Bag of treats

Happy All Hallow's Eve! To celebrate, here is an assortment of dark, goth, eerie, fantastic, morbid, and spooky links. Enjoy!

Blogs:

Deviled Ham is a great blog featuring all devils, all the time. Vintage art and new showing the devil in all sorts of guises.

Zombie Eat Brains is a very funny personal journal straight from the brain of a very hungry zombie with a one-track mind.

Animation:

Day Off the Dead at AtomFilms, the romantic adventures of a skeleton in the Land of the Dead.




Spook, a short, cute animation about a little ghost girl who wants her teddy bear.




Tales of the Scarecrow, a Flash animation about a kid who messes with a scarecrow and gets in a lot of trouble.




Eat Your Peas, a scary tale about a reluctant boy and a plateful of evil peas.




The Tell-Tale Heart, the 1953 animated classic retelling of Poe's tale of horror. Beautiful film.




Lenore: The Cute Little Dead Girl, a twisted series from the mind of Roman Dirge.




Neurotically Yours, an animated series about a jaded goth girl and her hyperactive some-kind-of-creature (cat? Squirrel?) sidekick.




Art:

The Monster Engine is a neat site where artist Dave Devries takes children's drawings of monsters and turns them into fully-rendered, realistic monster portraits.




The Unfortunate Animal of the Month Club is one of the cool features at Morbid Tendencies, a site chock full of dark, morbid sculptures and other art, often using ex-live things as material. For a fee, the artist will send you your very own Unfortunate Animal, a plush toy subjected to any of a number of freakish, unfortunate mutilations and metamorphoses. Personally, I like the aliens.




Games:

HALLOWEEN, a cute kids' flash game in which you must explore a haunted house and save your family, who have been turned into pumpkins. In French only.




Daelindor: The Dark Castle is a short exploration game in html format.

On a hike through the foothills of some ancient mountains on the Continent, you and your friends venture into a dark and silent forest. Quite unexpectedly, you find yourself in the midst of long-forgotten ruins - the remnants of an age-old castle.

While your friends play hide-and-seek between the broken and overgrown walls, you suddenly slip and slide down into a ravine. As you get back onto your feet, you find yourself in front of the gaping entrance to an old mine...




Virtual Curry's Haunted Castle is a Halloween-themed romp through a typical haunted house, with cheesy sound effects and all. Cute and fun.




In The Dead Case, you are a ghost who has lost his memory, and you must investigate to discover what has happened.




Cauchemars: Les aventures is another cute kids' flash game in which you are a young boy who must make it through the frightening landscape of the nightmare world. In French only.




Jinx Episode 1: "Dark and Stormy Night" is yet another very cute Halloween-themed game. You are a little kid in a ghost costume exploring a spooky mad scientist's house. The game is pretty simple, but fun.




For more, you may wish to visit some of my previous posts:

The original collection of Dark animation

More spooky games in Abandoned places, Five haunted houses, and Protect the harvest!

There now. Like a bulging bag of Halloween candy, that should be plenty of goodies to last you the rest of the year!

Reviews and interviews

I turned up this bunch of links that have been mouldering in the folder for some time -- several interesting articles and conversations by and with cool people about the latest in sci-fi, fantasy and fairy tales. Enjoy.

TIME recently had a very nice interview with Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman about their new movies out, Serenity and Mirrormask, as well as Firefly, Neil's new book Anansi Boys, and geek culture going mainstream.

TIME: I almost miss the stigma that used to attach to these things. Now everybody's into Tolkien. And I feel a little like, hey, I've been into that stuff my whole life. And in fact, you used to beat me up for it.

JW: I miss a little of that element, the danger of, oh, I'm holding this science fiction magazine that's got this great cover. There a little bit of something just on the edge that I'm doing this. That's pretty much gone. Although when I walk into a restaurant with a stack of comic books, I still do get stared at a little bit.

NG: I always loved, most of all with doing comics, the fact that I knew I was in the gutter. I kind of miss that, even these days, whenever people come up and inform me, oh, you do graphic novels. No. I wrote comic books, for heaven's sake. They're creepy and I was down in the gutter and you despised me. 'No, no, we love you! We want to give you awards! You write graphic novels!' We like it here in the gutter!

JW: We've been co-opted by the man.

In the Slate article "Fairy Tales in the Age of Terror: What Terry Gilliam helps to remind us about an ancient genre", folklorist Maria Tatar uses Brothers Grimm as a jumping-off point to consider the role of fairy tales in the modern world.

A film about fairy tales and about the two men who collected the traditional German tales that migrated across the Atlantic to become part of our folklore, The Brothers Grimm delivers a startling reminder that the narratives started out as adult entertainment—violent, bawdy, melodramatic improvisations that emerged in the evening hours, when ordinary chores engaged the labor of hands, leaving minds free to wander and wonder. Fairy tales, John Updike has proposed, were the television and pornography of an earlier age—part of a fund of popular culture (including jokes, gossip, news, advice, and folklore) that were told to the rhythms of spinning, weaving, repairing tools, and mending clothes. The hearth, where all generations were present, including children, became the site at which miniature myths were stitched together, tales that took up in symbolic terms anxieties about death, loss, and the perils of daily life but also staged the triumph of the underdog.

Salon has an interview with "Fantastic friends" Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I will read as soon as I can get my hands on it. They discuss their friendship, their respective books, the elusiveness of an authentic English fairy tradition, and the nebulousness of the fantasy genre.

Do you make this material up or do you go back to the folklore?

S.C.: I do go back to the folklore and to Katharine Briggs. That's the only bit of the magic in "Strange & Norrell" that I really researched. English folk tales and fairy beliefs are very fragmentary. Scottish, Irish and Welsh are a bit more developed. They have more remnants to pick at. Obviously, though, you also pick out stories from books you've read as a child. So I can't say I've been absolutely strict about it. It's just what's useful at the moment.

Do you think it's the lack of a developed folk tradition that spurs the imaginations of British writers?

N.G.: We don't know! We can lie, though. We're writers.

S.C.: That's the theory I'm beginning to come up with.

N.G.: It gets really interesting when you start trying to look for English folk tales. You wind up in places like the Appalachians, reading the Jack stories. Except the Jack stories in the Appalachians have no magic. It's all gone. So you think, well, they were telling these stories in England and the king in them would have been a real king, not the rich man at the other end of the road. Reading any book of English folk tales, what you're mostly struck by is the grumblings of the people who in the 19th century went out on the road trying to collect them and discovered that all they had was bits of stuff that had come over from [the Brothers] Grimm or [Charles] Perrault that people had been reading and passing on.

Lots of good stuff. That's all for today.

Even more Samorost-style games

(Previously on Blue Tea: Six cool Samorost-style games.)

Vestibular Unisinos is a strange little Brazilian flash game in which you must reunite a stray school desk with a group of its fellows in a series of unlikely settings. Like other games of this type, you must click on different elements on the screen to make things happen. I'm not really sure why this game exists -- I think it's something about promoting university admissions tests. It's quite a nice game, really.
Portugese only, so get your help and hints at Nordinho.




Save the Kiddo is another classic Samorost-style game from the creator of Sangar Sabriina and Sabrina in North Pole. There's only one level, but it's nicely done.
There's a link at the top of the page to the site's own forum, with hints.




Under One's Wing, also referred to as Shanabea (I think that's actually the creator's name), is a very lovely game. It is reminiscent of Shift in the way you must progress by making a forest grow and move bit by bit. The game has several levels, all of them gorgeous, and there's more to it than just random clicking. There are hidden spots which you must unlock for a different ending, and if you just move along to the next level as fast as possible, you'll miss them. The game is in Japanese only, so the plot is a mystery -- but it's so nice to look at.
Get help at the game's post at lazylaces.




The Foonbox Arcade at Foon.co.uk boasts a couple of excellent games, Hapland and its sequel Hapland 2. Both are single-level games, but they are quite complex, and have the interesting feature that a single wrong move will doom you, requiring you to reset and try again. There is also Escape from Rhetundo Island, which is a slightly different kind of game requiring quick reflexes and precise timing rather than reflection and puzzle-solving. Frustratingly, a mistake at any level in this game will require you to replay all levels, and many trials are usually required to solve a level. But I throw it out there for the sake of completeness.
Here are some links to help you along: Hapland walkthrough; Hapland 2 walkthrough; Milkandcookies thread on Escape from Rhetundo Island.




Industry is a cute game inspired by Hapland. A very fun, nicely done game with the same cleverness and sense of humor as the Hapland series. Originally only four levels, a bonus fifth level was added later -- unfortunately, I've only been able to locate walkthroughs for the first four (here). And I'm stuck.
UPDATE 07/15/06: That link is no good. Here is a complete Industry walkthrough with all five levels, located at Flashtrofe, the creator's website.




Up next: Interactive eye candy.

Least ambitious advertising slogan ever

Proudly painted onto the van of a local landscaping company:

"We Return All Phone Calls"

Moral: If you set your standards low enough, success is almost inevitable.

The measure of a blog

Based on AOL's recent purchase of Weblogs Inc. ($25-$40 million), some people are attempting to calculate the worth of any given blog based on Technorati stats.

Thus, by some accounts:

My blog is worth $10,161.72.
How much is your blog worth?

Via This Blog Will Be Deleted By Tomorrow.

Alternatively, instead of being turned into dollars, my blog can be rendered as a beautiful plant (click to enlarge):





OrganicHTML offers little in the way of introduction or explanation, but apparently it renders different aspects of a webpage as various plant parts, incorporating the colors of the page design. I wish I knew what some of the things were, like the little spinning flower stalks, but I'm guessing that the abundant flowering branches represent outgoing links, with which this blog is pretty well endowed.

For comparison, my Blurty, which is trying to crawl away:





And my poor little website, which apparently died.





Via scribblingwoman.

Protect the harvest!

Two funky experimental-type Flash games involving warding off unwelcome agricultural pests.

Wombat Tale is a curious sort of non-game. It's 1953, and you are a Russian farmer's son trying to bring in the meager tomato harvest while a gang of freeloading Australian wombats, lured by the promise of delicious, easy food, gobble up all the fruit of your labor. It is especially bad because you move very, very slowly, and can only carry two tomatoes at a time. The game has been interpreted as a commentary on communism, and as a parody of the adventure game genre, as you toil slowly through a seemingly impossible task. There is a way, though.

Hint: don't ignore the fallen tomatoes on the ground. The game has a few bugs which can screw things up. If the farmer retreats to the middle ground and doesn't go offscreen, the wombats won't appear and the game can't be completed. Also, if you harvest all the tomatoes, no more will appear and you will have to restart. And while the character does move slowly -- intentionally so -- I found that he picked up a tiny bit of speed if I decreased the graphic quality. A pity, because this game's imaginative, stylish graphics are what make the whole thing worthwhile.

There is a little useful information in the comments on the game's post at lazylaces, but the tips I've given above should be enough for anyone to finish the game.




A little more engaging is A Murder of Scarecrows at The Skeleton Shop (enter the site and click "play" in the bottom right corner). This is a very nicely done arcade game with Burtonesque, gothic graphics in which you must chase off crows by flinging seeds at the scarecrows to get them to wave their arms around and fend off the birds. If left unmolested for too long, the crows will destroy the scarecrows. It's a clever and fun game mechanic. Don't forget to turn the sound on to get some nice goth music playing.
Via Infocult.

Things that don't go

Car #1 (mine): suddenly having problems starting, will start only by pumping gas; stalls whenever brakes are applied.

Car #2 (mother's): vibrates steadily at speeds below and violently at speeds above 45 mph; will smooth out after several miles of uninterrupted driving, only to recommence cycle once brakes are applied or steering wheel turned to the right; front left wheel heats rapidly; something terribly wrong with brakes.

Body: wracked with allergies, manifested as runny nose and explosive sneezes; refills of required medication withheld for months by multiple doctors pending costly office visits.

Cat: both rear feet badly burned following contact with heated stovetop, foot pads blistered and intermittently bleeding; cat retreating to cabinets to hide and nurse his wounds; prognosis uncertain, fear of possible future infection.

Wish me luck.

Time to unload quizzes

I may as well get it over with. If you hate quizzes, avert your eyes.

I'll start with the short and easy ones:

You are elegant, withdrawn, and brilliant. Your mind is a weapon, able to solve any puzzle. You are also great at poking holes in arguments and common beliefs. For you, comfort and calm are very important. You tend to thrive on your own and shrug off most affection. You prefer to protect your emotions and stay strong.

The World's Shortest Personality Test

You are Rerun!

Which Peanuts Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla




You are 'Gregg shorthand'. Originally designed to
enable people to write faster, it is also very
useful for writing things which one does not
want other people to read, inasmuch as almost
no one knows shorthand any more.

You know how important it is to do things
efficiently and on time. You also value your
privacy, and (unlike some people) you do not
pretend to be friends with just everyone; that
would be ridiculous. When you do make friends,
you take them seriously, and faithfully keep
what they confide in you to yourself.
Unfortunately, the work which you do (which is
very important, of course) sometimes keeps you
away from social activities, and you are often
lonely. Your problem is that Gregg shorthand
has been obsolete for a long time.

What obsolete skill are you?
brought to you by Quizilla


This is a really neat quiz with a lot of interesting results, but unfortunately, I couldn't get any of them. I cheated a tiny bit because I am simply not juggling.

And now the large and complex OkCupid quizzes. The political chart in particular has been pretty popular lately.

Pure Nerd 69 % Nerd, 43% Geek, 39% Dork

For The Record: A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia. A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one. A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions. You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd. The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and tendences associated with the "dork." No-longer. Being smart isn't as socially crippling as it once was, and even more so as you get older: eventually being a Pure Nerd will likely be replaced with the following label: Purely Successful. Congratulations! THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 80% on nerdiness You scored higher than 61% on geekosity You scored higher than 64% on dork points

Link: The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test written by donathos on OkCupid Free Online Dating

You are a Social Liberal (70% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (23% permissive) You are best described as a: Democrat Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid

That's all. Content later, I swear.

Stuff or nonsense?

I've just come across a couple of very cool quizzes at Reverent.org. They aren't lame personality tests, they're simple quizzes with two answer choices, in which you must distinguish between something that is famous or great and something that is fake, obscure, or just bad. I only missed one on the "True art or a fake?" quiz, and got progressively worse from there. I only got 50% on "Great Prose or Crap?" which pits Charles Dickens against Edward Bulwer-Lytton*...a statistically likely result for mere guessing. And I think it got worse after that. Those with good eye can try "True art or a fake?" and "Famous or unknown artist?", the musically inclined can attempt "Mozart or Salieri?" and "MIDI or Virtuoso?", and literary folks can do "An artist or a hack?" and "Machine translation or Faulkner?"
Via A Sweet, Familiar Dissonance.

These remind me of another fun quiz I posted a while back, Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer?

Good luck.

*Edward Bulwer-Lytton is the inspiration for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest to write the worst first sentence of a novel, and the Lyttle Lytton Contest, the same thing in 25 words or less. (Side note -- I had known of and admired the Lyttle Lytton for some time when I discovered that its creator was someone whom I had recently met and worked with. My mind was just a little blown. Especially when I browsed the rest of his site and saw all the interesting stuff he's into.)

Six Myst-style adventures

These are all first-person adventure games more or less in the style of Myst, meaning that they are all concerned primarily with exploration and discovery, and preferably take place outdoors and are not room-escapers. This is not true for all of them, but they're all very nice games, whatever kind they are.

Terra Realms is a nice little exploration game in classic slideshow format. The first installment online is a plug for the other two episodes, but as always, you can enjoy it on its own. The puzzles are simple, but generally decent. The game site provides its own hints and walkthrough.




Vastáre is another short game with some attractive scenery. Using your senses and objects you find, you must solve puzzles to unlock four different worlds and escape.
There is a walkthrough at the Adventure Games Unlimited forum.




Locus is a simple but very nice-looking game in QuickTime VR. It is extremely short, with easy puzzles like matching and memory games, but its main attraction is as interactive VR art. The game is available to play online, and there is a higher-quality, full-screen version to download. As far as I can tell, the telescope is the end of the game...I can't find anything beyond that to click on, though there's no definitive ending to indicate it's over. If you find something else, let me know.




Kharon4a is a very cool game. It has a sophisticated interface, character selection, an interesting storyline, and multiple endings. You are exploring the four rooms of a futuristic genetics lab in an attempt to save a friend. Along the way you have to learn facts about genetics and DNA, and the workings of your world. The game has a dark, gritty atmosphere, and is accompanied by an appropriately eerie soundtrack. The game is available in both English and Norwegian.
There is a walkthrough at Orgdot.




Archipelago is a nice game by designer Wooly Thinking, which also brings us
Return to the Archipelago and the very cool abstract puzzle game The Dark Room. In Archipelago, you navigate a sizeable panoramic 3-d world to explore an island chain and try to find your way off after a shipwreck. The scenery is made up of simple flash drawings, and the bright, sunny islands have a certain cartoony charm. The game provides its own walkthrough and other documentation.




One Time Never is an interesting and unusual game. Apparently dreaming, you wander aimlessly into encounters with various creatures that you must pass by answering riddles and solving puzzles. Failure to evade traps will cost you life points. Nice locations and jazzy music set the tone for your journey.
There is a walkthrough in the lazylaces forum.




Two of the games that I most wanted to post in today's category no longer exist. Faradise, a game puzzlingly produced by Fa, maker of bath products, was one of the best online adventures I've ever played -- lots of intriguing locations, beautiful graphics, lovely music, interesting puzzles, and a bit of a story -- and now it's gone without a trace. My point is, it's already been created, so what's the harm in keeping it online? But no. Also Endsequence, a great adventure game with really cool visuals which for some reason now only exists in the Hungarian. I have a similar complaint about this game -- the English version was made, so why is it no longer online? I left a pleading message in the guestbook, and maybe if you do the same the creator will consider reinstating it. Or you could just muddle through the Hungarian, which I suspect I may give up and attempt someday.

While I'm at it, I should post some game-site related news... there is a new category in the blogroll called "Online Games" which currently includes Little Fluffy Industries, which daily posts links to all kinds of online games, usually flash puzzles and other great little time-suckers; and lazylaces, which comes up often in my search results for me to know that it was some people with a bit of interest in adventure games, but which I didn't realize until today was a great blog that posts loads of treasures all the time, online games as well as other exciting things.

Also, I've learned that the reason I couldn't access Nordinho, my main resource for adventure game links and walkthroughs, was because they've moved: it's now Nordinho.net, not Nordinho.com. This means that I'll have to change all those walkthrough links in my previous game posts. I won't do that right now, but soon. For now, I have changed the link in the sidebar.

I have also added one new adventure game forum to the list: Adventure Games Unlimited.

And that's all. Next: Even More Samarost-style Games.

Subterranean splendor

Metro Bits is a very nice site celebrating the world's subway systems. You can browse world metro lists, compare logos, and see metros with a view, but the section that really can't be missed is the one on Metro Arts and Architecture, featuring photos of beautiful metro stations from around the world. The picture below is a of station in Munich.




Moscow Metro boasts "the biggest photo collection on the web" of Moscow's impressively opulent subway system. K and I have often discussed the pros and cons of aesthetically pleasing subway architecture, and he would always tell me about the surpassing extravagance of Moscow's subways...I could never imagine what it was like until I saw these pictures. The site features beautiful panoramic images of twenty amazing stations around Moscow.




Then, of course, there are maps. Animals on the underground is a great site displaying images of animals traced out on the lines of the London Underground map. In addition to the pictures themselves, they have desktops, games, and merchandise. The elephant below is perhaps their most classic creation.




A more recent discovery is that this same trick can be performed with maps of Germany's various subways: Zoobahnplan is the colorful result. The site is in German only, but it shouldn't matter.