Halloween Countdown, Day 22
Are you looking for some Halloween-related online fun? Here are a few suggestions:
-- Go here to play The Creature Must Die!, the game in which you are Dr. Victor Frankenstein. Your goal is to bring the creature to life by harnessing the power of lightning to charge your machines and give three jolts of life-generating electricity to the creature. But you must first get a brain for the creature -- and you must do all of this while defending your laboratory against a mob of angry villagers.
-- Go here to play Halloween Hangman, complete with a skeleton who hurls insults at you.
-- Go here to use the Goth-O-Matic Poetry Generator and create your eerie masterpiece. You have your choice of darkly Gothic poem styles: Supernatural Violence and Horror, Feeling Very Sorry for Yourself, Fear of Religious Persecution, Eternal Love of Vampires, and The Black Abyss of Righteous Hatred. What's not to love?
Text of the Day: Today's short story is "The Room of the Evil Thought" by Elia Wilkinson Peattie (1862-1935).
Excerpt:
Sitting one night till late,—so late that the fashionable young wives with their husbands had retired from the strips of stair carpeting,—and raging at the loneliness which ate at his heart like a cancer, he heard, softly creeping through the windows of the house adjoining his own, the sound of comfortable melody.
It breathed upon his ear like a spirit of consolation, speaking of peace, of love which needs no reward save its own sweetness, of aspiration which looks forever beyond the thing of the hour to find attainment in that which is eternal. So insidiously did it whisper these things, so delicately did the simple and perfect melodies creep upon the spirit—that Boyce felt no resentment, but from the first listened as one who listens to learn, or as one who, fainting on the hot road, hears, far in the ferny deeps below, the gurgle of a spring.
Then came harmonies more intricate: fair fabrics of woven sound, in the midst of which gleamed golden threads of joy; a tapestry of sound, multi-tinted, gallant with story and achievement, and beautiful things. Boyce, sitting on his absurd piazza, with his knees jambed against the balustrade, and his chair back against the dun-colored wall of his house, seemed to be walking in the cathedral of the redwood forest, with blue above him, a vast hymn in his ears, pungent perfume in his nostrils, and mighty shafts of trees lifting themselves to heaven, proud and erect as pure men before their Judge. He stood on a mountain at sunrise, and saw the marvels of the amethystine clouds below his feet, heard an eternal and white silence, such as broods among the everlasting snows, and saw an eagle winging for the sun. He was in a city, and away from him, diverging like the spokes of a wheel, ran thronging streets, and to his sense came the beat, beat, beat of the city's heart. He saw the golden alchemy of a chosen race; saw greed transmitted to progress; saw that which had enslaved men, work at last to their liberation; heard the roar of mighty mills, and on the streets all the peoples of earth walking with common purpose, in fealty and understanding. And then, from the swelling of this concourse of great sounds, came a diminuendo, calm as philosophy, and from that, nothingness.
Read the complete short story.
-- Go here to play The Creature Must Die!, the game in which you are Dr. Victor Frankenstein. Your goal is to bring the creature to life by harnessing the power of lightning to charge your machines and give three jolts of life-generating electricity to the creature. But you must first get a brain for the creature -- and you must do all of this while defending your laboratory against a mob of angry villagers.
-- Go here to play Halloween Hangman, complete with a skeleton who hurls insults at you.
-- Go here to use the Goth-O-Matic Poetry Generator and create your eerie masterpiece. You have your choice of darkly Gothic poem styles: Supernatural Violence and Horror, Feeling Very Sorry for Yourself, Fear of Religious Persecution, Eternal Love of Vampires, and The Black Abyss of Righteous Hatred. What's not to love?
Text of the Day: Today's short story is "The Room of the Evil Thought" by Elia Wilkinson Peattie (1862-1935).
Excerpt:
Sitting one night till late,—so late that the fashionable young wives with their husbands had retired from the strips of stair carpeting,—and raging at the loneliness which ate at his heart like a cancer, he heard, softly creeping through the windows of the house adjoining his own, the sound of comfortable melody.
It breathed upon his ear like a spirit of consolation, speaking of peace, of love which needs no reward save its own sweetness, of aspiration which looks forever beyond the thing of the hour to find attainment in that which is eternal. So insidiously did it whisper these things, so delicately did the simple and perfect melodies creep upon the spirit—that Boyce felt no resentment, but from the first listened as one who listens to learn, or as one who, fainting on the hot road, hears, far in the ferny deeps below, the gurgle of a spring.
Then came harmonies more intricate: fair fabrics of woven sound, in the midst of which gleamed golden threads of joy; a tapestry of sound, multi-tinted, gallant with story and achievement, and beautiful things. Boyce, sitting on his absurd piazza, with his knees jambed against the balustrade, and his chair back against the dun-colored wall of his house, seemed to be walking in the cathedral of the redwood forest, with blue above him, a vast hymn in his ears, pungent perfume in his nostrils, and mighty shafts of trees lifting themselves to heaven, proud and erect as pure men before their Judge. He stood on a mountain at sunrise, and saw the marvels of the amethystine clouds below his feet, heard an eternal and white silence, such as broods among the everlasting snows, and saw an eagle winging for the sun. He was in a city, and away from him, diverging like the spokes of a wheel, ran thronging streets, and to his sense came the beat, beat, beat of the city's heart. He saw the golden alchemy of a chosen race; saw greed transmitted to progress; saw that which had enslaved men, work at last to their liberation; heard the roar of mighty mills, and on the streets all the peoples of earth walking with common purpose, in fealty and understanding. And then, from the swelling of this concourse of great sounds, came a diminuendo, calm as philosophy, and from that, nothingness.
Read the complete short story.
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