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thoughts on horror

I'm getting kind of tired of antagonists in media who are Evil because they're Evil, or because they're Satanists or whatever. We kill sacrifice infants because we are Evil and Bad and there's no nuance there

I'm talking specifically about The Night Birds by Christopher Gold, which takes place on a long abandoned freighter in the Gulf of Mexico where a forest of mangrove trees has impossibly grown into the ship. could have had some really cool atmospheric shit in there but noooo

anyway, Satanist antagonists are pretty boring. it doesn't really engage with cultural fears much at all, besides like the basic satanic panic. that's why I like gothic horror so much, it's subversive and deals a lot with guilt, buried secrets, the past coming back to haunt you. (I recently read a gothic novel called Spoiled Milk where the original source of the evil is imperialism, and the ill gotten wealth that built the manor)

and thinking about it, maybe why Satanism as an antagonizing force doesn't do it for me, is because that shit plays into the hands of conservative christians believe about Satanism. It literally is satanic panic shit - you don't fit it with our vision of society, so you must be literally evil.

and if you look at modern Satanism from like Anton LeVay - it's something that's supposed to be subversive, in that it's a kind of socialism with a goth aesthetic. it's religious trolling - Satanists are being annoying on purpose. so I guess what I'm saying it that I'd like to see someone play with Satanism and antagonism in a different way in fiction

I also just listened to Scream with Me, which is about horror movies and feminism in the 1970s, and she talks a lot about how famous movies - Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, The Stepford Wives, The Exorcist, Alien, and The Shining engage with feminist themes of domestic violence, forced pregnancy & bodily autonomy, sexual assault when feminists were trying to get the ERA off the ratified by the states and when Roe v. Wade was new. And how now after the Dobbs decision repealed Roe v. Wade, domestic horror is coming back into vogue

#horror #fiction #literature #anyway #satanism

wtf-scientific-papers

Submitter comment: I'd like to submit this '[s]tudy of defensive behavior of a venomous snake as a new approach to understand snakebite' not for it's topic (worth studying!) but for it's insane methodology, which... well, I'll just let the researcher speak for himself:

[Q: Why did you decide to do this experiment?

A: Snake behavior has been generally neglected as a field of research, especially in Brazil. And most studies don’t examine what factors make them want to bite. If you study malaria, you can research the parasite that causes the disease—but if you don’t study the mosquito that carries it, you will never solve the problem. Up until now, the popular wisdom was that the jararaca would only attack if you touched it or stepped on it. But that was not what we found.

Q: Why did you need to be the victim?

A: The best way to do this research is to put snakes and a human together. In this case, the human was me. We put the snakes inside a ring on the floor of our lab until they got used to it, then I stepped in wearing special protective boots. I stepped close to the snake and also lightly on top of it. I didn’t put my whole weight on my foot, so I did not hurt the snakes. I tested 116 animals and stepped 30 times on every animal, totaling 40,480 steps.]

From the recent (aptly named) interview: Researcher steps on deadly vipers 40,000 times to better predict snakebites

dragongirl-casca

baybelletrist

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles.

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

Become ungovernable.

rosieandthemoon

I am cordially inviting all of you to post this in the comments/reblogs of any and every Al post you come across, on any platform. Especially useful for accounts who “teach” people how to use Al.

synandsym

Sprint pond

#art #q

completely-sane-scientist

firewalkwithmedvd

Was trying to make a joke about TV writing to my friend the other day and had to pause and go "...does the phrase 'surf dracula' mean anything to you?"

firewalkwithmedvd

One of the most important critical texts of this century imo

hypokeimena

image description: tweet by @/topherflorence, reading: back in the day if u did a tv show called surf dracula you'd see that fool surfing every week in new adventures but in the streaming era the entire 1st season gotta be a long ass flashback to how he got the surfboard until you finally get to see him surf for 5 min in the finale /end description

sergal

everyone shut da fuck up this is the only thing that matters

jewish-joy

Last year, I befriended a Catholic seminarian. We've gotten to be pretty decent friends. Seeing as he was staying in town for the summer and I wasn't, I entrusted him with caring for my plant.

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

Listen, totally cool. My plant becoming Catholic is a great deal for her not dying over the summer. But now I must navigate this interfaith household. Keep me in your thoughts.

jewish-joy

#i love prayer plants but they're fussy so I don't keep them#can we have a picture op they're so pretty

Behold, Dorothea

(Naming my plant "Gift of God," and then giving her to a seminarian with just the explanation that it's a prayer plant? Okay, that's my bad.)

jewish-joy

I should also add- I ran into my rabbi and explained the situation. I then asked, earnestly, if there was a remedy. A mikveh of sorts, or a beit din, or something.

He turned to me, sighed, and said in a very deadpan tone-- "Plants don't have covenants, Joy,"

So Theodora's a free agent according to rabbinic opinion. I guess I'll permit her to be Roman Catholic.

#that's a magnificent prayer plant #very rich colors

fuckhugeoctopus

For years, sci-fi has asked, what if aliens were wetter than us. Project Hail Mary posits a new, daring question. What if we are the wet aliens

jewish-joy

Last year, I befriended a Catholic seminarian. We've gotten to be pretty decent friends. Seeing as he was staying in town for the summer and I wasn't, I entrusted him with caring for my plant.

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

Listen, totally cool. My plant becoming Catholic is a great deal for her not dying over the summer. But now I must navigate this interfaith household. Keep me in your thoughts.