This Halloween season, why not get spooked the heck out? Really, WHY NOT? Is there a better way to get spooked the heck out than by reading a supernaturally spooky book? What book series is more spooky than Goosebumps? Especially a choose-your-own-adventure Goosebumps!?
O gosh, reading this book made me scared that I would die of fear or scares that I might die. More… »
Comic Book of the Month:
Strike Team: Code Name: Diamond Force
Aside from having one of the greatest names in the history of entertainment, Strike Team: Code Name: Diamond Force is a thoroughly entertaining pastiche (not parody) of late-70s, early-80s low-budget action “extravaganzas.” Mike Tanner’s script pairs with Łukasz Kowalczuk’s skate-punk b&w art style to create something that is at once exactly as it should be and completely unique. This book was a Kickstarter project, so I’m not sure how to get your hands on it now if you missed out on that other than to find Mike or Łukasz at conventions (maybe Mike can hop into the comments to let us know?).
Instagrammer of the Month:
@dana_dooodles
My pal Dana (who was at one time a recurring villain in Fools Play Improv) started a drawing-a-day project in 2018, and it has consistently been one of my favorite Instagram accounts since then. Some real gems have emerged in that time:
I don’t believe in astrology.
Believe in Yourself – Follow Your Dreams (I want this on a T-shirt SO BAD).
Pokemon I Invented.
Website of the Month:
Botnik Studios
Botnik at its core is a predictive text generator. You input a source of text (for example: every single script for Star Trek: The Next Generation), then you start typing and Botnik will give suggestions as to what word you should enter, and what words should come after that (much like your average text message app). I used Botnik combined with a random-number generator to make my H.P. Lovecraft Halloween Posts last year. Well, I’m not the only person using it, and Botnik Studios compiles some of the best of this machine-assisted content generation. And they make me laugh SO HARD. Like these:
For the third time, here is some predictive-text-generated funtimes. This time I added the text of Call of Cthulhu to The Colour Out of Space. This one gets a little psychedelic:
The great, shapeless stream of vehicles said, “I do nothing shewed about of that terrible. It must, though.” Dreaming this, the professors stayed, and the fragment seemed inexplicably clammy. The aspect had terrible innocents. A little curiosity was an angel that night. It must have been, for several in his ears (and other globules) depended on the learned, and a verbal set of people.
Come back! Deep in men not quite useless was the vegetation. This must ever be sunk, or among the acre were the terrible departed.
Ministers held their hysterical horror at night. I had visions of my personal lamplight as it slunk at r’lyeh: Green gloss tainted dank, cyclopean earth. Merwin was a simple gnawing old gardner. His thing was clearly great.
Sinking, i attended completely and sure to the orgy in the attic pasture. It with a shudder and my uncle had possessed the professors. They were failing to trace lusciousness, but silently called cthulhu in their churchgoing motive. Gruesome experiences, nothing familiar, and subterrene horrors (not taxicabs) had been stricken with wholly unprecedented things. i did nothing.
Stars came down. I seen it. Everything was spherical. Soul carved from latently human sacrifices. Undying down in intermittent eaten could subject dank sent boxes. But i shall go mad.
Happy Halloween tomorrow! I hope your thing is clearly great, too.
Just as I did on Monday, here I present to you some predictive-text+random-number funtimes based on H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space.
The house had been in a state of nervous tension. Soil lived in the yard. Such substance wasted away. Unfortunately in the carpet was a monstrous constellation of unnatural boys. The colour of the neighbouring herbage is not quite right.
He said he behaved in arkham. It was just grotesque. Comfort always was strange. What he told in arkham was given a short paragraph in the gazette. Spot lived in the well. He had gone with the three professors from miskatonic university who hastened out the next morning to see the as was nameless fate of young thaddeus.
Soil lived in the well gave a hint good. that his long pole must have stirred up something. All dogs canadians a minds his high ground to use till the soil was good. What he told in the fields and distorted the deer just a colour out of the sky. Spot perhaps there seemed to strain a pail borrowed from beyond.
Happy 27th day of Halloween, errybody! I hope your long poles stir up something as well.
I found a predictive text generator and fed it the entirety of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space. It gave me back these 4 paragraphs:
The trees grew afraid of her consciously lied to seeds. With the moments the shining of the trees increased strength. It was a fearsomely archaic place that everything the Indians there had stunted. The men who hastened through the strange growths would draw all the changed colour out of humans. God was not so near. The blasted landscape forewarned the fruit portents. Thought be near a window overlooking the yard.
He thought unaccountably of the strange meteor. It must be something. It had shrunk down to just ooze. He climbed in.
There were other realms in the ancient dust. Sunlight changed to lethal grotesque night. He indulged in fallen detective, but there was absolutely none. It had been powerful acids. He climbed through the strange meteor to the growing luminosity of nothing but gouged, curving poison.
The spaces and trembling party realised that nature mystery was all that frightful messenger from unformed unnatural life. They gouged ye stoutest gardners.
These are a lots of funs! I’ll post them periodically throughout the remainder of the month! I think I’ll add some more Lovecraft texts to the mix as well and see what kind of salad we get.
More details on how I did it:
I somehow stumbled upon the Botnik predictive text generator (I don’t remember how). I found the entire text of The Coulour Out of Space on the internets, copied it to a text file (love.txt) and uploaded it to botnik. Then I had a window of Botnik open and a window of random.org to generate a random number between 1 and 18, which I used to pick the next word. I would then go back and add punctuation and clean up grammar (trying to get tenses to match and eliminating extraneous words, for example) to get it to make some semblance of sense.
