Music Genre: Video Game

who else is in the “didn’t realize sheep have long tails until i was like 20″ club

the videogame man is real and he will marry me you’ll all see

This is a compiled list of some of my favorite pieces of short horror fiction, ranging from classics to modern-day horror, and includes links to where the full story can be read for free. Please be aware that any of these stories may contain subject matter you find disturbing, offensive, or otherwise distressing. Exercise caution when reading. Image art is from Scarecrow: Year One.

PSYCHOLOGICAL: tense, dread-inducing horror that preys upon the human psyche and aims to frighten on a mental or emotional level. 

“The Frolic” by Thomas Ligotti, 1989

“Button, Button” by Richard Matheson, 1970

“89.1 FM” by Jimmy Juliano, 2015

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892

“Death at 421 Stockholm Street“ by C.K. Walker, 2016

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1973

“An Empty Prison” by Matt Dymerski, 2018

“A Suspicious Gift” by Algernon Blackwood, 1906

CURSED: stories concerning characters afflicted with a curse, either by procuring a plagued object or as punishment for their own nefarious actions.

“How Spoilers Bleed” by Clive Barker, 1991

“A Warning to the Curious” by M.R. James, 1925

“each thing i show you is a piece of my death” by Stephen J. Barringer and Gemma Files, 2010

“The Road Virus Heads North” by Stephen King, 1999

“Ring Once for Death” by Robert Arthur, 1954

“The Mary Hillenbrand Cassette“ by Jimmy Juliano, 2016

“The Monkey’s Paw” by W.W. Jacobs, 1902

MONSTERS: tales of ghouls, creeps, and everything in between.

“The Curse of Yig” by H.P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop, 1929 

“The Oddkids” by S.M. Piper, 2015

“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” by Richard Matheson

“The Graveyard Rats” by Henry Kuttner, 1936

“Tall Man” by C.K. Walker, 2016 

“The Quest for Blank Claveringi“ by Patricia Highsmith, 1967

“The Showers” by Dylan Sindelar, 2012

CLASSICS: terrifying fiction written by innovators of literary horror. 

“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, 1843

“The Interlopers” by Saki, 1919 

“The Statement of Randolph Carter“ by H.P. Lovecraft, 1920

“The Damned Thing” by Ambrose Pierce, 1893

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving, 1820 

“August Heat” by W.F. Harvey, 1910

“The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe, 1843

SUPERNATURAL: stories varying from spooky to sober, featuring lurking specters, wandering souls, and those haunted by ghosts and grief. 

“Nora’s Visitor” by Russell R. James, 2011

“The Pale Man” by Julius Long, 1934

“A Collapse of Horses” by Brian Evenson, 2013

“The Jigsaw Puzzle” by J.B. Stamper, 1977 

“The Mayor Will Make A Brief Statement and then Take Questions” by David Nickle, 2013

“The Night Wire” by H.F. Arnold, 1926 

“Postcards from Natalie” by Carrie Laben, 2016

UNSETTLING: fiction that explores particularly disturbing topics, such as mutilation, violence, and body horror. Not recommended for readers who may be offended or upset by graphic content.  

“Survivor Type” by Stephen King, 1982

“I’m On My Deathbed So I’m Coming Clean…” by M.J. Pack, 2018

“In the Hills, the Cities” by Clive Barker, 1984

“The New Fish” by T.W. Grim, 2013

“The Screwfly Solution” by Racoona Sheldon, 1977

“In the Darkness of the Fields” by Ho_Jun, 2015 

“The October Game” by Ray Bradbury, 1948

“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison, 1967 

HAPPY READING, HORROR FANS!

Wait, what's wine forgery? How would you fake wine?

VERY EASILY, MY FRIEND. BUCKLE UP.

First of all, you gotta understand that wine is BIG BUCKS. Old and rare vintages can sell for tens of thousands of dollars or even more to wealthy collectors at auctions. A single bottle of 1947 Cheval Blanc sold for $300,000 back in 2010. And a lot of 114 bottles of a rare Romanee-Conti sold for $1.4 million in 2014.

And it turns out that high-end wine is dazzlingly easy to fake. Only a handful of people have ever tasted the rarest vintages in the world; and how the bottles were stored, if they were exposed to sunlight or kept in darkness, if the bottle had been opened or kept sealed, or if the environment was humid or dry can affect the wine’s taste, especially after decades or centuries. So who knows what a bottle of 1785 Lefitte actually tastes like? Can anyone actually tell it apart, with certainty, from a hypothetically-much-less-valuable 1784 of the same vintage?

Considering that some of the greatest wine-tasters in the world have also been dupes of some of the biggest wine scams in the world, I’m gonna say no.

There are definitely flavors associated with old wines, even specific vintages of old wines; but you don’t need to shell out for a pricey bottle to top off your fake. Get a cheap bottle of old wine and mix it with some nice quality, younger wines, and no one will be the wiser. Million-dollar wine forgers like Harvey Rodenstock and Rudy Korniawan do exactly that.

It gets even easier when you think that a lot of the people who buy these ultra-pricey bottles never even open them. They’re not for drinking! They’re an investment, or they’re a prestige item, something you take down from your shelf to show off to your friends once in a while. You could fill the bottle with grape juice, and who would ever find out?

So how are you supposed to tell a real bottle from a fake one? The bottle itself? The label? Wine bottles are nothing special; get one made in the right couple-of-decades as the vintage you’re faking, and there’s nothing to tell them apart. Some of them have etched signatures, but those were done with simple hand tools, that you can still buy today. And the labels are no security at all. They’re just paper, ink, and paste. People today are forging the holograms off of $20 bills; you could convincingly fake a wine label using a standard laser printer.

Wine forgery is a HUGE problem in the wine world today. Tracing the provenance of any particular bottle is next to impossible. And frankly, the money in the business is just too good for anyone to want to ask too many questions. The head of Sotheby’s auction house’s international wine department joked that more bottles of 1945 Mouton were consumed on the 50th anniversary of the vintage than were ever produced in the first place. 

The question isn’t how do you fake wine: it’s how the fraudsters ever get caught. In Rodenstock and Korniawan’s cases, they just overplayed their hands. Rodenstock sold so many bottles of rare wine that a suspicious customer had a bottle carbon-dated, which revealed that it was two centuries younger than Rodenstock had claimed (and it still took years to take him down). 

As for Korniawan, he started selling a vintage so rare that, it turned out, it had never existed in the first place.

There’s a great podcast on this topic in the Stuff You Should Know archives, if you want to hear a whole lot more about this. 

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

"Are you a boy or a girl?" I'm a punchline.

so i saw some clips of the Realtime Fandub of Sonic The Hedgehog and decided to watch the full thing and let me tell you this scene right here made me laugh so fucking hard it triggered an asthma attack that nearly killed me and that isn’t even an exageration

Chuuya, the tiny delinquent

man i can’t believe nomura made it required to kin xehanort if you play khux

“Colorism isn’t real.”

Let me talk about Dazai Osamu.

Dazai is often so animated, whether it be flirting shamelessly with beautiful women, or trying to get on Kunikida's nerves, or messing with naive little Atsushi, or irritating the living heck out of Chuuya.

But, emotions? In a previous post, I talked a bit about deciphering Dazai's emotions, about how he shows real and true emotions only in certain very calculated and planned situations.

Even for a person who rarely shows true emotions, it is visible how his face changes when the Port Mafia is brought up. His voice, his eyes, the tightness in his jaws— everything changes.

Season 1 Episode 3, when Kunikida is describing the Port Mafia to Atsushi.

For me, this is a very important hint to decipher him, a tiny gap in space-time from where I can peek into his heart.

In Season 1 Episode 5, when he intervenes the sergeant's nervous rant to say, "No, this wasn't the Mafia's doing", he's a changed man. He not only describes, but reminisces and relives the numerous times he's seen the event he's describing unfold.

He doesn't meet anybody's eyes, he's staring into space. His voice is lower, a sharp contrast to the usual high pitched, lulting, lively voice. This isn't the voice he uses to talk with his colleagues in the Detective Agency, with Atsushi.

In Dead Apple, while facing away from Atsushi, he says, "I might have stayed there, murdering people." His head is angled towards the ground, voice low.

(what might he have been feeling then? that's a topic for another day.)

In Season 2 Episode 9, while he's talking directly with the Port Mafia boss, Mori-san, there's is somethingly uncannily odd about his face— eyes open far too wide, smile far too forced.

I've searched long for the right word to describe this expression— it's uncomfortable.

Haunted.

He's uncomfortable, he's uneasy, but he doesn't know that, he can't acknowledge that, he wouldn't accept that, because how do you hide what you don't know you're feeling?

∘

The problem here is, Dazai cannot see that he himself, was also a victim. He sees himself only as an abuser.

The fact that he's also a victim, a young boy who watched his boss murder an old man, a young boy held at gunpoint so he couldn't go to save his friend— he doesn't understand his abuse. He doesn't understand he was also wronged, he always sees himself as the wrong do-er.

Which is why he never let himself heal, because in order to do that, you have to notice your injuries first. Like he literally covered himself up in bandages, figuratively he did so too— made up a smile and built walls all around him, impenetrable, insurmountable.

In these specific moments though, his face betrays his mind.

His face makes it very apparent that he was affected, is still affected, regardless of whatever he tells himself.

It's in these moments, that you see he has a living, beating heart, scarred and heavy and haunted with the trauma of his unspeakable past.

It's in these moments that you see he's human— still, despite, after all.

∘