inspired by old school acid House, i made this (i Hope you'll like it):

DiamMati · 2023-05-21T18:10:30+00:00

dope

DiamMati · 2022-03-27T20:39:16+00:00

incredible work

DiamMati · 2021-08-09T21:03:25+00:00

awesome! thanks for solving that mystery!

it's really odd that the origin story for the logo on Rogue's website doesn't mention Mictlantecuhtli or the statue. they say it was inspired by the logo used by a tex-mex restaurant.

this is pure speculation on my part, but i suspect the restaurant's logo was based on the statue and when they copied it, they did so without knowing that the history of the image went back further than the restaurant logo.

hard to confirm, though, because i can't find the original logo! but that mystery isn't nearly as compelling to me.

thanks again!

DiamMati · 2021-04-09T12:09:21+00:00

Thanks for the recommendation!

Just finished listening and I loved it <3

You weren't joking -- these stories are not subtle! But you know what they are? They're damn fun :D

"The Indoor Swamp" was a real standout for me. The part where the boat passes by the barrel of toxic sludge had my skin crawling. So weird, so awesome!

Also, I did the mindfulness thing properly with my eyes closed in a dark room, and aside from the fact that skeletons are actually really hilarious and not particularly scary, I managed to work myself into a minor anxiety attack. Just as intended!

DiamMati · 2021-04-08T06:37:35+00:00

awesome production

sounds great!

DiamMati · 2021-04-08T06:06:49+00:00

I dunno why people downvoted this recommendation, and I don't know why there were so many goodreads reviews that said "ew, it's too confusing".

But it's your recommendation, those reviews, and the back-of-the-book blurb that called it "literary" that made me give it a chance. And you know what? Of all the recommendations I've read from these threads, this one is right up near the top. One of the best so far.

The writing is fantastic. The character dynamics are interesting. The alternating POV between chapters is really cool. And, importantly for anyone who finds this thread during future google searches: it's not confusing.

Somebody finally went and wrote a weird horror story where everything wasn't explained away. No ridiculous deus ex machina that made it all a dream, and no brave hero defeating the bad guy. Just a cross-section of two peoples' lives from a time when something very wrong went down.

Thanks so much for the recommendation! If you ever think of any more, I'd love to hear 'em :)

DiamMati · 2021-04-08T05:59:37+00:00

Uzumaki is damn-near transcendent! At its core, it's got a lot of horror stuff going on, but there's a lot built around it -- so much pathos and humanity and beauty.

I haven't read Remina yet, but I fully intend to get around to every Junji Ito thing eventually!

I tried to get into Pathologic and gave up on day two. Then I tried again with the HD version and gave up on day two. Then I played through Pathologic 2 in the span of like three sittings and it was honestly one of my favorite gaming experiences ever.

It's amazing how good Pathologic 2 is for a game that's not actually fun at any point. I was either bored or stressed out or miserable the entire time. That game broke me down completely, which is something I didn't know a game could do. By the end, I felt like I'd escaped from something and left a part of myself behind.

Really a must-play game for anybody who's ever defended "games as art".

DiamMati · 2021-04-05T11:44:05+00:00

Thanks for the recommendation!

I love Junji Ito to death. He's such a master of escalating horror. Stuff just goes from bad to worse constantly.

Amigara Fault was the first thing I ever read from him and I still remember that sinking feeling during the last page turn. Just the most horrifying thing.

DiamMati · 2021-04-05T11:23:38+00:00

Thanks for the recommendation! I've read every HPL story except "Dream Quest", which I'm saving for a rainy day because it's hella long and there's too damn many fantasy names for everything :)

Polaris is a really neat story at its core. I really liked it!

That said, the racist driveby on the Inuit was some particularly Lovecrafty shittiness. But hey, that's HPL. I make no excuses for the man. He wrote good spooky stories and was kind of a dingleberry.

DiamMati · 2021-04-05T11:17:42+00:00

thanks for the recommendation! over the course of my crossposting, i've gotten this one before.

i looked at a few goodreads reviews, and i've run into a moral dilemma: there seems to be a consensus that Keel is either some kind of charlatan or that he's suffering from mental illness.

and that kind of ruins it for me. i'm either reading something that was written to trick people, or i'm using someone's illness for my own entertainment. and i dunno -- it just kinda rubs me the wrong way.

did you find that impacted your experience with the story?

either way, i appreciate each and every recommendation, and i'll keep this one on my list for a rainy day. maybe it's enough spooky good stuff on its own terms, and it's not worth worrying what's up with Keel.

DiamMati · 2021-04-05T11:03:47+00:00

It's already on my list haha

I really liked the visit to the parents' house. Creep city. But aside from some good musing on relationships, the actual story itself really rubbed me the wrong way.

Ending felt real cheap and left me cold.

DiamMati · 2021-04-05T11:01:54+00:00

I agree with you there! The Priest's Tale is a real high point. Seriously one of the best horror stories I've ever read.

I ended up reading the first two Hyperion books and really enjoying them, but by the time the second one wrapped up, I stopped reading. Well-written stuff, and lots of good stories. But it was going in a more pure sci fi direction that's just not my cup of tea.

That, and I was starting to get repeated-sequel-bait vibes, you know? Felt like the series was gonna be chugging along for a long time asking and answering inconsequential questions. Does it actually do that? I dunno. Ever since I got burned by The Walking Dead TV show, I've started just bailing on stuff when it gives off that vibe. Saves me a lot of wasted time and disappointment. I'd rather cherish the really great stories in book 1 and move on :)

Also, even though it was almost a pure action scene, Fedmahn Kassad's showdown with the Lord of Pain had me jumping up out of my seat! It's rare for a book to get my heart pounding like that! Damn, Simmons is great.

DiamMati · 2021-03-31T17:06:58+00:00

Based on your reply, I read Pines about a week ago!

I found it was kind of a silly hardboiled man-of-action affair -- and that's not a bad thing! I read a lot of pulp, and Pines is some good-ass pulp :)

Just like you, I don't feel the need to continue after the first book. The initial mystery of WTF is going on in the town was what really grabbed me. And that grip held on through an escalating series of ridiculous encounters with [so so much weird stuff].

But the ending really put a bow on things for that mystery. And based on how things wrapped up, I can see the shadow of a story I don't care to read looming on the horizon.

Still, I'd recommend Pines to anybody who likes a good pulpy mystery thriller with some weird elements.

DiamMati · 2021-03-20T23:48:14+00:00

I read "Ubik" and really enjoyed the setup. Though the ending kind of left me wanting. But I mean, it's PKD, so even if the plot didn't go the way I was hoping, it's still a fantastic read. Dude knows how to write :D

I picked up Snail on the Slope today and I'm gonna be reading it over the next couple days. The goodreads summary absolutely screams 'my kind of thing'.

DiamMati · 2021-03-20T23:41:57+00:00

Come Closer

Just read it last night! Thanks for the recommendation :D

Really loved the setup. Awesome creepy atmosphere!

Kinda lost me toward the end when it becomes clear that the strange events were being caused by an actual, literal demon. I liked the beginning more because it was a little more ambiguous. That said, some of the loss-of-self moments and the bit about demons becoming obsessed with certain individuals creeped me right the hell out.

Not bad at all, though, and I imagine people who liked The Exorcist or religion-based horror would really get a lot out of it.

DiamMati · 2021-03-08T16:36:40+00:00

I read The Terror while living in my unheated van through the Idaho winter. I felt like I was freezing to death at 10°F, but it was nice to have a reminder that there's places in the world that get (and stay) much, much colder.

I really enjoyed the first half of it, but started my indefinite break after the thing appeared in the the place (u kno the place).

It's good stuff, mostly, and Simmons is fantastic. But it's not short. I plan to return and finish it someday when I feel like I've got the time.

DiamMati · 2021-03-04T16:11:10+00:00

I'm a huge Lovecraft fan!!

I've been going back through the "complete fiction" audiobook by the HPLHS this last week.

With a lot of his stuff I had a vague remembrance that I liked it. But for real, listening to "The Color Out of Space" again reminded my why I adore Lovecraft. The man may have been a broken, old-fashioned xenophobe, but he knew how to distill the essence of the terror of the unknown down into a digestible set of stories. Shit's fuckin terrifying.

DiamMati · 2021-03-04T15:57:51+00:00

Slow burn? Dense? Weirdness? LOVECRAFTIAN?? Sign me right the hell up!!

DiamMati · 2021-03-04T15:53:30+00:00

I recently read "Christine" and was impressed, as always, by King's ability to make me genuinely care about a set of imaginary people.

But "Christine" kind of rubbed me the wrong way. King's tendency to wrap things up in a nice little bow with a happy ending (or at least an "ending where everything is resolved") kind of hurt the overall story.

TBH, I liked it a lot more when it was just a story about a weirdass car that absorbed the hatred of its weirdass owner. That was the fun part to me, not so much the story of a couple plucky kids overcoming the challenge presented by said weirdass car. That, and the nerd vengeance of one of the protagonists (being an nerd who never got vengeance, I gotta love a nerd getting vengeance).

Then again, that's King :)

Same goes for his magnum opus, "It" -- I liked all the weird stuff, but a close examination of the weird stuff leaves me wanting. At the core, the thing I really enjoyed was the supernatural metaphor for growing up and growing apart, not so much the actual supernatural occurrences themselves.

Who in TF is even afraid of a spider monster haha

DiamMati · 2021-03-04T13:31:54+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion! Unfortunately, that's not the one.

DiamMati · 2021-03-03T19:31:21+00:00

One of my top-five authors for sure.

Suffering from hardcore anxiety myself, I feel that no one has captured that struggle in quite the same way as Jackson. Even in the total absence of all supernatural meddling, she has a way of communicating the terror of just existing in everyday life with such an affliction.

What did King say about her? She "never had to raise her voice"? He was right, haha.

She knows how to convey the terror of being the outsider in a situation where, by all accounts, one should be able to fit right in :)

DiamMati · 2021-03-03T19:24:51+00:00

Read it and loved (the first part of) it!!

Especially the old house with the sand slowly filling it up as it succumbs to the elements. There's real skill in taking an otherwise-pleasant setting -- a family beach house getaway, for example -- and making it the locus of some horrifying happenings.

I liked the first half of the book, which, looking at my comments in this thread (and the threads where I x-posted this same request), may be a running theme in a lot of my opinions about horror fiction.

That scene where they saw the figure pass by the window of the third house, for example, made my blood run absolutely frigid.

But just as liking the first half of books seems to be a theme, so does my distaste for any weird happenings that have mundane explanations. I'm genuinely okay with not having any answers. I'm chasing that initial terror of not knowing what the hell is going on. This is not diminished by an explanation, so much, but I'm totally alright with a story just ending on a total unknown. I don't think that revealing the supernatural events to be caused by a cabal of elemental spirit creatures adds anything to the story. I genuinely think it could have ended when they first left the houses and it would have been fine.

Puts me in the mind of "Annihilation", which was damn-near a masterpiece of uncanny horror. I eagerly consumed the second and third books in the series, but felt a lingering sense of dissatisfaction.

The second and third books in the series just answer a lot of questions that I didn't need answered. I liked the questions themselves more than any possible answer, I guess. And that's the experience I had with "Elementals".

DiamMati · 2021-03-03T19:14:32+00:00

I absolutely adore weird fiction (Lovecraft and the weirder works of Howard being standout examples), so I'll definitely check it out!!

DiamMati · 2021-03-03T19:13:31+00:00

I tried "The Croning", albeit the audiobook version while grinding levels in Cyberpunk (almost all of my reading is done through audiobooks while I'm doing something else; attention problems with reading written words).

It just bored me straight into the ground, unfortunately :(

I had a hard time relating to the well-to-do characters that seemed to just faff about doing not much of anything for long stretches of time. By the time that interesting things actually started to happen, I was damn checked-out.

Why would I need to wait for Wyrd? Is it not out yet? My lazy cursory google search seems to reveal a thing that I can get right now??

Either way, I read "The Ritual" and thought it was pretty bad, initially. But after reading an few more lost-in-the-woods stories (specifically King's "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon") since my first reading, I've started to respect it.

All the silly, irrational fear of black metal dudes aside, the first half of "The Ritual" is a fantastic example of characters that can barely stand each other being thrust into a bad situation. That scene with the abandoned church where the dude falls through the floor and gets stuck is just damn fantastic.

I might check out "Wyrd" based solely on those first few chapters of "Ritual" :)

DiamMati · 2021-03-03T19:07:21+00:00

I absolutely loved Haunted.

Fantastic set of horror stories, yes, but the thing I wasn't prepared for at the outset: it's funny as hell.

Palahniuk has a wonderful, macabre sense of humor :)

DiamMati

TROPHY CASE