THE OCEAN WASHED OPEN YOUR GRAVE
Beach Life-in-Death, Car Seat Headrest
Your ex is dead (to you). It’s time for a beach funeral. Find and close the grave for good1.
MECH KIDS
Someone is Always Moving on the Surface, Kota Hoshino & Hideyuki Eto
Merely two weeks after the SONG OF DAYS, the Council flees to Canada. California is underwater. Oregon is torn asunder. New Texas smolders. It took two CHILDREN to lock the 2ND, 3RD and 5TH ANGELS under San Andreas Fault. It took five more to lure the 1ST and 4TH to Canyon Port. Make this count2.
SHOES OFF
Seraph II, Seraphim
LOS ALTO HILLS, CA is where your friend, Harry Nguyen, is taking you over spring break. Your tight-knit group will crash at his uncle’s mansion house in the California suburbs for the wild week you’ve all been planning. With a carry-on, your best friends and some luxurious sights, you’ll never need to go on another trip again3.
THE FLOOD
Bad North, Martin Kvale
These lands are sick. The Basin has turned dark, thick with slime and sewage. The Oldwood gnaws back into land lost to the Capitol. The Plains fall away beneath the rain, as buildings slide atop them. So the Capitol must move seven years earlier than planned.
Pack all its riches into the Caravan and keep your people calm. You have five days and five nights to prepare. Set your wheels in motion and find help where you can4.
STRANGERS IN STRANGE LANDS
TOWERS, TOWERS
After a massive solar flare wipes out electronic communications and induces blackouts across the world, the residents of a quiet suburb fall into a heat-induced coma. Some wake up in hours, some in days, and some don’t wake at all.
You’ll need answers, eventually, but first you’ll need to merely survive. A newfound silence blankets the world. There are yet stranger things that may wake as well.
WORLD END TRAIN RIDE
Transatlanticism, Death Cab for Cutie
You’re a traveler coming home as the meteors hit. In 120 hours you’ll plot your way from city to city, walk around the empty platforms, check in on old friends, and maybe make some new ones.
You’ll see fantastic displays of the End as you travel, with some places disappearing before others. Spend money at first, although you’ll be able to just take anything once it gets late enough. Take your time, it’s all we’ve got now56!
SNAKE OIL
Milk & Honey #1, Arcade Fire with Owen Pallett
Baker’s Head is a town that wants to be left alone. The most attention it’s had in decades was the fight over the new golf course, but the money came and the trucks followed and it was finished and the area’s as quiet as ever.
Quiet enough to mourn the twelfth anniversary of the Glenn Quarry strikes. Quiet enough to manufacture fake pills without anyone asking. Quiet enough to notice a missing hiker’s wife packing for the city upstream7.
LEECHES
NMS_exteriorAtmos1 / False Suns, 65daysofstatic
A ceaseless war roils the system.
You find yourself on-route to Limos and its five moons. Once their fiber deposits ran dry, the PANAM corporation abandoned them and destroyed their assets. Limos’ moons are now full of deserters, the indebted, and the obsolete.
You plan to sell off your scavenged goods at Port Molotch, maybe accept some petty gigs, and then leave Limos for a more active front, following the wave of wrecked mecha. While you serve WUHAN-BAXTER on paper, nobody cares how you maintain your ship and funds off-duty.
You wake up on your ship, the ____8.
WET PAINT
Stratosphere, Duster
Shelley Mason-Wells was the first of fifty-two women to report skin abrasions after exposure to the Jenson Brothers’ patented MONARCH BLUE paint. While thousands of such cases pass under the radar of regulators every month, Shelley’s was unique: all fifty-two women lived in the same postwar suburban development. Later investigations found similar abrasions in their children and longer-lasting psychological effects in the families of their largely Latine domestic staff.
By the time MONARCH BLUE was recalled in 1962, it had a minor regional foothold in nail salons and offices. Subpoenaed documents showed focus groups feeling calm and hopeful, with one tester fraudulently signing up twice to take more color slips home. After a private settlement with regulatory agencies, the Jenson Brothers collapsed and sold their minor divisions to private equity.
Decades later, in 2021, MONARCH BLUE and the now abandoned town of Boston, Colorado resurfaced on hobbyist forums. Most widely mock an absurd manifesto by “Caldwell Jenson” that details the prophetic capacities of MONARCH BLUE as a shitpost.
But it only takes five to raid an abandoned chemical plant and twelve more to line multiple shipping trucks with the banned substance. The fervor now spreads across state lines, with new bodies drying faster than the paint9.
LORDFEAST
The Music of Erich Zann (Contrabass), Alex Voytenko
Behold— the rotting carcass of a falling God!
It will be picked clean by the time it shudders into the ocean floor. By whom? The crustacean hordes of the Northern Trench, the Court of Urchins, the Merfolk Federates, the Mossangel Valley spores— the bottom feeders of the Abyssal Deep. The Carcass Divine will stall the withering of countless Undead. Everything descends through the Abyssal Deep after death. The ocean floor is but a final bed for those who cannot feed on their way down.
Great power lies beneath the rotting flesh. Human cities digested whole. Iron veins and marrowmilk. Surface rocks protected from erosion. Shell fragments to line the great halls and forts of the Abyssal Deep.
And of course!
The lethal rot itself. An alien lifeform in its own right, to be contained and used sparingly. It has killed every God, marked the end of every Age. The cunning will use its unparalleled disruptive force to claim this new Age as their own. It will split the carcass into pieces the size of kingdoms, then, mere mountains to send crashing down on foes.
This God is dying. May her children feed10.
Bleak Spirit, Chris Longhurst || Twin Fantasy (Face to Face), Car Seat Headrest || A Place to Fuck Each Other, Buried Without Ceremony
Neon Genesis Evangelion, Hideaki Anno || Into the Breach, Subset Games || Umurangi Generation, ORIGAME DIGITAL
Get Out (2017), Jordan Peele || Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House, Jacob Geller || Chinese Labor in the California Gold Rush
EXU Calamity, Critical Role || Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Hayao Miyazaki || Macbeth 2015, Justin Kurzel
Riding Past the End of the World, npckc || 17776, Jon Bois || Cities Without People, Jacob Geller || everytract, Neil Freeman
I wrote about similar feelings in the final third of shinies - scale (v003a)!
Fargo, FX || Ghosts, Goblin Punch || D&D Doesn’t Understand What Monsters Are, Throne of Salt
Armored Core VI, From Software || Citizen Sleeper, Jump Over The Age || The Company, Mega_Corp
Liminal Horror, Goblin Archives || A Normal Creepypasta Retrospective, hazel || Slender Man (2018): Misunderstanding Ten Years of the Internet, Evan Santiago
A Court of Fey and Flowers, Dimension 20 || Hollow Knight, Team Cherry