What particularly intrigues me is that the clowns increasingly tend to be spotted on the edge of the forest. The forest is traditionally the place where the supernatural exists. Our European folklore has magical people that live in the forest, who frighten young children. So in other words, the clowns hover on the border between the natural and the supernatural.
We live in a very stiff era, where we're looking for a trickster figure who can shake up the established order that's failing to work. The creepy clowns are quite literally possessed by Loki, or Anansi, or whatever name your culture has for this phenomenon. They are the collective manifestation of our subconsciousness that the supernatural takes in an era that has a strong yearning for an external source of disruption that allows it to shake off its pathological routines that it finds itself too handicapped to shake off in a conscious manner.
The SCP Foundation is a website where members can submit descriptions of... well, the site carefully keeps this undefined, but it's all weird scary stuff. You might want to start with top rated pages.
Leigh Ann and I have been watching smart horror films, and we really liked Ghostwatch, a fake TV paranormal investigation that caused a panic during its only broadcast in 1992, and inspired the less imaginative Blair Witch Project. The writer of Ghostwatch, Stephen Volk, also wrote a 2011 ghost movie called The Awakening. We watched that and The Orphanage, a 2007 Spanish film with a similar story. I thought The Orphanage was scarier and better directed but The Awakening was better written and more of a head trip.
I'm moderately bipolar and have become very aware of when I become hypomanic. High energy, drive, sleeplessness, grandiosity, a compulsion to talk a lot, and extraordinary self esteem are definitely part of it. At my highest levels of hypomania, I was driven towards a goal where I felt like it was the singular purpose that my whole life was converging towards, I was the one person in the world that could best accomplish it, and it was something the world desperately needed. That is certainly Trump right now.
4) Hillary Clinton has her own tragic flaw. She cannot let go of the belief that people at the top deal with truths that ordinary idiots can't handle. That's why she hid her emails, not because she was using power selfishly, but because she believed she was using power for the greater good in ways that she does not trust you and me know about. In the age of Wikileaks and Russian hackers, Hillary's Nixon-like obsession with keeping secrets is likely to bring her down, because if she does something even a little bit shady, and it comes out, it's going to look like she was trying to cover it up.
]]>Imagine a theatre where the author dictates the speed at which the actors should read each sentence, and how loudly each word should be read, the length of each word and the tonal character of the voice of the actor.
On to my usual weekend subject, drugs and music: High Hitler is an article about a new book, Blitzed, and the close relation between Nazi Germany and powerful stimulants. German chemists invented methamphetamine, and soldiers all took it so they could stay awake for three days and nights and invade France. Hitler himself was addicted to cocaine and oxycodone, and Mussolini was getting the same drugs from the same doctor. At the end, on top of losing the war, they were all going through withdrawal.
Anyone on cannabis will enjoy this video, Minecraft Acid Interstate V2. I hate the music, but I love how the video is synchronized to the music, with the stone things passing exactly on the beats. It shouldn't be too hard to make software that can take any music and go farther, with different kinds of trees and buildings matching different instruments and vocals.
And some better music. Diane Coffee is the stage name of Shaun Fleming. He's a good songwriter and performs with an energy that's going to make him much more famous than he is now. I think his strongest song is WWWoman, and here's a live performance (at 14:05) of his prettiest song, Green.
In honor of Hurricane Matthew, here's a video I made in 2014 using footage of Typhoon Haiyan, and a live graphic mapping its location and wind speeds.