Eerie Aquarium's take on depression is hauntingly accurate. Some of the other conditions fit, some don't, but I get the concept. And yeah, being neurodivergent is terrifying at times. NSF...brains? Disturbing content, definitely. Touch of body horror? Mild gore. Soundtrack-induced dread?

Also, as an aside, since the last post was political, let's carry on:

Creator @bekahdayyy has put together a point-by-point refutation of anyone in your life who says they voted for Donald Trump because of their Christian faith. It's not about faith, it's about power. If you're in the position to be attending Thanksgiving, Christmas or other holidays with family and friends who voted for the orange loon, maybe print this out to answer any questions they might have.

But it's not just about the policies. Project 2025 is a comprehensive document covering many areas the writers seek to "improve". Among them:

• Defunding the Department of Education, including Pell grants for college, striking down special education programs, and taking all further education and schooling for children to pricy private (many religious) schools.
• Defunding the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare, and ACA, yes, it very much IS the same thing)--which will also include Medicare and Medicaid being cut by 90%, and removing all prescription price caps (including Biden's $35 cap on insulin. Also of note: food stamps will be taken from 93% of all Americans currently involved in the program.)
• No-fault divorce will be banned nationwide, leaving many women stuck in abusive situations to be battered, severely injured, or even slain.
• Another plan that will kill women is their purported federal abortion ban, allowing zero exceptions for rape, incest, or fetal malformations and the life of the mother.
• Try this one on for size; Dismantling the Marriage Equality Act and federally ruling that marriage can only take place between a man and a woman. Women will also, under the new ruling, lose their independent rights to separate financing, owning property, or--should the unlikely divorce be granted--their own children. and let's not forget, the Marriage Equality Act also insures that interracial marriage is protected. So that will be struck down as well. Guess Clarence and Ginny Thomas are splitting up next year.
• How about the rights of workers? They won't have any. Employers will be free to break up unions, to no longer offer overtime, to fire employees for any reason without fear of repercussions. And federally, employers will no longer have to worry about displaying bigotry or racism--they'll be free to make their workplaces as white as they wish.
• The military, and likely ICE, will be deployed to enact mass deportations. Far as I understand, the procedure will be arrest first, ask questions later--if at all. And let me quote from the document directly, as she put it so well:

  "1 in every 15 families is of mixed documentation status. American citizens will be subject to deportation if they have a family member living in the home undocumented...Denaturalization of immigrants who have received citizenship will begin. DACA will end. Our Asylum Program will be dismantled."

• This is a fun one--since Homeland Security was created as a bureau, the police already were partially militarized. But after Trump takes office? Police officers will receive prosecutorial immunity and be further militarized. Checks and balances on police overreach? What are those? Oh, and racial discrimination? Prepare for that to come back, in spades, as they receive a mandate to gun after anyone not white and conservative.
• Trump, through Project 2025, will give reparation to victims of discrimination...but of course, only the white ones. The plan is also to weaponize the Department of Justice to go after teachers, professors and alumni in colleges that practice diversity, equity, and inclusion (the dreaded "DEI") and fire them. Then tear down the colleges themselves, especially black ones.

Do I need to go on? Because I can go on. This document covers the appointees Trump is planning to push through, as well, and some of them are just as reprehensible, racist and lacking any skill sets for the positions they'll be taking over, as their chosen convicted felon is.



So, for anyone still reading along who voted for Trump? This is why I'm not interested in you being part of my life. We already had four years of him, when he was basically a gleeful, wheezing toddler with a hammer, breaking structures and yelling for hamburgers. He managed to put a tidy sum of money into his pocket from YOUR from being president those four years, too, or didn't you catch that he was charging the Secret Service hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent rooms in hotels he owned?

And you voted to put him in power again. I know there will be members of Congress fighting against his despotic desires, but he has said, multiple times, to multiple Cult 45 members, in multiple cities, that at the very least he plans to:

• Destroy education as we know it from kindergarten to college
• Ban teaching ANYTHING about African-American history; Japanese histories of children growing up in camps instead of houses (even though many Japanese-Americans during WWII were born in the US); anything about the contributions people of color have made to this country through invention, innovation, scientific, medical, legal and political advances; any reference to the near-genocide and seizure of land for indigenous peoples--essentially, anything that might hurt poor white peoples' feewings
• Destroy Medicaid and Medicare (so there goes my insurance)
• Destroy Social Security (and there goes my ability to pay rent)
• Destroy the Affordable Care Act (so there goes one of my love's insurance)
• Set high tariffs against countries he currently dislikes, which will drive the cost of EVERYTHING up (or didn't you realize what tariffs actually do?)
• Destroy the Veterans' Administration entirely (so there goes my other love's insurance, since she's a veteran)
• Remove responsibility for womens' medical care and bodily autonomy (and as a woman, I kind of take that personally)
• Remove marital rights guaranteed to men from women (and this alone, even were I not happy with the loves I have, would ensure I'd never marry), essentially starting the process to make them American citizens with reduced rights;
• Restrict food stamps to the narrowest possible sliver of citizenry (so, hey, I guess I don't need to eat anymore, right?);

I didn't go through a single haunt this year. It's strange to say that. I have so many things to review, and I've missed the events they were at for all of them. I regret that. And I have so many drafts I wanted to go through and post. I still might, but...there are more important things to do.

Listen. If nothing else, this has proved unequivocally that half of the United States still thinks women aren't people.

The forced-birthers won. The COVID deniers won.
The religious extremists won. The anti-vaxxers won. The anti-maskers won.
The climate-change deniers won. The prosperity gospel churches won.
The QAnon conspiracists won. The MAGAt cultists won.
The tech bros with frat-boy mentalities won. The NRA won.
The anti-feminists won. The Trump-as-Messiah worshippers won.
The neo-Nazis won.

It's morning in Gilead. This is who we are. But this is not who we have to be. I do not intend to subside quietly until the jackbooted thugs come to carry us away to the camps. I am who I am yesterday, who I am today--bisexual, Rökkatruar heathen, polyamorous--and I am not going to hide.

And if you're friends with me, or if you're one of my loves, and you voted for Trump--don't tell me. Or do, so we can break it off clean and walk away from each other. That is my line in the sand. Because if you voted for him, you voted for dozens of hate groups behind him that want to make this a theocratic dictatorship. You voted against every LGBT+ person in your life. You voted against anyone who's trans in your life, whether they've come out to you or not. And ultimately, you voted against everyone who shares my gender.

Is it sinking in yet? More women will die with a locked-in federal ban on abortive and prenatal care. Anyone who's not white has a very good chance of being attacked in the streets, arrested, deported, whether they were born here or not. Separating children from their parents at the border will likely start up again..not that it actually ever stopped, but there has at least been an attempt to reunite families post-Trump...Mandated church attendance? They could do that. I know when we were living in a very frightening small town, we were told to pick a church and go to it faithfully--because otherwise, we'd be considered Satanists and they'd shoot us.

These were cops saying that, by the way. I believe the exact quote was, "Well, ma'am, then we'll come back, help you both into a truck, drive into the scrub, and put you to sleep."

Is it sinking in yet? Trump is talking about putting a man with a partially-devoured brain in charge of women's health. Musk he's lined up for a new department, one called "Efficiency", where he'll kill any program he deems as wasting too much money. You know, like he did with Twitter--oh, sorry, I mean X--when he fired the entire coding department and suddenly, things started breaking down. Such a mystery.

He's talked about removing the FDA, the Bureau of Education, killing school lunch programs, loosening the clean-air restrictions so factories and corporations don't have to go by the keeping-people-alive programs. He says he'll fire every civil servant on the government's payroll, and replace them with his hand-picked people. He's enslaved now to special-interest churches who seriously believe that Jesus won't return until every tree is cut down. He wants no separation between church and state. The Supreme Court, formerly a panel with--at least supposedly--the most well-educated, well-versed in law, judges and lawyers...is essentially in his pocket.

And all of that is assuming he lives for the next four years. It would be so easy to be one of those "best people" close to him and just--help him to stop breathing. And then we'd have President Vance.

Trump is the first convicted felon to hold a high office. He's been convicted for fraud, embezzling, sexual assault, attempting to overturn the government...Is this really the caliber of man we want leading the country? Essentially an emotionally stunted sociopath, clearly and obviously sliding into Alzheimer's, who golfs more than Obama did, who keeps a list of people and groups that were mean to him so he can penalize them directly...this man is not presidential material.

"But oh, she supports Israel...oh, she isn't left enough...oh, it's not the time for a woman president...oh, as a prosecutor she put a lot of people of color away..." Okay. Compare and contrast--someone who might reconsider at least part of her position if enough voters asked for it, versus...Trump. Who WILL further arm Israel, who plans to cut off any future aid to Ukraine, and may in fact start shipping ammo and arms TO Russia, for all we know.

IS IT SINKING IN YET??

I'm not hiding. And echo chamber or not, I'm just porting away from anyone who starts talking about how great it's going to be under Trump again. Or bouncing people from the Gearhaven estate if I'm there. I am done with tolerating the fools who think the next four years will be anything but greater chaos than he managed during his first four years.

I don't often talk politics on this blog, because I don't want to. I left Twitter a month after Musk took over, because I could already see it becoming a haven for every right-wing nut-job still gunning for the Obamas and the Clintons for being part of the huge underground child trafficking ring...which doesn't exist, which never existed, but hey, I could pull up a double dozen articles on Republican senators, preachers and business owners who were caught doing that exact thing. May I refer you to Matt Gaetz, for example? The DOJ was told to drop the case, but the civil and criminal charges are still pending. And he's far from the only one.



But that's it. You can go home now. Everybody out of the pool.

Or go here and do some good.

NOW that's it.

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."

Well, this is going to give me nightmares. (Seriously, this is disturbing content. Not nudity, per se,, and not gore or violence, really...It's just skin-crawling, disturbing AI images. Be *warned*.)

Also, uh, hi again. I have about ten drafts waiting to be finished, that I planned to finish, and then the days ganged up on me again. Bah. If anything's not time-critical, I'll do my best to backdate, but only by a few days, not the month before, or the month before that--when I was supposed to pull my act together and toss them in as entries.

Anyway, soooo.....currently I'm at Harvest of Souls, which I still think of as a "newer" event? My brain thinks it started after SABBATH--or Ritual--but definitely not past Salem or...bah, what's the other name...I know it's not Trick or Treat Lane, because they've been around FOREEEVERRR...Gods, October's going to suck this year, EVERY event is planning on opening, it seems...



"You may ask yourself, 'Well, how did I get here?'"

Though that's not really my main question. I'm actually trying to avoid the main question, which circles around between "I haven't updated since WHEN?!?" and "If I'm going to stand around in world, by myself, for six hour stretches of time while I'm distracted to the point of getting nothing done in RL, either...am I really needed in world?" That one...I'm going to have to deal with at some point.

At some point. But not today.



"Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water..."

Today I'm at the event. I may do an entirely separate entry just walking around and capturing really fun landscaping. But I do look like I dressed for the booth, weirdly, and I hadn't seen it before porting to the event. What's actually in the booth, for sale, is /Vae Victis\' "Cernunnos" Monarch Antlers. It's now entirely redone mesh, all original work by Grimoire Hexem, and I'll get around to reviewing that hopefully soon!

[[Insert from the Editrix, sadly AFTER publishing--I am a complete FAILURE, I have forgotten how Vae Victis is spelled, oh, the horror and tragedy--but, err, the names have been fixed. My deepest apologies. When I'm more awake--the Editrixing is taking place late at night and one day forward...as is tradition...I'll check the keywords on other entries.]]

This is not going to be my usual exhaustive review. also. I know there are three places to change the color scheme, the jar itself, the trim along the jar edges, and the edges of the crack that the souls are trying, so very hard, to break through. Each can be tinted fourteen different tones, though I fully acknowledge that the booth's red light (along with the red facelight I'd forgotten I had on), means you're not getting that good a look at the options.



"I have my scars, you have yours..."

And, of course, we're only mentioning tangentially that having a migraine for a day and a half may have impaired some of my ability to brain and take pictures. Still. (This is not me asking for sympathy, either. My brain and I are not on speaking terms at the moment--it knows what it did--but that doesn't mean I'm trying to add stress and worry to anyone's plate. Yes, the Eternal Headache is still there, and why yes, the migraine was laying over it--but it doesn't matter. The headache is just that--mine.)



"Walk on water through the swamp..."

I can't even say for certain which color combos I used. My notes were scattershot. I did say this:

"The jar I'm holding, by the way, is one of the hunt prizes. Fourteen colors for the jar, fourteen for the trim, and fourteen for the broken edge that reveals trapped souls yearning to be free. Broken things can be very pretty, and this is, oh, so very pretty."

So, remember forever ago, when I said I'd be following up the /Vae Victis\ geta post with the rest of the shoes...that I've still been collecting, because I am an obsessive muffin...? Anyway, yeah, that's now starting to happen, but it'll be a while before it's all graphicked up for posting.

Something else did happen, though:



Ah, right. That thing I never celebrate came up. But this year I actually received an email from the Lindens?

And, of course, to follow that:



Yeah...For some reason the email, and in particular the image above, completely kicked the stuffing out of me for three weeks. No idea why. Maybe that I found myself appalled that the "average" SL resident visits 100 regions. That's almost criminal, the grid is WIDE. Same thing with the teleports.

But the last thing, I just do not believe. There have been times I thought I logged out, and didn't, and I come back to lots of blinking IM windows. Totally my bad. But I have never, not even once, left my computer on, running, and logged in 135 days. Not. Possible.

But the bigger reason I sunk into the tarn was...761. That's the number that's been ringing in my head, and it's more advanced now than in July, when the actual rez day, and the "My Year in SL" pic, happened.

That's over two years. I've had the Eternal Headache (and that name is comically apt at this point) for over two years.

And...that...that was kind of a lot.

So I'm working on remantling, and working--harder--on accepting the Headache is now a feature, not a bug. So goes all flesh, et cetera.



But hey! The Garden's been revised in Tannhauser Gate Station! That's good news, right?



Yep. Just peachy.

So I'm frantically trying to get through as much as possible of the Shop and Hop before I fold up for the time being (and yes, I know, I KNOW, I should have been done by now!) and finally reached Aluveaux Technologies. And their gift--shown below--is a universal door plug-in:



And I got all excited. Granted, Tannhauser Gate Stations has iris doors, but still! Sounded potentially neat!



Okay! They put up a build, showing how the doors work! Though, come to think...this one doesn't seem to have doors in it...



Oh. ...Oh. Well, that's...unfortunate...

So some bugs in the system yet. Pity.

[19:45] Grimoire Hexem: no problem, sorry for the inconvenience
[19:46] ɐɹpuɐxǝlɐ (misssuicide.marshdevil): hi its me im the inconvenience its me :P

[16:48] sxxxxx Rxxxxxxx: nice body
[16:48] Emilly Shatner-Orr (emilly.orr): Thank you.

First off: the entry for the Typhon Monstrous Adorned Horns entry has been updated. Not a lot of changes, but in going back through it, I realized I'd left out a link for /Vae Victis\ (the mainstore}, Abnormality (their coming soon page, because the next Abnormality round is in August, two months away), and I realized I never got back to the Vineyard Terrace information cards on swamp biomes. In a very tangible sense, swamps are the natural representation of liminal space.

Continuing from yesterday...



We're starting with the second set of panels from the run, and...wait.
Did...I not have more panels to show off?? I mean, I know the last picture from yesterday was another multi-shot, but...I could have sworn I took more pictures...

A...pparently not! I just chose to show off some of the insets in the squnched-short version.

Well. These are AT THE MAINSTORE BY NOW, and--having tracked them down in the meantime--I now know they run L$450 for the set in store. (Which, I should mention again, includes both the short-tall and the REALLY tall versions, plus each geta has the choice of plain or etched panels, in the colors so chosen.

I must love the sound of deadlines swooshing by.

Next up: something unofficial I decided to do on my own--who DOES make the highest heels in SL? Tune in...uh...whenever I post again?

Today...is the day. Or at least today will be a good start? Maybe a good start. I have no idea, I'm standing in the cam sim for this round of Cyber Fair.



This may not be the full line-up-and-comparison shoefest I had planned? I now own at least a third of the really high and/or really weird platforms on the grid, so I really want them shown off SOMEwhere. And might as well run the demos while I'm at it, because I'm certain sure I'm not going to keep ALL of them. Demo or actual platform, that is a LOT of weird fetish footwear to dump in my inventory! (Azoury and Madame Noir, I'm looking at you.)



So first off, I forgot to do a thing. I like to show whatever it is straight out of the box, untouched--so to speak. This time, I didn't, because I so rarely use the flat-footed option for Maitreya these days, there was a lot of height adjusting that seemed necessary. So, out of the box, added, considered, tinted shades to match the whole frosted oiran look, then--even though these are the shorter version--I shortened them further.



Ten colors for the hanao (the padded straps), ten colors for the dai (the angled, wooden flat piece in traditional geta), and a full twenty-two colors for the ha (the raised stilt portion). And each pairing there features a plain wooden stilt, or one that's the same tone, but has an inset with either etched art in the wood, or ink-painted motifs.



Ooh. I feel dizzy all the way up here.



Now, adjustments, color changes, and panel art!



Well...four pieces of panel art. This took me a LOT longer than I thought, so this is not all the etched or painted panels on the Daitengu geta, and I'm hoping to get to the rest tomorrow! It's now far too close to four am for my liking, so I'm off to rest the injured brain and everything it's trying to control. See you for part two!

I last posted in MAY?! Void stars, I'm losing my grip.

(Also, I still maintain Christianity would be on the rise if they listened to Reefer Madness's take...but I digress.)

So, what's going on? I am deeply delinquent on reviews. Events are opening at speed. It's getting darker, and I've forgotten what sun feels like on my skin.