Scary Story

The winners of Jezebel's Scary Story Contest have been posted. There's nothing particularly interesting or spooky this year. There's also no "my landlord was living in my crawlspace" real-life trauma, which is a shame.

I love horror, but nothing spooky has ever happened to me or anyone I know. This is probably the closest I can get to a Jezebel-style scary story...

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The house hadn't been cleaned out before it was sold. Mostly I left everything as I found it instead of poking around into closets and so on, but one night I got bored and tried to move a stack of cardboard boxes from one room to another. None of the boxes were taped shut, so I couldn't help but see what was inside them:

Hundreds of paperback copies of the smutty cavepeople romance novel The Clan of the Cave Bear, all very clearly read from cover to cover. Which raises questions I don't want to ask and don't want answered.

Anyway, my dad eventually moved into the house after he married and divorced his girlfriend. He now lives there with his most recent wife, who is a hoarder. Not only does her stuff fill all of the rooms of the house (and the porch!) from floor to ceiling, but I doubt anyone ever got rid of the stuff that was in the house to begin with. So magic has not faded entirely from Middle Earth - all the boxes of The Clan of the Cave Bear are still out there being weird and mysterious.

Re: Scary Story

Being both a literature professor and someone who has trouble reading from a screen, I actually have a lot of books myself. Getting unsolicited review copies doesn't help, and people insist on giving me books as presents. I do my best to donate and give away (and sometimes just throw away) books on a weekly basis, but still. There are a lot of books I want to keep, and they add up.

On my creative bio, I say that I live "at the center of a maze of bookshelves," and this is very literal. I don't consider myself to be a hoarder, I just live in a small apartment and therefore need to organize the space creatively by using bookshelves to form interior walls. Aside from the bookshelf maze in the living room, my apartment is very clean and minimalist.

Still, if I drop dead one day, I hope my books creep out whoever comes after me.

I will take all the drawing cheats I can get

Drawing Backgrounds
Part One: https://blog.sambeck.ca/post/641255530689609728/drawing-backgrounds
Part Two: https://blog.sambeck.ca/post/665658381775831040/drawing-backgrounds

This is a great post by Sam Beck about drawing backgrounds that's very useful to me in particular. I'm not a big fan of abstract concepts like "perspective," but if I see something concrete enough times I can gradually figure out the theory from the details. I've been having a good time sketching architecture from photos, and using Blender to create 3D models sounds like it will only be frustrating for about a month before it becomes fun.

What Comes After

What Comes After is a visual novel about a suicidal young woman who falls asleep on a commuter train and wakes up to find herself on a train to the afterlife. The game takes about 45 minutes to play from start to finish, and it costs $3.

The gameplay is simple: You walk from left to right and talk to ghosts. When you get to the end of the train, you turn around and go back to the car where you started in order to have one final conversation. That's about it.

The dialogue is unabashedly sentimental, and nobody spellchecked the text, but I didn't find this distracting. What Comes After is basically a warm cup of tea in visual novel form, and I think it's actually better that it's not cleverly written or immaculately polished.

Also there are ghost cats and ghost dogs, and yes you can pet them. There's a ghost elephant too, and you can hug its trunk. There's another type of ghost on the train, but I won't spoil the surprise. Let me just say that, when you get to that specific train car, it's a solid "Jesus fuck that's beautiful" moment.

What Comes After is clearly a passion project created by one person (with a few friends helping out on the publishing end), so it serves as a decent model of what a micro-scale independent game can look like. It's a bit inspirational, like, Perhaps I could create something like this myself one day. In any case, I was saving this game for when I needed a small dose of happiness, and I enjoyed the experience. That was $3 well spent.