Home Alone Gothic

"I was drunk one night and he worked at a gas station. Thought he was hot, so I gave him my number. We hit it right off... meaning we just had sex. It was casual for a while, then it progressed from there."

Pacific Northwest Gothic

- Trees crack the sidewalk, roots gasping for air, trying to break free from the concrete prison. If you look at the trees from the corner of your eyes you can almost see them trying to escape.

- Graveyards full of crumbling head stones with names long forgotten. They say if you sit among the tombs and read the faded words you will be forgiven for your sins. The ghosts of the forgotten will smile upon you for trying to remember.

- There are whispers that deep in the desert lay the bodies of the dead; skeletal hands pointing west, towards water. The crows live here finding homes in broken rib cages. The sand littered with the broken jewels of bottles and old wilted leather boots. If you find the place you will become nothing more than bones.

- You can always trust the sea to do what she wants. The sea is her own master she finds pleasure in pain and peace. But if you giver her your trust she will let you live. If you wade out into her waters and give her your body letting the rough waves cut against your calves going farther up to your chest above your head letting her have you she will let you live. She will let you live safely for she knows that you belong to her.

- The fog creeps and claws at the horizon it reaches for your soul. You’ve seen it take others. You know loved ones who have disappeared into the fog. You run afraid of what might happen if it catches you.

- Deep within the forest where the ferns and the fur trees are so thick you can barley see the sun. The earth swallowed by moss and lichen here is where the fairies live. Their sharp claws click and their teeth bare craving human flesh. But if you stand still they won’t take you away quiet yet they will leave you to the trees. For they are hungry too.

- If you drive and drive heading east. You will find them town after empty town. Not a living soul for miles and miles, only bare earth. Perhaps you’ll stop to take a picture of an old dilapidated building, a cow skull, wagon ruts. This small town existing only on a small patch of road. So small you don’t expect to see a person. So small you know there are no people. So small you pray no one is watching. When a hand grabs your shoulder you know you were mistaken.

- Here the earth swallows buildings the mud and dirt devouring brick and metal. The trees seem to walk, they look closer then you remember. The rain never stops falling. It falls forever upon endless streets, the worms drowning upon the pavement; you cannot save them any more then you can save yourself. The crows fly in remorseful circles even the buzzards are afraid of them. The only building left standing is the old town hall its brick and marble pillars lopsided but its foundation will be the last to crumble.

- The sea eats away at the earth making it crumble to dust. Back and forth the waves go until there is nothing left. Cliffs and people fall to the sea, but never did you imagine that the world would as well.

- Do not trust the mountains, their picturesque peaks blanketed in snow. Do not trust the mountains, they have taken so many.

- The fishermen are the only ones you can trust, their sea weathered faces stained by sun and sand. Their wrinkles so deep as if cut with knives, their skin as rough as leather. Trust the fishermen their hands calloused and bleeding full of knowledge, every knot still caught on their tongues. Trust the fishermen their eyes dark from too many worlds seen, their hearts heavy with lost. Trust the fishermen for they are the only ones who know what is at the edge of the world.

- The trees creak with secrets. The wind ruffling their dead leaves creating devils that swirl with ghostly fingers pointing accusingly towards the sinners. The trees have secrets engraved in their puzzle like bark. If you want you can feel the wood like brail beneath calloused fingertips. Few can understand the words stuck like amber upon the flesh of the tree but even fewer have tried.

- At night the lake swallows the moon creating moonbeams that dance across its surface. They say if you dare to drink the water you will be able to live amongst the stars.

- They say the trees bring salvation. Whispers of the children born amongst the trees live in every one’s hearts. It is thought that these children grow strong their bones made of powerful oak and their blood pumps with sap from maples. They say their hair is dappled with lichen. They say, they say. If you watch quietly you might catch them as they dance amongst the forest, the trees showering them in secrets of worlds that crumbled, devoured by flora and fauna. When you leave the forest returning home to the city full of weak children, their lungs full of smog and minds programed with rusted mechanics, you will dream of the forest your head full of pine and spruce. These dreams call to you begging you to come back to the trees, to return. To leave behind these men of steal, to come live in the forest, to come home. Do not listen to these dreams. The trees are not your salvation, they will call for you then swallow you whole slowly decomposing your bones.

i’m so upset

I just realized that the reason ghosts say Boo! is because it’s a latin verb

they’re literally saying ‘I alarm/I am alarming/I do alarm!!

I can’t

Slate Magazine

I’m the TikTok Couch Guy. Here’s What It Was Like Being Investigated on the Internet.

The invasive TikTok sleuthing I experienced was not an isolated instance, but rather the latest manifestation of a large-scale sleuthing cul

Posted without commentary:

On Sept. 17, 2021, my long-distance girlfriend, Lauren, paid a surprise visit to me while a friend filmed my reaction. Three days later, she set the 19-second clip to a hokey Ellie Goulding song and posted it to roughly 200 TikTok followers. The first commenters—Lauren’s close friends—had positive things to say. But soon strangers—among whom the video was less well received—began commenting, criticizing my reaction time or my being seated on a couch next to friends who happened to be of the opposite sex. “Girl he ain’t loyal.” “Red flag! He didn’t get up off the couch and jump up and down in excitement.” “Bro if my man was on a couch full of girls IM WALKING BACK OUT THE DOOR.”

As comments accusing me of infidelity rolled in, the video quickly became the topic of fierce online debate, à la “The Dress.” I, an ordinary college sophomore, became TikTok’s latest meme: Couch Guy. TikTok users made parody videos, American Eagle advertised a no-effort Couch Guy Halloween costume, and Rolling Stone, E! Online, The Daily Show, and The View all covered the phenomenon. On TikTok, Lauren’s video and the hashtag #CouchGuy, respectively, have received more than 64 million and 1 billion views.

While the Couch Guy meme was lighthearted on its surface, it turned menacing as TikTok users obsessively invaded the lives of Lauren, our friends, and me—people with no previous desire for internet fame, let alone infamy. Would-be sleuths conducted what Trevor Noah jokingly called “the most intense forensic investigation since the Kennedy assassination.” During my tenure as Couch Guy, I was the subject of frame-by-frame body language analyses, armchair diagnoses of psychopathy, comparisons to convicted murderers, and general discussions about my “bad vibes.”

At times, the investigation even transcended the digital world—for instance, when a resident in my apartment building posted a TikTok video, which accumulated 2.3 million views, of himself slipping a note under my door to request an interview. (I did not respond.) One viewer gleefully commented, “Even if this guy turned off his phone, he can’t escape the couch guy notifications,” a fact that the 37,600 users who liked it presumably celebrated too. Under another video, in which hall mates of mine promised to confront Couch Guy once they reached 1 million likes (they didn’t), a comment suggested that they “secretly see who’s coming and going from his place”—and received 17,800 approving likes. The New York Post reported on, and perhaps encouraged, such invasions of my privacy. In an article about the “frenzy … frantically trying to determine the identity” of the “mystery man” behind the meme, the Post asked, “Will the real ‘couch guy’ please stand up?” Meanwhile, as internet sleuths took to public online forums to sniff out my name, birthdate, and place of residence, the threat of doxxing loomed over my head.

Exacerbating these invasions of my privacy was the tabloid-style media coverage that I received. Take, for example, one online magazine article that solicited insights from a “body language expert” who concluded that my accusers “might be onto something,” since the “angle of [my] knees signals disinterest” and my “hands hint that [I’m] defensive.” This tabloid body language analysis—something typically reserved for Kardashians, the British royal family, and other A-listers—made me, a private citizen who had previously enjoyed his minimal internet presence, an unwilling recipient of the celebrity treatment.

Mercifully, my memedom has died down—interest in the Google search term “Couch Guy” peaked on Oct. 5—and I have come to tolerate looks of vague recognition and occasional selfie requests from strangers in public. And my digital scarlet letter has not carried much weight offline, given that Lauren and the other co-stars of the now-infamous video know my true character. Therefore, my anxiety rests only in the prospect that the invasive TikTok sleuthing I experienced was not an isolated instance, but rather—as tech writer Ryan Broderick has suggested—the latest manifestation of a large-scale sleuthing culture.

The sleuthing trend sweeping TikTok ramped up following the disappearance of the late Gabby Petito. As armchair TikTok sleuths flexed their investigative muscles, the app’s algorithm boosted content theorizing about what happened to Petito. Madison Kircher of Slate’s ICYMI podcast noted how her “For You page just decided I simply needed to see” TikTok users’ Gabby Petito videos “over and over again.” It appears that a similar phenomenon occurred with my lower-stakes virality, as I found myself scrolling through countless tweets bemoaning the inescapability of “Couch Guy TikTok.” One user despairingly reported seeing “five tik toks back to back on my [For You page] about couch guy.” (I assure you, though, that nobody despised Couch Guy’s omnipresence more than myself.)

The most recent target of the app’s emerging investigative spirit was Sabrina Prater, a 34-year-old contractor and trans woman, who went viral in November after posting a video of herself dancing in a basement midrenovation. The video’s virality began with parody videos, but quickly veered into the realm of conspiracy theory due to (you guessed it) the video’s apparent “bad vibes”—at which point I got a dreadful sense of déjà vu. As Prater’s video climbed to 22 million views and internet sleuths came together to form a r/WhosSabrinaPrater community on Reddit, Prater faced baseless murder accusations, transphobic comparisons to Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs, and overzealous vigilantes who threatened to go to her neighborhood to investigate further. This incident reveals the harmful potential of TikTok sleuthing. One expert aptly summed up the Prater saga to Rolling Stone: “It was like watching true crime, internet sleuthing, conspiracy theories, and transphobia collide in a car crash.”

Given the apparent tendency of the TikTok algorithm to present viral spectacles to a user base increasingly hungry for content to analyze forensically, there will inevitably be more Couch Guys or Praters in the future. When they appear on your For You page, I implore you to remember that they are people, not mysteries for you to solve. As users focused their collective magnifying glass on Lauren, my friends, and me—comparing their sleuthing to “watching a soap opera and knowing who the bad guy is”—it felt like the entertainment value of the meme began to overshadow our humanity. Stirred to make a TikTok of my own to quell the increasing hate, I posted a video reminding the sleuths that “not everything is true crime”—which commenters resoundingly deemed “gaslighting.” Lauren’s videos requesting that the armchair investigation stop were similarly dismissed as more evidence of my success as a manipulator, and my friends’ entreaties to respect our privacy, too, fell on deaf ears.

Certainly, noncelebrities have long unwillingly become public figures, and digital pile-ons have existed in some form since the dawn of the digital age—just ask Monica Lewinsky. But on TikTok, algorithmic feedback loops and the nature of the For You page make it easier than ever for regular people to be thrust against their wishes into the limelight. And the extent of our collective power is less obvious online, where pile-ons are delivered, as journalist Jon Ronson put it, “like remotely administered drone strikes.” On the receiving end of the barrage, however, as one finds their reputation challenged, body language hyperanalyzed, and privacy invaded, the severity of our collective power is made much too clear.

lamenting // april 2025

My hypothesis is that in like 10 years gen z is gonna have a big cult boom the way the boomers did in the 70s

random video essays i like

pathologic analysis; themes of a dying classic - a video essay

heroism in futility; pathologic, the void, and the hero narrative

the manga that breaks people

evil queens: a gay look at disney history

monsters in the closet - a history of lgbt representation in horror cinema

the complex problems with mental illness in fiction

elon musk

the ideology of the marvel cinematic universe

zootopia, umasou, and the failures of racial allegory

sinbad and the death of pirate cinema

brave was a disappointment

tips for walking in an abandoned graveyard

if it’s dark, don’t shine your flashlight into the trees.

if a child approaches and asks you a question, don’t tell the truth.

you may find some harrowing artifacts (i found a ribbon on a tree and some bible pages) pick these up and keep them. they belong to you.

if you walk down a long, straight pathway, you will feel someone behind you. don’t look

you may see people in your peripheral vision; these are the spirits. they won’t hurt you.

if you wish to communicate with the spirits, do not do it alone. cast a protection circle. only ask polite questions.

you will feel bursts of dread and terror. ignore them.

don’t read too much into what the graves say. some things are best left unsolved.

research the history of the graveyard beforehand. you need to know what you might encounter.

some beings may not want you to leave. should you come into contact with one of these beings, leave immediately.

don’t read the hidden graves.

if you find a headless angel statue, don’t look for her head.

if you find a tipped over angel statue, leave her be. she’s only resting.

don’t listen to music. this will distract you from them.

don’t look in the bushes. you will find something that you weren’t supposed to.