Fallout November

My last blog was Oct 20^th, so here’s all that’s happened since:

I switched to a different position at my job, and it’s awesome. I get paid to watch movies on Fridays, now. Also, I have some of the students that I had a long time ago, and it’s good to have them back.

I spent Halloween handing out candy and showing off my new Cerberus animatronic. It was great.

I went to a Halloween+Thanksgiving+Birthday party with a ton of people I don’t know. Sometimes I’m great at sinking into a new group, sometimes I’m awful. This time, I was OK. I chatted with my friend’s girlfriend about Mario Kart and other games, and I met a few people I’ve seen around town but never have spoken to. Also, I saw Corey of Superfun Yeah Yeah Rocketship dressed as Burt Reynolds from SNL’s parody of Celebrity Jeopardy.

BTW, if you don’t know what Superfun Yeah Yeah Rocketshipis, watch:

So awesome! I love this band. They have the best audience engagement ever.

I had dreams about farming and raising bees, Five Nights At Freddy’s haunted houses, Bloodraven from ASOIAF, and one where my house slid down a giant mudslide.

I got Fallout 4, also. It’s from my ABSOLUTELY FAVORITE game developer, Bethesda Games Studios. It’s amazing.

My mom had a birthday, and I got her a light-up Three Kings for her Nativity set.

My buddy came into town and we did some Christmas shopping. He told me about his new girlfriend, who seems to be truly awesome.

I took a paid-time-off day and began a new artistic project.

As of typing this right now, I’m about to go on a field trip to a circus with my school. I love getting paid for doing fun things. Today is going to be great. It’s only a three day week, too, as Thanksgiving is coming and then a 4-day weekend. How nice!

Anyway, I wanted to save this for the end. The Paris attacksthat happened on 11/13/15 shook the world. What an awful thing to happen to humanity. I will never understand what kind of brainwashing people who become terrorists must go through to think that mass murder is necessary. Nobody ever thinks of the terrorists, but I can’t imagine what has been done to them to twist them so badly into doing such evil. They can’t be sane any longer. I couldn’t imagine killing a person under any circumstance, much less training and being brainwashed my whole life to kill people. Paris is such a tragedy, and I wish them peace.

Thanks for keeping up with me! You can find me @Oxyborb on Twitter.

Halloween 2015

 I love Halloween.

It is how I describe my personality. I am Halloween. I am mischievous fun. I am autumn.

This year I bought a few new toys. The biggest being... Cerberus.

 He spits fog. He lights up. He barks. I love him!
Here's a video:


Cool right?

Looking forward to November

I get so excited about the Halloween season that I start it around August 20th, when the Halloween shops open. Now, I can't stop thinking about Christmas.

I know. I'm ridic. 

But November is going to rock for me. My favorite game-maker, Bethesda, is releasing Fallout 4. As a school teacher, I get Veteran's Day and Thanksgiving (+Friday) off. I took a PTO day on the 18th, as well. Meaning, I only have one 5 day week in November. Two four-dayers, and one three dayer.

There's also a field trip to a circus that Thanksgiving week, so that'll feel more like a 2-dayer. Then it's straight on until Christmas, which is 11-days of paid relaxation. HOW NICE!

But, I love Halloween. I do. It's nice that it's on a Saturday. I'm excited to wear a costume to school (I'm thinking of going as Gargamel, since I have a student that loves Smurfs). Last week, I went on a field trip to the pumpkin patch. There's nothing better than wandering around a pumpkin patch. I might go this weekend, just for fun. 

Still, November is the month I'm excited for.

In other news, last weekend I was a monster in a haunted trail for cub scouts. I do this every year, but it was still really fun. The stars were out that night. I realized that it had been a long time since I've seen them, and it was refreshing. It reminded me how small earth is, in the scope of things. How many planets and stars are out there! 

My time has been freeing up lately. I've been so, so busy since August. It's nice to be able to consider more about life than just work. I have more time for art. I began rereading Half-Blood Prince. Haha.

What I found at an indie bookseller for a dollar is... Beyond Belief

I am a crazy horror fan. Specifically, I love anything that reminds me that Halloween is coming. I also love books, so when I saw Dracula's face on this book, Beyond Belief, I had to open it up.

What I found inside was even cooler than I imagined!

It's a pop up!!!

Inside the haunted house, there's a seance going on. If you shine a light into the chimney, an apparition appears. Some sort of mirror trick! I love it!

 Big foot.

Aliens!

Dracula! On the flip side of Dracula is a bat that hangs upside down when you close the book. 

There's only 4 pages, but I think it'll make a great coffee table book. It's really fun!

You can buy it on Amazon for cheaps!  This is not a paid promotion; I just really like the book!

Halloween Decorations 2014 - The year of BONES

This year my Halloween decoration theme was BONES. I wanted to do something different than my usual, so I bought nothing but a bunch of skeletons and bone-creatures. My favorite is this little skeletal bird that I got at Target for 8 bucks! What a steal!

I also wanted an awesome full-sized skeleton, so I got a really high-quality posable one from Spirit  and stuck a sword through him. I hung a bunch of bones around the house with rope and then sprayed them with this quart of fake blood. I also love the skeletal rats I got, mostly because my novel, The Unraveler, has a skeletal rat in it!

SLENDERMAN DISASSEMBLED

This is an idea I had: Take a cool concept/character/location/object from fiction and dissect it to find out exactly why it is just SO COOL! It's sort of a short literary analysis, only without a thesis. Some of these observations are obvious, but I'm going to list them because I'm going to try and tear apart the concept into its most fundamental ingredients:

drawing by me

SLENDERMAN

The core essence of what makes him amazing:

1. His story is unknown
It's weird how a mind can create its own narrative when there isn't one immediately apparent.

2. He's partially/vaguely human
I think the most terrifying monsters have human traits because humans are afraid of what they might become if they went down the worst of life's roads.

3. He lives in the woods, but wears a freaking suit jacket
Why the suit? A forest is a terrible place to wear a suit, however the suit does make him, in a sense, more welcoming. You don't expect a professional to also be a monster. I can't really think of too many other suit-wearing creatures, can you?

4. He follows
Just the fact that he's always right behind you is frightening. He doesn't come straight at you; he waits until you're not looking.

5. He only makes the kill after he primers you with fear. The fear, to him, is like a flavor
Slender Man stories always start with a few sightings of the creature before the kill. It's like the Slender wants to be seen, like the fear builds something desirable.


6. He is slender like the trees he walks between
The forest is filled with slender life: trees. He's just the right shape to hide amongst the trunks.

7. He disappears and reappears
Teleportation is creepy because it is an unknown. It's easier to be bold against your fears when you know where they are. It's not so easy to combat fear when it can move all around you.

8. Although his limbs are long, he generally attacks with the tentacles on his back
The arms don't move much. They sway a bit, which gives Slendy an eerie effect.

9. He can cause visual distortion
Along with the fact that he can teleport away and not be seen, Slendy can also take away your visual ability. Blindness is frightening, because it causes the world to become a great unknown.

10. He can cause memory loss
Forgetting is one way to renew fear. Without your field of experiences to draw upon, the old scares from before will be fresh the next time around.

11. He inspires paranoia
Even when he's not in view, Slender Man continually makes you look over your shoulder.

12. He is often seen stalking children on a playground
Harming children is the worst kind of crime imaginable, so any monster that goes specifically for them is the worst kind.


Follow me @Oxyborb and check out my website at http://www.harrisonaye.com Thanks for reading!

Weird Dream Tattoos and Going On New Adventures

I just re-read my last entry, and I’d say that the last month has been hard. I’ve just been lonely recently. I’ve been sort of clueless as to what to do besides continue working on my novel.

I’m on a huge upswing right now, though. I decided to take some action and now I have a bunch of plans to go out into the world and do stuff over the next few weeks. I’m making plans for a hike, to go hang out with a bunch of video game nerds, and to go play some tabletop RPGs with a meetup group. I plan on going to a convention that is happening next month. I even updated my OKcupid, haha. Maybe I’ll actually man up and go on a date.
 

So, that’s the update on that. I’m doing stuff. I've lined up some adventures, and it's changed my mood in positive ways. Life moves on, hopefully gets better, you know, the human experience. It’s Halloween; I’m destined to enjoy myself more than usual. I bought a skeleton, haha. If only I could find someone to go to a haunted house with this year!

In weird dream related news (why is this becoming a thing?), I had a pretty good one the other week and I drew a picture to go with it:

"In my dream, I was tattooing a pretty girl at a state fair.

The tattoo was a centipede with a long body crawling down her back, but at the opposite end of the head was a lion. The last leg of the centipede was the lion’s reaching claw, and the lion’s tail made an S up her shoulder. On the bushy end of the tail was a tiny toy King with a sword reaching out the same direction as the lion’s claw. The woman I was tattooing kept shivering and telling me that my ink was cold.”

I wrote the words above before making the drawing. The brain is a weird place, isn’t it?

Follow me @Oxyborb and check out my website at http://www.harrisonaye.com Thanks for reading!

Budweiser’s Make Opening Day A National Holiday Campaign

Baseball makes Budweiser a ton of money. Do I need to say more? Yes? Alright…

It seems like everyone is being shuffled into another dumb viral marketing campaign. My facebook is clogged with people talking about making MLB’s Opening Day a nationally recognized holiday. Meanwhile, all of the shared links, pictures, and videos of Ozzie Smith are plastered with Budweiser, Budweiser, Budweiser.

Before you start calling me a commie, please note that I think Opening Day would be a fun sort of holiday. I love baseball. I really do. I have the STL Cardinals, and who could ask for a better team to root for? (I used to own an Ozzie Smith baseball card collection!)

brought to you by...

But the idea of a major corporation purchasing a nationally recognized holiday sickens me. It really does. Corporations already own the entire government. Political leaders might as well have endorsements sewn onto their suits to display all the companies that own them.

Do we really need for our national culture to become marketing propaganda any more than it already is? Because that’s what it will be. If Budweiser can throw money at this, purchase a national holiday, it will not be baseball’s holiday… it will be Budweiser’s.

Every year, we will have a nationally recognized holiday that will have been bought and paid for by a beer company, and they will never let us forget it.

MLK vs. BUD

I don’t want Budweiser in the same league as Martin Luther King Jr.. I don’t want to decoration for Budweiser Day the same as I do for Christmas. No. No, no nononoono.

No!

If you want opening day as a holiday, America, do it on your own terms, not a beer company’s. Please. Have some self-respect. Don’t sell out our cultural significance to marketing propaganda.

Also, opening day can’t become a holiday before Halloween.





Thanks for reading! Keep in touch; follow me on Twitter: @Oxyborb or visit my website!

No Vom Bre – Geno Cosplay, Halllow-hallow-ween, and David Ortiz

So, I went as Geno from Super Mario RPG for Halloween. Only a handful of people at the party knew who I was, but I had wanted to make this costume since I went to PAX Prime so I’m happy to have made it.

Super Mario… R! P! G! It is the only game just for me!

This was a great Halloween season, in general. I got to decorate the heck outof the yard, I went on hikes, went to three parties, finished editing the seconddraft of my novel, and went on a ghost-story telling tour with an old friend.

Life has been very good, actually. I’ve been enjoying the bachelor lifestyle. Playing video games without guilt. Spending no money whatsoever. Taking hikes. Horror movie marathons. Back in that post I wrote about divorce and stuff, I said I was excited about getting to date again. Well, to update on that, I have lost all excitement. I dated one girl for a while, and then I was done. I forgot how much work it takes to date someone, and, only being divorced a month now, I believe I have a right to enjoy a period of relaxed singledom. I disabled my OKcupid account, lol. I kept getting into conversation with girls that had a lot to offer and seemed to click with me, but I just had no follow-through whatsoever because I think I’m going through my apathetic phase. I just want to play Diablo 3 and have guy-type fun like that. I’m sure I’ll get over this, but… yeah. That’s the update on that account. 

We only got one group of trick-or-treators on Halloween. It was raining, so, it sucked. I had set up laser light machines and everything! Instead, I took the candy bowl to my neighbor’s house and offered her some M&Ms, which she took. Then she came out and handed me a little fun prize-bag filled with goodies. So, in that way, at age 27, I got to trick-or-treat. I realized that I hadn’t eaten a candy bar in a very long time. It was so good, especially after watching the movie Trick ‘R Treat (one of the best movies of all time). 

The worst part about moving back to Belleville was watching the Cardinals lose the World Series. How %$!%#$ sad! But, David Ortiz was absolutely amazing (he’s a Red Sox player, and his post-season batting average was like .799 or something). He would get on base and yell at his team to get them motivated. He smashed the crap out of almost every pitch thrown at him. What an excellent player. Even as a Cardinals fan, I have to give it up to him for being such a talented, spirited player. I wish he were on my team. But, the Sox outplayed us in the end. I have to admit that. They were on, and we were falling for their amazing pitching lineup.

Anyway, that’s my life for the past few months. Keep rocking!

Thanks for stopping by my blog!
UNRAVELSPACE UNRAVELTIME

Building a Haunted House: 5 Things I’ve Observed While Being a Visitor

It’s a HUGE dream of my wife and I’s to own and operate a haunted house someday. I’m a lover of all things horror/creepy/Halloween, and this would be the culmination of my fascination. The other day, I went to a local haunted attraction based in a mall. On the drive home, my wife and I discussed a few things we need to keep in mind when we do end up building one:

 1. Remember the ratio of time spent in one room to the number of props. 

Sometimes haunted houses are over too quickly, and that leaves the visitor with a feeling of poor value for the money they paid. The haunt I visited the other day had a classic “meat butcher” room, and the props amazed me. This room was FILLED to the brim with arms and legs and heads and other fun Halloween props. But, we were pushed through the room within a period of about 5 seconds. 

There was hardly any time to admire any of the props. Meanwhile, the haunt was VERY short (although they had a lot of unused space to work with). I realized that they could have taken 1/4^th of the props from the butcher room and hung them from ropes and make you walk through them or something. Spread out all of those props you’ve invested in! People want to see them!

hit the jump for more!