and the engine's failed again, all limits of disguise

It's October already, and no haunts have been visited in September. At all. I have no explanation. Also a lack of updating, there's that. To the point that I might have to reintroduce myself to anyone reading along.

So, hi, I'm dy--I mean, I'm increasingly impair--I meant to say, hi, I'm locked in a pitched battle with my goddamn neurologis--

Errr. Let's try again. I'm Em. Hi. The rest is flavor text.

Aaaaaanyway...I had decided to do something potentially ill-advised, namely--the 21 in 31 Challenge. Now, there are existing 31 Days of Horror challenges. I know that. This felt more my speed, though.

For example, here's HordesofHorror's list:



She's following down her curated list, and even managed an explanation for each one. And I've seen both "You have to make your list on day one and stick to it!" and "Pick a movie a day you haven't seen!" camps for the usual 31 Days Challenges. I planned to fall in the middle of the road: I wasn't making a list beforehand, but I would watch each film all the way down. No five-minute "this is too terrible to continue watching" waffling.

And I'd do my best to pick things I haven't seen.

And then...several days more went by, and...here we are. So we're starting with "The Last Ghost Hunters", filmed in 2021, currently on Tubi--because it may be the only one I have energy to cover. Their capsule description says:

"Terror is about to break loose when a team of ghost hunters get hired to explore a vacant country house where several people have disappeared forever."

Okay then!



Now, I could have sworn the house used in this film was one I'd seen before, and my mind was saying Black Mirror. I checked, but as far as I can tell, it's not that. Maybe it's just similar to a lot of other houses I've seen, that were built in the same era.



So first off the bat: they do the best they can. I think all the actors did the very best they could, trapped between poorly-green-screened ghosts and the Big Evil of the piece...essentially some dude in a gas mask. There was a lot of gritting my teeth to get through the runtime.



And I'm not great at giving reviews without spoilers, so let me tell you this was the best shot I could get of the green screen, and even here, it's pretty bad. Add in special effects--smoke, fog, fire, ACTORS MOVING, whatever--and the believability sinks like a flan in a cupboard. I'm not sure, had it not been a challenge, I would have bothered to finish it, frankly.

Adding in to the "not bothering" camp: I saw Platform 2 had arrived, so I figured, I should probably try to finish the first one...and I made it twenty minutes farther in and stopped. Nope. Just couldn't do it.

Same thing with Terrifier--I liked the original anthology film that spawned Art the Clown, but not so much his segment of it. Then the first Terrifier film came out, and I tried to get through it, and...Look. I don't mind slashers. I don't mind gore. But I do have to have some greater sense of character than "woke up this morning and decided to saw into people". I don't need much of a why past that, but I do need at least that.

I even figured, hey, if I'm lost, I'll go back, but let's jump directly to Terrifier 2, since Terrifier 3 had just dropped.

Big huge nope. I just don't like the character. And this is likely the year that cements not wanting to push my brain, because...it's dealing with enough.

Is it Halloween yet?

I wanna live a vibrant life, but I wanna die a boring death

This is the..."Ham Tree"...at LORE. It's a group gift.

Mesmer's love of meat where meat should not be is spreading...

Anyway, it's been...void stars, the 30th of March. That is a long time not to post. There's been...a steady uptick in head pain. And, I think, two falls? Not sure. Maybe just one.

*Em goes to check...*

So, I did mention the concussive episode. Right. So the fourth fall...eh, let me just grab what I said, it'll be easier...

[10:39 PM] Emilly: I made a snappy little graphic earlier.


[10:40 PM] Emilly: Apparently that was too subtle for the rest of the court. Ah, well.
[10:42 PM] Emilly: Ranked from least stupid to most, I'd say this was just slightly less stupid than trying to put on a coat and falling instead. This was me trying to stand up, but being too far forward on the chair, when I reached for stable surfaces, the gas lift in the chair supports engaged, and I slipped right off.

[11:04 PM] Emilly: There was profanity. One of the girls came in and pointed out that my legs were not, precisely, oriented as legs usually were. And then began the debate, between saying hello to the EMTs again, and just going about the rest of the day. The lynchpin for this being, can Em get off the floor by herself?

Should I have just nodded and gone to the ER? Maybe. But at what point do I just accept that fragility is my state of being? That, I don't know.

[11:07 PM] Emilly: It was...a struggle. There is a fear of falling developing, and I'm not even sure it's worth heading off, because it's in the places where I think I can just move through it, do things I used to do, overreach to get something that seemed necessary at the time...So, it's going to be a great deal of second-guessing myself, which will be annoying. But, maybe necessary too.

And hoo boy, am I being careful now. Of course, the screaming back and left leg pain--must've been the left leg that took the brunt of the latest fall--is helping me considerably to be careful.

I'm just...I'm getting so tired of falling. I have seemingly gone from my current age to 197, and that's hard to deal with.

Anyway. Want to get this done...er...

Damn it. All set to go through Emmation City's haunted house, and...now I have to log off. Gah!

Okay, fine, one image, and then we'll be in the full review. So part one, I guess.



...or not, because I can't remember which sim I took this in, and--beyond being from Madame Noir--what's the name of these insane clompy plats. Even better, now I can only find two images of the original (brief) run of eight! ARGH!!



But here's the second shot for this post, I think...the third? That I took this night. Can't find the other two. That is deeply bugging me, but onward we stagger. So part one coming...I hope soon.

cómo se puede bailar, es un escándalo

Received this from someone on Discord, who had originally DMed me out of the blue asking to be "friends"...and then followed that up with constant server invites to his own server, where apparently he's "God". I finally just asked him what he was here for, becoming my friend, or just seeking new fish to swim into his server?

That's what I got back. The capitals make it extra-important, I guess.

And two different requests for aid: first, the maker behind Pirocious recently rescued a Husky, and he has a shattered leg. She'd like to ask for help in getting (the absolutely gorgeous, there are pictures) Ghost back up on his feet. Here's how directly, or you could just go to the store--she's having a store-wide sale on everything she's made so far, and if you like things cute and spooky? This is where you need to start.

And, from the brand Debauchery comes this:

"I have received some medical news that requires me to need to spend a sudden and surprising amount of money.

So, if you can, please try to come find some things to buy to help support Debauchery and me.

If you can donate, anything you can give will be greatly appreciated. I've set up donation boxes at the store and around Maui.

I hate to ask, but I really need help.

Bandor"

For those who don't know, he's one of the makers of adult furniture on the grid that's decided more is definitely better? So most of his pieces are integrated with Lovense, various adult bits brands, I'm not going to say for sure INM, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that locked into any of his showers or hot tubs--and he runs not only the Debauchery store, but the Maui Swingers' Resort in the next sim over. (I don't attend normally, because most of the days I think I may want to wander in for a Mai Tai I have fur, and it's a human-only place? Store's not, though. Store you can show up as anything, and I've never had a problem shopping as a cat.)

(I should probably also say that both Debauchery, the store, and the Maui resort, are both strongly adult places, and in both of them you can frequently find folks au naturale, so...I guess they're NSFW, basically.)

But, above and beyond that, I have had the absolute worst day, so...time to check out an old favorite.



Wait. Is this the same place?



I mean, the big pumpkin guy's here, but...nothing else seems to match...



Well, the interior's largely the same.



And Madam Leota's there still.



All in all, the haunt has seen better days, at least on the outside? And some of that's entirely possible SL's current fun party trick of not rezzing things in on sims is to blame. At the end of the day, though, it accomplished what it needed to--calming me down. What more can I really ask for from a haunt?

We've been eating Gameraaaaa! (part two)

Picking up from part one...



Oh, yipe, what happened here? Those poor li'l Yetis...hope they recover.

Back into the bathtub, and the next room is a village of...heart trees??



Oh my. Site of another massacre. All those dead cherubs...poor things.



Another sploshy, curvy trip into the tunnel...and we've reached the sands of time? Now with added Soilfiends!



I fit right in with the rest of Eggland. (Though I will note, if you stand in certain places for too long, the sky rains chocolate eggs down by the...ah...dozen.)



Nope, I don't fit in after all--I better scamper before the bunny eats me!



And if you find all the jars, you can get prizes at the end stop. (And if you don't, there's a room between the last one, and the end coffins, where you can return to any zone you missed.)

All in all, this is a very enjoyable haunt. The hunt aspect isn't super difficult, the concept is sound, and I adore the whimsy of the bathtub rides from land to land. Five out of five skulls, do go if you can.

Gamera is really neat, Gamera is made of meat... (part one)

It's five pm, do I know where my children are?

No, actually, they're scattered through several timestreams at the moment. Working for the restoration of something, most likely.

In the meantime, I was in a profoundly weird mood, so--

Hmm? My moods are always weird, you say?



No, I'm serious. Even for me, carrying a teddy bear is just odd.



So I read through the instructions, and I'm following all but one of them--my sound settings aren't at the dead-low-tide point they were when all this started, but I doubt if they're even up to 30%.

But here we go anyway! On a jar hunt at Dark Adventures!



I kind of dig their pathway markers, the creepy tilted hand things. (And, checking, they seem to be something NOMAD came up with.)



So first off, and lemme drop my view so it's on a hopefully NON-arachnid containing frame...the start of the haunt is through a cobwebbed hallway. Just FYI.

...and GYAAAAH, arachnophobes definitely stay out, there was a trap in the tunnel that got even me! Not saying more than that.

Though, plus side, you could wander around in the upper level for quite some time, there is a great deal of seasonal pretty.



There is a short--and I do mean short--bathtub ride to get to the next section, so short I thought I'd looped in a circle to return to where I started!

[[Insert from the Editrix: I had actually gone to the first room, but thought I hadn't, so went back to the start, I thought--only ended up in the second room. Wups. This entry has been revised.]]



There is something deeply disturbing about these things. And it completely doesn't help that the pop-up monster for this room holds a toothbrush.

[[Another insert from the Editrix: in the (now three) days since I started putting this entry together, I have figured out what bugged me so much about the "tooth fairies" in this room. And it makes everything worse. Apparently part of my brain is deeply disturbed by the idea of a soft, squishy thing connected to a hard, chewing thing.

[[In other words. It's the eyes. It's always the eyes.

[[But that makes a good dividing line between part one and part two, so--off we go to the second!]]

they ask her why she did it, she said, "honey, you would too"

OKAY. OKAY YOU KNOW WHAT? NO. NO HAUNT FOR OCTOBER. NO. DONE.

Primarily because...



...this is as far as I'd gotten.

Yeah.



AND I'm hopelessly behind blogging. AND I'm hopelessly behind on haunt coverage. AND AND AND I'm hopelessly behind on hunts.

Oh, and somewhere in that, hee hoo ha, I was planning on teaching myself how to make Dinkie clothes because...reasons...and...

NOTHING IS GOING WELL.

And I'm both tired of complaining and haven't even started complaining yet. (Make that one make sense.) Plus, the entire household is sick, and tired, and...and...and...

Yeah. So, no haunt. I did buy the gorgeous hunk of now-useless Octember building from What's Lost Spirits, because I saw it at the event...can't even remember which one, the last Engine Room? Something...and I had to own it. And I was coming up with a way to do the pathing properly and make a rest-of hunt beyond that one room, but...just...everything takes energy.

And I have the energy of a small yellow plastic soap dish right now.

So yeah. No haunt. Eventually there will be some haunt coverage. No guarantee when. Check out the last entry if you care to, there's a video there that I was tickled about actually getting done. It's not perfect--I am not a videographer on the same level as I am not a photographer, I do both badly--but hey, perfection is no longer the goal.

Or something.

So...expect more content...but no longer giving whens. I'm not good at them at the moment.

Right, off to meatspace to see if there's chocolate.

come join the murder, soar on my wings

So, first of all I believe this is a group gift from /Vae Victis\, which has a nominal fee (ten Lindens, I think) mostly to discourage those who join a group only to immediately abandon it. We've all known people like that. Or, ah, occasionally have been people like that...

ANYWAY, that's not what I intended to do yesterday. I was going to cover the new "Ahriman" Draped Horns that are out now for sale at We ❤ Roleplay (which is open now), or the "Ezekiel" Nighthunter's Hat at the current round of Chronicles and Legends.



Sadly, while considering a place to be, I put the horns on and immediately sank to the floor with the new cats. Right, it was not a good heavy-things-on-head day, even virtually. Got it.

Didn't solve the problem of what to cover that day, and today, I ended up wandering over to Drear Fen, my haunt. And something about the lighting made me want to try the new spectacles.



So yes, these are bridgeless in every sense of the word. For consistency's sake, you can imagine the inner nose mini-braces (I don't entirely know the proper word) to be connected via a piercing bar through the nose. Or you could just go with them for the style and forget consistency.



On to the first hitch, and it's something that cannot be corrected for by the maker, it's a wider SL hazard: the chain is clipping through my shoulder. There are so many poses in our personal AOs, in the furniture we sit on, in dance sets--it's literally impossible to reduce all clipping possibilities. About the only thing you could do is extend the neck with a deformer, like those sold for the Snokra snake avatars, but...I think it's just an occasional glitch, and the pretty more than makes up for it.



Did I mention it comes with three actual parts? A solid bridgeless set, a right-side monocle style lens, and a left-side monocle style lens. This is the left.



And the right. And of course there's a pink, it's tradition, or something, now. Amusingly, this particular shade is less "pink" and more "fever-dream cerise pried out of Lisa Frank's paintbox"...which made me laugh a bit.

(Though in tracking down if Frank even had a web presence these days...learned she does kitchen gadgets now! And crocs! Whyyyyy...)



The HUD's simpler, but still gives you lots of options, and as with the above, remember, you can tint the whole thing, just one side as a singlet, or if you really wanted to be flashy you could wear each monacle as a pair and tint them different from each other!



All in all, I really like these. They project a fine, focused line of sarcasm before I even say a word. I don't even have to tilt my head to look over them disapprovingly. How wonderful.

So, next up, likely the "Ezekiel" Nighthunter's hat, since Chronicles and Legends has them there. I'll give a more direct SLUrl when I cover the hat. But they're going for L$400.

Wait...did I say that? I think I already said that...Well, bother, you'll just have to read it twice. (Oh, but also coming up: an Arkivet and Vae Victis collaboration blade, the "Apophis", which is a lovely khopesh sword. And that's going to run L$450. So watch the blog for more!)

dream on, the moon is on the wane

There are times with extended illness where we try to hide it as much as possible. Keep things light, laugh it off, downplay it. Dress up for guests so they don't worry.

Other times we sink into it, and the inner becomes the outer in cracked reflection.



I'm at the House of the Crimson Wings, a mixed therian nation/Japanese haunted house, depending on which direction one goes. I've covered it before--I had to go back to 2019 to find the actual post--and now I'm wondering how it's changed, or if it has.



I'm also showing off another /Vae Victis\ product. These are the "Astaroth" Cosmic Glasses, and they have mastered the arch look with zero effort.



This is as close as my cam skills will let me get--the eyeglasses chain? If you look close, they're not chain links, they're eyes.



The house is whispering to me again. And this isn't really the outfit for pinks, but...the pinks must be shown! It's tradition at this point.



And if you just want to completely goth out? There's a black option for all pieces.



There are eleven shades for the lenses, and seven shades each for the other sections. I'm going to have to find more superlatives beyond "gorgeous" and "beautiful", but these really are. I love the eye detail on the chain, and the pen-nib bridge is so clever.



You can find these at the Warehouse event starting January 23rd for L$360!

and I'm a world of emotion, for me, there's really just one thing to do

Started my morning off far earlier than I wished to, so I just wanted one good haunted house under my belt. That's not too much to ask, is it?



Apparently yes, yes it is. [[And note from the Editrix, I did not catch until today, the 31st, that the upload of this run of pics failed. They work now...obviously...]] Hello, Lisa. I have no patience today, so we're scratching the Port Adventure haunt off our list. Starting off with game rips does NOT give me confidence.

How about the Aura Haunted Area? It's adult, but that's not necessary a bad thing...



BAD THING. VERY BAD THING.

All...right...how about...the...World of Dark Imagination?



Well, easy's about my speed today.



That's...odd. It's just...hanging in midair. Nothing else. Silent. Just...there.



Yeah, won't lie. That's kind of disturbing. It...wiggles, when it reaches out of the hedge.



And then, into the haunted house proper, and...what? Bright yellow light, earth floor, trees growing through stone walls...It was a house on the outside, though??



Oh hey. I could live here. Save for the two obvious game rips, both from the haunted-house simulator game for the Nintendo Wii, The Grudge.



Okay, we get it, Satanism is scary to you.

By and large, though--this is a very strange haunted house, and--that's not a bad thing. There's a room of eyes. There's a room of clowns. There's a room of spiders--and I didn't show that one, because there was literally no angle I could find to snap a picture that didn't have a spider in it, and not small ones, either. There's a fairly accurate, game ripped children notwithstanding, of Children of the Corn.

I think it's honestly worth a visit. I didn't even finish, I had to go meet with a client, but I'm still saying that, because what they're doing is pretty unique. So I think this is my first five out of five this year. Check it out.