Don't look in it's eyes...
Official poster for the 50th anniversary of THE WICKER MAN.
Just thought to myself "can't women have a bad time in fiction without rape being involved" which really shows you how much you're in the fucking trenches if you are both a horror fan and women fan
Anyway. There's lot of places for these stories don't get me wrong but HUGE shout out to women in horror stories that have terrible things happen that don't involve: pregnancy, motherhood, and/or sexual assault. You too deserve to have a cronenburg eqsue body horror transformation because you trusted a glowing green liquid to solve your problems
Two perspectives that deserve peer review
Amen to this observation! The episode “The Outside” from Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities leaps to mind as a refreshing exception from the female body horror = rape, pregnancy, and/or motherhood trope. Also The Substance. On a totally different register, Turn of the Screw & its best adaptation, The Innocents (although imperiled governesses were pretty tropey in their day).
musings on the sun
christina perneta, noor hindi, vincent van gogh, jeanette winterson, zinaida vysota docenko, anne sexton, olga kos, khalil gibran
A look into MBARI's video vault
This week, we’re sharing content curated by the team of experts responsible for our deep-sea video archive. Each member of the Video Lab team has gone deep into the vault to find some of their favorite moments in MBARI’s history of ocean exploration. Get the inside scoop on some of the most interesting and unique observations they’ve made over the last few decades. Be sure to follow along all week as we share those moments with you!
In 36 years of deep-sea discoveries, MBARI’s remotely operated vehicles have completed more than 7,300 successful dives and recorded nearly 30,000 hours of deep-sea footage. This video archive includes more than 10 million observations about what we see on video—animals, behaviors, interactions, geological features, marine debris, and more—along with location, depth, and surrounding habitat characteristics. The Video Lab’s deep-sea experts comb through all of that footage with eagle eyes to identify and label animals and objects we film.
Learn more about the amazing team behind our stunning video!
how to write creepy stories
- over describe things
- under describe things
- short sentences in rapid succession build tension
- single sentence paragraphs build dread
- uncanny valley = things that aren't normal almost getting it right
- third person limited view
- limited expressions
- rot, mold, damage, age, static, flickering, espsecially in places it shouldn't be
- limited sights for your mc - blindness, darkness, fog
- being alone - the more people there are, the less scary it is
- intimate knowledge, but only on one side
your reader's imagination will scare them more than anything you could ever write. you don't have to offer a perfectly concrete explanation for everything at the end. in fact, doing so may detract from your story.
society if vampire lucy survived as the mirror to dracula with her 3 weed smoking vampiric boyfriends
Chinese Censorship of the 2023 Hugo Award Nominations
Back before the 2023 Hugo Nominations were conducted, I noted that the Chengdu Worldcon Hugo committee had inserted a worrying clause indicating that local government officials could invalidate nominations for breaching the norms and standards of China. I suspected this would result in arbitrarily applied censorship to control the ballot. I am sad and unsurprised to discover I was correct.
The 2023 Hugo Nomination vote data has been published (https://www.thehugoawards.org/2024/01/2023-nominating-and-final-ballot-statistics-published/), and includes notation where nominations were excluded from the ballot. Those with normal reasons, such as being in the wrong category or not being published in 2022 are identified with their reasons for exclusion. This time there are a number of nominations that are merely marked at "Not eligible".
Here is the list of those nominations, that would otherwise have been placed on the final 2023 Hugo Award Ballot.
Babel - R.F. Kuang - Best Novel: Very likely excluded for referencing student revolution, and the use of language and translation as coercive tools of oppression.
Color the World - Congyun "Mu Ming" Hu - Best Novellette : A story about perception of, aid of, and discrimination against disability. Congyun Hu has left China and now lives in New York.
Fogong Temple Padoga - Hai Ya - Best Story : Either there is something in the original Chinese that was not translated, there's a taboo subject that elides my reading, or this otherwise innocent looking near future tale of cultural building restoration was written by the wrong person.
The Art of Ghost of Tsushima: Dark Horse and Sucker Punch Games - Best Related Work : The video game Ghost of Tsushima was subject to directed social exclusion for it's depiction of the Mongol invasion of Japan.
Sandman, Amazon Studios: Best Dramatic Presentation (Long and Short) - A diverse and divergent cast, includes subject matter and social issues that are currently taboo in China.
Paul Weimer - Fan Writer: Publicly Critical of holding a Worldcon in China.
Xiran Jay Zhao - Astounding Award: Qualifying work "Iron Widow" is reimagined story of Chinese Empress Wu during a fantasy/mechanical alien invasion.
This raises a lot of questions as to if this basically taints the process, and what can be done about it.
the point of art is not to be great but to make it transparently obvious that there is something wrong with you