GentleMean

I got myself a new microphone, and made another cover! This time, it's The Cure's Lullaby. I've loved this song for quite a while now, and wanted to try something a little bit different from my usual style.

Also, I was once during a concert approached by an old rocker whom I half expected to assault me as I was very visibly queer in the middle of a metal concert, but instead he pat my shoulder and told me that he was glad to see 'more people like [me]' in the crowd, and that I looked exactly like The Cure's singer in his younger years.

This cover, in significantly better quality and with subtitles, is also on youtube:

Oh I've got a fun idea for a unique way to do a story: it's a fictional wiki page documenting the discoveries of a group of reverse engineers trying to figure out how to hack demons. They've got an API to make contracts with demons.

They've figured out to cast spells out of magical code stored in the blockchain (because of course it's a block chain, it's hell)

There's a list of spells people have found, with comments on what they might do, reports on experimentation, and attempts to decode the "source".

Like there's a subsection with a name that won't render properly because you don't have the proper demonic fonts installed, but it's got the reporting name "shinigami eyes". It's a simple divination spell, so called because it makes numbers appear over the heads of people.

They've got a home-patched version to switch it to arabic numerals for the non-hackery who can't read demonic numerals (they're base 6, of course), and they've been slowly brute forcing the different stats they can query.

The first success was a number that represents the number of days it's been since you've visited a library. Apparently that's one of the statistics stored in your the soul! And weirdly, it counts down? The spell has to query the per-person LIBRARY_THRESHOLD and then subtract from it the LIBRARY_CURRENT to get the displayed count.

It could even be real wiki: keep expanding it by adding additional pages for in-universe discoveries, like... the time they figured out how you can get test animals to cast spells from their own soul (which, being without original sin, have effectively infinite reserves).

P. S. Okay that one got me so I can't end here: they have a list of animals it doesn't work with. The implication being that some animals DO have original sin, and even better yet: these hellhackers only figured that out by accidentally selling a horse's soul to Beelzebub.

An alternate way to approach it that might be fun: do it as a video instead, pretending to be a presentation of one of the hellhackers involved explaining how they pulled off a specific spiritual exploit.

“so yeah we found this spell in a section that was otherwise focused on all kinds of scrying. We'd already figured out how to remote-view people through mirrors last week, because we were fucking with a segment of code and accidentally set a flag that allowed us to substitute any flat surface, so we turned Andy's desk into a livestream from my bathroom. So we kinda expected that next one would be a scrying spell as well. We had some trouble parsing it, because there was a huge nonsensical string hardcoded in there that was surrounded by syscalls we'd had to disable to get the thing to run on our machine at all, so we were trying all sorts of things. We could only figure out that the program needed to directly interface with a user's soul, from which it took a snapshot and appended it to that weird string before invoking another infernal syscall.

It was supposed to produce a visual output tho, so we decided, fuck it, let's run this thing with a my hamster Ferroconcrete's soul (the fact that hamsters have souls was established a week prior to this experiment when my roommate attempted to replicate a spell that was supposed to bolster a warrior's soul to give it strength to slay all that is holy and good, but the boon was granted to her hamster Squinky instead) and mirror the output to a screen.

We didn't get any usable output though, just noise and half a bible worth of warnings. At first we tried to find any usable information in there. It wasn't a judgement of the hamster's soul (those do render very well and are characterized by upsetting reds and blacks for all hamsters we'd tried this on so far) and it wasn't any kind of remote-viewing we recognized.

I was ready to call it a day and move on to that one fertility ritual we found, but then one of the girls who were supposed to be working on a secure summoning circuit pinged me and told me they had found a similar segment of nonsensical text, and one of her partners had figured out that that text wasn't nonsensical at all if copied to a machine that had no demonic scripts installed at all, because then it just rendered as hebrew script (which obviously needs to be disabled to get anything demonic to run at all, they hate the stuff). Lo and behold, the string was a legacy function called מֶרְכָּבָה

Knowing that, we finally understood the syscalls: the infernal motherfucker who had written that program had used a legacy function from an angelic system, which they'd run in a vm and only passed executable functions to and streamed the outputs back for further use. Well that left us with the problem of setting up a holy system that we could run the function on.

We had the version of hekhalOS that had been leaked in '87 when a US airforce patrol intercepted a messenger angel, misidentified it as a Russian spycraft and shot it down over Alaska where someone got to the remains before the military did and sold the halo. Through sheer luck we managed to get the setup just right and run it.

This time, our hamster had a proper vision that we could observe on our monitors. That fucking program was a scying spell alright, one that utilized a function made to deliver visions of the seventh heaven to worthy prophets. Our hamster was receiving images from the Lord's palace but the demonic program was set up to insert stock soundeffects into the retrieved footage, so every time the old guy tripped trying to catch the hamster that had suddenly appeared in His living room and was now trying to measure His limbs, the footage inserted 2010-esque dubstep drops and airhorns.

We had a blast watching all that, but lost connection after a few minutes when Ferroconcrete was almost caught by two cherubim, and only narrowly escaped over the courtyard's wall. Our monitor showed only the words 'epic fail' in the impact-font, accompanied by a nightcore mix of Linkin Park's 'numb', so we terminated the program after a few minutes.

I guess our plan for next week is to fuck around with hekhalOS some more since we've got it already set up now anyway, maybe we'll try to load Enochian 2.1.3 to see wether we can get Ferroconcrete back."

I present to you: The Whitegull River Symphony.

A classical symphony in four movements, inspired by @thesiltverses! The most recent episode swept me away in a river of creative inspiration, and I couldn't help but follow this stream to whatever murky depths it wanted to take me.

Creative thoughts and details beneath the cut.

Now available as sheets!

I present to you: The Whitegull River Symphony.

A classical symphony in four movements, inspired by @thesiltverses! The most recent episode swept me away in a river of creative inspiration, and I couldn't help but follow this stream to whatever murky depths it wanted to take me.

Creative thoughts and details beneath the cut.

Now on youtube as well!