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sylvan
Queen of the Night
amused
gridlore, and I considered that I might come back to post here for the day, just because I'm contrary and figured I'd make a dumb and useless gesture against another dumb and useless gesture. And yeah, my opinion on the strike is that it's a bit of an idiocy. I don't understand how they think it will make one bit of difference, really, but I'm not surprised that I don't understand. I am not fluent in idiot. I only know a couple phrases.![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif){kind=small}
christophine23 for your convenience. amused
happy
maiandra rocks.maiandra and I got to witness Quid's wedding to trip and a half at the bar. What a lovely couple.
bent
Exmortis is a Flash game with some excellent atmosphere. The opening premise is rather familiar in games of this type - you wake up in the woods with a lump on your head, no memory, and a creepy old house ahead of you. Turn the lights down, the sound up, and get ready for a decently spooky atmosphere as you explore the mysteries of the abandoned building.
The sequel is a good followup to Exmortis. Though the game can stand alone, it really picks up where the first one left off, as you deal with the aftermath of events in Exmortis. Squeamish be warned: graphic content and profanity to be found in the Exmortis games.
Less of a game and more of a linear interactive movie, Haunted House Massacre still manages to deliver some decent atmosphere. Its rather linear qualilty also makes it a bit easier to get through than many of the other games that are sprinkled through this Gothtoberfest post-a-thon.
A little change of pace in the silly/spooky games: Help Father Painbringer bring peace to the undead hordes in Ghoul Academy, through the gentle medium of the double-barrel shotgun. Fill the Ghoul Harvest Meter by destroying ghouls in any way you can.
That brings us to the end of your Gothtoberfest post-a-thon. We now return you to your regularly scheduled MoFi.
Happy Halloween!
bsimple is the gallery of conceptual photographer Misha Gordin (some images NSFW). Gordin's work often makes abstractions out of the human form, sometimes photographing multiple models together to create intricate patterns. Some images hint at the darker side of life, such as conformity and isolation even within a crowd.
"My task is the reunion of the visible and the invisible worlds, photography allows me to pervert the established method of perception amongst those who see and those who don’t." So says Evgen Bavcar (some images NSFW), a man who lost both his eyes before he was twelve in two consecutive accidents. Bavcar's work is black and white, and even his simplest images are fascinating and beautiful.
Wes Hardison at Vision Obscured also does wonderful photography, his work spanning both color and black and white, from landscapes to portraiture. I especially love his work in the Time Obscured gallery. His Figure gallery contains some NSFW images, but the rest is safe for working Monkeys.
The Endicott Studio is dedicated to the support and creation of mythic arts. Their online journal explores myth, folklore, fairy tales, and their use in modern art. Their blog presents news, musings, and reviews on arts that have been inspired by mythic themes, and has recently been counting down to Halloween with tales, poems, art, and photography based on the mythos associated with the approaching day.
The Batty Chronicles: Excerpts and Correspondence of the Late Madam Harriet Batty. Erik Seims finds himself editing and publishing the papers of Madam Batty (1874-1977), giving "an invaluable historic guide through a century of life in New York City, from the point of view of somebody who was absolutely batshit crazy."
Brains. The title of every post (as you might expect) in Zombie Eat Brains, the musings of one of the living dead.
La piedra de Anamara (The stone of Anamara) While running from the police, you find what seems to be a perfect hiding place. It's not long before you must deal with supernatural forces and mysteries hidden in the mental asylum for children.
XRaye is a simple game in concept, but nicely executed. Turn all the pegs yellow to advance to the next level. Some pegs must be hit more than once. Left and right arrow keys move you from peg to peg, space bar makes you detach from the peg you're on, ctrl skips the next peg you would have contacted.
Not really a game, but a cute little Flash timewaster: Build your Wild Self is offered by New York Zoos and Aquariums. First you build your human avatar, and then graft on various animal parts. Mine own efforts toward my virtual Halloween disguise.
The DM of the Rings is an excellent webcomic. Though it's created entirely from movie stills, it hits comedic notes that anyone who's played D&D will recognize. Imagine a gaggle of modern hack-n-slash AD&D roleplayers who had somehow never been exposed to the original Tolkien mythos, and then imagine taking those players and trying to introduce them to Tolkien via a D&D campaign. The gamers are easily distracted, obsessed with loot, and have a tendency to quote Monty Python at the drop of a d8. The frustrated DM tries to keep the party on the rails, and the players fight against the railroading. All in all, I think I've gamed with all these people before.
In Demonology 101, an adopted demon girl named Raven tries to deal with friends and high school while an epic struggle between the dark Powers that Be and a resistance group called the Network takes place. The entire story arc is complete, so there is no need to wait for the next episode. There is, however, an ongoing spinoff.
Stylish two-tone artwork with touches of color, a solid sci-fi story, and some nice worldbuilding all go into making NYC2123 worth the read. The story takes place in a grim cyberpunk future Manhattan, surrounded by the Wall and ruled by martial law, surrounded by floating, lawless barge-cities that are operated by organized crime.
The Four Rooms of Kharon is another escaper game, though this time there are four rooms instead of one. The game has a dark, gritty atmosphere with high tech/genetic engineering themes. The game is meant to inform as well as entertain, and has lots of information packed into it for those interested in genetic concepts and famous geneticists. Some commenters on the game had problems with the camera angles. I did not, but thought it worth mentioning that some camera angles are not appropriate for all Monkeys. Player discretion is advised.
Stuck? Frustrated? Want to give the poster a good kick for mentioning this thing in the first place? Don't worry! We has walkthrough.
Also in the "yet another escape game what the hell is Christophine's obession with these things" category is Daymare Town. It features hand-drawn graphics and a mysteriously deserted town to explore and try to get out of. The game's creator, Mateusz Skutnik, has given Daymare Town a very different look and feel from his previous efforts in the Submachine Series and Covert Front. He warns that this game has the most difficult puzzles he has devised so far and it is for "advanced" point-and-click gamers only.
The Nocturnes Gallery is a collection of the night photography work of a number of photographers who are serious about evoking images from the dark. Each photographer has a small gallery, each gallery has a link to the photographer's website. Their styles vary, from moody black and white to use of lighting effects, and much between the extremes.
The photographic essays of Mustard Gas Party explore the decay abandoned structures and modern ruins. The site collects three years' worth of photography of urban and suburban decay to keep aficionados of modern ruins happy.
Lab-Wan's photography is an exploration of both decay and darkness, with sections devoted to both abandoned places and night photography.
If your taste runs toward entire abandoned town and historic sites, Ghost Town Gallery houses some 1700 pictures of 180 Western US ghost towns, mines, cemeteries, old mills, and more. Includes an interactive map of the abandoned places that the gallery contains.
Indy Mogul, a site by and for amateur movie makers, produces Backyard FX. A new episode goes live on the site every Monday, and there's a Weekend Extra episode every Friday. Indy Mogul firmly believes that cool-looking effects can be had in amateur movies for a minimal outlay of cash, whether you need to tear off limbs, stage a fight, cook up your own sugar glass, or get a gunshot squib effect on a budget. The episodes show the creation off the effects and a short test-run. The Indy Mogul blog gives more detailed instructions and shopping lists. Some of it could also be useful for costuming and decorating for Halloween.
For some DIY fashion and costuming, Threadbanger may have what you're looking for. Perhaps a pirate costume for under $10 is what you need. Or maybe you're feeling a distinct lack of fairy wings.
Daniel Essig creates book-based art. He uses a binding style known as Ethiopian-style Coptic bookbinding, which dates from the fourth century. His sculptural books are mixed media, incorporating handmade papers, unusual woods, fossils, mica, and found objects.
The books created by artist Tara Bryan are just as unusual as Essig's work. She creates her books with unusual bindings, materials, and formats. The books have unexpected folds, flaps, and ties, among other whimsical elements of architecture.
Su Blackwell does lovely book-cut sculptures, creating scenes from the printed word, as if she is releasing the characters and places that were trapped between the covers.
Georgia Russell is a Scottish artist who transforms found books by meticulously shredding them with a scalpel into new and unusual forms. She also works with sheet music, photographs, maps, and other types of word or image on paper.
Al Magnus is a photo montage artist whose work has a surreal, lovely, dream-like quality. He plans his scenes, photographs the elements and scans them, and composites them into his montage digitally before printing. His images are planned in advance, some of them taking as much as two years to assemble all the photographic elements before work on the montage begins.
Jerry Uelsmann (Flash site, and some images NSFW) is another photographer who works in montages. Unlike Al Magnus, Uelsmann creates his images through use of multiple negatives and extensive darkroom work, using up to a dozen enlargers at a time. An interview with Uelsmann on the making of photographs and the role of art here.
Uelsmann's wife is Maggie Taylor, formerly a photographer who now works digitally. Her compositions are created with objects placed directly on the glass of a scanner and then montaged. Her work is both whimsical and surrealistic.
The paintings of Siegfried Zademack are also filled with the strange and fantastic beauty of a visionary dream. His work is divided into 7 galleries that showcase 153 of his pieces, as well as a smaller gallery of graphics and studies. Many of his images feature nudes, so working Monkeys beware the NSFW clickage here.
Nightmare Escape You're in a sealed room. In front of you, bloody footprints lead to a message written in blood: You are the next. Looks like it's time to find a way out of here. For the terminally lost, a complete walkthrough is behind a spoiler tag here at Jay is Games.
In Zombie Inglor, you wake and find you are disoriented and tired. You've been bitten by a zombie! The infection will take 50 days and 50 nights to run its course, and you must find a cure by that time or become a zombie forever.
You have no memory of who you are, but you do know that you've died and now must solve the mystery of your death and those of several other ghosts in The Dead Case.
If you're not in the mood to be a potential victim, a zombie, or a ghost, try being either a vampire or a werewolf. Whichever one you choose, you are a warrior in the fight between these two species of supernatural creatures in Monsters Game: The Battle Between Vampires and Werewolves.
A Kyoto geisha preparing by putting on her makeup. (This and all other links here are YouTube) It's a little long at a bit over 12 minutes, but it seemed a good inspiration for those who might be looking for last-minute costuming ideas for a Halloween shindig.
Further inspiration:
Low-budget zombie, Budget zombie/ghoul makeup, Showgirl makeup, Flapper makeup, A tiger face, and applying basic latex prosthetics.
For something a little more complex, the Theatrical Makeup Design Interactive lessons for cuts and bruises (and it's rather amusing to watch the woman get more and more battered as she applies new effects):
Blackened teeth, split lip, black eye, broken nose, open and sewn cuts, burned skin, vampire bites, and the Sacred Wafer trick.
The Art of Mourning is a collection of memorial and sentimental jewelery, funeralia, and art, ranging from hairwork to mourning brooches to miniatures. It also has information about the symoblism used in these forms of memorial art.
Memento Mori: Mourning, Monuments, and Memory (PDF) explores the relationship between memory, photography, and death.
A Victorian memento mori photography gallery at Haunted When it Rains contains a good-sized collection of images that may seem a little sweet or somewhat disturbing, depending on how you take to these things. The same can be said for Photography and Loss in the 19th Century and Gone But Not Forgotten, two more galleries of post-mortem photographs.
The Virtual Museum of Death Masks (Flash) is the web front-end of the One Street Museum in Kiev, Ukraine. It features death masks of a number of famous people, such as Pascal, Chopin, Beethoven, and Pushkin, as well as a history of death masks.
And, if you want to build your own model of a death mask, the Cleveland Museum of Art offers instructions and a printout for a model of a Pharaoh's death mask.
"The Surnateum is far more than a website designed to entertain and enlighten you. It is the virtual front-end for one of the most astonishing collections of authentic magical artefacts and strange stories gathered from around the world by the Collectors and Curators for more than a century." The museum is divided into departments, such as Cryptozoology and Teratology, Sacred and Secular Relics, and Demonology.
The Ghosts of the Prairie host The Haunted Museum. It chronicles ghost research, from Spiritualism to the modern day. Information on ectoplasm, a history of spirit photography, and how fraudulent mediums do what they do.
The Skeptiseum is hosted by The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and is the skeptical museum of the paranormal. Supernatural, paranormal and pseudoscientific beliefs proliferate worldwide. This virtual museum includes descriptions and images of artifacts and souvenirs associated with such beliefs from around the world.
The Merchant of Venice hand-sculpts lovely masks from leather. Each mask is a work of art.
At Mansour Designs, the hand-sculpted leather can include masks with dreads, be crowns and hats, or have elaborate carving and decoration.
More handmade leather masks at Fantasy Guild Studios, including masks based on astrological signs, the Greenman, and designs inspired by Shakespeare. Beautiful work.
Graveyards of Illinois is where we start our small tour of cemeteries and funerary art. To our left is Bohemian National Cemetery with its beautiful domed chapel, Odd Fellows Monument, and larger-than-life statuary. Another impressive Illinois graveyard is Acacia Park Cemetery and Mausoleum, known for its obelisks and its Masonic connections.
As we move on, please watch your step as we enterImmortelle, a pictorial tour of New Orlean's cities of the dead. St. Louis #1 or Cypress Grove, Metairie or Lafayette, New Orleans cemeteries reflect the mix of Spanish, French, African, and American that give the city itself its character.
The last stop on our brief tour is Afterlife: the 4 seasons of Streatham Cemetery, a flash presentation featuring photos of the cemetery with animation and sound.
Fear.net has made the move from reviewing and providing clips of horror movies into making their own. Their first effort, Devil's Trade, is complete, and offered for free online. It tells the tale of a cross made from pieces of a cursed tree, and the effect of the curse on the current owner of the cross. The current project is 30 Days of Night: Blood Trails, a tale of vampires in New Orleans. Episode 6 just recently premiered.
The 1953 animated short film of Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart (YouTube) stars the voices of Stanley Baker and James Mason, and was deemed culturally significant and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the US Library of Congress in 2001.
Mikhail Baryshnikov dances with a lovely black-haired incarnation of death, and is ultimately led to his doom by her, in Le Jeune Homme Et La Mort. (YouTube)
In a series of short segments, Day Off the Dead explores the romance of a pair of skeletons who fall in love in the afterlife. A little sentimental, a little sweet, a little funny, it's a nicely done stop-animation piece.
Strange Horizons is a weekly webzine of speculative fiction, including short stories, articles, art galleries, reviews, and poetry. The 'zine is published every Monday. It was founded in 2000, and has extensive archives to peruse.
Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest, a quarterly magazine, maintains an online archive of articles, short fiction, interviews, and reviews from past issues. Their area of interest is primarily dark sci-fi and horror.
For a more scholarly approach to the fantastic, there's Monsters and Martyrs, an essay on these themes in Baroque art. Or this essay on demons in ancient Iranian literature.
Myths and Legends of the Bantu covers a wide range of these tribal legends, including some Bantu ghost stories and tales of werecreatures and other monsters.
Project Gutenberg offers an eBook about Some Chinese Ghosts that seem appropriate for the season. You could also try some Tales of Ghostly Japan and Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things.
99 Rooms is a collaborative effort among four artists of different types - painter Kim Köster, Richard Schumann and Stephan Shulz on photography and animation, and sound designer Johannes Buenemann - that is more interactive artwork than game. Köster painted murals on the walls of abandoned buildings in East Berlin's industrial sector. The murals were then photographed, animated, and given soundtracks. In each room, you find what allows you to advance to the next scene. It can be a simple click anywhere on the screen, pulling levers or throwing switches, or a number of other triggers. If you get impatient, the space bar will advance you to the next room. The presentation is morbidly beautiful.
NFH Propaganda works in a similar vein, taking photos of abandoned buildings and factories, compositing them into a new scene, and then adding animation and sound effects. It is much more gory than 99 Rooms, and tends toward scenes of the dead, torture, and murder. Many scenes are very NSFW.
The third rather morbid and spooky interactive artwork is The Hospital. Photographs of an abandoned hospital were composited to make unique rooms with animation and sound. As you explore, small hidden camera icons in many scenes will show you the original photos that were composited to create the new image.
You're a reporter in Atrocitys, on a mission to investigate a haunted house. And, of course, there's the sequel Atrocitys 2: The Revenge.
All four games have some degree of gore, so be warned if gore and blood are issues.
For someone raised on Western horror traditions, horror stories from the East can seem very strange. Doubtless the reverse is true as well. For comparison's sake for all of us Western Monkeys, A Chinese Ghost Story, parts 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 and 10 (all links YouTube).
Interested in more Hong Kong horror? Try A Chinese Ghost Story II, parts 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 and 10. (Again with the YouTube.)
If you're more in the mood for bloodsuckers, Mr. Vampire has them, and apparently at least some vampires hop instead of walk in Hong Kong cinema traditions. 1 2 3 4 5 (part 6 appears to be missing) 7 8 9 and 10. (YouTube)
I learned about Digital Blasphemy's 3D rendered desktop wallpapers years ago, when the entire site was free, and was impressed with the quality and artistry of the work offered for there. The site still has a free gallery, and links to other 3D artist sites.
The work and amount of detail that goes into some of these just amazes me, since they all have to be modelled and skinned before rendering. I constantly redecorate my desktop, and so I'm always on the lookout for something new.
If Digital Blasphemy doesn't grab you, try Shifted Reality, nitro115, DigitalByNature, ROCHR, Neosurrealismart by George Grie, creator of my current favorite, Mechanical Mirage for some truly surreal characters, or ANS Graphics, with includes fantasy, fairy, and dragon imagery as well as the more traditional landscapes.
Halloween Advent Calendar, day eight. It's all about the wallpaper.
David Bolinsky talks about truth and beauty in science, particularly on the molecular level (flash video). One of the medical animators who worked on Cellular Visions: The Inner Life of a Cell (previously), he also provides some commentary about the first three minutes of the Cellular Visions animation.
Further truth and beauty normally invisible to the eye at the Biomedical Image Awards gallery, Nikon Small World Competition, and in Plant Cellular Anatomy where the stains used flouresce with fascinating results.
Ron Mueck is a former special effects artist and muppet designer turned hyperrealist sculptor. His process is complex(large video warning, dialup users beware), but the results are impressive. (Only first link guaranteed SFW.)
Working in a very different medium, Kittiwat Unarom of Thailand bakes some pretty realistic but edible body parts.
For real parts, The Unfortunate Animal of the Month Club at Morbid Tendencies offers strange and twisted stuffies, some incorporating real bits from animals into their design.
Lights Out was a suspense and horror radio show that had its debut in 1934. It was one of the first shows to develop distinct sound effects and scripts specifically aimed at an audience that could only listen and not watch the action.
The Creaking Door was a South African horror radio show that billed itself as "the tops in spine chillers" and were probably broadcast in the 50s, in the same vein as The Inner Sanctum.
Escape and its sister show Suspense were considered two of the top shows ever done on the radio, with many well-written episodes of horror, suspense, and adventure.
The Monster Club has collected an excellent sampler in their top 100 picks of Old Time Horror and Scifi Radio if you'd like to sample different shows. The club also produces an internet radio show full of mystery, murder, suspense, and spine chillers.
And for more Old Time Radio goodness, RadioLovers supports a large online archive.
The Art of Food Carving as collected by Ivan Minic. Some very pretty and intricate stuff to be found here.
If you prefer something larger, there's always watermelon carving.
The Egg Man prefers to carve and sculpt eggshells of different kinds. I'm especially fond of his filigree eggs.
Famous, or infamous if you prefer, for her elaborate Hogwarts Celebrations, Britta dons her guise as Webmistress of the Dark and offers up a selection of Halloween recipes for those who prefer something a little tacky and silly, but cute.
For some, it's not enough to buy a cardboard witch to hang on the door for their spooky holiday decorating. They're coating armatures (and, accidentally, themselves) in monster mud to build the Grim Reaper or a well. They sculpt tombstones and make glowing water (YouTube). My favorite is the flying crank ghost (YouTube).
More tips, tricks, and tutorials on making haunted effects can be found in the props section of The Haunters Hangout and some Haunted House Projects at FrightFX. Ghoul Skool, The Halloween University also offers some propmaking, costuming, stories, makeup tips, and a small selection of haunted sound effects. Get to haunting!
The Gothtober Countdown Calendar is a curated time-release flash-based online museum of 31 works of art by 31 different artists. The official run of the show is from October 1st to the 31st, a new piece being revealed with each day of the month.
busy
amused
kshandra, reincarnated as a lolcat.gridlore!
bouncy
sylvan, you'll be displeased to know that yet another person has heard a story out of your past. We got onto the subject of stalkers, and I had to explain how it is I inherited one. You can thank me for embarrassing you yet again later.dave_over next time. Can't always be picking on poor sylvan, after all. And the whole thing with the scarf usually makes for good storytime.
awake
enraged
depressed
