The strange thing about horror as a genre is that it inverts all the rules. Most movies are as good as their budget. With horror, the lower the budget, the better the movie. It’s not just the found footage movies. Friday the 13th had a budget of half a million dollar. The good ones with staying power always come from an unexpected corner.
Ninety percent of good horror, is just nothing happening. The atmosphere has to do most of the work. You have to get invested in the characters. You have to feel immersed in the scenario. And you need to have that haunting feeling, that something’s about to go terribly wrong.
In this sense, we’re all living in a horror movie now.
This horror movie sucks, it’s boring. Also, being an actor in this movie pays alright (probably) but my character would prefer to be a character in a action movie. Sucks to be him lmao!
Most likely it’s not premonition, just anxiety attacks from all the xenoestrogens the environment. And from the dysfunctional globohomo society crumbling down slowly and disgustingly, dragging everyone down into despair. Brain wants a Gotterdamerung to rationalize everything into a heroic ending…
>Holding it’s breath
For fuck’s sake, does anyone bother to spell correctly anymore?
> does anyone bother to spell correctly anymore?
Funny you say that, today I Googled “mpox” and one of the first results that popped up was this BBC news article written in West African Pidgin English:
https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/articles/c8rxe2l181po
“On Wednesday, World Health Organization declare Mpox as global health emergency of public concern for di second time in two years, afta di outbreak of di highly infection disease for Democratic Republic of Congo wey don spread to twenty-six kontris across di world.
Di new variant wey dem discover as clade 1 b, dey more deadly and easily transmittable dan clade 2b variant wey dem bin discover for 2022.
Although, many European kontris neva put in place travel measures for dia citizens, European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) on Friday recommend make dem get vaccinated and advise kontris make dem begin put in measures to control di Mpox C1 variant wey don affect kontris like Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya.
Di United States tok say dem go kontinu to work closely wit African goments, Africa CDC and WHO to ensure effective response to di current outbreak of Mpox while dem advise dia citizens make dem get vaccinated even though dem neva report any case for US”
But what does this mean for Scrabble?
“With horror, the lower the budget, the better the movie.”
So much truth to that! And I don’t really understand why.
It’s difficult to pull off a good horror movie, and maybe it’s no longer possible in this fucked up era.
The Scorpion highly recommends the following low budget horror flicks:
Phantasm (1979)
Body Melt (1993)
Habit (1997)
Ravenous (1999)
If you haven’t seen at least 2 of these 4 yet then you’re failing as a human being.
Airborne mpox?
TOTAL MONKEYPOX MEGADEATH!
https://youtu.be/NX2s56qeuxg
I have always loved chaos. When I was young, I witnessed some revolutions, and I remember how fun it was to witness them.
That said, psychology has a concept of “feeling of impending doom,” which generally relates to not feeling well.
By the way, I just received my blood tests. My cholesterol is all normal and A1C is almost normal.
What is more interesting is that my TESTOSTERONE is completely normal and in the middle of the normal range.
My T used to be low despite eating meat a lot.
Now, I do not eat meat, I barely exercise (I am active during the day but do not go to the gym), and my T is in the middle of the normal range!
Back to the topic of your article, I also feel that all shit will soon break loose.
>By the way, I just received my blood tests. My cholesterol is all normal and A1C is almost normal.
>What is more interesting is that my TESTOSTERONE is completely normal and in the middle of the normal range.
>My T used to be low despite eating meat a lot.
Congratulations on healing your body Igor. I’m glad it’s working out.
Thanks.
Just to be clear, I am pretty positive that I could easily gain weight or have bad blood sugar while eating vegan. I make a significant effort to eat less than I would like and not eat things that raise blood sugar too much.
However, the testosterone restoration was a real surprise for me.
You’ve nailed the zeitgeist. One way or another, Armageddon is coming.
There are those who are confident of, say, a loooong and slow collapse of civ into a new dark age.
But really? With the inexorable mathematics of exponential growth driving massive consumption, and massive consequences, surely, it’s foolish to be so linear in one’s thinking.
We’ve all heard the slow collapse mantra: build some skills that will be relevant, get some religion, build resilient communities etc. However, those who espouse a slow collapse never successfully address why any of those activities are necessary RIGHT NOW if the collapse will take decades or centuries. Why? Because in the event of a slow collapse we would all just adapt over time in tiny increments.
If all goes well, and if events prove boringly linear, then the slow collapse gurus may well be right, but don’t you just wish that the sexy teases would just spare us the constant edging?
They give this impression that collapse is imminent, and then they turn around in the next paragraph to tease anyone who listened to their spiel and is worried about it as a panicking fantasist. And then they suggest learning to be a blacksmith or whatever without any irony, because the world is really experiencing a shortage of fucking blacksmiths right now. “But you could beat the rush by learning these old skills!” they say. “Hang on.” You say. “Didn’t you just say there was no need to panic or rush? So how about I just learn whatever skills the job market actually demands of me right now”.
Rinse and repeat. It’s a living for them, I guess. And they can get away with it because the day they’re wrong we’ll all have something more important to worry about.
But, for those of us who want release, there are good reasons not to share their optimistic confidence in a slow collapse.
Firstly, it is based on faulty inductive reasoning. Circumstances are changing, so nobody knows how it will play out from one moment to the next.
Secondly, there are numerous examples in history of civilizations that have come to sudden ends.
War seems to be a common cause.
One minute you have a civ, the next, the invaders have breached the walls, slaughtered all the men, cast the babies from the battlements, raped the women, sold the children into slavery. . .
“Sayonara shitbirds!”
Why? Do you need a reason? Because the winners could. Because they had more power than their victims and wanted something they had. Because they wanted to. Does a lion need a reason to eat a gazelle? Not at all! The lion doesn’t sit there all day, tearing itself up with guilt over eating some weaker animal. It. Just. Eats. Them. Because it is powerful and in nature the powerful eat the weak. Only the weak piss about with ‘reasoning’ and musing over the morality of it all, the strong are able to just run on instinct and eat what they like.
Time and again those instincts come to the fore – we humans cannot escape our nature.
A long and slow collapse? Bah!
Civ can be destroyed down the bedrock at any time.
It’s been done before, and with our technology, there are oh-so-many new and novel ways to do it all again.
But: “Oh, that would never happen to our magnificent civ because of [insert reason/s]!” Said the intellectuals of every single civ in the graveyard.
And with that introduction, my picks for horror flicks would be John Carpenter’s apocalypse trio:
1. The Thing
2. Prince of Darkness
3. At the Mouth of Madness
Kinda meshes with a Cthulhu octopus theme too, and a growing sense of dread at a deeply weird world that is cosmically indifferent to our existence and sensibilities and can take us out at any time.
Well, even our birth rates are way down— and we have no foreign invaders.
Future historians might look at this population contraction, and project a terrible cause— plague, barbarian invasion, famine. When the mundane reality is that we have lost the will to keep going, collectively at least.
I was watching something on birth rates the other day.
The birth rate in Oz has fallen since the 60s
The birth rate now for native Australians is something like 2.1, so at about replacement level. Essentially, all population growth now in Oz is due to massive immigration programs.
My interpretation of all this is that decades ago, life just started to get too hard due to overpopulation. There were too many people, so too much competition and other stressors, but low infant mortality, so people had few children.
Result? The system organized massive immigration to drive the ponzi scheme to ever greater heights despite humans/residents/citizens naturally deciding for themselves, consciously or otherwise, that they’d reached the limit that they were comfortable with.
Now we are obviously in decline.
Too many humans.
Self-destructive culture wars. Degeneracy. Unable to even say what sex we are. . .
A prime example of people over-rationalizing and degeneracy and loss of power right there. As if what a man or woman is can be reduced to a check list! We understand these things on instinct, based on a gestalt of the overall picture of information, but to act on instinct takes power, which we seem to have lost.
Instead, we get this mealy drive to rationalize every decision we make or accept that they are somehow invalid, as if that is always necessary or good, or comports with the natural world that we are all part of.
Anyway, have many children I say! The future will be shaped by those who breed. They will pass on their values and beliefs etc. The others will disappear.
Basically, it is all made worse by too many people consuming too much stuff, driven on by Ponzi neoliberal economics that makes life worse for all but the elite/corporations.
Too much competition.
Too much overcrowding.
Too much pollution.
Etc, etc, etc.
Result? The shitshow around us all today, right across the west.
The bomb has already gone off, and the damage is spreading, so hurry up and breed if you want to leave a legacy.
Or not, if you’d rather rest on your laurels, or opt out, or whatever.
And get some religion too. Enough of this self-defeating, seditious, secular, atheist fad in the west – a mere aberrant blip in history, and not reflective of global trends.
It can be hard to see from inside the secular west, but it’s the religious who are increasing in numbers and the atheists who are withering away.
Yeah, all this competition is clearly horrible for us. We’re like rats or insects in a hive.
I think the immigrants, as they assimilate, will face the exact same thing. The more they belong to this society, the less they will feel like reproducing. It’s a hunch, but I think it’ll play out.
One of those things you hear about declining empires is ‘hedonism’— and yet everyone seems so bored and tired these days.