because some kind of exotic mold in the trees (Trees) has grown far in excess of its usual amounts, due to its natural predator the jackanory weevil being gobbled up en masse by invasive spotted balinese assassin bugs.  When the wind kicks up and the pollen rains down, humans catch something like ergotism.  All suffer erratic adrenaline spikes and altered behavior, but the most socially conformist become prone to violent rage and sadistic oppression.

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Where to Escape Politics?

It’s hard as hell to find a genuinely non-political place to chill and take in content.  One could argue that everything is political, but if I’m not liking politics and I’m still capable of liking some things in this world, then that’s disproven from go.  A good pomo BSer can give you the politics of a kitten falling asleep while playing with a ball of yarn.  I know, because I’m a good pomo BSer and could do that right now if I wanted to, but it would be bullshit.

No, to me, political content is information about government, whether true facts, opinions, or bad information.  If it’s about the government, it’s political.  To another extent, opinions about people’s bodies and relationships and metaphysical beliefs can also be political, particularly if prescriptive or proscriptive regarding speech and behavior – saying something is a good way or a bad way to be.

What does that leave?  Dad jokes, funny animals, practical information about day-to-day life like recipes or the weather report, sportball, vidya games, hobbies, science that omits portents of doom…  Doomy science is important and has its place – in steering politics, frankly.

I just want a place where I can go and reliably expect nobody is going to shit on somebody else’s entire existence, or look at me with coal black eyes and hollowly intone the specifics of the death of me and everybody I love.  I recognize it’s a privilege to even imagine it’s possible to cultivate an experience like that.  Some people are staring down the barrel of the political every day, up to and including their grisly deaths.

Very sorry to y’all, but I don’t feel like every human alive must live in torment because some humans do.  I will do what I can to face the political on wednesday and help the tormented out, but on thursday and friday I want to enjoy what life has been granted to me by the unfeeling indifferent radioactive constantly exploding and crumbling abyss of a universe we live in.  Give me a fucken minute, guys.  I’ll get back to you.

Srsly I do recognize that is an unspeakably cruel position to hold, in certain company.  I’m not gonna say that to the face of a Palestinian, right?  But we all need this sometimes.  We need to be able to feel OK, when and how we can.  If nobody is ever allowed to feel perfectly hunkydory for a minute, that’s no kind of world to live in.

Anyway, drop recs for non-political content in the comments.  If you can think of any times when said content got political, don’t bother to mention it with caveats.  Just don’t even start typing until you can think of something genuinely without politics in it.  Maybe we can make the comment section a resource for well-being, right?

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         …and for now i’m FUCKING done, thanks

Spooktober Day Twenty-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 #24 — FOLK HORROR
(× Mountain or Odd Couple or Dark Magic)

TITLE:  The Alpine’s Bumpin’

PREMISE:  I’m gettin’ good grip from the fifty series tires; the alpine’s bumpin’ but I need the volume higher…  So quoth Sir Mixalot.  I know folk horror is usually about a summery rural cult torturing some squares to death but I don’t love the genre so I’m going with the idea this category could include faerie tales.  So.

Jakeem and Bernard are an odd couple (Odd Couple), wherein Jakeem is the low-key nerd, and Bernard is the vision-questing Jim Morrisonesque tripping man.  He must drag his personal Ray Manzarek (Jakeem) to the ends of the earth, and this time it’s up a mountain (Mountain).  They went to a ski resort with the idea they’d meet some cool people and learn how to snowboard, but the resort is all but abandoned.  The weather report said skiing too dangerous, slopes closed, but the resort itself was still technically open, which is how they ended up with tickets while everybody else was staying home.

The skeleton crew of a staff warns them to stay inside, enjoy the cocoa by the fireplace, take in the view from the grand lodge, whatever.  But Bernard ensorcels Jakeem to follow him off a cliff, in his usual way.  The dudes end up high literally and figuratively in snowy dangerous places.  The mountain paths rely on consensus reality to stay moored in the mortal realm.  Without two hundred snowbunnies thinking it’s just a ski slope, it becomes a path to the impossible.  The guys find themselves in an ice castle, subject to palace intrigue between some talking ravens, dwarven servants, and a wicked ice witch (Folk Horror).

HORROR ELEMENT:  At first it’s all fun and games.  Jakeem teaches the ravens to smoke weed, Bernard wheedles the witch about the nature of reality, maaan.  But things take a turn for the real when the witch bites back with vindictive curses and spells (Dark Magic), leading to grim shit like raven cannibalism and horrible transformations.  All psyche stripped to the bone, what’s left of our gentlemen?  Will they ever get back to college?

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Cover Song Idea

For some reason I find myself wondering if the lyrics of “Milk It” by Nirvana could be molded to fit the tune of “We Belong” by Pat Benatar.  Just writing this down for future reference.  What is a blog for, if not memos to one’s self?  Don’t answer that.

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