D20 Additional Anomalous Media

Getting on the ol' bandwagon: https://throneofsalt.blogspot.com/2020/11/d20-anomalous-media.html

1

Violin Concerto IX: Degraded magnetic tape recording of a four hour violin concerto. The concerto was composed by a child prodigy referred to in classified documents only as "Black Mozart" at the age of eight, shortly before he was taken into custody by a CIA agent.

The child was given to a team including ex-Nazi scientists brought over to America by Operation Paperclip in order to extract the secrets of musical genius, a process involving experiments which were deemed unethical to perform on whites. This was to be the masterstroke of a faction within the CIA's International Organizations Division that saw the Division's support of Abstract Expressionism over more traditional art as degenerate.

The child prodigy was killed by the experiments. All that remains of him and his tremendous body of work are some scraps of brain matter in formaldehyde jars and a poorly-preserved recording of Violin Concerto IX.

2

Concerned Mothers Against Satanic Abuse PSA: A short documentary which features the testimonies of several women, their children, and psychiatrists on the topic of occult child abuse conspiracies, as well as readings from the Malleus Maleficarum. The testimonies are separated by interludes of metal music playing backwards while pentagrams and crayon illustrations of demons flash. Aired for a period of three months on public-access television at the height of the Satanic Panic. Recordings can be found on most streaming sites.

Watching the PSA in full inserts false memories of relatives, teachers, and other caregivers having abused the watcher in a ritualistic fashion when they were children.

3

eep.png: An image file containing a "basilisk" which is able to hack the human brain through its visual cortex. Viewers perceive the image as being something antithetical to their core political identity and beliefs. Viewers have reported seeing a slaughterhouse in operation, interracial pornography, a Russian flag flying over the White House, a former president defecating on the Bible, and a cartoon frog, among other things.

Besides its shifting appearance, eep.png is also able to affect the human brain by amplifying viewers' disgust, fear, and anger reactions when exposed to expressions of political beliefs they don't share. Exposure to eep.png has been connected to the Amphitheatre Parkway Shooting, the Tampa Iridium Bombing, the Metro Hakone Derailing, the Strasburg Stabbings, and the Moscow Maulings. While suspected, its connection to the disastrous Invasion of Iran is unconfirmed.

4

The Last Stand of a Weeping Man: A single act, single performer play about a man trying to drink himself to death in a motel room.

If performed accurate to the script and in an empty theatre then an audience will filter in over the course of the play. At the play's climax the actor asks three questions of the audience:

"Who is watching me?"

"Who is following me?"

and "Why must I die?"

Two of the three questions will be answered accurately with regard to the actor's own life by the audience. As the script requires imbibing a significant amount of liquor before the questions are asked most performers report difficulty remembering the answers in full.

When the play has been performed in front of a human audience it has been criticized as "gimmicky", "flat", and "navel-gazing".

5

Abel Ape Pamphlet: A pamphlet that saw limited circulation in PETA mailing lists in the early '90s. In dual columns of English and incompetently-translated Medan Malay the pamphlet lays out an alternate interpretation of the myth of Cain and Abel, wherein Abel is the peaceful orangutan, intended to inherit the Earth by God, while Cain is the violent and envious humanity who usurps their brother through murder and degradation.

As proof of this narrative the pamphlet claims that it is printed on paper made from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Fiber testing of the paper indicates bizarre differences to all known tree species.

6

Nevuh Fuggedaboutit: The surreal and apocryphal 87th episode of The Sopranos, which lacks an opening and credits. The episode follows an older A.J. Soprano (played by an as-yet unidentified actor), who has followed in his father's footsteps and become boss of the New Jersey mob, which now consists of only him, a decrepit Paulie, and an inexplicably unaged Furio. A.J. drives around New Jersey and repeats lines and actions which Tony performed in earlier episodes, often interacting with characters who are not actually present in the scene.

There is a B-plot which A.J.'s story does not cross over with at any point, which involves Carmela renovating the family home impossibly quickly, and Meadow struggling to find her within. All characters besides A.J. appear to be portrayed by their actual actors in the series, though when questioned about it at conventions all have denied involvement in or knowledge of the episode.

The fate of Tony Soprano is not mentioned.

7

Platypals:  A podcast hosted by two friends with the occasional guest (typically the second host's boyfriend) with a 121-episode run that has an average of 240 downloads per episode. It was self-described as "the one-stop shop for all things platypus".

The podcast documents the disintegration of the hosts' friendship as they run out of platypus facts in the first ten episodes, and sprawl into more tenuous content, such as a twenty five episode run of speculative evolution in a world where every vertebrate but the platypus is rendered extinct. Further strain is added by the first host spending thousands of dollars of their pooled savings on recording equipment, Platypals merchandise, renting convention space, and a trip to Australia.

At the twenty minute mark episode #113 records the first host bludgeoning the second host to death with the base of a stuffed platypus. The remaining eight episodes were recorded and released in rapid succession as the first host fled first from the second host's boyfriend and then the police. Over its entire run the podcast made a total of $250 on patreon, all donated ironically by a furry with a platypus fursona.

8

Anomorphosis.txt: A 98 page compilation of posts by the founding user Jasmine86 on the now-defunct pro-anorexia forum Anomorphosis. Jasmine86 became infamous on some corners of the internet for her mostly-misinformed rants on Sufi and Jain asceticism, as well as for posting thousands of nude pictures of herself. Egged on by trolls and a few sincere believers, Jasmine86's health reached its nadir when the skin over her right knee split open due to a combination of malnourishment and holding self-invented "yoga" positions for hours. Jasmine86's final post features a picture of the evidently infected wound, which she refers to as her "body flower", and a journal of a dream in which the "flower" is "viscerally pollinated" by "astral birds".

While initially put together to make fun of Jasmine86, Anomorphosis.txt has since inspired almost a dozen copycats and caused one death and three hospitalizations.

9

Gloria Sophia Digitalia: A vocaloid program created by a one man over the course of 18 years. GSD was built to be the "Earthly incarnation of the transcendent ideal of beauty", with code arranged according to principles of sacred geometry, among other painstaking features. English and French curse words, as well as various other words such as "circumcision", "Halloween", and "Mecca", are automatically censored when placed in GSD's vocal track.

The programmer behind GSD died seven days after its completion and release. He was shot in an armed robbery he perpetrated to support the amphetamine habit picked up during GSD's development.

Listening to songs made with Gloria Sophia Digitalia in accordance with its creator's instructions has been known to cause religiously-themed psychosis similar to Jerusalem syndrome.

10

CentaurThirdAttempt.mkv: A short video of a man with legs amputated midway down his thighs and a horse standing upright with most of its upper head and lower jaw missing in what looks to be a garage. The man uses a hand-operated crane to lift himself into a harness attached to the horse's neck and shoulders. By pulling some straps with his thighs he is somehow able to make the horse take a few steps forward, before it trips and knocks the recording camera over.

11

The Olfactorum: A device which resembles a high-tech bagpipe. It can be "played" to release a huge variety of scents in layered compositions. The olfactorum's creator claims to have woken up holding it after being abducted by aliens, and has maintained a marginal living by touring outsider art exhibitions with it.

12

Amazing Autumn Hedge Maze Adventure: A "walking simulator" game set in an endless hedge maze decorated with pumpkins. The game is able to calibrate itself in real time to the preferences of its player, turning itself into an inescapable Skinner box over the course of many hours of play. Fortunately the game starts off boring enough that relatively few people have become trapped for a lethal length of time.

13

Crushing Portraiture: A series of crush fetish videos and painting tutorials which were hosted first on an OnlyFans account and then an extreme Czech porn site once the account was banned. The videos feature a woman, of whom only her hands and legs are show, killing progressively larger animals by stepping on them with high heels, then using the resulting paste to paint a self portrait. The first animals to be crushed are mosquito larvae. The last is a donkey foal, which takes several hours.

The videos demonstrate an in-depth knowledge of archaic painting techniques paired with impressive if horrible personal innovations, deriving a range of shades and textures from organs and bodily fluids.

14

"The Absolute Rampage of Dairaijon": A VHS tape containing a low budget dubbed kaiju movie apparently filmed in the late '70s to early '80s. With the exception of a few lines (in particular any sentence in which the titular monster Dairaijon is mentioned by name) the dub is complete gibberish.

What can be gleaned of the movie's plot is that a bolt of lightning discharged from a nebula passing the Earth creates or awakens Dairaijon, who terrorizes a Japanese city until the protagonist, a housewife who loses her family to Dairaijon's attack, causes the ocean to animate and drag away the monster.

Compared to contemporary kaiju movies The Absolute Rampage of Dairaijon appears inexpertly made. The Dairaijon costume's paint fades over the course of the movie, and cracks form in the rubber. One of its dorsal eyestalks falls off midway through a scene and is not replaced in later scenes. The sets lack detail, and building models are full of raw beef.

When played on a cathode-ray tube screen the movie displays peculiar electromagnetic effects. It causes people nearby to experience feelings of dread and severe Alice in Wonderland syndrome, perceiving animals and structures in their surroundings to be much larger than they are. Electrical infrastructure the screen is plugged into suffers fires and blackouts.

15

Les Exécrables: A hand-drawn Quebecois children's cartoon that was cancelled after 8 episodes when it came out that its producers were embezzling Canada Media Fund grants.

Each episode revolves around the grotesque, Muppet-esque characters reenacting various events in Quebec's history, from the voyages of Jacques Cartier to the October Crisis. The writing is satirical and contains much innuendo that would go over the head of a young audience.

Les Exécrables attracted a cult following after its cancellation, with fans combing the show for Easter egg phrases encoded in song lyrics and diagrams that appeared in backgrounds. Due to the efforts of a small team of dedicated watchers it was pieced together that these assumed Easter eggs in fact composed a plan to assassinate then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper. This plan exposed security weakpoints that went unaddressed and were later exploited to kill several members of Parliament.

16

Ricardo de la Luna: Apparently what was intended to be a science fiction radio play, recorded on a stack of vinyls by a Spanish soldier fighting for an unknown side in the civil war. The radio play follows the moon-born heroic engineer Ricardo as he supports a war effort against invading aliens that have destroyed the Earth.

The radio play is intolerably dry, with atrociously long digressions into orbital equations, technical specs of spacecraft, and the like. These digressions also show the writer's incredible acumen with science and mathematics, such as an understanding of rocketry that wouldn't be matched until the Apollo missions, seemingly developed alone and ex nihilo. Among other implausible predictions the radio play also includes a sort of analogue blockchain currency.

Due to the loss of some of the vinyls the play ends on a cliffhanger as the aliens launch a missile containing an enhanced H1N1 influenza A virus towards the last bastion of humanity, forcing a crucified Ricardo to watch on.

17

Auntie Yonnie's Progressive Throat Songs: A self-published album of experimental throat singing, with each song on the album starting with clips of Auntie Yonnie walking the listener through the body modification surgery she'll undergo to perform the song, and audio from the surgeries themselves.

The album cover is a picture of Auntie Yonnie bleeding out from tubes in her neck after the final surgery.

18

NDAY.mp4d: A video shared on three content aggregation sites by a user under the name "John Titor", who based on comparison of IP addresses is unlikely to be the original John Titor. The video is grainy and shaky aerial footage taken by either a large drone or from some kind of VTOL aircraft. There is audio commentary over the footage, but it is difficult to make out over the sound of rotors. The footage shows a ruined city riddled with craters and debris, with crowds of people running around and colliding into, possibly attacking, each other. The video runs for 4 minutes and 49 seconds, ending with the aircraft being struck by an air-to-air projectile and spinning towards the ground.

Based on landmarks visible in the video, the city it depicts appears to change every 24 hours. The original version changed at 12:00 AM, GMT +9, while saved copies change 24 hours after they were created.

19

"God Help Me": A graffiti painting of a haggard man in a stained blue tracksuit and undershirt which appears in alleys and foreclosed homes in Manchester. The man is always painted with a speech bubble containing the words "God help me".

When the paintings show up in mainstream media they're typically attributed to an anonymous street artist, like a less political Banksy. Due to the fact that no more than one physical copy of the painting has existed at one time (with even copies enclosed in a mesh cage disappearing without a trace) there is an online conspiracy theory that the painting is itself a living creature. There have been several attempts to kill it with sledgehammers and explosives, but it's returned looking more worn down each time.

20

The Vanguard of Dreamless Sleep: A comic book set in a dystopian future where the Earth is on the verge of being taken over by a super/sub-human variant called the Tabulatarchs. Tabulatarchs are not another species, but rather ordinary people who through drugs and auto-hypnosis have "optimized away their animal minds", ridding themselves of "unsatisfiable desires" and "that glutton of sleep which is called dreaming".

The plot of the book follows a rebel against the Tabulatarchs who becomes disillusioned by the infighting, ineptitude, and laziness of her fellows. She eventually becomes a Tabulatarch herself and locks her former comrades in "tele-cells" where they're incapacitated by a constant stream of audiovisual stimulation.

The comic's manuscript was originally submitted to 2000 AD in the '70s, but it was rejected for the hostility of its application letter. Copies circulated in indie comic circles for decades, until a full printing was made in the early 2000s.

Readers of TVoDS often report a decrease in appetite, increase in attention span, numbness toward art which typically triggers feelings of the sublime, and lack of memory of their dreams. Addition of The Vanguard of Dreamless Sleep to primary school curricula has been added as a requirement for aid by the World Bank, a policy which has seen notable gig productivity growth in its initial application in the American Midwest.