Ross: Ok, why is Grace Jones so fucking creepy? Qais: I think she and Seal are vampires. Qais: Maybe aliens? Ross: Grace Jones could be an alien, Ross: or a robot constructed by aliens. Qais: Dude Seal is totally an alien, Qais: or a vampire. Qais: I’m ok with either, really. Ross: I hadn’t thought about Seal, to be honest. Qais: Oooh! Qais: Maybe they’re alien vampires! Ross: … Ross: Maybe.
When they aren’t walking in slow motion to a techno soundtrack, looking bored at shows, or crafting spells to finally show that jerk Brad who’s boss these precocious gothlets fight prejudice and inequality wherever it can be found. Sadly, not everyone understands the hardships of being spooky and fighting for the right to be taken seriously while looking like a complete jackass.
The goth wonder twins were ejected from a bus (the enormous leathery bat wings with which they usually travel being in the shop) due to the lead the the more feminine of this fearsome duo (the one with less clothes on in case you’re wondering) is led around the streets of West Yorkshire. Citing a strict “No dogs allowed” (do you see what he did there?!) policy, the bus driver refused to take on any more passengers or move the bus any further until the gothlets took a powder from the virtuous and wholesome people’s public transportation.
I’m strangely torn, on one hand I support the bus driver’s decision simply because of the atrocious taste these youngsters display with zeal. More people should catch a little humiliation for nancing around in an unoriginal costume they put no thought into whatsoever. On the other hand, at no point did the bus driver inquire whether Gothy McCliche was using his young paramour as a service animal; a seeing eye goth as it were. Think about it, if you saw these two out and about would it really be that much of a stretch to assume blindness as the source of their fashion woes?
Paramount Studios released a series of shorts between 1932 and 1934 under the umbrella title of Hollywood on Parade in which they exhibited nearly every star they had in their stables singing, dancing, or playacting. In this particular clip, from 1933, Mae Questel gives a rare on screen performance as Betty Boop, the animated minx she voiced for eight years. She’s set do a song routine with a couple of mannequins but Béla Lugosi, revisting his role as Dracula, cuts the performance a bit short, proclaiming, “Betty, you have booped your last boop.”
I know what you’re thinking. How could “What is Love” have anything to do with monsters or anything even remotely creepy outside of a rapidly bloating, sweat drenched club-kid in polyester? Apparently, only myself and a few select initiates share the secret of Haddaway. The video for “What is Love” features the aforementioned artiste as the desperate victim to a trio of female vampires brimming with early 90’s sensuality, whose fishnet and leather clad cabal he eventually joins. Now go forth and spread the gospel of Haddaway my ectomites of the night.
This video (and stupidly enjoyable track) must have cost at least a cool million, but the Backstreet Boys didn’t care. They were riding high on Lou Perlman’s buggery adoration, they had legions of teenage girls at their beck and call, and it was the nineties, so nobody bothered telling them (to their faces) how stupid they looked, acted, and sounded.
When you’re that rich, that vaunted, and that young, what can you do? Why, a Thriller rip-off that will live in infamy for a chosen few, of course. Namely, me and the rest of the malcontents who were impressionable youth during that cursed era.
And by impressionable, I mean we thought backflipping werewolves were pretty much the golden apex of comedy. We still think that.
Why am I posting this on Cthursday? Pay attention to the gangly gentleman in the deceptively intellectual glasses, with the briefcase and the obsession with staring away from the camera at exactly a ninety-degree angle. I assume he’s supposed to be some sort of Jekyll/Hyde manifestation, but his bifurcation is less monstrous than it is piscean. My hypothesis is that some concept artist snuck that one past the board, giggling into his dog-eared copy of the Compleat Works of Lovecraft the while.
But I don’t think backflipping werewolves had to be snuck past anyone.
El Guardian Invisiblo: an invisible Mexican superhero who punches out skeletons, vampires and mummies with his transparent but curiously outlined fists of fury. With El Guardian Invisiblo, every punch is a sucker punch.
Unhallowed Metropolis is the tabletop roleplaying game of retropostapocalyptic horror that I’ve been working on for the past couple years. The process has been arduous, the art draining, the photography persnickety, and the entire concept so ludicrously appealing that I did it anyway.
It has been two hundred years since first the outbreak of the Plague, when without warning the dead rose to feed on the flesh of the living. […]
Seventy percent of the world’s population succumbed to the Plague, secondary epidemics, or the mass starvation that followed.
The year was 1905; it was the dawn of a new dark age.
In the following decades, the survivors to learned to fight back and to retake what they had lost. Recalling the golden age that had come before, the Neo-Victorians set out to rebuild their shattered nation. […]
London 2105. The capitol of the Neo-Victorian Empire is a vast, densely crowded city surrounded by fortifications fifty-feet high. The dead walk the Wastelands beyond the walls, and spontaneous outbreaks of the Plague ravage the population within. It is only through constant vigilance and massed firepower that order is maintained.
I heard recently from Jason Soles, one of the writers and project heads (the other being Nicole Vega) that the first UnMet book will be released at GenCon Indy, a gigantic gaming convention in Indianapolis. I will probably be in attendance to sign and shmooze, we’ll be hawking books and prints, and you’ll finally get to see what the hell we’ve been posting about for the past however many months.
Alas, this kind of smoldering, masculine beauty is on the decline.
Were beautiful Bela to grow a three-day beard, don a pair of hornrimmed specs, and jauntily tilt a foam trucker’s cap on a shaggy hipster ‘do, he’d be indistinguishable from the rest of the numbnut young bucks that choke every gathering spot for people my age. My kingdom for a decadent foreigner to stare at once in a while.
Brownlee doesn’t count, the whore chokes my inbox with webcam photos every time he gets a haircut or a new fez. What he doesn’t know is that I immediately submit them to my local child molester listings, usually after shopping in a luxuriant moustache.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
