This is sort of a follow-up to the last post I made about music in the workplace, so the first thing I want to say is that, while it hasn’t gotten better by any stretch of the imagination, it also hasn’t really gotten any worse. I can narrow down the songs I don’t particularly enjoy down to a select few, noticed and appreciated a few more, and the rest I can easily tune out at this point.
But of course, all that gets thrown out the window once the holiday season rolls around. The Saturday after Thanksgiving, I walked into work and was immediately greeted by what I can only describe as somebody drunkenly mumbling their way through Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
This has happened for three Christmas seasons in a row and it still catches me off guard. Like, I know our playlist is bad, but the sudden (if not unexpected) addition of holiday cheer still finds new ways to disappoint. I can’t even give a good example of the type of music they play there; just looking for it would probably make me want to one-up Van Gogh and chop off both ears.
So far, I have been able to identify two leading factors in why this is the case (that is, why not just normal-people Christmas songs?). The first is that repetition would probably breed contempt for just about anything. It hasn’t happened to the songs I do like in the playlist because they only come up so often.
The second is that, as I learned recently, the playlist is actually a Youtube Music playlist, which means it’s curated by someone, and the someone that puts together the normal music set probably also picks the Christmas songs. So really, the entire store has to suffer because of one person’s bad taste.
Well, that’s not entirely fair. There’s no Carol of the Bells on there to terrify me, for example, and some good songs do make it through. But just like the rest of the list, the ratio of good songs to bad is very lopsided.
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe our music is designed this way so that the good songs stand out more. I doubt it, but that’s one of the ways I keep hope alive in this minimum-wage world, I guess. It’s certainly a better thought than the alternative.
-F
Tuesday, November 27, 2018
Tuesday, November 20, 2018
Blue Curtains
There’s a movie I can’t get out of my head. Not because I think it’s a great movie (though it very well may be (I’d have to get back to you on that)); it’s more like when you’ve got a song in your head and all you can remember is the chorus and maybe a riff or two, and if you don’t sing about it (or, in this case, talk kind of adjacent to it), it’s just going to get worse.
The movie in question is The Other Side of the Wind, the last film by Orson Welles (now available on Neflix!). It’s a frenetic piece; its conceit is that it’s footage from a bunch of cameras all trying to get a hot new scoop on a Hollywood director on the night of his seventy-fifth birthday. What I can’t get over is how prescient it is for being shot in the 1970s.
But let’s take a step back for a moment. The title of this post is based off a tired joke that goes a little something like this:
An author, in a fit of self-indulgence, decides to sit in on a class teaching his own work. The professor goes into a long, impassioned speech about the curtains in a scene. “The author made the curtains blue here,” the professor says, “because it symbolizes the purity of the scene, while also foreshadowing the tragedy to come.”
Upon hearing this, the author shouts “The curtains are blue because I like the color blue!”
This was also at the heart of The Beginner’s Guide, the subject of a Raindrops on Roses post I made a few months back. In that game, Davey, for as much as he tried to demonstrate his understanding of Coda’s games, didn’t know Coda as well as he thought he did and so ruined their friendship because of it.
But there’s something wrong with both of those conclusions, right? The term “Death of the Author” still has meaning, right? Like, I remember discussing the briefcase in Pulp Fiction with a friend. We were both talking about what we thought was in it and I said, “Well, Quentin Tarantino says…”
He interrupted me with “I really don’t care what Quentin Tarantino says.”
I feel much the same way about The Other Side of the Wind. Taking it as a 2018 movie about 1970’s Hollywood makes it very much a period piece in the same way that Barton Fink (directed by Joel and Ethan Coen) is. It certainly helps that many of the characters are played by their inspirations up to and including John Huston in the lead role.
What makes it prescient, though, is how little some things have changed in the intervening years between filming and release. For example, sex and sexuality is one of the themes that permeates throughout the movie; one of the things all the cameras are trying to figure out is the relationship the main character has with the women in his life. But as the movie goes on, it’s revealed that not only is that kind of a touchy subject, but shades of modern-day’s difficulties with sexual assault begin to crop up as well.
Another example would be the opening monolog, especially as this one was added near the end of the arduous editing process and by making mention of otherwise anachronistic items like cell phones, it only adds to this bridge between the old and the modern.
But, again, these interpretations on certain contexts were certainly not Orson Welles’ intention. Sometimes the curtains are just a nice shade of blue. But I never really liked how that joke villainized the professor. They’ve presumably developed their own context for the piece after years of study, and suddenly someone shouts back a retort with nothing but some perceived authority. And in most cases, I find it actually weakens the piece. The Other Side of the Wind goes from a period piece spanning multiple periods to its own inside joke that the audience can never be a part of.
-F
The movie in question is The Other Side of the Wind, the last film by Orson Welles (now available on Neflix!). It’s a frenetic piece; its conceit is that it’s footage from a bunch of cameras all trying to get a hot new scoop on a Hollywood director on the night of his seventy-fifth birthday. What I can’t get over is how prescient it is for being shot in the 1970s.
But let’s take a step back for a moment. The title of this post is based off a tired joke that goes a little something like this:
An author, in a fit of self-indulgence, decides to sit in on a class teaching his own work. The professor goes into a long, impassioned speech about the curtains in a scene. “The author made the curtains blue here,” the professor says, “because it symbolizes the purity of the scene, while also foreshadowing the tragedy to come.”
Upon hearing this, the author shouts “The curtains are blue because I like the color blue!”
This was also at the heart of The Beginner’s Guide, the subject of a Raindrops on Roses post I made a few months back. In that game, Davey, for as much as he tried to demonstrate his understanding of Coda’s games, didn’t know Coda as well as he thought he did and so ruined their friendship because of it.
But there’s something wrong with both of those conclusions, right? The term “Death of the Author” still has meaning, right? Like, I remember discussing the briefcase in Pulp Fiction with a friend. We were both talking about what we thought was in it and I said, “Well, Quentin Tarantino says…”
He interrupted me with “I really don’t care what Quentin Tarantino says.”
I feel much the same way about The Other Side of the Wind. Taking it as a 2018 movie about 1970’s Hollywood makes it very much a period piece in the same way that Barton Fink (directed by Joel and Ethan Coen) is. It certainly helps that many of the characters are played by their inspirations up to and including John Huston in the lead role.
What makes it prescient, though, is how little some things have changed in the intervening years between filming and release. For example, sex and sexuality is one of the themes that permeates throughout the movie; one of the things all the cameras are trying to figure out is the relationship the main character has with the women in his life. But as the movie goes on, it’s revealed that not only is that kind of a touchy subject, but shades of modern-day’s difficulties with sexual assault begin to crop up as well.
Another example would be the opening monolog, especially as this one was added near the end of the arduous editing process and by making mention of otherwise anachronistic items like cell phones, it only adds to this bridge between the old and the modern.
But, again, these interpretations on certain contexts were certainly not Orson Welles’ intention. Sometimes the curtains are just a nice shade of blue. But I never really liked how that joke villainized the professor. They’ve presumably developed their own context for the piece after years of study, and suddenly someone shouts back a retort with nothing but some perceived authority. And in most cases, I find it actually weakens the piece. The Other Side of the Wind goes from a period piece spanning multiple periods to its own inside joke that the audience can never be a part of.
-F
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
A Follow-Up
With better planning, this would have been last week’s topic, but there were ah, more pressing issues. Though, to be fair, this also gave me a bit more time to reflect on the writing experience. This is something I actually don’t get to talk about much. Normally all my fictional pieces go through the college workshop-level process, where authors are specifically not allowed to talk about their work.
So now, two weeks later, let’s talk a little bit more about Write What You Know.
One of the things I didn’t mention in my Raindrops on Roses post on creepypasta was how enamored I am with their structure. It’s a basic structure, sure, but I think that’s why it’s so easy to copy down and use. While The Hero’s Journey is used to mold longer stories, all a shorter story like a creepypasta needs is a series of spooks that slowly escalate, and an optional denouement at the end.
I knew I wanted to write a Halloween-y story for this blog, if only to prove that I could. That’s a feeling I get sometimes, often when a story has a false start and I end up dropping it. I started this blog for the same reason, to give another example of this. The next step, of course, was the subject matter.
I do have older false starts of horror stories, mostly involving weird sounds that keep showing up around me. Spotify glitching out was the one that I had actually part of an introduction written for but there was also this weird hum at work that I obsessed over for about a week before dismissing it as “worth noting, but maybe not worth writing more than a sentence or two about” (oh hey!).
But what I also have is a bunch of stories about “Nancy.” The “Finlay story” was the most memorable, and it took a little memory digging to find the other ones, but I mean, those aren’t that scary by themselves. Like, I’m fine now. I’m fine.
I’m fine.
So then all I needed was a conceit, and that one I concede I was a little less creative on. Demons and blood and pentagrams and all that are kind of cliche in creepypasta, but I mean, I have to convince people that my English teacher is a demon spawn somehow, right? The point was, these stories I had were the type.
The climax, of course, is where things diverge from reality. At some point, you just need to creep people out, real life be damned. I’m reminded of this line from Adaptation.:
“The last act makes a film. Wow them in the end and you’ve got a hit. You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit.”
So yeah! I had a lot of fun writing it, stringing events together like I did, and I do hope that everybody enjoyed reading it. Unless being scared isn’t your thing, in which case I do apologize. But I’d also want to know what you were expecting the day before Halloween.
-F
So now, two weeks later, let’s talk a little bit more about Write What You Know.
One of the things I didn’t mention in my Raindrops on Roses post on creepypasta was how enamored I am with their structure. It’s a basic structure, sure, but I think that’s why it’s so easy to copy down and use. While The Hero’s Journey is used to mold longer stories, all a shorter story like a creepypasta needs is a series of spooks that slowly escalate, and an optional denouement at the end.
I knew I wanted to write a Halloween-y story for this blog, if only to prove that I could. That’s a feeling I get sometimes, often when a story has a false start and I end up dropping it. I started this blog for the same reason, to give another example of this. The next step, of course, was the subject matter.
I do have older false starts of horror stories, mostly involving weird sounds that keep showing up around me. Spotify glitching out was the one that I had actually part of an introduction written for but there was also this weird hum at work that I obsessed over for about a week before dismissing it as “worth noting, but maybe not worth writing more than a sentence or two about” (oh hey!).
But what I also have is a bunch of stories about “Nancy.” The “Finlay story” was the most memorable, and it took a little memory digging to find the other ones, but I mean, those aren’t that scary by themselves. Like, I’m fine now. I’m fine.
I’m fine.
So then all I needed was a conceit, and that one I concede I was a little less creative on. Demons and blood and pentagrams and all that are kind of cliche in creepypasta, but I mean, I have to convince people that my English teacher is a demon spawn somehow, right? The point was, these stories I had were the type.
The climax, of course, is where things diverge from reality. At some point, you just need to creep people out, real life be damned. I’m reminded of this line from Adaptation.:
“The last act makes a film. Wow them in the end and you’ve got a hit. You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit.”
So yeah! I had a lot of fun writing it, stringing events together like I did, and I do hope that everybody enjoyed reading it. Unless being scared isn’t your thing, in which case I do apologize. But I’d also want to know what you were expecting the day before Halloween.
-F
Tuesday, November 6, 2018
Your Vote Matters
Oof, this is going to come off a little cynical, isn’t it? I guess I should lead with this, then: Yes, I voted today. Despite all this essay might say, I still vote regularly. But…
In an online town hall, Bernie Sanders described this midterm as “the most important Midterm of our generation,” kind of like how two years ago was “the most important election of our generation” and while I don’t really remember the rhetoric of four years ago the midterms were probably important then too (not important enough, of course, to get the average American to vote but ehhh…).
Another common piece of rhetoric is “Your vote matters. Your vote always matters.” And yes, there are a myriad of examples where this is true. Anecdotes abound of ties and near-ties and coin flips and recounts, but where I think these go wrong is not providing examples of the other side of the coin: The times when it’s almost unanimous but not quite. Sure, these examples negate the general argument the “Voting Matters” people are trying to make (you can make a difference), but perhaps consider this alternative argument: “You should let your voice be heard.” This, I think, can be demonstrated very well with these sorts of overwhelming defeats.
So here’s my story. It’s nothing so dramatic as a federal or even state election; it was a high school student-level forum. Now, my high-school was a little different in that they tried to let their students have much more of a say in the goings-on of the school. Every one of these meetings, somebody tried to move the school’s dress code away from business casual, for example.
The big-name item on this particular meeting was the school’s schedule. The high school was in many ways an extension of the big-name college in the city. Seniors and even many Juniors took a lot of college-level classes and the high-school had a lot of oddities to accommodate that. The one most specific for this essay was the trimester-style scheduling, which itself mirrored the college experience at the time.
But times change. The college was moving to semesters, with an auxiliary “May-term” to accommodate missing any credit hours that might be lost in the schedule change. The proposal for the high school was a similar semester schedule, but with a “January term” or “J-term” for… reasons I don’t really remember anymore.
I remember Freshman-age me not being a particular fan of this change. The tentative schedule proposed still didn’t sync up all that well with the colleges, and J-term seemed needlessly complex. I also wasn’t really convinced by the arguments to change. The most egregious argument came from one then-Junior who really wanted to go sailing over summer break and this schedule would… cut into that I guess? By a week or two? The point was, I felt it was in my best interest if the school kept going with its trimester-styled schedule.
Voting was something of an embarrassing experience. Instead of counting “ayes” or ballots, they had all in favor of a particular motion stand up and those running the meeting would gauge the results from there. Voting in favor of trimesters went first, so up I went.
Nobody else stood up with me.
Some people laughed. I heard somebody yell “Sit down!”
The next morning, the results of the forum were announced. The semester schedule won in a unanimous fashion. Now, a quick google search of the word “unanimous” will yield this:
u·nan·i·mous
/yo͞oˈnanəməs/
[...]
2. (of an opinion, decision, or vote) held or carried by everyone involved.
Uh huh.
I tried not to cause too much of a disruption, but I do remember saying, “It wasn’t unanimous.”
The response was, “It was basically unanimous.”
These sorts of fora at my high school died out within a few years and I think this was one of the reasons why. Even at the level people reference when attempting to convince people to go to the polls, the most micro of levels, votes can get discounted.
Again, this is going to come off as cynical. One could easily read this as a cautionary tale against democracy. But to me, I think about this as trying my damnedest to get an opinion across. Sure I failed (and, as a schadenfreude-y aside, J-term did turn out to be a needlessly complex addition to an already weird high school), but I did try. And when I filled out my ballot today, that’s what I thought about.
-F
In an online town hall, Bernie Sanders described this midterm as “the most important Midterm of our generation,” kind of like how two years ago was “the most important election of our generation” and while I don’t really remember the rhetoric of four years ago the midterms were probably important then too (not important enough, of course, to get the average American to vote but ehhh…).
Another common piece of rhetoric is “Your vote matters. Your vote always matters.” And yes, there are a myriad of examples where this is true. Anecdotes abound of ties and near-ties and coin flips and recounts, but where I think these go wrong is not providing examples of the other side of the coin: The times when it’s almost unanimous but not quite. Sure, these examples negate the general argument the “Voting Matters” people are trying to make (you can make a difference), but perhaps consider this alternative argument: “You should let your voice be heard.” This, I think, can be demonstrated very well with these sorts of overwhelming defeats.
So here’s my story. It’s nothing so dramatic as a federal or even state election; it was a high school student-level forum. Now, my high-school was a little different in that they tried to let their students have much more of a say in the goings-on of the school. Every one of these meetings, somebody tried to move the school’s dress code away from business casual, for example.
The big-name item on this particular meeting was the school’s schedule. The high school was in many ways an extension of the big-name college in the city. Seniors and even many Juniors took a lot of college-level classes and the high-school had a lot of oddities to accommodate that. The one most specific for this essay was the trimester-style scheduling, which itself mirrored the college experience at the time.
But times change. The college was moving to semesters, with an auxiliary “May-term” to accommodate missing any credit hours that might be lost in the schedule change. The proposal for the high school was a similar semester schedule, but with a “January term” or “J-term” for… reasons I don’t really remember anymore.
I remember Freshman-age me not being a particular fan of this change. The tentative schedule proposed still didn’t sync up all that well with the colleges, and J-term seemed needlessly complex. I also wasn’t really convinced by the arguments to change. The most egregious argument came from one then-Junior who really wanted to go sailing over summer break and this schedule would… cut into that I guess? By a week or two? The point was, I felt it was in my best interest if the school kept going with its trimester-styled schedule.
Voting was something of an embarrassing experience. Instead of counting “ayes” or ballots, they had all in favor of a particular motion stand up and those running the meeting would gauge the results from there. Voting in favor of trimesters went first, so up I went.
Nobody else stood up with me.
Some people laughed. I heard somebody yell “Sit down!”
The next morning, the results of the forum were announced. The semester schedule won in a unanimous fashion. Now, a quick google search of the word “unanimous” will yield this:
u·nan·i·mous
/yo͞oˈnanəməs/
[...]
2. (of an opinion, decision, or vote) held or carried by everyone involved.
Uh huh.
I tried not to cause too much of a disruption, but I do remember saying, “It wasn’t unanimous.”
The response was, “It was basically unanimous.”
These sorts of fora at my high school died out within a few years and I think this was one of the reasons why. Even at the level people reference when attempting to convince people to go to the polls, the most micro of levels, votes can get discounted.
Again, this is going to come off as cynical. One could easily read this as a cautionary tale against democracy. But to me, I think about this as trying my damnedest to get an opinion across. Sure I failed (and, as a schadenfreude-y aside, J-term did turn out to be a needlessly complex addition to an already weird high school), but I did try. And when I filled out my ballot today, that’s what I thought about.
-F
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Write What You Know
I had this story idea. The main character (told in first-person, of course) was going to be wandering their old elementary school when they remember that, as a kid, they never went into their school’s basement. Nobody did. Because, you know, of what kind of story it would have been, when our main character inevitably explores that lower level, they come across all kind of demonic imagery. There would have been blood, either molded or crusty with age (I didn’t do any research and wasn’t sure) all over the walls, sometimes forming a pentagram, sometimes, just there because, well, that’s what you write about when describing a room like this.
There was going to be something else in the room, too. Something alive. Something contained in that basement that, now that the door had been opened could escape and enact whatever sinister plan it had.
I never got that far. I never even knew what the creature was going to be. I just knew how I would have felt descending into that basement, and I knew what had to be at the bottom. You see, I never had to deal with demons or other such monsters in elementary school, but I did have to deal with my third-grade English teacher.
Nancy was, from what I remember of her, an okay English teacher. Like, she certainly didn’t go above and beyond fostering her students’ latent interests in writing, but she, you know, did teach us the ins and outs of sentence structure and hey, I guess that’s all you can ask for in third grade. And by the way, Nancy’s not actually her name. But if I’m going to speak ill of the dead, I’d rather not use more identifiers than I have to. You see, Nancy had an, ah, other side to her. And when trying to remember events from my elementary-school life, she tends to dominate my thoughts.
Sometimes, for example, Nancy told these old wives tales. Which, you know, is fine. But to impressionable eight or nine-year-old minds, well, when you tell them that cracking your knuckles leads to brittle bones and your mother cracks her knuckles all the time, well, it just might drive a kid to tears.
But there were also these other, more sinister moments. We were talking about street names once, and Nancy polled the class asking what type of street each person lived on. “A street? A road? An avenue? A boulevard?” I never raised my hand to any of those. I lived on a “Way.”
Nancy never asked what I lived on, though. At the end of those four questions, instead she said, “Well, I don’t know what else you could live on unless you lived in a bag.” And I didn’t know how to respond to that. Because I knew I lived on a way. But I didn’t have the words to express that at all.
In my story, the demon was going to torment the protagonist in largely the same way. The demon was going to present these illusory worlds, at once both grotesque as they were beautiful, and it was going to be these visions that would prompt the protagonist to investigate in the first place. Because the world couldn’t be wrong by itself, right? Somebody had to be at fault, right?
There’s this recurring dream I remember having during my time as a third grader. I don’t remember too many details now, obviously, but I do remember lying on my back, arms outstretched like some sort of horizontal crucifix, being bathed in a dim red light. And then, well…
So the basement at my school was full of rumors. Nobody ever seemed to go down there, and the few times that somebody did open the door, there was this weird red tint over everything, like somebody had put red tissue paper over the single lightbulb down there. And the smell! The rumor going around was that teachers like Nancy snuck down there to smoke cigarettes.
It always smelled like brimstone to me, though.
There’s one specific moment that sticks out when I think about Nancy. I remember staying a little after class as a sort of detention for not turning in homework on time. Now during this detention I remember Nancy not really referring to me by name at all, just saying things like “Sit here and do your homework.” Which, you know, is fine. She was mad at me. Whatever. But as I was packing up and getting ready to go home, she said, “See you tomorrow, Finlay.”
My name’s not Finlay. But when I said that, she said, “Well, you don’t deserve your name.”
In my dream, I remember a claw reaching out and making a cut right around my left temple, tracing my face in a single blood-red line down to my chin, then back up and around, following my hairline just so before returning to its original starting point. I remember how loose and ill-fitting my face felt in that moment, and how I tried to scream as the claw started peeling it off. But I couldn’t. That’s the thing about dreams, if you’re not lucid, you’re completely helpless against them.
I wanted to translate that feeling to the protagonist of my story, too. I mean, if I was basing it off myself it should have been easy, right? I could have this character who would lose his sense of place and identity to this… this thing, and I mean, I still remember those feelings well enough, right?
There’s one final story I remember about Nancy. You see, near the end of the school year, she would lead all the third graders on an overnight field trip up to the lake. This was “the big thing” back in third grade. Kids spent a month preparing for it and even longer talking about it. It even infected schoolwork, with science classes spending time talking about fish biology and all the math word problems having a “lakeside” theme to them.
Don’t get me wrong, it was a great time! I mean, when you’re nine, every time is a great time, but this was one of the first times I had ever been up to the lake, and with so many different things scheduled, it was hard to not enjoy it. But at the same time, there’s this one moment.
It was late. I mean, I don’t remember exactly what time, but I had just woken up to use the restroom, and Nancy was standing there right over me. There was a dead look in her eyes, like this time, of all the times, she had slipped a little bit further into the abyss.
“Nancy?” I said.
And she just kept looking at me for a long while, as if she was still deciding what to do with me. For the longest time, neither of us moved. We just stared at each other, me. helpless, barely under the covers and her, well, I don’t even have the words anymore to describe her. But then she spoke:
“The angels are gone,” she said.
It was barely a whisper, but it was deafening in the silence.
The next thing I heard was Nancy slowly turning and shuffling back out of the room. In the morning, she was fine! I mean, she didn’t mention anything about the previous night (and I didn’t dare bring it up) but she was, you know, normal! She was back to telling us how dangerous leeches were and how her sister once nearly got eaten alive by the things, back to getting overly fussy around docks and all those other things old teachers do.
Nancy retired a couple years after I graduated elementary, but when I was in college, I would come back and volunteer with the after-school program. It was easy enough, take attendance and then play with the kids until their parents and/or guardians picked them up. After that, I just had to clean up a little and I could go home.
I never had to go in the basement, but it always tempted me. I could always see that familiar red tint under the door. But I always told myself it was none of my business. And it never was.
One day, though, well, I figured just a peek wouldn’t hurt, right? I mean, Nancy had tormented me, not just in these moments during the school day, but in my dreams as well, right? I had to know what was going on down there because there had to be something. She was down there all the time! What was she doing? Acting solely on this whim, I marched straight to the basement door, threw it open, and went down those final stairs.
But there was nothing. It was just a smokey old storage basement. And when the door creaked closed behind me, I was left alone, just me and my thoughts.
-F
There was going to be something else in the room, too. Something alive. Something contained in that basement that, now that the door had been opened could escape and enact whatever sinister plan it had.
I never got that far. I never even knew what the creature was going to be. I just knew how I would have felt descending into that basement, and I knew what had to be at the bottom. You see, I never had to deal with demons or other such monsters in elementary school, but I did have to deal with my third-grade English teacher.
Nancy was, from what I remember of her, an okay English teacher. Like, she certainly didn’t go above and beyond fostering her students’ latent interests in writing, but she, you know, did teach us the ins and outs of sentence structure and hey, I guess that’s all you can ask for in third grade. And by the way, Nancy’s not actually her name. But if I’m going to speak ill of the dead, I’d rather not use more identifiers than I have to. You see, Nancy had an, ah, other side to her. And when trying to remember events from my elementary-school life, she tends to dominate my thoughts.
Sometimes, for example, Nancy told these old wives tales. Which, you know, is fine. But to impressionable eight or nine-year-old minds, well, when you tell them that cracking your knuckles leads to brittle bones and your mother cracks her knuckles all the time, well, it just might drive a kid to tears.
But there were also these other, more sinister moments. We were talking about street names once, and Nancy polled the class asking what type of street each person lived on. “A street? A road? An avenue? A boulevard?” I never raised my hand to any of those. I lived on a “Way.”
Nancy never asked what I lived on, though. At the end of those four questions, instead she said, “Well, I don’t know what else you could live on unless you lived in a bag.” And I didn’t know how to respond to that. Because I knew I lived on a way. But I didn’t have the words to express that at all.
In my story, the demon was going to torment the protagonist in largely the same way. The demon was going to present these illusory worlds, at once both grotesque as they were beautiful, and it was going to be these visions that would prompt the protagonist to investigate in the first place. Because the world couldn’t be wrong by itself, right? Somebody had to be at fault, right?
There’s this recurring dream I remember having during my time as a third grader. I don’t remember too many details now, obviously, but I do remember lying on my back, arms outstretched like some sort of horizontal crucifix, being bathed in a dim red light. And then, well…
So the basement at my school was full of rumors. Nobody ever seemed to go down there, and the few times that somebody did open the door, there was this weird red tint over everything, like somebody had put red tissue paper over the single lightbulb down there. And the smell! The rumor going around was that teachers like Nancy snuck down there to smoke cigarettes.
It always smelled like brimstone to me, though.
• • •
There’s one specific moment that sticks out when I think about Nancy. I remember staying a little after class as a sort of detention for not turning in homework on time. Now during this detention I remember Nancy not really referring to me by name at all, just saying things like “Sit here and do your homework.” Which, you know, is fine. She was mad at me. Whatever. But as I was packing up and getting ready to go home, she said, “See you tomorrow, Finlay.”
My name’s not Finlay. But when I said that, she said, “Well, you don’t deserve your name.”
In my dream, I remember a claw reaching out and making a cut right around my left temple, tracing my face in a single blood-red line down to my chin, then back up and around, following my hairline just so before returning to its original starting point. I remember how loose and ill-fitting my face felt in that moment, and how I tried to scream as the claw started peeling it off. But I couldn’t. That’s the thing about dreams, if you’re not lucid, you’re completely helpless against them.
I wanted to translate that feeling to the protagonist of my story, too. I mean, if I was basing it off myself it should have been easy, right? I could have this character who would lose his sense of place and identity to this… this thing, and I mean, I still remember those feelings well enough, right?
• • •
There’s one final story I remember about Nancy. You see, near the end of the school year, she would lead all the third graders on an overnight field trip up to the lake. This was “the big thing” back in third grade. Kids spent a month preparing for it and even longer talking about it. It even infected schoolwork, with science classes spending time talking about fish biology and all the math word problems having a “lakeside” theme to them.
Don’t get me wrong, it was a great time! I mean, when you’re nine, every time is a great time, but this was one of the first times I had ever been up to the lake, and with so many different things scheduled, it was hard to not enjoy it. But at the same time, there’s this one moment.
It was late. I mean, I don’t remember exactly what time, but I had just woken up to use the restroom, and Nancy was standing there right over me. There was a dead look in her eyes, like this time, of all the times, she had slipped a little bit further into the abyss.
“Nancy?” I said.
And she just kept looking at me for a long while, as if she was still deciding what to do with me. For the longest time, neither of us moved. We just stared at each other, me. helpless, barely under the covers and her, well, I don’t even have the words anymore to describe her. But then she spoke:
“The angels are gone,” she said.
It was barely a whisper, but it was deafening in the silence.
The next thing I heard was Nancy slowly turning and shuffling back out of the room. In the morning, she was fine! I mean, she didn’t mention anything about the previous night (and I didn’t dare bring it up) but she was, you know, normal! She was back to telling us how dangerous leeches were and how her sister once nearly got eaten alive by the things, back to getting overly fussy around docks and all those other things old teachers do.
• • •
Nancy retired a couple years after I graduated elementary, but when I was in college, I would come back and volunteer with the after-school program. It was easy enough, take attendance and then play with the kids until their parents and/or guardians picked them up. After that, I just had to clean up a little and I could go home.
I never had to go in the basement, but it always tempted me. I could always see that familiar red tint under the door. But I always told myself it was none of my business. And it never was.
One day, though, well, I figured just a peek wouldn’t hurt, right? I mean, Nancy had tormented me, not just in these moments during the school day, but in my dreams as well, right? I had to know what was going on down there because there had to be something. She was down there all the time! What was she doing? Acting solely on this whim, I marched straight to the basement door, threw it open, and went down those final stairs.
But there was nothing. It was just a smokey old storage basement. And when the door creaked closed behind me, I was left alone, just me and my thoughts.
-F
Tuesday, October 23, 2018
Raindrops on Roses (Part Fifteen) -- Creepypasta
I promised three posts ago that one of these horror-themed Raindrops on Roses posts wasn’t going to be strictly-speaking good, and I think even just looking at the title might give the impression that this one is the one I was talking about. But before we get into why I kind of adore these b- or c-grade stories, I have to do talk a little bit about the etymology of the internet.
Sometimes the internet really likes a certain turn of phrase (or, perhaps more accurately for the purposes of this post, a certain turn of text), and when that happens, it tends to spread rather quickly. In cases like “john is kill” or “He Boomed Me”, these phrases are mutable enough to become memes in their own right, but sometimes the actual text is deemed perfect in the eyes of the internet and becomes the go-to text for expressing an often sarcastic version of a particular emotion. Fake outrage, for example, draws the “Navy Seal Rant” (and yes there are variations on Navy Seal, but unlike the first two examples, they’re far less popular than the original text). These instances are referred to as “copypastas” or simply “pastas”, which itself originates from “copy-paste”.
But not every copypasta wants to associate with an asterisk everytime it wants to evoke an emotion. Especially with an emotion like horror, which needs to be taken seriously (at least the ironic sort of seriousness that a comedy-horror sort of story like Shaun of the Dead might go for) or risk utterly breaking its audience’s immersion. Because of this, these viral horror stories have distanced themselves a little from their copypasta roots and now tend to go by the name “creepypasta”.
So what makes a creepypasta? More specifically, what makes a creepypasta different from, say, a normal horror short story? Perhaps the most glaring difference is the insistence on a first-person past-tense perspective. Creepypastas want the reader to believe that this truly happened (as opposed to media like It Comes At Night which describes a post-apocalyptic scenario that might happen), and one of the ways they do that is with “I”. This also lets the author skip by a little bit of character establishment. Sure, the “I” might have an occupation or friends that spooky things also happen to, but their purpose is better served as the metaphorical cameraman, guiding the reader through a series of events.
The consequence of this, of course, is the same consequence that lets cameramen (in most cases) not die during action movies. The main character in creepypastas seldom dies, so the horror generally has to come from elsewhere. One of the ways they do that is downer endings or, in some cases, no ending at all. Frequently this hinges on a Shyamalan-like twist (As an aside/fun fact, the plot of Sixth Sense was originally going to be part of a horror anthology TV series, so the ancestry is certainly there), which lets the author narrate a proper resolution before pulling out the rug and going “Surprise!”
Just like Shyamalan movies, though, these twists can easily be marred by how out-of-nowhere they are. The novel Penpal by Dathan Auerbach, itself a collection of six connected creepypastas tends to fall prey to this, with each chapter describing a spooky event and then going “Haha! It was a pedophile!”
Lastly, creepypasta itself has its own subgenres. The most popular is what I like to call “corruption of the innocent,” which takes a piece of media and twists it. Some of the more famous examples of this are “Lost Episode” pastas like Suicide Mouse or “Haunted Video Game” pastas like Ben Drowned or the incredibly poorly titled Godzilla NES Creepypasta. The problem here is that if it is popular enough to spawn its own subgenre, it can easily breed familiarity, and familiarity can easily break immersion, which as previously discussed, can kill the reception of a pasta.
Do you recognize the pattern yet? Every trope that makes a creepypasta a creepypasta also can easily be a detriment to its quality. So why do I like them? Well, some of that I admit is because of how I consume them. I generally get these stories in audio form; I listen to them while doing more menial tasks where my mind would otherwise wander (closing up shop at work, for example). And in that way, it transforms these stories into almost campfire stories, where the focus is less on the quality of the story and more on the act of telling. So sure, creepypasta is generally on the lower end of the quality spectrum compared to a lot of horror, but just like everyone has a favorite campfire story to tell, everyone has a creepypasta they like to share around the internet.
I close, then, with links to and comments on some of my own favorites.
Candle Cove: This is one of those creepypastas that often comes with a the (italics included), as in the creepypasta. And that’s not without a good reason. Its forum-post style makes it easy to spread around, it moves deftly from beat to beat and is able to recontextualize old low-budget children’s tv in a way pastas like Suicide Mouse or Squidward’s Suicide never could. It was also expanded into a miniseries as part of SyFy’s Channel Zero, so that’s a fun fact as well.
Killswitch: I don’t think Catherynne M. Valente intended for any of her posts on her Invisible Games blog to be viewed as truth, but the legend of a game that is only playable once certainly stuck around. In my head, it influenced the creation of games like One Chance or Execution, though that’s just me guessing. I don’t even think it was the best story on the now-defunct blog (the link before goes to archive.org, which may not have grabbed all of them), but it certainly was a good introduction to the stories it wanted to tell.
Godzilla NES Creepypasta: Yes, the title is garbage. Yes, the plot has been done a thousand times down to the specific beats. But just like the game in the story itself, the narrative just keeps going, adding on more and more, slowly weaving its own mythos. Add on some creative sprite work to simulate screenshots from this haunted game, and it’s at least worth a look.
SCP-1981: I don’t generally like the SCP Foundation subset of creepypastas. They have a faux-scientific style that reads to me as more dry and boring than scary, and the community tends towards being fascinated with potential world-ending catastrophes as a source of horror, which, you know, doesn’t work if the world’s still here. But sometimes the foundation comes across something more mundane, (say, a videotape with some odd properties) and in those instances, I think the writing style can work.
-F
Sometimes the internet really likes a certain turn of phrase (or, perhaps more accurately for the purposes of this post, a certain turn of text), and when that happens, it tends to spread rather quickly. In cases like “john is kill” or “He Boomed Me”, these phrases are mutable enough to become memes in their own right, but sometimes the actual text is deemed perfect in the eyes of the internet and becomes the go-to text for expressing an often sarcastic version of a particular emotion. Fake outrage, for example, draws the “Navy Seal Rant” (and yes there are variations on Navy Seal, but unlike the first two examples, they’re far less popular than the original text). These instances are referred to as “copypastas” or simply “pastas”, which itself originates from “copy-paste”.
But not every copypasta wants to associate with an asterisk everytime it wants to evoke an emotion. Especially with an emotion like horror, which needs to be taken seriously (at least the ironic sort of seriousness that a comedy-horror sort of story like Shaun of the Dead might go for) or risk utterly breaking its audience’s immersion. Because of this, these viral horror stories have distanced themselves a little from their copypasta roots and now tend to go by the name “creepypasta”.
So what makes a creepypasta? More specifically, what makes a creepypasta different from, say, a normal horror short story? Perhaps the most glaring difference is the insistence on a first-person past-tense perspective. Creepypastas want the reader to believe that this truly happened (as opposed to media like It Comes At Night which describes a post-apocalyptic scenario that might happen), and one of the ways they do that is with “I”. This also lets the author skip by a little bit of character establishment. Sure, the “I” might have an occupation or friends that spooky things also happen to, but their purpose is better served as the metaphorical cameraman, guiding the reader through a series of events.
The consequence of this, of course, is the same consequence that lets cameramen (in most cases) not die during action movies. The main character in creepypastas seldom dies, so the horror generally has to come from elsewhere. One of the ways they do that is downer endings or, in some cases, no ending at all. Frequently this hinges on a Shyamalan-like twist (As an aside/fun fact, the plot of Sixth Sense was originally going to be part of a horror anthology TV series, so the ancestry is certainly there), which lets the author narrate a proper resolution before pulling out the rug and going “Surprise!”
Just like Shyamalan movies, though, these twists can easily be marred by how out-of-nowhere they are. The novel Penpal by Dathan Auerbach, itself a collection of six connected creepypastas tends to fall prey to this, with each chapter describing a spooky event and then going “Haha! It was a pedophile!”
Lastly, creepypasta itself has its own subgenres. The most popular is what I like to call “corruption of the innocent,” which takes a piece of media and twists it. Some of the more famous examples of this are “Lost Episode” pastas like Suicide Mouse or “Haunted Video Game” pastas like Ben Drowned or the incredibly poorly titled Godzilla NES Creepypasta. The problem here is that if it is popular enough to spawn its own subgenre, it can easily breed familiarity, and familiarity can easily break immersion, which as previously discussed, can kill the reception of a pasta.
Do you recognize the pattern yet? Every trope that makes a creepypasta a creepypasta also can easily be a detriment to its quality. So why do I like them? Well, some of that I admit is because of how I consume them. I generally get these stories in audio form; I listen to them while doing more menial tasks where my mind would otherwise wander (closing up shop at work, for example). And in that way, it transforms these stories into almost campfire stories, where the focus is less on the quality of the story and more on the act of telling. So sure, creepypasta is generally on the lower end of the quality spectrum compared to a lot of horror, but just like everyone has a favorite campfire story to tell, everyone has a creepypasta they like to share around the internet.
I close, then, with links to and comments on some of my own favorites.
Candle Cove: This is one of those creepypastas that often comes with a the (italics included), as in the creepypasta. And that’s not without a good reason. Its forum-post style makes it easy to spread around, it moves deftly from beat to beat and is able to recontextualize old low-budget children’s tv in a way pastas like Suicide Mouse or Squidward’s Suicide never could. It was also expanded into a miniseries as part of SyFy’s Channel Zero, so that’s a fun fact as well.
Killswitch: I don’t think Catherynne M. Valente intended for any of her posts on her Invisible Games blog to be viewed as truth, but the legend of a game that is only playable once certainly stuck around. In my head, it influenced the creation of games like One Chance or Execution, though that’s just me guessing. I don’t even think it was the best story on the now-defunct blog (the link before goes to archive.org, which may not have grabbed all of them), but it certainly was a good introduction to the stories it wanted to tell.
Godzilla NES Creepypasta: Yes, the title is garbage. Yes, the plot has been done a thousand times down to the specific beats. But just like the game in the story itself, the narrative just keeps going, adding on more and more, slowly weaving its own mythos. Add on some creative sprite work to simulate screenshots from this haunted game, and it’s at least worth a look.
SCP-1981: I don’t generally like the SCP Foundation subset of creepypastas. They have a faux-scientific style that reads to me as more dry and boring than scary, and the community tends towards being fascinated with potential world-ending catastrophes as a source of horror, which, you know, doesn’t work if the world’s still here. But sometimes the foundation comes across something more mundane, (say, a videotape with some odd properties) and in those instances, I think the writing style can work.
-F
Tuesday, October 16, 2018
Raindrops on Roses (Part Fourteen) -- Anatomy
I noted what could perhaps be a poor response to the opening paragraph of last video. I made what some considered to be a leap in logic between the title of certain films and phallic imagery. So instead of leading with a similar paragraph here, let’s jump straight into talking about… Anatomy.
One of the weird things about video games is that, because the medium is so new, there isn’t much clout behind, say, some of the “B games” like there is behind “B movies”. Sure, there are rather large-profile independent games (for example, Fez, Super Meat Boy, and Braid, as featured in Indie Game: the Movie), but the large majority of games go unknown and unloved.
One of the more recent “B games” to break out is Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, which actually commented on this. Bennett’s game is actually an interpretation of Sexy Hiking, and in the game he talks about his fascination with creation on a personal level. Getting Over It is his, and not just because his name’s in the title. He talks about how some games don’t really care about the player because it’s more of an expression of the creator’s intent than the ideas the player puts into it.
Anatomy by kittyhorrorshow doesn’t care about the player. Not because of anything Bennett Foddy says (though that’s certainly part of it), but because really every moment in the game expresses how much it doesn’t want the player there. This isn’t even the first kittyhorrorshow game to tackle this theme, 000000FF0000 (that's, uh, hexadecimal for Black Red) managed that a little earlier, but it doesn’t do so as completely as Anatomy does.
Anatomy is about a haunted house, which is exactly the type of house that one would expect to not want the player there. But it’s not the type of house that has spooky ghosts (though technically it does have one), it’s more about emptiness and loneliness. I asked last week, “What happens to a house when it is left alone?” and that’s what I was talking about.
But what’s more is that Anatomy is about familiarity. At every point in the game the player is exploring some facet of the house, wandering around the house searching for some unexplored nook or cranny. But when you go back to where you’ve been before, you realize that something’s off, which in turn only gets worse and worse as the game goes on.
And by the end, it’s all the player can do to not be consumed.
-F
Next time: Short, not often sweet, but worthy of discussing nonetheless.
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