tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31647494231233185912024-03-10T20:22:21.053-07:00The Institute for the Study of Forbidden MediaUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger26125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-57431279989858751202023-10-23T13:21:00.002-07:002023-10-23T13:21:38.107-07:00Moving House<p>I'm in the process of moving the contents of this blog over to a website on Substack. New content, and old, will appear there over the course of the next few weeks. A few details may change, but the core will stay the same. </p><p><br /></p><p>Find me here from now on: <a href="https://open.substack.com/pub/dylanfreeman/p/the-gravid-tape?r=2xen8a&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web">Lost Media and Other Supernatural Concerns</a><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-52850603804382454112023-06-28T18:35:00.004-07:002023-07-01T12:26:28.296-07:00Prismatica: Killer Queer Fiction<p><b>Report compiled by Tristan Marshall, Visual Media Investigator, Institute for the Study of Forbidden Media</b><br /><br /><br />To my superiors:<br />I apologize for the prolonged lack of communication. I came into contact with a new fragment of <i>Passerine Birds of the Great Lakes (Vol. II) </i>and thought it pertinent that I quarantine until I was positive that I was no longer transmuting. The fragment is in storage at my place of residence; please send an agent to collect it as soon as possible, it’s broken three filing cabinets as of writing. <br /><br />Unfortunately, due to my contact with <i>Passerine Birds</i>, I had to immediately vacate my civilian employment. I have been squatting in a building that once belonged to the law offices of Peterson and Vanclad PC, Attorneys at Law in the scenic Mistake on the Lake-- Cleveland, Ohio. If I’m correct, then at least one member of the Institute’s Board should have raised eyebrows upon reading that name; Abraham Vanclad was a nightmare to Northern Ohio’s indie publishing scene from 1976 until his death in 2009, due to his litigation of smaller presses when they toed the line of public domain. While most of them were unscrupulous (no tears will be shed for No Vacancy Publishing’s demise, with their $50 submission fee and proto-MLM pay structure) his litigation means that over three dozen anthologies, comprising over 1,000 individual short stories, are now permanently out of print.<br /><br />And, it seems, Mr. Vanclad kept trophies of sorts-- I don’t see why else the room that was formerly his office would have an aging copy of 1995’s <i>On King Arthur’s Secret Service,</i> an attempt to adapt Arthurian Lore into a James Bond-esque spy-fi setting, or <i>2048</i>, an anthology that somehow had the blessing of George Orwell’s estate to tell stories of the world of <i>1984</i>, IngSoc and Big Brother during the titular year. All of these have been documented, and I have done my best to preserve them (again, please send an agent to collect) but the crown jewel of the collection was a copy of Prismatica, the lost 2009 queer fiction anthology curated by Valeria Schrader.<br /><br />Firstly: it’s braced. I’ve managed to confirm that much-- the paper is impossible for me to tear or cut, the cover is unaffected by mold or any other form of rot or aging. It’s a bona fide anomalous document containing seven pieces of short, queer fiction from the late 2000s.<br /><br />I’ve inspected the volume fully-- it seems to have lost the ‘bite’ it had circa 2009, as it were. From what I’ve read, Prismatica was weaponized post-publication, being handed out at gun shows, Republican campaign rallies, and other conservative functions disguised as everything from The Turner Diaries to The Anarchist’s Cookbook; excerpts of it were even reportedly published in pamphlets meant to look like Chick Tracts, though they lacked any illustrations. The Institute was predominately straight prior to the mass proliferation of the internet; perhaps the fact that I haven’t been affected by a fully intact copy of Prismatica is due to my own complex relationship with gender.<br /><br />Regardless, I have read all seven stories, and have summarized them below. <br /><br /><br /><b>Lipstick Stain<br />By Julian Schipp</b><br /><br />‘Lipstick Stain’ tells the story of a teenaged boy who, after wearing his mother’s lipstick out of curiosity, is forced to eat the rest of it. The effects on his body are horrific-- probably the most graphic description of aluminum poisoning I’ve seen outside of a murder mystery novel. His mother tries to bury his paralyzed body in the yard without realizing that he’s alive.<br /><br />I had to be careful when reading this; Lipstick Stain was associated with at least a dozen cases of aluminum poisoning reported at the 2012 Republican National Convention; these were likely psychosomatic in nature, due to reading graphic descriptions of the symptoms. Precedent exists for plain text causing illness if the description is graphic enough; see the 1952 Illustrated Encyclopedia of Maladies or the Palmer, Kansas School District’s 2013 STD Education Pamphlets, among others.<br /><br /><br /><b><br />Agent O<br />By Gregory Grimm</b><br /><br />A spy thriller pastiche, comedic in nature; the twist is that the James Bond stand-in, ‘Agent O’, is gay, and nobody seems to get it, least of all the object of his affections, Agent Q. I don’t much care for spy fiction, so I don’t know how this stacks up in the genre, but much of the humor seems to come from the fact that it doesn’t occur to most people that LGBTQIA+ people… exist. There’s a line that mentions Agent O foiled ‘a plot wherein terrorists attempted to set off a bomb that would have rendered the citizens of San Francisco unable to be attracted to the opposite sex’. Grimm is listed as having been with ‘a man he considers his husband for fifteen years’ in his bio at the back of the collection; I don’t know if the humor simply isn’t landing with me or if it’s just bad writing.<br /><br />The anomaly with this work is both active and annoying; every piece of music I hear sounds like it’s straight out of a bad spy film. My playlist says ‘Florence + The Machine’, but I’m hearing the theme to Operation Double 007, a 1967 Italian spy film starring Sean Connery’s brother. <br /><br /><i>Note: effect faded after approximately six hours.</i><br /><br /><b><br />The Queen in Yellow<br />By Nannette Simpson<br /></b><br />“Over the course of the 20th century, the so-called Yellow Sign, a symbol both deviant and divine, became a common mark for the sexual pariahs of the world-- gay, trans, lesbian, all could come together beneath the Yellow King’s mark and be one.” Thus begins The Queen in Yellow, a tale which attempts to tell a new story from the world of Robert W. Chamber’s horror anthology <i>The King in Yellow.</i> ‘Carcosa’ is misspelled twice in the 5000-word work, and the plot tells the story of a trans woman getting the Yellow Sign tattooed on her right breast, and how it affects her.<br /><br />There’s a strong theme of reclamation throughout the work, which makes sense; The Yellow Sign and various other hallmarks associated with Hastur were co-opted by Lovecraft for his Cthulhu mythos, and Lovecraft was every flavor of bigot available in the early 1900s. Enjoyable enough. <br /><br />Again, I had to be careful with this one; copies of The Queen in Yellow distributed at the 2010 Louisville Gun Show resulted in ‘spontaneous changes in human mammaries’, per an Institute report at the time. While reportedly the effect is less pronounced in those who aren’t cis-hetero, I’d rather not risk the chance of me needing a mastectomy while I’m uninsured.<br /><br />At this point, I started noticing that there were consistent elements in each of the works-- particular word choices and foibles that are hard for unskilled authors to conceal, or easy for a skilled author to accentuate for thematic purposes. For instance, the phrase ‘lemon-scented’ appears in each story, as does the description of a ‘sky so blue you could drown in it’, and both this and Lipstick Stain have a character extinguish a candle by pinching the wick. Schrader was the editor for this, so she may have inserted these phrases… but she could just has easily have written them all herself and published them under a variety of pseudonyms.<br /><br /><br /><b>Guenevere’s Eyes<br />By June ‘Jojo’ Johannsen</b><br /><br />A lesbian retelling of the tale of Guenevere and Lancelot-- Lancelot in this continuity is a young woman impersonating her older brother, who is a ‘layabout and a lout’. Apparently, the author thought alliteration was appealing to her audience, as it pervades the work. ‘Lancelot’ commissions the assassination of King Arthur so that she and Guenevere can be together.<br /><br /><i>Note: I’ve been informed that several early King Arthur stories were written in alliterative verse. Perhaps this was intended as a callback to those?</i><br /><br />Language and references are both anachronistic; it’s one thing to mention Bedlam House in a vaguely medieval work, but at one point, a ‘village idiot’ croons out a verse from Sloppy Seconds’ immortal song, <i>Why Don’t Lesbians Love Me?</i>, in order to heckle Guenevere and Lancelot kissing in public. He even says ‘dude’.<br /><br />Guenevere’s Eyes was, perhaps appropriately, reported to cause blindness among seven members of staff at a facility called Camp Bethlehem, a ‘pray the gay away’ conversion camp in Western Pennsylvania-- once again, this doesn’t seem to affect me, but I would caution any of the Institute’s more conservative members against reading it. Furthermore, this shares the ‘lemon-scented’ descriptor with the other works in the anthology, this time talking about some wine that Lancelot drinks.<br /><br /><b>Great Blue Sea<br />By Willa Tombstone</b><br /><br />As far as I’m aware, the term ‘queerbaiting’ didn’t arise until the mid-2010s; however, the term ‘queer baiting practices’ comes up in this story in an odd context. It’s a cyberpunk future, and ‘fishermen’ are tasked with weeding LGBTQIA+ individuals out of the population by luring them into containment using what I can only describe as rainbow-coded dog whistles. Some of it reminds of<i> Fahrenheit 451</i>, specifically the later theatrical adaptation; it’s legal to be a homosexual as long as you don’t show homosexual behavior, just as it is legal to own books but you are disallowed from reading them. This is the situation our protagonist, a ‘homosexual man of fifty-two years married to a woman with whom he has had five children’, finds himself in.<br /><br />It’s… grim, to say the least. Rather gruesome, as well. But this anomaly might be the most baffling of the bunch-- it wasn’t obvious to me at first, but after reading it and going to do some light errands, I found that people were asking what my pronouns were regularly-- I’m male-presenting, by and large; could this confound pronouns? Possibly more testing needed.<br /><br />If I am correct, and Schrader did write all of these stories, or affect them in some way with her editing, then it’s clear that we have someone who has great skill with the art of writing. Five distinct anomalies across five separate works; it’s terrifying, and likely explains how Schrader was able to pull off what she did when she was active.<br /><br />Schrader was part of a majority-female pro-queer militia calling themselves ‘The Society of Stonewall Scythians’; they were calling for LGBTQIA+ individuals to arm themselves long before it was in vogue to do so, and while it has never been proven, allegations linking the SSS to the 2006 ‘Fountain of Blood’ outside the Sistine Chapel have circulated for over a decade. Schrader herself may be a polymath, versed in both anomalous writing practices and anomalous sculpture.<br /><b><br /><br />Royale<br />By Colleen Pierce</b><br /><br />Gay intrigue at a royal palace in the fictional European country of The Republic of Cote Rania. (At least I’m assuming it’s European-- they mention their ‘cousins in England’ at one point.) Surprisingly complex for a short story-- but complex doesn’t mean interesting. It revolves around a succession crisis after the crown prince announces that he will marry his male fiance, and… bearing in mind that I don’t know much about anime, this feels like the plot of a bad anime, one where every character has the same face and there are fewer frames of animation than a Synchro-Vox cartoon.<br /><br />This story is unique in that its effects seem to be geared towards queer individuals; Cote Rania's flag is described as being 'hued with all the colors of the rainbow... a stain on vexillology, but a flag the people are proud of, and fiercely defend'. This might explain why, in 2018, the Patton Baptist Church in Patton, Nebraska was destroyed following its public burning of the Inclusive Pride Flag; anecdotally speaking, I nearly cursed out a woman for sneering at an agender pride pin I had on my shirt.<br /><b><br />Prismatica<br />By Valeria Schrader<br /></b><br /><br />Prismatica is the titular work in the piece, and is less a short story and more of a manifesto by Schrader, beginning with an autobiographical segment. She explains how she was six years old when the Stonewall Riot happened, and that her father berated the television whenever he saw news about it; she reasoned that if these people were capable of making her father angry so easily, that she wanted to know more about them. When she came out as bisexual and trans-femme in 1984, her father attempted to ‘dispose of her’ (her words exactly), but she ‘fought him off with a copy of Juliet & Juliet by Mary Caddick’; Caddick was a queer author who died in 1987, and her work has largely been beneath notice. However, I managed to dig up a police report about the 1984 incident, which states that Willem Schrader, Valeria’s father, was found in a ‘crater’ in his front yard, with ‘several broken bones’. A manifestation of Schrader’s own abilities ,or does Juliet & Juliet have its own anomaly?<br /><br />In any case, she continues with a screed:<br /><br />“For centuries, the Christian Man has attempted to lock us in closets and let us suffocate. For centuries, the Christian Woman has pushed to lobotomize us in the name of defending her children. Levi’s tribe is dust, and its laws with it. We will not be beholden to the laws of a God of Hate-- we have a right to live, a right to love, and it will not be abridged by the fascism of the Christian Nation. I refuse to be beholden by any of your Stolen Commandments, and that includes the seventh-- I shalt kill in the name of my own defense, beginning with…”<br /><br />And then the document goes on to list dozens of names. I’ve looked them up-- all of them were local to Northern Ohio, and all of them are affiliated with some form of homophobic group of some form, ranging from members of the Catholic Church to the law firm of Peterson and Vanclad, PC. Abraham Vanclad was hired by someone else named in the manifesto to sue Schrader and her publishing company for harassment and defamation of character, among other allegations.<br /><br />Process servers attempting to serve Schrader with papers vanished twice, re-appearing in Nova Scotia weeks later. So, Vanclad took it upon himself to attempt to personally serve Schrader. The result was recorded in a statement to the Cleveland PD by a witness:<br /><br />“I lived down the hall from her. She seemed nice enough; a little quiet, and clearly a dyke, but she didn’t seem harmful. So when I heard screaming coming from her apartment, I thought ‘oh my god, someone’s hurting her’. I called the police, but when I looked out into the hallway… it was the strangest thing. There was something standing out there, it looked like a sculpture, a man made out of paper, like pages from a book. It was soaking wet, too; it took me a while to realize it wasn’t water or ink. That man was a lawyer, you said? He was just trying to do his job. I hope you catch her.”<br /><br />And they have yet to; Schrader has been on the run for over a decade at this point. Reportedly, she was sighted at the 2016 Akron Firearm and Hunting Expo, distributing pamphlets; the contents of these pamphlets are unknown, as the majority of them seemingly self-destructed following reading. Notably, Akron held its first Pride parade the following year.</p><p style="text-align: center;"># </p><p style="text-align: left;">To my readers: thank you for sticking around, those of you who have. My employment situation varies between 'precarious' and 'non-existent' at the moment; while donations are not expected, I do have a Ko-Fi you can find in the sidebar, if you wish to donate. </p><p style="text-align: left;">I'm behind on Institute work, but hopefully I can make up for lost time. I have a couple of items in the trunk, as it were, waiting to be published.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Be seeing you.<br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-75000501763074319012023-03-23T11:26:00.002-07:002023-03-23T11:26:44.545-07:00Sporadic Updates to Come<p>So, this is basically the situation as it stands.</p><p>The Head of the Institute, and several board members, were concerned upon seeing my vent post a week or two ago, and they decided a re-assignment would be best for me. I'm still going to be in the Midwest; unfortunately, we don't have bottomless resources to help an archivist and scribe like me move. </p><p>As I write this, I'm getting ready to present my two week notice to my civilian job. That's already going to help a bunch with my state of affairs; I don't mean to sound elitist, but I'm overqualified for pretty much every job in this hick town I live in, and my degree makes my resume noxious to anyone looking to hire me within Hornbeck County. It's hard to believe that Superior is less than an hour's drive away from the literal parade of Blue Lives Matter flags I've seen every Fourth of July for the last four years.</p><p>My new assignment is going to be in Cleveland. I know Cleveland has a certain image to it (thank you, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysmLA5TqbIY">Mike Polk Jr.</a>) but it's been an area of focus for a few reasons, and yes, one of those reasons is the fact that Bill Watterson seems to be completely impossible to photograph. He's like bigfoot or something. Plus there are marketing jobs all over Cuyahoga County that are looking for people with film degrees, so it shouldn't be too hard for me to find a job up there.<br /></p><p>Only problem is that Cleveland is home to a more... athletically-focused branch of the Institute, shall we say. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the local anomalies there relate to the abysmal performance of the Cleveland Guardians (n<span><span data-dobid="hdw">ée Indians)</span></span> and the Browns; at least one person claims to have captured a version of the 2016 World Series on their DVR where the Indians won instead of the Cubs. Someone in Chagrin Falls claimed to have captured a time loop occurring in a game between the Boston Celtics and the Miami Heat, but considering that is literally the premise of an SCP, I'll press X to doubt.<br /></p><p>I don't care. I'll learn about knuckleballs and quarterbacks if it means I can get out of this shithole town. Goodbye, Sloth's Pit, Wisconsin and your freaky-ass plastic industry. </p><p>But yeah, more sporadic updates. I have gotten a couple of reports I've been meaning to put up, so expect those every other week or so until I get myself situated.<br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-52806980887710556652023-03-18T09:43:00.004-07:002023-03-27T15:33:47.866-07:00Sunwalkers<p>Ms. di Corci from the <a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-alescio-manuscripts-1983-1987.html">Alescio Manuscripts</a> case has returned to us with another write-up. This is something she pulled from the files of one of her ‘father’s’ colleagues, regarding a strange art exhibition in the middle of the 2000’s.<br /><br /><br />As an aside, I have to applaud Ms. di Corci for growing so diligent in her research already. New York, as you can imagine, is a hotspot for a lot of odd media activity; she’s already written up half a dozen cases since joining, but this is the one she’s most comfortable with presenting at the moment.<br /><br /><br />Before I let her take the metaphorical floor, I leave you with a quote:<br /><br /><br />“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.” --Sir Terry Pratchett<br /><br /><br /><b>1.</b><br /><br />Here's the deal: it’s June 2005. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City is hosting an exhibit by an up-and-coming sculptor from the Lower East Side known as Herman Binger. It was a series of stainless steel sculptures depicting melted or melting figures, called ‘Sunwalkers’, because Binger thought that this is what would happen if people walked on the sun-- he called it a ‘perverse transmutation’. <br /><br /><br />The sculptures looked neat, but nobody knew how they were made; they resembled cast steel, but (this is a quote from the NYT) ‘the combination of humanoid forms below and melted steel on top seems too complex for current artistic techniques’. Binger explained how he did it, and most people accepted his explanation; he took department store mannequins, dismembered them into poses, and dumped molten steel on them. Even from pictures, you can tel something is off about the display. Some of the sculptures had faces that seemed too detailed for a mannequin.<br /><br /><br />One weird thing is that each of the sculptures also had at least two holes somewhere on them; no larger than a few millimeters. Binger explained that it was his signature, and that if anyone else copied it, he knew that it was plagiarism.<br /><br /><br />They’ll believe anything in the world of art, it seems.<br /><br /><br />There was one piece, “Prostrated”, that had a kneeling figure with its mouth open, apparently praying. It was one of the most evocative pieces, in no small part due to the fact that it looked the most melted out of the whole exhibit. It made noise when wind blew through it, so they set up a fan, creating a sound somewhere between a whistle and a scream.<br /><br /><br />Critics ate it up; the New York Times called the display ‘haunting and evocative’, while the New Yorker called it a ‘must-see’ for anyone visiting the city at the time. MoMA extended the time it would be exhibiting the museum by two more months.<br /><br /><br />Binger, for his part, had some odd habits when it came to the exhibit; he wouldn’t let anyone else touch the pieces, and insisted on coming in three hours before the museum opened to polish them all by hand. He insisted that he not be disturbed while doing this, on pain of lawsuit against the museum and removal of his exhibits.<br /><br /><br />In July, Binger announced a new piece for the exhibition; this is unusual in any museum, moreso as the MoMA decided to allow him to display it. Called “Amalgam”, it was almost twenty feet tall, made up of bodies piled on top of each other, all coated in layers of steel, with a single screaming figure at the top.<br /><br /><br />Nobody was really sure what the exhibit was actually trying to say. Some thought it was a commentary on the horrors of war, with the melting forms being based on allegations of white phosphorus rounds being used in the First Battle of Fallujah. Others thought it was a take on just how badly 9/11 scarred the country, with the melted steel being an allegory for the ruin of the World Trade Center. Some thought it was a parody of statues around the city; Binger had lived in New York his whole life, so the thought was that this was his view of the statues around Manhattan.<br /><br /><br />If there’s one thing I’ve learned so far as part of this weird-ass project or community, it’s that the only thing worse than an art critic is a New York art critic.</p><p><br /><b>2.</b></p><p><b> </b><br />It took until August for people to notice the smell. <br /><br /><br />Nobody knew what it was, at first; maintenance at MoMA was called to look into the possibility that a rat or a pigeon had gotten into the ventilation shafts and died, but even that didn’t fix the putrid, stinking scent in the exhibition hall. Anyone who’s been to New York knows that the city has some… interesting smells, but most New Yorkers are used to clouds of gas from the sewers, not rotting flesh and filth. Well, okay, if you live by the Hudson, maybe you’re used to filth.<br /><br /><br />Eventually, Binger came in and removed one of his sculptures, called ‘Venus di Argent’; it was a take on Venus di Milo, complete with arms being removed, but she was bent in half like she was throwing up, and once-molten metal was coming out of her open mouth. The smell vanished over the course of a few days; Binger explained that a family of mice had gotten trapped in the podium the piece was being displayed on and died. <br /><br /><br />Again: people in the art world will believe anything.<br /><br /><br />Nobody knew what Binger was actually doing until a few days before the exhibit was supposed to end. A family visiting from Nebraska came to the MoMA with their six-year-old son. Bringing a six-year-old into a museum with expensive art is already a risk, especially one who’s angry at his Gameboy being taken away by his parents. So, when they got to the Sunwalkers exhibit, this kid started messing with the statues. Eventually-- and don’t ask me how, these were supposedly solid steel-- he ended up knocking over a piece called ‘Mother of Babylon’, a female figure with no legs, sitting on a pedestal. The steel on the face chipped off when it hit the ground.<br /><br /><br />Beneath that steel was human skin, and a human eye. At first, when the NYPD got there, they thought they were dealing with a corpse inside the statue, like Binger had been grave robbing or something, but that wouldn’t explain why the body was so-well preserved.<br /><br /><br />And then the eye turned to look at them, and the person inside started letting out a low, rasping moan-- the closest thing they could make to a scream.<br /><br /><br /><b>3.</b></p><p><b> </b><br />All fifteen pieces in the exhibit of them had at least one person inside them; Amalgam had at least ten by itself. Most of the people inside were dead, early works when Binger hadn't perfected his process, but only Venus di Argent had started to rot. Seven survivors were found among the sculptures, and several things about the exhibit began to make sense.<br /><br /><br />The signature holes left in the metal by Binger were just big enough to put in an IV tube and a catheter. That’s what he was really doing whenever he would ‘clean’ the exhibits by himself--keeping his statues alive with a liquid diet and removing their waste. One of the survivors was the subject in Prostration, and he actually had his mouth propped open so that Binger could force liquids down his throat.<br /><br /><br />But nobody could explain how they got in there. Pouring molten metal over a corpse makes some sense, god knows it’s probably a more humane way to display bodies than what those fucks who make art out of the corpses of political prisoners do. But pouring molten metal over a living human being, even one who’s drugged or restrained, will definitely kill them. The main explanation for it was the Leidenfrost effect, which is something involving why you can stick a wet hand into a pot of molten metal and not get burned (don’t try that at home) but I call all sorts of bullshit.<br /><br /><br />You can't just stick steel on top of someone and expect them to survive. The weight of the metal alone would crush bones and organs, assuming they weren't incinerated outright. Binger did something to these people to keep them alive.<br /><br /><br />I tracked down one of the survivors in Jersey City. She doesn't really remember being in the statue, which I guess is a blessing. All she knows is that she was invited home by Binger one night after a gallery showing of his, had some tea that he said was from "the old country", and next thing she knows, a team of surgeons and engineers are working to get her out of a steel sculpture. <br /><br /><br />At first, I didn't necessarily think there was something spooky or kooky going on here, beyond some people surviving being encased in steel for a few months. Not that it matters much, because we'll never know his "technique"; one of Binger's victims-- the woman who was in Venus di Argent, the only person who died while on exhibit-- was identified as the niece of an NYPD officer, whose gun "accidentally discharged" into Binger's brain stem when he was cuffed.<br /><br /><br />At first, I thought the only clue we might have is the tea, but even then, it might just have been drugged. Then I tried to find Binger's autopsy report, hoping to find something behind the miasma of bullshit the NYPD uses to cover their tracks-- but there just wasn't one, nor was there a paper trail indicating that one was absent. <br /><br /><br />Even for 2005, way back before police accountability was a hot topic, that was weird. But paperwork kept on referring to an incident report not included with the rest of the case file; one FOIL Act request and a bunch of stonewalling from the NYPD later, I had a redacted copy of it in my hands. The report read:<br /><br /><br />"On 9/25/2005, Assistant Medical Examiner ████████ █████ attempted to begin an autopsy on a subject who died following arrest in connection to Complaint 952930918. Subject's remains had been delivered to the City Mortuary two days prior and were in cold storage. <br /><br /><br />A.M.E. █████ attempted to begin the autopsy at approximately 5:20 P.M., after a period of thawing. Subject's remains were in a standard body bag, and despite A.M.E. █████ claiming that the profile of the subject's body could be seen while the body bag was closed and had the appropriate weight for a human body, upon opening the body bag, a mass shredded paper smelling heavily of ozone was found within, with no sign of the deceased subject. <br /><br /><br />The shredded paper appears to correspond to an obscure, currently out-of-print erotic novel originally published in 1978, titled 'Skin of Steel, Heart of Gold'; the similarities between the contents of the novel and the method in which the subject carried out their crimes has been noted.<br /><br /><br />A. M. E. █████ has been placed on paid administrative leave; as the subject has no known next-of-kin, and was the perpetrator in the deaths of at least seventeen people, the condition and location of his body are considered low priority. No follow-up is required."<br /><br /><br />I've tried tracking down <i>Skin of Steel, Heart of Gold</i>, but I haven't found anything other than a couple of pieces of superhero-related smut. Considering it's 45-year-old spank material that sounds incredibly niche, and the author died in '89, I'm not surprised. But I'm not sure how Binger could have been inspired by it; he was born in '78, and by the time he would have been old enough to enter a shop that sold that kind of thing, the book would have been out of print for a decade. <br /><br /><br />I'll keep looking for it, but that's firmly on the back burner. There's a lotta weird shit going on in the five boroughs, and I can't really focus on a serial killer who's been, metaphorically speaking, in the ground for almost twenty years.<br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-60772721794129254562023-03-10T09:53:00.003-08:002023-07-01T12:25:53.097-07:00I lost a friend.<div>I’ll be real. The reason I haven’t updated lately is because the arcade job went south. Not in the way you think-- nobody’s in jail, nobody’s dead. But I did lose a friend.<br /><br /><br />I was looking forward to talking to you all about how we broke into an abandoned resort, decimated thanks to COVID, to recover a cursed arcade cabinet. It’s actually a pretty fun game called Crime Stoppers, a light-gun game developed by the now-defunct Yumegemu Entertainment (they got bought out by Capcom in 2003 or 2004). But when you play it around loaded firearms, those firearms have a tendency to spontaneously discharge. Not a problem in Japan, but in America, where there are 1.2 guns for every person, it’s a big yikes. We’ve been going around and disabling them for years by ripping out the board that actually has the game’s programming on it and…<br /><br /><br />It doesn’t matter. <br /><br /><br />It just doesn’t fucking matter.<br /><br /><br />There are times when I really, really hate this fucking job. It’s not even my real job; god knows it pays pennies on the dollar. My job at the hospital isn’t much better, populated by miserable people who commit so many HIPAA violations on a daily basis that I’m surprised the hospital where I work hasn’t been wiped off of the earth by a wave of lawsuits-- a sue-nami, if you will.<br /><br /><br />Therapist says I deflect trauma with humor. Guess she’s right.<br /><br /><br />After the job was done… We went to an IHOP. It was the only place open late enough that we could get food. There were about half a dozen other people from the Institute there. One of them was a friend I’d known pretty much since getting into this business-- let’s call him David. It’s not his real name, do you think we’re stupid enough to use our real names here?<br /><br /><br />David and I were… I’m not sure ‘thicks as thieves’ would be the right term here. He used to be a really mean son of a bitch; I remember having to hold back Cecilcy (who’s AMAB and now identifies as trans-NB) from punching him because David used to be fairly transphobic.<br /><br /><br />I’m a misanthrope, and part of that is because I believe people can’t improve in terms of morality. In terms of skill, you can learn and get better at something, but actually improving as a person is basically impossible. People always take the easy way out, and it’s always easier to fall back on bad habits, to crawl back in the cave, to live in blissful ignorance. <br /><br /><br />David is probably the sole exception I’ve met. No offense meant to any other members of the Institute, but we do have a tendency to wallow. After being yelled at by dozens of people that his attitude wasn’t cool, on top of some personal tragedies that I won’t discuss for his sake, he’s one of the few people I know that has actually shown meaningful improvement over the course of his life.<br /><br /><br />The job was… it didn’t go smoothly. We were trying to contain the board by ripping it out of the machine, but I kind of smashed it in the process. Squirrel’s confident we can get it back together since the memory chip that actually contains the game was intact, but David broached a subject that many members of the Institute have questioned during our time.<br /><br /><br />“Why not just destroy it completely?”<br /><br /><br />At this point, Squirrel and their brother Matt conveniently had to make a phone call. And David and I got to talking. His reasoning was that shit like this was actively harmful, and served no purpose. A lot of the stuff we studied did; why talk about the Hemaphytes like they’re a valid art movement instead of a glorified bunch of serial killers? Why not burn every copy of Adventures in Alorane we find immediately?<br /><br /><br />I reasoned that we couldn’t realistically do that to every piece of media we find; beyond the whole bracing phenomenon, there’s all sorts of stuff that’s propagated online to the point where it would be impossible to mitigate or undo the harm. LiveLeak dying only helped so much, but the Garrison Footage has popped up on dozens of porn sites, and while we don’t think mind_the_gap$.mov is doing anything beyond giving people non-anomalous nightmares, it can’t exactly be scrubbed from the internet by a group of 200-odd people working on a budget of shoestrings and prayers.<br /><br /><br />Then he brought up an uncomfortable topic. <br /><br /><br />People in RPG circles have probably heard of Mr. Welch’s List, or as it is properly known, “(X) things Mr. Welch can no longer do during an RPG”; the last known count was at around 2500. Copycats have popped up to the point where there’s a Tv Tropes page about them; there’s one dedicated to XCOM, one to the MCU, one dedicated to Shipgirls (I don’t know what that is and I don’t want to know)... basically if a fandom exists, assume someone has made a Welch list. (Or a Skippy’s List, apparently?)<br /><br /><br />He brought up a list that falls under our purview. “Things Mr. Drake Is Not Allowed to Do in [REDACTED]”. The redaction is there because I don’t want to call out the fandom associated with it. The Drake List is a fairly minor anomaly, all things considered; the person who wrote it somehow made it so that the entries on it are burned into your memory. Fairly harmless, all things considered.<br /><br /><br />But there was a secondary component we weren’t aware of until a couple of years ago. A second half of the list, as it were, one that the original person who wrote it would send to… to children. While it doesn’t have a name officially, we’ve termed it the “Things Mr. Drake Is Allowed To Do To You” list. It’s sickening, and I don’t want to talk about it; the man who wrote it is somehow still free, likely because he can coerce his victims to consent.<br /><br /><br />Inarguably, the world would be a better place without the list. We technically have the means to remove the first half of it from the internet, but it would be a logistical headache that would essentially be an all-hands-on-deck situation for the Institute, an expungement that would have to be approved by the Institute’s Board. <br /><br /><br />I’m for media preservation in general, no matter how harmful it is. I realize that’s not the best viewpoint to take when your job is literally to study media that can kill people, but in my eyes, it’s like studying diseases; we have to understand what’s causing it before we can make the vaccine.<br /><br /><br />It got heated after that. I barely remember what was said, but I remember it was stupid. I would like to think I told him that he was an idiot if he thought removing the public list would undo, or even mitigate, the harm that it did, but in all honesty, everything I said to him was a blur. I tried making a point about how, if we wanted to talk about harmful media, we should be destroying every copy of the Bible we find, and taking flamethrowers to Harry Potter.<br /><br /><br />I’m not very good at rhetoric. My friend Dora (not part of the Institute) says it’s a weakness of mine, and I’m hoping is a flaw in skill rather than a flaw in morals; if it isn’t, then I’m kinda fucked.<br /><br /><br />Eventually, I told him to go to hell and left. I didn’t drop below 50 until I got back into my hometown in Wisconsin. <br /><br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">#<br /></div><div><br />Why the vent piece, you might ask? God knows why. This blog is my outlet, and I feel bad for not posting for a month. People have apparently been worried about me, so this is me just. Writing for the sake of it.<br /><br /><br />I’ve listened to music that’s gotten me hospitalized. I’ve had to help photograph paintings that have survived fires that destroyed families. I once had to read a book that told me, in excruciating fucking detail, what my fucking sociopathic redneck neighbor did to the cats he caught on his property.<br /><br /><br />This has made me feel worse than any of that. Because now, I realize he was right.<br /><br /><br />This list, this fucking list, is on the verge of being pulled down, but I can’t even express my support for it without looking like some kind of hypocrite. It’s not like it’ll accomplish that much; it’s been adapted into other forms by now (I think the monstrous son of a bitch was trying to sell individual entries on it on T-shirts for a while) and he’s still going to be able to exert control over people who read it. <br /><br /><br />David, on the off chance you read this: you were right. I’m sorry I wrecked everything over this. You know how to contact me if you don’t think I’m a complete asshole.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-52791452618078501312023-02-19T15:43:00.004-08:002023-06-22T16:46:12.559-07:00Change Your Number: 424-555-0177Expect the write-up about the arcade cabinet next week; right now we’re in the process of re-assembling it, as it were. This came across my desk a bit earlier today.<br /><br /><br />If you’ve ever watched TV, you’ll know that pretty much every phone number in any given TV show includes the local block code “555”-- for instance, an episode of Law and Order: SVU might display a New York City phone number as 212-555-XXXX. ‘212’ is New York’s area code, but ‘555’ as a phone code is restricted in North America, and is basically only used for fictional works, so that actual phone numbers aren’t dialed. 867-5309/Jenny by Tommy Tutone caused issues by using a valid telephone number in its chorus, resulting in several people in the 1980s having to, ironically enough, change their number.<div><br /><br />With that being said, here’s a question for you: why has the phone number “424-555-0177” been appearing in real-world advertisements since 1985? And what happens when you call it?<br /><br /><br />‘424’ is the area code for a large portion of Los Angeles. That much I can attest to, having blocked dozens of phone numbers from that area. The 424-555-0177 number is not registered to any Los Angeles business or home, but nonetheless has appeared several times over the years.<br /><br /><br />It first appeared as a toll number, 1-900-555-0177, in an advertisement for… let’s not sugarcoat it, for a phone sex hotline. It appeared on late night television commercials in the LA area, but sadly (or thankfully) there are no reports of what happened to people who called this number; however, in August 1985, when this number was used, there was reportedly a strong smell of ozone in residential districts of LA, even on smog-free days.<br /><br /><br />It next appears in an infomercial for the Magik Oven, by Magik Technologies, an oddly-named start-up from the early 90’s. It was one of the first convection ovens that was small and light enough for home usage; basically an early air fryer. They had the toll-free number 1-800-555-0177, but they never sold a single unit through their infomercial; the following is a transcript of a phone call attempted by a member of the Institute in 1992.<br /><br /><br /><br />Caller: Hello? Is this the Magik Oven order service?<br /><br /> <br />Operator: Thank you for calling the Algernon Board of Tourism, this is Laverne, how may I help you?<br /><br /><br />Caller: I’m… I want to order a Magik Oven.<br /><br /><br />Operator: I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong number, ma’am.<br /><br /><br />Caller: No… this was the number on the infomercial, I swear.<br /><br /><br />Operator: This has been happening a lot, they put the wrong number in the damn commercial. Have you tried dialing 455 instead of 555?<br /><br /><br />Caller: I’ll try it, thank you.<br /><br /><br />Operator: You’re welcome. Happy False Saints Day, ma’am.<br /><br /><br />Caller: …you as well.<br /><br /><br />1-800-455-0177 did connect with the ordering service used for the Magik Oven, but sales were low due to this error. Magik Technologies eventually went out of business due to this blunder, as has been recounted on the product review and history podcast Disinfomercial.<br /><br /><br />(There’s a podcast for goddamn everything, isn’t there?)<br /><br /><br />The first instance of the 424 area code preceding the phone number was recorded in 1997, where it appeared on a commercial for the law firm of Schuyler, Baumer and Walker in Los Angeles. The law firm still exists there, so clearly the number didn’t affect their business too much. The number’s even been seen in the background of a couple of LA-based television shows.<br /><br /><br />Its most recent, and most troubling, manifestation occurred only three weeks ago. <br /><br /><br />Marc Koch was a YouTuber based out of Antwerp, Belgium, whose channel was, to be frank, predatory. It was a genre of channel that created content based on making phone calls to fictional characters and pretending to hold conversations with them; Marvel heroes and villains, Disney princesses, Freddy Fazbear, Fortnite characters, that kind of thing. Cheap and easy to produce, brings in ad money like gangbusters.<br /><br /><br />Koch’s body was found in his bathtub, sans left kidney; he had a rare blood type, so it was assumed the organ was harvested and he was left to die. However, this does not explain the footage that was found on his video camera.<br /><br /><br />In the footage, Koch sets up his camera and announces he is going to call the Madrigal family, from the Disney film Encanto. He holds up the phone to the screen, dialing the 424-555-0177 number, and calls. “Hello, is this--”<br /><br /><br />“Thank you for calling the Algernon Board of Tourism, Happy Windelsmith’s Day. How may I direct your call?”<br /><br /><br />Koch looks alarmed. “Uh, no, I have the wrong number. I’m trying to do this thing for a Youtube video where I call, uh…”<br /><br /><br />“Oh, I know exactly who you’re looking for! Just have to route you through the Ol Coman(?) exchange…”<br /><br /><br />“The what?”<br /><br /><br />The line dies, briefly, and then a woman’s voice talks to him from the other end. “Hola?”<br /><br /><br />“Uh… wrong number.” He tries hanging up, but the phone is unresponsive. He turns the camera to show the phone number, mouthing something that I’m told is essentially the German equivalent of ‘what the fuck?’ <br /><br /><br />“No, Marc,” the woman says, “I think this is exactly the right number. You have a few things we need. What you need to do is--”<br /><br /><br />He manages to shut off the camera. When it’s turned back on, it’s on the floor next to him, and he’s piling something up by his feet. A pair of tweezers will enter the frame, deposit an object, and then go back up. After a while, the female voice says, “That’s enough.”<br /><br /><br />“I think I have one more--” Marc says, before there’s a sickening squelch. “And that was one of his arteries. God dammit.”<br /><br /><br />“Do they have those in their mouths?”<br /><br /><br />“They bleed so much so I just assumed--”<br /><br /><br />“You idiot. Extract, now.”<br /><br /><br />There’s a sound of falling viscera as Marc Koch’s body hits the floor, scattering the pile of teeth. “Oh come on!” a distorted voice says. “Took me five hours to do that. Fucking tax.”<br /><br /><br />Marc Koch’s only injury was the removed kidney; he was found with a fully intact set of teeth, but they did not match dental records taken antemortem. <br /><br /><br />Koch was the first confirmed death caused by the 555-0177 number in almost thirty years. Others had been suspected in the interim, but this was the closest we’ve gotten to video footage. <br /><br /><br />Do not call this number. If you’re lucky, you’re wasting minutes calling a fictional number. If not… at least leave a record for us.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-30492661645581063072023-02-02T10:30:00.004-08:002023-06-23T19:50:41.574-07:00Safety Square (2002-2003)<p>I’m sorry for this blog being dead for so long; I got swamped with projects by other Institute members, on top of recovering from COVID. What projects, you ask?<br /><br /><br />Some members of the Institute prefer to record their findings with audio and then have someone like me transcribe it. The Institute doesn’t have many rules, but one of them is absolutely no automated speech-to-text software like Dragon or Speechnotes; either a human transcribes it, or it collects dust. We learned our lesson the hard way in London.<br /><br /><br />Believe it or not, this is normally my ‘job’ at the Institute when I’m not busy pursuing a case; the Institute’s Board (if it can be called that) prefers that we have written copies of all reports. I only started this blog, and started documenting new cases, literally because I ran out of work.<br /><br /><br />Then I got twenty audio recordings on my desk the same day. This is just one of them, sent by an investigator I’ll call Clark, sealed inside a Faraday pouch wrapped under six layers of masking tape in a tamper-proof envelope.<br /><br /><br />I should note that this transcript discusses the deaths of and injuries to children aged eight and under. <br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">###<br /></p><p><br />[several seconds of clapping to calibrate the audio]<br /><br /><br />Begin recording.<br /><br /><br />This is a story that can be told using three graves in Northern Ohio. Their links are not obvious; their dates of death do not line up with each other, but each of them are connected by an insidious thread that I aim to unravel.<br /><br /><br />The first grave is located in Woodlawn Cemetery in a small town called Norwalk, situated almost exactly at the midpoint between Cleveland and Toledo. It is in an area dedicated to children, and belongs to Suzanna Moore, born May 1997, died October 2003. The circumstances of her death were bizarre-- her father, Alexander Moore, carried her through the front doors of the Emergency Room at the local medical center, saying that she wouldn’t wake up, apparently oblivious to the massive wound in her head and the blood that had run down her face and stained not only her Halloween costume, but also her father’s jacket. Furthermore, he seemed to not comprehend that the ER nurses were telling him that his daughter was dead for almost three hours, until he saw her in the morgue, at which point he had to be restrained for violently attacking several members of ER staff.<br /><br /><br />I cannot interrogate Alexander Moore about this topic, as he took his life in 2009. His grave is in his native Connecticut; part of his divorce settlement with his ex-wife included the stipulation that he not be buried within five-hundred miles of his daughter’s grave. I did not wish to bother the former Miss Moore, though-- [the tape cuts off here before resuming, audio may have been deleted]<br /><br /><br />In any event, the information I seek can be more easily obtained from public record than private testimony. Autopsy information does not fall under HIPAA, and I was able to glean the information I required from a line describing the clothing of the deceased.<br /><br /><br />‘‘Halloween’ costume, styled after an alligator/crocodile wearing a tutu”.<br /><br /><br />If this sounds like a non-sequitur, then it is time to move on to the second grave.<br /><br /><br />This one belongs to the Spinelli Family. Miranda Spinelli, born June 1964, died July 2014, and her son Carter, born August 1992, died September 2000. The name ‘Carter Spinelli’ may be familiar to those of you who walk in the more morbid circles of the internet; the ‘true crime’ [He says with no small amount of disgust] podcast <i>Strange Deaths of the 90’s </i>covered it in Episode 129, ‘Kids These Days’.<br /><br /><br />Carter Spinelli died after jumping off a bridge in his hometown of Toledo, Ohio. While not suicidal, Carter was developmentally disabled--though they used a much harsher term in 2000--and may have had trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. That was the assumption police made when they found him in between the train tracks with a nylon cape from a superhero Halloween costume wrapped around his body. There were allegations that bullies from his school had encouraged him to attempt the jump, as he was apparently called “Specialboy” [all one word, per Clark’s notes] due to his developmental issues, with the words “Specialboy: the World’s First [slur removed] Superhero” written in his 1999-2000 yearbook. These allegations never panned out.<br /><br /><br />Miranda had a surviving son from a previous marriage, sixteen-year-old Martin Spinelli. After shoving a reporter who was attempting to interview him on the way to school and being suspended following this incident’s broadcast, he threw himself into a project, a video tribute to his little brother, using various imaginary friends of Carter's. Among them was ‘Manda’, who Carter had drawn in the image of a crocodile wearing a tutu.<br /><br /><br />This was a very elaborate video tribute, with Martin creating puppets and drawings in the image of his little brother's imagination. This became a sort of obsession with him, and he would claim to find himself lurking-- pardon, working on it as late as 3:00 AM. His efforts manifested through his failing school grades, and eventually, the video was shown at a memorial service to Carter on what would have been his ninth birthday in 2001.<br /><br /><br />An uninvited party was in attendance at the service-- their name was Winston Plummer, a station manager for the local PBS affiliate, WGTE. He was impressed with Martin's work, and asked if he would be interested in working on a series of safety-focused TV shorts that they were planning to air early in the morning; specifically, they were interested in using the Manda puppet. Plummer explained that the aim of the program was to teach children about dangers such as peer pressure, loaded firearms, and high falls. They also invited Miranda onto the show to discuss her son.<br /><br /><br />The program, called Safety Square, began production in September 2001, before being postponed for reasons that should hopefully be obvious. It resumed in November of that year, and in February of 2002, the first episode, “Don't Go Up”, aired, focusing on the dangers of high falls.<br /><br /><br />Safety Square is clearly a public access production; it was shot on tape, and the copies of it that exist today are full of magnetic aberrations and glitches that even Institute technology struggles to compensate for and repair when it’s digitized. None of the child actors seen on-screen have camera presence, several of them mispronounce their lines, and they look past the puppets and at the people operating them. To call it ‘low budget’ would be generous.<br /><br /><br />And-- [clunking sound, scream of pain] SON OF A BIT[audio cuts out here]<br /><br /><br />Apologies, apologies. I made the mistake of watching “Don’t Go Up” while doing research on this. Its anomaly is probably the least obvious of the six episodes produced; after approximately thirteen minutes, around the time when Manda says the line “Make sure you always hold onto something when you’re going up and down the stairs”, viewers begin to experience feelings of intense vertigo when looking down from a height-- for instance, descending stairs from the second floor to the entrance of your apartment building. It’s just a sprain, and I know that someone is going to lecture me about watching media before it’s been parsed, and I’m not about to let it be you, Tristan.<br /><br /><br />I didn’t watch any of the others after that. The only reason I watched “Don’t Go Up” was because of Miranda Spinelli’s testimonial at the end, about Carter. She wanted to dedicate the series to him to make sure that no other child in North-West Ohio suffered the same fate that he did.<br /><br /><br />In the aftermath of “Don’t Go Up”’s airing in February 2002, seventeen children eight and under were admitted to hospitals in the area after falling down flights of stairs, off of playground equipment, or in one case, off of a couch. No fatalities resulted.<br /><br /><br />Episode 2 of Safety Square is entitled “Safe in the Kitchen”. Individual frames I collected--safely this time, Tristan-- show Manda and several other characters learning how to be safe in the kitchen-- not to drink stuff in cupboards that isn’t clearly labeled, always checking expiration dates, staying away from the knife drawer. That kind of thing. It aired in June of 2002; reportedly, a four-year-old in a town called Berlin Heights crawled into the oven as his mother was starting to prepare dinner, but was unharmed. <br /><br /><br />The tape for Episode 3, “Fire Safe”, was presumed lost. It evidently surfaced at a garage sale in 2009, shortly before a house fire killed a family of three. The slagged remains of a VCR were found, but the tape inside was not identified, see included documentation.<br /><br /><br />[I’ll spare you that much. Official Institute reports are very dry compared to what I put up here.]<br /><br /><br />I believe you see the pattern by now, but in case it’s not evident, Episode 4 was called “Guns Aren’t Fun”. See included data drive for a series of autopsy reports dated to October 2002, soon after the episode aired.<br /><br /><br />[Again, sparing you that. This is already rough enough to write without me transcribing the autopsy report of a six-year-old.] <br /><br />Episode 5 was called “Owie!”, make sure there’s an exclamation point in there. It talked about how to deal with injuries if you got hurt-- cuts, scrapes, bruises. It was simple enough for kids to understand, and…<br /><br /><br />The last episode of Safety Square aired in May of 2003, but they had finished “Owie!” by that time. They didn’t air it until October of that year, to fill a gap in the schedule. It aired a couple of weeks before Halloween 2003, just enough time that a father could help his daughter put together a Halloween costume based on the alligator puppet.<br /><br /><br />I don’t think the connection was ever made while Miranda Spinelli was alive. It would have broken her heart, knowing something that her surviving son helped create negatively affected, or even killed, so many people. <br /><br /><br />I talked with Martin Spinelli about this; he works at the local CBS affiliate in Toledo, and denies any knowledge that what he created caused so much harm, going so far as to call me a lunatic and… well, suffice to say, I’m happy that it didn’t escalate. Man looked like he could do some damage with the equipment he was carrying.<br /><br /><br />I did mention that there were three graves that told this story, but that isn’t quite true; the third one is in the process of being dug. It belongs to a man who was found inside a red 1990 Hyundai Excel in an inlet in Lake Erie. Police ran into some trouble with identifying the body, and understandably so; it was entirely skeletonized by Lake Erie and its wildlife over the course of over twenty-five years. They ran into a break in the case when the glove compartment was opened, and they found a mostly-intact wallet inside. Among other things were a AAA Membership card, a photograph of the deceased and their family, and a driver’s license, issued in 1995.<br /><br /><br />The name on the license was Winston Plummer, the aforementioned WGTE station manager, who, by all accounts, was alive at the time. Dental records on the body did not match those taken from the entity calling itself Winston Plummer during an exam in 2021-- but they did match those taken from Plummer during a dental exam in 1994.<br /><br /><br />It’s the teeth. It’s always the teeth they get wrong. They can replicate somebody down to the pattern on their retinas, but they always have trouble with the teeth. I don’t know why.<br /><br /><br />Winston Plummer, whoever this version of him was, was not located following the discovery of the wreck. He had reportedly come into the station that morning and locked himself in his office; when maintenance unlocked the door, the office looked as if it hadn’t been used or had upkeep done in over twenty years, with rotting carpet, peeling paint, and a stain on the ceiling over where Plummer’s chair used to be.<br /><br /><br />Publicly, Winston Plummer died from crashing his car into Lake Erie about… four days ago? As of recording. Privately, something is rotten here, and everyone knows it.<br /><br /><br />I am still investigating Plummer’s posthumous tenure as station manager, and I’m dreading what I will find. While Safety Square was thankfully not more widespread-- the range of casualty failed to even reach nearby Detroit-- Plummer, whatever he was, collaborated with PBS stations across the nation from 1997 until 2023. The infamous ‘Hat Man’ episode of Sesame Street aired during this time-- surely you remember that, with how Big Bird dedicated a whole minute to telling children how important it was to have a fire extinguisher in their house?<br /><br /><br />Whatever happened to this version of Plummer… the entirety of the office smelled like ozone, and there were… footprints in the carpet. <a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-concordance-dagger-and-how-to-deal.html">Snowmen</a> don’t come after normal humans, and they don’t attack unprovoked.<br /><br /><br />I think that Plummer was an Algernite. If so, that’s the longest one has continually existed in our reality. As you can imagine, I’m going to be asking for more resources dedicated to investigating Algernon.<br /><br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">###<br /></p><p><br />Algernon, where Algernites come from, is… a whole can of worms I don’t have time or energy to get into. Turns out, getting COVID makes you long for the sweet embrace of death long after your symptoms are better.<br /><br /><br />I’m well enough to travel, at least. Algernon will have to wait; some urban explorers and a few dozen institute members are getting together to perform a rescue operation… on an arcade cabinet. <br /><br /><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-75861353454141548462023-01-05T11:37:00.002-08:002023-06-24T19:23:30.345-07:00The Black Rondeau <p style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: small;">So, here's the deal. Tristan is bedridden with COVID right now, so I'm taking over this week. Hell of a way to spend the New Year.</span></p><p style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></p><p style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm Squirrel, musician and audio engineer by day, person-shaped thing that looks into cursed audio by night. Let’s talk about the Black Rondeau.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In our line of work, when you want to research the weird shit we find, sometimes you have to create or perform it. Sometimes that means you have to emulate the Hemaphytes and paint with your own blood, or put on a production of </span><span style="font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Love's Labours Surrendered, </span><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">or playing a game of Calliope (</span><span style="font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">never again</span><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">). In my case, it means trying to perform various pieces of cursed music. Some stuff isn't too bad; sure, Everdeath's discography will make everyone who listens to it have a nosebleed, but that's only a danger if you're on blood thinners. But there is something I will never play again.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Black Rondeau is an incomplete piece for cello from 1748, and the first recorded performance of it was in 1749, but the most infamous performance took place in Cleveland in the 1970s; if you've ever read about the Severance Music Hall massacre, you now know the cause. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The sheet music that we have for it is seven pages long and can be played in about seventeen minutes, but it was originally believed to have been thirteen pages and required approximately twenty-three minutes of playtime. The last six pages were destroyed after the original performance.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The piece is notable for requiring two people to play it, despite technically being listed as a soloist piece. One person mans the fingerboard to help generate the chords, while the other actually plays the notes on the strings. It’s a difficult piece to play, and getting it wrong can cause horrible consequences. Getting it right can do even worse things-- again, Severance. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The 1749 performance was a private one, held in Leipzig. Approximately thirty people were in attendance, and the performance was done by twins, Hans and Alfons Koch. Otto Koch, their father, composed the piece. Hans and Alfons were both cellists in an orchestra at the time, and both of them bemoaned the ease of the pieces they had to play; their father is said to have written their Rondeau in an attempt to challenge them. We’ll get more into what happened during this performance in a little bit.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">#</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The performance I put on occurred in mid 2018. While I did the chords on the fingerboard, I had my brother, “Matt”, play the strings. It was an awkward set up, with me having to sit in his lap. We had an audience of ten people, seven from our community, and three willing participants from outside of it. We took all of the appropriate measures we could-- we left appeasements, we said prayers, we took showers to cleanse ourselves. But the whole time, I was afraid it might not have been enough.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One thing I have to stress about this: if you’re a student of classical music and manage to find a copy of The Black Rondeau and want to play it: don't. It's a test of endurance after you get through the last intact page, and can take anywhere from five minutes to six hours. You can </span><span style="font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not </span><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">stop playing.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To play the Rondeau, the cello has to be tuned in a specific manner; the D string has to be slackened, which risks compromising the integrity of the instrument. By contrast, the A string has to be tightened to the point where, if you try to play pizzicato, you end up slicing your fingers open; this is completely intended.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The performance began with a standard canon progression. The sound it made was the musical equivalent of a train wreck-- it sounded utterly wretched, but it was completely enthralling. The three members of the audience from outside of the community tried covering their ears in some manner as we progressed through the first several bars. Matt was clearly uncomfortable playing his cello from high school in a manner that was potentially destructive to the instrument. But that discomfort was nothing compared to what came next.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At the start of the eighth bar of the piece, the playing instructions call for the person who’s manning the fingerboard to pluck the A string as hard as they can. Despite the thickness of the cello's strings, it drew blood. I gasped in pain, and those who weren’t in the community looked ill when they saw blood flowing down the fingerboard. But as it did, the tone of the music literally changed.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I felt like an entire symphony was grabbing onto the fingerboard beside me. Notes that could not have been played by one, two, or maybe even ten people resonated from the instrument, and the temperature plummeted. An invisible, slimy hand came up against my bleeding finger, and an invisible tongue licked my blood from between the strings. The good news was that we had begun playing it correctly: but without the final six pages, how it would go from there was up in the air.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">#</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 1749, Hans and Alfons began their performance to an audience of thirty, including some celebrities among the Electorate of Saxony’s musical scene. Accounts of the time confirm a similar finger-slicing to what happened here, with Hans being the one to spill blood. The music that came from the cello after this was described as ‘sonorous and wild… like a murder of crows learning how to sing an aria’. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As Hans’s blood flowed down the neck of the cello and began pooling onto the floor, it reportedly flowed uphill from the small pit where they were performing, and up into the audience. It stopped at the front row, and one of the people in attendance there reported that it felt like the blood was somehow ‘looking at me… as if a million invisible eyes were judging my reaction to the piece’.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Others reported feeling claustrophobic in a room that was big enough to hold an audience of two-hundred. One man felt something sharp pressed against and eventually into his skull, right above the eyes, but no blood was produced. Eventually, one woman-- the wife of a nobleman-- stood and bolted for the door.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">She found it locked from the outside. And as she panicked, trying to pull it open, the music intensified. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">#</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The locked door was likely intended to contain whatever the hell the Black Rondeau summoned. Thankfully, times have changed, and now all that’s needed is a few powerful electromagnets to keep them from escaping.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These beings, what Alfons called ‘oneiroi’, had flooded the room. One of the non-Institute members stood and fled, screaming about how something was trying to strangle him. As he ran out, the electromagnet hummed, and I picked up the brief impression of something falling against the floor with a </span><span style="font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">thump</span><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At the midpoint of the piece-- at the top of page six-- Matt was required to make his own sacrifice. He pulled away the cello’s bow as I plucked the strings during a brief interlude, and with a grunt of pain, yanked out a lock of his hair, jamming it it into the horse hair of the bow. He continued playing, and the oneiroi howled.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One of the other non-audience members, an older woman, looked around wildly; part of me wonders if she was looking for hidden cameras, like this was some kind of prank show. Our researchers just took notes, some discussing their experiences with each other. Once you experience an unsound or three first-hand, musical aberrations like this cease to really amaze.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Blood continued flowing from my finger, and as I turned the page, my heart sank; we were on the last one, but we had to keep playing to a point at which the oneiroi were satisfied so that they didn’t tear us apart. That happened before-- in 1749.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">#</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We'll call the man who felt the blade by his eyes Sebastian. After seeing two people faint from fear, he decided to put a stop to the performance, drawing a pistol and aiming it at the performers. “Cease!” he called. “Cease this devilish music at once, or I shall silence you forever!”</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hans and Alfons either didn’t hear him, or didn’t care. Another witness reported at least one of them crying, trying to pull his fingers away.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When Alfons moved to join his hair with the bow, Sebastian loaded and fired his pistol. The bullet hung in the air about three inches in front of the barrel, and was slowly flattened and molded by something. It reportedly glowed red-hot for a moment, before being rolled into a long, needle-like shape, and shoved into his eye.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sebastian didn’t scream in pain-- he just stood, startled, as lead that was still practically molten metal penetrated his left eye and exited his right. His eyes became clouded by cataracts as he fell unconscious; he would not awaken for the rest of the performance.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That left everyone essentially glued to their seats until the song’s conclusion. Hans and Alfons kept playing like a gun hadn’t just gone off within ten feet of them.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">#</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We reached the end of Page 7. From there, we had to keep playing to satisfy the oneiroi. Both Matt and I are musicians, but we’d never actively hurt ourselves performing, and this was starting to take a toll. We had some sheet music that we’d managed to adapt for this set-up, something from Beethoven. We could only hope it would suffice. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The cut on my finger had started to scab over, so I plucked it open again. There’s only one non-community member in the audience by this point, a young woman. She kept trying to look over the shoulders of Institute members to read their notes; one of them invited her into an empty seat, and they began discussing what was happening. We had a new convert, maybe someone to replace us in case shit went fully sideways. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was some discordant muttering from the oneiroi. They recognized that we weren’t playing the music that called them forth in the first place, and several of them growled. I kept playing as we transitioned to a more modern piece, something from the 1920s. This seemed to satisfy them.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We renewed the sacrifices every few bars. I had to cut open my finger on the same string, and Matt had to pull out more hair and jam it into the bow while I improvised pizzicato. I felt sick, but there was no applause still, so we couldn’t stop. This was the most difficult performance of a cursed piece I’d ever pulled off.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Twenty minutes turned into twenty-five. Thirty. Forty. I lost count. The group members are looking worried, and a few of them are debating how to safely put a stop to the performance. I just had to keep going until I passed out, or the oneiroi applauded.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">#</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hans and Alfons failed to finish their performance.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After two more people collapsed from fright, with Sebastian barely breathing, someone in the audience took the initiative to storm the pit they were playing in. They were a Frenchman named Gernons, and they were directly responsible for the only death that night.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They strode up to the stage, and kicked Hans Koch in the sternum, driving them five feet away from the cello, and interrupting the performance. He began berating Hans in French; what he said is lost to time. But his kick drove Hans directly into a set of invisible arms. First, growling came from around Hans. Then, heat and music filled the room, tones that were both beautiful and incredibly angry.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The heat didn’t ignite Hans. It dried him out, ‘like a tomato’ as one account puts it. He shriveled into a leathery sack (no bones were reported as being seen) before an invisible knife began cutting off a piece of his skin from his back and forming it into a sheet. Blood was splattered onto the page, and musical notes formed on it.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gernons took the music and fled the room, never to be seen again. All of the candles in the room flickered and died, before spontaneously re-igniting an unknown amount of time later; Alfons was curled up sobbing by the cello, which was completely shattered.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another casualty resulted from that night; Sebastian, who was completely blind from the cataracts the oneiroi gave him, attempted to get surgery the next year. Said surgeon was a quack doctor, and Sebastian died from complications at age sixty-five.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You may have heard of him; his full name was Johann Sebastian Bach. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">#</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Two hours turned into two and a half, then three. I couldn’t feel my fingers. My mouth was a desert. I cried as I tried to stand upright, until my knees buckled, and I fell over, exhausted, tears in my eyes. I once played the violin for six hours, but I didn't have to self-harm every other bar.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was whispering all around me, and for several minutes, I was sure I was done for. Someone in the group tried to pick up an electromagnet to contain the oneiroi swarming around me, but it would have been a temporary measure; they’ll eventually find me, and I’ll just become another piece of sheet music.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">However, Matt managed to finish the performance with a flourish, before he also collapsed. Our eyes met as he landed on the floor and then closed, as we waited for the worst. I muttered for people to evacuate the room, but nobody heard me.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Then, the room broke out into thunderous applause. It’s like I’m in a stadium with the acoustics of a concert hall. My ears rang after three minutes, and it took another five for me to realize that they’ve dispersed. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That one woman from outside of the research group was a nursing student. After she treated us with some help from one of the Institute's medics, she asked the typical questions (“What the hell was that?” “Who are you people?” “Is anyone going to believe me about this?” “How can I help?”) and the questions are answered in turn (“Long story”, “Concerned parties”, “Probably not”, “You already are.”). We gave her our Telegram link, and we got her on the path to help figure out some of the more bizarre parts of the world of media.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I haven’t played cello since, and even playing guitar is harder, thanks to the scar on my thumb. Like I said, I’m an audio engineer; because of this performance, a lot of the music I make nowadays typically involves a lot of MIDIs in the melodies.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">#</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The piece of music made from Hans Koch’s skin is called the Bloody Minuet; a short piece, only one page, front and back. I’ve heard that performances of it have occurred as recently as 1995, but it’s fallen off of the face of the earth. Honestly, I’m not even sure if the Bloody Minuet is cursed, or if its just a novelty, with it being printed with human blood and skin. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm one of the Institute's lead music experts, but I don't try to perform classical music anymore. The Black Rondeau was bad enough, but in 2020, I was subjected to one of the Posthumous Symphonies. I recoil at the sight of clarinets almost three years later.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 2.4; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;"><span style="font-size: small; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Assuming Tristan's condition improves, he should be back next week. If not, we have plenty of other people who can do essays. </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-24446550623808004672022-12-29T11:19:00.000-08:002022-12-29T11:19:35.416-08:00Can't Get You Outta My Brain<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tristan here. Guess who fucking caught COVID in L.A.?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The material I was going to write about this week is only accessible in-person, so until I’m out of quarantine, you’re going to be hearing from some other members of the Institute. Flora (she/her) is an intern who joined late last year, and has chosen to study anomalous music, something I am woefully unqualified for-- I can’t even tell you a single song that released in the last year, let alone fill you in on the specifics of a literal earworm.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Original essay written by Flora Miller, junior researcher</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Novelty songs are popularly regarded as somewhat childish in comparison to other pieces of music, but despite this they sometimes have remarkable staying power. Consider, for example, the long-lasting appeal of the works of “Weird Al” Yankovic, or the ubiquity of “Monster Mash” whenever the month of October rears its head. It is a considerable relief that the song “Can't Get You Outta My Brain” did not experience the same kind of popularity. The origins of this particular track are a bit sketchy at best, and it is difficult to determine how many dormant copies of the song exist, but the earliest recorded incident occurred in August of 2000.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Brian Wilson was a computer programmer and amateur music critic who ran the now-defunct website “Just for the Record”, a blog where he reviewed various albums and the occasional single. Fortunately for the continued existence of humanity, it was not an especially popular blog.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">According to Mr. Wilson’s final blog posts, he first encountered the song on a CD entitled “Novelty Hits of the Swingin’ 60s” which he acquired at his local thrift store. The disc contained a number of popular novelty songs from the aforementioned decade, including “Surfin’ Bird”, “The Lurch”, and “The Name Game”. As far as can be determined, aside from “Can't Get You Outta My Brain”, none of the other songs in the collection possess any hazardous traits. His initial review of “Can't Get You Outta My Brain” was as follows:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Track 24 was a little unusual to me, it was a short little number called ‘Can't Get You Outta My Brain’. Now, most of these songs are at least somewhat familiar to me, but for the life of me I swear I have never even heard of this one before, which is a shame because it’s pretty good! Honestly, with a few minor changes, I would have expected this one to get mainstream success. It’s got a nice, slightly jazzy soft rock instrumental backing, with a beat that just makes you wanna snap your fingers to the rhythm. Definitely good music to dance to.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There’s something weird about the backing though, no matter how many times I listen to it I just can’t quite make out one of the instruments, it’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before. It sounds a little bit like some kind of modified guitar, but there’s this unusual resonance to it that I can’t put into words. It was a little distracting the first time I listened, but now that I’m used to it I think it really works with the song!</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The main reason that it’s considered a novelty song is most likely some of the nonsensical lyrics. Aside from the chorus (Baby even though you cause me pain/I can’t get you outta my brain), most of the verses contain frequent nonsense words. For example, the opening verses of the song are ‘Oh my baby is special, a real shaladrak/She always makes my tzagthoth krulanak’. Like, sure, it rhymes, but those aren’t real words, y’know? The whole song is like this, but strangely enough it kinda works. I keep finding myself coming back to this track, it’s a real earworm.”</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After completing his initial review of the CD, Mr. Wilson began to show signs that something was wrong. According to a surviving friend, who prefers to remain anonymous, “He kept shaking his head a lot, like it was hurting. Sometimes I’d catch him scratching at it, and I swear when he drew back his hands there would be blood, but he always wore that stupid baseball cap so I couldn’t see the damage. He also never, and I mean never, stopped humming that stupid song.”</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After the review of “Novelty Hits of the Swingin’ 60s”, Mr. Wilson proceeded to post 27 consecutive reviews devoted entirely to “Can't Get You Outta My Brain” over the course of a week. During this time, he apparently did not go to work, sleep, or eat, and only consumed the bare minimum amount of water to keep himself alive. The later “reviews” eventually devolved into simple repetitions of the song’s chorus.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Below is an excerpt from one of his later posts:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“It’s beautiful. Legitimately, I think it is the single greatest work of art ever produced. I hope that when humanity goes extinct, our lasting legacy is this song. I want this broadcast throughout the universe, I want every single inch of stone on the planet carved with the lyrics. Everyone needs to know about this song, okay? EVERYONE. I didn’t get the words at first. I didn’t know what zolanor even meant, much less why it would be good for it to be alerious, but now I understand. THEY whispered it to me in my dreams. It hurts sometimes. Baby even though you cause me pain/I just can’t get you outta my brain. Baby even though you cause me pain/I just can’t get you outta my brain. Baby even though you cause me pain/I just can’t get you outta my brain.”</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mr. Wilson’s repetition of the song’s chorus continues for around 5000 words.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">During the last week of Mr. Wilson’s life, he produced numerous copies of “Novelty Hits of the Swingin’ 60s”, mailing them out to various addresses, including the White House, multiple radio stations, and several of his friends.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Only 7 days after Mr. Wilson first listened to “Can't Get You Outta My Brain”, he died of an apparent seizure while attempting to send more copies of “Novelty Hits of the Swingin’ 60s” through the mail. Officially, the cause of death was listed as a cerebral hemorrhage. The true autopsy report was never released to the public.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Upon opening up Mr. Wilson’s skull, the pathologist found that a significant portion of his brain had been consumed by unidentified insects, similar in overall appearance to the larvae of </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hermetia illucens</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Preserved specimens are accessible to members of the Institute, with the address of its storage unit in Indiana available to qualified parties.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As a result of Mr. Wilson’s efforts to share “Can't Get You Outta My Brain”, there were 47 casualties, 4 of whom were members of the Institute. To date, anyone who has listened to a full recording of the song, even once, dies within 1-2 weeks. During this time, victims universally develop an intense fixation upon the song, particularly the incomprehensible lyrics. The exact mechanism through which the hazardous effects are spread are not fully known, but the source is believed to be in the so-called “nonsense words” contained in certain verses. Simply listening to the tune or chorus are not enough to result in fatality, and reading an incomplete portion of the lyrics seems to generally be safe.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Since the initial outbreak, there have been 4 other recorded incidents involving “Novelty Hits of the Swingin’ 60s”, resulting in a total of 13 further casualties, and during one such event a copy of the song was uploaded to YouTube. Fortunately, the video was not picked up by the algorithm, and once detected by the Institute the recording was swiftly taken down via copyright strike.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0.0pt; margin-top: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is of the utmost importance that any copies of “Can't Get You Outta My Brain” are immediately neutralized, as widespread dissemination of the song could potentially result in the near-total extinction of humanity as a species.</span></p><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-17702880712929164302022-12-20T11:36:00.001-08:002023-01-09T09:29:04.448-08:00The Concordance Dagger, and How to Deal with Snowmen<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sorry for being radio silent for a moment. To explain why, I need a moment to talk about Hollywood, and Los Angeles as a whole.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Imagine if you took an area of desert seven times the size of Washington, D.C., hired someone to drain the land around it of all water, and packed it with over four million people, several of whom don’t actually live there for tax reasons. Next, imagine it populated with people on the run from the law-- to be exact, run from patent law, as Edison was unwilling to let filmmakers use his camera technology to make films. Now sprinkle in a few decades of bigotry, sex crimes of every flavor, regular crimes of a few lesser flavors, and self-obsession so severe that it makes Narcissus look like Mr. Rogers, and we have modern L.A.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I may be a film student, but I have no illusions about Los Angeles. For God’s sake, the city doesn’t even have decent public transportation, something New York had figured out a century before it got anywhere near L.A.’s modern population.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So why, pray tell, have I wasted the last three weeks of my life in the City of Angels? Let me tell you why.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">#</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hollywood is several things, but ‘wasteful’ is not one of them-- at least, not when it comes to props and sets. You might be familiar with trivia along the lines of the PKE Meter from </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ghostbusters</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> appearing in </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Suburban Commando</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, or how a early 2000’s </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Power Rangers</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> series reused armor from</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Starship Troopers,</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> or how </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Forbidden Planet</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s Robby the Robot prop has been recycled so many times, it actually has an entry on IMDb as a distinct actor. Stanley Kubrick actually ordered all of the props and sets for </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2001: A Space Odyssey</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> destroyed specifically so they couldn’t be re-used for the inevitable sequel. Prop recycling has been common practice in Hollywood for decades.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Certain props, however, fall out of circulation, only to be found years or even decades later-- in some cases, even after the original film has been lost. What drew me to Hollywood in the middle of the holiday season was the alleged appearance of a prop from </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Concordance</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">; people who have been reading lately (I thank you for your continued patronage) will know this film has been a bugbear of mine for a while, and I’ve been trying to find an intact copy of it for almost six years. That said, props and pieces of the sets keep popping up, and this was a fairly notable one.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Concordance</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a 1912 silent film set during the 1500s, during a witch trial in central Europe. The titular Concordance is a ritual the film’s protagonist, Ysolde, is attempting to enact in order to catapult her somewhere more civilized, where she’s treated like a human being instead of like a woman in the 1500s. A central prop in the film was a ritual scythe-like dagger used by Ysolde to carry out the sacrifical murders needed to power the Concordance. Like most props up to the modern day, it was easier to just use an actual dagger than to make one out of a flexible or harmless material, and simply make edits to the film to make it appear as if a murder had taken place. But rather than steel or iron, the prop was apparently made of bronze, as the metal’s color made it look suitably ‘unnatural’ on film at the time.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The dagger has been missing since a warehouse fire in 1965, on the backlot of the relatively small RKO spin-off Breaker Motion Pictures. On December 2nd, 2022, it re-appeared in the LAPD evidence impound in their Hollywood precinct. I had no details beyond the fact that it was covered in fresh blood.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Tristan, surely you’re not going to confess to stealing from a police station on your blog. Do you </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">want</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to go to jail?” Cecily actually asked me this, but there were about half a dozen instances of “fuck” in there, including at least two “fucknugget”s and one “you fucking moron”.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are several problems with this thesis: firstly, I did not steal anything, and the circumstances under which I acquired it were legal, for a certain value. Secondly, I am in the process of having any and all charges dismissed or pled down. Thirdly… it’s almost awards season, and with all due disrespect to the LAPD, they have more important anomalous phenomena to get driven mad by this time of year. They aren’t going to miss </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">one</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> potentially paranormal knife when they have to deal with meta-cocaine and celebrity doppelgangers.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I flew down to LAX and took an hour-long cab ride from there to Beverly Hills (L.A. traffic is one of the closest things to Hell an American can experience), where I met my contact; he had experience with extricating items from evidence lockup for research purposes, but he wasn't part of the Institute. Riley, who you may remember from my investigation into </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Money for Nothing</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, had agreed to do me another favor in exchange for information I had found in the last few months regarding actress Zelda Pleunick.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">His house was small for Beverly Hills, but to someone who grew up in Rural Wisconsin, it was basically the Biltmore Estate, but with several more </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fortnite</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> action figures strewn about the floor by Riley’s grandchildren. “Their mom’s got ‘em visiting Universal Studios,” he explains as he pours a measure of bourbon for himself, notably not offering any to me. “And not just the theme park-- Goldblum owes me a favor.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Like Jeff Goldblum?” Easily the third-dumbest question I’d asked that week.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“No, Percy Goldblum. Christ, kid, don’t you have a film degree?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“You looked into me, then?” I asked.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I looked into your whole organization. You know how fuckin’ surprised I was to learn that the guy who runs you is Egyptian? Figured he’d be some pasty white motherfucker who looked too long at Ivo Dorakis’s </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Shattered</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and went crazy.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That stunned me. “You know Hemaphyte art?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Some of the newer stuff’s harmless. There’s going to be a showing in New York next-- but you’re not here for that. You’re here about the knife.” He offered me a seat.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I nodded and sat down, scanning the area for exits, my hand on a bit of Institute tech in my pocket. I noticed we were far away from the windows, no clear lines of sight for anyone to see us talking, but also close enough that I could bolt if I really needed to. “You know,” I said, “There are some more… extreme members of the Institute that want Hollywood to go up in flames.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“What, like the city?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Like the </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">concept</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. They figure you’re too dangerous to be left alive.” I rolled my shoulders. “You hear about how the entire cast and crew of that Marvel film in Georgia got food poisoning a few years back?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Delayed production worse than the pandemic did. America’s ass went through a dozen pairs of--” he paused. “Fucking hell, that was </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">you?</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Not me personally, but there are people in the Institute who hate the MCU so much that Alan Moore looks like Stan Lee.” I left out the fact that it wasn’t food poisoning.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Christ. Anyway, the knife.” He leaned back. “From what I can tell, a Jane Doe-- she's alive but refuses to talk to the cops and doesn't have ID on her-- walked into a secondhand store with her clothing all wrecked. She tried to buy all sortsa stuff with weird-lookin’ bills, obvious fakes. Thrift shop owner calls the cops after he realizes the bills are fake. She pulls the knife, police come in and cuff her.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"And the blood on the knife?"</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Fresh. No more than a couple of hours old. That gonna affect the value?"</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“It’s not for me to sell. I’m here to get it and store it. Besides, this isn’t the first time I’ve encountered a bloody prop.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“First time you’ve probably seen one used as a murder weapon, though."</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I blinked. "Before I got on the plane, you said they hadn't found a body. Did that change?"</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Murder wasn't done this century." Riley sighed. “So, here’s the deal. The knife was lost in the Breaker Backlot fire back in ‘65. The blaze supposedly killed four people and cost the studio over seven million dollars in lost or damaged props. All of the people who died were workin’ on the same film-- a Bible epic, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the Beginning</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Genesis? Ambitious.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Yeah, but Hays code meant no Garden of Eden stuff-- restrictions against nudity. Vincent Marché was the director, and the first body they identified-- he just got new caps put on his teeth a week before the fire.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Marché… why do I know that name?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Probably because his brother Casmir was the closest thing to Epstein you could get in the 1960s. And Vince, shall we say, partook of his brother’s supply.”</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“How do you know this?” I grimaced. “You’re… sixty-five? You wouldn’t even be in high school when this happened.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Sixty-four. And my family’s old Hollywood; my uncle worked as gofer on a lot of BMP’s films, and when I was getting into the industry, he gave me a list of people to stay the fuck away from. And no, you can’t see the list.” He took a drink of his bourbon. “Casmir caught a bullet in September of ‘83, and I’ve always wanted to shake hands with the son of a bitch who shot him.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I nodded. “The second victim, then?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Simon Tzan.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I blinked. “Like… </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tarzan: Force of Nature</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Simon Tzan? Edgar Margullis’s </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Treasure Island</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Simon Tzan?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Yeah, everyone forgets he died in ‘65 because his last film got released in ‘72. He had polio as a kid, damage to his bones is how they managed to figure out it was him. He was meant to play Adam. He got along really well with the kid they got to play Cain. He was the third body-- you wouldn’t know him, eighteen-year-old named Sam Yanner. Got cast because he looked just enough like Tzan that he could pass as his son. Yanner is the only one who we know didn’t die in the fire.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I blinked. “But you said he was the third body?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Yeah, but the fact that he had knife wounds all over his back, including one in the base of his skull, the M.E. was damn sure that he died before the fire started. Shape of the blade matched the dagger you're after.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I winced. “At least he died quickly.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"Small mercies." Riley shook his head. “Then we have the fourth person, the reason they were all in the prop warehouse that night. Gwen Lyons. She was meant to play Eve.” He shut his eyes, and took a sip of his drink. “The way my uncle told it… she was getting ‘uppity’ with the three of them. There was a scene where Eve confronts Cain after he murdered Abel, and Yanner ‘ad-libbed’ feeling her up.”</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Fucking </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Christ.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Yeah. She slapped him and walked off the set. Tzan tried to apologize on Yanner’s behalf, but…” He sighed. “My uncle said they decided to ‘teach her a lesson’, and the school supplies were a glass of Jack with enough benzo to kill an infant. They dragged her into the prop warehouse because it was dark, unsecured, and… there were a lot of things they could use to…” He sighed. “To hurt her.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That statement sunk in. “And… Gwen? You said there were three bodies. What about her?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Never found, but it was assumed she was incinerated.” </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As he raised his glass to his lips to finish off his bourbon, I said, “Bullshit.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Huh?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“A fire has to be at least 1400 Fahrenheit to completely incinerate a human body.” I stood up and started pacing. “Fatal burns can be caused by temperatures as low as 180 Fahrenheit, but given the state of other props in the warehouse, the fire couldn't have been hotter than 550-- aluminum props were damaged, but they weren’t slagged. And bronze doesn’t melt until you get up to the </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">thousands</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">….”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Riley had a look on his face that made me wonder if he wanted to call the police, or the psych unit. “You… know a lot about fire. Should I be worried?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I shook my head. “My dad was a firefighter. Retired after fighting a freak blaze in Douglas County back in 2015.” I sat back down, “</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Point is</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, there should have been no reason the dagger from</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> The Concordance</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> was lost when even the aluminum props were undamaged. And the absence of the body…” .</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My eyes widen and I spring out of my seat. “God dammit. I </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">hope</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I’m not right here.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“What?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I paced again, scratching my head. “Certain… items used to produce forbidden media can take on… odd properties. Vincenzo di Monteriggioni’s brushes can supposedly transmute oil paints into blood, the Typhon scroll constantly produces salt water, and the instruments that play the Posthumous Symphony-- I’m getting off track here.” I shook my head. “What do you actually </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">know</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> about </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Concordance</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, Riley?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Just what you told me in your email. Witch kills people, and uses the magic to teleport somewhere where they’ll treat her decent.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“She… doesn’t teleport, though.” I swallowed. “Ysolde’s spell… it’s alive, and it comes to the conclusion that she can never, and </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">will</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> never, be happy in a world where superstitious men rule. It takes her out of the 1500s… and into the middle of London on December 31st, 1910.” I’m shaking as I look at Riley. “</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Concordance</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, among other things, was notable for being one of the first depictions of </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">time travel</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in film.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Riley gawps at me for several minutes as he processes what I just said. Then, he laughs. “You can’t be serious, kid. </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Time travel? </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That would…” He paused. “That…” he looks through texts on his phone. He gets the same nauseous look that people whose worldview has been upended tend to get in these circumstances. He pours himself another glass of bourbon, hand shaking as he types out a text. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Riley?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“...my contact in the Hollywood precinct, I… I asked him why they thought the bills were counterfeit.” He licked his lips. “The Doe was trying to pay with twenties and fifties, but… none of them had security features. No reflective ink, no watermarks… and none of them have dates of issue after </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">1963</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We were both still for a moment. Riley hoped it wasn't real; I’m dreaded that it was. “I need to get to the Hollywood Precinct </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">now</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“What?” Riley snorts. “Are fucking time cops going to come to take her away?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Riley’s lack of imagination is probably one of the main reasons he’s such a successful producer. By the time he’s poured himself another drink, I’ve ordered an Uber to take me to Hollywood. By the time he cracks the time cop joke, it’s arrived. “I’ll text you once she’s safe.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Safe from </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">what?</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">” Riley calls after me as I nearly tripped on an action figure in the front lobby. “Kid!”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">#</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oscar Wilde published an essay in 1891 called </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Decay of Lying</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. One of the main points in it is that Life imitates Art more than Art imitates Life. But things have gotten far more complex since Wilde died; in the modern day, Life imitates Art because Art </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">rules</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Life.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Look around you right now. If you’re in public, how many people can you see wearing some sort of clothing with a video tv or film reference on it? If you’re on your phone, how many apps do you have installed that are some kind of microtransaction-fueled game? If you’re at your computer, can you honestly tell me that somewhere in the last two dozen Youtube videos you watched, there isn’t a clip of some show or anime, or a trailer for a video game, or some thinkpiece about how </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Game of Thrones</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Season 8 wasn’t a complete dumpster fire? When was the last time you quoted </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tv Tropes</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in a conversation?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Life imitates Art because Art pervades Life. But there’s a line that cannot be crossed; it’s one thing if a conversation you had with your father reminds you of a novel you just finished, but it’s another if characters, locations, phenomena or items from that work starts bleeding into reality. Bad things happen. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">People were gathered outside of the Hollywood Precinct; I could hear a fire alarm blaring within. The entities I described emit massive amounts of ozone; in a smog-filled hellhole like L.A, it wasn’t an unfamiliar scent, but someone probably assumed there was an electrical fire and pulled the alarm. The fire department wasn’t there yet, but I was at a loss as to how to actually get in--</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And that’s when a member of the LAPD came up to me. He looked like he was a detective, badge on his belt, gun beneath his coat, and… at first, I thought the look on his face was anger at some tourist gawping at the incompetence of the LAPD, but then I realize the sheer terror in his eyes. “Are you Tristan?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I started to bolt. He puts out his hands. “Whoah, easy. Riley called, he said that… said that you could take care of what… of what’s happening in there. Can you?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I inspected the crowd, plan formulating in my skull. “Is there another way in?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Fire exit around the back.” He starts leading me there. “How the hell are you meant to help? You’re a </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">kid</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I’m twenty-seven, and I’ve gotten rid of these things a few times.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The fire exit was wide open. “Good news is that they hate the noise. Was she alive when you last saw her?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Yeah. I think so. But she… she wasn’t well. We found benzo in her system, and she was having trouble waking up.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Then there’s probably hope.” I entered the deafening precinct, light and sound threatening to overwhelm me, but beneath it all, I hear screaming from the direction of the holding cells. As I entered, I saw a trio of beings around the cell holding Ms. Jane Doe-- or, as I was now assuming, Ms. Gwen Lyons.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are a variety of names for these entities; for the sake of simplicity, let’s call them Snowmen. They look roughly like people-- body, two arms, two legs, something vaguely head-shaped-- but they look, and sound, like they’re made of television static, or ‘snow’. There’s a constant low, crackling drone when you’re in their presence, a white noise that threatens to overtake all thoughts and leave you helpless. If they touch you, they pass right through you, but they can leave you numb for weeks, or even months, at a time; a colleague of mine ran through one in November 2019, and couldn’t feel the left side of her body until next June. And that’s if you </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">aren’t</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> their target. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the modern age, they’ve become their own worst enemy. Snowmen emit massive amounts of ozone, which anyone who’s touched a lightbulb in the last century will tell you is a scent associated with electrical fires. Modern fire alarms produce a sound that the Snowmen hate, and it also blocks out their white noise. The ones that are in front of the cell look like they’re writhing in pain, until I come in.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And I swear, for the barest instant, that they recognize me. There’s something about the cadence of their white noise that changes when they see me, almost inquisitive, like ‘hey, remember me?’. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“You don’t want her,” I said. “She’s innocent. She’s here by accident.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One of them managed to adapt to the sound, and began melting through the bars of the holding cell. Gwen screamed.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“You don’t want her!” I repeat. “I can give you what you want,” I admit, reluctantly. “Just… don’t take her. Please?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Snowmen leaned in close to me, their bodies of static casting a glow upon my face. “Look, you don’t even have to destroy it. I… I think I can neutralize it. Do you understand? Neutralize? Make inert? Break?”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They peeled back from me, and just stood there. I fired off a quick text to Riley, and he responded with details as to where the dagger is being kept. What I did next made me die a little inside, both as someone who’s studied </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Concordance</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and someone who believes in the preservation of film history.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The evidence bin was easy enough to find. The dagger was beautiful; it was cast entirely out of bronze, and it still shone in my hands as brightly as it must have when </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Concordance </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">was being made over a century ago, barring the blood across the sickle-like blade. For a moment, I can’t bring myself to do it; then I hear screaming from the holding cells, and know it has to be done.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I found what I needed in the maintenance closet-- a drill. I drilled straight through the blade in front of the Snowmen, and once it got weak enough, I snapped it in half in front of them. We’re meant to say something to the Snowmen when they leave, some sort of ritual the Institute’s head figured out back in the 90’s. I struggled with the pronunciation, they got the gist of it. “Xekínise, Eumenides.” Begone, Gracious Ones. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Snowmen faded away. Gwen was left sitting in her cell, confused, and sobbing.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">#</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For legal reasons, I can’t disclose what happened to Gwen, but I can confirm that the woman in the cell was, in fact, Gwen Lyons, removed from the 1960s to the modern day. Rest assured that, for now, she is safe.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The dagger was rendered inert by my damage, as promised. The Snowmen haven’t shown up again to check up on it, at the very least, which is something that does happen. I’ve entertained the thought of getting it reforged into its proper shape, but for now, both halves are on display on the wall above my computer.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As for me… I discovered that Riley’s power over Hollywood, however vast it may be, isn’t immutable. He doesn’t know every cop, and I ended up with a pair of taser bolts in my back when I tried to get out of the station through the fire exit. I was arrested for trespassing, destruction of evidence, assisting escape, instigating a false fire alarm, and a bevy of other things.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In short: for Christmas, I have a court date. The only reason I’m writing this from my computer in Wisconsin and not from a hotel room with an ankle monitor attached to me is that the Institute has </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">very</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> good lawyers. Unfortunately, said lawyers have asked me to lay low until the New Year, but they said posting an update should be fine.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, Happy 2023 everyone, and may your pursuits of knowledge not end up with you getting handcuffed.</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-33930151028978232762022-11-25T07:32:00.006-08:002022-11-29T12:47:00.844-08:00The Gravid Tape<div style="text-align: left;">When I was a freshman in college, I had no clue what I wanted to study, and I didn't have many options, either.<br /><br /><br />The first college I attended, before I transferred, was in dire financial straits. The president of the college, and her thirty-six vice presidents, had basically misappropriated so much money that the list of majors that had been cut in the previous two years and the list of still-available majors were about equal in size. I had originally wanted to major in anthropology, but that was one of the first degrees on the chopping block.<br /><br /><br />While most students would drown their existential dread in a can of Bud Light, I was neither old enough to drink nor well-connected enough to get convincing fake IDs. So, I tried joining different clubs, but I struck out in all of them. The gaming society was insular, full of <i>Magic </i>players who probably took out loans to afford their decks and <i>D&D</i> groups who were locked in campaigns that had been going on for years. Two different book clubs sneered at me when I told them I didn't think <i>Harry Potter</i> was all it was cracked up to be. The less said about my experience in the culinary club, the better. <br /><br /><br />Eventually, I found somewhere I belonged. The university's film school had been one of the first cuts when the financial issues started. Because of one clause or another in his contract, the dean of this particular school was kicked upstairs to an admin position instead of being fired. Let's call him Dr. Whaley. Dr. Whaley had gotten the green light for a 'film appreciation club', with the caveat he would not be paid to run it. I decided to attend a session or two.<br /><br /><br />The first session, Dr. Whaley told us something I'll never forget. "The only person who should have a say about whether or not a film is valuable isn't a body of decrepit zombies that call themselves an Academy, or a twenty-something online whose mixed up 'yelling at the camera' with 'humor', or some member of academia who insists that the medium of film declined with the invention of the talkie. You, and you alone, can decide what films are valuable to you."<br /><br /><br />We watched some of the usual suspects; <i>Citizen Kane, A Clockwork Orange, Psycho</i>, but we also watched newer stuff like <i>The Dark Knight</i> and <i>How to Train Your Dragon</i>. It was an attempt to get us to appreciate cinema in all its forms, but also point out where the warts were in the classics; to say there’s an uncomfortable amount of racism in <i>Gone with the Wind</i> would be an understatement.<br /><br /><br />By the end of the fall semester, I was the treasurer. It was a small club: there was myself; Dr. Whaley; Sidney, a senior who had once been part of the film program before it got cut, now staying at the college to fulfill a math major; Tyler, a fellow freshman who was going for a literary studies major; and… Quentin. <br /><br /><br />We all just assumed Quentin was a science student, maybe something in psychology, because of the way he dissected the Ludovico Technique in <i>A Clockwork Orange</i>. I took a psych class, but I never ran into him, but I always figured it was just because he was more advanced than me. He looked like he was maybe old enough to be a grad student, but I never even learned his last name, and Dr. Whaley seemed okay with him.<br /><br /><br />Towards the end of spring semester, Quentin told us he has a film project he wanted to share. This surprised all of us. Sid outright asked, “You’re a psych student. Why did you make a film?”<br /><br /><br />Quentin explained. “I’m taking a poetry class, and the final project for this term is to write and record a video poem. I used a camera from the library to record it; I think you’ll like it. It’s pretty funny.”<br /><br /><br />Dr. Whaley was one of those people who was very supportive of his students (that's what he called us, despite it not being a formal class) and invited Quentin to share the project with us at the next meeting.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /></div></div><div><br />Not all forbidden media is large-scale. Some student projects have anomalous elements in them, and his project was one of them.<br /><br /><br />Sidney, Tyler, Dr. Whaley and I gathered in the same classroom we always did to watch our films. Quentin plugged in a purple and red flash drive and started up the film, whose file name was “Gravy.mov”. “I had a friend help me with this,” he explained. “Just provided the voiceover.”<br /><br /><br />It began in a downright surreal manner-- the camera was focused on a hand holding a BLT sandwich. The sandwich was manipulated like a hand puppet to recite lines from his poem, titled <i>Gravid</i>. Here's how the first stanza went:<br /><br /><br />"<i>Gravid</i>, by Quentin N.<br /><br /><br />"Something new grows inside her,<br /><br />A lemming, a lemur, maybe a spider.<br /><br />It writhes beneath the dermis thin,<br /><br />Threatens to pierce her virgin skin.<br /><br />She screams and writhes and shakes, <br /><br />Praying that soon, her water breaks,<br /><br />And the thing within her aching womb<br /><br />Finds itself in its father's tomb."<br /><br /><br />We were watching this in a vacant room of the student union. While we were laughing at the absurdity of a sandwich puppet, Dr. Whaley was turning pale. He said he needed to make a phone call, and ducked out of the room.<br /><br /><br />Right before the second stanza started, the hand stopped "speaking". A voice, presumably belonging to the hand's owner, asks "We good, dude?" before a sledgehammer comes down and crushes the hand. The audio track cuts out just as the hand's owner starts screaming, and Quentin's voice plays as the hand writhes in pain, bones and muscle exposed to the air.<br /><br /><br />"It will be born some time anon,<br /><br />Eating the Whore of Babylon. <br /><br />From its maw, it utters a cry,<br /><br />That will dry the sea and rot the sky <br /><br />Mother writhes and mother screams,<br /><br />Mother sees the child in her dreams."<br /><br /><br />Tears of shock are in Sidney’s eyes as she asks, “Where’s Quentin?” She looks up just in time to see him doing… something to the door from the outside. He jammed the handle with something, and Sidney can’t get it open.<br /><br /><br />Tyler gets up to try the door. The handle doesn't move. He picks up the fire extinguisher to try to break the window on the door and force it open from the outside; even as he manages to shatter the window, it’s too small for him to get his hand through and clear the obstruction.<br /><br /><br />The whole time, I'm glued to the screen. I couldn’t look away; my mind was filled with equal parts fascination and disgust, as if I was watching some gruesome surgery, where the patient is screaming because the anesthetic is ineffective, but the doctor keeps operating anyway. The broken hand… changes. Lumps of flesh and bits of bone recombine to form something that looks like a cross between a human mouth and a lamprey's sucker. It eats the remains of the sandwich as Quentin's voice continues to speak.<br /><br /><br />"It shall be cesarean,<br /><br />And then the child will be born again.<br /><br />Polka-dots dance across her vision, <br /><br />As the doctor makes the first incision.<br /><br />Blood flows from unsullied skin,<br /><br />As the wet nurse is pulled in.<br /><br /><br />Gravid, Gravid, Gravity,<br /><br />Kill the sky and drain the sea. <br /><br /><br />The child is born, the world is lost <br /><br />Within a hellish pentecost,<br /><br />Child eats mother, sister eats brother, <br /><br />And the whole world shall be--"<br /><br /><br />Something awful was going to happen if the poem finished. I didn’t know how I knew; it was as if there was a voice in my very soul telling me the recital could not be finished. Not knowing what else to do, I ran to the computer and unplugged every cable I could find, managing to get the power cord unplugged before the last word could be spoken. I unplugged every other cable as well, just in case the projector somehow kept playing. <br /><br /><br />I remember there being something wrong with the projector’s screen. The canvas was now blank, but it was warping outwards, to the room, as if something behind the screen was stretching out into it. It was completely stationary, which was the oddest thing about it.<br /><br /><br />Dr. Whaley came back, wearing sunglasses with X's on each lens, and a member of maintenance to get the door open. The look of relief on his face haunts me-- I think he expected at least one of us to be dead.<br /><br /><br />"Where's the data?" He asked, coming to the computer. <br /><br /><br />I unplugged the flash drive that Quentin had stored the video on. Dr. Whaley placed it in a Faraday bag, and turned off the projector. As he did, there was a soft screech from the projector screen, and then everything seemed to return to normal.<br /><br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /></div><div><br />The club disbanded after that. I saw Sidney in the dining hall a couple of times, but I never heard from Tyler again. <br /><br /><br />Dr. Whaley met with me before the semester ended. He said that he'd already offered a letter of recommendation to Tyler (who was transferring colleges) and had told Sidney he would always be a positive reference for her. He asked if there was anything he could do for me.<br /><br /><br />"Yeah. Explain what the fuck that was."<br /><br /><br />He told me that it was a recitation of the poem <i>Gravid</i> by Quentin Naismith, a poet from the 1940s whose work was never widely published, due to its deleterious effects on reality. He told me that the 1996 Milwaukee explosion wasn't caused by a gas leak, but by someone playing a recording of Naismith's poem <i>Flagrante</i>. <i>Gravid</i> would likely have killed, at the very least, everyone in the building we were in through "infestation".<br /><br /><br />"And the video?"<br /><br /><br />"The student-- I doubt he was one, come to think of it-- needed a medium to transmit it. Film-- or at least, the moving image-- is one of the more powerful mediums for proliferating an anomaly like that. If it were to a larger audience, it's likely a good part of the campus would be infested."<br /><br /><br />"And… there's more like this?"<br /><br /><br />He nodded. "There's <i>The Concordance, The Maddening Quiet</i>, The Garrison Footage, the Kilauea Tape… that's just in film. I had to get on a phone with a colleague of mine that night to confirm that what I was listening to was actually <i>Gravid</i>."<br /><br /><br />I nodded. “I think I’d like the letter of recommendation. There’s a school in Ohio that’s supposed to have a good film course.”<br /><br /><br />Dr. Whaley smiled at me. “After all that, you still want to study film? You could run into some dangerous stuff in that field. I don’t want you to be hurt.”<br /><br /><br />“Can the film really hurt me if I don’t think it has value?”<br /><br /><br />Dr. Whaley sighed. “It can. And I hope you never run into anything else. What’s the name of the school?”<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br />***<br /></div><div><br /><br />As I stated in my last post, I ended up doing my bachelor’s thesis on <i>The Concordance</i> and the impact it had on early cinema. That was what got me back on Dr. Whaley’s radar; he met with me a few days before graduation, and offered me a position.<br /><br /><br />“It doesn’t pay well,” he told me. “But you’ll get training, and you’ll be able to help people. You’ll be helping us stop people like Quentin. People who use films, books, games, art… people who use culture and media to try and cause harm.”<br /><br /><br />“Do you run it?” I asked.<br /><br /><br />“No. But I’ve met the people who do. They do good for us, and we have people all over the world.” He paused. “I’m actually going to be leaving the country soon. There’s been a report of someone distributing copies of the Garrison Footage in Taipei. Two people have already died. I could use an extra set of hands.”<br /><br /><br />I told him to let me think about it. Instead, I had a drink about it. <i>The Concordance</i> wasn’t the only thing I’d dug up during my research; Naismith’s works, the Black Rondeau, the Hemaphyte Movement, and so many ‘last known footage’ videos, depicting impossibilities, causing impossibilities. I’d fallen down a rabbit hole, and I knew it was impossible for me to climb out on my own, if at all.<br /><br />So, I figured, it would probably be best if I made like Alice and find friends on an island within a sea of tears, even if those friends ended up being a bunch of dodos and lorikeets. I boarded the plane to Taipei a week later, and have been part of this Institute ever since.<br /><br /></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-57783494092264123412022-11-17T07:47:00.002-08:002022-11-28T16:08:30.019-08:00Institute Q&A<p><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The head of the Institute has encouraged me to do a Q & A session with this blog's readers. So, after collecting questions from Discord and Telegram, here are the answers.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Have you ever investigated (insert weird piece of media here)?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">About half of the questions I received were along these lines, so I figured this was a good place to start. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Polybius:</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Alleged arcade cabinet that dispensed LSD and was monitored by the CIA. It's a hoax, and a shoddy one at that. Probably based on a failed initiative by the CIA to attempt to bug arcade machines in areas like Berkley or NYC; the noise from the arcade made the bugs useless, and what bugs were useful were often damaged or destroyed by routine maintenance or even people just playing the games. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>SCP: </b>A weird fiction website. I think the only people who believe that it's real are tweens who play too much Infinite IKEA on <i>Roblox</i> (and if you are one of those, please stop reading this blog, I don't want to be slapped by COPPA).</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Atuk:</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Unproduced screenplay notorious for having several actors associated with it die, including John Candy, Phil Hartman, and John Belushi. Due to ongoing legal proceedings, we're unable to comment on this particular work.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Snuff Films: </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We have found about half a dozen. "GUTS GUTS GUTS GUTS GUTS GUTS" is the worst I've ever seen. We always report them to the authorities, but more than once, it turned out to be a film student's final project that was leaked online, and everyone involved is fine physically.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">"That one Super Sentai series where the main actors all died":</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I have no clue what this is talking about. </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Super Sentai</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is the Japanese franchise that </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Power Rangers </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is based on, but I've not found anything about this. I know I have at least one Japanese reader of this blog, do you know what this is about?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Literally any found footage film: </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Do you honestly think that last known videos and/or outright snuff films would be shown in theaters? I wouldn't put it past Hollywood at this point, but found footage is almost always fictional. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What's the Institute's verdict on the events surrounding the 1912 silent film </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Concordance</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and the subsequent destruction of all copies of the film?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I did my undergrad thesis on </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Concordance.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> It's more influential than people realize; the Motion Picture Production Code of 1934 probably wouldn't have had four pages forbidding various forms of "the depiction of occult acts in a positive manner" if not for </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Concordance.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That said, I'm almost positive that at least one copy still exists. It is damn near impossible to destroy a braced film by burning it.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Is the 2003 Tanner Bigfoot tape real?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It's more credible than the Patterson-Gimlin footage, due to the fact that we have hospital records to back up the injuries sustained by Lacey Tanner. However, we don't believe that the creature on film is bigfoot; generally, 'capable of flight' isn't something corroborated by bigfoot lore.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I heard that the Garrison Footage killed sixteen people, is that true?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That was the death toll as of 2019. It circulated online during the height of the pandemic; the current death toll is estimated to be between 36 and 40. I should note it's safe to watch for most people-- just make sure that that you have someone to bring you back after you're done watching it. Most deaths caused by the Garrison Footage are from dehydration. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What's your opinion on 'mind_the_gap$w.mov'?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I hope to God that it's a hoax, but it's impossible to know for sure; digital media isn't braced and can be deleted with the click of a mouse, so it's harder to tell genuine anomalies from the hoaxes.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>What do you think of the 1989 religious superhero musical film <i>Exodusman</i>? </b></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think that the accidents on the set were exaggerated and weren't caused by "Satanic saboteurs" as the director claimed, but by sheer incompetence. That said, the alleged 'angel' that kept appearing during production was witnessed by several people who had no ties to the film or the church providing funding, so events are a tad muddled.</span></span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Is there any veracity to the story of Lady Annabelle Jones’s psychic photographs? </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Seems like someone saw the </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Strange Pictures</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Halloween Special this year. We believe that Annabelle Jones thought the photographs were genuine, but similar photographs from the era have been proven fake with easily replicated techniques. This isn't to say spectral and psychic phenomena aren't real, I have firsthand experience with them. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Does the institute have any knowledge as to the whereabouts of the lost tablets of Adrahasis? </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At first I thought this was referring to the incomplete tablets of the Babylonian epic </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Atra-Hasis</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, but apparently Adrahasis is something completely different, which is… confusing. After talking with some of my archaeologist colleagues, they’re convinced that at least one of the tablets is in the British Museum but haven’t been put on exhibit due to ‘undisclosed dangers’. Beyond that, we’re not sure.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Are there any extant copies of Johann Hofmann’s </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ghoul Cults of the Great War</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, despite its ban by the Nazi government? </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Occasionally a copy pops up in an ‘esoteric bookstore’, wedged between books on homeopathy and copies of “How to Become a Werewolf”, typically on the same shelf as ‘genuine’ editions of the </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Necronomicon</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that cost $60. They’re largely reproductions; genuine copies with the anomalies intact are harder to find. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That said, the Institute did manage to procure a copy in the 1990s, when the son of a Thule Society member attempted to burn his father’s possessions (Nazi memorabilia collectors and hate groups had been alternately offering thousands of dollars and threatening the owner to attempt to acquire them) and found several braced items among them.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are urban legends about NASA scientists trying to locate and photograph God, is there any truth to that? </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A friend of my family worked for NASA, but resigned after the stress of the </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Challenger</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> incident nearly gave him a heart attack. I asked him about this, and he said that there are photographs from </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Apollo 13</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that took images of space beyond the dark side of the moon, and that there’s something there, ‘But it isn’t God’.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">About a decade back I swear an image file called truevoid.gif made the rounds on a bunch of paranormal web forums, but now I can’t find a single trace of its existence. Any idea as to what happened to it?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oh shit, truevoid, there's a name I've not heard in a while. I remember that someone tried making a game based off of it some time in 2015 but apparently they used a copyrighted song in it without approval, so that got nuked from the internet too. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">While the original image has vanished from the surface internet, there's an occasional mention of it on darkweb conspiracy forums. I'm not qualified to write about it myself, but I think Cecily wrote an essay about it back in 2018. I'll ask her if she wants to put it up on the blog.</span></span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How do I access Shadow Netflix?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Please let this be a joke. We had to work around the clock in 2018 to shut down Skreen, an actual anomalous streaming service. More about that later.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How long has the Institute been around?/How old is the Institute?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In its current form, the Institute dates back to July 19th, 1986, when a group of "protesters" raided a public library in Michigan and burned several items deemed "corruptive" in the parking lot. Most of the usual suspects of the time were there- </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Howl, Naked Lunch, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> The Color Purple.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Among the oddities were a few volumes of Anne Rice's </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Vampire Chronicles, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">for 'promoting homosexuality'.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A librarian looking through the pile of ashes after the incident found a single volume had escaped unscathed, having been braced. It was a novel, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nemesis </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">by Walter Brink (Not to be confused with the Asimov novel of the same name). </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nemesis</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> was about a young woman possessed by the "spirit of revenge" whose victims ended up receiving karmic punishment corresponding to their crimes; the protestors objected to the fact that one of the antagonists was an evangelical preacher. The librarian took it back into the library and kept it hidden for almost a year.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile, a string of apparent arsons would plague the city, resulting in the deaths of the majority of the people who had attempted to burn </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nemesis.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Except it wasn't arson; the librarian saw one of the people who participated in the burning spontaneously combust.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From there, the librarian asked some of their friends around the country about weird things they had found during their job. They realized </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nemesis </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">wasn't a unique case, and from there, the community grew into what it is today. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Does the Institute ever release less-harmful versions of media?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We'd like to, some day. But unfortunately, that requires talent and funding. So while we'd like to take </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Rapturous Revival of the Crosse</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> on an off-Broadway tour or release a non-fatal version of any volume of the </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Adventures in Alorane</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> series, we just don't have the resources at the moment. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What media have you debunked?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">More than you think, less than we'd like. I'll write more on this next year, as this was a very common question. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Does the Institute have any rival organizations?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Most rivalries we have are academic, and we collaborate with other organizations frequently. A few urban exploration communities partner with us so that we can train to navigate abandoned buildings and other difficult terrain. We also work with paranormal investigators, and we've consulted cryptozoologists when trying to determine what the hell was on the Mackinac Island Drone Footage. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That said, the Nova Network has been a colossal pain since the mid-2000s, when it shifted away from documentaries to conspiracy and paranormal programming like </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Skinwalker Ranch, America's Most Haunted</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Aliens Among Us</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, low-effort alternate history programming like their abysmal adaptation of Harry Turtledove's </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Guns of the South, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and of course, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Strange Pictures </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and its spinoff </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Strange Writings, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">which both concern forbidden and lost media. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I won't go into it here, but anyone that claims that the Patterson-Gimlin Footage is real, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, is trying to sell you bigfoot merch. That's not even going into the Damascus Phonograph, the Diary of Martha Packard, or the Werewolf of Warsaw. All fake. And yet </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">we're </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">called crazy.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What preferred "eye bleach" do you have after interacting with anomalous media?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It varies. I know Mr. Draper likes to watch commercials he helped produce, while one of our audio gurus, Squirrel, cleans out their ears with songs by Coheed and Cambria and I Fight Dragons. Personally, when I see something traumatic, I just put on a Marvel film or blast some Billy Joel.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What's the oldest piece of Media the Institute has investigated?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was a purportedly cursed copy of the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead that was responsible for at least fifteen deaths since its discovery in the 1880s. Turns out it was just infested with mold. That's why we have a mycologist on staff.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If we're talking film, the Lumière film containing Le Chapeau is the oldest we know of. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The History of Cardenio</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is one that keeps getting away from us. It's from 1613, written by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, and has been lost for centuries. We're not sure if it's anomalous, but it's elusive. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pronouns?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Here's everyone who's comfortable sharing. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cecily: She/They</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Squirrel (Audio Specialist): They/Them </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mr. Draper: He/Him</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Azula (Editing Guru): She/Her</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Atticus (Mycologist): He/Him</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Myself: As long as you don't call me "it", whatever is fine.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Face reveal?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nah.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Make, model, and license plate of your car?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This was the weirdest of the "please dox yourself" questions and I'm honestly astounded by it. Do people think we're going to answer these?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Has anyone in the Institute ever died in the pursuit of their studies?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In fact, a member of the Institute who will probably be dead before the end of the month has asked me to post his findings after he dies. But I'll need time to comb through his writing.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What's your story? How did you get involved with the Institute?</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another common question. One I think I'll answer next time.</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-23962473313252430582022-10-28T08:26:00.005-07:002022-10-28T11:40:37.813-07:00The Lassiter Hotel Footage, Part 4<p><b>Previous:<a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-lassiter-hotel-footage-part-3.html"> The Lassiter Hotel Footage, Part 3</a></b> <br /></p><p> </p><p>So, <i>America's Most Haunted.</i> Those of you who are familiar with the 2017 reboot are probably aware of its various controversies-- how their episode on Lovecraft had them consult a scholar with ties to the KKK, how a member of their camera crew nearly died from the bends after their attempt at an underwater seance went awry, and how they attempted to fulfill a Make-A-Wish Foundation request posthumously by contacting the spirit of a deceased fan. Robin McGuire, the current showrunner, as well as host Xander Banks, have been raked over the coals by people far more erudite than I. We aren't here to discuss the current incarnation of <i>AMH</i>.<br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil8kBVcu1l69T7-KV5Qqak1WYnKkcjsMJMYkUg76SUkhSaxemp4tQgMq9BYoClnta1JhmvqHNKGLXFl8KuUl6LkddMjqP4ua9NQZKOEkT9uWXL_Nyi870VOcZ1CGk0CP4-TT8JbXUm7T5yMUo1VPUFTvsLcaNt8cKQ1sZU52f67Pz9tjiIin7mwDpWJg/s1905/Untitled24_20221026175846.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1334" data-original-width="1905" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil8kBVcu1l69T7-KV5Qqak1WYnKkcjsMJMYkUg76SUkhSaxemp4tQgMq9BYoClnta1JhmvqHNKGLXFl8KuUl6LkddMjqP4ua9NQZKOEkT9uWXL_Nyi870VOcZ1CGk0CP4-TT8JbXUm7T5yMUo1VPUFTvsLcaNt8cKQ1sZU52f67Pz9tjiIin7mwDpWJg/w481-h285/Untitled24_20221026175846.png" width="481" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p></p><p><br />Instead, we're talking about the version of <i>America's Most Haunted</i> that aired from 2006 to 2011, hosted by and ran by Daniel Fox (B. 1980). Fox was a genuine paranormal researcher, a visionary, an accredited exorcist… and a member of the Institute. He specialized in media that recorded spiritual phenomena. <br /><br /><br />In 2011, the Nova Network had him film a series of episodes themed around "Ghosts of the Jersey Shore". It was a gimmick, to be sure; one proposed episode would have had them attempt to contact the spirit of a deceased mobster (later found to have faked his own death to hide in Italy). Another episode had Nicole "Snooki" LaVelle accompanying the crew as they filmed in the Resorts Casino Hotel in Atlantic City.<br /><br /><br />Fox was incredibly reluctant to film at the Lassiter; he had personally cataloged the Molnar footage back in 2000, and knew about the Videophobes within. On top of that, the hotel was suffering from black mold infestation, making it unsafe to be in without protective equipment. However, the Nova Network had already bought the rights to film in the hotel from Cape May's government, and they refused to let Fox back out.<br /><br /><br />Fox had access to the Institute's resources including its more esoteric implements. If he had to film the Lassiter, he was going to do it with our equipment. He was going to attempt to defuse the Lassiter. <br /><br /><br /><b>Part 4: America's Most Haunted, Season 6, Episode 5, <i>Grand Alexandria</i> </b><br /><br /><br />Fox always preferred to record with commercially-available cameras-- specifically, they used Toshiba Camileo X200s (Toshiba was a sponsor of Nova Network in the late 2000s and early 2010s). It gave America's Most Haunted a distinctive look, compared to its contemporaries, even if the X200s had an abysmal 45-minute battery life; Fox was able to use batteries modified by members of the Institute to extend this to three hours. Fox wanted to encourage amateur paranormal investigators by using affordable equipment to record the show.<br /><br /><br />So it was understandably alarming to both the crew of <i>AMH </i>and Nova Network executives when he unveiled the cameras they were going to use in the Lassiter. High-end Canon Vixia HF200s, priced at almost $4000 at release. Indeed, the first thing we hear when Fox turns on the camera is:<br /><br /><br />"What the fuck, Dan?"<br /><br /><br />The woman speaking comes into view. Jasmine Sheridan, age 29, stares past the camera and at the man holding it, wind blowing auburn hair into her face. "Dan, does the network know you blew the budget on new cameras?"<br /><br /><br />"I didn't blow anything," Daniel explains, turning the camera to himself. They're outside in downtown Cape May, in a small shopping district. He's recording B-roll. "Friend loaned me this equipment."<br /><br /><br />"Same friend who keeps on sending you creepy video tapes?" <br /><br /><br />"Actually, yes." The camera is jostled as Fox inspects something on it. "Okay, good."<br /><br /><br />"Do I want to know what that is?" Jasmine has a wary note in her voice. <br /><br /><br />"Just a microphone."<br /><br /><br />"It looks like a goddamn grenade launcher."<br /><br /><br />"It's not." Fox resumes filming. "Come on, we have a meeting with the historical society in half an hour."<br /><br /><br />Fox continues to record b-roll, the attachment on his camera drawing odd looks from passersby. Eventually, they make their way into Cape May's historical society. The most relevant detail comes from a snippet of conversation between Fox and Joanna Michelson, head of the society. <br /><br /><br />"Do you believe it's haunted?" Fox asks.<br /><br /><br />"No, but I think it's cursed. Ricky Lassiter bought so many things from Egypt, one of the things he bought is bound to be cursed."<br /><br /><br />"Didn't he collect books?" Jasmine asks. "I've heard of cursed mummies, but I don't think some paper is going to cause too much harm."<br /><br /><br />"Do you know what happened to his collection?" Fox sits up a bit straighter.<br /><br /><br />"As far as I know, it got sold off in an estate sale. Don't know where it's ended up."<br /><br /><br />"Curious." Fox reclines in his seat, satisfied by the answer.<br /><br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">***<br /></p><p><br />"Why does Dan have a grenade launcher on his camera?"<br /><br /><br />A few hours later, the crew of AMH convenes outside the hotel. Speaking now is Robin McGuire (yes, the same Robin McGuire acting as showrunner on the current iteration of <i>AMH</i>), whose eyes goggle at the camera. <br /><br /><br />"It's a microphone." Dan sighs. "Rob, you have the gear?"<br /><br /><br />"Right here h-- right here." You can tell that Robin has to catch himself from saying "hon". Though not known publicly at the time, McGuire and Fox were in a relationship, something that had to be kept off-camera. Fox describes their current relationship as "Someone made of salt trying to hug a person with open wounds for the better part of a decade."<br /><br /><br />Robin holds up respirators, full-body clean suits, and large, thick dowel rods pointed at one end. "What's with the sticks?" Robin asks. <br /><br /><br />"To make sure that the floor is safe to walk on. God knows what the mold's doing on the inside."<br /><br /><br />"He's got a point," Jasmine admits. "Give one to Monica, maybe she can use it for dowsing."<br /><br /><br />"That's not how that works and you know it!" The last member of the team, thirty-two-year-old spiritual medium Monica Morse, speaks from off-camera. She steps into view, face briefly hidden behind a set of beaded dreadlocks before she parts them, revealing an exasperated expression on her face. “Seriously, what’s with the new gear?”<br /><br /><br />“Friend loaned it to me. Network’s already cleared it for this one episode.” Paper is shuffled around. “Okay, yeah… from the top?”<br /><br /><br />From here, they start going through their lines, briefly explaining the history of the Grand Alexandria/Lassiter, including the disappearances, the propensity for recorded (or unrecordable) anomalies, and then, Fox says: “Anyone want to back out?” <br /><br /><br />There’s confusion among his crew; this isn’t part of the script. Robin shakes his head, while Jasmine says, “I haven't seen you this freaked since we investigated the McCormick house.”<br /><br /><br />“Yeah, well. Just avoid recording anything in the lobby, okay?”<br /><br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;">***<br /></p><p><br /><br />Jasmine is left outside in the van to monitor the rest of the team. B-Roll is shot in the lobby, but the crew is silent until they leave it and proceed to the second floor. Fox turns the camera towards his crew; all of them are wearing respirators and coveralls. He presses down onto the floorboards, making sure they don’t give before stepping forward. “I know our usual MO is to split up,” he says, “But we can do that in post. Just make sure a couple of us stay off-camera at a time.”<br /><br /><br />“Christ, Dan.” Robin sighs. “What’s gotten into you? Lassiter had mob ties, the disappearances were probably just witnesses he needed to make vanish.”<br /><br /><br />(He’s not wrong; Richard Lassiter’s son was allegedly put into Witness Security after testifying against several members of the New Jersey mafia.)<br /><br /><br />"It's not that," Fox lies. "This place is infested with mold. I'd rather not have anyone fall through the floor and get hurt."<br /><br /><br />As if to demonstrate his point, the next several minutes of footage are spent maneuvering around a hole in the floor large enough to swallow any one of them. Eventually, they reach the first room they're intending to Investigate: Room 29.<br /><br /><br />"Okay. This room reportedly had more people die in it than anywhere else in the hotel." Fox's tone of voice changes as he slips into his "professional ghost hunter" mode. "Monica, are you sensing anything?"<br /><br /><br />(Room 29 is located directly below Room 38 from the Molnar footage, and should have been where Tiffany Molnar landed when she fell through the bed.)<br /><br /><br />"Hold on a sec." Monica sits in the center of the room, cross-legged as she focuses on a point in the middle distance. "Hard to concentrate with the damn mask on." She looks at Fox, "Will you watch where you're pointing that? It's breaking my concentration."<br /><br /><br />"It's just a microphone," Fox sighs. "Just tell me when you feel--"<br /><br /><br />A low, rumbling bellow suddenly permeates through the building. Morse stands abruptly. "What was that?"<br /><br /><br />"Sounded almost like something fell." Robin groans. "Are you kidding me? Does the Network's insurance even cover this?"<br /><br /><br />Jasmine's panicked voice comes over their radios. "Guys, what room are you in?"<br /><br /><br />"What?" Fox goes to the window of Room 28, shining a light down into the parking lot, illuminating the van. "Can you see us?"<br /><br /><br />"There is something else in there with you. It's on the fourth floor."<br /><br /><br />"Something else?" Robin grimaces. "What do you mean?"<br /><br /><br />"There was a massive fucking shadow on the building, bleeding through the windows!"<br /><br /><br />"Bleeding?” Fox asks. “Or running, like water?"<br /><br /><br />“Who cares?! Get out of there!”<br /><br /><br />“That’s not in the script,” Robin mutters. The camera turns to him. “What the fuck is happening? There’s nothing about shadows in the script. What the fuck?”<br /><br /><br />“Get out,” Fox says. “I need to take care of this.”<br /><br /><br />“Take care of-- Dan, is this some kind of joke?” Fox muscles past Robin and heads to the stairway. “Dan? Dan!”<br /><br /><br />“I’m coming with you.” Monica follows after Fox. He tries to protest, but she just gives him a steely look that says ‘I’m in this with you.’<br /><br /><br />“Monica, this isn’t a ghost,” he tries to explain. “It’s--”<br /><br /><br />“One of your side projects? I’m not stupid, Dan. I saw the footage you tried to hide from the Juniper Theater.”<br /><br /><br />“Then you know how dangerous this is.”<br /><br /><br />“And I also know that you’ve been trying to learn Greek for the last month for some reason. I know Greek! Let me help.”<br /><br /><br />“I--”<br /><br /><br />“Oh, mou éphayes ta aftiá.”(Translation: “You’re talking too much”.) Where are we headed?”<br /><br /><br />“Room 47, Fourth Floor.” The camera is jostled as Fox removes the attachment to it, and it’s here that we see it clearly for the first time. It does, indeed, look like the barrel of a grenade launcher, being a long and hollow-looking tube with what appears to be a stock attached to the end. “I need you to read something once we get up there.”<br /><br /><br />“Fourth floor? Where the shadows are?” Monica follows after him up the stairs.<br /><br /><br />“They’re not shadows.”<br /><br /><br /></p><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /></div><div><br /><br />They pause when they reach the fourth floor so that Daniel can record something. Through the door, they see what appears to be water flooding the entire floor, constantly flowing out of Room 47, but never seeming to fill the room. “Hold onto something,” Daniel says as he opens the door.<br /><br /><br />Inexplicably, water does not come flowing out as the door opens, instead staying as a semi-liquid wall. Daniel prods it with the tube, and some of it appears to be sucked in. The same bellowing is heard once again. Fox opens the tube at one end and withdraws a folded piece of paper, handing it to Morse. “Can you read this?”<br /><br /><br />Morse takes it and scans the paper. “Yeah. Yeah, easy enough. What do you want me to do with it?”<br /><br /><br />“Say it out loud as we walk through. It should protect us.”<br /><br /><br />They begin wading through chest-high water. Monica begins chanting, in Greek: “Chaíre paníschyre Tyfón, férnontas tou télous, theoktoní, vasiliá ton kataigídon Chaíre ekeínon pou eínai thamménos káto apó to Sfyrílato tou Ifaístou, anávontas ti flóga tou. Dóxa ston Tyfón[indistinct]”(Translation: “Hail mighty Typhon, bringer of the end, god-slayer, king of storms Hail he who is buried beneath the Forge of Hephaestus, kindling its flame. Glory to Typhon”). The chant continues as they make their way to Room 47, water being siphoned into the tube. “Dan, what’s in that?”<br /><br /><br />“Long story, keep chanting!” They make their way into Room 47, and find themselves facing an aperture with a mirror-like texture. Steam is emerging from it, and the water around it is seething; this only increases in intensity as the camera turns on it. <br /><br /><br />“Dan, what the fuck--” Morse begins.<br /><br /><br />“It’s real.” Fox laughs. “Holy shit, it’s an actual portal to the <i>Bibliotheke</i>. If only I could… no, bad idea.” Fox hands the camera off to Morse. “Keep it up with the chant, I need to make sure that this gets recorded.” <br /><br /><br />“O-okay.” Monica’s hands shake slightly as she holds the camera. “It’s cold…”<br /><br /><br />Fox opens the tube, revealing a piece of papyrus within; water is drawn up towards it as he unravels it. “Typhon!” He yells. “I am a librarian, a keeper of knowledge! Thy tale has been let loose on this world unjustly! I know your pain, and I know what you are trying to hold back! Come forth! Come home!”<br /><br /><br />The water is drawn towards the papyrus, little by little, and the paper sucks it up like a sponge, but seems to be undamaged. “That’s good,” Fox grins. “Come home, Typhon, come home.”<br /><br /><br />Morse focuses the camera on the parchment. “Dan, what the hell is happening?”<br /><br /><br />“I’m just putting a story back where it belongs.” <br /><br /><br />Over the course of five minutes, all of the water on the fourth floor is drawn into the parchment. The portal that Fox observed closes as the water retreats, and by the time the water is around his ankles, it’s almost completely closed.<br /><br /><br />And then, disaster strikes.<br /><br /><br />A gout of flame emerges from the portal, hitting Fox in the face. He falls in the water face-first, and it’s thankfully extinguished, but not before the left side of his face is burned. Skin has already started to slough off from the heat, and Monica screams for Dan to wake up. The portal is still open, ever so slightly, and flame is coming from it, boiling off the remaining water in the room.<br /><br /><br />“Dan, we have to go.” She starts dragging him out of the room as it begins to burn. “Dan, come on, wake up. Dan!” She focuses the camera on his face-- <br /><br /><br />And it’s at this point, for approximately sixty seconds, that the footage becomes unsafe to watch. While no fatalities have been attributed to this part of the Lassiter Hotel Footage, first-degree burns have been reported, as well as paper and other flammable objects, such as clothing and paper, spontaneously combusting in its vicinity. <br /><br /><br />The moment passes as we see Monica take up the scroll. The water has almost completely vaporized, leaving clouds of steam in its wake. “--get out of here,” Fox is heard panting. “The scroll, what does it say?”<br /><br /><br />Monica begins to read it. “It’s… it’s something about the myth of… Dan, what the fuck is--”<br /><br /><br />“<i>What does it say?</i> Does it say where it belongs?”<br /><br /><br />Monica looks over the papyrus. “...Uh. First floor atrium, <i>Bibliotheke</i>.”<br /><br /><br />Fox is heard sighing, and then groaning in relief. “We have to get out of here. Now.”<br /><br /><br />“Your face--” Monica tries to turn the camera to him.<br /><br /><br />“Don’t! I’m… it’s not safe anymore. Please.”<br /><br /><br />Fox’s hand obscures the camera. At this point in the recording, there is a surge of heat, and then, the recording ends.<br /><br /><br /><b>Supplemental</b><br /><br /><br />Humans can become Videophobic anomalies as well.<br /><br /><br />Due to his injuries sustained in the Lassiter Hotel, Daniel Fox’s face is actively unsafe to record. Physical photographs of him burn upon development, digital photography can cause devices to overheat and brick themselves. This effect is lessened if his face is at least partially obscured; he’s been wearing a face mask continually since 2011 to alleviate the effect.<br /><br /><br />America’s Most Haunted was canceled due to ‘catastrophic injuries’ sustained during the expedition into the Lassiter. The footage was intended to be destroyed, but as is often the case with anomalous media, the film was braced and, for all intents and purposes, indestructible. Fox sued Nova Network for damages, alleging that the network knew the Lassiter was unsafe to film in, but he was forced to do it by their contract. They settled out of court for a handsome sum, and Fox was able to obtain the footage.<br /><br /><br />The Lassiter itself was destroyed in 2012 by Hurricane Sandy; the rotting structure crumbled under the storm surge. In its place, a small shopping center was built, and to date, no further anomalies have been reported-- except for the fact that the shopping center spends an inordinate amount of money on mold removal.<br /><br /><br />The papyrus that Fox contained the entity in is still in the possession of the Institute. As previously stated, it is a piece of the Greek Magical Papyri, dedicated to the myth of Typhon; however, in contrast to typical depictions of the entity, Typhon is portrayed as an embodiment of the ocean itself, living water, a flood meant to drown Olympus itself. It is an unorthodox portrayal, but a valuable one, and it is one of the oldest examples of a braced piece of media we possess.<br /><br /><br />The entity which inhabited the Lassiter has been absorbed by the Papyrus, and is, for the Institute’s purposes, neutralized. However, the document itself can’t be stored conventionally; our archivists have had to use an aquarium to contain it, due to the sheer amount of water it produces. Thankfully, it hasn’t outgrown the ten-gallon tank we use.<br /><br /><br />None of the disappearances at the Lassiter have been solved, and I doubt they ever will be. That said, some… odd news has come about since my last entry, one that I had to revise this piece to accommodate.<br /><br /><br />After reading the description of the Molnar footage, a woman from Akron, Ohio reached out to me. She claims that she has been having dreams about events that roughly correspond to the Molnar footage since she was eight years old and adopted by her foster family, who found her at the side of the road, wearing pajamas and begging for her mother. Having talked with her over Zoom, she does bear a striking resemblance to Tiffany Molnar’s age-progression photos. She has sent away her DNA for testing at a lab with ties to the Institute.<br /><br /><br />And at the end of the day? None of this makes any <i>fucking</i> sense.<br /><br /><br />New Jersey has come up a few times over the course of what I’ve shared on this blog. We originally thought that the Lassiter was a locus point for it, a sort of magnet for strange occurrences or maybe even a gathering place for anomalous entities. But the Lassiter was destroyed, the primary entity within it contained, and yet there are still dozens of pieces of Forbidden Media connected to New Jersey.<br /><br /><br />The Papyrus had no ties to Ohio, so how on earth did she end up there in 1998? If this woman is Tiffany Molnar, how did she end up there? And what force made it impossible to record people within the Lassiter’s Lobby?<br /><br /><br />There are few things that keep me up at night. The Lassiter is one of them. If anyone has any information about this place, I beg you, reach out, tell us something. Anything.<br /><br /><br />For the time being… The Institute’s head is advising me to take a break, reconnect with my family. It is almost Thanksgiving, after all. I’ll see you on the other side.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-32995976188573382032022-10-21T08:43:00.007-07:002022-11-28T15:57:45.654-08:00The Lassiter Hotel Footage, Part 3<p> <b>Previous Entry: <a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-lassiter-hotel-footage-part-2.html">The Lassiter Hotel Footage, Part 2</a><br /></b></p><p> </p><p>On June 3rd, 1996, the Molnar family checked into the Lassiter Hotel. Julia Molnar (41) had booked the trip as a surprise for her husband Edgar (40) and their daughter Tiffany (6). They were informed of the "no photography" policy, and were shown to Room 38, a double queen room. Their week was pleasant and largely uneventful, though Julia did complain that she was having strange dreams in a phone call to her mother on the 6th.<br /><br /><br />On June 10th, the Molnars missed check-out time. When members of hotel security were dispatched to their room, they found it vacant, with their luggage still present, their beds unmade, and the television turned on to the local NBC affiliate. <br /><br /><br />After the room was searched, they discovered a lump in one of the mattresses. Cutting it open, hotel security discovered a Sony CCD-TR500 Hi8 camcorder, heavily waterlogged to the point where it was unusable.<br /><br /><br />The tape within was intact. <br /><br /><br /><b>Part 3: The Molnar Footage (1996)</b><br /><br /><br />The Molnar Footage refers to the final 17:28 of the VHS tape; prior to this, footage shows the Molnar family enjoying their vacation, visiting Wildwood and the Cape May Zoo, taking part in a whale-watching cruise, and enjoying time on the beach. <br /><br /><br />The footage starts in Room 38. Edgar is filming, even though his wife pleads for him to stop. "It's our last night here! What are they going to do, kick us out for filming in our own room?"<br /><br /><br />"They said no filming, Ed! I don't want Tiffany's first vacation to end with her seeing us get sued."<br /><br /><br />"But you already have suits!" Tiffany giggles. She's over on her own bed, bouncing up and down, trying to touch the ceiling. <br /><br /><br />"I just want to get a shot of the ocean from our room, then the camera gets put away. All right?"<br /><br /><br />Julia relents, and Edgar goes over to the window recording three minutes of the beach and the Atlantic as viewed from the Lassiter. He turns the camera around just in time to catch his daughter landing on the bed. She gives him a gap-toothed grin. <br /><br /><br />And then, she begins falling through the bed. Tiffany screams with glee as she's sucked through the bed, and her parents scream as they're faced with an inexplicable void dragging their daughter into it.<br /><br /><br />Edgar leaps in after her, camera in hand, and yells at Julie to call 9-1-1 before he lands elsewhere. <br /><br /><br />It's dark where he lands. He picks up the camera, and turns on the infrared view, allowing him to see. The footage appears to show another hotel room, vacant; there is no sign of Tiffany, nor are there any windows. The television is playing static.<br /><br /><br />He calls for his daughter, but receives no answer. After a moment, the camera spins around, revealing the door to the room swinging ajar. Garbled speech is heard, before Edgar bursts into the hallway. <br /><br /><br />What he finds himself in is not the Lassiter Hotel. The structure is dark with a high ceiling, and seems to be made of sandstone. There are signs of the space having been recently burned; scorch marks are plainly visible, and ash is falling from above, settling into piles around the structure. “Tiffany!” He calls out again, voice strained.<br /><br /><br />He hears a response this time, and for a moment, the camera films the ground, swinging back and forth as he runs, calling her name. “Tiffany!” He yells. “Daddy’s here! Keep calling for me!”<br /><br /><br />The scene transitions from an ash-covered structure to one that is inundated. He stops, confused as his feet grow wet, and he aims the camera upwards, showing he’s now in some form of courtyard with a pair of shallow pools down the middle. There is a figure laying by one of the pools; as Edgar approaches, it becomes clear that it's the skeleton of an adult, wearing a high-visibility safety vest, thick gloves, and a hard hat.<br /><br /><br />Edgar calls for his daughter again, and hears her scream; not in pain or terror, but in delight. Edgar's camera swivels up to see her bouncing up and down in a doorway across from Edgar, seemingly unharmed. He approaches her, and picks her up, dropping the camera.<br /><br /><br />It is now he must realize that he has no idea how to return to his hotel room. He calls for his wife, but is met with silence. He curses and screams, before he's seen picking up his daughter and vanishing into the complex. <br /><br /><br />After two minutes, the camera is picked up by a new, unseen entity. It glides across the ground, and briefly what appears to be writing is visible, the word "ΒΙΒΛΙΟΘΗΚΗ" (“bibliotheke”, Greek for “library”), carved into the stone. <br /><br /><br />The entity finds Edgar carrying his daughter in an area that resembles the space he entered. He is inspecting a wall when his daughter points at the camera. Edgar tries to scream upon seeing it, but instead finds water flowing from first his mouth, then his nose, then from everywhere else. The man is lost under a flood, and his daughter is swept away by the current, squealing with glee.<br /><br /><br />The camera turns to her, and a limb made of liquid picks her up. She laughs, and then after a splash, falls silent.<br /><br /><br /><br /><b>Supplemental:</b><br /><br /><br />Those of you who are into true crime are probably familiar with the name Tiffany Molnar, as she is a perennial subject of age progression photography. She would be thirty-two years old this year. An incisor was found under the pillow in her bed, and the DNA from that tooth has been compared to dozens of female cadavers over the years. To date, no match has been found. <br /><br /><br />This is the best-known instance of the Lassiter Hotel footage, but it is often scrutinized, due to its prominence. Strange Pictures and several other programs have attempted to analyze it for signs of doctoring or special effects, despite the fact that analysis of the film has shown evidence of no tampering other than Bracing.<br /><br /><br />A 9-1-1 call was placed from the Lassiter by an unidentified woman, believed to be Julia Molnar; a transcript is included below. <br /><br /><br /><b>Dispatch</b>: 9-1-1, do you need police, ambulance or--<br /><br /><br /><b>Caller: </b>My daughter! My daughter and my husband, they fell!<br /><br /><br /><b>Dispatch:</b> They fell? Ma'am, do you need an ambulance?<br /><br /><br /><b>Caller:</b> They fell through the bed! But I'm sitting on it, and there's nothing there!<br /><br /><br /><b>Dispatch:</b> Ma'am, where are you?<br /><br /><br /><b>Caller: </b>The Grand Al-- hold on, someone's at the door. Ed?<br /><br /><br /><i>Twenty seconds of silence.</i><br /><br /><br /><b>Caller:</b> No, we didn't know.<br /><br /><i><br />Ten seconds of silence. </i><br /><br /><br /><b>Caller: </b>We didn't know it hurt!<br /><br /><br />The Lassiter Hotel appears to host multiple entities, or multiple manifestations of the same entity, that are averse to being recorded on video. The Institute has encountered several of these entities in the past; the general term for them is “Videophobe”. The Videophobic entities appear to reside in an extradimensional space connected to the Lassiter, possibly created by an item possessed by Richard Lassiter, the Typhon Papyrus mentioned in the previous article. <br /><br /><br />This item vanished in 1996.<br /><br /><br />Even so, the Lassiter was a perfectly safe hotel to stay in, provided no recording occurred; “was” being the operative word. After the disappearance of the Molnar family, the Lassiter was closed down permanently; too many tragedies had occurred in the hotel. It remains standing, despite efforts of the Cape May government to tear it down. Because of this, it was thought to be prime territory for a 2011 episode of the third-most popular ghost hunting show in the USA and Nova Network’s highest-rated show at the time, America’s Most Haunted. <br /><br /><br />Next week, we will be discussing exactly what happened on the set of AMH, and uncovering the footage that caused Nova Network to cancel the show for almost half a decade.<br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: right;"><b>Next Entry: <a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-lassiter-hotel-footage-part-4.html">The Lassiter Hotel Footage, Part 4</a></b><br /></p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-61235716251436070712022-10-14T07:54:00.001-07:002022-11-28T15:36:46.091-08:00The Lassiter Hotel Footage, Part 2<div> <b>Previous Entry: <a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-lassiter-hotel-footage-part-1.html">The Lassiter Hotel Footage, Part 1</a></b> <br /></div><div> </div><div>This write-up deals with the aftermath of a hurricane. Due to the extensive damage caused by Hurricane Ian, I’m putting up a content warning here, in case anyone who was affected reads this blog. Furthermore, if you want to help out with the very real damage caused by Ian, you can find reputable organizations on Charity Navigator’s Hurricane Ian page linked below. <br /><br /><br /><a href="https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=9967">https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=9967</a><br /><br /><br />In 1945, World War II veteran and aspiring novelist Richard Lassiter inherited a hotel in Cape May from his father. It had fallen into disrepair during the Great Depression, and Richard was tasked with revitalizing it by his father. Over the years, it has had many names; in the 1920s, it was the Grand Cape Hotel, while from the 1940s to the 1990s, it was known as the Grand Alexandria Hotel. Various investigative bodies, including the Institute, refer to it as the Lassiter for the sake of consistency.<br /><br /><br />The Lassiter had no record of unusual phenomena prior to the incidents in 1958; however, local legend maintained that Room 47 had a higher than normal incidence of guests checking out early, or else dying in their sleep. These myths appear to have originated after the 2011 <i>America's Most Haunted</i> episode, which I will be covering in a later installment. By all accounts, Room 47 was a normal hotel room, provided it was not being recorded, hence the ban on cameras.<br /><br /><br />The Lassiter's "no camera" policy was maintained under threat of legal action for twenty-seven years, until Hurricane Gloria rolled in.<br /><br /><br /><b>Part 2: The Eakin Insurance Footage (1985)</b><br /><br /><br />Hurricane Gloria was a Category 4 Hurricane that tore across the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States. While it did not make landfall in Cape May, the storm surge and resulting damage, including from loss of power and infrastructure, resulted in fourteen deaths. It was hailed as a storm of the century, but people at the time were actually disappointed by how little damage was caused.<br /><br /><br />The storm surge flooded Cape May with almost six feet of water, inundating several properties, including the Lassiter. While logically, the damage should have been confined to the first floor (particularly the lobby and pool areas), damage was observed as high as the fifth floor, including the elevator shafts. When Richard Lassiter attempted to file an insurance claim with the Eakin Insurance Group-- a New Jersey-based agency that specialized in insuring hotels-- they were told that an inspection had to be done to assess the damage. To this end, they dispatched a pair of investigators-- Kenneth Kosa, age 50, and William Duffield, age 32. Between them, they had over thirty years of investigative experience at Eakin and other insurance companies. <br /><br /><br />Going against both hotel policy and Richard Lassiter's insistence, they brought along a Super 8 camera, and approximately eight hours worth of film, not knowing that they would be dooming themselves in the process. <br /><br /><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/H52_hurricane_gloria_1985.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="755" data-original-width="527" height="755" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/H52_hurricane_gloria_1985.jpg" width="527" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An aerial view of the storm surge caused by Hurricane Gloria, taken by the US Coast Guard.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /></div><div><br /><b>The Lobby</b><br /><br /><br />In the twenty-seven years since the failed advertisement, the Lassiter's lobby has changed very little. In color, we can see the polished sandstone and marble far more clearly. We can also see ruined rugs, plants that have been knocked over, and even a painting, damaged by the storm surge. Special attention is drawn to the painting, and the place where it rested on the wall, with the hook it hung on eight feet off the ground.<br /><br /><br />"What do you make of that?" Kosa asks.<br /><br /><br />"Maybe a wave brought it down?" Duffield responds. He focuses the camera on the painting itself; it was a three-foot-long landscape painting showing Cape May's iconic lighthouse during a stormy night. It's been ruined, though not by water damage: the canvas is visibly torn and crumpled, and the frame has been splintered. "Looks like it got stepped on," Duffield observes. <br /><br /><br />"By who? Andre the Giant?" Kosa laughs.<br /><br /><br />The camera heads behind the check-in desk. Room keys are strewn all over the floor; in contrast to other hotels at the time, the Lassiter used traditional, toothed keys, but had recently purchased equipment for making mag-stripe key cards. The device is in pieces behind the desk, and shows evidence of having caught fire. "Get the serial number off of that," Kosa instructs. <br /><br /><br />Duffield sets the camera on the check-in desk; neither of the men are visible. The front door of the Lassiter blows open, scattering debris. The men are heard cursing. The camera records the debris hitting an invisible mass on one side of the room, where it is outlined by its absence; the area of the lobby the mass occupies is free of debris and water damage. <br /><br /><br />The men do not seem to notice the anomaly, and instead collect the camera, making their way to the pool. <br /><br /><br /><b>The Pool</b><br /><br /><br />By 1985, The Lassiter Hotel's swimming pool had been remodeled twice, closing for the 1972 season to expand its glass enclosure to the fourth floor. As stated previously, the majority of the damage caused by Hurricane Gloria in Cape May was from the storm surge, with the wind speed reaching only 85 mph.<br /><br /><br />This raised the question: why was the enclosure so damaged? Over half of the planes of glass had broken inward. The pool is overflowing, filled with dirty water. <br /><br /><br />"The hell? Why didn't they drain it after the surge?" Duffield asks. <br /><br /><br />"Watch your step," Kosa says, stepping in front of the camera for the first time. He's a pale, portly man, wearing safety equipment-- thick gloves, a reflective vest, and a hard hat, among other things. At his hip is a Polaroid camera, which he pulls out to photograph the devastation. "Does that frame look bent to you?"<br /><br /><br />Duffield points the camera upwards; there is a visible dent in the frame, as if something heavy has made impact, about twenty feet off the ground. "Andre the Giant, you think?"<br /><br /><br />"Nah. Probably buckled from something hitting it. When did this place last get inspected?"<br /><br /><br />"December."<br /><br /><br />"They must've missed it. Pretty high up…"<br /><br /><br />(They did not, in fact, miss it. The glass enclosure was one of the more thoroughly-inspected parts of the hotel, with both the panes and the frame being examined for damage on a weekly basis by hotel staff; the inspection Duffield is referring to was performed by Cape May's building inspector and similarly found no issues.)<br /><br /><br />"At least we know he wasn't lying about the damage. Jesus." Duffield steps before the camera now, revealing a thin man with dark skin, clad in the same safety gear as Kosa. He begins unrolling a tape measure. "Ken, little help? I need to see how far the debris spreads."<br /><br /><br />Kosa takes the other end, and some measurements are taken. Duffield writes in a notebook. "That's funny."<br /><br /><br />"What?" Kosa asks, lighting a cigarette.<br /><br /><br />"Do you see any glass in the pool?"<br /><br /><br />"With how murky it is? The Hope Diamond could be down there and we wouldn't see it."<br /><br /><br />"Huh." <br /><br /><br />At some point, Duffield takes the camera and records the pool itseld. The water is a sickly greenish-grey color. Kosa discards his cigarette into the pool; the liquid parts, and it's dragged beneath. <br /><br /><br /><b>The Second Floor<br /></b><br /><br />"What the fuck happened in here?"<br /><br /><br />Kosa asks the question as they enter room 29. The interior is completely trashed, with beds overturned, the television smashed, and a white substance caked on the ceiling.<br /><br /><br />Duffield grabs a chair and stands on it to scrape some of the substance off. He smells it, grimacing. "It's shampoo."<br /><br /><br />"You see any water damage in here?"<br /><br /><br />"None."<br /><br /><br />"Seems to me like guests trashed the room and they're trying to staple it onto the claim." Kosa sighs. "What can ya see from the window?"<br /><br /><br />Duffield heads over to the room's far wall. "Pretty good view of the damage to the pool."<br /><br /><br />And so, Kosa and Duffield get thirty seconds of footage of the pool's enclosure from a higher, exterior angle. Kosa mutters "We're burning film, c'mon," before he turns the camera away.<br /><br /><br />Neither of them noticed the pool, clearly visible through the shattered enclosure, was empty. <br /><br /><br /><b>The Elevator Shaft <br /></b><br /><br />Thankfully, Kosa and Duffield don't record in Room 47. They do, however, attempt to open the elevator shaft on the fourth floor. "The hell's wrong here?"<br /><br /><br />"Apparently the elevator's not going past the third floor. Cables nearly snapped when they tried to call it up here." He produces a small, round key meant to open the doors of an elevator in an emergency and sticks it in the panel, under the call button. It turns, and the doors grind open. <br /><br /><br />There is a hole in the far side of the elevator shaft, as if something has burst through from the other side. There's nothing but darkness visible on the camera.<br /><br /><br />"It looks like something punched through," Kosa observes. "Shine a light in there, Bill."<br /><br /><br />Duffield turns on a light. Through the aperture, a hotel room is clearly visible; the pink and white hues of the Venus Suite, AKA Room 42. "Why the hell would they build a room right next to the elevator shaft?"<br /><br /><br />(They didn't. Testimony from former staff at the Lassiter, combined with the blueprints, show a maintenance closet being behind the elevator shaft on the fourth floor.)<br /><br /><br />There's no sign of disturbance in the Venus Suite, beyond the massive hole. "Hello?" Duffield calls.<br /><br /><br />"The fuck are you doing?" Kosa hisses.<br /><br /><br />"Thought I saw something move in the room." There is no movement on the camera. "That's weird, right?"<br /><br /><br />"Let's get the fifth floor and get out of here." Kosa withdraws the key and the elevator doors shut. <br /><br /><br />Duffield collects the camera, carrying it under his arm, lens facing the elevator. Water begins seeping out through the door; Duffield curses as he realizes the camera is still on, and the footage cuts out.<br /><br /><br /><b>The Fifth Floor</b><br /><br /><br />The camera is turned on within Room 501, the Owner's Suite. As the name suggests, the suite is specifically reserved for Richard Lassiter and his family. The suite takes up a quarter of the floor, far larger than any other room in the hotel. Duffield is on camera, clearly baffled. The room is pristine. "What are we looking for here? This place is spotless."<br /><br /><br />"According to the claimant, something got stolen from here during the storm surge."<br /><br /><br />"Christ. Talk to the cops, not us."<br /><br /><br />"He says he did. Apparently the item stolen was…" Kosa checks his notes. "A 'Greek manuscript, approximately two… two-thousand years old'? Shouldn't that be in a museum?"<br /><br /><br />"What is it, then? Dante?"<br /><br /><br />"The title is… damn, his handwriting is shit. Thy… Typh… Typhoid? Typhoon? Yeah, Typhoon."<br /><br /><br />"Didn't think Athens got many hurricanes." Duffield chuckles. "Well, where was it supposed to be?"<br /><br /><br />"In the safe behind his desk."<br /><br /><br />The footage cuts to a study area with a desk in disarray. Duffield is heard speaking mid-sentence. "--saying is, it's weird he reported a missing book, but not the water damage up here."<br /><br /><br />"Probably not a book. Maybe a hunk of stone or--" Kosa walks onto the camera, eyes glued to the ceiling. "Or a scroll." <br /><br /><br />The camera turns upwards to where Kosa is looking. Inexplicably, a large scroll of parchment is stuck to the ceiling. Kosa takes off his glove and swats at it. It falls to the ground. <br /><br /><br />"Huh. Well, glad we found it." Kosa chuckles. "This was insured for almost ten mill." He places it on the desk.<br /><br /><br />There's a crash from the next room, followed by the sound of flowing water. Duffield curses, picking up the camera. Water is flowing from the ceiling, blocking access to the suite's exit. "When did-- what the--"<br /><br /><br />Kosa, trembling, comes onto camera and picks up an object floating in the water. He holds it up to Duffield; it's a cigarette.<br /><br /><br />Then, a wave washes over them, tearing the camera out of Duffield's grasp. The men scream as the sound of running water overtakes the audio. Eventually, there is a gargantuan thud, causing the camera to jump in the air. It breaks upon landing. <br /><br /><br /><b>Supplemental </b><br /><br /><br />Neither William Duffield nor Kenneth Kosa were ever seen again. Their vehicle was found in the Lassiter's parking lot three days later by Cape May Police; none of their equipment, including the Super 8 camera used, was recovered at the time. <br /><br /><br />The Lassiter had to be closed until 1990, due to severe water damage and further mold infestation. During this time, the pool was filled with concrete and the glass structure demolished completely; they turned it into outdoor patio seating for a second restaurant that was opened in the hotel.<br /><br /><br />The scroll that Kosa was inspecting was later found in Richard Lassiter's safe. The manuscript is, in fact, one of a series of scrolls known as the Greek Magical Papyri, and is dedicated to retelling the myth of Typhon, a colossal entity in Greek mythology associated with storms.<br /><br /><br />The camera was found six years later on a beach in Wildwood, a resort town to the north of Cape May. The film within was practically untouched; this is a phenomenon commonly seen when inexplicable activity is recorded, where the medium that documents it is rendered unnaturally hardy. The Institute calls this “Bracing”. The Institute obtained the footage in 2007.<br /><br /><br />Richard Lassiter died in 1992; by this time, the hotel had severe financial difficulties, leading his son, Alexander Lassiter, to take drastic measures so that the hotel could stay in the family. Starting in the 1993 season, children would be allowed to stay in the Lassiter Hotel.<br /></div><div>In 1996, this would lead to tragedy, and the permanent closing of the Lassiter Hotel.<br /><br /><br /><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-33291829591134332012022-10-05T20:18:00.010-07:002022-10-27T08:35:00.467-07:00The Lassiter Hotel Footage, Part 1<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/603851064281792534/1027418941427044362/Untitled23_20221005231549.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="622" height="511" src="https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/603851064281792534/1027418941427044362/Untitled23_20221005231549.png" width="397" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A still from the attempt to record footage in the Lobby of the Lassiter, 1958.<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> <p></p><p><b>Original Essay by Tristan Marshall, Forbidden Media Investigator</b><br /><br />Some people who have been following this blog have been curious about a particular item that’s been mentioned twice before, that being the Lassiter Hotel Footage. Some of you may be familiar with it from clips played on shows such as America's Most Haunted or Strange Pictures. The Lassiter Hotel Footage most people are familiar with comes from June 1996; however, it is only one of four collections of footage documenting anomalous activity within the area. Over the course of this month, I'll be taking you through each of the four instances of the Lassiter Hotel Footage. <br /><br /><b><br />Part 1: The Advertisement (1958) </b><br /><br /><br />The Lassiter was a luxury hotel located in Cape May, New Jersey, less than half a mile from the shoreline. It advertised itself as being classier than the motels in nearby Wildwood; it was said that if you wanted to have a trip, you booked a motel, but if you wanted a vacation, you stayed at the Lassiter. It had a Michelin-starred restaurant, two bars, a salinated swimming pool in a two-story glass enclosure, a rooftop garden, polished sandstone as far as the eye could see, and--perhaps its most attractive feature-- a "no child" policy. With very few exceptions, nobody under the age of 21 was allowed to stay in the Lassiter, a policy that would remain in place from its opening in 1946 all the way until 1993. It was a favorite of amateur ornithologists, due to the fact that Cape May is home to a wildlife refuge that attracts rare birds, some of which would roost in the rooftop garden. <br /><br /><br />In 1958, the Lassiter attempted to film a series of commercials to appeal to suburban, middle-class homeowners who didn't have children, or just wanted to get away from their kids; the nuclear family wasn't for everyone, and with the baby boomers turning increasingly rebellious as they became teenagers, there was an appeal in leaving the kids with grandma and having a week to yourself on the beach. <br /><br /><br />The filming didn't go as planned, and the project was scrapped in favor of radio advertisements, which re-used audio tracks intended for the commercials. Even then, the commercials didn't air until the 1960 tourist season due to the damage caused during filming. <br /><br /><br />Three major incidents occurred during the attempted filming. One in the lobby, one on the rooftop garden, and one in the infamous Room 47, which is where the 2011 footage shot by <i>America's Most Haunted</i> concluded.<br /><br /><br /><b>The Lobby Incident </b><br /><br /><br />The shot of the lobby was meant to capture an average day at the hotel, guests checking in and out, people arriving and leaving for the day. Cameras were set up to record in the morning, and guests were asked to sign waivers for use of their likenesses, something that wasn't standard in hotel contracts at the time. Everyone was informed that cameras would begin rolling at check-in time, which was 12:00, earlier than any hotel in the area. <br /><br /><br />When the cameras rolled… nothing happened. It's not that they didn't record footage, but nobody came into the lobby from either the rooms or the outside. This was in the middle of peak season, and they had at least a dozen arrivals that day, but nobody showed up. <br /><br /><br />The instant the cameras turned off, someone came in the front door to check in, and two other groups checked out. By the time the cameras were rolling again, the lobby was empty, and it stayed empty as long as they tried to record. The director, a local named Samuel Renard, said it best: "It's uncanny."<br /><br /><br />There's no obvious distortion or anomaly, but one of the cameras was filming the reception desk. For some reason, the entire time the cameras rolled, no clerks were at the desk, despite them being told that no breaks were allowed while filming was ongoing. <br /><br /><br />There are certain areas of reality averse to being filmed or photographed, such as the Great Dismal Swamp Anomaly or Oxford's so-called "third tower". This is one of the only times the Institute has seen a space that makes people averse to being recorded.<br /><br /><br /><b>The Garden Incident </b><br /><br /><br />The rooftop garden was tall enough to have a view of the entire Cape May shoreline, with foliage strategically placed in such a way that it blocked out the more urban and New Jersey-like parts of the city from view. To a black-and-white camera, most of the plants even look real.<br /><br /><br />There is no obvious anomaly on the rooftop itself; the footage shows people sunbathing, a few even waving to the camera. Things go wrong as the camera tries to get a panoramic view of Cape May.<br /><br /><br />As the camera turns to face the Atlantic, the film shows signs of heavy degradation. The audio track records a male scream, along with a “Holy sh--” before the camera inexplicably shows a view of the Lassiter’s roof. The film crew looks up at the camera directly, stunned. It hovers in place, before falling to the ground six storeys below, spinning four times as it drops. When it faces the sky, a shadowy shape is visible, towering over the Lassiter and blotting out the sun.<br /><br /><br />Just before the camera lands, its momentum is arrested, and it’s placed upright. People run out of the hotel to recover the camera, clearly confused. Pedestrians walk by, seemingly ignorant of what just happened. Through the glass doors of the lobby, a figure wearing a boater hat is visible.<br /><br /><br /><b>The Room 47 Incident</b><br /><br /><br />Room 47 of the Lassiter was one of eight luxury suites in the Lassiter, each named after one of the other eight planets at the time; To be specific, this room was known as the Neptune Suite. It’s twice the size of a standard room, has two bedrooms, a kitchenette, a much larger bathroom, and a private balcony, and is decorated with a prevalent nautical theme. The crew had intended to film an average day in the suite, hiring a pair of actors to pretend they were on a relaxing vacation… but something went wrong. <br /><br /><br />The actors-- a blonde woman and a brunette man, both white-- enter the room and mime going through the process of unpacking; as they do, the camera lingers on a corner of the room right by the door. While the corner is in focus, something appears there. It's an oval shape with a mirror-like texture and indistinct edges, showing only darkness. It's present in the corner in subsequent shots, but not focused on in any way. <br /><br /><br />The actors were eventually directed to change into bedclothes and pretend to sleep, with the shades drawn over the windows to simulate low light. But in that darkness, the oval anomaly seems to glow.<br /><br /><br />And then, slowly, a limb emerges from the aperture, as glossy and dark as the mirrored surface it emerged from. As it does, someone is heard asking, "Does anyone else smell that?"<br /><br /><br />Then, someone else: "The camera's on fire!"<br /><br /><br />The being fully emerges from the aperture just as the camera is destroyed by fire. One of the actors screams as she sets eyes on it.<br /><br /><br /><b>Supplemental </b><br /><br /><br />The fire that resulted from passively recording the anomaly in Room 47 resulted in over $50,000 in damage to the Lassiter, though there were no reported deaths. After the blaze was extinguished, the hotel had to be closed for repairs and inspection; during this time, a large amount of mold was discovered throughout the hotel, necessitating a complete remodel. <br /><br /><br />The Neptune Suite was inspected and re-opened after nothing was found amiss within. Until 1985, the Lassiter put a notice everywhere they could-- on the front door, in the pool, the lobby, the rooms, everywhere.<br /><br /><br />"For the purposes of protecting the architectural integrity and uniqueness of the Lassiter Hotel, we ask that guests refrain from photography within the building, including the rooftop garden. Thank you for understanding."</p><p> </p><p style="text-align: right;"><b>Next Entry: <a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-lassiter-hotel-footage-part-2.html">The Lassiter Hotel Footage, Part 2</a></b> <br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-39931984641610434672022-09-30T08:10:00.010-07:002022-10-21T11:27:19.711-07:00The Alescio Manuscripts (1983-1987)<p><br /><br /> Tristan here. I’m busy working on a big write-up for this October, so this week, we’re having a newer member of the Institute take over. But she’s asked me to provide some context first.<br /><br /><br />Fictocognition, also known as scribocognition, is the ability to use writing, specifically fiction writing, to tell the future. An arguable example of this is the 1898 novella <i>Futility</i> by Morgan Robertson, which describes the wreck of a ship named the <i>Titan</i> fourteen years before the wreck of the <i>Titanic</i>; however, this is attributable to Robertson’s knowledge of contemporary ship-building and naval practices, and an edition issued in 1912 ‘corrects’ the gross tonnage of the <i>Titan</i> to more closely resemble the <i>Titanic</i>’s, making this claim dubious at best.<br /><br /><br />Less explicable is the 1989 Norwegian crime thriller novel <i>Den dyreste forbrytelsen av alle</i> (EN: <i>The Most Expensive Crime of All</i>), which details a team of detectives attempting to solve the theft of several valuable pieces of art from a museum in Oslo. Among the works stolen were three by Rembrandt, one by Vermeer, and four by Degas. The methods in which the guards were subdued, the location where they were held, and several other details-- including the artists who created the stolen artwork-- mirrored the thefts at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. Notably, however, <i>The Most Expensive Crime</i> ends with the artworks returned; as of writing, the Gardner Museum theft remains unresolved.<br /><br /><br />This essay discusses an instance of possible fictocognition in 1980s New York.<br /><br /><b><br />Original Essay by “Ms. di Corci”</b></p><p><b> </b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Sing_Sing_012.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="534" data-original-width="800" height="327" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Sing_Sing_012.jpg" width="490" /></a></b></div><b><br /> </b><br /><br /><b>1.</b><p></p><p><b> </b><br />I’ve been told it’s a good idea to include a content warning for this, so here goes. This report describes cruelty to animals, the American prison system, police brutality, kidnapping, and suicide. <br /><br /><br />In May of 1986, an inmate from Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York attempted to enter a nationwide writing contest meant to promote literacy and creativity in the vast American prison population. He wrote a seventy-four page manuscript titled “Dog Burglear”(sic), a story riddled with spelling errors about an operation out of Brooklyn which stole “feerce-looking” dogs such as dobermans, German shepherds, and pit bulls and forced them to participate in an illegal dog-fighting ring. Before it was sent off to the group running the contest, it was opened, searched, and partially read by a guard at Sing Sing, who found it uncannily detailed; the guard lived in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, and noticed that several dogs had been reported missing in the area. He brought up his hunch to the Warden of Sing Sing, who contacted the NYPD. <br /><br /><br />Surveillance was conducted on an address mentioned in “Dog Burglear”. After the NYPD saw a van full of caged dogs being unloaded at the address, they obtained a warrant and raided it on June 9th, 1986. Several animals, unfortunately, had to be euthanized, but almost thirty dogs were returned to their families. <br /><br /><br />The operation had been ongoing since the winter of 1985; at first blush, it may seem like that the prisoner was simply writing a story inspired by his own crimes, perhaps some attempt at a confession or redemption. But there’s a problem: the prisoner in question had been in Sing Sing since 1982, serving three consecutive life sentences for murder. His name was Gervasio Alescio, and he was an enforcer for the Italian mafia in New York who had been at the wrong end of a plea deal.</p><div><br /></div><div><b>2.</b></div><div><b><br /></b>Alescio was thirty-nine years old at the time. He had been illiterate for most of his life, only learning how to read in 1983, as part of Sing Sing’s prison literacy program. He had managed to read four books since then: the King James Bible (having grown up in a religious household, he was familiar with the general contents, if not the exact version), <i>A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations</i>, and <i>The Prince and the Pauper</i>. With the help of the prison’s chaplain, Father Alexander Mayhew, he learned how to write, but he struggled with spellings of common words.<br /><br /><br />He had written several manuscripts during his time in prison, several of which were illegible, most of them no more than one or two pages. They were regularly confiscated by prison guards and stored in his file, for fear that the paper could be compacted and made into a weapon. However, after “Dog Burglear”, they went through the file and found several of the manuscripts matched up to other crimes-- a murder in the Bronx, the disappearance of over $5,000 from a register at a department store, and a stolen vehicle in Queens, all crimes committed <i>after </i>Alescio had been incarcerated.<br /><br /><br />Unable to find a reasonable explanation, Alescio was pulled into the warden’s office on June 12th. When questioned how he knew of the crimes he described, he said that the story ideas just ‘came to him’ and that he just ‘knew how they were going to go’. The warden did not find this explanation satisfactory, and ordered Alescio to be placed in solitary confinement until he was ready to say how he actually knew what to write.<br /><br /><br />Alescio would remain in solitary for almost eight months, begging to be let out on a daily basis, and begging for something to write with. His only contact with another human during this time was a weekly fifteen-minute meeting with Father Mayhew after he held service on Sunday; the chaplain claimed that Alescio was telling the truth about his writing, and said that what he could do was a God-given gift.<br /><br /><br />With Mayhew transcribing what he said, Alescio was able to write several stories. Two stories were notable; the first, “Sam’s Granddotter” (Alescio insisted on the spelling) was about an alleged child that serial killer David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz fathered in secret, and how she would go on to terrorize not only New York, but also the Jersey Shore, inspired by Alescio's fascination with the Son of Sam trial.<br /><br /><br />The second was titled "Stickup”, and was discovered by a guard during a search for contraband that included the chaplain's office. It was incomplete, but it detailed a robbery that took place at an electronics store in Chinatown, and how the thieves were using the items stolen (radios, Motorola DynaTAC cell phones, and smoke alarms, among other things) to create explosives that would be detonated throughout Manhattan, with the Americium (or “Americanium” as Alescio said it) from the smoke alarms causing widespread radioactive contamination. The warden ordered Alescio and Mayhew to both be disciplined-- but he recognized the robbery. There had been a story about it in the New York Post two days previously. Following his gut, the warden alerted the NYPD, and a major terrorist plot was foiled.<br /><br /><br />The NYPD had previously hired psychic investigators to mixed success. But this was as close to the genuine thing as they’ve ever gotten.<div><br /></div><div><b>3.</b><br /><br />Alescio was released from solitary into the general prison population and given a deal by the district attorney. A three-year-old girl had been kidnapped from Midtown Manhattan, and the NYPD had zero leads. If he could provide a manuscript that could lead them to the culprit, they would reduce his sentence from three consecutive life sentences to thirty years, with a possibility for parole after fifteen. With that, Alescio started writing.<br /><br /><br />Within a week, he produced four short stories. The first, “She’s Got The Jak”, talked about a car theft ring in Queens. The second, “He’s Our Son”, prevented an arsonist from burning down a prominent nightclub. The final one was entitled “Help Her Pleas God Help Her”, and seemed to describe the kidnapping case… but there were two problems with the manuscripts that led the warden and the District Attorney to withdraw their deal.<br /><br /><br />Firstly: hours before Alescio started writing “She’s Got the Jak”, he was seen talking to a fellow inmate, who had been sentenced to life in prison for murdering someone during a carjacking. This inmate was previously involved with a car theft ring in Queens, one that the NYPD had already been monitoring. Naturally, it was assumed that this inmate had simply fed Alescio information about the car thefts.<br /><br /><br />Secondly: “Help Her Pleas God Help Her” alleged that the kidnapping victim was being held by a police officer-- not in any legal capacity. She was being, for lack of a better word, trained to be his police officer’s daughter, after his own daughter had drowned in the Hudson. They even named the police officer explicitly, a first for Alescio’s work.<br /><br /><br />It was Alescio’s arresting officer, a detective who had been part of the NYPD for nearly a decade. <br /><br /><br />Believing it to be a vindictive move on the part of Alescio, his sentence was not re-assessed, and his privileges to both Sing Sing’s library and access to writing utensils were revoked for five years.<br /><br /><br />Alescio was found dead in his cell less than a year later, having slit his wrists with a pen that had been smuggled to him. Allegedly, he used it to write a suicide note; the guard flushed it down the toilet without reading it.<br /><br /><br /><b>4.</b><br /><br />Alescio’s manuscripts are one-of-a-kind, and several of them have been destroyed; however, Alexander Mayhew, Sing Sing’s chaplain, managed to save a handful of them, including “Dog Burglear”, "Sam's Granddotter", and “Help Her Pleas God Help Her”, mimeographing the latter seven times in case the original was destroyed.<br /><br /><br />The officer identified in “Help Her Pleas” died in 2014 of pancreatic cancer like his father and his father’s father; he left behind a daughter. After the advent of widely available genetic screening in the late 2010s, she got tested to see if she carried the same risk for pancreatic cancer as her ancestors.<br /><br /><br />The test showed that she was not related to the man she thought was her father. Alexander Mayhew, a friend of the family, told her about Alescio’s manuscripts, and gave her the surviving ones.<br /><br /><br />I have been trying to find my biological parents ever since.</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-50833115349626907042022-09-22T08:31:00.005-07:002022-09-26T13:17:02.130-07:00The Lumière Anomaly: Le Chapeau<p></p><p><b><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/09/kitchen-blitz-pilot-2013.html"><< Kitchen Blitz Pilot (2013) </a><br /></b></p><p><b> </b></p><p><b>Original Essay by an Anonymous Institute Member</b></p><p><b> </b></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUNmlbJqccheykQ4Tv6McGYBI2NrblOrYzrDK0DTvlSN8uSm4t-zpGlPW1GewHP-BHoLKrovO2226LLeJw9EkdMMvszKxeE4yqpMdOsgjwtoxsvGKIg3UxaQ98UEsQ5JjeRp4sSU44qTKX7aYC3OWsGGk98Mb89TXrSv57ILgB3aLLcXPLYUzdWjtH1A/s1117/boaterhatman.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="617" data-original-width="1117" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUNmlbJqccheykQ4Tv6McGYBI2NrblOrYzrDK0DTvlSN8uSm4t-zpGlPW1GewHP-BHoLKrovO2226LLeJw9EkdMMvszKxeE4yqpMdOsgjwtoxsvGKIg3UxaQ98UEsQ5JjeRp4sSU44qTKX7aYC3OWsGGk98Mb89TXrSv57ILgB3aLLcXPLYUzdWjtH1A/w400-h222/boaterhatman.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A still from <i>L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat</i>, in which Le Chapeau is clearly visible, slightly right of the center.</td></tr></tbody></table><p><b> </b><br />Paris, January 25th, 1946. Despite the frigid winter, a line has formed outside the Le Champo cinema. France still holds fresh wounds from Nazi occupation, but on that night, cinephiles from around the nation gathered to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most iconic pieces of cinema history: the screening of the Lumière brother’s <i>L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat</i>. The film is scarcely fifty seconds long and is nothing more than footage of a train arriving at a station, but it was one of the first widely-known pieces of <i>Cinématographie</i> in the world. While the Lumière brothers themselves did not attend, eleven of audience members from the original screening of <i>L'arrivée d'un train</i> were present. The oldest was eighty-five-year-old Jacques Masson; the youngest, sixty-two-year-old Claude Morel.</p><div><br /><br />After a speaker gives a brief history on the Lumière brothers and their accomplishments, as well as how cinema has developed since the screening of this film, the lights dim, and the projectionist begins the film. To some, it’s an experience just as magical as when the film was first screened; some have not seen a movie since before France was liberated. There are some in the audience who are too young to remember films that weren’t some form of Nazi propaganda. They are watching the earliest form of cinema, but it is still something magical: moving pictures on screen.<br /><br /><br />Among the eleven original audience members, however, there’s confusion. Masson is heard muttering that ‘something isn’t right’. Then, at approximately thirty-five seconds into the film, Morel stands, points at the screen, and screams: <br /><br />“Who is that man?!”<br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Le Chapeau</b><br /></p><p><br /><br />The figure that caused the panic is first visible at approximately 0:24, and vanishes at 0:36. It is a man wearing a boater hat, the top half of their face covered in shadow. They are wearing a dark suit with a white shirt visible beneath. At 0:34, they appear to look directly at the camera, before walking off-frame.<br /><br /><br />Several witnesses to previous screenings of <i><i>L'arrivée d'un train</i> </i>corroborate that this figure was not in the film prior to 1935, but their presence is not made explicit until 1946. That was eleven years wherein this figure (termed “L’homme au chapeau”, or simply “Le Chapeau”, after their distinctive hat) could have been inserted into the film. Who are they? And how did this happen?<br /><br /><br />There are three prevailing theories: the first was published in 1946 by members of <i>La Société des Anomalies Cinématographiques</i>, and is sometimes called the ‘French Hypothesis’; the second was put forth in 1982 by film historian Hubert Pfenning, or the ‘German Hypothesis’; the final, from 2019, was created by Institute members.<br /><br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The French Hypothesis</b><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /><i><br />La Société des Anomalies Cinématographiques</i> was founded in 1941 as an unofficial part of the French Resistance, following the discovery of the film <i>Bergenkreiger</i>(1940), a German fantasy propaganda film that was essentially an unauthorized<i> Conan the Barbarian</i> adaptation. After the slaughter of seventeen Nazi soldiers at its initial screening in Paris, it was stolen by the French projectionist and studied. By 1942, the anomalous copy of <i>Bergenkreiger</i> was destroyed by the same anomalous entity which caused the initial deaths. <i>La Société</i> would term this being, and others like it, cinemanauts.<br /><br /><br /><i>La Société</i> was around in a reduced capacity after World War II, and several members of it investigated Le Chapeau. They concluded that Le Chapeau was a cinemanaut, someone who had managed to jump from our reality into the film for reasons unknown. They even attempted to attach a name to the face: Gustav Ablin, a student of film who went missing shortly after the establishment of Vichy France. He was in the process of restoring a print of <i>L'arrivée d'un train </i>when the Nazi invasion began, and was said to be highly stressed by the events, before he simply vanished.<br /><br /><br />The who and why were explained, but not the how. But for the purposes of <i>La Société</i>, this was enough, and was the accepted theory for almost forty years.</p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The German Hypothesis</b><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br />Hubert Pfenning (b. 1951) is one of the leading experts on so-called <i>Okkulteskino</i>. Sadly, the most prominence granted by his research has been four appearances on the Nova Network’s <i>Strange Pictures</i>, where he was forced to debate the veracity of the Lassiter Hotel Footage <i>twice</i>. <br /><br /><br />In 1982, Pfenning managed to obtain a print of <i>Arrival of a Train</i> in which Le Chapeau is absent, dated to 1942, a year after Albin’s disappearance. Travel performed by cinemanauts instantly affects the media they travel into or out of, so this narrowed the timeline in which <i>L'arrivée d'un train</i> could have been affected from over a decade to four years.<br /><br /><br />He formed a new hypothesis, one that was dismissed as laughable at the time, but gained renewed interest in the mid-2000s: that Le Chapeau was not a French citizen, but a German spy. Specifically, Le Chapeau was Hugo Lorenz, a German cryptographer that had been researching how to encode messages into cinema to spread to Nazi spies in allied territories. Lorenz came to the conclusion that films depicted alternate realities, and that if need be, members of the Nazi party could flee into film as either a temporary or permanent refuge.<br /><br /><br />Lorenz disappeared following the Liberation of France in 1944, and was last seen purchasing a boater hat from a boutique in Marseille. <br /><br /><br />But there is a problem with both of these hypotheses that came to light in 2019.<br /><br /><br /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Institute’s Hypothesis</b><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br />Neither Gustav Albin nor Hugo Lorenz could possibly be Le Chapeaufor one reason: by the time of Le Chapeau’s appearance in <i>L'arrivée d'un train</i>, both of them were dead.<br /><br /><br />In 1952, a skeleton was discovered in the river Seine in Paris, just beneath a bridge. It was wearing a pair of pants whose pockets were filled with rocks, and near it was found a small glass jar, still sealed, containing a piece of paper and several film negatives:<br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><blockquote>The Germans will burn our country to the ground. I cannot bear to
live in a France ruled by Hitler. I am sorry, mother. G. Albin, July
1940.</blockquote><br /><br /><br />The negatives, when developed, showed Albin spending time with his family in London.<br /><br /><br />As for Hugo Lorenz, records from the Nazi party itself show that Lorenz died in 1942. He suffocated on fumes from an incinerator where he was burning unusable and damaged film. This was not publicly known until the declassification of Operation Stone Soup in 2019; Stone Soup was an effort by the United States to recruit Nazi filmmakers and propagandists in order to bolster their own anti-communist propaganda during the Cold War, and describes Lorenz’s death as ‘the unfortunate loss of a valuable asset’.<br /><br /><br />That leaves the question: who is Le Chapeau? The answer can be found by looking elsewhere in the history of not just film, but media itself.<br /><br /><br />On at least six occasions, screenings of Fritz Lang’s <i>Metropolis</i> have had a scene in which the inventor Rotwang shows Fredersen his <i>Maschinenmensch</i> is interrupted by a man in a boater hat walking through the laboratory. Rotwang and Fredersen stare at the man as he walks past, before the plot resumes its normal course.<br /><br /><br />Approximately eighty first edition copies of Italo Calvino’s novel <i>If on a winter’s night a traveler</i> contain a passage during one of the second-person sections where the character of Ludmilla is accosted by a man in a dark suit wearing a boater hat; this is not referenced for the rest of the work.<br /><br /><br />It has been purported that approximately one in every thousand copies of issue fourteen of Neil Gaiman’s <i>The Sandman</i> have an inexplicable page-wide spread depicting a man in a dark suit wearing a boater hat; these are not present in any omnibus collection.<br /><br /><br />The Institute believes that Le Chapeau is not, and was never, a human, and is not any form of cinemanaut. They are an entity which is capable of ‘walking’ through film, literature, art… most forms of media have been visited by Le Chapeau, and it leaves evidence of its presence. We do not know its motives, and there seems to be no discernible pattern of its movements. It is believed to be harmless to humans, but Le Chapeau’s presence may be startling. To date, it is only responsible for a single death.<br /><br /><br />Jacques Masson, upon seeing Le Chapeau on screen on that fateful night in January, suffered a fatal heart attack. If reports are to be believed, a man with a boater hat was seen at his funeral six days later.<br /><p></p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-52733059642385032442022-09-15T09:33:00.004-07:002022-11-29T11:12:29.049-08:00Kitchen Blitz Pilot (2013)<p><b><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-anti-drug-abberation.html"><< The Anti-Drug Aberration </a><br /></b></p><p><b>Essay by Tristan Marshall, Forbidden Media Investigator<br /></b></p><p>I'm afraid I've been lying to you these past couple of weeks regarding my injury. I figured "pinched nerve from sitting weird" was less embarrassing than the truth of "I was injured during an investigation", for some reason. What I'm going to be talking about today was filmed not 20 miles from my hometown. And now that I'm healed and have some test results back, I'm ready to discuss it. <br /><br /><i>Kitchen Blitz</i> was the 2013 pilot of a home improvement TV show that was pitched to HGTV. As the name might suggest, the show focuses on trying to renovate the kitchen specifically. It makes sense: a house can exist without a TV room, a breakfast nook, a ‘man cave’, etc. But the kitchen is the third-most important room in the house, after the bathroom and bedroom, and it’s also the most complex to maintain. You have to deal with gas lines, electricity, plumbing, waterproofing, managing storage space, dealing with pests, and so much more, so of course some people would find entertainment value in it.</p><p><br />Like a lot of media I deal with, the episode is made up of a bunch of unedited takes from various cameras. I’ve managed to create together a coherent narrative with the help of my colleague ‘Azula’ (pseudonym), who is the editing guru in the Institute; she helped cobble together the Money for Nothing tape. But before we get to the episode, let’s discuss the house itself.<br /><br />The house it was filmed in-- which still stands to this day, abandoned-- was built in the 1850s. It used to be a farmhouse, before all the land around it was bought up and developed into something that would be called suburbs, if it were closer to a major city. It’s the oldest house on the block, and it’s falling apart. Part of the roof has collapsed on the north side, rendering the attic inaccessible. The debris from that has crushed the carport on the house's north side. The front porch was torn up by the police, exposing the crawlspace beneath. The front door is about three feet off of the "ground" as a result, covered in faded yellow crime scene tape. <br /><br />Supposedly, you can get anywhere with a clipboard, a tie, and a lot of confidence. The same is true of Institute research, but the props are different. When I went to investigate the house, I wore a set of white nylon coveralls, along with gloves, goggles, and a face mask, with a bag in one hand and a clipboard in the other. To most people, I’ll look like either a CSI tech or someone who’s coming to inspect the house for mold; either of those were welcome sights when it came to this ruin. Properties on either side were put up for sale years ago, and remain vacant.<br /><br />Negotiating the crawlspace was easy enough; jump down, walk across, crawl under the police tape. There's no condemned notice, for some reason; I think the city considers this a landmark because of how old the house is, so they're reluctant to tear it down, but people don't want to move in because of its history.<br /><br />On my way in, I left some Institute tech by the door; it's a laser tripwire that goes up at ankle level. It should have sent an alert to my phone if anyone crossed it. That way, I'd have advanced warning if anyone comes in after me.</p><p><br />The kitchen was at the back of the house; between me and that was a lot of rotten carpet and disintegrating floorboards. Thankful for my boots, I stepped across the moist rug, and once I was somewhere dry and stable, I began comparing my observations to the notes I had made on the pilot earlier that day.<br /><br /><span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p><i>Kitchen Blitz</i>’s pilot focuses on the hosts, a husband-and-wife couple who I’ll call [Norm] and [Pam], fixing up the kitchen of this house. Circa 2013, the house was owned by a septuagenarian widow and former restaurant owner, Mrs. Kate Ferguson, who had lived in the house her whole life and longed for a kitchen that was A) easier to maneuver in, B) reminded her of her time owning a restaurant, and C) had more modern equipment. The most recent piece of technology in her kitchen is a stove from 1993; everything else is from the 80's or older.<br /><br />Mrs. Ferguson’s interview paints her as a grandmotherly type of woman, someone who probably has a snickerdoodle recipe with a secret ingredient that she’ll never tell anyone, a couple of cats, and a nice china collection. Her husband died three years prior to this, and she’s clearly lonely, wanting someone to talk to. She’s given an all-expenses paid trip to Myrtle Beach, which is at least a little cooler than the hellscape that is the Midwestern summer. The show’s goal: finish the kitchen within a week.<br /><br />The first day’s worth of tape shows [Norm] and [Pam] estimating the costs of what [Mrs. Ferguson] wants. This is all for the cameras; they’ve already calculated costs beforehand, but seeing them talk through a script of what they’re going to do about it is entertaining. We’re able to see little glimpses of the hosts without their personas on; cute nicknames for each other, holding hands whenever they get a chance, and when [Norm] shorts out electricity to the whole house while trying to unhook something and it looks like they’re going to start arguing, laughing and start figuring out how to fix it.<br /><br /><span></span></p><!--more-->Nine years later, I began recording my observations. <br /><br />"The house appears to be uninhabited and uninhabitable. Smell of mold permeates what was once the dining room. Water damage on the ceiling, south-west corner is visibly sagging. Door to the kitchen has been removed; I'm entering the space and-- <i>Jesus Christ.</i> It smells like rot in here. Meat as opposed to mold. I'm going to hope a squirrel crawled into the wall and died." <br /><br />"The breaker box is on the wall by the door. Completely stripped of wiring-- by whom? I don't know. Going to start taking photographs."<br /><br />"Note: photographs aren't coming through clearly. It's possible that there's a Marble Field permeating the area."<br /><br />The 'Marble Field' is the institute term for electromagnetic interference caused by supernatural phenomena. It's how you can tell a genuine encounter with shadow people apart from hoaxes. <br /><br />"All appliances, including the sink, were removed. No, wait-- the fridge is still here. That's odd. I'm going to set up a system to open it remotely. Where did I put that string?"<br /><p></p><span><!--more--></span><br /><span></span>About ten minutes into the footage, [Norm] is getting situated under the sink, muttering lines to himself. When they go live, he explains that he’s getting ready to rip it out, but he has to go through a bunch of steps first. Shutting the water off, removing the faucet, all that. He mentions that Mrs. Ferguson has been having trouble with the left part of the sink clogging, so he removes that portion of the drainage pipe first, and we hear something rattling about the whole time.<p>After a while of messing with the pipes, he gets the obstruction out, and laughs-- it’s a long, white object. “Chicken bone!” He explains. “She must’ve used the wrong pipe for the garbage disposal.”<br /><br />Then it’s back to work. With the sink out, they begin the arduous process of uninstalling the dishwasher next to it. They gasp and start to gag as a sudden, overwhelming stench fills the room. Someone says it smells like an animal died behind the appliance; they decide to not move it until they can get someone who can handle biohazardous material in.<br /><br /></p><span><!--more--></span><p><br />"Apparatus is set up, but I'm observing the rest of the kitchen first. There is a noticeable void where the countertop used to be, and there's a silhouette where… yes, that is where the dishwasher used to be. It's an uneven box-like shape, with a smaller, oblong shape on top. There's either mold or-- fuck! That-- that's hair. Why am I surprised?"<br /><br />"Wait. The interference alarm on the sensor just tripped. I can see it from here, it's been knocked over. I'm hoping the wind did it, you get a lot of gusts in this part of Wisconsin in late summer. But I'd prefer to get out of here sooner rather than later. I'm going to open the fridge."</p><p><span></span></p><!--more--> <p></p><p>After taking a break and opening a few windows to get rid of the stench, they begin removing the fridge. Mrs. Ferguson was supposed to clear it out before they came in, but she left some food behind for the crew. There are a few shots of people eating food that she supposedly made for them. Mashed potatoes, pulled pork, creamed corn, all sorts of comfort food. So while they do have to throw out a little food, they have dinner taken care of for the day. <br /><br />There’s another candid scene, where [Pam] is on the phone with a hardware store, asking why the new fridge still hasn’t arrived. “Come on!” She snaps over the phone. Then, she calms. “Look, I’m sorry, it’s just… this job I’m on is giving me the creeps, and I don’t know why. The whole house smells weird, and… and the floorboards feel too hollow, does that make sense?”<br /><br /></p><span><!--more--></span><p><br /><br />"The fridge is open. And… it's an anti-climax. Empty. I don't think it was ever hooked up; there are remains of what I think was red ribbon around it. Footage showed it tied in a bow for Mrs. Ferguson. And nine years later, I'm left wondering if the meat in the fridge actually was pulled pork…"<br /><br /><br /></p><span><!--more--></span><p><br />Soon, the crew had arrived at arguably the most satisfying part of any home improvement show: the tear-down. After getting all of her cooking wear, china plates, and a collection of very old-looking cookbooks out of the kitchen, [Norm] and some of his crew enter with sledgehammers, face protection, and gloves. They don’t need to do this, since they could easily just remove the cabinets and shelves and even the counter with normal tools, but [Norm] outright says that the majority of it is “Plastic and pressboard crap, from ‘91 or ‘92”, even going so far as to rip off a chunk of the plastic that covers the countertop by hand. After he checks with [Pam] to confirm that, yes, the granite countertops are on schedule for delivery by the end of tomorrow, they begin smashing.<br /><br />I’ll admit, it's very satisfying to watch people break down an area that must have taken a hundred man-hours to do in the space of fifteen minutes. One person works on demolishing the cabinets, while another smashes the countertop to pieces with a crowbar. The machismo is tangible. <br /><br />Then we come to the point where it all goes wrong-- there’s a non-load-bearing wall that they want to knock out to make it easier for Mrs. Ferguson to get in and out of the kitchen by expanding the doorway. [Norm] sets up the camera and acts like he’s going to swing a golf club, even making a joke about how “Arnold Palmer ain’t crap”. Then, he swings it into the wall.<br /><br />That's when the bones come falling out. They don't stop.<br /><br />Norm just stands there as what was later identified as four different skeletons come falling out of the wall. He’s obliterated at least part of one with the force of his swing. [Pam] comes to check on him, not knowing the horror she’s walking into. She screams as she almost steps on a brittle skull.<br /><br /></p><span><!--more--></span><p><br /><br />"I've found what I believe to be the hole made by the sledgehammer's impact. It's… seeping. I'm going to collect a sample for Atticus."<br /><br />"Specimen is black and pink. Pink might be insulation-- no, wait, it can't be. The house is too old for that. What is this? Whatever it is, it seems to be coming out of the other holes made by the police's excavations. I… think it's time for me to leave."<br /><br /></p><span><!--more--></span><p><br /><br />The police put the crew to good use. Someone keeps recording, for some reason, and the crew shows the police how to open up walls, find studs, and tear up floors in order to locate more remains. <br /><br />By the end of it, there were nine complete bodies found in the house. Seven partial remains were discovered. <br /><br />The worst one was behind the dishwasher. It’s not shown on-camera, thank god, I don’t think I would have held my lunch if it was. <br /><br />But a police report describes it as being squashed ‘completely flat’, with ‘pulverized bones’. There were pieces of rope found with the… I can’t even call it a body, it was ‘remains’.<br /><br /></p><span><!--more--></span><p><br /><br />"The alarm system's gone. It's halfway across the entry hall. As much as I hate to leave behind Institute technology, I-- shit."<br /><br />"There is another entity in here with me. It appears to be six… six and a half feet tall. Humanoid. It's indistinct, appears to be covered in paper or-- FUCK!"<br /><br />"Shit, shit, shit, shit! It's… I'm okay. My arm, fuck… I fell backwards out of the door and landed on it in the crawlspace. The entity is visible, but isn't pursuing."<br /><br />"Note: do not return. Wildly unsafe. Active anomalous entity. Shit. Hey, Google, navigate to the nearest hospital."<br /><br /></p><span><!--more--></span><p><br /><br /><b>Supplemental:</b><br /><br />As you could probably tell by the fact that I haven’t been censoring her name like with [Norm] and [Pam], Mrs. Kate Ferguson likely wasn’t her real name. A Kate Ferguson did live at that address… in 1962. Whoever she was, she managed to get away from the ‘handler’ the show had set up for them in Myrtle Beach, and was last seen on a bus bound for New Jersey. <br /><br />Needless to say, the network execs didn’t pick up the show, which is a pity; it would have been legitimately good television with a pair of charismatic hosts, if not for the fact that they had the bad luck to renovate what might have been the house of a serial killer.<br /><br /> [Norm] and [Pam] never tried for a TV show again, but they’re still married; I didn’t want to reach out to them. Mrs. Ferguson remains at large, and when I asked a member of the local police about it, a lieutenant told me to not "waste his fucking time”. <br /><br />I was treated for a sprained arm at a local hospital and released the same day. I also asked for some anti-fungal treatment, to be safe. I'm recovering well.<br /><br />I sent my glove, and all the gunk on it, to someone in the Institute that specializes in mycology; part of the reason for this write-up is that I just got the results back. He says it's <i>Aspergillus siamensis</i>. If that name sounds exciting, then I'm sorry to inform you it's just a run-of-the-mill toxic mold… that is typically found in the aftermath of fires.</p><span><!--more--></span><span><!--more--></span><p></p><span><!--more--></span><span><!--more--></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-76408977831050761612022-09-09T08:00:00.007-07:002022-09-15T21:02:20.032-07:00The Anti-Drug Abberation<p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/09/a-brief-history-of-killer-apps-guest.html"><b><< A Brief History of Killer Apps</b></a> <br /></p><div>My arm’s still healing from my stupid pinched nerve, so I’m still having someone sub in for me. Today, we have someone who calls themselves Mr. Draper taking over for me, talking about how he first got into this mess through the world of Advertising.<br /><br /><b>The Anti-Drug Abberation<br /><br />By Mr. Draper<br /></b><br />From the top: none of us use our real names. I especially am not supposed to; despite what Tristan and a few other die-hards want you to think, the Institute isn't a formal organization, but it’s more serious than a hobby. Think of us as a monitoring agency. But a monitoring agency needs capital, and I’m one of the main providers of lucre. Ad money, in this case, and through my job, I have a finger on the pulse of the whole malicious media octopus. <br /><br />This is a tale from 2006 or so, when I was getting my feet wet in the world of professional ad copy.<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">#<br /></div><div><br />I’m old enough to remember drinking the D.A.R.E. Kool-Aid back when it was first served in the 80’s, and realized it was bunk after I had my first hit of the Devil’s Lettuce at sixteen-- weed is half the reason I got through college. But me realizing that the biggest anti-drug program in the United States was baseless propaganda didn’t stop me from getting a paycheck from a firm that specialized in anti-drug PSAs, demonizing everything from tobacco to crack to caffeine. I like to call this place Fun Police, Inc.<br /><br />I got noticed by someone higher up in the firm back in 2004, after I pitched a trio of anti-smoking advertisements that I wrote while smoking three packs a week, themed around how bad it was compared to harder drugs. One was a guy trying to snort cigarettes, advertising that “Nicotine is Ten Times more Addictive than Cocaine”. The second was absolutely disgusting, a photograph of a smoker’s teeth, with the caption reading “Cigarettes are worse for your teeth than Meth”. The third one I wrote got me to quit smoking after I did some research on it-- a lonely guy in a club, apparently trying to inject a cigarette into him while others held a conversation. The slogan? “Heroin addicts have more friends than tobacco smokers”. Read into that what you will.<br /><br />When it comes to Anti-Drug PSAs, you have to be as blunt and unsubtle as possible, really nail it in that Drugs Are B-A-D Bad, because if the kids viewing it even get a second of critical thinking, they’ll realize that the adderall they take is basically microdosing meth. Blame Reagan, blame Nixon, blame Hearst or Daren the Lion or anyone you want, but the idea that drugs are a bad thing has been baked into American culture for decades, and it’s no less profitable.<br /><br />Like I said, it was ‘06. I was ready to write ad copy about the harder stuff, but before I or anyone else in my department did that, Fun Police, Inc. wanted to do an exercise to see just what we could do. The staff broke up into teams of two, and drew little pieces of paper out of a hat. The papers had the ‘official’ name of the drug on them, a bunch of street names, and their effects. The catch is that none of these drugs were real, and the effects were really bizarre. One team got a ‘narcotic eyedrop’ called ‘scrundle’ that they had to write copy about, and someone else had to figure out how to make the prospect of smoking horse piss not sound absolutely hilarious.<br /><br />I got paired up with another guy, name of Luto Frederickson. He was a bit of an oddball, pretty sure he was foreign, always stuttered when he spoke. But he was okay, overall, until this project started; he and I were assigned a drug called Ramaltadone, which was allegedly a prescription drug that was abused by ‘the youth’ (their words, not mine) for its side effects. Intended to treat schizophrenia, Ramaltadone was highly addictive and could actually induce hallucinations in those who didn’t have mental illnesses.<br /><br />Yes, I know that pharmaceuticals don’t work that way. But the people who wrote the prompt didn’t care. We were a marketing firm, not Pfiezer. We decided to just go with a general ‘prescription drug abuse’ message, but… Luto wanted something more.<br /><br />“What if,” he asked, “we show them the true horrors of using this drug?”<br /><br />I just sorta gave him an odd look. “The drug isn’t real. How can we show them the horrors of it?”<br /><br />And he responded, “How do we show children that dragons are horrifying?” And then he just… set to work sketching something on a sheet of paper, while I started to write some copy up.<br /><br />I don’t have the original copy, but it went something like this: “Taking drugs without a prescription can be a killer.” And then I wrote, for the image, ‘something like a kid passed out on the floor with pills coming out of his eyes maybe?’. I figured that sounded too horrific, but I showed the concept to Luto, and he just kinda grinned and started sketching away.<br /><br />By lunch, he had drawn something that resembled what I had in mind pretty closely. It was honestly messed up-- the kid was no more than twelve and he had pills coming not only out of his eyes, but his nose and mouth. For something drawn within a few hours, it was pretty good; not like those photorealistic drawings that take two damn months to make, but a more-than-decent job that you’d expect from an art grad. <br /><br />The intent was to convey an overdose, but… Luto didn’t seem satisfied. “Doesn’t convey the hallucinations,” he muttered, and then asked, “What’s your favorite color?” We weren’t using colors, just pen and pencil.<br /><br />“Uh. Purple.”<br /><br />And then he made a few adjustments to the drawing. He scrawled… something on the shirt the kid was wearing, before he presented the drawing back to me. The shirt was now purple.<br /><br />I took the paper out of his hand and turned it over, touched it, and even tore a little bit off. The shirt looked, for all the world, like it had been colored in purple with some crude colored pencils, maybe even some crayon mixed in. But he had just scribbled a few lines on it-- lines that I couldn’t see. “What the fuck?”<br /><br />“Ah! So you can see it. Good. That’ll be the first symptom.” He picked it up and walked to the break room. Then, he clocked out for lunch.<br /><br />That damn thing was in the break room for the rest of the day, pinned to the corkboard. People tried not to notice it; I think the color weirded them out more than anything. I made some pretty messed-up pitches before, but the drafts were pretty much never in color. <br /><br />I started getting a headache after I got back from lunch. I was expecting Luto to be there working with me, but… apparently he left to pick up a food order from the lobby of the building, and never came back. This headache started out dull, like the kind you get when you’re in caffeine withdrawal, or dehydrated. I drank some cold coffee and went to work on the draft-- before realizing it was still pinned to the corkboard. My head hurt, but I could at least get a fresh cup while I was getting the draft.<br /><br />I stopped at the door. The draft wasn’t on the bulletin board. Well, it was, but it was completely different. We didn’t have access to photo-editing stuff in the office, we were literally just there to write ad pitches and do a few sketches. So what the hell was a photograph of a kid with pills coming out of his eyes and mouth doing on the bulletin board, looking like it had just been ripped straight out of a magazine?<br /><br />I pulled it off the board and showed it to one of the other copywriters; we’ll call her Dee. Dee looked between me and it, confused. She asked if it was one of my ads that got printed. I told her no, that I had drafted it earlier that day, and it now looked like that. I asked her to hold the paper; it didn’t feel like the semi-glossy sheets you get in most magazines. It felt like the same drafting paper we used.<br /><br />My boss, let’s call him Jay, came over and wondered what the hell I was doing away from my station. Jay, it should be noted, wore glasses; somehow he was the only guy in the office to do so. He looked at the thing we were holding mid-sentence, and backed away from it as if we were Jeffery Dahmer admiring one of his severed heads.<br /><br />“You okay, Jay?” I asked.<br /><br />“What the hell is that?” He took off his glasses and rubbed his face, tears in his eyes. “Get it-- get it away from me!”<br /><br />“Jay, calm down, it’s--” I stopped. Dee was pulling out her reading glasses to see what was wrong. I put my hand on her arm and shook my head. Jay just curled up on the ground.<br /><br />A few other people came to see what all the hubbub was about. After a while, we just all stood there, transfixed on the ad. I don’t know what everyone else saw, we never talked about it after. But as for me…<br /><br />The stream of pills coming out of the kid’s face started flowing out of the picture, and onto the floor. I felt the gel capsules gather around my feet, almost slipping on them a few times. It was ever enough to go past my ankles, but I was never on steady footing. It was tolerable, like standing in the middle of a creek without any of the wetness. The whole time, I didn’t question it. <br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">#<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /> I’ve done drugs before, like I’ve said. I honestly don’t think you can write ad copy for anti-drug stuff without trying at least some of the softer stuff like weed or shrooms. The hardest thing I tried was acid.<br /><br /> There are all sorts of cartoonish portrayals of what an acid trip is. You don’t see people’s heads turn into walruses, or see your toenails turn into gnomes, or literal pink elephants, or some guy holding a pie that’s on fire telling you the name of your band is stupid and you should change it. <br /><br />It’s an altered state of reality, but by and large, it’s still that: reality. You’ll see people’s faces twist into horrible, monstrous expressions, or see the walls move up and down, see the sky turn bizarre colors. But there’s more than the sights; the sounds are intense, too. There’s a reason a lot of the best music of the 60’s was written while on acid. If I’d thought to write down what I heard, and if I could sing worth a damn, I’d have been a rockstar by the time I was twenty-five.<br /><br />There’s some tactile stuff, one time I thought the couch I was on was trying to eat me because it was burning my skin. The point is, acid trips are weird, but part of you knows that this isn’t real.<br /><br />With the vision I was having… I didn’t get that. It felt too real, too perfect. I felt like I was staring at some divine-- or else unholy-- work of art that was making me see these visions. And the whole time, I felt like I was being drained of my desires. The company I worked at never did drug tests, so I did a little reefer every now and again. As I was viewing that, I never wanted to do weed again. Hell, I never wanted to take so much as cold medicine again.<br /><br />Then, there was a shrieking noise straight out of hell itself, and lights flashing all over. Some of us fell on our ass, some of us started crying, and some of us stumbled around, blinded by the light. After a moment, we realized what it was-- the fire alarm.<br /><br />We got out of there as quick as we could. On our way down the stairwell, someone was going up-- none of us tried to stop them, we were too busy trying to get away from that damn thing on the desk. Everyone got outside okay, but we were all very, very confused.<br /><br />We’d all gathered around the ad at about 2:00 PM or so. But now? Now it was dark outside. My watch read around 8:00 PM. We’d lost six hours, staring at some weirdo magic advertisement.<br /><br />Naturally, everything that happened was attributed to a gas leak. We were told to go home and that we’d be compensated for the time we were supposed to work until the issue was fixed. So, I went to the garage where my car was… and I found someone waiting there for me.<br /><br />They were a lot younger than me, maybe in college. She had a pair of sunglasses on, and the lenses of the glasses had red X’s painted on them, inside a circle, looking like some crosshairs or something. She was blonde, a bit chubby, and wore entirely black clothes. Underneath her right arm was a brown art folio. I’d never seen her before-- and then I realized she'd been the one to push past me to go upstairs.<br /><br />“Were you paired with Luto Fredrickson?” She asked.<br /><br />“What?”<br /><br />She repeated the question.<br /><br />“No, I heard you, but… why do you care?”<br /><br />“Mr. Frederickson has gone by several names over the years-- Lewis Newton, Lincoln Nilson, Ludo Neptune, to name a few. We’ve been trying to track him down, but it looks like we’ve lost him again.”<br /><br />“You a cop? Too young to be a cop.”<br /><br />She just smiled at me. “I’m a concerned party.” She held up the folio. “We managed to contain his work. Can you describe to me what you saw?”<br /><br />I don’t know why, but I told her. She pulled out a composition book with a black and white cover and started writing what I said down. By the end of it, I just… kind of started to panic as I described the feeling of the pills around my legs.<br /><br />“All right.” She closed her book. “I suggest you go home, rest, and maybe try to move past this incident.”<br /><br />As she walked away, I asked: “What if I don’t wanna?”<br /><br />She turned around, genuine confusion on her face. She took off her sunglasses.<br /><br />“Look. You said that Luto or Ludo or whoever, he’s done this before? Somehow? I don’t know what kind of weird voodoo shit there was up there, but I don’t think this is an isolated incident. What else has happened with this?”<br /><br />She put away her sunglasses. “You’re going down a pretty deep rabbit hole here. Are you sure about that?”<br /><br />“Yeah.” I swallowed. “Yeah, I’m sure. If there’s more stuff like this out there, I want to make sure it doesn’t reach the public eye.”<br /><br />She just kind of smiled at me, and reached into the folio, handing me a Polaroid photo. It showed the entire staff standing over Dee’s desk, looking at the ad. I couldn’t see any of it from here, but what I did see was Jay, on the floor-- or rather, halfway in the floor. Something that looked like TV static was dragging him through the carpet. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Jay on the way out.<br /><br />“When did you take this?” I asked. I hadn’t seen her there.<br /><br />“About twenty minutes after you evacuated the building.” As if it explained her bonkers sentence, she held up an old Polaroid camera that was at her side. “They’ve weaponized the world’s media. We found a way to strike back.”<br /><br />After that, we went out for drinks, and she gave me the sales pitch. I got invited to their IRC thing, which eventually became their Telegram. Been part of the group ever since.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">#<br /></div></div><div><br />Whatever Luto did, it never stuck for me. I still do weed every now and again. Tried some of the harder stuff after this, but it wrecked my teeth.<br /><br />We never saw Jay again. In light of all the weird shit that happened with the ‘gas leak’, the company cut back on employees. I managed to stick around. Since then, I've taken over the company,, and we've moved away from anti-drug stuff, especially since everyone and their godmother is pushing for the legalization of weed now. Good.<br /><br />I’ve run into a few other things over the years. A few completely normal products have had just… goddamn bizarre ads made for them. Just to name a few: several implied cannibalism ads for fast food places, a beer commercial where they suggest garnishing it with a severed finger, and a movie trailer where every character is somehow Elijah Wood. Not played by Elijah Wood, just… Elijah Wood, looking terrified of the aliens around him.<br /><br />Luto/Ludo/Whoever the Hell he was keeps popping up. Sometimes he’s a musician, sometimes an artist, sometimes a writer. But his works are all messed up. One of our guys in London is still serving a prison sentence for destroying one of his works before it went up at the Tate.<br /><br />I don’t know much beyond that. I’m the ad guy, and the backer. Other people have the job of finding and stopping this weirdo.</div><div> </div><div style="text-align: right;"><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/09/kitchen-blitz-pilot-2013.html"><b>Kitchen Blitz Pilot (2013) >></b></a> <br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-43339114805819832292022-09-06T18:14:00.015-07:002023-06-28T18:48:22.445-07:00The Institute for the Study of Forbidden Media: Directory of Entries<p> </p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/08/mission-statement.html">Mission Statement (Start Here!)</a></p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/08/money-for-nothing-1999.html">Money for Nothing (1999)</a> </p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-kilauea-recording-2006.html">The Kilauea Recording (2006)</a> </p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-maddening-quiet-1962.html">The Maddening Quiet (1962)</a> </p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/09/a-brief-history-of-killer-apps-guest.html">A Brief History of Killer Apps </a><br /></p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-anti-drug-abberation.html">The Anti-Drug Aberration </a></p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/09/kitchen-blitz-pilot-2013.html">Kitchen Blitz Pilot (2013)</a></p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-lumiere-anomaly-la-chapeau.html">The Lumière Anomaly: Le Chapeau </a></p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-alescio-manuscripts-1983-1987.html">The Alescio Manuscripts (1983-1987) <br /></a></p><p><b>The Lassiter Hotel Footage</b></p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-lassiter-hotel-footage-part-1.html">Part 1 </a></p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-lassiter-hotel-footage-part-2.html">Part 2 </a></p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-lassiter-hotel-footage-part-3.html">Part 3 </a></p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-lassiter-hotel-footage-part-4.html">Part 4</a> </p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/11/institute-q.html">Institute Q&A</a><br /></p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-gravid-tape.html">The Gravid Tape</a></p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-concordance-dagger-and-how-to-deal.html">The Concordance Dagger</a> </p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/12/cant-get-you-outta-my-brain.html">Can't Get You Outta My Brain (Guest Post)</a> </p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-black-rondeau.html">The Black Rondeau</a> </p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2023/02/safety-square-2002-2003.html">Safety Square</a> </p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2023/02/change-your-number-424-555-0177.html">Change Your Number</a> </p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2023/03/sunwalkers.html">Sunwalkers</a> </p><p><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2023/06/prismatica-killer-queer-fiction.html">Prismatica: Killer Queer Fiction </a><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-18505635221457988642022-09-02T07:59:00.001-07:002022-09-15T21:00:17.795-07:00A Brief History of Killer Apps (Guest Post)<p><b><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-maddening-quiet-1962.html"><< The Maddening Quiet (1962)</a> </b></p><p> </p><p>Tristan here. Bad news: doctors said I have a pinched ulnar nerve from resting my elbow weird on stuff. Updates are going to slow a bit, but other members of the institute have agreed to do write-ups in my absence. <br /><br />The first of these is written by Cecily Smith, and talks about various ways your cell phone can kill you. She's reluctant for it to be published and objects to the very concept of this blog, but smashed out something usable in the last week.<b></b></p><p><b><br />A Brief History of Killer Apps<br /><br />Original Write-Up by Cecily Smith</b><br /><br /><br />Let me preface this by saying that you'll have to take my word for it on a lot of stuff here. Smartphone apps generally aren't forwards-compatible, so if you have an app on your phone from five years ago, there's no guarantee it'll work on newer operating systems. This applies to all devices, which means, I have to rely on emulators and testimony regarding their effects… but emulation doesn't replicate the anomalies these applications cause, meaning I'm working on testimony when it comes to these things.<br /><br />Anyway. <br /><br />The first-ever application (or ‘app’) put on Apple’s store was a television remote, released in May of 2008. Third-party apps began to be listed on the App Store in June 2008. The first death attributed to a smartphone app occurred on August 25th, 2008. This death was nothing of particular note; some poor soul in London was just bidding on an eBay auction while driving and missed the fact that the light had turned red. <br /><br />This is a brief run-down of apps that have actively caused harm.<br /><br /><b>Name:</b> Carpe Diem<b> </b></p><p><b>Category:</b> Life Aid/Malware<br /><br /><b>Released: </b>April 9th, 2009<br /><br /><b>Last Active: </b>April 9th, 2009<br /><br /><b>Injuries and Deaths:</b> 20 seizures<br /><br /><i>Carpe Diem </i>was advertised as a daily planning app. In reality, the app was programmed to, after approximately two minutes of continuous operation, display a ‘screamer’ image with flashing lights and a loud sound, which was intended to cause epileptic seizures. Nobody died, thankfully, and it was pulled from the store before it hit 500 downloads. The App’s creator was arrested and was sentenced to six months in prison; the sentence was so light because legislation regarding computer programs that cause physical harm, as opposed to material or monetary harm, was and is still sparse.<br /><br /><b>Name: </b>Cointraq<br /><br /><b>Category:</b> Finance/Malware<br /><br /><b>Released:</b> July 2017<br /><br /><b>Last Active:</b> September 2017<br /><br /><b>Injuries and Deaths:</b> Between 20 and 50 injuries, in addition to an unknown quantity of destroyed property.<br /><br /><i>Cointraq</i> was a very dumb app. It was a 2017 Android application which advertised itself as a way to monitor various cryptocurrency markets in real time. It was also malware, which turned your smartphone into a crypto mining rig for the app’s creator. This wouldn’t have been a problem (at least, from a medical perspective) if they tried to mine using the CPU of the phone; however, they attempted to use the phone’s far less powerful GPU to mine. Most phones that downloaded it were bricked within a week, and the phones that weren’t bricked overheated, with some even catching fire. I doubt that all of the cases of exploding Samsung Galaxy Note 7s are related to <i>Cointraq</i>, but I’m willing to bet at least one is.<br /><br />The precedent for apps that are harmful, but ultimately mundane, usually follow these trends-- malice, incompetence, critical user error, etc. I could write a whole essay on deaths caused by <i>Pokémon Go</i>, but if the Institute focused on ways that <i>Pokémon</i> was actively harmful, we’d never get anything done.<br /><br />Anomalously dangerous apps take several forms, but commonly are novelties, or at least look like them. If you have a smartphone, you’re likely at least aware of apps that use your phone’s motion sensor to do things like simulate the pouring of liquids, roll dice, or do other relatively useless actions.<br /><br /><br /><b>Name: </b>Blut<br /><br /><b>Category: </b>Digital toy/novelty<br /><br /><b>Released:</b> 2011<br /><br /><b>Last Active: </b>2016<br /><br /><b>Injuries and Deaths:</b> 52 confirmed; 71 total suspected.<br /><br />A liquid simulation app that requested access to biometric data (i.e. what your phone’s fitness app could register). Users that granted access were allowed to play with a simulation of liquid blood. Several users poured the blood out of its digital container and suffered catastrophic hemorrhaging, with at least four users suffering complete exsanguination.<br /><br /><b>Name:</b> Lucre<br /><br /><b>Category: </b>Financial/Marketplace<br /><br /><b>Released: </b>2015<br /><b><br />Last Active:</b> Ongoing<br /><b><br />Injuries and Deaths:</b> 89+, including one case of severe chronological alteration.<br /><br /><i>Lucre</i> is an app dedicated to "creating a consumer-centric marketplace"-- a swap-meet app, where you could buy and sell unwanted items. You'd put something up for sale, ship it off to one of Lucre's warehouses, and when it got bought, you'd get the money. It advertised 'Insanely fast shipping', and it fulfilled its promise… but the creators of <i>Lucre</i>, Gordon Software LLC, cut corners, in the temporal sense.<br /><br />Items that were shipped using Lucre ended up becoming ‘chronologically altered’ (and not ‘chronologically confused’, despite it being a much better term). Items would arrive before they were even ordered, poofing out of existence after the buyer realized they didn’t want to order them anymore. (The universe is very tidy about paradoxes, when it comes to inorganic items.) Other times, the items would arrive reduced to their base components, whether that be individual circuit boards or shards of plastic and rubber. But two cases bucked this trend.<br /><br />Firstly: I’ll let this article from the Orlando Sentinel circa 2017 speak for itself.<br /><b><br /></b></p><blockquote><b>SEVEN LOCAL RESIDENTS HOSPITALIZED FOLLOWING EXPOSURE TO RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS</b><br /><br />ORLANDO-- Seven individuals, all staff at the Green Well Bar and Grill in Orlando, were hospitalized following exposure to radioactive materials.<br /><br />Clark Karpin, owner of the Green Well, said in a statement that symptoms of radiation sickness occurred after opening an online order from a small ‘swap-meet’ website, and that the order ‘just looked like ordinary equipment for brewing’.<br /><br />Karpin had recently acquired a license to brew and bottle his own alcohol, and had ordered used brewery equipment from the internet. It is believed radioactive material was packaged with the items. Doctors expect Karpin and his six employees to make full recoveries.<br /><br />The agents from the Department of Homeland Security are investigating, and declined to comment.</blockquote><br />The second case cropped up much more recently; someone ordered an item when the app started up in 2017, and never received it… until March of this year. The contents were supposedly a french press coffee maker, and the owner, a small-time Youtuber, did an unboxing live stream.<br /><br />When he opened the box, the live stream’s feed seemed to pause, but the video kept recording. As of writing, the stream has been ongoing for over five months, just the same angle of hands looking down at the coffee maker as they pull it out of the box. We’re trying to find out where he lives so that we can get him out of whatever he’s stuck in, because the stream is still going. Light changes through the windows of their house. But they don’t move.<br /><br />I realize, at best, apps like this are adjacent to the media studies we dedicate ourselves to. They’re software, and mobile games generally don’t kill people. Most lost apps don’t kill people, and most of them don’t even display any anomalies. Lucre and Blut are two major exceptions, but there is a sort of third that’s an Unholy Grail for me-- basically it’s what the Kilauea Recording is for Tristan, something so dangerous it needs to be gone.<br /><br /><b>Name:</b> N/A (designated ‘Scan’)<br /><br /><b>Category: </b>Malware/Spyware/Stalkware/Data-Skimmer<br /><br /><b>Released:</b> 2010 (?)<br /><br /><b>Last Active:</b> Ongoing<br /><br /><b>Injuries and Deaths: </b>Unknown, estimated to be over 5,000<br /><br />I call this app <i>Scan</i>, based on the fact that the main UI element is a green button with that word on it. Pressing that button lets the app root through your phone’s data, everything from Facebook to your contacts, and from there, it extrapolates, searches, expands its net further and further until no data can escape it. <br /><br />It can tell you what brand of wine your best friend likes. It can tell you what type of car your ex-girlfriend is now driving, and where she’s going to be spending vacation this year. It can track down your high school bully, the one who made your life hell, and tell you what pharmacy he goes to in order to get his antipsychotic prescription filled. And it proceeds to give you nudges in the right-- or wrong-- direction. One use of it and every machine I own started giving me advertisements for gun stores, fertilizer, and electronics manuals.<br /><br />And it can do all that in less than twenty seconds after pressing the button. It’s like someone made a real-life version of a hacking app from a bad episode of <i>CSI</i>. <i>Scan</i> isn’t dangerous because of what it does; it’s dangerous because of what people are pushed to do with the information it gives them. The chain of bomb threats in Baltimore in late 2014? Connected to <i>Scan</i>. The 2012 assassination of three members of Brazil’s parliament? <i>Scan</i> facilitated that. Three of the dump sites from the “GUTS X6” killings (Tristan will probably write about that at a later date) showed up on <i>Scan</i> months before bodies were found there.<br /><br />I use <i>Scan</i> myself. It’s useful for keeping tabs on other members of the Institute, making sure that, when we go off the grid, we do so of our own volition. But my main motive with using it is to figure out who made it and how to get rid of it. Digging through the code is fruitless; it looks like complete nonsense, to the point where I think it has to be some custom programming language that I’m unaware of. Part of the purpose of this blog is to try to get knowledge from the outside world; with that in mind, if you know anything about computers at all, get into contact with me, maybe you can figure out what the code actually does.<br /><p></p><p>Until then, keep an eye on your screens. Who knows what they do when you're not watching?</p><p>--Cecily Out</p><p style="text-align: right;"><b><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-anti-drug-abberation.html">The Anti-Drug Abberation >></a></b><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-52665429874687665082022-08-26T08:18:00.003-07:002022-11-28T15:30:08.067-08:00The Maddening Quiet (1962)<p><br /><b><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-kilauea-recording-2006.html"><< The Kilauea Recording (2006)</a> </b></p><p><b>Original Essay by "Tristan Marshall", forbidden media investigator.</b></p><p><b> </b><br />Gimmick films are a part of cinema that have always fascinated me, and I’m sad that they’ve died out. We’ll always have 3D films, but we’ll never again have anything like William Castle’s <i>The Tingler</i>, whose “Percepto!” used vibrating seats to simulate the crawling of the titular parasite on the backs of the theater-goers as Vincent Price urged the audience to scream. We’ll never have another instance of <i>Psycho</i>’s policy of ‘No Late Admissions’ so that the twist of the film couldn’t be spoiled. I doubt that the new version of Clue that’s been in the works for years will give audiences the ability to choose their own ending. I’d kill for one movie to use <i>Scratch-n-Sniff Cards.</i><br /><br />One of the lesser-known gimmick films, something that’s truly considered forbidden cinema, is 1962’s <i>The Maddening Quiet</i>. Like <i>The Tingler</i>, it advertised itself with a gimmick, which called itself “The Silent Scream”; unlike that film, it was sold to theaters as not needing any special equipment to execute its gimmick. Its director, Laurence Forrester, actually took potshots at several of William Castle’s gimmicks in a marketing pitch for the film, saying:<br /><br /></p><blockquote>Theaters that screen The Maddening Quiet do not need to distribute napkins with insurance policies written on them, or rig a skeleton to fly over the audience, or create a fire hazard with special seats. Rather, the score of the film, the dialog, shall do that all on itself… a blind man could sit in the theater and still scream in fear at the void upon the screen!</blockquote><br /><br />In another pitch, meant for smaller theaters, he says this:<br /><br /><blockquote>The Maddening Quiet does not rely on cheap rubber suits with high-contrast zippers or makeup that suffocates the actors to deliver on its promise of fear. All of the horror is in the soundscape of the film-- with the help of the great Dr. Ludo Neptune, people will flee from the theater in droves!</blockquote><br /><br />On this point, he was a bit optimistic, but ultimately correct-- but something like this wouldn’t happen until twenty years after it was originally released. I watched it, and the following is going to be both a documentation of the plot, and the film’s effects on me.<br /><br />The worst crime any movie can commit is to be boring, and The <i>Maddening Quiet</i> isn't boring. Like a lot of films at the time, it features themes of transgressive science, hypnotism, and past lives. In it, Dr. Harold Neyman is attempting to bestow hearing upon a woman named Pearl Franklin, who has been deaf since birth, using “past-life regression hypnotherapy’; he reasons that since Pearl is deaf not due to damage to her ears but due to a defect in her brain, the hearing can be restored if she experiences a past life that is capable of hearing.<br /><br />The session is where we first start to get trippy. The hair on the back of my arms stands up on end as Dr. Neyman walks her through the process, having her read his lips and hold her hand on a clock that ticks very loudly, so she can feel the vibration of it. I have a copy of the script, so I'll just transcribe it when needed:<br /><br /><b></b><blockquote><b>Dr. Neyman:</b> Pearl, you are going into a deep sleep. When you go to sleep, you will awaken in the body of one of your past lives, one that is capable of hearing. When you awaken, you will bring back the sense of hearing with you, and you will be able to enjoy the world as the rest of us do. When you awaken, you shall once again be Pearl Franklin, with the ability to know what my voice sounds like. You will be Pearl Franklin when you awaken...</blockquote><br /><br />After that, the sound cuts out. We go into Pearl's mindscape, and see a woman that looks like her in Victorian-era clothing, who seems to be a singer in a music hall. Even in the black-and-white film, you can see she's very pale. She's singing on stage, but again, it's inaudible... except for a droning sound in the background, like hearing a jet fly overhead when you're half a mile underwater. It's not music, it can't be; the effects of it actually start to make me feel nauseous after about a minute.<br /><br />Then, the singer collapses, and sound returns. The audience is heard murmuring in confusion, and she looks straight at the camera, saying:<br /><br /><b></b><blockquote><b>Singer:</b> I shall not go into the quiet. Not like this.</blockquote><br /><br />Pearl awakens, startled, with her hands over her ears; the ticking clock's volume is greatly amplified for a few seconds, producing a jumpscare that's enough to get my heart going. She can not only hear, but she can speak, sing, and even has better hearing than the characters who were born with it. How she knows how to speak English when she's never spoken a word in her life is glossed over through the power of reincarnation.<br /><br />But there’s a problem-- Pearl’s got something following her, which manifests in a scene at a grocer in her small Midwestern town. For years, people have been talking about Pearl behind her back, and she has literally been unable to hear it. One of these is a man named Floyd, who for years has been shooting… ‘compliments’ at her. This is taken verbatim from a copy of the script I have:<br /><br /><b></b><blockquote><b>Floyd:</b> Pearl’s a name that don’t suit her. I feel like she could be named Kitten. Let her out at night, bring her back in for some nice warm milk in the mornin’...</blockquote><br /><br />When Pearl overhears this, and other gems from him, rather than pretend to ignore it and play deaf, she turns on him and gives him both barrels-- or at least, I assume she does.<br /><br />At this point, all audio cuts out from the film. It cuts between takes of Pearl yelling at Floyd and Floyd looking increasingly distressed. Then, it cuts between Floyd and an image of a gaping black void, while the sound of howling wind plays. Floyd falls dead of a heart attack when Pearl is finished yelling at him.<br /><br />This was meant to be the first big scare of the film. Up until now, the film had basic B-Movie trappings; here, it does a 180. The whole scene is tough to sit through, even before the scare starts. Not to the degree of something like a Ruggero Deodata film, obviously, but we hear Floyd cat-calling her for over three minutes as the actress grows more and more uncomfortable. Some of the things he says aren’t even in the script; there’s one line he has about ‘buying a hot-dog cart’ that made my skin crawl. And then the void, the titular ‘Maddening Quiet’, hits.<br /><br />There’s something about the lack of score, the eerie silence. At first you think the audio on your device has failed; in my case, I had to double-check the headphone jack on my computer. Then, as the tension builds in the scene, as Floyd grows more terrified and Pearl grows angrier, you feel like you’re glued to the seat. You feel like you’re standing in between a pair of passing trains, but there’s no wind, no sound; just the feeling of some vast, dangerous presence all around you.<br /><br />When the Maddening Quiet actually appears, you had better be sitting down. Something about the sudden darkness, and the feeling of vastness, knocks you flat. I made the mistake of standing to check the settings on my monitor, and nearly got a sprained ankle for my trouble.<br /><br />The Institute was established to study ‘forbidden’ media, but occasionally, we come across something truly supernatural, or ‘cursed’; the Kilauea Recording from last week is a good example of this. I wasn’t sure if the movie was supernatural in nature, or not, at this point. <br /><br />The film continues with Floyd’s body being carried out on a stretcher. After a short scene with a useless member of the town’s police, Pearl’s boyfriend Nelson comes to pick her up from the grocery store. He’s astounded to learn that Dr. Neyman’s treatment worked, and Pearl runs into his arms, overjoyed that she can hear his voice for the first time. He makes a joke about her no longer needing to read his lips, and she gives as good as she gets, replying with:<br /><br /><b></b><blockquote><b>Pearl: </b>I could hardly read them before, with how close they were to my eyes!</blockquote><br /><br />The film continues with a series of vignettes after this, where Pearl adjusts to a life of hearing. She’s startled to hear a car blaring its horn in the street, has to stop to marvel at birdsong, and is fascinated by a kitten mewling at her. She makes an odd comment when Nelson drops her off outside of her house:<br /><br /><b></b><blockquote><b>Pearl:</b> Honestly, it was a lot quieter than I thought it would be.<br /><br /><b>Nelson:</b> What do you mean?<br /><br /><b>Pearl:</b> The sun’s so big and bright… I expected it to be louder,</blockquote><br /><br />This whole time, though… I get a feeling of dread. The car horn sounds like a fuse box shorting out. The birdsong feels like fingernails on a chalkboard, at the volume of a foghorn. My adrenaline spikes when Pearl pets the kitten, and my head whips over my shoulder. And I don’t know why.<br /><br />I can tell the second big scare is coming when Pearl starts getting agitated at a barking dog owned by her rather nasty neighbor, Mr. Wolfe. I pause the video and take a moment to calm down, doing a bit of research on the film in the meantime.<br /><br />Contrary to my expectations? It flopped on release. Critics complained of the audio cutting out at big scenes, which... It was meant to do? They said that the film is occupied entirely by a black, silent screen for five minutes around the climax (we’ll get to that in a bit) and they’re left wondering if the projectionist unspooled the film. It was only screened in a few theaters across the country, and in West Virginia, one critic said this:<br /><br /><blockquote><i>The Maddening Quiet</i> is a series of money-saving tactics barely supported by a charismatic series of actors-- I would not be surprised if the director ran out of money prior to shooting the climax, and simply cut to a black screen. Perhaps he intended to exposit the surely horrific events that happened to the townsfolk behind the screen, but was too besotted to do so.</blockquote><br /><br />Forrester was heartbroken by the reception. This was his first foray into cinema, after he had grown up watching Hammer Horror films. He genuinely thought he could make it, but he never filmed anything again. As for the “Dr. Ludo Neptune” who helped with the sound design... nobody of that name exists, obviously, but he felt so convinced that a horror film could be carried on sound alone, and it flopped. Why?<br /><br /><br />Back to the film. Mr. Wolfe’s dog keeps barking at her, and Wolfe himself keeps yelling. The Maddening Quiet appears once again, with the sound cutting out. Wolfe clutches his head in pain, and his dog gets down, putting its hands over his ears. Once again, there’s no sound, but the presence of a vastness is there, right by my ears.<br /><br />Then, a scream breaks the silence. I wrench my headphones from the computer as I stand, startled, and the black void appears. The scene cuts back to Wolfe on the porch, a gibbering mess. Pearl runs back inside and pretends nothing is wrong.<br /><br />Dr. Neyman comes to check up on her that night, and mentions that Mr. Wolfe had an episode of some form, and was rushed to the hospital. His dog is heard howling in the background, as Neyman gives Pearl an examination. The characters in the scene-- Pearl, her mother, Dr. Neyman and Nelson-- all suddenly react as if a very loud noise has been played. Nothing comes through on my end, thankfully, but Dr. Neyman has to clap his hand to his ear; when it’s pulled away, he finds blood on his palm.<br /><br />Pearl complains that she feels faint and goes to lie in bed. Dr. Neyman and Pearl’s mother converse as Nelson takes her up to bed.<br /><br /> <b></b><blockquote><b>Dr. Neyman:</b> That noise-- did you hear it, or did you feel it?<br /><br /> <b>Mother: </b>I’m afraid I really can’t say, doctor. I felt like… like I was standing next to a tree that was falling over.<br /><br /><b>Dr. Neyman:</b> I need to do some more tests on her. Bring her to my office tomorrow, after Church.</blockquote><br /><br />Then we come to the Church scene. Pearl at first is afraid to cross into it, stunned by the volume of the organ music within. She explains that she’s used to feeling the music rather than hearing it, and it makes her feel unsteady. Nelson appears and offers to sit next to her and her mother on a pew; it’s implied that Nelson isn’t of the same denomination as them, and that his appearance here is unusual.<br /><br />The dread I’ve been feeling for the last several scenes has died down, only to start back up when they start singing a hymn. Pearl stands to sing, and all eyes are on her by the time the hymn is finished; the pastor, Father Webb, stares at Pearl like she’s something straight out of hell.<br /><br /><b></b><blockquote><b>Father Webb: </b>God in heaven, what manner of beast are you?<br /><br /><b>Pearl: </b>Not a beast, father. The treatment worked! I can hear perfectly.<br /><br /><b>Father Webb:</b> There is no surgery that can restore your hearing and make you understand me, child. What manner of devilry was committed on you?<br /><b><br />Pearl:</b> Why, Dr. Neyman hypnotized me! It’s an amazing thing, maybe you should--<br /><br /><b>Father Webb:</b> How do I know you are the same Pearl Franklin that was in here the previous Sunday, and not some foul being using her form to speak?<br /><br /><b>Mother: </b>Now see hear[sic], Father Webb! My Pearl has been through a lot these last few days, and I shall not have you antagonizing her with your--</blockquote><br /><br />And then the audio cuts out again. Everyone around the church looks around, confused. There’s a shot of the organ player resting on the keys, trying to get them to work, and the pipes not producing any music. And like Pearl… I don’t hear the sound, but I feel it.<br /><br />It’s like an explosion in my head; a deafening blast of nothingness that gives me a headache. For a moment, I’m convinced I’m deaf, blind, maybe even dead; I can’t even hear myself breathing. I can’t feel my arms. Then, it passes, and I’m in my seat, sweating bullets.<br /><br />Before the Maddening Quiet can appear, Nelson puts his hand on Pearl’s shoulder. Her head snaps to him, and she leans into her boyfriend, crying. All around the church, people glare at her. They make themselves scarce quickly.<br /><br />A lot of the film repeats this formula until the climax, so I’m going to gloss over them; at this point, I was just unplugging my headphones every time a scare came. About a day after the church Pearl makes an entire street experience the Quiet, causing someone to crash into a storefront. At another point, she’s arrested by that same useless police officer from earlier for breaking curfew with Nelson, and the Quiet causes him to sit stunned in his car, blaring his siren for what is later stated to be three hours, in the hopes that he can hear something again.<br /><br />The climax takes place in Dr. Neyman’s office; Neyman has become convinced that one of Pearl’s past lives has overtaken her body, and that the Maddening Quiet is Pearl trying to communicate with people to tell them that she’s still alive. This is evidenced by the fact that Pearl, at several points, seems to forget Nelson’s name, despite them being together for several years. So, he aims to try to hypnotize her and drive out the past life possessing her.<br /><br />But… the Quiet, or Pearl, doesn’t want to go back into the body. There’s a feeling I got when I watched it, that whatever the Quiet was was… happy. It wanted to be out of a body that it considered broken and useless. It had been experiencing sound outside of Pearl’s body, and knew if it was ever driven back in, it would never be able to hear music or birdsong or anything like that ever again. I knew this, but the characters… didn’t. And I have no idea how I knew it.<br /><br />Dr. Neyman starts his hypnosis. By this point, I’ve taken off my headphones and unplugged them, electing to have subtitles on. But... I’m so unsettled that the five-minute black screen of nothing actually gets to me. I put the headphones back on about halfway through, because I have to know what’s happening.<br /><br />There… there’s something talking in the darkness. I don’t know what it’s saying, but it’s mad. It doesn’t want to go back into Pearl. The Quiet likes being outside of Pearl. And it would rather tear apart everyone in the room before it becomes Pearl again.<br /><br />When the darkness fades, all we see is Pearl, in repose. A sheet is draped over her as an inconsolable Nelson sits in the corner. A pair of feet are seen hanging through the doorway from the next room; the coat and pants match Dr. Neyman’s. Nelson gives the closing lines of the film:<br /><br /><b></b><blockquote><b>Nelson: </b>Maybe it’s better this way. Maybe, now that she’s gone… she’ll be content with the quiet.</blockquote><br /><br />An ominous tone plays over the speakers. I remove my headphones; my face is wet, my breath is ragged. I put my fingers to my left ear; there’s a stream of blood trickling from it. I feel like I’m having a panic attack and a migraine at the same time. After a moment I just… kind of passed out in my seat.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Supplemental: </b></span><br /><br />In 1982, as part of a B-Movie Film Festival, a movie theater in western Pennsylvania screened The Maddening Quiet. I won’t name the exact theater beyond that, but it was shown, alongside classics like <i>Them!</i>, and <i>The House on Haunted Hill</i>, and dumpster fires such as <i>The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies</i>. It was screened in a theater of seventy people, most of whom reported being ‘uncomfortable’ during the viewing. One forty-two-year-old woman said that ‘I hadn’t been that scared at a picture since that poor woman got cut down in a shower’.<br /><br />When the climax, with its five minutes of solid black nothingness, came onto the screen, people began pouring out of the theater. Barely two minutes in, the theater was empty; fearing that a fire had broken out, the manager had the whole building evacuated, spreading further panic among the crowd. In the end, there were twelve people injured in the crush, with one man needing to have a foot amputated from the sheer damage done to it.<br /><br />After twenty years, Laurence Forrester’s movie had the intended effect. People were fleeing, likely due to the “Silent Scream!” gimmick. But what changed in those twenty years?<br /><br />Someone in the research community-- our audio specialist ‘Squirrel’-- did some digging into the audio channels of the movie after hearing about my symptoms. Squirrel found that the audio track for the movie contained sounds that were of an inaudible frequency between 16 and 19 hertz-- something called ‘infrasound’. A few studies done into it show that it can cause fear responses in humans, trauma to the ears… it’s been attributed to be the cause of some ghost phenomena (which is... wildly untrue, but that’s a story for another time). The sound couldn’t have been properly broadcast on speakers available in 1962, but by the 1980s, the technology had caught up to the medium.<br /><br />I wondered how the hell they didn’t account for this, so I did some digging; as it turns out, director Laurence Forrester is still alive, eighty-three years young. I got into contact with his granddaughter, who arranged for communication between us via email exchange. He was flattered that I enjoyed the film despite its somewhat extreme effects, and had this to say when I asked him about who on earth “Ludo Neptune” was.<br /><br /><blockquote>“Neptune was an audio engineer out of New Jersey. Claimed to work on some parks on the boardwalks. The man could make the most beautiful music with this weird little box of his-- he called it a ‘Magnaphone’. But, like you said, we couldn’t get them to play back on anything other than his own equipment, which he provided for the preview screening he gave us. Even then, the effects on us were nowhere near as bad as they were for you, or any other audience.”</blockquote><br /><br />When I asked him where from New Jersey, he responded:<br /><br /><blockquote>“He said he was from around Cape May. I tried tracking him down back in 1966, but didn't find anything; he’s most likely dead by now, and ‘Ludo Neptune’ isn’t a real name, of course it isn’t. Never found any trace of him.”</blockquote><p><br /><br />A colleague of mine has been investigating a series of anomalies in the Cape May-Wildwoods area of the Jersey Shore; I’ll have him add it to the list as soon as he’s done with his ‘arcade raid’ project.</p><p> Beyond that, I don't have much to report. It's a relatively harmless curiosity, but the film has been out of print since 1992, and there doesn't seem to be much interest in getting a new edition of it out. That said, the film is in the public domain (there was no copyright notice on the film when it was first screened so it fell into PD automatically) and I've heard that there's a copy floating around Youtube somewhere. Seek it out, if you wish.</p><p style="text-align: right;"><b><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/09/a-brief-history-of-killer-apps-guest.html">A Brief History of Killer Apps </a><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/09/a-brief-history-of-killer-apps-guest.html">>></a><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/09/a-brief-history-of-killer-apps-guest.html"> </a></b><br /></p><p></p><span><a name='more'></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-7506250443814565712022-08-19T11:29:00.003-07:002022-08-19T11:30:14.608-07:00The Kilauea Recording (2006)<p> <b>Original essay by 'Tristan Marshall', forbidden media investigator.</b> <br /></p><p>I’m going to splash a content warning up here: if you’re uncomfortable with reading about bad things happening to children, I wouldn’t read on. This gets rough.<br /><br />Thanks to the likes of <i>The Blair Witch Project</i>, the genre of ‘found footage’ films was all but ubiquitous in the 2000s and early 2010s. You occasionally got a quality piece, such as <i>The Atticus Institute, REC, Trollhunter, or Paranormal Activity</i>, but more often than not you were left with dreck like <i>The Devil Inside, Apollo 18, The Pyramid</i>, and… “Trash Humpers”, a movie that doesn’t deserve proper italics. Some are mistaken for genuine, thanks to the ignorance of the audience or deceptive marketing.<br /><br />And then we have genuine articles, pieces of forbidden media that are found by some unwitting passerby that document some sort of bizarre event-- or else cause harm to the viewer. You have Lassiter Hotel Footage, the Reykjavik Flare, and the so-called ‘Night March’ recorded in Central China. These have been documented by us, but we don’t feel comfortable releasing information on them at this time.<br /><br />There’s always one that keeps getting away from us: the Kilauea Recording. Part of the reason I’m putting this up is a plea that somebody can maybe help us find it, because it is dangerous, and is honestly one of the few pieces we’d prefer not to preserve.<br /><br />The Kilauea Recording, sometimes called the Kilauea Tape, is a thirty-one minute long video stored on a VHS-C tape. As the name might suggest, it was shot at Kilauea, the most active volcano in Hawai’i. Despite the imminent danger of lava that can literally cook you to death, it attracts thousands of tourists every year, as lava flow is largely cordoned off and what is accessible is slow and stable enough that you can be near it with relative safety. There’s probably a few thousand pictures on Instagram of people trying to roast a marshmallow on the lava there or something.<br /><br />Nobody who’s part of the Institute, or the broader community, knows the full contents of the video, but the context around it is well-known. It’s known to depict an anomalous event occurring near Kilauea in Hawai’i. It was shot by the Sinclair family-- Malcolm Sinclair, along with his sister Matilda, his wife Gwen, and his eight-year-old son Brian. A fifth individual, park ranger Sarah Cameron, is seen throughout the tape, but is largely absent after 00:11:27. It was recorded in 2006 using an unknown model of Sony camcorder.<br /><br />As the recording starts, we get a shot of the Sinclair family inside the visitor’s center at Kilauea, which is part of the Hawaii Volcano National Park. Matilda is shooting for the majority of what’s safe to view. A shot of the wall shows a clock reading 10:22 AM. They explain that they’re going to scatter the ashes of ‘Grandpa Harold’ in the park, with Malcolm holding up his urn somewhat somberly; this Harold was apparently a volcanologist (or, as Brian adorably puts it, a ‘volcanist’) who studied Kilauea from the 1970s to the 1990s. <br /><br />Park ranger Sarah Cameron arrives and goes over safety procedures in the park; don’t stray off of marked paths, make sure you can see her at all times, don’t go within a certain distance of any lava flows you see, and if the ground starts shaking, get out of there as fast as you can.<br /><br />What’s more, Cameron seems to be at least a little familiar with ‘Grandpa Harold’, as she expresses her condolences, saying that she’s more than happy to help put him at rest, and that she ‘owes him for saving her job’. <br /><br />The first five minutes or so are dedicated to setting out from the visitor’s center, with Brian’s mother demanding he put his toy-- a little well-loved plush dog-- in the car. After being assured there’s water in the car so his plushie won’t get too hot, Brian reluctantly puts the dog away, and is grouchy for a good few minutes, before he gets to see how beautiful it is. Everything is lush and green, but it’s… manicured, is the best way to describe it. Everything is just a bit too orderly for it to be natural. The trail they’re taking is well-worn with trail markers and warning signs, but there’s still enough natural beauty for Brian to genuinely begin enjoying himself.<br /><br />At about nine minutes, the ground shakes slightly. Cameron goes to find reception for her radio to check what’s going on, and instructs the family to stay put. Brian, being a little kid, immediately goes running off. His mother Gwen follows after, with Matilda more than content to just wait for her to get back. Then, at 00:09:43, a scream is heard, followed by a sickening crunch, and inconsolable sobbing. <br /><br />Matilda and Brian’s father Malcolm find Brian at the bottom of a drop, his face contorted in pain and covered in tears. His mother’s made his way down to him, and is gingerly touching his leg, causing a shriek of pain. “It’s broken!” She yells. “Call for help!”<br /><br />Cameron explains she can’t get reception on her radio, and instructs them to wait for assistance as she begins the trek back to the visitor’s center. Following 00:11:27, Cameron is not seen on the recording, until the very end. Brian’s mother begs Matilda to turn off the camera; the recording terminates.<br /><br />The video picks up what seems to be several hours later; it was morning when they arrived, but the angle of the sun seems to show that it is now mid-day. The camera seems to have been turned on by accident, as none of those on tape acknowledge it being on.<br /> Brian is at the base of the cliff still, being held by his mother, who’s helping him swallow a pain pill. He asks why ‘the lady hasn’t come back yet’, and his mother just lets out an exasperated sigh, looking outwards.<br /><br />Macolm is heard cursing out a cell phone, and Matilda says to him “Don’t throw the damn thing!”. Further dialog confirms it’s been about four hours since the expedition set out. Malcolm announces he’s going to follow the path back to the visitor’s center, and as he’s searching through the bag for a spare water bottle, he asks: “Where’s the urn?”<br /><br />There’s commotion as Matilda and Malcolm search through the supplies. The urn was clearly visible on film at the outset, and Matilda picks up the camcorder, presumably to check this. They continue to be ignorant of the camera being on, and an argument breaks out between Brian’s parents, with Brian beginning to cry and beg for his stuffed dog, apparently named ‘Sparky’.<br /><br />Seeing no better options, they start to set out for the visitor’s center, with Gwen carrying Brian on her back, his arms wrapped around her neck. The path is easy to follow, but after five minutes, they realize they aren’t passing any signposts. They do, however, see a series of figures on the path ahead of them; they’re dark and indistinct, but appear to be wearing something bright red. Brian’s father calls out for help, and all he gets in return is a series of heads turning towards them and tilting in unison.<br /><br />He approaches them, continuing to ask for help, seemingly ignorant of Matilda’s question-- “Do you smell smoke?” <br /><br />Following the timestamp of 00:19:13, the recording is unwatchable. I don’t mean that the recording quality degrades or that the data is corrupted. I mean that watching the Kilauea Recording past this point has, to date, resulted in over forty deaths and at least one-hundred severe injuries. All injuries result from exposure to an unknown, extreme heat source; people who have watched for a minute after this point typically suffer from first-degree burns on their retinas. Nobody has survived watching the tape for more than three minutes after this point.<br /><br />Only recently, with advances in neural networking, have we been able to isolate parts of the recording that are safe to view.<br /><br />The first, from timestamp 00:20:07, is a series of six frames. These frames show the urn containing Grandpa Harold’s ashes, smashed against rocks, appearing to have been thrown from off-screen. Lava is visible in the background.<br /><br />The second, timestamp 00:23:55 to 00:24:09, shows an area of dark forest, apparently somehow at night; the neural network that analyzed this video confirms that there have not been any cuts since 00:19:13. An unconscious Brian lying on the ground. His breathing his shallow, and Brian’s mother is begging the filmographer, “Don’t look at his leg, it’ll happen to you too!”<br /><br />The third, timestamp 00:27:09 to 00:27:25, has the camera largely shooting the ground as the person holding it runs. Their gait is unsteady, as if they are carrying something heavy. A voice, garbled shouts, “There it is!”. The camera swings upwards, showing a tall, indistinct shape, wreathed in frames. Someone screams.<br /><br />The final shots are from 00:29:03 to the end of the recording. It is morning once more. Four charred bodies are seen in the same area where Brian fell. A team of rangers come onto the scene, stopping in sheer disbelief. Sarah Cameron goes up to the smallest form, inspecting them. She shouts, “Medic!”. A ranger notices the camera and picks it up; the recording ends as we see rangers attempting to treat Brian’s burnt form, as the very act of picking up the camera somehow terminates the recording.<br /><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />Supplemental:</span></b><br /><br />In April of 2006, park rangers at Kilauea recovered the burnt bodies of three individuals-- Gwen Sinclair, her husband Malcolm, and his sister Matilda. The exact cause of death, beyond ‘injuries sustained from burns’, was never determined. Brian was discovered nearby, covered in third-degree burns but somehow alive. He was life-flighted to a hospital in Hilo, Hawaii where he underwent almost a year of treatment and therapy. He survived, barely.<br /><br />I attempted to reach out to Brian Sinclair for an interview or even a comment; instead, I received a strongly-worded email from his lawyer. The Law Offices of Schuyler, Baumer and Walker in Omaha, Nebraska informed me that Brian Sinclair is under a conservatorship ‘owing to severe physical disabilities’. Basically, I was very politely told that there was no way in hell I was getting an interview.<br /><br />I did, however, manage to get in touch with Sarah Cameron, however briefly. She no longer lives in Hawaii, and did not wish me to disclose her location, beyond the fact that the area she is in is also volcanically active. <br /><br />“Brian didn’t deserve what happened to him. Nobody in his family did. I still stay in touch with him, but it’s hard, seeing his burnt face over a video call, all these years later. Skin grafts can only do so much.”<br /><br />“I think I know what did this to him, and I’m trying to make sure it never happens again. There’s a way to put out the fire that burned him. I read about how to do it."</p><p>She did not elaborate beyond this. </p><p>The camera which created the Kilauea Recording was destroyed, apparently crumbling into ash in the hands of FBI arson investigators. Inexplicably, the tape was in pristine condition, and was digitized for easier viewing. Following a fire at the FBI’s Honolulu office, both the original VHS-C tape and the digitized recording where shipped to the mainland using protocols normally reserved for radioactive material. Its intended destination was in California; however, it somehow was re-routed upon entering the country, heading for a non-existent address in New Jersey. <br /><br />The data of the Kilauea Recording we have now comes from an upload put on LiveLeak in early 2011, creatively titled “WATCH THIS VIDEO TO DIE AT 19:13”. The video was pulled down by the site’s admins, but not before one of the Institute’s investigators managed to copy it. It was uploaded by the account “wiltedflowers12'', which some of you may recognize as the origin of the infamous “GUTS GUTS GUTS GUTS GUTS GUTS” shock video. What you may not know is that “GUTS X6”, as it is now known, is linked to twenty unsolved murders across the south-western United States.<br /><br />The Kilauea Recording’s properties persist on copies, as is already evident. And someone is copying it, and attempting to distribute it. Since 2006, forty-seven people have died as a result of exposure to footage present on the Kilauea Recording after 00:19:13; the vast majority of them have been in film processing labs that have obtained copies of the Kilauea Recording meant to be digitized. There’s seemingly no motive behind these attacks, nor any pattern.<br /><br />The most recent attack was in June of 2021. It destroyed a film processing lab in New York City, where a copy of the tape was sent, along with a request for digitization. The tape itself was pristine, and wisely not watched by NYPD Arson investigators.<br /><br />Current estimates are that there are at least thirty extant copies of the Kilauea Recording, not counting any online uploads. If you have any information about the Kilauea Recording, please reach out to us. That’s what this blog is for.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3164749423123318591.post-75118603008088738532022-08-12T08:52:00.004-07:002022-11-29T10:24:38.049-08:00Money for Nothing (1999)<div><p><b><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/08/mission-statement.html"><< Mission Statement</a> </b></p><p><b>Original essay by ‘Tristan Marshall’, Visual Media Investigator</b><br /></p><p>In 2001, the first-ever episode of <i>Fear Factor</i> aired. While its former host is notorious nowadays for reasons entirely unrelated to the show, it was the epitome of late 90's and early 2000's 'gross-out' media, and I do <i>not</i> mean that as a compliment. From more mundane stunts such as parkour to downright disgusting items such as forcing contestants to eat roadkill, <i>Fear Factor</i> wanted to define a generation of stunt-based game shows and, thankfully, did not manage to do that. But it wasn't the first game show to subject contestants to cruel and unusual punishment; it has a very obscure precursor, in the form of <i>Money for Nothing</i>.<br /></p><p><i>Money for Nothing</i> was a stunt-based game show filmed in 1999; however, in the middle of filming the fourth of five episodes for its original order, the host (a fairly prominent actress at the time) walked off the set, threatening to terminate her contract with the network.<br /><br />Officially, all recordings were either destroyed or placed into evidence. Despite this, I have seen part of the first episode, the majority of the second, a series of stills from the third, and the final shots of the fourth episode that caused [Host] to walk off the set. <br /><br />Up until November of 2021, the fifth and final episode was thought to be completely lost.<br /><br /><i>Money for Nothing </i>could be summed up with its tagline: “Do you have what it takes… to do NOTHING?”. It was the ‘Quiet Game’ writ large: how long can you go without doing or saying anything, while everything goes wrong around you? <br /><br />The set of <i>Money for Nothing</i> was a bizarre hybrid of <i>Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?</i> with its moody lighting, darkness, and amphitheater-like setup, and <i>Double Dare</i>, featuring several areas of modular flooring which could be used to set up the various stunts, with over 5000 square feet of usable space.<br /><br />The stunts were fairly out there, as well. For instance: Episode 1 featured the segment ‘Stopping Cart’, where the contestants sat in the basket of shopping carts and rolled down a ramp that gradually got steeper, until it ended in a pile of padded material. One of the contestants bailed from their cart less than halfway down the slope and lost. This was called a “Chicken Challenge”.<br /><br />Other than Chicken Challenges, we had what was meant to be the main draw of the show, the “Skin-crawling Challenges”. Contestants were expected to sit perfectly still and make as little noise as possible while in very unpleasant situations, a formula that would later be copied by <i>Fear Factor</i>. Episode 2 featured three different Skin-crawling Challenges: ‘Hammock Panic’ had a contestant laying in a hammock trying to stay as still as possible in the middle of a wind tunnel. ‘Oh, Honey!’ had [Host] drizzle honey on the contestant while the sound of buzzing filled the set. The final round had ‘Arach your Brain’, where contestants had their heads placed in a box full of wolf spiders (terrifying, but harmless to humans) while having to answer trivia questions. <br /><br />I have three stills from the third episode. When I saw the first one, there was so much smoke, I thought the set was on fire. Upon further inspection, I saw three contestants sitting in lawn chairs, trying to casually read through magazines, while [Host], wearing a gas mask, egged them on. The second still was straight out of The Wicker Man, with two contestants hanging upside-down from wooden scaffolding, laughing from the headrush.<br /><br />The last still from Episode 3 was likely not intended for broadcast. It shows a pair of crewmembers arguing, covered in white foam. Medics are attending a stretcher in the background. Nothing so far would warrant the destruction of the footage. I studied <i>Money for Nothing</i> on and off for three years, but never got any farther than Episode 3.<br /><br />The Institute has partial footage of Episode 4, but it was missing the camera angle that showed [Host] cussing out the producer. I had incomplete data.<br /><br />That is, until March of 2021, when I paid a visit to Mr. Renard.</p><p style="text-align: center;">*** <br /></p><span></span>In my line of work, sometimes we have to rely more on B&Es than Ph.Ds. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and find something on eBay or at an estate sale, where you can essentially scoop it up and research it at will; this wasn’t one of those cases.<p>There were three cameras that captured the last moments of [Host]’s tenure on <i>Money for Nothing</i>. The Institute had two of the recordings. The third was owned by a ‘Mr. Renard’, a superfan of [Host] in Iowa, who refused to part with it for any reason. Mr. Renard ran a fangroup for her on UseNet back in the day, named his cat after her most well-known character…and he has a restraining order from her framed on the wall in his ‘office’. I drove 400 miles, and he laughed in my face when I asked if I could buy the tape off of him.<br /><br />Plan B was breaking into the house and copying the tape with Institute equipment frankensteined out of a few old laptops and a VHS player. It made converting VHS digital-- a process which normally took an entire room’s worth of equipment-- into a portable affair. All I needed was ten minutes.<br /><br />So, when he left for work, I waited half an hour, vaulted the fence, and picked the lock. From there, I headed to his office on the second floor. In addition to the restraining order, he had posters, action figures, Photos of a Hustler shoot [Host] did, and a signed photograph of the two of them; [Host] looks like she wants to scream. He wasn’t cliche enough to have a shrine; most of it was on a single bookshelf.<br /><br />Sandwiched between several volumes of TV shows [Host] had been in was a single black plastic tape case, with the words ‘<i>$.F.N. 1999 Last Appearance</i>'' written on a label.<br /><br />First problem: the case it was in was too small for VHS. It was <i>Betamax</i>. Betamax-to-Digital conversion required highly specialized and bulky equipment-- equipment we had, but I was going to have to steal the tape.<br /><br />Second problem: the case caught on something and clicked as I tried to pull it off the shelf, and wouldn’t budge. From the way it jiggled, I could tell that there was a cable tied to the case connected to some mechanism behind the bookshelf I couldn’t see. It was booby-trapped, and considering that I didn't see a Betmax player in the house, I realized he set this up specifically to get someone trying to go after the tape.<br /><br />I kept the case still on the shelf, took out a box cutter, and began sawing through the case. It was made of cheap, but solid, plastic and was more likely to shatter than gouge, leaving behind shards. When I’d asked after the tape, I’d give Mr. Renard a false name, and I was wearing gloves as I broke in. If he didn’t find any evidence I had been here for at least a week, I could safely (and this is the technical term) skidaddle across state lines.<br /><br />After five minutes, I got through the seam linking the front cover of the tape and the spine. I dug my fingers into the sharp plastic, peeled it off-- and was met by a strange sight. The tape was in there, but immediately in front of it was a plastic bag filled with some sort of liquid. There was a bare wire inside of the liquid, a battery on the inside of the front cover, and I could smell gasoline-- the trap was meant to destroy the tape. But why?<br /><br />A car pulled up outside-- Mr. Renard was back, six hours early. The tripwire must have been some kind of alarm system, as well. I pulled aside the firebomb, said a prayer, and grabbed the tape. A door downstairs slammed open, and I heard him sprinting towards me.<br /><br />I toppled the bookshelf in front of the door, and dashed to the window. I was on the second floor, but outside of it was a bare trellis that made for a good ladder.<br /><br />The door burst open when I was halfway down the ladder, despite the bookshelf in front of it. I thought for sure that he was going to come to the window and start either throwing things down at me or shooting at me, but instead I heard him start to weep, saying that something was ‘ruined’ and that he could ‘never fix it’.<br /><br />I ran for my car three blocks away. I didn’t see any cops until I was at a diner two miles away, on Telegram with my colleague who runs the Betamax-to-Digital setup.<br /></p><span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;">***<br /></div><br /><div><span></span>It took until November for the digitization to be complete, which was for the better, honestly; less than a week after it was done, another colleague of mine got me into contact with one of the producers of I. While he’s technically under an NDA, he’s breaking it for the sole reason that “You’re a bunch of nutjobs and nobody would believe you anyway.” </div><div> </div><div>Harsh, but ultimately true.<br /><p>The producer, [Riley], talked to me over a Zoom call from L.A. Regarding the foam-filled photograph from Episode 3, he told me: “The challenge called for the contestant to hold a lit candle on their head. They sneezed, but… they lived.”<br /><br />“So the white stuff is foam? From an extinguisher?”<br /><br />“Exactly.”<br /><br />“There’s a lot for it for someone setting themselves on fire.”<br /><br />“They didn’t just set themselves on fire.”<br /><br />I presented him with what I had of Episode 4-- he asked how I got it, as the Network had lost the recording some time in 2002. He didn’t judge when I told him I broke into someone’s house.<br /><br />“Gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet.” [Riley] chuckled. “I like your gumption, kid. Better than I like this. Let’s see if it’s as fucked as I remember.”<br /><br />Episode 4 is… uncomfortable to sit through. Thanks to the tape I procured from Mr. Renard, what we have of Episode 4 consists of fifteen minutes of footage: three of [Host], talking with the crew prior to the incident, seven with her actually presenting the stunt, and five minutes of the aftermath.<br /><br />The stunt that caused [Host] to walk off the show was called ‘Raindrops on Noses’. The contestants were strapped into a set of reclining armchairs (It was the only stunt on the show that used restraints), and above their heads, a prop in the shape of a large rain cloud would drip water onto their faces. The chairs had buttons on them that would release the restraints and light up a sign indicating they forfeited. <br /><br />The first three minutes of the tape consist of [Host] having a conversation with one of the producers; it’s indistinct, and the words ‘disgruntled employee’ and ‘call security’ can be made out. [Host] doesn’t want to be here; she’s rubbing her hands together when she clearly just wants to wipe all of her makeup onto her shirt and start screaming. I’ve seen it dozens of times; when people don’t think the cameras are rolling, they become balls of stress. Part of me thinks that they were trying to record a blooper reel, since she drops her American accent at one point and says something along the lines of ‘buncha horseshite’.<br /><br />Then, the lights come back up. There are cheers from the audience as the host escorts the two contestants, [Carter] and [Etta], to the chairs, where she explains the mechanics of the challenge. Then, when she’s sure the contestants are in the positions, she says “Are you ready to Earn… MONEY FOR NOTHING?”. The audience is prompted to cheer as the challenge starts.<br /><br />There’s a lot of droning, moody music here. I think that it’s just to cover up the snoring of the audience. <br /><br />Riley asked me to pause so he could give some testimony. “The show was bullshit. Nobody wanted to watch people just sit around and do nothing. The shopping cart ride was an example of a good stunt-- people were expected to not bail out, kind of a weird expression of machismo. But this rain challenge? We were having people sit and watch contestants get wet for three to six minutes.” He rubbed his face. “One of the production assistants, he had an idea-- make the droplets fall randomly. Apparently it drives people crazy.”<br /><br />I squinted. “Isn’t that a form of torture?”<br /><br />“I didn’t know that until later but… yeah.” <br /><br />Since this episode was never aired, all the sound here is unedited; the video was cobbled together by my friend from the three different tapes. Even with the moody music in the background, even with the grand, sweeping camera motions, the show is mind-numbing to sit through. [Riley] was right, this show shouldn’t have been made.<br /><br />The challenge should have ended quickly-- [Carter] starts tapping at his release button while the [Host] is in the middle of commentating and cheering them on. His restraints don’t open, and the alarm to show that he’s forfeited doesn’t light up. He keeps pressing it, and [Host] doesn’t seem to notice.<br /><br />[Etta] takes a bit longer to crack; at the five-minute mark, she presses her button, and it works. As [Host] gets up to thank her for playing and congratulate [Carter], she notices something is wrong with him. The camera closest to him zooms in on his hand. The plastic button has shattered, and there are several cuts on his hand from him desperately trying to press down on the release. He’s clearly sobbing and writhing in his restraints, and I can see him mouthing ‘please oh god, please, please.’. Smoke is coming off of his forehead. All but one camera turns off.<br /><br />The only camera to remain on is positioned where [Host] would be sitting. [Etta] is pulled out of her chair and taken off-stage. Someone in the audience asks if they should call 9-1-1. The host’s microphone picks up [Carter]’s sobbing. A crew member resorts to breaking the raincloud prop off to stop the flow of water.<br /><br />[Carter] is cut free of his restraints and laid on the ground, where he curls into a ball. [Host] goes off to the side, right in front of the only active camera, where she has an argument with a producer.<br /><br /><b></b></p><blockquote><b>Host:</b> What the fuck was that?!<br /><br /><b>Producer:</b> Look, we figured this stunt would bring a bit more excitement to--<br /><br /><b>Host: </b>Excitement? If people want excitement, they can watch me poke through someone’s guts on Sunday night. What just happened here is fucking torture! The gas was bad enough, but this?! <br /><br /><b>Producer:</b> It was an accident! We’ll scrap this episode, but they signed waivers--<br /><br /><b>Host:</b> Fuck you. I’m calling my agent. Anyone who wants me to stay here can kiss--</blockquote><br /><br />At this point, the recording ends.<p></p><p style="text-align: center;"> ***</p>My first question was “What’s this about gas?”<p>[Riley] shook his head. “The guy in the chair was part of a stunt earlier in the program where he sat in a room full of smoke-- just a fog machine, really. He had some residue on him, but… I’ve never seen it react like that with water.”<br /><br />“And… it was water in there?”<br /><br />“Maybe. The cloud prop vanished before we got a good look at it.”<br /><br />It’s here that I started asking about Episode 5.<br /><br />“So, after [Host] walked off the set… we still had a contract with the network to fulfill. They asked for five episodes, and if their Queen of the Small Screen wanted off the show, they weren't going to say ‘no’.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “So, I made a few phone calls. Ever hear of [Sitcom], from the 80’s?” <br /><br />“Yeah.” [Sitcom] isn’t the actual title, obviously, and the only reason I knew about it was because someone in the Institute had investigated it.<br /><br />“We managed to get the mom from that show, [Actress]. She was a no-name by ‘99. She got a gig, and we got a new host.” He chewed his lip. “It’ll be easier to show you what happened.”<br /><br />My eyes boggled. “You have footage?”<br /><br />“Kinda. It’s only one angle of the set, and a wide one at that. But… you get to see most of it." He asked for my email.<br /><br />The last recording of Money for Nothing is seven minutes long. It begins with the contestant being placed into a clear, plexiglass box. He stands completely still as [Actress] walks around him; I can make out the words ‘little furry friends’ and ‘maybe you’ll come out the big cheese!’. Then, she looks out at the audience, and says “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the [inaudible]ack!!”<br /><br />The floor around the man opens up, and a swarm of what I assume are brown rats comes flowing out, gathering around his feet. Credit where it’s due, he stands completely still-- for a while, anyway. Once they start clawing at his clothing, he gets shaky, and by the time one climbs onto his chest, he faints.<br /><br />A tone starts to play, very high-pitched. At this point, [Riley] chimed in.“Get to the rats?”<br /><br />“Yeah. What’s that sound?”<br /><br />“It was meant to be a rodent deterrent. Something to make them go back below the stage once the stunt was done. Just… keep watching.”<br /><br />The tone plays again, but the rats remain in the box, crawling over the body of the fallen man. [Actress] is looking at the producers in confusion, and gets up to approach the box. She recoils as the tone sounds again, and I see it-- the rats are swarming over where the man fell. I know where this is going.<br /><br />Staff evacuates the panicking audience.[Actress] tries opening up the box, but is stopped by someone on the set-- they get into a fight, with her gesticulating at the swarm of rats. The bottom of the box begins to fill with blood. Someone comes over with a fire extinguisher to try to break open the glass; [Actress] tries to stop them, but it’s too late.<br /><br />The box doesn’t shatter-- it tips over, apparently poorly secured to the floor. Rats and blood flow out from beneath the box as it falls over, and everyone who hasn’t already evacuated the set does so. The rats abandon a bloody mass that I’m thankful I don’t get to see clearly-- there doesn’t seem to be much skin left, and barely any muscle. All there is are bloody bones covered in the barest fibers of flesh.<br /><br />“Fucking god.” I swallowed.<br /><br />“It gets worse. Keep watching.”<br /><br />Two minutes after everyone leaves. a figure emerges from the audience section, dropping down opposite the camera. They’re hard to make out, even though the entire set is lit from below; they don’t seem to have any distinct features, barring what seems to be a white T-Shirt with what looks like a broad “V” on it.<br /><br />Then, the lights go out entirely, leaving the set in darkness.<br /><br />“What the hell?”<br /><br />“Rat chewed through a power cable.”<br /><br />Footsteps approach the camera. The emergency lights show a shadowy form obscuring the lens. They wheel it over to what I assume is the center of the room, and aim the camera downwards. This whole time, I’m expecting his face to pop into frame, but instead I hear footsteps walking away.<br /><br />I check the timestamp. A minute is left in the recording.<br /><br />When they’re scavenging a corpse, animals normally go for the softest parts of the body first-- the eyes, the lips, the ears. So, I can’t explain why the head of the contestant that the rats had eaten was untouched. I can’t explain why his eyes seemed to open in response to the flashlights. And I hope to god that it wasn’t his voice calling for help before the recording ended.<br /><span></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span>***<br /></span></p>This wasn’t the first time I’d seen someone die on film, but you don’t really get desensitized to it. I felt ill, but this was valuable data that the Institute needed. <br /><br />After a moment, I asked, “What the fuck was that?”<br /><br />“That’s what the LAPD has been trying to figure out for over twenty years.” [Riley] lit a cigarette. “We’re fairly confident someone sabotaged the production, between the incident with the Raindrops stunt, and this one, which… god, I think they called it ‘Rat Pack’.” He shakes his head. “We got those rats from the same place that supplied productions like <i>Game of Thrones</i>. They should have been completely docile, but they went berserk when they heard the tone. I can't explain it." He blew on the cigarette and sighed. "Production was scrapped, tapes were burned, and any props that weren’t essential to the investigation were mothballed or destroyed. That footage you saw is supposed to exist only in evidence lockup, and nowhere else.”<br /><br />“How’d you get it?”<br /><br />“...it’s Hollywood. Do the math.”<br /><br />I saved the video, and I deleted the email. “Anything else weird happen?”<br /><br />“Surge of crank calls made to [Crime Show] right after this happened. Beyond that, nothing.”<br /> “What about at other studios?”<br /><br />“Wouldn’t know.” He blows on the cigarette. “Would you?”<br /><br />I frowned. “I’ll have to look into it. Now, how much do I owe y--”<br /><br />He shook his head. “Kid, I’m not in it for the money. I just… needed to get this off my chest.” He paused.“There is one thing.”<br /><br />“What?”</div><div><br /> “You do this all the time, basically? Look up creepy TV shows?”<br /><br />“Basically.”<br /><br />“If you ever find anything related to a show or movie that involves an actress named ‘Zelda Plunick’, you call me.”<br /><br />With that, he hung up.<br /><span style="font-size: medium;"><b><br />Supplemental:</b></span><br /><br />The deaths and injuries caused by <i>Money for Nothing </i>have been swept under the rug. [Carter], the contestant from Episode 4, declined a request for an interview, as did all other living contestants I could find.<br /><br />The video of Episode 5 has been analyzed by some other people in my community. We’ve determined that the figure is tall, but not anomalously so; maybe 6’4”, and is likely male. Other than that, it’s indistinct.<br /><br />[Riley] did technically break an NDA on this, but he’s wealthy enough to settle out-of-court. I’ve heard nothing about a lawsuit, so I’m assuming he’s going to be okay.<br /><br />I normally keep this kind of analysis and history within our institute. But something happened a few days back that got me spooked enough that I decided to post this, and other items, out into the broader world.<br /><br />The USB drive I had the video stored on went missing around the start of July. I’d uploaded it to the cloud and there was nothing else important on it, so I didn’t really need to keep it. A few days after it went missing, however, I saw something… disconcerting on my home security system, or what was left of it.</div><div><br /></div><div>A man came up to my front porch. It was the middle of the night, and my porchlight was out, so I didn't get a good look at him. What I did see was the notecards he held up on front of the camera.</div><div><br /></div><div>"We live in your screens."</div><div><br /></div><div>"We will overtake your dreams."</div><div><br /></div><div>"What was ours will be again."</div><div><br /></div><div>He dropped the notecards, and destroyed the camera with... something. But before it was smashed, I could clearly make out an image of a television set on his shirt, showing a test pattern; on top of the television were a pair of rabbit-ear antennas, which, when viewed from the right angle, looks like a very wide letter "V".</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: right;"><b><a href="https://forbiddenmedia.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-kilauea-recording-2006.html">The Kilauea Recording (2006) >></a></b><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0