#haunters

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Richard Setlowe - The Haunting of Suzanna Blackwell - Signet - 1985

[malky-tea]

The tenth image in the series is dedicated to Arcanos Pandemonium. The ability that uses the powers of chaos to create havoc in the living world. I love its versatility, and "WTO: Guildbook: Haunters" is one of my favorite WTO books

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The art of Daniel Danger

[Image ID: Daniel Danger's art print, 'To all who home to this happy place,' depicting a ruined Disneyland castle in a post-apocalyptic landscape with a statue of Walt and Mickey in the rubble.]

There’s this behavioral economics study that completely changed the way i thought about art, teaching, and critique: it’s a 1993 study called “Introspecting about Reasons can Reduce Post-Choice Satisfaction” by Timothy D Wilson, Douglas J Lisle, Jonathan Schooler, Sara Hodges, Kristen Klaaren and Suzanne LaFleur:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240281868_Introspecting_about_Reasons_can_Reduce_Post-Choice_Satisfaction

The experimenters asked subjects to preference-rank some art posters; half the posters were cute cartoony posters, and the other half were fine art posters. One group of subjects assigned a simple numeric rank to the posters, and the other had to rank them and explain their ranking. Once they were done, they got to keep their posters.

There was a stark difference in the two groups’ preferences: the group that had to explain their choices picked the cartoony images, while the group that basically got to point at their favorite and say, “Ooh, I like that!” chose the fine art posters.

Then, months later, the experimenters followed up and asked the subjects what they’d done with the poster they got to take home. The ones who’d had to explain their choices and had brought home cartoony images had thrown those posters away. The ones who didn’t have to explain what they liked about their choice, who’d chosen fine art, had hung them up at home and kept them there.

The implication is that it’s hard to explain what makes art good, and the better art is, the harder it is to put your finger on what makes it so good. More: the obvious, easy-to-articulate virtues of art are the less important virtues. Art’s virtues are easy to spot and hard to explain.

The reason this stuck with me is that I learned to be a writer through writing workshops where we would go around in a circle and explain what we liked and didn’t like about someone’s story, and suggest ways to make it better. I started as a teenager in workshops organized by Judith Merril in Toronto, then through my high-school workshop (which Judy had actually founded a decade-plus earlier through a writer in the schools grant), and then at the Clarion workshop in 1992. I went on to teach many of these workshops: Clarion, Clarion West and Viable Paradise.

So I’ve spent a lot of time trying to explain what was and wasn’t good about other peoples’ art (and my own!), and how to make it better. There’s a kind of checklist to help with this: when a story is falling short in some way, writers roll out these “rules” for what makes for good and bad prose. There are a bunch of these rulesets (think of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style), including some genre-specific ones like the Turkey City Lexicon:

https://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/18/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-for-sf-workshops/

A few years ago, I was teaching on the Writing Excuses cruise and a student said something like, “Hey, I know all these rules for writing good stories, but I keep reading these stories I really like and they break the rules. When can I break the rules?”

There’s a stock answer a writing teacher is supposed to give here: “Well, first you have to master the rules, then you can break them. You can’t improvise a jazz solo without first learning your scales.”

But in that moment, I thought back to the study with the posters and I had a revelation. These weren’t “rules” at all — they were just things that are hard and therefore easy to screw up. No one really knows why a story isn’t working, but they absolutely know when it doesn’t, and so, like the experimental subject called upon to explain their preferences, they reach for simple answers: “there’s too much exposition,” or “you don’t foreshadow the ending enough.”

There are lots of amazing stories that are full of exposition (readers of mine will not be shocked to learn I hold this view). There are lots of twist endings that are incredible — and not despite coming out of left field, but because of it.

The thing is, if you can’t say what’s wrong, but you know something is wrong, it’s perfectly reasonable to say, “Well, why don’t you try to replace or polish the things that are hardest to do right. Whatever it is that isn’t working here, chances are it’s the thing that’s hardest to make work”:

https://locusmag.com/2020/05/cory-doctorow-rules-for-writers/

But if I could change one thing about how we talk about writing and its “rules,” it would be to draw this distinction, characterizing certain literary feats as easier to screw up than others, having the humility to admit that we just don’t know what’s wrong with a story, and then helping the writer create probabilistically ranked lists of the things they could tinker with to try and improve their execution.

Which is all a very, very long-winded way to explain why I bought a giant, gorgeous art-print at Comic-Con this weekend, even though I have nowhere to hang it and had sworn I would absolutely not buy any art at the con.

I was walking the floor, peeking into booths, when I happened on Daniel Danger’s booth (#5034, if you’re at the con today), and I was just fuckin’ poleaxed by his work.

http://www.tinymediaempire.com/

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘It stopped being about the panic,’ depicting a ruined mansion interwoven with the skeletal branches of a tree, with a weeping statue and two human figures]

Now, see above. I can’t tell you why I loved this work so much (and that’s OK!), but boy oh boy did it speak to me. I just kind of stood there with my mouth open, slowly moving from print to print, admiring works like “It stopped being about the panic.”

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/2022-sdcc-it-stopped-being-about-the-panic-v4

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘headlight in the path of,’ depicting a ruined mall with a pair of stags standing at the top of the escalator.]

On the surface, this is moody, post-apocalyptic stuff, heavily influenced by classic monster/haunter tropes, but it’s shot through with hope and renewal and the sense of something beautiful growing out of the ashes of something that has toppled. There’s real “(Nothing But) Flowers” energy in “Headlight in the path of”:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/sdcc2023-headlight-in-the-path-of-v2

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘We are no longer able to protect you,’ depicting a ruined factory with a coming-apart sign reading ‘We can no longer protect you forever,’ and a statue of a sword-bearing angel.]

Danger isn’t just a

very

talented artist, he’s also an

extremely

talented craftsman. As a recovering pre-press geek, I was (nearly) as impressed by the wild use of spot color and foils as I was by the art, like in “We are no longer able to protect you”:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/sdcc-2022-we-can-no-longer-protect-you-forever-v3

[Image  ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘made of smoke and chains,’ depicting a ruined landscape with a pair of derelict subway trains at the foot of a hill on whose peak is a rotting mansion. A pair of human figures, holding hands, are approaching the mansion.]

Danger himself calls this work “weird sad hyper-detailed artwork of dreamy buildings of ghosts and trees,” which is a very apt description of this work, as you can see in “Made of smoke and chains”:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/made-of-smoke-and-chains-mist-preorder

So I looked at this stuff and sternly reminded myself that there was no way I was going to buy any art at the con. Then I walked away. I got about two aisles over when I realized I had to go back and ask permission to take some pictures so I could put a little link to Danger in my blog’s linkdump, which he graciously permitted:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=interestingness-desc&safe_search=1&tags=danieldanger&min_taken_date=1687478400&max_taken_date=1690156799&view_all=1

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s art print, ‘To all who home to this happy place,’ depicting a ruined Disneyland castle in a post-apocalyptic landscape with a statue of Walt and Mickey in the rubble.]

But then I got all the way ass over to the other ass end of the convention center and I realized I had to go back and buy one of these prints. Which I did, “To all who come to this happy place,” because fuckin’ wow:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/sdcc2023-this-happy-place-v6-foil

This was unequivocally the best thing I saw at this year’s SDCC, but I also got some very good news while there, namely, that Emil Ferris’s long, long-awaited My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Vol 2 is finally on the schedule from Fantagraphics:

https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/emil-ferris/products/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-book-two

It’s coming out in April, which gives you plenty of time to read volume one, which I called, “a haunting diary of a young girl as a dazzling graphic novel”:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/

If you are or were a monster kid or a haunter, this is your goddamned must-read of the summer. It’s a fully queered, stunning memoir for anyone whose erotic imagination intersected with Famous Monsters of Filmland.

(Also, if you’re that kind of person and you’re in the region, you should know about Midsummer Scream, a giant haunter show in Long Beach; I’ll be there on Sunday, July 30, for a panel about the Ghost Post, the legendary Haunted Mansion puzzle-boxes I helped make:

https://midsummerscream.org/

Now Favorite Thing book two was the best news, but the best experience was watching Felicia Day get her Inkpot Award and give a moving speech:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkpot_Award

And then learning that Raina Telgemeier also got an Inkpot; I love Raina’s work so much:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/04/ghosts-raina-telgemeiers-upbeat-tale-of-death-assimilation-and-cystic-fibrosis/

[Image ID: A photo of me with Chuck Tingle, who wears a pink bag over his head on which he has written ‘Love is Real.’]

To cap yesterday off, I also ran into @ChuckTingle, which is as fine a capstone to a successful con as anyone could ask for:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53065500076/in/dateposted/

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/23/but-i-know-what-i-like/#daniel-danger

[salelua]

༓࿇༓ 𝔱𝔶𝔭𝔢𝔰 𝔬𝔣 𝔥𝔞𝔯𝔪𝔣𝔲𝔩 𝔰𝔭𝔦𝔯𝔦𝔱𝔲𝔞𝔩 𝔠𝔯𝔢𝔞𝔱𝔲𝔯𝔢𝔰 ༓࿇༓

PART 2

(se você fala portugues BR, sinta-se livre para enviar DM ou pedir tradução de um post. boa parte vai estar em inglês, para facilitar minha vida e atingir mais pessoas.)

-`🕯 INTRO 🕯´-

This is based on my experience, the information I have gathered, and my personal take. This isn't a rule book, law, or scientific study. You can feel free to give your own opinions and experiences in the comments but make it respectful. Now, let's get ourselves on the same page: ❅ Spirits are conscious beings who no longer or never have possessed a biological residence, in other words, a body. They are condensed energy, in other words, they might reside in the material world, but not materially. ❅ Harmful Spiritual Creatures/Spirits are those who harm other spirits or living beings in general, whether they want to or not. Here, it is not taken different points of view as in the famous "it depends" to determine whether such actions are harmful or not, but rather the general consequences of their actions regardless of their motives or lack thereof. ❅ Witchcraft is the conscious manipulation of magic in the day-to-day life of a being. It doesn't have ethical or moral rules to follow, or a god that needs to be

-`🕯 THE LIST 🕯´-

❅ RESTLESS/RESTLESS GHOST As the term already suggests these are spirits who are indeed restless and can be found in a deep state of paranoia. Personally, I use such a term to refer to spirits of deceased beings (humans or not) who have not, for whatever reason, crossed the barrier to the afterlife. So, as many say, after we die we are supposed to rest and let the cycle of life follow, yet, some of us don't do that and as a result stay trapped in the material world as a restless spirit. Now, the cause for this is often due to denial, either that one has died or that they have died and were not able to conclude some sort of goal. In some rare cases, humans will purposefully hold these deceased souls down as slaves. Either way, these spiritual beings are usually found in a very vulnerable and pitiful state, of what seems to be an endless agony, paranoia, and restlessness. Still, in order to get rid of them, I do not recommend banishing them as this will likely make their pain much worse and make it difficult for them to move on. Exorcism should be done by someone with experience and knowledge only. Thus, if you don't want to banish and exorcism is out of the question, I recommend praying for the soul or souls and offering love. Of course, I know this might be hard if you're dealing with a restless soul who is some sort of criminal or abuser but try your best. A good example of this can be found in the anime Ghost Hunt, released in 2006, the episode of the Dollhouse case. In such a case, the ghost-hunting team is dealing with the restless ghost of a mother who committed suicide due to the extreme pain of her daughter's cruel death, who was kidnapped and tortured. As a result of the denial of everything that happened, the mother, as a ghost, ends up looking for her daughter in the body of other kids of similar ages. Thus, the team's leader decides to trick the woman in believing she found her daughter, using a wooden totem in which the daughter's full name and date of birth are written on. Of course, the anime covers other details, but the idea here is that in order to "get rid" of such spirits, is to kill what kills them, their agony. ❅ SKINWALKERS are not found in every place of the world, they are usually found in the USA in native lands. Overall, I have to say I never had an encounter with one, but I have contacted native people to learn more about them so I'm sharing what has been told to me. Basically, skinwalkers were natives in charge of helping people with their health problems, and one of their tasks sometimes involved traveling long distances in a very short amount of time. Yet, they could do this quickly if they shapeshift, but shapeshifting took years to learn. However, some of these natives were impatient and decided to make "dark" ceremonies that involved the sacrifice of an immediate loved one. This resulted, in the mid to long run, the lost of their morality and eventually becoming very desensitized. Still, these skinwalkers are more often than not found in the Navajo lands and they mainly use native animals such as coyotes and deer as their shapeshift. They eventually become bloodthirsty and act similar to haunters, in which they silence pets, usually not by killing them but by using a "dog whistle". They make scratching noises and growl, and you can usually hear their totems crackling. Their weapons are nature-based, so knives and poisons are made of dead bodies, rocks, or plants. They use a type of power in order to curse you that will eventually kill you. The ShanclenShadowProductions on YouTube has videos on them, so if you're interested you should check them out.

link to part 1, link to part 3

[germ-t-ripper]

07JUN25 Belly rubs!

[rigbeta]

Ghost Master Inspired Haunters

Ever since I was a kid, I was obsessed with Ghost Master, an amazing game that has the style of Sims, but the goal is scaring Mortals, freeing restless spirits and defeating various gifted humans like mediums, priests and the "Ghostbreakers". I remember pouring over the different classes and types and wanting to learn their definitions, powers and reasons for being that type of spirit. Here's some Original Characters (With some unoriginal blueprints, thanks to a lot of references to movies, cartoons etc) There's some classic Ghost Master Types, with some of my own added.

[contoursfx]

This is my daughter having fun doing some airbrush makeup for the first time on a crew of haunt makeup artists.

[lakipocki]

Some spooooky Haunters