Factual Dispatch #Boo! - Spooky Special Edition!

A modest collection of the scariest things I've found on the internet.

October 31, 2020

It’s Halloween, thus in addition to the spoopy skellington stuff for kids, here’s a Royal Sampler of the scariest things I’ve encountered in my digital travels. I’m not a big fan of jump scares and I hate torture porn, so this will be more tension, fear, cold sweat, and raw terror inducing. For…various reasons.

Virtual Influencers

If you thought human influencers were weird, you’re going to love the 2020 trend of Synthetic/Virtual influencers! That’s right, fake people selling you stuff. This stupendously creepy phenomenon is being tracked over at virtualhumans.org and Bloomberg’s interview with the founder led to this wildly dystopian quote:

“Virtual influencers, while fake, have real business potential,” says Christopher Travers, the founder of virtualhumans.org, a website that documents the industry. “They are cheaper to work with than humans in the long term, are 100% controllable, can appear in many places at once, and, most importantly, they never age or die.”

Zdzislaw Bekinski

The man who wished to “ photograph his dreams,” and managed to produce some truly haunting and anxiety provoking surrealist images.

For more, check out his WikiArt page, this sprawling Pinboard, and this video on him.

LOCAL58 Community Television

Local58 is absolutely my favorite type of horror. Kris Straub stitches together public access, royalty-free stock footage, to create some of the most unnerving & deeply horrifying tense video I’ve ever seen. You Are On The Fastest Available Route & Weather Service is legitimately Lovecraftian in scope and horror.

Mariusz Lewandowski

In the same vein as Bekinski, some truly weird and harrowing art that frankly might end up in my living room if 2020’s cavalcade of suffering continues into 2021. Like this one called “Atomic Emptiness”

Boston Dynamics Robo-Dog

Remember those weird, creepy robot dogs that Boston Dynamics has been demonstrating? They’re being used in real life by the NYPD and Mass state police!

New Yorkers!

I mean, this is just something to be proud of.

Sounds from Deep Space

AV Club documented the lovely release by NASA of the Sinister Sounds of the Solar System, in case you needed some ambient nightmare fuel:

Thomas Ligotti

Thomas Ligotti is a horror writer that I usually cannot read alone or in the dark. As one of the best writers to capture the idea of Dark Buddhism, he is in an extremely rare cohort. I can only describe the feelings he creates as willfully giving yourself sleep paralysis or night terror. Here’s a small paragraph:

Yes—lurking among the watchful winds of this and the several worlds. Everything seemed to be a manifestation of this evil and to my eyes was taking on its aspect. I could feel it also emerging in myself, growing stronger behind this living face that I am afraid to confront in the mirror.

Hard Questions!

This set of questions from Morgan Housel is sure to spook even the most solid and grounded person you know. My favorite two are:

Which of my current views would I disagree with if I were born in a different country or generation?

Who do I look up to that is secretly miserable?

Bill Watterson 

This man could make you terrified about the future using a smiling 6 year old kid in 1988.

Happy Halloween, be safe, keep your masks on, and no one is putting ecstasy pills or THC edibles in your kids candy bags. If you find any, I’d say mail them to me, but we all know the postal service isn’t going to work for the next month.

You’re missed,T