Here’s the story of Shadow of Mordor – You are a ranger guy. Orcs kill your wife and son, then you, in a ritual designed to bind a dead elf’s spirit to your corpse. It works. You resurrect with bonus ghost powers, like ghost arrows and ghost teleporting between ghost buildings and ghost respawning after being killed so you can never really die, in a clever melding of videogame and story.
You proceed to gruesomely murder your way through your surroundings. (more…)
Long ago, when I was very young and the syfy channel was spelled based on what a shortening of “science fiction” could be expected to produce, I watched some Twilight Zone episodes that horrified me and left me with the lasting impression that the show was all terrible things happening to people. These are probably far less upsetting if you’re not seven, but they’re still pretty haunting ideas. Enjoy!
The Magnus Archives are the audio recordings of various testimonies given to a paranormal research institute, featuring all sorts of random spookiness that slowly weaves together into an overarching narrative. The Black Tapes are that, if you like your narrators to be incompetent idiots who can’t do basic research and your paranormal to stick slavishly to the supposedly plausible pseudoscience of people who think ghosts are real and also boring as fuck. (more…)
Last time, Harry decided that he’d so thoroughly fucked up everything about investigating the A-plot that he might as well work the vampire party B-plot. (more…)
Back in my lab, it felt a little creepy to be working by candlelight. Intellectually, I knew that it was still full daylight outside, but last night had brought out the instinctive fear of the dark that is a part of being human.
Intellectually, working by candlelight makes you go blind. (more…)
Little Nightmares is a gorgeously done game. You play as a barefoot, starving scrap of a child in a world that’s warped and wrong, and malevolent and crushingly empty by turns. But despite the meathooks and monsters, despite the all around horror setting, the game itself isn’t especially scary, which I found interesting. (more…)
All hospital emergency rooms have the same feel to them. They’re all decorated in the same dull, muted tones and softened edges, which are meant to be comforting and aren’t. They all have the same smell too: one part tangy antiseptics, one part cool dispassion, one part anxiety, and one part naked fear.
This feels like one of those situations where the author’s flunking out on the whole “write what you know” thing and resorting to cliche. (more…)
Since I spent last October rambling about this, hey look, the movie’s actually happening and it looks like it’s sticking to the good stuff of the book!
Before the great Octobering, a set of requested reviews. (more…)
I’ve done smarter things in my life. Once, for example, I threw myself out of a moving car in order to take on a truckload of lycanthropes singlehandedly. That had been nominally smarter. At least I had been fairly certain that I could kill them, if I had to, at the time.
That’s really not how that went down.
God, the “last time on” things in this series are always so annoying. (more…)
Although the Lucki reviews were never completed, I’d already written up my side of the reviews and finally got tired of waiting, so I posted them to the fic.
For those of you here who object to the standard model of reviews, these are in-depth, copypasta-free reviews that I went very far out of my way to tailor to the author.
Yesterday, I posted the PM chain of communication failure. I ended on agreeing to review the author’s story if he agreed to read and review Lucki, with the hope that my story would get something across where my regular words had failed me. I wanted him to get to chapter twelve – it’s not the final denouement, but it would cover the issue of showing a pokemon’s wishes conflicting with that of their trainer, which was the point that stood out as the worst element – or at least, the thing that most bothered me – in what I’d been told about the story. And at the very least, I was hoping that seeing how he talked about Lucki might help me understand him well enough that I could communicate any of my own thoughts on his story successfully.
Alright. I’ve been busy, mostly with life but partly with my own brain-eating fanfic (two chapters and twenty thousand words in!). Back months ago when I wasn’t half so busy, someone appeared to ask me to beta read their boy’s-first-power-fantasy-with-trophy-girlfriend fanfic. I attempted to direct them to someone else who might actually enjoy that. They attempted to tell me that actually I should totally read their story, with each PM making it clear it was even worse than I’d previously pictured, until ultimately it wrapped around to such loathing I agreed just to see how much worse it could be. (more…)
Let’s finish up the last dangling threads. (more…)