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shirlleycoyle · 3 years

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How 9/11 Became Fan Fiction Canon

Every fictional character you can think of has experienced 9/11 in fanfiction.

A Clone Wars veteran with two lightsabers is on United Airlines Flight 93 and prevents it from crashing. Ron and Hermione get caught up in the chaos as the towers fall. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and her friends watch the attacks unfold on TV from Sunnydale. We have spent 20 years trying to process what happened on 9/11 and its fallout, and that messy process can be tracked through the countless, sad, disturbing, and sometimes very funny fanfiction left across the internet.

Many of the fanfics written in the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks seemed to directly respond to the news as it happened, processing the tragedy in real-time through the eyes of characters they loved. In the absence of a canon episode where Daria Morgendorffer paid respects to those lost, writing fanfic about these characters also experiencing trauma helped fans cope.

One YuGiOh fanfic published on fanfiction.net in May 2002 could have been ripped exactly from what this writer experienced that Tuesday morning. “It started as a normal day,” user Gijinka Renamon wrote. Yugi and his friends were in school, where their teacher informed them of the attacks and sent everyone home from school.

“After reading people’s 9/11 fics, I decided to write my own, and put a certain character in it. And Yugi and his pals were my first choice,” the author's note reads, explaining the connection they felt to United flight 93 and the World Trade Center attacks. Given that they lived in Pennsylvania, and “it’s close to New York, I felt really sad about it.”

Stitch, a fandom journalist for Teen Vogue, told Motherboard that this reaction to 9/11 is not at all uncommon in fandom.

"Fandom has always been a place that positions nothing as 'off limits,'" she said. "Historical tragedies like the Titanic sinking and atrocities like… all of World War 2 show up regularly across the past 30 years of people creating stories and art about the characters they love. So, on some level, it makes sense that 9/11 and the following 20-year military installation in the Middle East has joined the ranks of things people in different fandoms turn into settings for their fan fiction."

Reactions depicted in a handful of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfics published in the weeks after the attacks ring a little truer to the characters. “Tuesday, 11th September 2001,” written by Anna K, almost echoes the lyrics from “I’ve Got a Theory,” one of the songs in the musical episode that aired in November 2001. “We have seen the apocalypse. We have prevented it. Actually, we’ve prevented quite a few. So we know what they look like,” they write, before taking a darker turn. “They look a lot like…New York today.”

Killing demons and vampires doesn’t phase the Scooby Gang, but when preventable human death is brought into the picture, it’s gut wrenching.

“What am I supposed to do…When I can’t do anything to save the world?” Buffy cries into Spike’s chest, watching the attacks unfold on TV in a fanfic the author described as being “about feeling numb and helpless.”

In “Blood Drive,” Kirayoshi writes about Buffy and her friends saving a van full of donated blood meant for victims of the attacks from a group of thirsty vampires. One Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic even takes a blindly patriotic turn, where noted lesbian witch Tara McClay helps Xander hang an American flag from the window of the magic shop to make Anya feel better.

Experiencing 9/11 as a young teenager was overwhelming not just because of the loss of life. Almost immediately after the event itself, it was as if the entirety of American culture re-oriented itself towards an overtly jingoistic stance. As we get distance from the attacks, seeing the tone of television and movies from the early 2000s is jarring, and some have gone viral on Twitter. In the world of pop music, mainstream musicians like the Chicks, formerly known as the Dixie Chicks, were blacklisted from the radio while Toby Keith sang about putting a boot up the ass of terrorists. On the Disney Channel, a young Shia Labeouf reading a poem he supposedly wrote about the events. The poem concludes with the line, "it's awesome to be an American citizen."

In a world so completely saturated with this messaging, it is not surprising that fanfic authors started including 9/11 in their work so soon after the event. Even The West Wing had a strange, out of continuity, fanfic-esque episode where the characters reacted to 9/11. In some cases, it made sense that the characters in the stories would be close to or a part of the events themselves.

"For characters like John Watson or Captain America, the idea works to an extent," Stitch told Motherboard. "In the original Sherlock Holmes works and the 2011 BBC series, Watson had just returned from Afghanistan. For Captain America and other Marvel heroes, 9/11 was something that was addressed in-universe in The Amazing Spider-Man volume 2 #36. Technically, 9/11 is 'canon' to the Marvel universe."

In “Early Warning: Terrorism,” a fanfiction for the TV show Early Edition in which a man who mysteriously receives tomorrow's newspaper, predicting the future, avoids jingoism, but tries to precent 9/11 from happening. This fanfic remains unfinished; it’s unclear if the characters successfully prevent 9/11 in this retelling.

Largely in fanfic from the era just after 9/11, when many young authors were trying to emotionally grapple with it, the characters don't re-write or undo the events themselves. It's this emphasis on the reaction to tragedy that colors the fanfiction that features 9/11 going forward.

Although fanfiction authors have been writing about 9/11 consistently since soon after the event, whenever that fanfiction reaches outside of its intended audience, it looks bizarre.

A screenshot of a Naruto 9/11 fanfic on the Tumblr subreddit comes without any context, or even more than two lines and an author's note. It’s impossible to suss out if this falls into the category of sincere fanfic without the rest of the piece or a publication date, but modern-day commenters on the Reddit thread see it as classic Tumblr trash.

Screenshot from r/Tumblr

“Bin Laden/Dick Cheney, enemies to lovers, 10k words, slow burn,” one user joked in the replies, underscoring the weirdness of Naruto being in the Twin Towers by comparing it to a What If story about Cheney and Bin Laden slowly falling deeply in love.

It’s hard to tell how much of the 9/11 fanfic and fanart starting a few years after the attacks is sincere, and how much of it is ironic, and trying to make fun of the very concept of writing fanfiction about 9/11.

A 2007 anime music video (in which various clips, usually from anime, are cut together to music) that combines scenes from The Lion King with Linkin Park’s “Crawling” and clips from George Bush’s speeches immediately after the attacks feels like the perfect example of this. Even the commenters can’t seem to suss out if this person is a troll or not.

There’s no way that My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic 9/11 fanart could be serious, right? Especially if the description pays tribute to “some of the nation's most memorable buildings,” and features five of the main characters as child versions of themselves. The comments again are split between users thanking the artist for a thoughtful remembrance post, and people making their own headcanon for why Twilight Sparkle is surreptitiously absent from the scene.

Screengrab via DeviantArt

There’s Phineas and Ferb fanfic that combines a 9/11 tribute concert with flashbacks to Ferb being rescued from the towers as a baby, written on the 10th anniversary of the attacks. It jumps from introspection to lines like, “‘Quiet Perry the Platypus. I’m trying to listen to these kids singing a 9/11 tribute.’”

The author's notes make it more likely that they meant for this to be a tribute piece, but it doesn’t quite make sense until watching a YouTube dramatic reading of it from 2020, fully embracing the absurdity of it all.

“For me, 9/11 is synonymous with war. It completely changed the course of my life," Dreadnought, the author of a Captain America fanfic Baghdad Waltz that sees Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes fall in love over the course of the war on terror, told Motherboard. "It’s the reason I joined the military, and I developed deep connections with people who would go on to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq. These very much felt like my generation’s wars, perhaps because people I graduated high school with were the youngest folks eligible to serve at the time.”

Dreadnought told Motherboard that although they didn't deploy, their career has kept 9/11 and the trauma from it in their mind. After seeing that people who fantasize about Steve and Bucky getting together seemed particularly interested in reading fanfiction that related to 9/11, they decided to try their hand at it.

"I had to do something with all of that emotionally, and I’m admittedly a bit emotionally avoidant. So I learned through fic that it’s easier for me to process those feelings and the knowledge of all the awful stuff that can happen in war if I can turn it into something creative," Dreadnought said. "Give the feelings to fake people and then have those fake people give the feelings to readers!"

To Dreadnought, who is a queer man, the experience of researching and writing this was more cathartic than they first expected, especially as a way to navigate feelings about masculinity, military culture, and queer identity. But they said the research they did, which included watching footage of first responders at ground zero, was what helped them finally process the event itself.

"It was like a delayed horror, and it was more powerful than I expected it would be." Dreadnought said. "When I was eighteen, I was pretty emotionally divorced from 9/11; I just knew I wanted to do something about it. So coming back to it in my 30s while writing this fic, it was a very different experience. Even the research for this story ended up being an extraordinarily valuable exercise in cognitively and emotionally processing 9/11 and all of its second and third order effects."

Fanfiction that features 9/11 provides an outlet for people who still grapple with the trauma from that day. But Stitch warns that the dynamics of fandom and how it relates to politics can also create fiction that's less respectful and more grotesque.

"With years of distance between the stories written and the original events of 9/11, there seems to be some sort of cushion for fans who choose to use those events as a catalyst for relationships—and Iraq and Afghanistan for settings," Stitch said. "The cushion allows them room to fictionalize real world events that changed the shape of the world as we know it, but it also insulates them from having to think about what they may be putting into the world."

The tendency of turning these events into settings or backgrounds for mostly white, male characters to fall in love has the unintended effect of displacing the effects that the war on terror has had on the world over. Steve and Bucky might fall in love during the war on terror, but they would also be acting as a part of the American military in a war that has been criticized since it started. Fanfic writers in other fandoms have come under fire for using real world tragedy as settings for fic before. In the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake Supernatural fanfiction about the actors Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki going to the island to do aid became controversial within the fandom. There have also been fics where characters grapple with the death of George Floyd that is written in a way that displaces the event from the broader cultural context of race in America.

"A Captain America story where Steve Rogers is a 'regular' man who joins the US Army and 'fights for our freedom' post-9/11 is unlikely to deal with the war’s effect on locals who are subject to US military intervention," Stitch said. "It’s unlikely to sit with what Captain America has always meant and what a writer is doing by dropping Steve Rogers into a then-ongoing conflict in any capacity."

After enough time, “never forget” can even morph into “but what if it never happened?” A 19k+ word Star Wars alternate universe fanfic asks this question, wondering what would have unfolded if someone with two lightsabers was on United Flight 93. This fic, part of a larger fanfic series with its own Wikia, considers what would have happened if Earth was a military front in the Clone Wars.

In this version of events, a decorated general who served in the Clone Wars is able to take back control of Flight 93 before it crashes, landing safely and preventing even more tragedy from happening that day. In the end, all of the passengers who made harrowing last calls to their loved ones before perishing in a Pennsylvania field survive thanks to the power of the Force, and are awarded medals of honor by President Bush.

Twenty years after the attacks, it’s painful to think about what would have happened if people got to work 15 minutes later, or missed their trains that morning. There weren’t Jedi masters deployed to save people in real life, but for some of the fanfic writers working today, the world of Star Wars might feel just as removed as the world before September 11, 2001.

Fiction serves as a powerful playground for processing cultural events, especially generational trauma. The act isn't neutral though; a decade's worth of fanfiction that takes place on or around 9/11 shows how our own understanding of a traumatic event can shift with time.

How 9/11 Became Fan Fiction Canon syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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thefloatingstone · 4 years

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If you’re doing Self Quarintine (and you should be if you can help it) here’s some Youtube recommendations! Some of these I have posted about or recommended before but with almost all of us stuck indoors now’s a good time to remind you of some cool things you can watch for free!

I’m not gonna imbed the videos, I’ll just post the link because otherwise I would only able to post 5 and I want to collect a few so you can make a playlist or something. (I could make a playlist too but then I couldn’t tell you what each video is and you can’t pick and choose which one sounds interesting to you)

In no particular order:

Polybius: The video Game that doesn’t exist

An hour long documentary in which the youtuber did extensive research to find the origin of the “Polybius” Urban Legend, which speaks of an early arcade game reportedly seen around the early 1980s which reportedly gave people migraines, insomnia, nausea, subliminal messages, and in some cases heart attacks.

The Universal S

A shorter video in which LEMMiNO does his very best to try and track down where exactly this S that we all drew in middle school comes from? Why does literally every country on earth seem to HAVE their children draw this S?

I also recommend LEMMiNO’s video on the Dayltov Pass Incident and the perplexing UFO cases

Down the Rabbit Hole: Henry Darger

Fredrick Knudsen has an incredible fascinating series called “Down the Rabbit Hole” which simply focuses on... anything you can discover and go digging into. From weird internet personalities, to bizarre happenings in history. This video is about the artist Henry Darger, a man who lived in the early 1900s and for all intents and purposes had a perfectly average, lonely life, until it was discovered just before his death he had spent literally decades writing and drawing a fantasy world in what is possibly the longest piece of literature ever written.

I also recommend his video on the Hurdy Gurdy

Bedtime Stories Channel

I’m actually just gonna link the whole channel for “Bedtime Stories”. If you like weird and creepy stories, all of which at least claim to be “true” then Bedtime Stories is great. Coupled by illustrations and subtle sound effects, Bedtime Stories is literally listening to someone tell you a story about such things like hikers who mysteriously went missing, Sightings of Bog Men in Florida and giant Birds over Chernobyl, as well as weird and unsettling murders that remain unsolved. Sometimes the facts are a little dubious or have been disproved, but that’s not the point of the channel. It’s here to tell a creepy story, not give you a documentary.

A Journey Through Rule of Rose

Rule of Rose is a Survival Horror gave for the PS2 which has rather bad gameplay... but a FASCINATING story with just as many layers and symbolism as Silent Hill 2 could boast. It tells the story of one young woman traveling back into her own childhood in an orphanage in the 1930s, and all the horrors that contains. From repressed grief, abusive relationships, child neglect, abuse, and bullying... but it ALSO contains symbolism of societal class structure, politics, eating the rich, and how power structures work. Not for the faint of heart, but HIGHLY recommended.

I also super highly recommend his video on the similarities between Silent Hill 2 and Solaris

Clemps Reviews Crisis Core

Mr. Clemps is a great internet gamer who reviews JRPGs and other games he simply enjoys. Sprinkling in a heavy dose of comedy and very fast jokes and observations, Clemps’ videos are always upbeat, fun, and incredibly enjoyable to watch. I’m linking part 1 of his Crisis Core video in which he explains why the PSP game remains a personal favourite of his despite its flaws.

I also recommend his video on Eternal Sonata

Defunct TV: The History of Dragon Tales

Defunctland is a channel that deals with theme parks and theme park rides that are no longer standing, or which are no longer around in their current form. Defunctland also has a sub series though, called “Defunct TV” where they look at the origin of children’s TV which are no longer airing. I recommend the video on Dragon Tales which is incredibly wholesome, and a genuinely uplifting and soft story of good people trying to make good things for children. (I also recommend the videos on Bear in the Big Blue House, Zoboomafoo, and Legends of the Hidden Temple)

Hagan’s Histories of Polar Exploration

A Playlist for Diamanda Hagan’s videos about the doomed Franklin Expedition from the late 1800s, where England tried to find a passage through the Northern Arctic to the Pacific Ocean. This went horribly horribly wrong, with every member of the Expedition dead. Over a 100 years later we are still fuzzy on what EXACTLY happened, but apart from the arctic chill, there is also evidence of faulty canned food, a series of bad decisions, and cannibalism. Caution advised for this series.

I also recommend the rest of Diamanda Hagan’s channel. She is NOT for everyone, but if you enjoy somebody reviewing Z grade indie movies as well as just BIZARRE films, really bad Christian media bordering on Science Fiction (without making fun of religion itself) hot takes of classic (and modern) Dr. Who, an introduction to Red Dwarf, She’s an EXCELLENT channel to check out.

Good Bad or Bad Bad: Pass Thru

A half podcast half review show where two guys watch a terrible film, decide if it’s “Good” Bad or just Bad Bad and tell you if you should watch it too.

That’s it. That’s the whole show.

I recommend diving into the untold madness that is one of the best(?) bad film makers currently still producing batshit insane movies, the immortal Niel Breen.

There is literally nothing I can say that’ll prepare you for Niel Breen.

(I also recommend their more recent video for “Dancin’ It’s on!”)

History Buffs: Apollo 13

Do you like History? Do you like movies ABOUT History? Do you want to know if the movies about history you watch actually resemble what really happened in any way at all? History Buffs is an EXCELLENT channel, which does talk about the merit of a film itself, but is mainly focused on letting you know just how true to life that historical film you watch is. I highly recommend his longest video which covers the space race between the USA and the USSR, leading to what is known as “The most Successful Failure in NASA’s History”. The Infamous Apollo 13 and where the words “Houston, we have a problem” came from.

If you’re not interested in Apollo 13 however, I also recommend his video on the movie Casino, as well as his video on the female philosopher, Agora.

The Internet Historian: The Goodening of No Man’s Sky

With videos with literally MILLIONS of views, you probably already know the Internet Historian. But I still want to recommend him very highly because his videos are just THAT good and entertaining. I recommend his newest video, documenting that time we were all pissed off about No Man’s Sky, the difficulties the game studio was in when the game released, and how they have been working hard to finally create what is now a truly brilliant game which is winning major awards. A really good underdog story of how a video game company actually saw what was wrong with their game, and FIXED it.

I also recommend his video on Fallour 76 as well as the Failure of Dashcon

8 Creepy Video game mysteries

Hey. Did you know that sometimes there’s some REALLY weird shit in video games, hidden easter eggs which took literal decades to find as well as just a lot of “what the actual fuck?”. Oddheader is a channel with a dedicated discord and Reddit form solely focusing on trying to find or replicate bizarre video game finds, mysteries, and hidden glitches. Even if it means getting in his car and driving to a specific arcade just to check a rumour about Street Fighter II’s arcade version. So if you like getting spooked by weird game shit that’s not just some dumb creepypasta, this is a great place to start.

I also recommend his video on weird discoveries in DVDs and movies.

Red Letter Media: Best of the Worst

Look you already know who Red Letter Media is.

You know... these guys:

Here’s a video of them and Macaulay Culkin watching 3 terrible movies together.

I recommend literally any and all of their videos. Their discussion on Carpenter’s The Thing is amazing.

The Impact of Akira: The film that changed Everything

Ok trying to pick just ONE Super Eyepatch Wolf video is literal torture. Originally I was going to suggest his recent video on Final Fantasy 7 for the PSone but I realised I recommended something FF7 related with Clemps, so instead I will recommend The Impact of Akira, a video talking in depth about Akira both as a film as well as a manga, how it completely and utterly changed the anime industry both in Japan as well as the west, and why it is still a meaningful and one of the most important anime/manga even to this day, still being unsurpassed despite so much competition.

However, ALL of Wolf’s videos are incredible, so I also recommend his videos on wrestling (despite me not caring about wrestling at all), His video on how media scares us, The bizarre reality of modern Simpsons, Why the Dragon Ball Z manga is great, and literally any other video he’s made. He hasn’t made one bad video yet.

Was Oblivion as Good as I remember?

Exactly what it says on the tin. The Salt Factory goes back to playing The Elder Scrolls Oblivion and now with hindsight and modern sensibilities, gives feedback on his experience and whether Oblivion still holds up. This isn’t a super in depth review of the game’s mechanics or how its put together or how it was made. This is simply one guy talking about his experience replaying it with somejokes thrown in and how he felt revisiting it. It’s pretty good.

I also recommend the video he did on Morrowind (because I’m biased).

Weird Japan Only PS1 games

Thor High Heels is SO GOOD and deserves SO MUCH MORE subs than he currently has. THH focuses a lot of obscure and lesser known games as well as big popular titles like the Yakuza series, talking about what he likes about them, what he thinks is cool, and just what kind of atmosphere and mood a certain game has, even if the game itself is kind of ass. He’s done several videos on games that were only released in Japan, as well as videos talking about the fashion in Squaresoft games and how it inspired as well as was inspired by real world street fashion, the aesthetic of PC-98 games and other topics. He also styles his videos and thumbnails after promotional art for video games from the 90s and generally just has an excellent style to his channel over all. Very chill.

Blue Reflection Review

ValkyrieAurora is a channel run by Sophie where she talks about games she personally likes and enjoys. Her videos are really laid back and her voice is really calm and pleasant to listen to. She’s made a bit of a reputation for herself as “The channel that talks about the Atelier Games” and general is just a really enjoyable channel worth checking out if you just want something soothing to listen to.

Ancient Chinese Historians Describe Japan

Voices from the Past is a channel were historical text is read out loud in english. These can be anything like the above video where Chinese historians describe the people of Japan around 297 AD, Accounts of “Dog-Men”, or the worlds oldest letter of complaint from 1750 BC. If you’d like something interesting historically to listen to but don’t want a full blown history lesson, this is a really good way to hear contemporary people talk about their experiences and what they thought about each other in their own words, without opinions or input given by the narrator.

The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

Whang! is a channel that covers weird internet stories, some horrifying, some curious and interesting, and some just plain weird. His video on The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet and its update, are about a song which was recorded off the radio in Germany around the 1980s, and after one person online asked if anyone knew who the artist was as they couldn’t find any information, led to the realization that NOBODY online knows where this song came from or who sang it. It’s a fun mystery to look into that, unlike some others on this list, is not creepy or unsettling, although perhaps a little frustrating.

I also recommend his video on The Most Mysterious Anime theme song, and the haunted Ebay Painting.

5 Lost, Destroyed, and Locked away Broadcasts

Yesterworld is similar to the Defunctland channel in that it talks about obsolete rides, theme parks and other forgotten pieces of entertainment. Although the majority of the channel focuses on movie rides, rollercoasters and Disneyland, I recommend the video on lost and locked away broadcasts which you can no longer see. I also recommend the video about Lost and Rediscovered movie props.

The Nightmare Artist

I talked about this one recently as I just discovered this channel. This video is about the renowned Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksinski who painted surreal and horrifying paintings during his lifetime. There is no mystery here or anything like that, it merely talks about the impact WWII left on Beksinski and how the trauma his country and people suffered influenced his painting, and how certain images and motifs can be seen to directly reference this terrible part of Poland’s history.

Disabilities in Prehistory

Modern media likes to portray how “savage” the ancient past is, and tell us stories of how any person born with a deformity or disability would be thrown over a cliff or dumped in a well because they would be too big a drain on a community to look after. But here’s the thing... according to archaeological evidence, it turns out our ancient ancestors actually did their best to look after its disabled members to the best of their abilities. This video talks about archaeological finds of people who had genetic disabilities and what we can learn from their remains. TREY the Explainer is a great channel for archaeology and also talking about what answers we could have for sightings of cryptids. (not ALL of which we have answers for)

I also recommend his video on Pre-Contact dogs as well as Homosexuality in Nature and the Genetic History of the Ainu.

Decoding “The Secret: A treasure Hunt”

“The Secret” was an art book released in the 80s full of beautiful paintings, but it is also more than that. The book has a fantasy story talking about 12 fantastical races who left wonderful treasures for humans to find,and the book’s paintings and riddles will tell you where you can find each of these treasures which are yours to keep if you can solve the puzzle... and the treasures are 100% true and can actualy be found and claimed, if you can solve the riddles in the book. The video tells the story of the artbook, who was behind it, what the treasures are, how many have been found and various other facts and details.

I also recommend the videos on this channel “The Game: A scavenger Hunt” and “The investigation of Erratas”.

5 Ancient Inventions That Were WAY Ahead Of Their Time

I would recommend you be careful with this channel as its main focus is existentialism and rather alarming topics such as “how close are we to the apocalypse” and other things whose titles alone are enough to upset me. However this video is nothing like that. This video is exactly what the title suggests it is. 5 ancient inventions that were so incredibly ahead of their time you’d think they were made up. From the computer used by ancient Greeks to steel swords we don’t know how to replicate, this video is a great mix of mystery and history.

Although I caution you with this channel, I recommend Joe’s other videos about mysterious books, as well as his video on the most inbred people in history.

However, I know I keep repeating this, I highly recommend caution with this channel. Perhaps its just me and the topics of life and existent are just triggering for me, but I’d recommend maybe just doing a search for the titles I mentioned and not to go searching through the video library unless you’re not bothered by this kind of thing.

Anyway I could keep going, but I think that’s a LARGE amount of videos to keep you occupied for the time being as well as some suggestions for further viewing.

Please enjoy, let me know if you found something interesting, and look after yourself!

If you enjoyed this list at all, please consider tipping me for a coffee

☕️ Ko-fi ☕️

#self isolation #Youtube #Links #Recommended #recommendations #documentary #long post #ask to tag #tumblr ate the 'read more' I put on this so screw it #Just scroll past or hit J to skip this if you want #No editing we die like men

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aleatoryalarmalligator · 4 years

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Hello,

So, it's funny because i was depressed right? and then as we all know the world kinda got scary, and now it's like i almost have a reason to feel validated in my feelings of hopelessness, which doesn't make me feel great, but does seem to kind of level me in this strange way.

I spend too much fucking time on reddit. I live in Portland, and basically i worked for this really extremely poorly run restaurant/brewery pub called Laurelwood. It's a long story, but the place has the worst management. Some of the people weren't like, bad people, but the way it was managed was really bad in ways i would have to spend hours explaining. They recently did a deal with Ninkasi a little over a year ago and now you can find their beer everywhere, and i guess if you are into beer most people seem to like it, so it's not really a diss on their alcohol itself though i am more of a hard liquor/hard cider fan and beer isn't typically my thing unless it's some desserty imperial stout. They expected a lot from their employees - and because of their poor management they also kind of let a lot of us get away with stuff. So we kind of, as employees created a very strong personal work ethic and friendship amongst one another in turn, we within reason broke rules and had a system of doing it to where we remained competent and managed ourselves, as our management was failing and self centered. If it wasn't the really cool friends i made there - some of the closest friends i have ever had and a ton of first time unique experiences - i learned a ton about myself and grew a lot in that position, i probably would have hated it. the owner was the kind of boomer who wanted to pull in hype of like, young trendy Portland kids, but they really made it look like a bad wannabe applebees and never really valued the fact that we were basically keeping the place open for him, so the aesthetic was kinda lazy and the demeanor between us and our top heavy upper management was pretty separated.

Anyway, since of course i worked in this field when the whole pandemic thing happened, I was naturally laid off. They didn't pay us. They sent us a message saying they just didn't have the money, and it's clear that they hoped to just, kinda, take the money they had left and bounce. The message was vague and demeaning, and everyone in the last three weeks is essentially working for nothing. So, one of the brewers, a pretty nice dude named Brandon that i didn't know too well, went on reddit and was respectful and clear, about how this really messed him up. They not only cannot pay us for the last two pay periods, but they also had a lot of their previous checks bounce. This on top of the financial collapse. To me, it's bad, but i sort of expect a lot of bad stuff now. I mean, this kind of collapse was a long time coming. I imagine it's going to take literally years for Portland to bounce back. I hear horror stories from long time Portlanders about how pretty decent people just became homeless during the recession of 2008, and i have a feeling this is going to be even worse. I feel like thus far in my life, though i've had a lot of really bad luck with relationships and family stuff, and sometimes my health, I've never had to really worry about something like this so directly impacting me. When 2008 happened, i was 19, I had never worked and lived with my parents on bare minimum, but my life had always been that way so i never felt that bad about it, though on retrospect it was kind of neglect. I lived in a factory town that had particular staples and products that never were that hit by the market crash, so that particular town in Idaho never saw a real drop in unemployment. I read about the collapse a lot, watched the Big Short and stuff, so i have my fairly strong opinions about it, but it's never actually caused me to go without. My mother is a nurse at a nursing home, and my father worked at a bullet factory. And like i said, i was relatively unaffected.

The message from Brandon took off, on reddit, thousands of people are seeing it and are disgusted, and they are being turned in for not paying us, because that is theft, that is illegal. I am willing to sign whatever documents neccesary when it comes down to it, if i don't get paid eventually. I was already personally very bad off, and i have this bitter realization that after the damage of this pandemic takes it's toll, I'm gonna have to struggle hard. I am not even mad at this point in a personal way. I just think companies need to know you don't fucking treat people this way. That the principle of the matter is that we are not just cogs for businesses to step on. We need to make the wealthy, even the vaguely wealthy people know that they need to appreciate fully those who work for them and under them, and when something bad happens, and they better intend on taking care of those people, or whatever their business model is is going to fail. It goes without saying that this pandemic has exposed a lot of what was already there. I think some people are naive enough to believe this corruption or this problem was unexpected. Lawmakers, and people who are privileged should have worked to make sure that hospitals had enough for the worst case scenario, and that there needs to be a safety net for people. None of these issues are new. I mean, it's not, at all. This is the rich doing the same old shit they have always done, and i imagine, trying so hard not to be pessimistic, but imagining just the same that this is only going to get worse. There are so many homeless drug addicted and mentally ill people in Portland already it's crazy. There was already rent that was impossible for full time employees to pay. It's funny because all these 'luxury suites' are being built throughout town in Portland, and i wonder now who they think is going to move in. Most of them were empty anyway. It's a mystery to me, because in a way it is classic gentrification the way they tore down old buildings and built these giant fancy expensive apartment buildings everywhere, but kind of weird because they were mostly empty. I mean, how could that have been worth it to investors or business owners?

I guess there is a lot I don't know about the stockmarket, banks, finance, housing and such, but it stands to reason that if you spend hundreds of millions to build something and nobody can afford to live there or pay your inflated rent, why are you bothering? I was told that a lot of these places were because of the Portland's population grew so much and these buildings were just now being built from people who had hoped to ride the 'rich Californian movers' era. The rent has just become kind of unmanageable. It's normal to live in a house with four or five people, all working full time just to maintain a single bedroom in a house of half-strangers. Meanwhile, studios that don't even come with a separate bedroom are nearly 2000 dollars, and things that should be there to help the homeless like tiny houses are marketed to rich minimalists who are so bored and guilt ridden by their own privilege they have to pretend to be quaint little peasants in order to feel unique in their own position, that they literally make it expensive to live in something not unlike a camper. But Portland is now just kind of at a steady growth. They came to late, and now with what's happened, what comes next.

Anyway, i am not leaving this city. I hated Idaho. It was a sad place for me, and i see a lot of beauty in Portland. I feel like i have a personal relationship with a good portion of the city. I tried to walk ten miles a day the first year i lived here. I lost a lot of weight here, fell in love here, I had a lot of meaningful experiences, met new people, gained new perspective. I've been afraid for my life here, drank more here, lost and found myself i mean, it's been an adventure in and of itself that becomes clearer to me now the more i have been here. I really do love Portland. It's sad but a lot of places i really loved and appreciated here in Portland won't be here anymore when this is over. A lot of small businesses i really appreciated. The kind of stuff that makes Portland really interesting, or reaching for something new. I hope that culture will crop up again, but we shall see.

I have a dry cough, and i wonder if i am catching Covid 19. My throat tingles a little, and I've already had two fever/colds in the last month, so something tells me this is it. Like a pregnant woman waiting to give birth or something. I am self quarantining. I'm a little nervous because a friend of a friend has a cousin in the FBI who has heard word from his superiors that they are considering the possibility of a full on quarantine, closing even the grocery stores. I didn't want to give in to early hysteria, like the toilet paper thing baffled me. I remember people getting really scared about Pigflu and Birdflu in the past years, but it didn't seem to really spread too far, though i did catch the Pigflu. My foodstamps refill on the 7th, so i hope if this does happen, they don't close by then. I just need to get in and get some bare essentials, because it now is looking like it might be smart to stock up now.

It's funny too, because i am not a homebody. I naturally am inclined to be depressed if i stay in one place too long. I have a somewhat mild case of ADHD, and i love to move, and i enjoy working. If i won the lottery, i'd still work in some fashion for 20 hours a week because i realize i don't feel satisfied living for myself. I like having a civilian duty, even if it's just cleaning off tables. I like feeling useful and connected to people. But i have a leg injury that's not going to heal on it's own, so walking has hurt me for the last eight months, and now this, and i have a health condition that makes it pretty easy for me to gain weight. So i am trapped in the house, snacking and trying to find things that make me laugh or inspire me. I did get inspired to start making paper mache masks. I think i can make the most of my quarantine time. I just hope they don't close the grocery stores before i get my money.

I am worried about both my parents. I have a lot of family, so it's not that unlikely i could lose someone to this virus. I am not concerned with myself that much. I could die, but the chances are relatively low. I am reading a lot of informed reddit posts, about the aftermath of this whole thing, and i'm a little bit nervous.

#text

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huntervote600 · 2 years

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Best Games Steam Reddit

Control: Ultimate Edition is currently 60% off right now, sold for just $16. Remedy Entertainment’s popular title is loved by many, though you have to make sure that your PC is up to the task as it is one of the most demanding games out there. The Steam Summer Game Sale 2021 is ongoing and will end on July 8 at 1 p.m. Twinfinite says: 'Steam has gotten plenty of steamy and sexy games that leave little to the imagination. Here are the best adult games you can get your hands on.' Coming Out On Top HuniePop PC twinfinite.net. Read Full Story twinfinite.net. The 15 Best Horror Games You Can Play On Steam For Free. Steam is filled to the brim with a wide array of great Horror games. Here's a look at some of the best that you can play for free.

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Ah, the point and click adventure. The land of well-defined characters, imaginative worlds, and brutally illogical puzzles that will send you running to the LucasArts hint line.

The genre has had an interesting history, from main attraction to cult favourite to reinvented classic. And you can chart every twist and turn on Steam, as brand new games and retro gems live alongside one another.

There are some 300 point and clicks on Steam. These are our the best ones.

Grim Fandango Remastered By Double Fine Productions - buy on PC, Mac, and Linux (£7.36)

Skeletal travel agent Manny Calavera makes a four year journey across the underworld, hoping to uncover a conspiracy in the land of the dead. Its mix of Mexican folklore and film noir creates a wholly unique style.

This Remastered version adds handy point and click controls, and some subtle visual tweaks. But those mind-bendingly difficult puzzles remain untouched.

Detective Grimoire By SFB Games - buy on PC, Mac, and Linux (£4.99)

A comical whodunit, set in a sweltering swamp that has been turned into an oddball theme park. Instead of solving puzzles, you'll be collecting clues and questioning witnesses in an attempt to solve a murder.

A clever collection of deduction mechanics let you feel like a detective, as you piece together the thoughts in Grimoire's noggin.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition By Phoenix Online Studios - buy on PC and Mac (£12.99)

Before Gabriel went 3D and started making fake moustaches from syrup and cat hair, he was in dark and suspenseful thrillers like 1993's Sins of our Fathers.

This 20th Anniversary Edition gives the game a complete facelift with HD graphics, new puzzles and scenes, and a bunch of making-of content. If you want the original you'll need to go to GOG.

The Walking Dead By Telltale Games - buy on PC and Mac (£18.99)

The Walking Dead doesn't have many puzzles. And the head-scratchers get fewer and fewer as you play more episodes. Instead, the game's all about making choices.

How do you distribute food rations to a starving group? Who do you side with in an argument? How do you explain a zombie apocalypse to a little girl? And, most importantly, whose life do you save?

Broken Age By Double Fine Productions - buy on PC, Mac, and Linux (£18.99)

It's the game that crushed it on Kickstarter. Grim Fandango creator Tim Schafer got 3 million bucks to make a classic point and click - and he very much delivered on his promise. Even if he was a little late.

The outcome? An ambitious game of two very different kids, with the very similar aim of breaking into adulthood. You know, by defeating monsters and escaping from spaceships. Puberty, eh?

Monkey Island 2 Special Edition: LeChuck’s Revenge By LucasArts - buy on PC (£6.99)

This tale of wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood is a stone cold classic, and I'm sure many people reading this list cut their teeth on this comedy favourite.

You don't need to decide whether to buy the pixel art original or the HD remastered version - they're both in the same game and you can switch between them at any time with a button press.

Kentucky Route Zero By Cardboard Computer - buy on PC, Mac, and Linux (£18.99)

An impressionistic indie game that largely ditches traditional puzzles in favour of dialogue choices and thick, sweaty atmosphere.

You play as a delivery truck driver Conway, who's looking to get a parcel to a mysteriously hard-to-find address. Things get a bit weird when the twisty, self-referential narrative starts to bend back into itself.

Dreamfall: The Longest Journey By Funcom - buy on PC (£13.99)

If point and click adventures are known for their inventive worlds, then Dreamfall surely deserves some kind of prize. Between its futuristic Earth and its stunning fantasy realm, the game is constantly taking you to surprising new places.

Some of the more action-focused elements might turn off genre purists, but you owe it to yourself to dive into this beautiful, enrapturing adventure.

Machinarium By Amanita Design - buy on PC and Mac (£7.49)

While many adventure games are packed with dialogue and talkative characters, Machinarium's cast of tin-can robots never speak. You'll have to figure things out through body language, observation, and lovely cartoon speech bubbles.

As well as traditional item puzzles, Machinarium is packed with cute mini-games and little logic riddles to keep things fresh. But the star of the show is that staggeringly detailed, hand-drawn world.

Gemini Rue By Joshua Neurnberger - buy on PC, Mac, and Linux (£6.99)

A gravel-voiced detective, prowling about some rain-soaked exoplanet. An inmate, trapped in an orbiting prison complex. They're the two characters you'll control in this retro throwback adventure.

But this is not slavishly oldschool. A refreshing focus on logical puzzle solutions and the promise of multiple solutions to many problems gives this sci-fi epic a modern twist.

Tales of Monkey Island Complete Pack By Telltale Games - buy on PC and Mac (£26.99)

Before Telltale ditched all the puzzles in favour of branching paths and zombies, it made classic point and clicks. The best of the bunch was surely this Monkey Island swan song.

It can't quite hold a candle to the originals (through, it's much better than Monkey 4), but it is funny, clever, and creative enough to fit the series.

Time Gentlemen, Please! and Ben There, Dan That! Double Pack By Size Five Games - buy on PC (£2.99)

While many modern adventures go the serious route, Size Five Games hearken back to games like Toonstruck and Sam and Max with oddball situations, gross-out humour, and only-sorta logical puzzles.

Besides, it's the only series on this list whee you can stick some dude's lopped-off arm down a toilet to get Hitler's blood and stool.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis By LucasArts - buy on PC and Mac (£4.79)

I maintain that Fate of Atlantis is a better Indiana Jones movie than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Maybe not a hard award to win - most things are better than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But still.

You'll have to play this game three times as the choice to play with your brains, with your fists, or to team up with Sophia Hapgood will take you down three very different paths.

Year Walk By Simogo - buy on PC and Mac (£4.79)

A chilly Scandinavian forest, and a weird Swedish tradition called year walking. The two settings for a daring mobile adventure that you can now get on Steam.

The puzzles are well designed and the story is suitably mysterious. But top marks go to the crunchy, snowy atmosphere of these weird woods.

Broken Sword: Director's Cut By Revolution Software Ltd - buy on PC, Mac, and Linux (£4.99)

When vacationing lawyer George Stobbart is caught in a terrorist explosion, he finds himself bouncing around the world, chasing a bonkers cult of Neo-Templars (before Dan Brown ruined them).

It's absolutely beautiful and wonderfully witty, but Steam users will be stuck with the inferior director's cut. Get the original on GOG if you're a retro purist like me.

Resonance By XII Games - buy on PC (£6.99)

Best Games Steam Reddit Download

Another terrific game from Gemini Rue developer Wadjet Eye Game, which looks like some forgotten VGA classic from 1995. This time, we're trying to stop a particle physicist's doomsday tech fall into the wrong hands.

The game's got a clever system where your memory - both short term and long term - acts like a second inventory so you can discuss events you've seen or use massive objects you couldn't possibly fit in your pockets.

The Last Express Gold Edition By DotEmu - buy on PC and Mac (£4.99)

An incredibly inventive point and click, that broke a lot of barriers. This adventure aboard the Orient Express plays out in real-time so you can miss events, characters will remember how you treat them, and the graphics are all rotoscoped.

Best Games Steam Reddit

If you thought point and clicks were all about standing still and solving logic puzzles, think again.

Life Is Strange By DONTNOD Entertainment - buy on PC (£3.99)

This college drama borrows a lot of ideas from The Walking Dead, but puts its own twist on things. Most importantly: the ability to rewind time to make a different decision if you weren't keen on the outcome.

The cringe-worthy appropriation of teen culture will turn some people's stomachs, but it's hard not to get wrapped up in this involving story and feel a little nostalgic about those hazy, lazy autumn days of yore.

Deponia By Daedalic Entertainment - buy on PC, Mac, and Linux (£15.99)

A gorgeous adventure from Germany, where people didn't even know that the adventure game died. This one's about a man who tries to escape his social status in a world that has been turned into a junk heap.

It's funny, it looks absolutely stunning, and it's a good reminder of why we loved this type of game in the first place.

Want more?Check out our growing collection ofBest on Steam features!

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Could Dead Space Remake Be the Next Step in a New Era of AAA Survival Horror?

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Thirteen years on from its release, Dead Space is still regarded as one of the best horror games ever made, especially within the community of dedicated fans that to this day mourn the death of the franchise. Unable to meet publisher Electronic Arts’ increasingly ambitious sales expectations, the final death knell for the series was 2013’s Dead Space 3, an action-heavy sequel that abandoned the scarier tone and environmental storytelling of the original for co-op shooter gameplay meant to appeal to a wider audience.

“Survival horror is hard. Horror games in general are expensive to make and hard to sell. People would give us the feedback that they love Dead Space but don’t buy it because it’s too scary. Kind of works against itself,” former senior level designer Zach Wilson famously told Gamesindustry.biz in 2017, just a week after EA had shuttered Visceral Games for good. Wilson went on to explain that even Dead Space 2, which sold 4 million copies, failed to recuperate the cost of making the game in the first place. By 2017, with the cancellation of Visceral’s Star Wars game, EA had been left cold to single-player titles altogether.

But like a necromorphized crewmember on the USG Ishimura, Dead Space is getting a new lease on life. A new remake exclusively for next-gen consoles and PC was revealed during EA Play 2021, the company’s biggest gaming showcase of the year. While no actual gameplay footage was shown in the short CG announcement trailer, EA confirmed in a press release that the game is being “completely rebuilt from the ground up” on the publisher’s Frostbite engine by Motive, the studio most recently behind Star Wars: Squadrons.

The short video, which largely serves as a demo for what the new engine will be able to do with the creepy, viscera-covered hallways of the Ishimura, does suggest that EA’s interested in recapturing what made the original so great — the atmosphere, to name just one element in a long list of things — rather than reshaping it for mass appeal. (And unlike in 2008, horror is enjoying a new golden age in the mainstream at the moment, anyway.)

That said, EA has promised a few tweaks courtesy of the Frostbite engine, including “an improved story, characters, gameplay mechanics.” Let’s just hope it’s nothing too drastic.

With the revival of the Dead Space franchise, there’s a more important question to be asked. Is EA’s return to survival horror games — something that seemed like a distant dream back in 2017 — the next step in a potential resurgence of the genre across other big-budget publishers?

In 2013, Dead Space 3 was only the latest prestige horror series to meet a gruesome end. Capcom had already decided to take one of its crown jewels back to the drawing board after Resident Evil 6 took a big spill in 2012. The Silent Hill series was all but dead at Konami after 2012’s horrid Downpour and the cancellation of Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro’s Silent Hills. In the absence of these prestige horror franchises, it largely became the job of indie games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Outlast, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and others to keep the genre alive and introduce some new ideas along the way. (That’s not to say other AAA publishers didn’t take a stab at survival horror during this time — The Evil Within and Dying Light launched during this period, for example.)

But when survival horror came home to Capcom in 2017 with Resident Evil 7 (9 million copies sold as of March 2020), and the blockbuster remake of Resident Evil 2 outsold the original game in 2019, it began to feel like a resurgence was afoot. Classic big-budget survival horror series could still sell well if publishers invested in thoughtful sequels and remakes that weren’t just trying to rehash the latest gameplay trends.

For the moment, EA seems to agree. In fact, according to reliable GamesBeat reporter Jeff Grubb, who broke the story ahead of the official announcement, EA’s approach for the Dead Space remake is heavily influenced by Capcom’s recent success with Resident Evil 2 and 3.

“Expect the next Dead Space to use the original game as a strong foundation. But it should also have modern visuals. And it will likely bring in new gameplay mechanics inspired by other entries in the franchise,” wrote Grubb earlier this month. “And speaking of Capcom, it is likely a major reason a new Dead Space is happening. While EA has let its horror franchise wither, the Resident Evil series is larger than ever. And Capcom has provided an easy blueprint for EA to follow.”

Whether following that blueprint will prove beneficial for EA remains to be seen. And what could Dead Space‘s return mean for the other prestige survival horror series we’ve been dying to see back on shelves? Reports of Silent Hill‘s resurrection have reached a fever pitch in the past few weeks, thanks to a new partnership with famed horror studio Bloober Team as well as a Reddit conspiracy theory involving Konami, Sony, and Hideo Kojima. With Resident Evil, Dead Space, and Silent Hill all back in the gaming conversation, it does indeed seem like a new golden age for survival horror is just within reach.

No release date has been set for the Dead Space remake. The game is coming to Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC.

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citizen-undead · 6 years

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10 Years of Cloverfield: Part Two

By Jay Truant

I love monster movies. When I was a wee prehumous lad, my dad spent many weekend afternoons introducing me to classic monster movies such as Toho’s Godzilla series, King Kong, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, Them! and many more. My fascination with giant city-destroying monsters developed quickly and would follow me into adulthood – so when I saw the first teaser trailer for the JJ Abrams-produced found footage monster flick Cloverfield, I was all in. I followed the movie’s Alternate Reality Game (ARG), bought a Slusho t-shirt and even took the day off of work to catch the earliest showing of the film on 1-18-08. I was excited by Abrams’ desire to make the Cloverfield monster America’s equivalent of Japan’s Godzilla, and patiently awaited further sequels. As it would turn out, it would be nearly a decade before a sequel arrived in theaters – and once it had, it completely defied any and every expectation that fans had for it.

Cloverfield was a huge success for Paramount Pictures and producer JJ Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions. On a production budget of $25 million, the film quickly turned a profit during its opening weekend, debuting in 3,411 theaters with a final weekend gross of $40 million. Rumors that Paramount were eager to push a sequel into development were the talk of the Internet that Monday morning, and director Matt Reeves addressed the possibility of a follow-up in an interview with Coming Soon:

There’s a moment on the Brooklyn Bridge, and there was a guy filming something on the side of the bridge, and Hud sees him filming and he turns over and he sees the ship that’s been capsized and sees the headless Statue of Liberty, and then he turns back and this guy’s briefly filming him. In my mind that was two movies intersecting for a brief moment, and I thought there was something interesting in the idea that this incident happened and there are so many different points of view, and there are several different movies at least happening that evening and we just saw one piece of another.

Over the next eight years, Reeves and Abrams would discuss the sequel in interviews, despite Abrams’ confirmation of the monster’s death at the end of the original film in an interview with Rolling Stone. In January 2016, Cloverfield fans would have their patience rewarded when a surprise trailer for 10 Cloverfield Lane debuted ahead of Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.

10 Cloverfield Lane was conceived as its own original story independent of the Cloverfield universe in a spec script by Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken titled The Cellar. In 2012, the script was sold to Paramount Pictures and earned a spot on the Tracking Board’s year-end hit list.

In the script, a young woman named Michelle wakes up in an underground bomb shelter with a man named Howard who claims to have rescued her from a nuclear attack that has rendered the air outside the shelter contaminated. Howard’s claims are backed up by Nate, who arrives at the shelter in a hazmat suit and quickly forms a bond with Michelle. Throughout the script, Howard and Nate’s credibility is repeatedly called into question and the reader is left to wonder if an apocalyptic event has truly taken place, or if Michelle has been the victim of an elaborate kidnapping.

Paramount hired Bad Robot to develop The Cellar for their fledgling Insurge Pictures division. Based on Paramount’s success with 2009′s found footage horror flick Paranormal Activity, Insurge was created to focus on the development of micro-budget films. Whiplash director Damien Chazelle was hired to further develop the script, and Dan Trachtenberg signed on to make his feature directorial debut. Chazelle made several updates to the script which included further development of the film’s characters. The character of Nate was changed to Emmett, and retained none of the sinister qualities he possessed in the original spec script. Howard subsequently became a more cagey and volatile character, while Michelle is much stronger-willed than she appears in the script.

During the film’s production, producer JJ Abrams began to feel a kinship between Trachtenberg’s contained science fiction thriller and the original Cloverfield. In interviews, Abrams explained that while 10 Cloverfield Lane wasn’t a direct sequel to Cloverfield, it was a ‘blood relative’, stating that the series would take on an anthology approach similar to Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone where each film would be connected in tone only.

“The spirit of it, the genre of it, the heart of it, the fear factor, the comedy factor, the weirdness factor — there were so many elements that felt like the DNA of this story were of the same place that Cloverfield was born out of. It just became clear that as we were working on the movie, this could be something that is not the sequel that anyone might expect. It’s not the continuation of the story that people might think of, but it was so clearly associated.”

–JJ Abrams, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.

A large portion of the success of the original Cloverfield can be attributed to the film’s innovative viral marketing campaign. In-game websites such as the now defunct 1-18-08.com and Slusho.jp (temporarily down) were initially discovered by fans who obsessively analyzed the film’s teaser trailer looking for potential clues that would help them understand the nature of the film’s monster. The teaser for 10 Cloverfield Lane was similarly picked apart upon arrival, though fans would have to endure a certain degree of misdirection before the official ARG started.

At one point in the teaser, the film’s characters can be seen drinking Swamp Pop, a Louisiana-based soft drink. Fans immediately began scouring Swamp Pop’s official website for clues, believing the cola to be 10 Cloverfield Lane’s equivalent of the fictional Slusho that appeared in the original film. Swamp Pop, however, is a very real product that can be purchased in stores and was likely featured in the film to pinpoint the story’s regional location. This didn’t stop the company from having a bit of fun with fans, however, as their online store offered a “long-term shelter supply” for a brief period of time.

Fans also began investigating Tagruato’s website for potential updates that would point them in the direction of the film’s ARG. Several fans began e-mailing Tagruato with in-game questions, hoping to illicit a reply from the fictional Japanese mining company that played a key role in the Cloverfield ARG. While this tactic initially seemed far-fetched, fans would eventually begin receiving replies from Vanessa Gwon, Tagruato’s employee of the month for January 2016. This would lead to the discovery of Tagruato’s “Employee of the Month” page, which featured a picture of John Goodman as Howard Stambler. Howard is listed on the page as a Telemetry Analyst for Tagruato’s subsidiary company Bold Futura whose work had resulted in a significant breakthrough diagnosing transmission complications with two of Tagruato’s governmental clients’ orbiting satellites. Fans also noticed that he was wearing a shirt containing the phrase “Radioman70″. Visiting radioman70.com redirected fans to FunandPrettyThings.com, the first and only original website of the 10 Cloverfield Lane ARG.

The homepage of FAPT features a number of images that directly reference the film’s teaser trailer. One of those images is a screenshot from Pretty in Pink that prompts the entry of a passphrase when clicked upon. Entering the phrase “Do you want to talk?” leads to a message board with posts from Howard Stambler.

The first post on FAPT’s message board is used to set up the premise of the film’s ARG: Howard Stambler is posting these messages for his daughter Megan to warn her of an impending danger, and instructing her to get to his underground shelter as quickly as possible. Towards the end of his message, Howard insinuates that Megan’s mother has been keeping her from him, potentially due to her belief that Howard is mentally unstable. Further updates from Howard would reference his disdain for Megan’s mother, as well as his longing to reconnect with his estranged daughter.

Fans soon discovered another page on FAPT titled “Life Preserving Information”. The page featured a survival guide that Howard put together for Megan, complete with tips on how to put together a bug-out bag or hot-wire a car. Howard also provided links to other (real) survival websites and included widgets that provided weather updates and train schedules. Subsequent updates featured a link to a real news article about a train track fire in New Orleans.

Similar to the original Cloverfield ARG, FAPT also provided fans with some background information on Howard. In one of Howard’s message board posts, he mentions that he used work with spy satellites. He references a discovery that he and his team made while in space and explains that the government is now trying to cover it up. Howard also mentions that he worked on Seasat, the first Earth-orbiting satellite designed for remote sensing of the Earth’s oceans. Conspiracy theorists believe that the military shut down Seasat when they discovered it could also be used to track submarines, using a short circuit as a covering story. Finally, Howard explains that his mentor was accused of spying and sent to prison for 365 years. It is assumed that Howard’s mentor was a real life Navy Radioman named Jerry Whitworth, a member of the Walker Spy Ring who was sentenced to 365 years for selling secret information to the Soviets.

Howard also designed a text-based survival simulation game for Megan to help her practice surviving inside of the bunker. Fans were able to interact with the game, and could even post their high scores. One user was able to pass 1,000 days inside the bunker, and was rewarded with a secret message from Howard revealing the location of a dead drop in Chicago. Reddit user helveticatt went to the locker at the HI Chicago hostel and found a Paris bag containing a cellphone. The phone had one voicemail, which was a message from Howard to Megan:

“Megan, as promised - a phone just for you and me to talk. Keep it hidden so your mother doesn’t ruin this too. I put my number into your contacts. Call me as soon as you can. I need to hear your voice, and I gotta get you out of Chicago before everything happens. Your life is in real danger, Radiogirl. But I promise to keep you safe. Call me please. Love, dad.”

After the discovery of the dead drop, FAPT continued to be updated regularly. In one message board post, Howard made reference to his estranged wife Denise selling their family heirlooms. Fans quickly found a listing from Denise on Craigslist that contained a picture of the heirlooms with one of Megan’s school notebooks visible to the side of it. Fans e-mailed Denise to ask about her husband, and her replies relayed frightening stories of Howard’s “extreme prepping” and suggested that something terrible may have happened to Megan:

Howard was always worried about emergencies. I used to think it was just how he’d learned to see the world from when he was in the Navy. But things got so much worse when he started working at Bold Futura. He used to come home at night and sit through dinner without saying a word. He became obsessed with building his fallout shelter, putting all our money into it. I didn’t even think he’d mind too much when we left. That way he could keep building his bunker without anybody to get in his way. But reading everything you’ve shown me on this site. I can see that it’s just made him more obsessed. This is not the first time he’s done this. Every few years there’s some new danger that’s going to kill us all. But the disaster never happens. And then he just finds something else to obsess about. During one of his panics, he made us hide in the cellar. Megan must have been about 11, and she wouldn’t stop asking him why we were hiding. So he put his hand over her mouth to keep her quiet, and kept it there so long that she couldn’t breathe. That was the moment I knew that I needed to get us away from him. Maybe if I’d realized it sooner, things wouldn’t have turned out so badly.

The last update on FAPT came from a message board posting by Nikolia Roza, a fellow employee of Bold Futura. Linked in the message is a strange audio file, which starts out as haunting music, but appears to contain some sort of encoded message. Playing the audio file, while running a decoder program, generated an image of one of the alien spaceships from the film approaching the earth.

The trailer for 10 Cloverfield Lane would return to theaters ahead Deadpool. Depending on which theater fans attended, a brief image would quickly flash at the end of the trailer, containing random numbers. By combining the numbers featured on each of the five images, fans were given geographical coordinates to a second dead drop.

Reddit user MugensKeeper discovered the dead drop, which contained survival gear, dry food, a puzzle piece and a USB drive. The USB drive was loaded with an audio file that contained a recording of a Mission Control conversation concerning a large burst of unexplained magnetic energy. At the end of the conversation, they are instructed to cover up the incident.

Shortly after the discovery of the second dead drop, the outgoing message on Howard’s cellphone was changed:

This phone belongs to my daughter. I don’t know how you got it, but it doesn’t matter much anyways. It’s happening… and, I wish everyone just listened to me. I could have helped you all if you just listened.

Howard also texted Megan’s phone, instructing her to delete all the messages in her voicemail box so he could leave her a new message. The final message from Howard arrived a few days later:

“It’s my fault, I see that now. Now it’s too late for you to leave Chicago. I was never going to see you again. You were my little girl, and it was my job to protect you. I failed. I’m going to make it up to you, I know how to make it right, I promise.”

10 Cloverfield Lane yielded another success for Paramount Pictures and Bad Robot Productions. The film was met with critical and commercial acclaim, earning a 90% certified fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and $110 million at the worldwide box office. Some fans, however, felt as though the movie was marketed under false pretenses; at the end of a TV spot that aired during the Super Bowl, a clear variation of the Cloverfield monster’s roar can be heard, leading them to believe that this movie would be a direct follow-up to the original This roar would make its way into the film as one layer of the sound the alien spaceship makes after its blown up by Michelle. Despite their disappointment, these fans nonetheless admitted to enjoying the film as a standalone movie, praising the performances of John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Gallagher Jr.

After the release of 10 Cloverfield Lane, Paramount and Bad Robot announced that they would be adapting a screenplay from writers Doug Jung and Oren Uziel called God Particle with Julius Onah set to direct. The synopsis of the film described a crew aboard a space station finding itself alone after a scientific experiment caused the Earth to disappear. Fans immediately began speculating that the audio file contained in Howard’s dead drop was a reference to the crew and station set to appear in God Particle. A leaked synopsis from the online survey website Swagbucks also made reference to an alien attack, leading many to believe that the next film in the Cloverfield franchise would be a direct follow-up to 10 Cloverfield Lane. As they would discover two years later, the next film in the series wouldn’t be quite so easy to figure out.

#cloverfield #10 cloverfield lane #the cloverfield paradox #horror #netflix

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 7 years

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Why were we allowed to read Animorphs as kids, anyway?

It’s a question I see come up in this fandom again and again: How the heck did Animorphs books make it into school libraries and book fairs across the country to be marketed to eight-year-olds when they feature drug addiction, body dysmorphia, suicide, imperialism, PTSD, racism, sexism, body horror, grey-and-black morality, slavery, torture, major character death, forced cannibalism, and genocide?

To be clear, I don’t actually know the answer to that question. It is, admittedly, a little odd to consider, especially in light of the fact that Bridge to Terabithia gets banned for killing one character (much less several dozen), The Witches gets banned for having a character trapped in the body of an animal (without even going into issues of predation or body horror), The Chocolate War gets banned for having moderately disturbing descriptions of violence between teenagers, Bird gets banned for dealing with the realities of drug addiction, Winnie the Pooh gets banned for having talking animals, Harriet the Spy gets banned because the main character lies to her parents, and The Secret Annex gets banned because Anne Frank describes normal teenage puberty experiences throughout her diary. And yet Animorphs was marketed to children as young as six nationwide, and (despite selling better than even some classics like The Chocolate War at its peak) no one ever bothered to burn those books or cry that they would rot children’s minds.

If I had to take a wildly inexpert guess, knowing as little as I do about the publishing industry and the standards parent groups use to determine whether books are “moral,” I would venture to speculate that there were several different factors at work.

Grown-ups judge books by their covers just as much as children do. For proof of that phenomenon, just scroll through the Animorphs tag on tumblr, any relevant forum on Reddit, or any old post that uses that stupid meme. The book covers suggest that the stories inside will be silly, campy adventures about the escapist fantasy of turning into a dolphin or a lizard. People don’t look too closely at the books with the neon candy-colored backgrounds and the ridiculous photoshop foregrounds, especially not when they imply a promise that the novels themselves will be the most inane form of sci fi.

There’s no sex. To quote the show K.A. Applegate most loves to reference: "I guess parents don't give a crap about violence if there's sex things to worry about." The large majority of books that get banned from schools are thrown out for having sexual content: the freaking dictionary was banned from California schools for explaining what “oral sex” is, And Tango Makes Three was removed from shelves because apparently married couples are inherently shocking if they happen to be gay, and the list of most-banned books in the U.S. is full of books which explain in perfectly child-appropriate terms what puberty is and where babies come from. Animorphs, by contrast, never gets more explicit than Marco calling Taylor a “skank” or Jake and Cassie’s few stolen kisses. The only mentions of nudity are implied (and even then only when the kids are first coming out of morph), and the most explicit thing we ever hear about Rachel and Tobias doing is staying up late in her room to do her homework together. It becomes unbelievably obvious in retrospect that there’s a decent level of queer representation in the books (Marco repeatedly describing both Jake and Ax as “beautiful” or “handsome,” Mertil and Gafinilan, multiple characters casually morphing cross-gender), but it’s also possible to overlook the queerness if you don’t know it’s there. There might be explicit autocannibalism in this series, but at least it never uses the word “nipple.”

There’s no profanity. Again, there’s a strong implication of profanity—Rachel and Jake especially often “use certain words to describe things” in a way that makes it incredibly obvious what they’re saying, and context clues tell us Ax says “fuck” at least once—but given that the strongest expletive that comes up with any regularity is “good grief,” this can act as an obvious (if dumb) heuristic for parents that a book is appropriate for children. People love to count the swear words in Catcher in the Rye when describing why it should be banned (generally without, heaven forbid, reading the goddamn book). Other works such as To Kill a Mockingbird have been banned for using a single word, regardless of context. If a parent is looking to object to a single word or set of words as grounds that a book is inappropriate, the worst they’re going to find is half a dozen instances of “heck” and maybe a dozen of “crap.”

Some of the worst content is context-dependent. As I pointed out above, at least five or six different characters (Tobias, Arbron, Alloran, Tom, Allison Kim) attempt suicide over the course of the series. At least three or four species that we know about (Hork-Bajir, Howlers, Nartec) get largely or entirely annihilated. However, in order to understand that any of that occurs, you actually have to read the books. Not only that, but you have to read them closely. Cates pointed out that some of the most disturbing passages from #33 are, in a vacuum, just descriptions of blinking diodes and weird hallucinations. The description of Tobias attempting suicide is just a long list of mall venues that flash by as he zooms full-speed toward a glass wall. Even the passages with Rachel threatening David (or carrying out those threats) don’t make much sense unless you know how a two-hour limit on morphing works. For the parent skimming these books looking for objectionable content, nothing jumps out.

The books are, in fact, appropriate for children. This quality is what (I believe) prevented parents like mine from taking the books away from us kids even after reading several entire novels out loud to us before bed. The books contain violence, but they sure as hell don’t condone it. They touch on subjects such as drug addiction and parental abuse, but they do so from the point of view of realistic-feeling kids and don’t fetishize that kind of content. Most of the lessons contained within are tough—that there’s no such thing as a simple moral code, that people with the power to prevent atrocity also have the obligation to do so, that members of the hegemony aren’t actually all that special, that the world is a scary and violent place for most people who have to live in it—but they’re also important lessons, and good ones to teach to children. I would be comfortable with my own children (assuming I had any) reading these books at the same age I started reading them, in first and second grade.

You have to understand the fictional science to understand (most of) the horror. Trying to describe some of the most horrifying passages in Animorphs is like “and then they flushed the pool for cleaning, but the pool was full of slugs!” or “but she explained to her son that she had to have a parasite in her brain so the parasite’s friends wouldn’t be suspicious!” or “and then the hawk ate a rabbit, as hawks are wont to do!” while one’s non-fandalite friends stand there and go “... so what?” The laws of Applied Phlebotinum in the series turn those earlier moments into a war crime, an assisted quasi-suicide, and a loss of identity, respectively; however, you have to understand the laws of applied phlebotinum in order to know that. For anyone not reading closely, the horror can be overlooked. For those of us who are reading closely, phrases such as “host breeding program,” “fugue state,” “eight minutes too late,” and “the howlers are all children” (or any mention at all of people being injured while taxxons are in the vicinity, for that matter) are enough to chill your blood. But again, for that to happen, you actually have to read the books. Which we can assume most of the people skimming for curse words do not.

Some of those exact same premises wouldn’t be horror at all if handled by a different author. K.A. Applegate subverts the “wake up, go to school, save the world” trope; normally premises that feature teen superheroes fighting aliens are considered appropriate for all ages (e.g. Avengers Assemble, Kim Possible, Teen Titans) because they feature bloodless violence and gloss over the question of whether aliens are people too. The utterly arbitrary standard that kids should be allowed to see violence but not blood allows for justification of movies like Prince Caspian, Night at the Museum, and Ghostbusters to feature characters getting murdered in all kinds of ways in PG-rated movies. “Violence” and “sci-fi violence” are two different categories according to the MPAA rating system; guess which one gets a lower rating. Of course, there’s a crapton of science showing it doesn’t make the tiniest bit of difference to kids whether or not they see blood, they’re still gonna learn violent behaviors and potentially be traumatized, but again where the arbitrary standard persists. Therefore, if most of the premises of Animorphs books don’t sound horrifying, they must not actually be horrifying. Right?

The books are almost as light as they are heavy. Part of the reason I have comfortably loaned my copies of the early books to friends with ten-year-old kids is that it’s not primarily a downer series. Animorphs aren’t R.L. Stein books, which always end on (the implication of) the protagonist’s death. They’re not uniform horrorfests like Dolls in the Attic or Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Applegate doesn’t fetishize violence the way that Cassandra Clare and Ransom Riggs do. The most-quoted passages from these books are the ones that are funny, not horrifying. These are stories about the joy of aliens discovering Volkswagen Beetles, about the wonder of being able to fly away from one’s life, about friendship and the power of love being enough to make the gods themselves sit up and pay attention. The whole saga tells the story of six kids sacrificing more than their lives to save their families, and of how that sacrifice brings down an empire. I suspect that many parents were either paying so little attention they didn’t realize these stories could be classified as battle epics or as kiddie horror, or else were paying so much attention that they concluded that this series is a battle epic worth reading.

Then again, maybe there was a whole other set of market pressures which accounted for the lack of censorship which I don’t know about. If so, the economics side of tumblr is encouraged to enlighten me.

#animorphs #marketing #body horror #kiddie horror #censorship #seriously tho WHY WERE THE SIX-YEAR-OLDS READING ABOUT AUTOCANNIBALISM IN THE 90S #what even was that

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narcisbolgor-blog · 6 years

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9 Naughty Adult Jokes Hidden in Classic Kids Movies

Kids movies are supposed to be good, wholesome fun for the whole family.

And by the whole family, we mean the kids.

The only problem is, adults make them, and after spending months, or sometimes even years making a single film, those adults get very, very bored.

That's when they make very adult jokes, which they sometimes leave in the final cut of the movie.

Here are 11 of the most risqué ones.

1. The Grinch - Where do babies come from

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Reddit user Herp-de-Herp reminds us that when innocent Cindy Lou Who asks the Grinch’s two aunts where babies come from, “one of the men in that scene sees the baby and yells “Hey Honey, our baby’s here!” and then mutters “He looks just like your boss….””

Get it?

One strange thing we’ve always wondered is if the cuckolded man in The Grinch ever truly understood that he’d been cuckolded.

Maybe we’re thinking too deeply about this. The Grinch is a kid’s movie, after all.

2. Car - Flashing lights

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In the world of Cars, stock car Lightning McQueen is a big shot. He’s driven to win, and tends to accomplish whatever goals he sets, including winning prestigious competitions.

No wonder the twins Mia and Tia are his “biggest fans.” When they meet him in person, they “flash” their lights at him, and the police have to lead them away.

Subtle.

3. Ratatouille - Spit or swallow

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This is the conundrum that plagues famed food critic Anton Ego. Ego, who is a man of rare and refined tastes, refuses to ingest any food that is beneath his palette.

As he explains to the awestruck Linguine, “I don’t like food, I love it. If I don’t love it, I don’t swallow. ”

Okay…

4. Ratatouille - Vegetables

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Another naughty moment in Ratatouille comes when Linguine has a breakdown over using a rat to cook in one of France’s poshest kitchens.

When he goes to the refrigerator to cool off, he is followed by the suspicious Chef Skinner, who asks him what he’s doing. Linguine replies he’s familiarizing himself with the vegetables, to which Skinner gifts him this immortal repartee:

“One can get TOO familiar with vegetables, you know! “

5. Ratatouille - Little friend

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Honestly Ratatouille is a little treasure trove of obscenities for adults to spot. Another classic moment comes when Linguine is overcome with the guilt of lying to his love interest Colette, and tries to come clean to her.

What Linguine wants to say is that he has a tiny little rat that tells him what to do. What he ends up saying instead is that he has a “tiny little…”

Cue Colette glancing horrified at his nether regions.

6. Shrek - Lord Farquaad

Possibly the king of dirty jokes in children’s movies is the animated film Shrek. Honestly, we’re not even sure it qualifies as a kid’s film it’s so perverse.

For instance, the villain’s name is Lord Farquaad, which sounds a whole lot like the word f***wad.

Classic.

7. Monster House - The uvula

Monster House is a horror movie for kids, and a very scary one at that. We were honestly so frightened by the whole venture, we wondered how – HOW – it was marketed as a kid’s movie.

The scariness of it wasn’t the only thing that gave us question marks. There’s a scene in the movie where the house reveals itself in all its frightening glory, leading to the kids pointing out its anatomy.

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“Well, if those are the teeth, and that’s the tongue, then that must be the uvula!,” says one kid, pointing at a chandelier.

“Oh, so it’s a girl house,” replies another kid.

Uvula is the dangly organ in your throat, but since this is a “female house”, we’re pretty sure he means vulva, which is a whole other organ entirely.

Nice.

7. Toy Story 2 - Buzz Lightyear pops a woody

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Cowgirl Jesse’s talents sure must be stimulating, because when the heroic Buzz Lightyear first claps eyes on them in Toy Story 2, his jaw drops and his wings pop out.

Yep, you guessed it, he pretty much sprang the galactic toy version of an erection.

Nice job, Disney.

8. Madagascar - Sugar Honey Iced Tea

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Say you’re a busy writer with a bit of a potty mouth, and you want to use cursing in a kid’s movie without actually cursing at all. Do what the writers of Madagascar did and make Sugar Honey Iced Tea your go-to exclamation.

Let that acronym set in…

9. Shrek - Trying to compensate for something

youtube

Remember that scene in Shrek when Shrek and Donkey walk up to Lord Farquaad’s castle and he remarks, “Do you think maybe he’s compensating for something?”

Yeah, that was definitely an innuendo.

Definitely…

Original Article : HERE ; This post was curated & posted using : RealSpecific

=> *********************************************** Originally Published Here: 9 Naughty Adult Jokes Hidden in Classic Kids Movies ************************************ =>

9 Naughty Adult Jokes Hidden in Classic Kids Movies was originally posted by 11 VA Viral News

#11 VA Viral News

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savetopnow · 6 years

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2018-04-03 01 MOVIE now

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derkastellan · 4 years

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Musings: Fanboys...

I hope I don’t come over as a negative nelly in general, I have to admit coming from a culture that likes to criticize. A minor sample maybe, but in the heady days Google+ (which was quite a boon for roleplayers in general) I was part of a discussion where a bunch of grumpy Germans complained that our American friends tended to hype even rather mediocre products over the moon - and would avidly defend their makers from criticism.

I even forgot the name of the product - a copy-cat imitation of the Forgotten Realms (themselves not the most original product at times) for Savage Worlds. Ah yes, Shaintar. Found it. I remember one reviewer quipping that the map only contained equidistant cities. A bit of a cardinal sin for making a varied map.

I come to this from two recent experiences - trying out Monte Cook’s Numenera and then reinstalling Torment: Tides of Numenera to play it after it sat there for two years or more, unfinished.

I like Numenera for its setting, but I think the game system is seriously overhyped among its fans. It tries to codify how the GM interacts with the story into meta-gaming with the players, and it does so poorly, and it at times tries to solve the wrong problems. Basically, “GM intrusions” are meant to make the game “more interesting” but the first thing they came up with in the original edition was to say “well, your sword breaks in the middle of combat.” And they have been struggling with finding a better way to express it since. Taking the Narrative by the Tail is another product failing to do so.

Now, over time “GM intrusions” (and now: “Player Intrusions”) have evolved by people using them. If you like the idea of giving the players a bit of a story choice the system is workable but frankly to me it just messes with the natural flow of GMing a game and pacing it well. Also, by now reddit provides many decent examples of GM intrusions and help for many other of Numenera’s issues. Of which there are plenty. The game tries to be not as crunchy (and definitely not as combat-oriented) but it only gets there halfway. It is neither a good/pure story game nor does it truly leave its d20 roots behind. It leaves many areas poorly defined - like what is an action, what is a saving throw/free roll? It’s wishy-washy language and omissions make several focus descriptors and powers in the game something the GM has to research online or figure out for themselves, when really these should have been properly game-designed given they made it into the core book of a game. (And 2nd edition, at that! Does all of this truly get play-tested?)

You wouldn’t know this from reading through the internet. Some people are over the moon about this game as if it set them free from some imaginary shackles. You would at times this is a gift from the gods to players and GMs alike. I guess if you only ever played D&D and clones before this might be true (somewhat), but there are so many other RPGs out there just as good or better. Don’t get me wrong: Numenera is a solid, enjoyable experience. But it’s also at times clunky and not exceptional as a game engine.

Its setting is exceptional , though. It sometimes relies a bit on fridge logic, but is interesting, fascinating, full of potential, and encourages many play styles from regular dungeon fantasy to horror and even to building your own settlement. The game is well-supported and there are some gems for it. (And what fridge logic you ask? You have had at least one galaxy-dominating previous culture on Earth but it just left the Numenera of these other civilizations untouched, even though it must have surpassed all these other civilizations? This does not compute... There are several of these in this game.)

And therein, I think, lies the rub. You see, when people tend to fall in love with something - the feeling of being freed from some rules-lawyering shackles maybe, or a great setting, they tend to view the whole thing through rose-tinted glasses. Even things worthy of critique.

There is another game where I experienced this, a game in comparison to which Numenera shines but has some similarities with. Shadow of the Demon Lord. It is another attempt at a lighter version of a D&D-like game that sells itself through its setting. What lured me in was them claiming they had a rich and varied set of classes customizable into 64 variations that was somehow similar to Warhammer Fantasy RPG (which I had not played at that point, but 4th edition I’ve discussed since...).

Numenera and SotDL have indeed something very much in common. They both allow you to select from a big set of character building options to build very narrowly defined, one-trick pony characters. Have a few powers from the same theme but not many, definitely too few to build a varied toolbox to solve problems with.

For Numenera I realized this when playing Torment: Tides of Numenera. You quickly realize how few powers and variations you have thereof in a computer game.Both the CRPG and the tabletop try to explain that limitation away by de-emphasizing combat, or claiming to do so. Fact is, tabletop Numenera has slews of interesting, captivating, and visually brilliantly depicted enemies that feature everywhere in the game, so combat, while not directly rewarded, is as much a feature of the game as in D&D almost. You don’t publish 350+ pages (Ninth World Bestiary 1 & 2, beautiful products!) worth of monster manual without intending the GM to use it... but as varied as these might be, your character is not.

The one-use cyphers and artifacts then serve to give you the missing problem-solving capabilities and to vary your approach, but think about it for a moment. If the GM hands out a cypher befitting your problem, how is that different from playing a point-and-click adventure on tabletop? Figure out where and how to apply the solution. A puzzle. Often in D&D your wizard, cleric, druid, etc powers can become tools expanding the ways in which you solve things your own way. Given the limits of your class builds items become their replacement in Numenera. And frankly, I’m quite okay with that! (Though it becomes very unconvincing in the generic Cypher System spun off from Numenera and The Strange.) By which I mean, at least you have something here to build a toolbox, albeit a temporary one, from. (And after all, didn’t most of the powers a character could really rely on in old-school D&D come from their gear?)

Shadows and Demons and... oh Lord, why?

In comparison, SotDL character feel ... just limited. I quickly discovered how poorly balanced the game was when running it for a few levels with my players. When you don’t optimize the build for the fighter type, you can’t get into the heavy gear early and the rogue became, by no special virtue of the player, the main damage dealer. The wizard and cleric types had very limited spell selections, and the wizard was the better healer by virtue of being able to get into additional spell schools. The wording of many powers was confusing and I had regular rules questions for the web community without satisfying answers.

The choices you make during character evolution hem you in, forcing you to live with your limiting choices, they do not expand your character, at least it doesn’t feel this way. There may be 64 variations, but they are all very limited in scope, making characters of very limited capability. The poor balancing between basic classes and the unsatisfying rules made me switch the group to 5th edition D&D, and we never regretted that in comparison.

But again other people reacted in general very differently to the game, and maybe that was due to liking the setting. You see, I didn’t like the setting and did have a very different game in mind. (And now they are releasing a version basically doing the same. A bit late for me, but maybe they want to expand away from their original buyer base.)

But people may have very well liked the dark fantasy, horror, grim vibe. And if you’re into that, maybe it delivers for you. I can’t tell. I honestly can’t. I do know however that the game was well-supported with a slew of expansion books and adventures, giving people plenty to chew on. And I think that combination of setting and support plus some hype gave many people reason to like the game. (And it is a lighter engine, no doubt, if you prefer that kind of thing. I usually do!)

Wherein I actually try to make the original point

And that’s what I’m getting at. It’s hard to put out your own view of these games without running into people who behave like fanboys. And I am actually happy I only was disagreed with emphatically, but not in a hateful way. It just annoys me that people want to ignore a game’s failings because it also has strengths. Do a few things right enough and you will attract people who will see no wrong.

Now, Steam’s binary rating system (recommend/do not recommend) doesn’t help with videogames for example, but when seeing that Torment: Tides of Numenera has by now a “Mostly Positive” rating one has to wonder. The game is mediocre at best, really buggy, and short. But I have to admit because of its setting and aspirations of living up to a much better game, people to tend to give it a lot of credit where little is due. Admittedly my opinion, but you can find many well-reasoned, well-written scathing reviews of the game.

Yet people have by now elevated it into “Most Positive” where “Mixed Ratings” would serve it just right. Neither good nor all bad. But somehow how people would like to feel about it, or people wanting to push the genre, or people getting it for less money erased over time all the controversy of unfulfilled promises, bugs, or its other failings. (I reviewed it here if you are interested. I will say no more.)

Criticize what is improvable, love what’s great. I might even give the new SotDL spin-off a try. I am sometimes very critical of games but I always hope for a lot. And I wish these games were fixed and improved upon, not left in the state they are. I wish there would be a better edition of Dungeon Crawl Classics because the game could benefit from a coherent feel and vision, right now it’s a mess, but a lovable one. I wish there were improved versions of both the games I discussed here at length because I like well-supported games, and these issues are fixable. (And sadly, you can criticize computer games all you want, but few are fixed. I’m happy that some publishers listen and Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: Original Sin, and a few others got better sequels.)

Frankly, I might like playing Numenera with 5th edition rules better, and they offer that. While this is another hype money train everybody wants to get on, if done right, it can work. 5e is a solid, robust system, and while delivering mostly one kind of experience, it does so very well.

What I’m saying is that all games are improvable. New editions can be made, compatible even with older ones. D&D had 3rd edition superseded with 3.5 for good reasons. Numenera: Discovery balanced the basic classes better in terms of powers, it was quite apparent that they tried to avoid players making un-hittable jacks or glaives spamming the same moves all the time. Games evolve and they should. By making Numenera: Discovery pregens for a Numenera 1st edition adventure I realized how subtle the changes were and started to appreciate them.

Just dare to call a horse a horse. While I prefer peaceful fanboys over the trolling kind, there’s no reason to spare improvable games criticism. And all games are improvable!

(And to be fair, Numenera does a lot of things right. It’s mechanic to reduce a roll’s difficulty to 0 and thereby avoiding it is a very worthy addition to the role-playing catalog. It rewards skillful stacking of advantages and makes players feel they have reliable competence at their hands like no d100, d20, or 3d6 system can imitate.)

#role-playing #rpg #tabletop #pen & paper #musings #numenera #shadow of the demon lord

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nicholerestrada · 6 years

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How A Generation Of Sims Players Got Away With Murder

Mortimer Goth settles in to one of the 15 wicker chairs that have suddenly appeared by his lit fireplace. He feels strangely compelled to sit and remain seated, as if guided by an unseen hand, even as the room he’s in grows curiously hotter and hotter. Before he knows it, the chairs around him burst into pixelated flames. He’s on fire! He calls for help, but his wife, Bella, can’t hear him. She’s swimming in circles in their backyard pool, searching fruitlessly for a ladder that doesn’t exist.

For the uninitiated fiddling around their family desktop, the original version of “The Sims” was mostly about nurturing humanlike characters through life’s minutiae. For everyone else, “The Sims” was and is a game about death, about wacky, inconsequential death, about fiery death and watery death, death by starvation and death by electric shock and death by skydiving malfunction ― Mortimer and Bella’s worst recurring nightmare. And as the game evolved over the years, a kind of meta-game has formed around it: a subtle relationship between creative, death-obsessed “Sims” players and the game’s ever-adapting designers, keen on raising the stakes of the simulated lives we so easily ended.

Today, death on “The Sims” can feel harder and harder to come by. But it’s never impossible.

In the scenario above, the deaths of Mortimer Goth and his wife were no accident. They were the result of a human player deciding to set in motion a series of events that would lead to the inevitable demise of digital beings brought to life in a simulation game. That human player could have ushered Mortimer and his wife into a room and removed the door, watching as the Sims starved inside. The player could have prompted the characters to start making a feast with their cooking skill at Level 1, tempting a shoddy oven to burst aflame and engulf them. The player could have even neglected the couple’s guinea pig, only to have Mortimer pick it up and allow the rodent to administer one fatal bite.

But that player chose to cluster highly flammable chairs near the fireplace and hope they caught like tinder, and remove the ladder in the swimming pool once Bella, ignorant of the option of simply lifting herself out, dived in.

Back in the heyday of the game’s first iteration, everyone killed their Sims. I feel confident in stating this even without hard data to back it up: Killing Sims wasn’t exceptional behavior, it was the norm. Just look at the Reddit threads relaying depraved “Sims” activity with comments spooling into the thousands, or this Polygon article, where it is written, “It is a proven fact people love killing off Sims.”

“That was the only enjoyable way to play ‘The Sims’!” Maddy Myrick, 31, told me. She’d responded to my callout on Twitter, asking first-generation “Sims” players to explain the morbid habit of killing a thing you were ostensibly tasked with keeping alive. “Sometimes I would start a new family, convinced that I would let them live. But, inevitably, I quickly became bored with designing their house (which I was never able to finish).”

And so she killed them. Sims have died for less.

One of the most common tactics for killing a Sim, beautiful in its simplicity and effectiveness, is the “murdershed” method, as one “Sims” player described it: the doorless room.

“My favorite thing to do was lure my Sims into a seemingly normal space and then take away its exit,” my colleague Sara Boboltz confessed in a direct message. “So, I’d make a tiny house and take away the door. I’d make a pool and take away the ladder. Make a two-story house, take the stairs. You get it. Sometimes my Sims would be teachers I didn’t like.”

“I made a guy who was a compulsive neatfreak,” Reddit user vsanna wrote in a comment that rose to the top of its thread. “Put him in a really surreal little house with a wedding buffet and a hamster or something, deleted the door. Eventually he went insane from lack of cleanliness and depression over his little rodent friend dying, and starved to death once the banquet rotted. I put the resulting urn in the room. I then repeated an identical scenario several times, always keeping the urns in the room.

“Eventually the tenth iteration of this guy is up all night, every night, terrified of a parade of ghosts of himself.”

Our penchant for serial killing has not gone unnoticed at “Sims” headquarters. According to “The Sims 4” senior producer Grant Rodiek, who’s been with the company since 2005, the latest version of the game registers around 28,000 Sim deaths per day.

“I think [killing Sims is] a way players can express ultimate control over a thing. It’s funny, mischievous, dark, without being grotesque,” Rodiek said. “It’s a kinder, gentler method of using a magnifying glass to burn insects.”

Between life and death in “Sims 4,” there’s still no single path to playing. The vastly open-ended game nudges you toward certain goals — meeting your Sims’ physical needs; securing them a means of making money — but no task or accomplishment is necessarily required.

Rodiek and his colleagues have had a lot of time to analyze the preferences and behaviors of “Sims” players. He’s whittled users down to a handful of types: There are the “aspiring Frank Lloyd Wrights” who love tinkering in the game’s Build mode; the Create-a-Sim artists who painstakingly remodel favorite characters or celebrities in digital form, or the narrative writers who play out classic storylines (think: mysterious new kid, star-crossed lovers, etc.) in Live mode.

“And then you have the sort of people … we call them deviant players,” Rodiek said. “People who like to mess with their Sims, people who like to poke at the system, people who like to have fun and break the game and do weird stuff.” (These categories, I’d add, are not necessarily mutually exclusive.)

In the early years, these players, in an effort to discover all the ways they could ruin their Sims’ lives, might’ve swapped stories with friends about building murder houses and endlessly uppingtheir budgets for DIY torture devices using the “rosebud” money cheat.

As the internet’s capacity to bring people together has evolved since the early 2000s, so have user-created parameters to keep gameplay interesting. Forums hold lists of restrictive challenges, which can involve everything from having one Sim birth 100 babies to re-creating consecutive historical eras with each generation of a family. On YouTube, players show themselves re-enacting “The Hunger Games” or building lengthy mazes meant only to make simulated life harder for their tiny humans.(One Simmer who orchestrated 12 seasons of Sim “Hunger Games” — complete with training days and sporadic gifts of food like apples — was recently hired on by Electronic Arts as an associate producer.)

Over the years, the current base game — there are four total now — is supplemented with expansion packs to provide new ways to play the game — and kill your Sims. Rodiek said it’s the first thing developers plan out with each new expansion, along with new places for your digital hedonists to hook up.

Much-beloved YouTuber “Call Me Kevin” has a series showcasing his comically deadly restaurant in “Sims 4,” where unskilled chefs serve up the sometimes-fatal pufferfish nigiri introduced in the “City Living” expansion pack. It’s the only thing on the menu. Watching him play, you see Sims dining casually together, only to be interrupted when one diner clutches at their throat and falls head-first into their food. He’s amassed quite the graveyard behind the restaurant, complete with a coffin that you can WooHoo in — Sim-speak for sex.

Part of the widespread appeal of killing Sims might be that the actual moments of their demise aren’t particularly disturbing. Generally, dying Sims just drop or crumple to the floor in distress, disappearing altogether in some versions of the game. Coming across a hungry cowplant provides the bizarre and delightful visual of a giant flower consuming a Sim, but there’s no blood or errant limbs left behind. In a fire, Sims might become visibly odorous as their Hygiene levels plummet, but that’s about it — no gore or horror-movie theatrics.

There are some deaths “The Sims” avoids altogether.

“We don’t let toddlers burn to death,” Rodiek said. “That’s just gross. That’s not funny, there’s nothing humorous there. We don’t let dogs burn to death because like, again, that’s gross.”

Eventually, the grim reaper, who can talk to but sadly not have children with Sims, comes to collect your character’s soul, leaving an urn or gravestone in the Sim’s place. The reaper himself has a cellphone or a tablet, ostensibly to process the Sim’s soul, or something. It’s all a little goofy.

The fact that players have long brought Sim death on themselves is all a part of probing the edges of an established world.

Philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen, who has written extensively about the philosophy of games, likened the act of killing Sims to the innocent phenomenon of “speedrunning,” where players try to complete a given game as fast as possible.

“One of my favorites is a speed run of ‘[Super] Mario [Bros.]’ where you try to get zero points … even though the traditional goal of ‘Mario’ is to max out your points. Trying to get to the end as fast as possible with zero points is actually much harder and much weirder,” he said. “You’re playing the game in an unintended way, which, for some people, I think it makes them feel more creative.”

“The system seems to tell you, ‘Look, the point of this game is to take care of the Sims,’ and all the tools that are given to you are given to you to take care of your Sims,” he said. “So if you want to kill your Sims, you have to do kind of creative and unexpected things and kind of remix the game.”

However, Nguyen said it was also possible that, for the players who like “The Sims” for its narrative possibilities and engage with “the fiction of the game,” explorations of death could have deeper personal significance.

“It may vary from player to player, but I think from talking to a lot of players it’s actually about the creativity of using the system for a new purpose,” he said.

Whatever the explanation, the game’s creators have come to understand that we use “The Sims” not just to simulate life, but to play God. And it’s impacted the way the game has shifted, from “Sims 1” to “Sims 4.”

The first two versions of “The Sims” ― which Rodiek described as “disastrously hard” ― made it easier for the Goths to expire outside of a player’s purview. Direct Sim-on-Sim homicide isn’t possible, so accidents were more often fatal: a grilled cheese that burns down the house, a malfunctioning skydiving simulator, or a fatal shock delivered to a character standing in a puddle during an electric repair. In “The Sims 2,” simply being in the front yard at the exact time a satellite falls to Earth could be the end of a Sim’s brief journey.

But nowadays, compared to “Sims 1” and “Sims 2,” it’s a lot harder to deliberately kill off dear Mortimer and Bella. Anyone coming to “The Sims 4,” the game’s latest version, might notice their characters can now easily hop out of a pool, ladder or not. It’s a change that came with “The Sims 3,” effectively eliminating one of the preferred manners of Sims murder.

“I love how funny and surprising it is to say, ‘Hey, we as a team recognize what you’re doing and, ha-ha, we flipped the switch,’” Rodiek said. The decision was born out of developers’ desire to further up Sims’ intelligence and self-sufficiency with each new version. Players, he said, “got pissed at this.”

“Basically, our thought was if Sims are smarter, and if Sims are less likely to just frickin’ die all the time, well, maybe they’re smart enough to pull their asses out of the pool,” he said, noting that you can still kill them from exhaustion if you build walls around the pool. “They’ll still fart at the wrong time and they’ll still just pass out in a pool of vomit if they’re tired enough and the timing is wrong, but that, at least, is a win for them.”

Now, if you leave them unattended, “your Sims will basically default to neutral,” Rodiek said. Players can worry less about making sure everyone has had a bathroom break or a meal. If you don’t direct your Sim to do it, they’ll likely figure it out themselves.

“Our tagline was, ‘We want to move past peeing,’” he said of shifting Sims’ needs beyond basic survival. “However, for them to really succeed, you have to nurture them. And nurturing your Sims comes from more emotional, higher-level fulfillment.”

Now, Sims have aspirations generally based on interests or specific actions: One Sim might want to become a tech genius, while another wants to become the neighborhood enemy. Fulfilling these wishes results in rewards that make the Sim better.

I’m usually a gentle “Sims” player, nurturing my families into fulfilling home lives and careers, watching as they level up in activities like baking and guitar playing, occasionally tossing in a love affair here and there. For the purposes of this article, though, I set out to kill as many Sims in “Sims 4” as I could.

Not wanting to delete doors and watch my Sims starve, I fell back on faithful killing strategies, like the classic fire scenarios. There were newer tactics I could try, too: In “Sims 4,” even Sims’ emotions, taken to the extreme, can be fatal; their hearts can explode from sheer rage or cease beating from hysterics.

In “Seasons,” the most recent expansion pack, Sims who are skilled in flower arranging can whip up a mysterious plant, the scent of which ages or kills its recipient. A video from website Sims VIP illustrating this particular death demonstrates the cruelty: At first, an elder Sim is pleased to be receiving a gift. But upon realizing his bad luck, he becomes angry, shouting out “Narb!” He wipes his brow, swoons to his knees, and even checks his pulse one last time before the grim reaper arrives.

“Seasons” also allows the possibility of death by freezing or overheating, or getting struck by lightning. New kinds of warnings tip you off to these sorts of ends: The game indicates via a Sim’s “moodlet” that your electronic buddy might die if he doesn’t get out of the blizzard, or change out of his snowsuit during a heat wave, or run in from the thunderstorm.

One of the suggested ways to murder your Sims is through overexhaustion, though once a Sim becomes “uncomfortable,” many actions, like jogging, become unavailable to a player. In “Sims 4,” more Sims simply die of old age than tragically before their time: Age accounts for 30.5 percent of deaths in the game, compared to the 11 percent who die of hunger; the 10.7 percent who drown; or the 10.6 percent who die in a fire, according to statistics provided by Rodiek.

Maybe I’m unpracticed, but I couldn’t murder my Sims. I made one Sim flirt with her husband’s dad in front of her husband, enraging the husband until the spouses became enemies, then nemeses. I had them all fight — illustrated by a cloud of dust and occasional flashes of limb — but it only made them a little dazed. I had them all pee themselves, then installed a shower and had them all walk in on each other, but no one reached the deadly “mortified” level of embarrassment. I made the dad swim in the pool in wintertime, but he kept getting out once he started freezing. Without resorting to the walls-around-the-pool method Rodiek mentioned, I couldn’t play God quite like I used to.

Defeated, I had the enraged husband and wife divorce before closing my game. It seemed only fair. When I opened up “Sims 2,” however, I found that one installation of the “shoddy fireplace” did the trick in no time. My Sims freaked out and wailed, too frantic to obey my requests for them to stand directly in the flames — but the blaze got them in the end.

Electronic Arts

A “shoddy fireplace” did the trick to start a fire in “Sims 2.” The cat, seen in the lower right corner, ended up running away. The fifth household member was swimming in circles in the pool.

Stakes, Rodiek acknowledged during our interview, are what make “The Sims” fundamentally interesting. Making death a part of the game from the start provided those stakes.

“It is really great when people have a Sim that they really care about, and they care about how they orchestrated their life, and they see them raise children, and maybe get a divorce, and then their children grow up and then they die. They go, ‘Oh, man, I could just re-create them, but it will never be that Sim.’”

“Our game is about creating weird, quirky, erratic, strange little humanlike characters that we want you to care about deeply,” he added.

In a perpetual quest, developers hope to keep inching “The Sims” toward a better reflection of real life and death, to keep raising the stakes and allowing customization in ways that matter to players.

In 2016, “Sims” released an update that expanded the possibilities of gender expression among characters, no longer restricting certain hair, makeup or clothing items to one gender or another and allowing players to select whether a Sim could impregnate others or get pregnant, regardless of outward appearance. Similarly, Rodiek said, creators are discussing the possibility of incorporating Sims who are deaf or hard of hearing, blind, or use a wheelchair. To help develop these, the team has been talking to players who have similar experiences.

“In actually talking to these players, talking about how it affects their lives, we’ve been thinking, how can we reflect this in a way that works in our game?” he said. “That’s the stuff we’re actually looking into that we really want to figure out, because it’s scary to get it wrong, but I think it’s so important if we can get it right.”

In terms of death, Rodiek said he could envision developing a kind of long-term, terminal disease within the game from which Sims can’t recover (but, seriously, don’t ask him about it on Twitter, because they’re not making this right now).

“I could see us approaching that in sort of a generic way that we’re not saying that it’s this specific cancer. But we’re basically saying that your Sim has something that can’t be cured and they will die before their time as a result of that,” he said. Maybe, he added, it’d be an option players could toggle on or off.

“I think it’s a reality of life … in a way that is like, yes, it’s real, and yes, it’s sad. But maybe for someone who wants it, it’s cathartic or its interesting and it helps you tell a story,” Rodiek said. “Those are some of the things we’re trying to grapple with and talk to our players about how to get right. And it’s terrifying, but it’s really cool if we could do it.”

Illustration by Tara Jacoby for HuffPost.

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Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/killing-sims-death-murder-ea_us_5adf94dbe4b07be4d4c58fd4

Source: https://hashtaghighways.com/2018/10/28/how-a-generation-of-sims-players-got-away-with-murder/

from Garko Media https://garkomedia1.wordpress.com/2018/10/28/how-a-generation-of-sims-players-got-away-with-murder/

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michaeljtraylor · 6 years

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How A Generation Of Sims Players Got Away With Murder

Today, death on “The Sims” can feel harder and harder to come by. But it’s never impossible.

And so she killed them. Sims have died for less.

One of the most common tactics for killing a Sim, beautiful in its simplicity and effectiveness, is the “murdershed” method, as one “Sims” player described it: the doorless room.

“Eventually the tenth iteration of this guy is up all night, every night, terrified of a parade of ghosts of himself.”

There are some deaths “The Sims” avoids altogether.

The fact that players have long brought Sim death on themselves is all a part of probing the edges of an established world.

“It may vary from player to player, but I think from talking to a lot of players it’s actually about the creativity of using the system for a new purpose,” he said.

Electronic Arts

A “shoddy fireplace” did the trick to start a fire in “Sims 2.” The cat, seen in the lower right corner, ended up running away. The fifth household member was swimming in circles in the pool.

Stakes, Rodiek acknowledged during our interview, are what make “The Sims” fundamentally interesting. Making death a part of the game from the start provided those stakes.

“Our game is about creating weird, quirky, erratic, strange little humanlike characters that we want you to care about deeply,” he added.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby for HuffPost.

Download

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/killing-sims-death-murder-ea_us_5adf94dbe4b07be4d4c58fd4

from RSSUnify feed https://hashtaghighways.com/2018/10/28/how-a-generation-of-sims-players-got-away-with-murder/ from Garko Media https://garkomedia1.tumblr.com/post/179530072194

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kidsviral-blog · 6 years

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Appreciate The Horror Genre The Right Way With These 10 Scary Films.

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/appreciate-the-horror-genre-the-right-way-with-these-10-scary-films/

Appreciate The Horror Genre The Right Way With These 10 Scary Films.

Halloween is approaching fast, so it’s time once again to break out the horror flicks! They’re fun any time of year, but they’re especially fun when you curl up with (or hide under) a big blanket with some friends. Or alone…if you dare.

There are so many horror movies and, unfortunately, a lot of them are pretty terrible. Don’t get me wrong, I love a terrible horror movie from time to time. There is something satisfying about laughing at something that was obviously meant to terrify.

But there are only so many horror movie tropes you can see before they start to bore you. Creepy little girls in white nightgowns, flash cuts, jump scares, and oozing black substances get old. With so many sub-par films out there, it can get disappointing when you’re in the mood for a scare.

So we compiled a list of some of the best and scariest movies we’ve ever seen. We’re leaving out a lot of the classics, because you’ve probably heard of them. Instead, we’re including smaller movies and movies that might not be traditional “horror” films, but are creepy anyway.

1.) The Haunting, Robert Wise, 1963

ForgottenFlix

The 1999 sequel never happened. It never happened. Okay? This horror movie is perfect for people squeamish about horror movies, because the scares are in your mind rather than on the screen. You don’t have to wonder when something is going to appear and shock-scare you, but hardened horror veterans can appreciate it, too. It’s a classic story of a group of strangers in a supposedly haunted house looking to do research on the paranormal. And, yes, they find it.

2.) The Innkeepers, Ti West, 2011

BadAssDigest

A hotel with a known ghost legend is about to close. Two ghost hunting employees, alone for the hotel’s last night, are determined to find ghosts before they have to find new jobs. And they do…kind of. This is another film that’s more psychological than just things popping out and shrieking, and it requires thought. Director Ti West stated in interviews that he’s not content to let the audience in on too much. Instead, he makes them come along for the ride without the benefit of figuring out what’s actually going on.

3.) Paranormal Activity, Oren Peli, 2007

Empire

No, wait, hear me out. Ignore that this movie became a franchise with about a billion sequels. The original movie is actually pretty good. It’s a found-footage movie chronicling couple Micah and Katie’s move into a new house and the way they cope when things start…happening. It’s a pretty slow-paced movie, with little in the way of scares or special effects, but what it offers is effective. It’s also an interesting take on the “haunted house” genre, with the people, rather than the space, being haunted. Skip the sequels, though. They’re not worth it.

4.) The Orphanage, J.A. Bayona, 2007

TooScaryToWatch

A couple moves into an old orphanage with the hopes of refurbishing it and making it into a home for disabled children. When they arrive, their young son Simon begins to make friends, in particular a little boy named Tomas. Trouble is, no one can see Tomas. As the movie unfolds, secrets about Tomas, Simon, and the orphanage become unveiled. Though there are horror elements, and the film is chilling and suspenseful, but what carries this one is the compelling story. It’s also produced by Guillermo del Toro, so it’s visually striking as well.

5.) The Conjuring, James Wan, 2013

SciFiNow

A family of seven moves into a picturesque old house. When things start getting creepy, they call in famed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. Then things get really creepy. This film was shot and styled like a classic 70s horror movie. It has nothing in the way of gore, violence, sex or even swearing, but was given an R rating simply because it’s really scary. It’s also lightyears better than Wan’s Insidious films.

6.) Event Horizon, Paul W.S. Anderson, 1997

Via Joanna Parypinski

The crew of a spaceship discovers a ghost ship off Jupiter that disappeared after generating and entering a manmade black hole. The trouble with creating black holes is you might open up into a dimension of pure chaos, but the rescue crew doesn’t realize this. What follows is the descent into both figurative and literal hell for the crew. This is not a film for children, with a considerable amount of violence and gore. And while it’s scary, the film’s real horror comes from the impending doom, the isolation of space, and each of the crew members’ personal demons.

7.) Jug Face, Chad Crawford Kinkle, 2013

YouTube/hollywoodstreams

This Southern gothic tale is not what you expect. Whatever you expect, you’re probably wrong. The movie centers on a rural, isolated community that worships “the Pit,” a hole in the ground exuding a supernatural force…and demands human sacrifice. Again, whatever you’re thinking now, you’re also wrong. It’s a desolate, ominous, character-driven piece with a mythology of its own.

8.) The Moth Diaries, Mary Harron, 2011

Japan Times

This movie is “horror” in the traditional sense, drawing inspiration from the gothic novels of the 19th century. When a newcomer strikes up a close friendship with her best friend, boarding school student Rebecca struggles with the feeling that something isn’t quite right about this new girl. Or maybe she’s just jealous? Using the classic vampire tale as its foundation, this movie is also an exploration of the friendships of teen girls. It’s an interesting departure from the basic vampire story. Vampire fans should take a look.

9.) Alien, Ridley Scott, 1979

Reddit/BugOverloard

“But wait,” you say, “that’s a sci-fi movie!” Yes, it is, but it’s more science horror than science fiction. It’s described as a “slasher movie in space,” and director Scott knew from the outset that fear was the feeling he wanted to inspire. The crew of a mining ship encounters a strange distress call, and when they investigate, an alien life form sneaks aboard their ship. This is the kind of movie that’s scary because of what you don’t see, and the claustrophobic settings add to the feeling of inescapable doom.

10.) “In Chambers,” Aleksander Nordaas, 2011

YouTube/horrornymphs

This one is a short! Clocking in at only 10 minutes, you can watch this on your lunch break for a spooky afternoon. This short involves nefarious men with medical equipment and a great soundtrack. Explaining any more would give too much away.

So grab that popcorn and turn the lights down. Actually, on better thought, you might want to keep them on for these!

Read more: http://viralnova.com/no-creepy-little-girls-here/

#horror #horror movies #scary #scary movies

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ethanalter · 7 years

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Inside 'The Perils of Punky,' the 'Punky Brewster' episode that scarred you for life

[Ed. Note: This post was originally published on Oct. 20, 2015. With Halloween approaching, we thought it was the ideal time to revisit an episode that kept you up nights as a kid.]

Hey…has this image been given you nightmares since your childhood?

How about this one?

Don’t worry; you’re not going crazy. You just had your mind warped by Punky Brewster as a child. That’s right, Punky Brewster: the otherwise adorable series chronicling the misadventures of a spunky orphan named Punky (Soliel Moon Frye), and her adopted father, Henry (George Gaynes). Exactly 30 years ago today, on Oct. 20, 1985, the beloved ‘80s series aired a two-part Season 2 episode that ventured into more horrifying territory than your average kiddie sitcom. Do a Google search for the episode’s title and you’ll find articles like “The Unexpected Horror of Punky Brewster” and “How Punky Brewster Traumatized a Nation,” not to mention Reddit threads where now-grown viewers share their memories about which scene freaked them out the most. (That first picture up top is a perennial favorite.)

“So basically, you’re saying that I scarred an entire generation?” asks Art Dielhenn, who directed “The Perils of Punky,” the terrifying episode in question. “I’m sorry! I wasn’t responsible — I was just taking orders.” Having already directed over 20 episodes of Punky Brewster prior to “Perils” (Dielhenn helmed the majority of the shows first two seasons, nearly 44 successive episodes in all), he approached it as he did any other installment. In fact, the only thing that really scared him during production was the thought of missing his deadline. “It was a challenging episode, and as the person tasked with getting it done, the size outweighed the task of making it scary,” he explains. “So it was a very different experience making it than the experience you describe having seen it.”

youtube

Actually, the first half of “Perils” isn’t so different from standard Punky fare. While on a camping trip, the titular heroine and her pint-sized pals — including chipper Cherie (Cherie Johnson), haughty Margaux (Ami Foster) and nerdy Allen (Casey Ellison) — get separated from their adult guardians and wind up inside a dank cave. While telling spooky stories to pass the time, the spirits of a Native American tribe approach them and charge Punky with the task of defeating an evil creature that lurks deep within the cavern.

Part 2 is where things get creepy, as Punky experiences a series of bizarre encounters that grow increasingly nightmarish as she approaches the end of her mission. First, she crosses paths with a man whose body parts are strewn in pieces around the cavern, leading her to christen him as — what else? — “Mr. Pieces.” (The fact that Mr. Pieces is played by instantly recognizable character actor, Vincent Schiavelli, just ups the weird factor. Dielhenn doesn’t recall the exact circumstances of Schiavelli’s casting or what it was like to direct a scene-stealer of his copious talents. “I doubt I had to do much,” he says, matter-of-factly.)

After that, the gang is set upon by a giant spider, which wrestles Punky to the ground, while Margaux, Allen and Cherie remain stuck to its web, screaming. Fortunately, Punky regains the upper hand and she dispatches her foe to the arachnid afterlife with a well-timed tomahawk blow.

Next up, the villainous spirit tests her lingering fears of abandonment, first by spiriting away her friends — replacing them with dancing skeletons or monsters with glowing red eyes — and then showing her a manufactured vision of Henry spontaneously deciding that he’s through being a dad.

But Punky endures these various trials, and finally comes face to face with the architect of her would-be destruction, a glimmery phantom with Freddy Krueger-esque claws and a sinister voice, provided by none other than series creator David W. Duclon. Although the ghost tries to break her spirit once and for all, it winds up withering in the face of her pluck. Punky saves the day and is promptly reunited with her friends and father. It’s also revealed that her whole quest has just been part of her campfire ghost story, although a final shot adds an “Or was it…?” sting to the proceedings.

youtube

Seen today, “The Perils of Punky” will likely inspire more laughs than screams, which is how Dielhenn characterizes the mood on set. “We always tried to make the set as fun and playful as we could for the kids. They would be going to school and then they’d come to set, and their buoyancy, kindness and desire for fun played into every scene.” One of those playful kids, Cherie Johnson, confirms his account. Now 39, the actress (and Duclon’s niece) remembers how her 9-year-old self cracked up. “I remember laughing at the spider,” she tells Yahoo TV. “I was on the spider web laughing with Amy and Soleil. We were like, ‘This is so lame.’”

The supernatural perils of “Perils” must have seemed extra-lame to Johnson considering that she and her co-stars were already seasoned horror movie fans. Every weekend, she’d have slumber parties with Moon and Foster during which they’d watch flicks like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Omen, while their parents cooked up big pots of blood-red foods like spaghetti and chili. “We would gross everybody around us out, but we were having the time of our lives,” Johnson says, laughing. “We were just different kinds of kids I guess, because we knew it wasn’t real. When we were shooting ‘Perils,’ we knew there was a props department, and we probably saw them making the spider and hoisting it up on its wires. So I don’t think the crew was worried about us being afraid. If anything, they had to be afraid of us trying to jump and play on it!”

Like Dielhenn, Johnson is surprised to hear that “Perils” left such a deep impression on viewers. “I’ve never watched it in its entirety,” she confesses, likening the experience of revisiting any Punky episode to watching home movies of herself in kindergarten. “My mother still has the molding of my head that was used for the prop with the red eyes. My brother put it on his face recently and I hadn’t seen it in thirty years, so I was like ‘What is that?!’” Johnson’s primary memories of the shoot are the days they filmed on location in the wilderness, before shifting back to the show’s soundstages on the NBC lot for the extended sequences within the cave. Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show was housed on the same lot and Johnson says that she and Frye would often run into celebrity guests at the commissary. “One time we met Cyndi Lauper, and she put us on her tour bus and dressed us up.”

Reflecting on “The Perils of Punky” thirty years later, both Johnson and Dielhenn now have the distance to recognize why it might have triggered youthful fears amongst its audience. For one thing, the episode spoke directly to one of the essential themes of the series and a primal childhood terror: the idea that your friends and family would reject and desert you. “That theme was explored in many episodes,” says Dielhenn, who went on to direct episodes of such sitcoms as Silver Spoons and Head of the Class, before seguing into his current occupation as a professional career coach. “Punky and Henry would have many conversations about wanting to be with her mother and whether Henry would accept her and does she feel safe. There was a fundamental honesty in the emotional life of the characters, and that’s what I liked about doing the show. I haven’t thought about ‘The Perils of Punky’ for thirty years, but scanning it again, I can see how it could have been impactful for kids. No question.”

“Perils” also remains a generational touchstone because there are so few episodes of children’s television that are quite like it, especially these days when so many family friendly shows got out of their way to avoid upsetting or offending young viewers and, more importantly, their parents. Johnson, who continues to act while also juggling careers as a producer and author, has a 14-month daughter and has observed first-hand how the genre has changed. “I think a lot of it is made for adults and not kids anymore. Our generation was exposed to more than this generation is; everyone is trying to shield their kids. [Children’s shows] don’t talk about serious subjects in the way that we used to. They’d probably be scared of doing something like ‘The Perils of Punky’ now because too many people would complain. But I think it’s funny that, 30 years later, this is what sticks in peoples’ minds.” Nice to know that we can all share a laugh about giant spiders, dancing skeletons, girls with glowing red eyes and boys with crooked teeth and lifeless eyes…

On second thought, no. Still freaked out.

All four seasons of Punky Brewster are available on DVD.

More Halloween stories from Yahoo Entertainment: MVPs of Horror: ‘Gerald’s Game’ star Carla Gugino on the scene making people pass out TV’s lost Halloween classics: 6 specials from beyond the grave Make a DIY ‘Spiderman: Homecoming’ suit from a few cheap items on Amazon

#_revsp:wp.yahoo.tv.us #halloween #_author:Ethan Alter #punky brewster #_uuid:d0fe9a18-b21f-3b2c-b920-ead7ff5d551a #_category:yct:001000086 #_lmsid:a0Vd000000AE7lXEAT #interviews

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sabertoothspacepanda · 7 years

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My Favorite Horror Youtubers

I did something a little different today. Instead of reviewing a scary movie, I decided to make a list. Here are my personal favorite horror -themed YouTubers, for those who are interested. I'll leave a video link for each of their channels. Be sure and leave a like on their page, these guys work hard.

Mr. Nightmare: Mr. Nightmare was my introduction to horror narrators on youtube. Not only does he narrate purportedly true stories he also does creepy countdowns and who doesn't love a good countdown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6b_KzjgkmE&list=PL40q7Mkbu6O34hkN9vxkXsJIu1YgVvYyc

Lazy Masquerade: Lazy was my favorite of these true story guys for a while, like many on this list he is a horror narrator, choosing many stories from Reddit's letsnotmeet page Lazy also frequently covers supernatural stories, which to me aren't as easy to believe, but scary nonetheless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2FRtEp-M1Y

Be.Busta: Be.Busta is an Australian narrator who is very similar to Lazy Masquerade as far as content goes. He covers both "real" and supernatural stories.Be.Busta will also narrate series from Nosleep, which I really enjoy. For awhile he was doing something called 8 disturbing moments caught on film, but he I'm fairly certain he stopped. They are still on his channel but not for the faint of heart, they don't get as bad as some of the others on this list, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E3so_ASVoo&list=PLwx5BoIerkl1b32Ik2U-CIjSZzkGisTCQ

Cayleigh Elise: I really like this girl, she has pretty much everything covered. She has a ton of different shows that cover a myriad of different topics ranging from giving detailed descriptions of various mythological beasts, reading true subscriber stories, as well as an unsolved mystery type show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJMHY8PC8Ok

Sir Ayme: Sir Ayme mainly covers fictional stories on his channel but puts a lot of personality and humor into otherwise morbid and frightening stories. I personally love his Nosleep playlist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr7gwrigrbM&list=PLqg6uB9se_yVPjnHHziwsQfw-hjNCgfbx&index=6

CreepsMcPasta: Creeps is one of the most popular horror YouTubers and for good reason. He is very articulate and has an emotive voice. He covers many of the classic creepypastas, such as Jeff the Killer's origin, Slenderman stories, smile.exe and several others. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2maSlsofOI

These last four do not shy away very disturbing content, more so than the others. They don't hold back on any content at all. So, if you upset easily I can't recommend visiting these youtube channels. I, however, have no soul and really enjoy their content, and I get the feeling a couple of you do too.

Dr. Creepin: Similar to CreepsMcpasta in that he reads fictional horror stories mainly, though he does have some "true" stories as well. He's under the warning above because he will narrate the gorier, more gruesome stories that Reddit has to offer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_fiZherl_g

Corpse Husband: Similar to Lazy Masquerade in content though he doesn't shy away from the more shocking fare.For example, the true EMT and police stories have a few upsetting tales amongst them. Like, Lazy Masquerade, Corpse Husband has a couple True Supernatural Story lists too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LukZWYdlzPw

WARNING...Seriously....these last two can be pretty f'd

Rob Dyke: Rob Dyke hosts a show called seriously strange in which he goes over four or five related topics (5 disturbing Tinder dates or 5 disturbing Craigslist encounters) Rob goes into the gory details about these true stories, every one of his episodes has graphic illustrations detailing these events. Rob has three other shows related to the morbid and the macabre that are all similarly narrated and illustrated: Twisted Tens, Anatomy of Murder and Caught on camera. These videos are all made with care and attention, so despite the subject matter, you'll find yourself drawn in by his hard work. Rob also has a comedy show called why would you put that on the internet...if you have thin skin, or offend easily, probably avoid these. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uesHXnX34s

Gloomy House: This is a video clip show unlike any other and gloomy can go to some pretty dark place While, not gory due to the censor bar, Gloomy House shoes some disturbing and mostly real videos while explaining the events transpiring within. He also has videos like "Haunted Dolls caught on camera" that will show short clips in succession to one another while Gloomyhouse talks about the subject of the video over them. There is something truly authentic and genuinely terrifying about his videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caKfkoyGf8I

(honorable mentions: Reignbot Horror, UrMaker, Letsread!)

I would like to narrate true horror stories but a lot of these guys have picked the letsnotmeet subreddit clean, so in the interest of keeping my content original, I'd like to do subscriber stories. If you have any please, please, send them to me via messenger, if you wish to stay anonymous tell me, but if you'd like to be mentioned let me know as well! I hope you enjoy this...I know it's a little different than a movie review but I hope you guys enjoy these channels!

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