Ronan's Spooky Mysteries: The Flannan Isles Lighthouse

It's the spooky time of year again, which usually means horror movies, horror games, and other scary media. But this year, I've decided to do something a little different.

I've always been a huge fan of unsolved mysteries and unexplained phenomena. As a child, I used to devour books about ghosts and UFOs. I now consider myself a skeptic (but not the gross Reddit kind) and don't believe that concrete evidence for any paranormal occurrence has ever been found, and my interest has shifted to more earthly mysteries like missing persons and unsolved murders.

Over the course of October, I'm going to share some of my favourite mysteries with y'all, and have a go at coming up with plausible explanations. Join in in the comments!

Our first mystery is the disappearance of the Flannan Isles lighthouse keepers. In 1900, the captain of a ship approaching the outer reaches of the Scottish Hebrides noticed that the lightouse on the remote island of Eilean Mor was unlit. An investigation discovered that the three-man crew was nowhere to be found, and that there was a high concentration of weird clues inside: half-eaten food suggested that the men had abandoned their posts in a hurry, the clock was mysteriously stopped, and the logbook was full of spooky nonsense about the keepers acting strangely, and ended with the eerie phrase "God is over all."

The biggest puzzle of all came from the weather, and the lighthouse keepers' odd discrepancies in recording it. There had been a bad storm on the day of the last log entry, but the logbook stated that the weather was clear. The keepers had recorded a storm, but they claimed it had taken place days earlier, during a time when the weather was known to have been calm. Oh snap! Did they phase into another dimension or something? Were they all high as kites and lost track of the date?

Actually, the explanation is a lot simpler: most of what I just wrote is total BS.

The Flannan Isles light house mystery is a great example of how a spooky story can be embellished over the years. The detail about the uneaten food came from a poem about the disappearance, and was almost certainly influenced by the Mary Celeste case, where a half-eaten meal was discovered on board. The logbook didn't have anything strange in it. The clock was stopped because it was a 19th century design that needed to be wound periodically.

In fact, the first person on the scene noted that everything inside was perfectly tidy and normal, save for two details: a single oilskin coat hanging next to the door and an overturned chair, both of which seem to indicate that one of the keepers had left in a hurry while the other two were outside (the lighthouse was never meant to be left unmanned under any circumstances).

So what happened? The most plausible theory is that two of the keepers were out at the cliff-side hauling supplies up from a storage area when the third spotted a rogue wave approaching and rushed out to warn them; all three of them were then swept away, and their bodies never found. Rogue waves can be extremely unpredictable and dangerous, and the very same part of the island that the accident is speculated to have taken place on was badly damaged by something in the preceding days--possible another rogue wave.

Granted, there is a problem with this theory: the front door and gate of the lighthouse were both locked, and it seems unlikely that someone rushing out to save his colleagues from mortal peril, in such a panic that he didn't stop to put on his raincoat even though there was a storm raging outside, would take the time to lock up on his way out. The combination of the locked doors and the oilskin are the kind of tantalizing detail that give mysteries like this legs, as it's hard to envision a scenario that explains both of them neatly.

What's your take on this? Can you come up with a plausible story?

My review of the first 40 minutes of IT

I tried to see IT last night, and had to leave after about forty minutes. Not because the clown was too spooky, but because of migraines. The human brain: sometimes it sucks.

So here's a review of that first portion of the film, and why I didn't like it very much.

Before we start, I should mention that I have never read the Stephen King novel (King being best--or possibly only--enjoyed in very small doses), nor have I watched the miniseries that a lot of people seem to remember fondly, so I really walked into this with no expectations or preconceptions beyond a desire for scary clown antics. And the movie delivered those, just not in the way I was hoping for.

I'm kind of a giant snob when it comes to horror movies, in that I think the vast majority of mainstream wide-release horror movies totally suck and aren't scary, mostly due to a reliance on jump scares over genuine fear. IT doesn't seem like it falls into that trap, but it's lacking in subtlety in a whole other way.

The part of the movie I saw repeats the same basic format over and over again: there's a scene with the characters hanging out or investigating something, a kid wanders off into an isolated area, they're confronted by a kind of goofy looking monster, then Pennywise runs at them going ARGLEBARGLEBARGLE. Then there's another bit where the characters hang out, then another arglebargle scene, and then another hanging out bit, and then...

It's a very strange structure, like being on a roller coaster that's composed of nothing but an endless sequence of climbs and drops, spaced out so you can always tell exactly when the next one is coming. The movie seems less interested in genuinely scaring its audience than in triggering an adrenaline rush, the "scare" scenes all being accompanied by a deafening score and intense imagery (note that I said "intense" and not "scary" or "disturbing").

The shame of it is that the movie does pull out a few moments of really great, subtle creepiness, as in this scene highlighted by Birth.Movies.Death. The opening encounter between Georgie and Pennywise is also played fairly low-key, at least until Pennywise activates his Monster Mouth and bites the kid's arm off.

Actually, that moment kind of encapsulates everything I didn't like about the movie. The scene ends on a shot of blood running down a storm drain, which I found way creepier and more affecting than the arm biting; I'm willing to bet the entire scene would have turned out much more memorable if you never saw what happened, and just heard Georgie's screams followed by that last, chilling shot.

But no, the movie wants to be VISCERAL and R-RATED and make audiences go BOY HOWDY THAT SURE WAS SCARY GOSH DARN IT (the audience turns into cowboys for some reason). 

Still, I'm glad it's doing gangbusters at the box office. For all its apparent flaws (and I am cognizant of the fact that I'm judging it based on a third of its running time), it's still an ambitious, relatively high-budget horror movie that was clearly created with a lot more care than your average disposable Halloween fodder. Given how trend-based Hollywood is, maybe it will be the impetus for studios to start putting more effort into horror movies from now on. 

Game of Thrones season 7 (contd)

It's time for some Very Important opinions on Game of Thrones' just-concluded seventh season, with full spoilers.

In my last GoT post, I talked about how the show was gradually moving away from being the dark, gritty deconstruction of epic fantasy is started as and toward just being plain epic fantasy. With this most recent episode, that transformation is fully complete.

All of the surviving characters have developed inch-think plot armour, half of them have supernatural powers or near-superhuman combat abilities, there's magic destinies and secret birthrights left and right, and the bad guy is flying around on a zombie dragon that shoots nuclear Godzilla laser-breath. If you mildly toned down the amount of boobs and swearing, you could easily pass this off as an adaptation of a YA novel.

Not that all of this is necessarily a bad thing--because sometimes you've had enough pointless death and misery and just want to see attractive heroes fight scary monster villains with their magic swords--but it does mean that the entire story's priorities are now suspect. Case in point: Jon Snow.

I knew there was something up with Sir Gormsalot as far back as the second season, because he kept making decisions that should have gotten him killed if the same rules that governed everyone else were applied to him (and they did, but then he came back to life). Things got more suspect when the story kept rewarding him despite his being a total dingus: first he became commander of the Night's Watch despite looking about nineteen at the very most, then he was crowned King in the North even though he nearly got all of his friends and allies killed, and now it turns out he's the rightful heir to the Iron Throne and probably the literal Chosen One (and got to sail to the bone zone with Daenerys Targeryan).

Strip away all the surrounding grimdark, and you're left with an absolutely bog-standard fantasy yarn about a mildly downtrodden (but still extremely privileged) youth who rises from a lowly position in life, proves himself, discovers his secret destiny and saves the world while having sex with an attractive woman (who...is actually his aunt, but let's ignore that for now). Unless this is all setup for a spectacularly cruel twist where Jon gets stabbed in the forehead in the first episode of season eight, it feels like a massive betrayal of the show's core principles.

Except it's not, because it turns out all of that grittiness and deconstruction baloney was a smokescreen. This is where the story was always heading: cool, dashing heroes fighting epic battles against zombie laser-dragons. 

I for one fully embrace the cheese, and plan to plunge headfirst into the stupidity come season eight.

In which the NYT bestseller list is corrupted

If you're not clued into the nebulous realm of Book Twitter, you probably missed the fact that there's a bit of a to-do going on at the moment. Specifically, there's been speculation that a debut author might have essentially bought her way into the New York Times bestseller list, possibly as part of some sort of weird effort to bolster a fledgling acting career.

You can read the basic summary here, although more details are coming to light seemingly by the hour*. As ever in cases like this, I'm leery of the possibility of false or incorrect information, but it sounds like there are enough people who know what they're talking about raising a small thicket of red flags in this particular case.

Regardless of what's really going on, it's a good illustration of how strange the mechanics of publishing can be. You sometimes see people asserting that the entire industry is corrupt from top to bottom, a place where influence and "platform" trump merit, success depends solely on who you know, and there's no chance for a genuinely good author to rise to the top if they don't have the right connections. I think that's demonstrably untrue, but at the same time you have to keep in mind that what seems from the outside like a monolithic machine is actually a bunch of discrete entities working at different purposes and goals; if you were inclined to view the NYT list as some sort of sanctioned authority filtering the collective will of everyone involved in book publishing (which is a mindset I see fairly often in writing circles), this should thoroughly refute that idea.

The other reason this case got so much attention is that the book in question is poised to end The Hate U Give's 25-week run on top of the YA bestseller list; Angie Thomas's book is apparently brilliant, timely and eminently worthy of its success (I haven't read it yet), whereas Handbook for Mortals is...

Now I know what I need to write if I want to hit* the NYT Bestsellers list.

On it.

*buy my way to pic.twitter.com/83uGo5ZMdW

— Kosoko Jackson (@KosokoJackson) August 24, 2017

...seemingly not any of those things.

I think I'm going to go buy a copy of The Hate U Give as soon as I finish what I'm currently reading.

*As of literally twenty minutes ago, it seems that the NYT has revised its list to remove Handbook For Mortals, restoring The Hate U Give to its number one spot. YA readers and authors do not fuck around, apparently.

The Long Dark

My video game options have been severely limited over the last seven months by medical issues that make it hard to concentrate on anything with too much difficulty or complexity (or story), so I've been gravitating towards games that don't ask a lot of the player in terms of mechanics. In practice this means I've been playing a lot of games where you walk around and look at things and/or where you walk around and collect things.

Enter The Long Dark, a sandbox survival game that recently left early access. The premise is that a mysterious electromagnetic storm disables all of humanity's technology, instantly plunging the world into a "quiet apocalypse". Your character had the misfortune to be flying over the northern Canadian wilderness when this happened, and now you've got to survive for as long as you can by scavenging abandoned human habitations and bending the hostile landscape and wildlife to your will. Hunger, thirst, exhaustion and temperature all have to be carefully managed, and death is permanent.

There's also a recently-included episodic story, but I've only tried out the survival mode so far. Unfortunately, anything higher than the lowest difficulty setting proved too taxing for me at the moment, so I'm probably not getting the experience the developers intended. Playing on "Pilgrim" mode tones down the survival mechanics to the point where they're not particularly challenging, but preserves them just enough so that they become a nuisance. Playing like this, the game also throws so many items at you that managing your rapidly-expanding inventory becomes a bigger hurdle than surviving the elements.

But I recognize that this is a particular quirk of my personal experience. Even with those caveats, the game has a lot to offer, including some beautiful stylized vistas (as seen in the gallery below) and a lot of atmosphere. The way electric lights flicker weakly to life whenever the aurora appears overhead is a nice touch, both lending a bit of creepiness to interior locations and giving the whole game the kind of mournful quality that a lot of post-apocalyptic stories reach for but never quite achieve. In that respect, The Long Dark reminded me a lot of Cormac McCarthy's The Road despite deliberately not featuring any of the brutality and cruelty of that story (which perhaps suggests that The Road's many imitators were missing the point).

Fault Lines

Earthquakes occur along tectonic fault lines, places where sections of the Earth's crust collide. The pressure builds up slowly, sometimes over decades or even centuries, before releasing in a violent moment of destruction. Some seismically active areas lie on the intersection of multiple fault lines--multiple sources of stress, all converging.

Looking at world events at the moment, it's hard not to see the fault lines combining and intersecting, the pressure building and building, slowly, inescapably. The ongoing disaster that is Donald Trump's presidency; North Korea's increasing belligerence; China's stated willingness to go to war with the US if the situation on the Korean peninsula erupts in the wrong way; and now a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville that seems to have earned endorsement-by-silence from the government. 

North Korea seems the most likely to slip, and it's easy to imagine how the seismic shock could trigger the other fault lines.

Trump over-reacts to an apparent threat by North Korea and retaliates, reversing the erosion of his support and emboldening the wave of white supremacy sweeping across America. 

Trump's ego and desperation to pander to his most extreme supporters causes him to strike first, triggering a war with China. 

North Korea launches a successful missile attack on the US; the resulting surge in nationalism and xenophobia is seized on by the Trump administration in order to facilitate the slide into autocracy that so many of his followers seem to want.

(Astute readers will notice that there's a common factor in all of these scenarios)

Whenever you study the outbreak of war or similarly catastrophic events, you're looking for the fault lines, the places where the pressure builds. It's only in hindsight that you recognize the moment when the earthquake became inevitable, and the only question is exactly which fault line slipped first.

Have we reached that point yet?

I don't know. But then, I wouldn't. We'll just have to wait until the shaking starts.

Food I've eaten: broccoli and grilled chicken rice bowl

I recently made a commitment to start eating healthier so I don't die in my 50s, and I've discovered that real food tastes good. Stop me if I'm going too fast here.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'll still eat the heck out of a pizza or a wide variety of fried foods, but I also like vegetables and grilled meat. For example: did you know that grilled chicken is great? It retains way more of the juice compared to oven baking, and as such tastes absolutely delicious. I realize I'm a bit late on the uptake here, but you should try it if all of your previous chicken experience has involved either breadcrumbs or the dry, leathery texture of a cooked shoe.

Game of Thrones season 7

We're four episodes into Game of Thrones' truncated penultimate season, and I'm Not Entirely Pleased.

On one hand, plot points that the show has been teasing since literally the first episode have finally happened--Dany is finally in Westeros with her dragons--which is undeniably exciting. But the episodes released so far have also been strangely flat and lifeless, featuring unusually poor dialogue and acting (I suspect the latter is a consequence of the former).

The battle scenes are a prime example of why this season isn't really doing it for me. Game of Thrones has come to be known for big, expensive battle sequences that far outstrip anything else on TV in terms of budget and production value, the standout being last season's "Battle of The Bastards". 

That scene was the culmination of a two-season-long standoff with the show's most loathsome villain, and a major turning point in the saga of the Stark family that began all the way back in episode one. Given how brutal Game of Thrones can be, you knew* there was a very real chance that the Starks would lose and we'd have to watch Ramsay Bolton butcher a bunch of our favourite characters for shock value.

*(Okay, in hindsight it's obvious that wasn't going to happen, but the show did a good job of making it seem like it might)

By contrast, the two big battles this season (and given how expensive these sequences must have been, I seriously doubt there's another one coming) have been random, fairly low-stakes clashes. One major character momentarily seemed to be in danger; the cliffhanger ending implied that another one is in mortal peril. He's probably not, since at this point the cast has been whittled down to characters who obviously have a role to play in the climax of the series and/or are walking plot triggers that have yet to go off.

That's the thing, over the last season or so Game of Thrones has quietly ceased being a dark, grounded story where there are no heroes and villains and anyone can die at any time, and has become the kind of fantasy story its source material was meant to be a refutation of: a low-stakes action-adventure romp featuring near-superhuman badasses who can't die before their story reaches a suitably dramatic moment.

At this point, I'm just left wondering what the endgame is. Do out heroes defeat the white walkers? I'm not sure how satisfying I'd actually find that. People have floated the possibility of a bleak ending where all the bickering over power finally comes back to bite Westeros in the ass, everyone dies, and our last shot is the Night's King ascending the steps to the Iron Throne. The internet would have the biggest meltdown in history, but I'm kind of hoping that's where we leave off.

Books I Read In July

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness - Arundhati Roy

A third of a great novel. I was head over heels for this at the start, but it begins to feel like several stories chopped up and sandwiched together, complete with wildly varying tones and writing styles.

Roy's writing is still powerful and eloquent, but the plot doesn't hold together.

 

The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead

Magical-realist history as polemic. I don't need to tell you how timely the story is, but you should know that it's both devastating and captivating. The kind of book where you can't stop turning the pages, even if part of you doesn't want to find out what happens next.

The Essex Serpent - Sarah Perry

Light, bright historical fiction in the mode of Jane Austen (with a possibly-imaginary river serpent). It's cosy and entertaining and the writing is lovely, but you'll see most of the story beats coming a mile off.

 

The Holocaust - Laurence Rees

Rees delivers both an informative oversight and a compelling new investigation of the Holocaust. This book should be your go-to if you want answers to questions about how and why it happened, and the nature of the Nazi leadership's involvement. 

Includes bonus unsettling parallels to current political discourse.

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