#loveofcamp

How are you doing? Long time no see! Around here things are quite not-same-old lately.

The last hiatus I took from horror genre content publishing was rather extensive, and I couldn’t find a time when all the variables (read: enthusiasm, energy, and ideas for quality content) aligned like they are now.

My 2018-2021 experiences around the horror social web were nothing to write home about, so I branched out into video game design, as you may know already if you’ve been up to date with my other project going on at Jimminy Studios.

I guess my cinematographer side is too greedy to stay in one genre, so I took advantage of the past several years of disconnect from the horror and Halloween 24/7/365 mentalities that drove me from ‘18 to late ‘21 and got into many non-horror things.

I watched a lot of non-horror and must-watch series, like The Sopranos, Better Call Saul, or The Wire, and old 1980s series too.

One thing horror I got into, and extra enjoyed is that I realized I had come full circle with Lovecraft after decades reading his tales, and got started with the Cthulhu Mythos writers and the tales I’ve read so far are kind of good and highly enjoyable.

Lovecraft is too big of a subject to really be done with it, if he interests you, not just as a writer of weird fiction, but also as a person in general.

Consider all his tales, poetry and articles, the biographies, and the ton of letters. And all this without counting the derivative products, like the Cthulhu Mythos writers and stories.

The one side of Lovecraft I’ve been into lately is his T. S. Joshi biography. Although I haven’t read it for almost a year and a half I’m not done with it. It’s a tome. I’m taking notes and it’s the best biography I’ve read so far, truly exhaustive.

Even if I have been this self-absorbed (I don’t know if I told you, but I relocated to a different place from where I was before) moving to Florida wasn’t something to take lightly and it took me a long quantity of months to adjust (and I’m not sure I’m too adjusted yet, to be honest), even if I couldn’t write anything or do any work for Shock Depot to grow, I had the mindfulness I needed each time I saw or read something remarkable that relates or belongs to the horror genre to star/fav/save it so I can later share it with you.

Streaming services are the bread and butter for a Shock Depot horror content publisher and while I administer and own the website I also fed, feed, and will feed it with content like anyone else, and lately I’ve been focusing on one source of ideas for content that doesn’t cease to amaze me.

First, some background to give you an idea of where my all-time horror (borrowed) knowledge comes from, it comes from Fangoria. So you must imagine that it’s just a sliver (among many) of knowledge of the genre.

I read all the Fangorias from the first issue up to issues from 2005 or so, and while I was doing that, I was taking notes of the movies I thought I wanted to watch, and later went and watched them.

This went on from 2006 until 2012 or so, from then on I got all my knowledge of horror from the web. Thinking vainly that I’d watched almost everything there is to watch from past decades, I kind of stopped inquiring about non-current horror movies.

The thing that changed this wrong notion about myself was Tubi. It has a big bunch of old horror movies and series I didn’t even know existed, and still today it doesn’t cease to amaze me for more than half a decade now.

Happy Halloween everyone! Like I said in my last entry more than a month ago Shock Depot is running better than ever. Who isn’t up to snuff yet (no pun intended) is me.

I had a handful of things planned for Shock Depot to be published on Halloween, but I couldn’t make time to work on a single one of them.

The most important piece was going to be a Vincent Price profile, a step beyond a mere review of a book like the one on Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror or the little Vampira Profile I wrote three years ago. Which was the funniest (while researching it and writing it) thing I ever wrote.

I guess that now I have a whole year to write Vince’s profile, so it’s going to be good. I might even make it bigger than a profile and a downright dossier on such a horror idol.

Besides that, I wrote a lot of listicles, but they aren’t finished so I’ll go publishing them one by one without any kind of haste. Most are about horror music on YouTube, something that is getting better by the hour.

Incorporating game development into a horror communicator occupation certainly drastically changed my lifestyle.

If there has been nothing from me on the horror topic since around November 2021 is because that was around the time I started to think about developing a game.

You can imagine from knowing nothing to having achieved something that resembles a game, with all the things involved in between, such as designing, learning how to implement things for the game, implementing… the last two years flew completely.

I remember it vividly, in 2020 I ditched my other two occupations for the whole month of October and the only thing I did was dispensing horror content.

In my current situation, I can’t do that anymore and it hurts but I guess sometime in the future I will have stabilized enough and will have the resources to do meaningful horror stuff during October.

Now I leave you with a thought, did it escape you that when some countries think of October as the month of Halloween for others is the month of Oktoberfest?

Nevertheless, for you and me, Halloween is every day.

I can’t believe the day has come when I’m finally writing this. This is a very special day in the story of Shock Depot, my horror genre website.

!! Since yesterday Shock Depot resides in a better hosting provider !!

This is what happened: I had a horror blog that used this same address, but when Tumblr as a CMS stopped being usable I migrated that blog (its name was The Horror Vivarium before a horror movie named Vivarium was released, I beat them to the name for like 1-2 years) to a WordPress self-hosted website, and re-branded it to Shock Depot.

The hosting provider I picked for Shock Depot back then, in July 2020 was very stingy with the storage quota they give to their low-end plans but I was very strapped for cash back then, kind of unable to pay for a better hosting provider and plan.

I confess that in the last three years, I worked intensely, though part-time, for Shock Depot albeit for only one year and a half.

I kind of abandoned the site, because a lot of other things got in the way, the most important among them was my relocation to the American mainland.

But it wasn’t all about the things I needed to do that weren’t related to the website. It was also about the website itself.

It had a very limited scope for growth due to the tiny storage quota and I was already at a dangerous level of used space.

Things got so bad in the last year and a half that the only storage left I had I couldn’t employ it for publishing new content or posting more files to download because I needed that slack of disk space to be able to keep the website in working order without stability or glitch issues.

Finally, it had to do also with my branching out from web communicator to independent video game developer, something I started working on 1/1/2021.

All of these things don’t mean that since around November 2020, when I started to wind down from working on Shock Depot for one year and a half, they don’t mean I wasn’t longing to return to the site and the social media channels where I connect with other horror fans.

No. I was jonesing to return like crazy but today I can officially announce that I’m returning to work actively on Shock Depot to bring horror fans as many horror benefits, horror resources, and horror web entertainment as I can.

So What Now?

Now the website will become enlivened again, since I'll be posting content and resources to it consistently.

The month that just passed, January of 2021, was one of this tumblelog’s worst months since I began to periodically post to it.

All through January I was (mostly) disconnected from social media due to returning to video game developing after eons away from it.

Need Good (and free) Horror? I Open the Door to my Sicko-World and let it Open for You to come, Visit and (hopefully) Stay!

Becoming my friend, helping me or following me and liking and sharing my content has its benefits. It's not only that I'll make it worth your while when you invest your time in reading my particular horror content.

I can assure you that the previous paragraph is true, but I can't prove it to you until you demonstrate to me that you like me with some reciprocation.

If you make yourself evident to me, I can cater to you on a personal basis, and I mean for free when I say this. I will never ask for money, even if someday in the future I would implement a monetization model on top of my blog.

I think it's important for you, if you're a horror fan, to know me. Because if you haven't already reached my reality level, your life as a horror fan has room for improvement.

When I say my level of reality, I mean that I was always so much horror-oriented, since the littlest childhood, that it came a moment when from a total normal reality, I entered a different one. One that I categorize as larger than fiction in oh so many levels, not just the paranormal experiences.

I'm decidedly misanthropic, and I'm having a hard time opening myself. Like I started to do not long ago, when I began writing The Horror Vivarium, in November of 2018. Still, I know that it's not a big deal. It's just like everything else: practice makes perfect.

I love to ideate and write fictional horror stories, but I also have a real side (that I'm developing under a different name) to share, on the topic of real paranormal experiences.

If you fill my horror story survey, you'll have an exclusive peek into that other side of my personality. The part of me that's generally worried of one more preternatural experience, one more chance of having a serious scare with potential to cause me a heart attack.

The most physical sensation product of an unexplained scare I felt was a hardened contraction of the neck's muscles and the sensation of my neck's hairs standing on end and tingling in the spine.

I can't say I didn't enjoy it, though... but those are just two horror sensations, in a long list of them that anyone can feel, with a majority of unpleasant ones.

If you fill my survey and let me your email address, I will send you a section of a book I'm writing with a record of most of my paranormal experiences with ghosts and similar anomalies. I hope you read it in the dead of night and be genuinely spooked by it.

Additionally, I hope that, if someday I decide to make a mass mailing to those that let me their email addresses, which will, of course, be a question for permission to send you content, I hope you'll accept it.

Horror Blogger Q-A

1) Did you have any experience with UFOs or aliens, are they in the sample you're going to send me?

Yes, I had a handful, but for the sake of organization, I decided to record those experiences in a different chapter of the book. Unfortunately, that section isn't finished yet and is not included in the gift.

2) I liked one of your ideas and want to develop it, what do I do?

If you want to develop any of my ideas, get in touch with me and we can negotiate it. Don't steal any of them, though. I have posted daimonic and demoniac entities in charge of protecting my intellectual property, instructing them to incapacitate those that do it in a gruesome way (I'm not giving any more details on this).

3) If I send you a link/archive/etc, would you endorse/review/comment on my horror thing?

I'm not aiming at becoming a horror influencer. I don't want to be sent any material stuff. But I'm more than eager to review anything written or designed on the horror genre and give feedback on it.

4) How can I help you?

Please fill my horror survey here.

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