In Darkness

Waaaaay off-topic, but I gotta speak my mind on this one.

The story:
Some white kids don’t like some black people in their high school, so they think its cool (or funny), hang some nooses from a tree. This sparks a bunch of violence and later, one of these young geniuses ends up getting the ever-loving fuck beaten out of him by some black dudes. Black dudes are now going to court for beating the ever-loving fuck out of somebody. Cue the Civil Rights whores on stage left.

Okay, those are the facts. Now my take:
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The Henry County Horror hasn’t been a part of darkicon.com since the LAST site redesign, several long years ago. That was an over site for which I profusely apologize. It really was a great story and for a long time were are a lot of people who never even knew it existed. That is no longer the case.

The story was originally told as a series of newspaper articles describing the gruesome, and ultimately otherworldly happenings in a small town near Atlanta. The articles (and the happenings) were fake, the setting was real. In the original presentation, I created a fake news website (I think it was called “OnTarget News”) that existed in a subdirectory of my main site. I intended to post the articles one day at a time, corresponding to the date on each one, as if the events were actually happening. I can’t remember if I actually DID that, but I think I may have managed to pull that off. My intention there was two-fold.

1) Tell a story in a new and interesting format. I’m always down for new ways of storytelling.
2) Try to fool a few people into thinking it was actually real (at least for the first part of the story, which is entirely plausible).

Now remember, this was 1999 and not 2007. People’s expectations of what a real news website looked like were much lower, and my presentation was… well… decent, if I must say so myself. Decent for 1999, anyway. The fact that it was hosted in a subdirectory of fiction website and not on its own top-level domain was probably a big show stopper as far as believability, but in the years during which the story was available, I’ve had one or two people email me just to… and here I’m paraphrasing…”make sure it was just a story”. That was attributable to the fact that on the internet, you can easily find yourself dropped into a single (fake) news article that is part of a (fiction) story. You don’t know its fake and you don’t know its a story, so you get confused. One article in particular might turn up as a “real” article for people looking for news about exotic animal attacks, which is what happened in these few instances. As a whole, I don’t think I fooled anybody, but that wasn’t my main objective anyway. It was all just a fun story in a new format for me, and hopefully it will be for you as well.

Now, about the story itself. I may need to do some ’splaining here.
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Dystopian: A dystopia (from the Greek δυσ- and τόπος, alternatively, cacotopia,[1] kakotopia or anti-utopia) is a fictional society that is the antithesis of utopia. It is usually characterized by an oppressive social control, such as an authoritarian or totalitarian government. In other words, a Dystopia has the opposite of what one would expect in a Utopian society.

MEME: Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time

1. Metropolis (1927)
2. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
3. Brazil (1985)
4. Wings of Desire (1987)
5. Blade Runner (1982)
6. Children of Men (2006)
7. The Matrix (1999)
8. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)
9. Minority Report (2002)
10. Delicatessen (1991)
11. Sleeper (1973)
12. The Trial (1962)
13. Alphaville (1965)
14. Twelve Monkeys (1995)
15. Serenity (2005)
16. Pleasantville (1998)
17. Ghost in the Shell (1995)
18. Battle Royale (2000)
19. RoboCop (1987)
20. Akira (1988)
21. The City of Lost Children (1995)
22. Planet of the Apes (1968)
23. V for Vendetta (2005)
24. Metropolis (2001)
25. Gattaca (1997)
26. Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
27. On The Beach (1959)
28. Mad Max (1979)
29. Total Recall (1990)
30. Dark City (1998)
31. War Of the Worlds (1953)
32. District 13 (2004)
33. They Live (1988)
34. THX 1138 (1971)
35. Escape from New York (1981)
36. A Scanner Darkly (2006)
37. Silent Running (1972)
38. Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001)
39. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
40. A Boy and His Dog (1975)
41. Soylent Green (1973)
42. I Robot (2004)
43. Logan’s Run (1976)
44. Strange Days (1995)
45. Idiocracy (2006)
46. Death Race 2000 (1975)
47. Rollerball (1975)
48. Starship Troopers (1997)
49. One Point O (2004)
50. Equilibrium (2002)

The ones in bold are the ones I’ve seen.
Yes, I really HAVE seen the Metropolis from 1927.
No, it has nothing to do with Superman.

It is Tuesday evening, September 25th, 2007.
I have been in Fargo, North (fucking) Dakota since Sunday evening.

And NorthWest Airlines still has no FUCKING CLUE where my luggage is!

Do you know where Fargo is?
It’s just a wee bit south of Canada.

Do you know where jacket and my clothes are?
In my fucking bag.

Do you know where my bag is?
NEITHER DOES ANYBODY ELSE!!! Northwest Airlines least of all!

How hard is it to get a bag from Atlanta to Fargo, preferably at the same time as its owner?

Well, if you ask Northwest Airlines its like simultaneously practicing brain surgery AND rocket science while reciting the entire contents of the Library of Congress. Backwards. In Aramaic. While drunk. On the MOON!

WHAT THE FUCK, PEOPLE!!?

You drop me off in (fucking) FARGO with nothing but the clothes on my BACK, NO FUCKING JACKET, ONE pair of dirty underwear to my name, and all you’ve got to say is “Sorry for the Inconvenience!?”

ARE
YOU
FUCKING
KIDDING ME!?

No, you’re not kidding. You’re SERIOUS! You SERIOUSLY have no IDEA where my shit is!

How about you fucking KEEP your “sorry” and FIND MY GODDAMN CLOTHES YOU MANGY SONS OF CRAB-INFESTED BITCHES! HOLY SHIT, how incompetent ARE you fucknobs?! Forty-Eight fucking HOURS and it’s not “your bag is in transit” or “we found your bag in Botswana”… it’s “We don’t have the slightest fucking IDEA where your bag is, sorry, our bad”?!

And what was it the last time I asked? Oh… the people in Atlanta haven’t returned your phone call yet. I wouldn’t return your call either, you retarded FUCKS! What did you say in your message when you left it: “uh-DUrrrrRRRrrrrrrr-Can You Has Baghh?”

YOU FUCKERS BETTER PRODUCE MY BELONGINGS BEFORE I LOSE MY FUCKING MIND AND START CHEWING THROUGH YOUR ENTIRE EMPLOYEE DIRECTORY LIKE A RAGE-INFECTED VELOCIRAPTOR ON BAD ACID!

Bitches.

AND your stewardesses are ugly.

…

…I probably shouldn’t post this. Fuck it-

Today marks a solid week of (sort of) new content every day. Between the story fragments here in the blog and the old/new stories in the Library, there’s been something new for you to read at darkicon.com every day.

I hope you enjoyed it.

I’ve got enough Archives stuff to keep it up for while, and I haven’t even touched the recently-rediscovered Unseen and Murder serials from Dragons Inn. The couple of never-before-seen stories that I have left are simply TOO bad to post, so you probably won’t be seeing those. Ever. I’ll just slow down a bit and let everybody catch up. I’ll do something like this again eventually (and I’ll even announce it ahead of time, unlike this one), but maybe then it will be NEW new content every day.

As always: spread the word, feedback appreciated, blah, blah, blah…