thank you, something awful. thank you for letting me see this incredible anime wolf. my life is complete.
Went to check out some of the weekend web articles..... Thaaaat's enough internet for today I think. ._.
okay so, when i was a kid, i was always terrified of my bedroom closet. it eased off as i got older, but then when i was about 14 we moved into this house and my closet was fucking terrifying again. not my brother's identical closet when i slept in his room, not friend's closets, not the crawlspace under the house, just that closet. i thought it was because i was a nervous kid, until i came back from my first year at college, a big tough grownup— and that fucking closet was still the scariest goddamn thing. it was like trying to sleep with a panther sitting in the room. up until my parents moved out of that house when i was about twenty five, any time i had to come back home and sleep in my old bedroom, that closet scared me. so the idea that buildings could genuinely be malevolent and want to eat you is kind of a 'yeah, yep, no shit' thing for me. also, as a young adult, i worked in downtown portland. most buildings there are built over the shanghai tunnels and use them as basements, in addition to being repurposed over and over through the decades. so both above and below ground, any building over three stories is a maze of abandoned, walled-off, unused rooms. i spent most of two years at one building trying to get to floor four, aka the creepiest possible floor that had locked doors from every entrance angle and you couldn't get there through the freight elevator either and if you angled everything just right you would see a hallway with a light at the end and a little, tipped-over kid's chair. i was completely convinced a) if i ever made it on to floor four i would probably die, and b) it would be super worth it. i did get to poke around in various basement rooms and corridors though, from time to time. if you had a crowbar you could get from one end of downtown to the other. but you'd probably get eaten. some of the rooms would have stairs that went straight up into the low ceilings, or doors that went half into the floors, or dividing walls knocked back down raggedly to waist-height, the cinder blocks piled up with old metal desks. there were definitely mysterious rusty puddles. it was incredible. if i get a million dollars i'm going back to portland and bribing managers to just let me go crowbar my way off to hell. in chicago, proving i have learned jack and shit, i like exploring abandoned train tracks. you find neat stuff, old bridges, weird little forests with iron bars embedded in the trees. i found a perfectly intact ceramic toilet once. just sitting in a clearing under an oak tree that was bigger than i could get my arms around. just a toilet. i love that kind of thing. anyway, in this RP right now i'm mostly just airing out my own personal 'unified foldspace theory', which i think simplifies and clarifies the phenomenon of 'so sometime places wanna eat you' best across all the different stories. so like ok, you have a construction. through some confluence of factors— enough age, time, magic, size, bad vibes, blood spilled, something—it comes alive. it tips over some sort of threshold, and it gets an animus, an intentionality. not like a person or a poltergeist, but like a little seed. it was something made. now it's taken over the making of itself. it starts to grow. maybe like a plant, maybe like a mushroom, maybe like a slime mold. but if given enough of what it needs— time, blood, magic, who knows— it flowers. it seeds. here's some good examples of the trope that are fucking traumatizing http://www.silveraspen.net/1408.html http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-087 http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-093 http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-2464 http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/The_Dionaea_House http://www.angelfire.com/trek/caver/page1.html and here's just some cool exploration shit http://imgur.com/gallery/yBle6 http://imgur.com/Eu988fE https://blog.mark17.net/finding-the-strange-pipes-in-the-woods-bunker/#.Vv2aH2QrKu4 there's a lot of other short stories i remember but can't find. like a guy who broke in to a house to rob it but couldn't get out again, because every time he tried to climb out through the attic window, he found himself in the basement again. but each time, the house was a little larger, and hotter, and more empty, and he died of thirst. plus, a whole lot of SCP objects involve folded space, even when they're not 'place that eats you' trope, like the hand with the phone, which is some kind of funky glitch. http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-1193 and then there's the history book with folded spacetime which i find particularly fucking cool http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-140 and of course the holder series relies exclusively on navigating folded spaces, each with their own clearly distinct set of rules. these examples imply a very deliberate construction: http://theholders.org/?Special:Series_List SO OKAY that was a lot of stuff, everyone can probably tell i'm procrastinating doing any actual work, bye~
@roach holy crap thank you i'm gonna entertain myself for like the rest of the day, at LEAST, going through all those :D Man, that settles it, I really need to read House of Leaves.
WELP I GAVE MYSELF A NIGHTMARE. Guess that'll teach me to read creepy shit right before going to bed. -___- (Good news is my dream made up for it by following all the creepy stuff up with an absolutely ridiculous number of puppies and kittens, so, I'm good.)
My boss' chocolate lab can open screw-top soda bottles! I saw him do it the other day, it is very impressive.
I would just like to note that in the infinite multiverse that is fanfic, Sunslammer Down now has a very popular Broadway adaptation.
Damn, reading these makes me want to start up a RP with some of my writer friends. After studying Very Self-Important MFA Bullshit till my brain dribbles out my ears, it's cool as hell to watch you play around with your OCs in three or four different universes for the sheer joy of it (and everyone involved has serious writing chops, so it's fun for the readers too). (please tell me Sgt. Dakota Pancho is going to fall head over heels for a cute selkie stoner somewhere on the Pacific Coast and then her creepy vampire ex shows up and gets fucking wolf-murdered because Cloris belongs dead in every universe)
i'd offer to play some stuff with you (and your friends) but every RP i've ever done with anyone besides jessie has died a quick and painful death for reasons unknown. i suspect jesse keeps some kind of cursed mummy paw under his keyboard that averts my terrible bad role play luck. eta: in case that sounded entirely self pitying, i should add, you should go for it, rp text adventures are incredibly fun when you team up with other writers, and shoving your characters through half a dozen AUs is also really enjoyable.
haha, don't worry about it. I've got some friends who already do some RP over email, so I can ask them. (Also I'm keeping a pretty wide air gap between "Frood" and my offline identity for now, for Reasons.)
It's just a nod in the fic, but I'm pretty sure that even among psionics alone, let alone the rest of the population, Sunslammer Down would achieve Lion King on Broadway status. Feferi is wearing a very worn out, very beloved T-shirt of Sollux's he got from the premiere.