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somesecretpie · 1 month

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I am looking for a human host!

Are you bored?

Are you lonely and bored?

Do you have a lot of time on your hands?

Do you have hands?

I’m offering you a proposal, with potential financial compensation for your troubles. It may sound off putting at first blush, but hear me out. I am looking for a human host. And I mean a “willing” human host who might be willing to give up some of their time to help out an odd fellow that doesn’t have hands or blood.

Am I asking to control your body? Yes. Sometimes. You’ll still be there, but taking the backseat. Now you’re probably thinking “That sounds no fun! I don’t want to spend all my time riding shotgun.”

And that’s valid.

But you all spend about half of the day unconscious anyway. Your body is just there, doing nothing—a complete waste. As for me, I don’t sleep (haha), so we could have it so that during the day, I will graciously let you do fun human things, and at night, I’ll do whatever. And by whatever, I mean perfectly safe, perfectly reasonable activities.

I don’t drink, and I rarely go outside.

I enjoy baking, I look at pictures of birds online, I’ve been getting into neuroscience lately. Very interesting stuff. You’re all very interesting.

And maybe you’re still thinking “Hey now, I don’t want some random mind-controlling thingy hauling my body around in my sleep, “Weekend at Bernie’s Style” to which I say, you’re no fun and you’re not the kind of person I want to live with anyway.

“But I’m a light sleeper!” you say.

Don’t worry! I can isolate your somatosensory cortex so you can’t feel anything.

“But my family will think it’s weird!” you say.

Don’t worry! You don’t have to tell them.

Actually, I would prefer that you don’t tell anyone. Please.

And should anyone question me, I’m not bad at impressions. I’ll get really good at a “you” impression, it’ll be the first thing I do!

I know this all sounds very strange and potentially unpleasant, but remember the financial compensation that may or may not be happening. Hell, I’ll even do some of your chores if you like, while you sleep. You can wake up and the dishes will be done, laundry folded and coffee made. Doesn’t that sound nice? And then you open the fridge and oh, what’s this? Someone baked banana bread last night (that was me, I baked banana bread last night.)

Now I should say, I don’t have a lot of standards, I really don’t. But I do (unfortunately) have some, so let’s just get them out of the way before I waste your time.

Please do not contact me if you have any of the following:

- Anemia: Sorry, it’s just not going to work out. I can pay for iron supplements, but I can’t work miracles.

-A weak immune system: I don’t like getting sick, I’m sorry. It’s gross, sick people are gross. I mean I know it’s not your fault, but healthy folks only please.

-A strong immune system: Yes, I know what I just said, but I also don’t want to be attacked by your immune system. So maybe you’re not the picture of health, but you’re just kind of okay. I’m looking for someone who is just kind of okay.

-A penchant for alcohol: It makes me feel strange…

-A name that starts with a P: I’m not the greatest at “speaking.” It’s hard, moving air through your throat and moving your tongue and your mouth at the same time. You all do it so easy—can’t say I’m not envious! I’m the worst at making the “P” sound.

I intentionally avoid any "p word" in conversation, and get by well enough, but I’ll look pretty foolish if I’m cavorting about, pretending to be you, and I can’t even say your name!

Those are my standards, but really, other than that, I’ll take anyone.

I don’t care if you’re male or female or anything in between.

I don’t care if you’re gay.

I don’t care if you’re smart.

I don’t care if you don’t have a lawyer.

There are so many things that I don’t care about.

Now, I’ve specified all the ways in which I could compensate you and how our relationship will be not in any way problematic, but I want to stress that, above all things, I am looking for a friend.

Someone I can spend quiet evenings with.

If you want to hang out with me during the day, that’s great! I can give you fun hallucinations. Or you could have hallucinations the normal way, like by reading, like what you’re doing now. I love to read! I love doing funny voices. I wonder what you think I sound like?

I hope I sound nice.

And one of the best things about me is I’m very quiet. No one else will be able to hear me except you. I’ll be like your own personal friend that only you know. Like a secret friend. And you don’t even have to talk to me because I can read your thoughts.

I suppose I should tell you a bit more about myself, since you’re still reading.

I was born in the Everglades, I think. It’s been awhile.

But I remember being so cold…

And so alone...

But then I met this sweaty man in a colorful tee-shirt, with a camera, and half a granola bar, and with blood so hot.

So yeah, he was my first host, and I’ll admit, we weren’t the best of friends. It was a confusing time for both of us. I was confused. He was confused. What happened was really both of our faults, you could say…

He was a bird watcher, if I recall correctly. Just watched birds all the time. I thought it might have been out of jealousy—watching those little things flying around makes you feel kind of stuck. I felt stuck.

So I decided to be a bird for a while to see if it was really all it’s cracked up to be. Squished myself into the body of this lovely American crow. We settled down, built a nest, and laid several nice, healthy eggs with a man-bird by the name of “Richard Baxter.”

He was a very proud bird, very large. And he gave me so many wonderful gifts. Like children, and also small pieces of plastic.

I still have all of them.

The plastic, not the children.

I’d never been so happy, all these hormones had me consumed in the joy of motherhood, but the crow’s health was failing. I could not sustain myself—it’s pathetic little heart beat weaker and weaker.

I tried starving, I tried everything I could, I wanted to be a bird so bad. But it just wasn’t working out.

The bird stopped working.

The other crows held a funeral service for me, even though I was still alive. I tried to tell them, but I’m not good at speaking, you remember.

It was all just a big mess.

I haven't seen Baxter since, but I still think about him a lot.

Is that weird?

I’m totally over it though, haha.

After that incident, I got kind of depressed... I possessed a lot of trash animals—gulls, racoons, and salespeople. I did what I could to survive. That’s kind of where I am now.

I am currently living in Miami florida—been body surfing almost every day (haha). Right now I’m using a library computer and a librarian. She does not like being possessed, boy howdy are these fingers twitching. But you can thank her for my halfway decent grammar.

I’m tired of feeling like a parasite.

I want to try a different approach.

I want to be friends? Like with Richard Baxter except I also live in your brain and drink your blood sometimes. But I’ll make you bread in your sleep, so it’s okay.

It’s been really hard finding someone willing to put up with me.

I’ve tried everything.

So I thought I would put up an advertisement online, why not?

Can’t say the P word in real life, but you can hear it in your head loud enough I hope.

I know I kept saying that I would compensate you financially, but I’m going to be real with you, I don’t have much. I’ve got like twenty bucks, some small pieces of plastic and a book about...finance....

But I’m a real hoot! ;D

So,

(P)lease,

If you are interested, leave your comments below. I would love to get to know you :)

I need to go now, the library is closing soon, but I’ll get back as soon as I can.

#short fiction #short story #writing #writeblr #writers on tumblr #this is a story I posted on reddit a few years ago #and I'm reposting it here #Pie writes #parasite #mind control parasite #yeerk #animorphs #body snatcher #nosleep #r/nosleep

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weirdlookindog · 6 months

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Gustave Doré - Illustration from 'The Works of Rabelais'

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#gustave doré #françois rabelais #grotesque #macabre #body snatcher #satire #art #illustration

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neznakomkav · 4 months

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forgot to post my favorite mob from game bleh

#fear and hunger #f&h #fear and hunger body snather #body snatcher #hi insectophobia!!!#his second pair of hands opens the trench coat

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dzgrizzle · 17 days

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#the body snatcher #body snatcher #boris karloff #bela lugosi #robert louis stevenson #horror films #vintage horror #horror film #horror classic #movie poster

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tawneybel · 1 year

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Female Cartoon Characters Who Get Possessed

Note: Or infested. Animation, comics, etc. Be free to suggest more. Male list. Female live-action list. Male live-action list.

Frightwig from Ben 10 (“Ghosfreaked out”)

Gwen Tennyson from Ben 10 (“Ghosfreaked out”)

Anya Alstreim from Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion R2

Sissi Delmas from Code Lyoko (“Contact,” “Cousins Once Removed”)

Tamiya Diop from Code Lyoko (“Music to Soothe the Savage Beast”)

Aelita Hopper from Code Lyoko (“Double Trouble,” “The Pretender,” “The Secret”)

nurse from Code Lyoko (“Contact”)

Yolanda Perraudin from Code Lyoko (“Tip-Top Shape”)

Milly Solovieff from Code Lyoko (“Music to Soothe the Savage Beast”)

Sophie from Code Lyoko (“Music to Soothe the Savage Beast”)

various from Code Lyoko (“Lyoko Minus One”)

Muriel Bagge from Courage the Cowardly Dog (“The Demon in the Mattress”)

Sam Manson from Danny Phantom (“Urban Jungle”)

Paulina from Danny Phantom (“Lucky in Love,” “Public Enemies,” “What You Want”)

various from Danny Phantom (“Urban Jungle”)

Mabel Pines from Gravity Falls (“The Inconveniencing”)

Mandy from The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy (“Get out of My Head!”)

woman possessed by mummy’s ghost from The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy (“Get out of My Head!”)

Ami Onuki from HiHi Puffy AmiYumi (“Ami Goes Bad”)

Wonder Woman from Justice League Unlimited (“Dead Reckoning”)

Jody Irwin from The Life and Times of Juniper Lee (“It Takes a Pillage”)

Ophelia Ramirez from The Life and Times of Juniper Lee (“It Takes a Pillage”)

Katie from Martin Mystery (“The Curse of the Necklace”)

Diana Lombard from Martin Mystery (“The Body-Swapper,” “Haunting of the Blackwater,” “Return of the Djini”)

M.O.M. from Martin Mystery (“Beast from within”)

Jenny Wakeman from My Life As a Teenage Robot (“Pest Control,” “The Return of the Raggedy Android”)

Lorna from Over the Garden Wall (“The Ringing of the Bell”)

Hotaru Tomoe from Sailor Moon S

Clover from Totally Spies! (“It’s How You Play the Game”)

Mira from Totally Spies! (“It’s How You Play the Game”)

Maria Kurenai from Vampire Knight

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eightfish · 1 year

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short little comic for you

#webcomic #short comic #comic #shapeshifter #body snatcher #witch #short story #slice of life

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kuronekkosan · 1 year

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#The summer that hikaru died #Hikaru ga shinda natsu #bloody #supernatural #gore #body snatcher #survival #shounen ai #yaoi #school life #horror #ghost #manga screenshots #manga #manga screencap #manga aesthetic #manga art #mokumoku ren

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danskjavlarna · 2 years

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Source details and larger version.

Newsworthy: a collection of weird headlines and book titles.

#vintage headline #graverobbing #body snatcher #ghoul #headline

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howardhawkshollywoodannex · 1 year

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Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in The Body Snatcher (1945). Their entry together among my best 1,001 movies is The Black Cat (1934). This is Bela's third honorable mention, after Mark of the Vampire and Plan 9 from Outer Space.

#boris karloff #bela lugosi #body snatcher

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onlyhurtforaminute · 2 years

Video

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BODYSNATCHER-MERCILESS

#BODY SNATCHER #DEATHCORE #HEAVY METAL #;METAL #THIS HEAVY VOID #2020 ALBUM

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fleshadept · 9 months

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you guys know you can get USB connectable CD, dvd, and blu-ray players right. and you can buy external hard drives with crazy amounts of space for an amount of money that would make the average person from 2009’s head explode bc of how cheap it is. and if you do this and get ripping software such as handbrake for CDs and DVDs and makeMKV for blurays you can both own a physical copy of whatever media you want and make it accessible to yourself no matter where you are. do you guys know this

#i was watching wwdits special features on a 13h flight then switched over to invasion of the body snatchers then nausicaä #cricket chirps #5k #10k #20k #50k #75k

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weirdlookindog · 2 years

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Sunset Drive-In

#house of dracula #the son of dr. jekyll #body snatcher #triple feature #drive in #vintage movie ads

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doomreturn · 1 year

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#boris karloff #vintage horror #horror art #horror movies #body snatcher

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violetbudd · 7 months

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Horror movie titles

made by me / use with credit

#horror #horror films #Halloween #resident evil #the exorcist #i know what you did last summer #friday the 13th #scream #the shining #candyman #invasion of the body snatchers #the amityville horror #glittercore #glitter graphics #my glitter edit #use with credit

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goryhorroor · 17 days

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horror sub-genres: science-fiction

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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I assure you, an AI didn’t write a terrible “George Carlin” routine

There are only TWO MORE DAYS left in the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

On Hallowe'en 1974, Ronald Clark O'Bryan murdered his son with poisoned candy. He needed the insurance money, and he knew that Halloween poisonings were rampant, so he figured he'd get away with it. He was wrong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Clark_O%27Bryan

The stories of Hallowe'en poisonings were just that – stories. No one was poisoning kids on Hallowe'en – except this monstrous murderer, who mistook rampant scare stories for truth and assumed (incorrectly) that his murder would blend in with the crowd.

Last week, the dudes behind the "comedy" podcast Dudesy released a "George Carlin" comedy special that they claimed had been created, holus bolus, by an AI trained on the comedian's routines. This was a lie. After the Carlin estate sued, the dudes admitted that they had written the (remarkably unfunny) "comedy" special:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/george-carlins-heirs-sue-comedy-podcast-over-ai-generated-impression/

As I've written, we're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

AI systems can do some remarkable party tricks, but there's a huge difference between producing a plausible sentence and a good one. After the initial rush of astonishment, the stench of botshit becomes unmistakable:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

Some of this botshit comes from people who are sold a bill of goods: they're convinced that they can make a George Carlin special without any human intervention and when the bot fails, they manufacture their own botshit, assuming they must be bad at prompting the AI.

This is an old technology story: I had a friend who was contracted to livestream a Canadian awards show in the earliest days of the web. They booked in multiple ISDN lines from Bell Canada and set up an impressive Mbone encoding station on the wings of the stage. Only one problem: the ISDNs flaked (this was a common problem with ISDNs!). There was no way to livecast the show.

Nevertheless, my friend's boss's ordered him to go on pretending to livestream the show. They made a big deal of it, with all kinds of cool visualizers showing the progress of this futuristic marvel, which the cameras frequently lingered on, accompanied by overheated narration from the show's hosts.

The weirdest part? The next day, my friend – and many others – heard from satisfied viewers who boasted about how amazing it had been to watch this show on their computers, rather than their TVs. Remember: there had been no stream. These people had just assumed that the problem was on their end – that they had failed to correctly install and configure the multiple browser plugins required. Not wanting to admit their technical incompetence, they instead boasted about how great the show had been. It was the Emperor's New Livestream.

Perhaps that's what happened to the Dudesy bros. But there's another possibility: maybe they were captured by their own imaginations. In "Genesis," an essay in the 2007 collection The Creationists, EL Doctorow (no relation) describes how the ancient Babylonians were so poleaxed by the strange wonder of the story they made up about the origin of the universe that they assumed that it must be true. They themselves weren't nearly imaginative enough to have come up with this super-cool tale, so God must have put it in their minds:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/29/gedankenexperimentwahn/#high-on-your-own-supply

That seems to have been what happened to the Air Force colonel who falsely claimed that a "rogue AI-powered drone" had spontaneously evolved the strategy of killing its operator as a way of clearing the obstacle to its main objective, which was killing the enemy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/ayyyyyy-eyeeeee/

This never happened. It was – in the chagrined colonel's words – a "thought experiment." In other words, this guy – who is the USAF's Chief of AI Test and Operations – was so excited about his own made up story that he forgot it wasn't true and told a whole conference-room full of people that it had actually happened.

Maybe that's what happened with the George Carlinbot 3000: the Dudesy dudes fell in love with their own vision for a fully automated luxury Carlinbot and forgot that they had made it up, so they just cheated, assuming they would eventually be able to make a fully operational Battle Carlinbot.

That's basically the Theranos story: a teenaged "entrepreneur" was convinced that she was just about to produce a seemingly impossible, revolutionary diagnostic machine, so she faked its results, abetted by investors, customers and others who wanted to believe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos

The thing about stories of AI miracles is that they are peddled by both AI's boosters and its critics. For boosters, the value of these tall tales is obvious: if normies can be convinced that AI is capable of performing miracles, they'll invest in it. They'll even integrate it into their product offerings and then quietly hire legions of humans to pick up the botshit it leaves behind. These abettors can be relied upon to keep the defects in these products a secret, because they'll assume that they've committed an operator error. After all, everyone knows that AI can do anything, so if it's not performing for them, the problem must exist between the keyboard and the chair.

But this would only take AI so far. It's one thing to hear implausible stories of AI's triumph from the people invested in it – but what about when AI's critics repeat those stories? If your boss thinks an AI can do your job, and AI critics are all running around with their hair on fire, shouting about the coming AI jobpocalypse, then maybe the AI really can do your job?

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

There's a name for this kind of criticism: "criti-hype," coined by Lee Vinsel, who points to many reasons for its persistence, including the fact that it constitutes an "academic business-model":

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

That's four reasons for AI hype:

to win investors and customers;

to cover customers' and users' embarrassment when the AI doesn't perform;

AI dreamers so high on their own supply that they can't tell truth from fantasy;

A business-model for doomsayers who form an unholy alliance with AI companies by parroting their silliest hype in warning form.

But there's a fifth motivation for criti-hype: to simplify otherwise tedious and complex situations. As Jamie Zawinski writes, this is the motivation behind the obvious lie that the "autonomous cars" on the streets of San Francisco have no driver:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/driverless-cars-always-have-a-driver/

GM's Cruise division was forced to shutter its SF operations after one of its "self-driving" cars dragged an injured pedestrian for 20 feet:

https://www.wired.com/story/cruise-robotaxi-self-driving-permit-revoked-california/

One of the widely discussed revelations in the wake of the incident was that Cruise employed 1.5 skilled technical remote overseers for every one of its "self-driving" cars. In other words, they had replaced a single low-waged cab driver with 1.5 higher-paid remote operators.

As Zawinski writes, SFPD is well aware that there's a human being (or more than one human being) responsible for every one of these cars – someone who is formally at fault when the cars injure people or damage property. Nevertheless, SFPD and SFMTA maintain that these cars can't be cited for moving violations because "no one is driving them."

But figuring out who which person is responsible for a moving violation is "complicated and annoying to deal with," so the fiction persists.

(Zawinski notes that even when these people are held responsible, they're a "moral crumple zone" for the company that decided to enroll whole cities in nonconsensual murderbot experiments.)

Automation hype has always involved hidden humans. The most famous of these was the "mechanical Turk" hoax: a supposed chess-playing robot that was just a puppet operated by a concealed human operator wedged awkwardly into its carapace.

This pattern repeats itself through the ages. Thomas Jefferson "replaced his slaves" with dumbwaiters – but of course, dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, they hide slaves:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

The modern Mechanical Turk – a division of Amazon that employs low-waged "clickworkers," many of them overseas – modernizes the dumbwaiter by hiding low-waged workforces behind a veneer of automation. The MTurk is an abstract "cloud" of human intelligence (the tasks MTurks perform are called "HITs," which stands for "Human Intelligence Tasks").

This is such a truism that techies in India joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians." Or, to use Jathan Sadowski's wonderful term: "Potemkin AI":

https://reallifemag.com/potemkin-ai/

This Potemkin AI is everywhere you look. When Tesla unveiled its humanoid robot Optimus, they made a big flashy show of it, promising a $20,000 automaton was just on the horizon. They failed to mention that Optimus was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Likewise with the famous demo of a "full self-driving" Tesla, which turned out to be a canned fake:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

The most shocking and terrifying and enraging AI demos keep turning out to be "Just A Guy" (in Molly White's excellent parlance):

https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1751670561606971895

And yet, we keep falling for it. It's no wonder, really: criti-hype rewards so many different people in so many different ways that it truly offers something for everyone.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

Image:

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Ross Breadmore (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/rossbreadmore/5169298162/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic #ai #absent indians #mechanical turks #scams #george carlin #comedy #body-snatchers #fraud #theranos #guys in robot suits #criti-hype #machine learning #fake it til you make it #too good to fact-check #mturk #deepfakes

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