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The Thing From Beyond Time

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19:34 / 19.08.02

I liked someone's idea that Arthur thinks he's interacting with people but really is never leaving his home. Perhaps Minty and Stephe should mention that they can't get in touch with them.

And Arthur should complain that his boss keeps leaving messages asking him when he's going to come into work, and Arthur's all like, "What does he think I'm doing every day?"

01:47 / 20.08.02

Well, it's tempting to write in a few more shifts in Aurthur's reality. New neighbors next door without the hassle and noise and excitement of moving-in? Changes in his favorite restaurant similar to the paint job at work? Make it clear that he's not quite in this reality anymore, then have him quit posting. I think for Minty and Stephen, we need a body but I'm not sure how we should do him in. Is it too too much for people to find an emaciated corpse in the apartment a week or two after his last blog? Maybe with the computer still logged in to something really strange that isn't a screensaver, but is hypnotic nonetheless?

04:40 / 20.08.02

...and the refrigerator should be empty except for a jar of bugs - either cocoons from those nasty moths from a month or so ago, or else hibernating but very much alive cockroaches.

12:00 / 20.08.02

Or perhaps they just find his desiccated skin, as though he's shed it, and become _something else_.

12:41 / 20.08.02

Re: dissecating empty skin:

Logos, looks like we have a winner...

13:08 / 20.08.02

oooh.... creepy...

13:27 / 20.08.02

That does sound good. Do we want to drag this into the realm of the obviously fictional yet or do we want to save the fantastic stuff for Minty and Stephen?

I'd been thinking that if we really want a death, that the death itself could be a stupid accident - he falls and hits his head, dies a la William Holden. But what he's doing at the time of death is creepy - he's been winding himself up in strips of sheet, cocoon-style. There's a pile of strips in a corner, obviously used...

Whether we have the cocoon or the empty husk, there should be one or two more subtle hints about transformation in the blog. Just a line or two.

13:56 / 20.08.02

Back on page three or so, there's this from Captain Zoom:
(can't find my cheat for setting up links...)
"As far as Jade's question about the horror to come, I think we need to keep it as ambiguous as possible. While Lovecraft's protagonists always fell victim to some slobbering horror, I think a more modern approach shows the victim slowly unbalancing to the point where you're not sure if he just went insane or was actually eaten or something. Have him hear noises, see odd things out of the corner of his eyes, but never describe what they are. If he were to come out and say it was a big, bug-eyed beastie of some sort, we lose credibility. In the end, I am firmly convinced that Arthur will be taken or killed or what have you by something not of this earth, but we don't want the reader to be so sure."

Are we going to stick with this subtle approach?

14:16 / 20.08.02

Well, I'll list the options we have discussed so far:

-One of the options had that Arthur would disappear, the baddies would take over his blog and try to convince the readers that it was all a big joke, or that Arthur wasn't bein himself those days, you know, with a slightly foreign accent and writing style so that people would think "You know, this is not Art speaking. Someone got him!" (I know, I know, let me daydream a little...

-Now there's another app-roach... Arthur turns into something else, and leaves behind an empty skin for his friends to find.

So, what should do now? It's been some days wihout Art writing, and I have two or three posts awaiting, that will hint at the big horrors about to come...

14:56 / 20.08.02

Fracture time is fast app-roaching...

15:11 / 20.08.02

I looove the idea of finding the skin. And yeah, subtle approach good.

I see no reason why you can't have a final "just kidding"-type post (I still like the idea of doing it IN ALL CAPS, BECAUSE THAT'S JUST CREEPY) and then something on Minty's blog about the husk of skin.

She should visit him soon, and be disgusted by bugses. Maybe she finds his specimens - the new ones. The Blattidae are so much more inspiring than simple butterflies....

That sets up the future, final visit, too.

19:51 / 20.08.02

All right, she'll visit him tonight.

19:52 / 20.08.02

I did it. I like what I did.

I also like Arthur's "I just got fired." Perfect.

19:58 / 20.08.02

ex-cellent...

20:04 / 20.08.02

Oohhh, grant... that was good. So she leaves him, and he passes out under his bed, right? Then wakes up to write today´s entries. Just establishing a mental timeline here.

Maniacal voice:
What will tomorrow bring, lil' Arthur???

13:30 / 21.08.02

12:53 / 22.08.02

And again.

He's referring to himself in the plural now.

13:03 / 22.08.02

crrrrreepy.

Listen, people: Phil has *someone verrrry important* to introduce to Art. (YEAH LIKE A 10 FEET TALL TRANSLUCENT COCKROACH FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION)

I'll update later saying that Art has agreed in receiving Phil and this "person" and the bunch of weirdos for a get-together in his place. That can be scheduled for Friday, if it's ok with you (and if you agree with where this is going).
Then that's it. Arthur's final entry will be something along the lines "Uh-oh, someone's at the door. Time to party! Seeya guys later".
And we never hear of him again until some weeks from now, when there'll be a CRAZY ALL CAPS POST SAYING "YES I AM FINE, HAHAHA THIS WAS ALL A JOKE. I AM FINNISHING THIS WEBLOG NOW. GOODBY EVERYBODY!!!!!"

Theen Minty can come forward, get suspicious, he can break into his apartment and find the sssskin...

whaddya think? whaddyathink?

And, Zoom, where are you? Your son Arthur misses you! He wants to hug you with all his six legs and tell you how thankful he is for what you've done to him...

16:39 / 22.08.02

Then Minty can come forward, get suspicious, he can break into his apartment and find the sssskin...

How X-files do we want this to get? I think I'd prefer to keep it all ambiguous - they find something sort of but not quite like skin, and don't find much of it - certainly not enough to have covered an entire human male....

17:04 / 22.08.02

yeah, I wondered about the skin too. perhaps, she's convinced it's arthurs whole skin shed like a snake, but by the time she get's back there with Stephen or the police, the skin has mostly disintegrated and parts with a face are gone...

actually, the fact that she broke into his home might keep her from going to the police for fear of being a suspect....

18:12 / 22.08.02

Hey dudes. Sorry I've not been around lately. Work and finance has been fucking with my head.

I just added a bit to Art's journal. Hope you don't mind. I'm going through all the stuff you all are suggesting and you're all very mean to poor Art.

I love it.

Zoom.

18:47 / 22.08.02

Ok, I posted something. And I commented on it as Minty. Would anyone please go to Minty's blog and talk a little about how she feels about the whole thing??

18:51 / 22.08.02

Well, I'm back from Eurpoe and now I'm gonna read and see all that I missed.

20:34 / 22.08.02

Jade's wish is Gridley's command.

16:57 / 26.08.02

Guys, I fucking have to hand it to you. I'm gonna sound like a complete idiot when I admit this, but I got to Minty's blog through the Barbelogs page, and read her entry about Arthur. Her Blog seems totally real, like anyone here's blog (I haven't read this thread yet to find out who does the writing), so i bumped on over to Arthur's blog last week (also via barbelogs). Coming back to it today, I got the strange feeling that something wasn't right. And then I remembered some of you were doing the fake weblog project. And here we are.

So, if you were wondering if it's any good so far, it's great. Kudos. I feel pretty foolish now.

18:03 / 26.08.02

The cool thing about the "blog" format, is that, aside from the red-herrings like the quizzes and everything, most people who stumble upon a blog won't read every single entry....they'll skip around, ("who's phil? Let's see where else he's mentioned.") and generally read things backward in chronology, making the narrative much less apparent. I also didn't go back very far the first time I read arthur's journal, so it was more believable to me as I went back in time.

What does it say about me if I think it's completely plausible that a putative Barbeloid would sleep in a roach-infested bedroom and not really remember what they were doing in the last few weeks?

14:37 / 27.08.02

So what does Minty do now? I put her in a holding pattern.

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

00:14 / 28.08.02

after a scary memory stephen then went to hit on minty, read up, quick, and i wont type anything after my medication kicks in...

15:57 / 29.08.02

I'm wondering if Phil should die and Minty should find a news story about it.

Oh, and I'm going into Stephen's blog to add crosslinks to the other two blogs. (Elijah gave me the keys.)

I was also considering what might happen if suddenly arthur started adding friends to his (now nearly defunct) livejournal at a massive rate. Like overnight, he adds 100 or 200 random livejournalers. 1. It's weird, data-gathering-type behavior, 2. it might get a few dozen readers, people noticing they're suddenly someone's friend and checking out who or why.

Any thoughts?

16:01 / 29.08.02

But who would kill Phil? Where did they take the New Arthur? To the sewers? What happened in that apartment?

16:26 / 29.08.02

Phil was both presiding high priest and human sacrifice/first meal for Arthur's new form?

16:29 / 29.08.02

Grant: The adding-200-friends-thingy: That would kinda of derail the setup we had so far, but it's a really creepy idea, so I think you should go for it!

16:39 / 29.08.02

I was thinking more along the lines of SOMETHING GOING HORRIBLY WRONG.
Or, you know, horribly right, depending on how attached Phil is to his fleshly identity. Body found near Arthur's apartment, badly mauled, apparently been outside for a long time, despite him being spotted the night previously by, say, a bouncer at a club. (The idea being he was eaten by a lot of bugs all at once rather than over the numerous weeks it would normally take.)

Just an idea.

On a more practical note, I've been trying to fix the damn archives on Minty's page and have no idea how to do it. Before I delete *everything* - does anyone have any ideas? Anyone know how the damn things actually work?
Why isn't it displaying the past entries??

17:00 / 29.08.02

Go to the archives section and tell blogger to re-publish everything, there's a button for that. Sorry if you tried that already and I'm talking bullshit.

17:33 / 29.08.02

I tried that - they still aren't appearing on the main page. And the help link with archive default settings isn't getting me anywhere - that page isn't there anymore, or something.

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