okay tumblr you get to see my Halloween costume first! I’m baba yagas hut! I’ve been wanting to try this costume for awhile but haven’t gotten the gumption ‘til now!
“The Green Bowl” by Sarah Orne Jewett (1901) “The English tart is nothing but a pie without a soul.”
A lot of stories from this period are people recounting some tale of the supernatural to their friends, sometimes with a little twist thrown in. This one’s fairly light on the twist part and isn’t scary except in a heaviness of the foreknowledge of death sort of way.
===
“Crush” by Janet Hetherington, Ronn Sutton, Becka Kinzie, Zakk Saam (2018) “His eyes are as wild as the sea.”
Aye, that’s a Gothic story alright. The foreword by Jacques Nodell that introduces the anthology was actually a really good breakdown of the Gothic literature genre and its trappings. The ending is pretty gruesome but then I think that’s also a tendency in the scary Gothic romances.
===
It Follows dir. David Robert Mitchell (2014) “It is not done with me either.”
This movie carried some good word of mouth but had fallen into the bottomless backlog of stuff I needed to watch. A showing at the Roxie prompted me to finally check it out. There was actually a short lecture by author Johanna Isaacson that introduced the movie and let me tell you, I’m always in for a pre-movie presentation to prime the brain for what’s to come. The movie itself is great of course, lives up to the hype and left me creeped out. I’ll be walking uneasily and constantly checking my surroundings for days.
This is one of those games that’s been in the back of my brain since the 90s as something to complete someday, and the season felt right for it. (It helps that I have a portable device with emulation support so I could cheese through the game with save states and a rewind function.) Now that I’ve completed it, whoof, what a pain in the ass. It can be fun with its horror and sci-fi tropes, but it’s also incredibly difficult. It’s meant to be completed over the course of weeks or months but I don’t have that kinda time. The levels also start to get repetitive, with latter levels essentially serving more challenging remixes of earlier stuff. I’m glad I finally got through it but it’s a tough proposition these days.
“Floating islands are common in Minnesota; it’s the size of this one that’s causing all the fuss. Sue Galatowitsch, a wetland ecologist at the University of Minnesota, says the island likely weighs at least 1,000 tons and could extend 30 feet below the water. Technically, it’s a floating bog. A natural assemblage of peat moss festooned with cattails and tamarack trees, the bog is more than four acres across—that’s about 64 tennis courts. ‘A bog that size,’ Galatowitsch says, “can kind of do whatever it wants.“
Residents of that area can suck it up and enjoy their new free bog-adjacent lives. Bogs are good, don’t fucking get rid of it just because you want to look at specific types of nature but not all nature. Nature wants bogs, let there be bogs!
“Sea of Souls” by Jenna Lynn Wright, Alvaro Feliu, Juan Francisco Mota, Ricardo Osnaya, Erik Lopera Tamayo, Jorge Cortes, Robby Bevaro, Maxflan Araujo, Walter Pereyra, Taylor Esposito (2022) “This isn’t the face I had when we met.”
The feel of a rushed committee affair, but stitched together adequately enough.
===
Prey for the Devil dir. Daniel Stamm (2022) “Now that you know the devil, the devil knows you.”
I was irked by the polite series of resolutions. The final moments imply it anyway, but I would have liked more commitment to this as an exorcist series.
My landlord gave me figs that are literally bursting open like “here they’re ready and really good” like it’s normal to scrape up a fruit’s innards from its rended flesh.
I’m definitely a Wirt, but when Greg said “Uncle Endicott pegged me all wrong. I got no sense, no sense at all,” I heard that.
Elon Musk has taken control of twitter. Immediately fired the person responsible for content moderation who suspended Trump. Reactionaries are flooding the mentions of their favorite targets with slurs, rape threats, and other forms of harassment. Elon posted a message to advertisers basically begging them not to pull out.
