Wednesday 18 November 2020

d20 more anomalous media

 Based on this Throne of Salt post. See also this guy. I'm taking it as read that all of this takes place in the Black Auction universe.

1. List of accidents and incidents involving military aircraft (1975-1979) - Wikipedia article. Contains several incidents not attested to by any other source, including the loss of an Israeli Lockheed C-130 Hercules over the Sinai Peninsula to what witnesses described as a "fist of light". These are tagged with [citation needed], but have not been taken down.

2. Krantz-Bohannon film - Silent 8mm film sequence shot in 1969 on the banks of the Klamath River in southern Oregon. Depicts a young man in a mohair jacket, provisionally identified as convenience-store worker Lee Bohannon, standing proudly over the corpse of an ape-like biped, holding a shotgun. As another biped lurches from the woods behind him, the video cuts out.

3. Matrakçı Nasuh map - World map compiled from Arabic and Portuguese sources in 1554 by Matrakçı Nasuh, the Bosniak polymath and Janissary. Includes an extremely detailed chart of the Antarctic coast, possibly derived from the missing fragments of the Piri Reis map, illustrated with black pyramids and leechlike creatures not found in nature.

4. "Never Give A Dollar To A Droggo" - Meme template originating on the 4chan board /pol/, in which a crude caricature of an emaciated, dog-headed creature stealthily picks a white man's pocket. Variations on the meme stereotype the "droggo" as being greedy, congenitally deceitful, superficially charming and prone to consuming his own vomit.

5. eibon.mobi - Kindle-formatted Hyperborean grimoire. Will "colonise" other books on the same device, inserting references to a toadlike divinity beneath Greenland. Novels become horror stories, books of science propose nonstandard theories and history books develop footnotes attributing catastrophes to the influence of antediluvian cults.

6. McKinley-Bryan debate - Livestream, briefly hosted on CNN website, of a televised presidential debate from 1896. A visibly uncomfortable McKinley, gleaming with sweat under the studio spotlights, attempts several times to interrupt Bryan's lectures on the silver standard, the plight of American labor and the villainy of Charles Darwin.

7. Screen Cheats - 2003 webcomic about two best friends who play videogames and their wisecracking roommate, a talking llama who smokes cigars. Goes in increasingly surreal directions after the 2007 Epic Mike arc, where the friends meld with their gaming couch to become a bloblike "pleasure hybrid", much to the llama's distress.

8. The Spreadable Pooch - Unreleased eleventh episode of Wallace and Gromit's Cracking Contraptions. Annoyed by Gromit's failure to fetch the newspaper on time, Wallace sculpts a new dog out of Wensleydale cheese and brings it to life with a bolt of lightning. While he goes about his day, blissfully unaware, Gromit must fight to stop it assimilating all organic matter in the village.

9. "It Screams When You Step On It" - Series of magazine ads for the 1984 Isuzu Intruder, featuring the car driving down a misty road at night with a blurred, ghostlike figure visible behind the smeared glass of the windshield. The copy promises "authentic pagan engineering" and "the only car on the market that feels real pain!"

10. What Went Wrong - Political tell-all book written by an unnamed staffer purporting to have worked on George H. W. Bush's 1992 re-election campaign, attributing his loss to a "failure to appease the Sunken Ones" and Clinton's base of support among "the hounds of Apollo", as well as a lack of decisive action on the budget deficit.

11. The Towers Benighted - 1824 oil painting by the English calamity artist John Martin, depicting the exact moment at which American Airlines Flight 11 made contact with the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Distraught citizens gaze up at the burning towers from the rubble-strewn streets of a decaying city, overhung by swirling plumes of apocalyptic smoke.

12. "Ihre Festung hat kein Dach" - 50,000 propaganda leaflets dropped from the sky over Stuttgart in 1954, claiming that humanity's defeat is inevitable and promising a reward to any soldier who defects to the invading forces. Followed by the disappearance of a Martin B-57 Canberra tactical bomber from Ramstein Air Base in southern Germany, along with its pilot.

13. Where Do Chuckles Come From? - 1959 children's book about a curious mouse who wants to know the origin of laughter. After a series of adventures that involve tickling a big pink pig and making fun of a frog, he finds a deep cave in the side of a hill that all the other animals tell him is "where laughter really comes from, right down at the bottom". The last two pages have been torn out.

14. Dev Kahraman 6 - 1974 Turkish cult superhero film about a Mexican wrestler saving Istanbul from Spider-Man, who lacks any of his usual spider powers but can turn anyone he touches into a copy of himself. Full of copyright violations, including a Chewbacca cameo and unauthorised use of Hans Zimmer's soundtrack to Batman Begins.

15. Else We Are Savages: Translation and Barbarism in Early Modern France - 2002 PhD thesis from a graduate student at the University of Hull which claims to prove, through painstaking textual analysis, that Michel de Montaigne was consumed and replaced by a Brazilian cannibal in 1579, and the history of French literature must be wholly reinterpreted in light of this fact.

16. Empty Planet - 2013 BBC documentary on subterranean fauna, narrated by Sir David Attenborough. Covers the Slovenian olm, the Pilbara blind eel, the bat-eating centipede of Venezuela and the pink-shanked langur of Xe Bang Fai, never before caught on film. The last two episodes were scrapped after the disappearance of a camera crew beneath Kentucky's Pennyroyal Plateau.

17. Princess Time! - YouTube Kids channel with over 13,000 videos of Eastern European actresses dressed as Disney characters, acting out short, algorithmically-generated scenarios about toilets, pregnancy and medical experiments. Endorsed by several prominent child psychologists as a safe and healthy way to process pre-adolescent trauma.

18. The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Bodies Know What Our Brains Deny - Bestselling 2017 pop-psychology book by self-proclaimed "concrete Jungian" Dr. Bryson Valentine. Sets out nine simple rules for living that enable anyone to build confidence, overcome anxiety and percieve the vampiric entities who walk among us unseen, enslaving us and sapping our sexual energy.

19. Šílenci - 1933 Czech horror film about a discredited doctor converting his enemies into circus freaks and selling them to an American showman. Notable for its use of actors with real disabilities. The surgical scenes have been closely studied by effects designers, Soviet censors and medical professionals, but it remains unclear how they could have been simulated.

20. Prisms & Pentacles - Orphaned D&D blog. Posts about spell tables and lists of medieval professions gradually supplanted by long, rambling personal essays, reviews of nonexistent films, prolonged exegesis of fictional scripture from an Old Testament-inspired setting never fully detailed. Final post in 2019 anticipates the recent discovery of a flayed corpse in the New Mexico desert.