Welcometo Day 27! I originally was going to do a list of the best horror movie opening scenes. However, I was struggling a little bit with that article. I started getting back into South Park recently and as I was rewatching the show, I was enjoying all of the horror references and homages. So, I wanted to discuss all of my favorite horror parodies from the show!
Using the Estes Method, the team encounters two different spirits who will only communicate through Dash. One is dubbed Gay Director Ghost and seems playful as they check out the theatre area of the building. Another seems more sinister and leaves Dash feeling uneasy. I also find this ghost encounter interesting. The entity seems to misread Dash, who is trans and non-binary, as someone who would enjoy misogynistic games with Fox and Rosa. He has Dash tell their teammates to get on the ground while giving Dash hints of shitty male energy. I wish this had been explored more because it raises interesting questions about how the old, and gleefully problematic, interpret the gender binary. When the documentary headed to the rural south, we expected the microaggressions to come from the living. So, this was a surprise and has stuck with me since I watched it the first time.
In 1988, as a result of an accidental drowning, my sister died only a week away from her third birthday. Fifteen months later, I was born into that grief. I had an acute awareness of death from my earliest memories.
Every year on her birthday, we gathered to open the chest full of her things. We passed around her toys and her clothes while my parents told us stories about each one: the floppy purple stuffed cat she should have received as a birthday gift, the white Popple with the yellow hair, her bendable Gumby and Pokey figurines.
In elementary school, I treated that grief like a fun fact. It was one of the first things I told people upon introducing myself, because I thought it made me sound interesting: I had a sister who died.
My dad always liked to put on a show for the neighborhood kids on Halloween night. It was our family tradition to take one of his horror movie SFX tapes and put it over the loudspeakers in the garage with the door cracked and lights flickering. Anyone who walked up our driveway heard knives scraping, monsters growling, women screaming, and chainsaws revving.
I turned to horror. What fictional fear could compare to my real anxieties? I desperately wanted something that could scare me badly enough to make my troubles feel small, even if just for a moment. I read Pet Sematary under the covers with a flashlight in the dark.
While Robby endured a series of brain surgeries, I disappeared into the pages of Stephen King novels, or creature features like Jaws and Jurassic Park where the danger lurking around the corner was something tangible. Being devoured by a shark in a frothing whirlpool of blood and guts seemed preferable to losing someone to the invisible grip of disease. At least when you close the book, the shark is gone.
The seizures came back. Sometimes a cluster of them would strike for hours on end, so powerful that he would need to be knocked out with hospital-grade sedatives. Robby described the feeling like an invisible force yanking his arm and dragging him to the floor. The best we could do was hold his head in our lap while he grunted, keep him from falling down or knocking into anything too hard, and count the seconds or minutes until it ended.
Carrie Lee South writes stories to keep you awake at night. Her work has appeared in Opus Comics, Tales to Terrify, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Dread Machine, diet milk, and elsewhere. She is working on her first novel. Read more at
carrieleesouth.com
I glanced at my watch. I had abandoned my family in a Western-style department store owned by a chewing gum company, skipped lunch, and spent the better part of an hour navigating color-coded subway lines until I managed to arrive at Sinyongsan Station. I had just under an hour and a half to find this flea market of dreams and get back to my hotel in time to catch a taxi to the airport, ideally reuniting with my wife and children at some point before I left the country.
And there I stopped. This is where my sherpa blog fell silent. Rows of sketchy vendors selling decrepit flip phones by the pound stretched down the street before me. The key landmark in this area, a giant Playstation billboard, was nowhere to be seen. To my right a man was selling printers of all shapes and sizes, similar only in that each was built before the invention of USB. He had them stacked like skulls at the border of his stall.
The billboard, it turned out, was right in front of me. It had been stripped of its Playstation advertisement and stood naked against the side of the building, identifiable only by the thin metal frame that surrounded it. Nestled below it, as promised by the outdated blog post to which I had pinned my dreams and possibly my future, stood a little unmarked door.
Video Game Alley is less of an alley and more like a narrow hallway, a gauntlet of five-foot stalls holding tables jam-packed with plastic game boxes. At 1 PM on a weekday it was deserted. Many of the stalls were empty, covered in black cloth. In a few, middle aged women snoozed in their chairs, barely visible behind great stacks of CD cases. I was the only customer in the entire place.
I could tell you about finding the game, waiting for the man to call the owner of the closed stand, and paying about $30 for it. I could tell you about how the middle aged women all woke up and stared as I left with my prize, probably wondering what single game could drive a clueless tourist into their domain. I could tell you that, as I left Video Game Alley, I realized that the massive Yongsan Station is literally across the street. I could tell you about getting home, booting Mystic Nights, and playing for about ten minutes before consigning it to the pile of unfinished horror games that I keep telling myself I will complete someday.
I can definitively tell how you feel. Searching for a video game store in a foreign country is usually a thrilling experience, words are hard to convey the sensation of walking through the narrow street, wondering if the coordinates you got through google maps on your phone are the correct ones. Or if it is still there and not closed down in the past few months. It is part of the fun
While World of Horror opens up into a whole world of horror, the core gameplay loop is actually quite simple. Dropped into unknown peril, your initial options are limited. For the scissor ghost case, you can click a button to search a random room in the school in an attempt to find the supplies for a banishment ritual. Each time you search one of these rooms, a random event triggers. These events either force you to pick one of several options, pass a skill check, or fight a monster. Combat is pretty simple, allowing you to combine a series of attacks, buffs, and defensive maneuvers into a single combo. Each skill you use has a point cost, which can be strung together into anything less than 201. You roll some dice, thwack back and forth, and hopefully make it out alive.
North and South Horror Rocks are two formations in the Hall of Horrors area of Joshua Tree National Park, California.
Because North and South Horror Rock formations are very close to each other, I have decided to integrate them into one page. These two formations constitute the closest rocks in a small complex of rocks that make up an area known as Hall of Horrors. Even though this area is a bit of a drive from the main climbing areas in Joshua Tree, they get plenty of attention and traffic by climbers.
I have written about one of the most popular routes in Joshua Tree called Lazy Day in the past. During the Joshua Tree peak climbing season, you would be hard pressed to find no climbers on Lazy Day and that is due to its low difficulty level. Lazy Day is located on the South Horror Rock and is highly recommended. The North and South Horror Rocks, however, have a lot more to offer than Lazy Day. Prior to the 1990s there were only half of a dozen routes on these formations. Except for one, all of the old routes followed the line of least resistance that were usually the crack systems. During the past two decades, however, many more bolted face routes have appeared on both of these formations.
Of all of the routes established on the North and South Horror Rocks, Lazy Day, rated 5.7, remains the easiest line up either formation. On the north face of the South Rock, you will find one of the best face routes of its grade in Joshua Tree. This is Dog Day Afternoon, rated 10b. Dog Day Afternoon climbs an exposed bolted face with an intimidating initial moves. This route stays in the shade for most of the day and has its own bolted anchor. In the more recent years more bolted face routes have appeared in the vicinity of Dog Day Afternoon.
If you are a competent 5.11 climber, you will find one of the best routes of this grade on the South Horror Rock. This route is called Cactus Flower, rated 11b, and it's located just to the right of Lazy Day. You can also easily top rope the crux of Cactus Flower from the Lazy Day Anchor bolts. If you have an easy time with Cactus Flower, try the direct start to this climb. It's by far more difficult.
The North Horror Rock has had its own share of history. Most of the crack systems in this area are located on the back side, west face of the North Rock, with the exception of one route. This exception is a crack that climbs straight up a curving horizontal crack on an overhang/bulge on the south face. This route is called Grit Roof, rated 10c. The first ascent of Grit Roof goes to the late Tobin Sorenson, one of the icons of his period, 1970s. Sorenson had a colorful history, one of which was connected to this route. Not knowing if the story is true or just a fiction, I'll spare you the details.
A personal Note: On my last visit to this area I witnessed an interesting development. A team of climbers had set up a slackline between the two North and South Horror Rocks and were walking across between the two formations. Although most of the climbers in this group were walking the line with a safety leash, there was one that didn't use any safety system of any kind. The practice of walking on a chain or inch-wide webbing only two feet off the ground has seen a mind-blowing evolution. The only question that remains is, what comes next, I wonder!
3a8082e126