Tales From the Meeting

Our story tonight takes place in a certain conference room. It could be anywhere. It could even be . . . in your town.

"There's no use trying to minimize it. From the numbers I'm looking at, it seems like our latest municipal advertising campaign is simply unlikely to justify the expenditure given our targets."
"I don't believe it. Everyone likes parks."
"Unfortunately, it turns out that's true. They like them so much they already have them. Our next campaign needs a new, fresh, exciting focus. Anyone?"
"Our natural beauty?"
"We don't have any."
"Our skate parks?"
"The popular ones are illegal."
"Maybe we should just, you know, tell everyone about the vampires and werewolves. And so on."
"And so on, right, but Dan, we've been trying so hard to keep that a secret. You know that. Why would you want to scare them away?"
"Yeah, but, see, it's fall. Specifically, October."
"And?"
"And the judge of the big contest for the best-carved large orange-colored gourd is the king of vampires, which means if advertise that, and I think we should, people will ask who this guy is and why he's such a big wheel."
"I hate to say it, but you might be right."

There you have it. Another clutch of fools and their worthless initiative saved . . . by SERENDIPITY. "But surely not every decision is made this way," you protest. If only you knew. If only you knew! Muhahahaha!
Finis

Starting October Early

Since there's nothing going on till Halloween, let's start setting the atmosphere. Did you know that Star Wars books are still coming out? Chilling!

October Transmutation

For the duration, lightning magic, generally the coolest magic, becomes frightning magic. I suppose that means something morale-based, which tends to be useless or overpowered, flamethrower-like.

Addendum

The only alternative is that ghosts are actually aliens and people just didn't know about space. While that's almost certainly true, supporing novel theories is the way to get ahead. It's not as if I'll endure any penalties if I'm wrong. The papers will have already been published and the citations counted.

October Update

Anybody been spooked to death yet? I'm hoping to confirm my theory that ghosts read blogs all day which is why everyone started reporting alien sightings instead (they can't be entertained by anything short of a cat video).

Halloween Sorting

Let's examing the categories of how people celebrate Halloween in particular and October generally.

Halloween Horror Type: These people watch well-reviewed horror movies and play Alien: Isolation.
Halloween Irony Type: These people watch Friday the 13th movies after the first one and play Unity asset flips.
Halloween Spooky Type: These people carve jack o'lanterns, put skeletons in their yard, and play Castlevania and Disgaea.

There is a group which does nothing at all, but it's better not to say anything about that. The important thing is to find your faction and coordinate to win the Splatoon Splatfest which will have this as its theme any day now. Spooky Type is clearly the most popular, but Irony Type probably has better players.

Neverscaryvember

Now that October is over, make sure your stories contain nothing frightening whatsoever. It's a serious impediment, but rules are rules and months are months.

Peril of the AI Ghosts

The chief engineer reported. "Our AI is better every day. We project that to continue for at least 2,500 years and no more than 5,750 years."
The board acknowledged the report and moved on to other business. The public was not so blasé when it saw the camera phone pictures of the presentation which a leaker posted. Internet analysts followed every implication to its most unreasonable but logical conclusion, and one such could not be endured.
"Better AI means worse AI ghosts!" That was the cry on message boards, imageboards, news aggregators, and livestreams. Nor did those responsible have a satisfactory answer.
"This will increase productivity."
"It's October!"
"The economy will boom."
"It's halfway over!"
"You'll see results by Christmas."
"It's Halloween soon!"
The largest Halloween demonstration of all time began, and as the vampires, witches, and horsemen holding their heads lay about with their axes in the AI development facilities, economists cried but the community-minded who bore a love for the human experience far greater and deeper than number-lust cheered.
Finis

New Ghost Era

The mood in the room was weighty, still, an elephant grown past easy handling. "Ladies. Gentlemen." The chairman did not try to relieve the seriousness. Doing so would have been futile. "The matter before us today is serious. Do we get rid of human ghosts?" The next person along the table nodded. "AI ghosts are much spookier."
The one after agreed. "Their utterances are impossible to follow but give the impression you can if you listen harder. Very spooky."
"They have the wrong number of everything. The more you stare, the worse they look."
"They don't rely on stale techniques like dripping blood or detaching their heads."
"People have started to feel bad for real ghosts instead of themselves."
All the way down the table and all the way back up, the opinion was unanimous. The decision was handed down, and soon all spirits trapped in this world were at last released from their torment to be replaced by AI ghosts. Thus shall it be forevermore.
Finis

Addender

It's tough to explain curseships because they're uninterested in communication, but an unnamed space pirate can handle it.

Addendum

The space curseship is a gigantic jack-o'-lantern. I figured it out.

Astronomy Chat

I'm not telling anyone how to name things, but blood moons should be in October, idiots. Morons. Dummies.

November Is the Cruelest Month

Denying us genre-related discussion material. Let's turn November into October II so we can talk about zombies and dullahans.