Gracetown, Florida
June 1950
Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.
Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. Through his friends Redbone and Blue, Robbie is learning not just the rules but how to survive. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member and connection in Florida to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.
On Sundays She Picked Flowers by Yah-Yah Schofield
When Judith Rice fled her childhood home, she thought she’d severed her abusive mother’s hold on her. She didn’t have a plan or destination, just a desperate need to escape. Drawn to the forests of southern Georgia, Jude finds shelter in a house as haunted by its violent history as she is by her own.
Jude embraces the eccentricities of the dilapidated house, soothing its ghosts and haints, honoring its blood-soaked land. And over the next thirteen years, Jude blossoms from her bitter beginnings into a wisewoman, a healer.
But her hard-won peace is threatened when an enigmatic woman shows up on her doorstep. The woman is beautiful but unsettling, captivating but uncanny. Ensnared by her desire for this stranger, Jude is caught off guard by brutal urges suddenly simmering beneath her skin. As the woman stirs up memories of her escape years ago, Jude must confront the calls of violence rooted in her bloodline.
Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark
In 1915, The Birth of a Nation cast a spell across America, swelling the Klan's ranks and drinking deep from the darkest thoughts of white folk. All across the nation they ride, spreading fear and violence among the vulnerable. They plan to bring Hell to Earth. But even Ku Kluxes can die.
Standing in their way is Maryse Boudreaux and her fellow resistance fighters, a foul-mouthed sharpshooter and a Harlem Hellfighter. Armed with blade, bullet, and bomb, they hunt their hunters and send the Klan's demons straight to Hell. But something awful's brewing in Macon, and the war on Hell is about to heat up.
Can Maryse stop the Klan before it ends the world?
House of Hunger by Alexis Henderson
Marion Shaw has been raised in the slums, where want and deprivation is all she knows. Despite longing to leave the city and its miseries, she has no real hope of escape until the day she spots a peculiar listing in the newspaper, seeking a bloodmaid.
Though she knows little about the far north--where wealthy nobles live in luxury and drink the blood of those in their service--Marion applies to the position. In a matter of days, she finds herself the newest bloodmaid at the notorious House of Hunger. There, Marion is swept into a world of dark debauchery--and at the center of it all is her.
Countess Lisavet, who presides over this hedonistic court, is loved and feared in equal measure. She takes a special interest in Marion. Lisavet is magnetic, and Marion is eager to please her new mistress. But when her fellow bloodmaids begin to go missing in the night, Marion is thrust into a vicious game of cat and mouse. She'll need to learn the rules of her new home--and fast--or its halls will soon become her grave.
You Should Have Been Nicer to My Mom by Vincent Tirado
When Papi Ramon, the patriarch of the wealthy Abreu family dies, he gives the family one last message in the will: “One of you is el bacà, the demon that I made a deal with. Get rid of them or you will be damned.” Xiomara, the uncontested favorite of Papi Ramon (and therefore the least liked in the family), watches as everyone dismisses this as the joke of a senile old man and demands the lawyer obtain the previous will Papi wrote.
While the lawyer drives back to his office, a storm breaks out, forcing the entire family—Xiomara’s aunts and uncles and cousins—to remain in the house. And the words of Papi’s will hangs over their heads even heavier than the rain clouds. Over the course of the night, scandal after scandal is revealed to the public about the family. Suddenly a tense few hours of surviving her family turns into a vicious night of recrimination, violence, accusations…and murder.
Xiomara is faced with an impossible task: uproot a demon and somehow kill it or excise the ghosts that linger within her own family.
And the clock is ticking...
Out There Screaming edited by Jordan Peele
A cop begins seeing huge, blinking eyes where the headlights of cars should be that tell him who to pull over. Two freedom riders take a bus ride that leaves them stranded on a lonely road in Alabama where several unsettling somethings await them. A young girl dives into the depths of the Earth in search of the demon that killed her parents. These are just a few of the worlds of Out There Screaming, Jordan Peele’s anthology of all-new horror stories by Black writers. Featuring an introduction by Peele and an all-star roster of beloved writers and new voices, Out There Screaming is a master class in horror, and—like his spine-chilling films—its stories prey on everything we think we know about our world . . . and redefine what it means to be afraid.
are people talking about the labor conditions at Taylor Farms yet? like the fact they use enslaved prisoners in their facilities?
are we drawing the connection between worker safety and consumer safety & public health yet?
are people demanding to see the conditions in this place that keeps making us sick? why are the enslaved workers not having the time to use the bathroom or to rest when ill? very few people would shit in front of their coworkers given any choice at all.
Dr. Lilith Fleischer - Lily, please - is a gifted therapist, a licensed psychiatrist, an exceptional hypnotherapist, and a mildly dangerous solipsist. She has concluded, after careful consideration, that she is the only person who is actually in there. Everyone else runs on chemistry. Fortunately for everyone else, chemistry is her whole job.
Her new patient is a 24-year-old game store clerk with six weeks of flat nothing, a single-car accident she is very done talking about. The chart says depression. The chart is a liar, but then again, so is she, and so are you.
SOLIPCYST is a puzzle visual novel inspired by Phoenix Wright, Return of the Obra Dinn, and grade school polymino puzzles: one patient, eight weeks, one hour at a time. Peel apart everything she tells you in good confidence to dig for clues. Pack her mind like a suitcase. Medicate, manipulate, stabilize, groom - anything necessary to heal the patient. Among other things.
A brain is a board: Therapy is polymino packing with a license.
A diagnostic interrogation: claims, evidence, challenges, and a woman who fights the label with everything except the truth.
The classic blunder: A visual novel that responds to your actions.
Eight endings, with variation. Designed to be replayed.
Average playthrough will discover around 12,000 words of Visual Novel, and hundreds more trying to pry apart all her testimony!
Content warnings: therapeutic abuse from the therapist's POV, grooming/manipulation of an adult patient, gaslighting, bipolar disorder, mania, depression, medical coercion, grief and parental death, a serious car accident (recounted and depicted), sexual themes. All characters are adults. The game does not endorse what it lets you do. Obviously.
Made for the Toxic Yuri VN Jam II.
Future case files to come, probably.
Credits below the read more.
CREDITS
Team
BSTDev - code, UI, design, script, music (that's me!)
Roxy Pop - portrait art; music & SFX consultation (@lonestareq.bsky.social)
Special thanks: Moon, Pallas, Quinn, and Eight - script feedback, plot workshopping, UI feedback, and moral support.
Third-party materials
Therapy office photograph via Unsplash
SFX/instrument samples adapted from the Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations soundfont and the Mother 3 soundfont, both under CC BY 3.0
Guitar chord sounds from the YouTube channel JP SFX (released free to use)
the RealDoll division that is working on AI-augmented sex dolls has sold an AI-equipped silicon unit named Sally to the Salamanca school district's high school at a steep discount, which is the only school district entirely inside an Indigenous rfeservation in America. they are testing an AI sex doll on high school kids, not sexually, but testing nontheless.
the Realbotix corporation claims the unit is not able to save identifying information, nor relay it or report it to Realbotix. But the robot is instructed to snitch on students it perceives as posing a threat:
Every safeguard described in the reporting traces back to the company itself. Realbotix's CEO said the system would always redirect conversation back to education and automatically alert administrators to language associated with self-harm. The superintendent, relaying what Realbotix told the district, said the system runs on a closed network with no internet connection and that Realbotix will not have access to personally identifiable student information. No independent audit, security review, or third-party verification of any of it appears anywhere in the reporting.
Realbotix can describe what Sally's safeguards do. No one, including Realbotix, can yet describe what a program with these products does to a teenager's learning outcomes or emotional safety, because neither study has been run.
no independent vetting has been done on this supposed closed system, likewise ii assume it has internet connectivity of some kind. the fact that this is being tested on indigenous children is a familiar historical refrain, and according to the Facebook posts from the parents in the Salamanca district I read a few days ago, this was not voted on or presented to the PTA, but rather pushed through the board without consultation with the students or parents in the school
Robin R. Means Coleman's book Horror Noire: A History of Black American Horror from the 1890s to Present has a Creative Commons licensed downloadable PDF available over on OAPEN:
If you're interested in further exploring this subject, the producers of the Shudder documentary of the same name collated a Horror Noire syllabus that has been reproduced for consultation here:
This syllabus was originally curated in 2018 & 2019 by the producers of the Shudder Original documentary, Horror Noire. There are fi
Not getting a ton of reporting in US news, but the Trump administration is going after donors to Palestine, including going as far as international extradition under the guide of "counterterrorism"
So I do 3D modeling and printing as a hobby, and a few weeks ago I designed wheel guards meant to prevent office chairs from running over cables and clothes... or your pet's tail.
I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.
Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.
So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.
Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.
Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵💫
Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.
Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.
I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.
This is what I mean when I yearn for contemporary fiction that's unreservedly, capital-W Weird. So many anthology publishers and yet many of them never reach this level of purity.
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