I'm in the ruins too, I know the wreckage so well (part one)

Okay.

Okay. Okay okay okay.

This needs to get done and the past two months in tailspin DO NOT COUNT. Okay? Okay.

I'm saying that a lot.

This also may run for more than two entries.



Also, I want to put a pin in this one to revisit later, because I forgot I tinted a pair orange and then took a bunch of shots in blue latex. Keep this on the back burner for now.

Also this one (from the same set in blue):



I know the image quality is bad, but just--put a pin in this for later, too? Because I did find a problem on the horns! (It's me. The problem is me. Not even kidding, because I fractured another mesh item from an entirely different maker in the same way yesterday.)

So. The first set was the blue and gold, and I took a bunch, and then--forgot where I put them? So next up was a few days later, and the image below is straight out of the box:



No modding, as-is standard (non-PBR; there are both PBR and non-PBR textured versions in the package), just picked one and hit add.

And then....things get a little...vague? I have about twelve pictures, in assorted outfits uploaded to my image host, and maybe six different half-completed entries? But I know I took a few shots while shopping at Moss and Luna:



...and I think that's either the PBR version (maybe?? PBR is strange for me, it works, but it's always weirdly highlighted in a pale, milky-blue shine??), or I've done something weird to them. Because of course I would.

So then I went through the pics I'd uploaded two months back. Like this one:



--which shows the HUD for the set. (And yes, there are two versions, the PBR HUD, and the standard HUD.) Near as I can tell, this is also straight out of the box, very little if any adjusting.

I'll go into some features in part two, which I'm hoping to get out tomorrow? In the meantime, I kept feeling like I needed to retake pictures, or take more pictures, or find the...I suppose "perfect" background...I don't know.



Maybe it makes no sense. And I wanted to say more. There's more pictures. Void stars, I have more than enough frames. This run of--unfortunately, only three--I only caught the mistake in post-processing--I thought I'd moved the horns back enough to not protrude, but instead, I gave myself a second set of eyebrows.

Anyway. There's more. Also, watching Pontypool while trying to figure out what to say to type this? Maybe not my best choice.

((Insert from the Editrix: I'm going to go post this as the first entry in coverage of, but the entry I'm going to post after was actually written weeks ago, and I just want to get SOMETHING out today because kicking myself in the back for the last two, possibly two-plus months, is starting to leave a dent.))



((Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.))

((Oh, and you can still find them on the back wall at Vae Victis' main store. Set you back by L$500, still, I believe, which again, is a reasonable amount for horns this adaptable. Ta!))

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?

lock it safe in an urnful of summer

Wanted to push to get at least ONE post out, and whilst doing that, decided to wander an event I hadn't finished yet, and whilst doing THAT, decided to say hello to a dear friend...

Three days ago, things were terrible. Two days ago, things were terrible. Yesterday, things were grindingly awful but for a couple bright spots--talking to you being one of them. And today my system is still reeling from the past three days of leading-up-to, and then actually-having, a crushing migraine, to the point that my entire system fought getting out of bed due to ow. I'm hoping it's going to get better from here?

...and then backspaced ALL of that to say

[15:20] Emilly Shatner-Orr (emilly.orr) says hello as she's wandering a random event.

I mean...I'm not outright lying,exactly, I'm just not...going into everything?



I know. I KNOW. But...it gets tiring answering The Question some days. I'm trying to be accurate while also not dragging everyone's mood down, y'know?

AKA, Em is Trying to Find the Balance. Or maybe balance in general.

"There's no right way to forgive a person who hurt you." Also known as Ladyknighthebrave's take on Mike Flanagan's A Haunting of Hill House. And it's a miniseries that has a lot to say, on a lot of topics, but Ladyknight's take on it, I think, is sound for the material. It's an hour of how we, as individual beings, process trauma, but also...how we, as families, process trauma.

And in the meantime, processing through new realities and new issues and trying to sort everything out. And still only a couple haunts for the year under my belt. Agh.

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!]]

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!

entangled in the loneliness, the memory of innocence

I seem to have really awful luck this year on finding good haunts, so--finally decided to go with what the Lindens recommended. And now I'm at Laurel's Nightmare.



So the first room told me the conceit of this haunt--namely, pretty accurate reproductions of horror films. Each one has the movie poster, or something representing the movie, and then a scene suggestive of same.



This is ostensibly the Mummy room, but--arachnophobe warning. I did my best to crop out the actual spiders hanging in the webs, but hoo boy, are there a LOT of webs.



Of course there's going to be a room referencing the Exorcist.



So, after my first reaction, I got what this room was--namely, reproducing a section of the Nostromo from the first Alien film--but at first, I blinked and went "wait, did I port back to Tannhauser Gate accidentally?"

Because somewhere, on Tannhauser, there's a set of rooms that are very similar to this set piece...



And now we're in Jason territory, and this area is just rife with the jumpscares. It's also the first room I remember that you will actually get stabbed, sawed, wounded...It won't be the last, but it is the first.



And I won't lie, I'm pretty sure it's due to having recently seen the Hellraiser remake, but this room seriously made me stop breathing for a moment. But it's also really gorgeously done--the moving floor is stellar, and it very much feels like we're in a puzzle box, looking at a puzzle box, standing on a slowly solving puzzle box.

Neat.

All in all, there's a lot of different rooms, and while it's mostly a walk through various horror films, over being a more traditional haunt, that's not a bad idea. I liked it, I'd say seriously four out of five skulls. Worth a trip if you have some time to kill.

maybe tomorrow I'll wake to find myself sleeping on the floor

It occurs to me that we're four days into October, and nary a haunt has been seen on the blog. This is very nearly criminal. So we're redressing that today by visiting the Haunted Reef in Kon Tiki North.



Entrance is suitably atmospheric.



There are rules. And yes, it is a dark ride.



The ride talks to you as you go:

[12:43] SUB 2022: Welcome to The Haunted Reef ride!
[12:43] SUB 2022: Along the way you will see strange, interesting, and amazing things!
[12:43] SUB 2022: We hope you enjoy the ride (and hope you survive:P)
[12:43] SUB 2022: Monsters lurk down here. Be still and they may not harm you.

Which is kind of neat.

Also, it's just a visual conceit, but I liked the illusion of a dome over the boat, so the riders have air. It's the little things.



A few rooms of coral and reef fish led me to this, an impressive display of very long electric eels.



Some parts of the ride led you through cave tunnels, or old ruins, like this one, and others were through open ocean.



And this is where your Editrix got very disappointed. Note the figures in the two circles. The closer is Lisa, from P.T., the one farther back is the Broken Neck Woman (called Kubi ga Oreta Onna no Rei in the original Japanese transliteration, or the Woman Who Jumps) from the first Fatal Frame game. They're both game rips. It's so sad to see.

I get that game rips are cheap. I get that they're everywhere. I get that some of them really work for zombies, or sim decor (the Fountain of Tears from American McGee's Alice: Madness Returns game is also everywhere). But they're still a violation of copyright.



And near the end? Laser sharks.

All in all, I found this a marvelously calming haunt, perfect for when you have the time to just sit and watch the sealife go by...but while I was expecting to give four, maybe even five skulls out of five for it--that room with the game rips drops them down to three. It's just so unnecessary, when the rest of the haunt is so inventive.

we live in a world someone else imagined

Pinterest contacted me today...

Hi Emilly,

It was bold in the original, I just kept it.

We recently removed a Pin from your "Unhallows" board because it goes against our Community Guidelines on self-injury and harmful behavior.

And that was when my brain dropped out through my open jaw, because...I have two Hallowe'en boards. "Vintage Halloween" is the more retro board, with everything from print-outs to tutorials on crafting haunted items. "Unhallows" is the more purely horror board, the place for everything unnerving, disturbing, skin-crawling...probably more '-ing', and...how...is that going to hold up to a sudden ToS change??

We limit the distribution of or remove content that displays, rationalizes or encourages suicide, self-injury, eating disorders or substance abuse. This content impacts the community - it can be triggering, or reinforce harmful behavior. These rules apply to all Pins, including ones on your secret boards.

I have no secret boards.

Please take some time to go through your Pins and remove any that may conflict with our policies, or we may take further action against your account.

I've spent the morning in between making appointments and meeting appointments of my own in applying the broadest definitions possible, just in case. Bleeding from the mouth? Gone. Bleeding from the eyes? Probably okay, but...if it's a large amount, gone. ANYTHING to do with wrist ribbons, wrist stitches, wrist wounds, EVEN IF IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SUICIDAL IDEATION...gone. I'm not even a third of the way through yet.

I'm still debating just dumping every single image with visible wounds anywhere.

The thing that frustrates me about these strikes, though, the thing that has always frustrated me about these strikes...is they no longer tell me what they've struck down. They used to, a few years back--and that information is kind of key to figuring out whether I want to challenge the strike or not? Because easily 70% of everything on Pinterest, for everyone, is relinked material. There is a very high noise-to-signal ratio.

How do I know if what I linked is bad, if you won't show me what I linked? How do I learn from my mistake if you won't tell me what it was?

"Why are you still on Pinterest?" asked Neome. My love, I am starting to wonder myself. A few years back they also made linking anything on the site that wasn't just pure image (which you had to open as a new tab and link THAT URL only) impossible, because now, when anyone clicks one of the links of mine (and you may even see it if you click the two boards I linked above), it takes them to the page--and then immediately greys out the page and a full-screen popup tells you how easy it is to create an account. It's become worse than useless for passing information on in any direction save back to Pinterest.

Apparently Elliot Management owns the company now, which is odd, because as this article says, they're more known for "activism", and as their own website says:

The firm employs a multi-strategy trading approach that encompasses a broad range of strategies, including, without limitation: equity-oriented, private equity and private credit, distressed securities, non-distressed debt, hedge/arbitrage, real estate-related securities, commodities trading and portfolio volatility protection.

...Right.

Maybe it's time to batchfile everything in a 'save these links' file and just kill my account.

how are you so burnt when you're barely on fire?

Yeah...



It hasn't been the best day.

Taking a mental health day today, I think, so if I log onto the grid, it won't be for long. I have things to do Saturday, and a reading at the Chelsea Hotel to do on Sunday, so I'll do that, but right now...yeah, I think I'm good just hanging out for a bit and going to bed.

I'm also putting the same behavior into practice on the blog, right now, that I've put into practice on Twitter right now: if you disagree with why the court decision bothers me, you're free to comment, but I will then delete your comment, and it will not cause me one single iota of regret. Cheers.

but you need your rotten heart, your dazzling pain like diamond rings

Welcome to Dreadmorne Township.



Obviously, this town has seen better days.



It's not just the eels, there's bodies in the water, too.



The eels are getting bigger...



And what's with the flowers?



That water can't be good for them...unless...



This is why I came, though. I first heard about it on Twitter, and read through everything it asked for. I have a Maitreya body, and the Regalia body. I now own Happy Paw's Lynx ears, Sugarcult's Fennex legs just in case, and Cerberus' Kisa head.

It retails for L$599. A bit more than I intended to spend--way more than I intended with all the accessory parts--but...new forms sometimes require sacrifice, don't they?

At least this one did.



And of course, in the center of town...the maw from the deep. Perfect, really.

Dreadmorne runs until...some point?? Finding information on it is very, very thin on the ground right now? But I'll update this when I can.

I don't belong among the angels, and baby, that's just fine with me

This is my entire aesthetic, yes.

pain is a warning that something's wrong

STATIC has really outdone themselves with this one. I'm showing off the pink--and one other later--but it comes with a hud for seven total glistening melted-candy effects (pink, red, yellow, mint, blue, purple, and white as noted on their Flicker. To note: while the item is mesh, you need to wear a BOM skin, because you *need* to use their alpha--the alpha cuts of most commercial bodies will not do.



It's even...is "better" the right word?...in person, with the light picking up glistening liquidity on the candy sections, and while the broken exposed rib moves a little less than naturally, honestly, this is the best thing I've seen since that one gore and guts attachment I found that was only fitted for male bodies. (Sorry, don't remember who made it, wish I did, but it was at We <3 RP several months ago.)



And here's the..."not so candy guts" one:



This one comes rigged for Belleza Freya and Jake bodies. Reborn, Legacy female and Legacy male, and Maitreya. It runs L$396 at the Dreadborne Township Forest of Dead Toys holiday event. I have no idea when the event closes, as I found it sidewise (tracking something I wanted to own at the Vae Victis booth at Shop n' Hop, and finding it led to Quills and Curiosities, which gave me the landmark for the event.

More information can be found on Second Life Syndicate's site, and found out when it's over! It runs until the 31st. (There's a hunt too, but they've been quite devious with gift locations!).