Fear and it's various facets

EXAMINATION STAGE

Fear is certainly a large grey area in the emotional spectrum. From what I've experienced, it's that lump of self-doubt in your stomach when being unable to talk to or convey emotions to that special someone, it's that jolt of adrenaline and sinking feeling you get when know what it means when a storm gets quite and you have to pop your ears twice, it's that feeling of paranoia and dismay at the inability to have nice things you watch Final Destination. It's also that weird thing where you read really intense creepypastas that you enjoy when you read them, but start fearing the dark and monsters again when you put it down and try to sleep, swearing never to do that under the cover of darkness again.

 I was rather fascinated when I discovered creepypastas, how they're so obviously fake, but so masterfully penned that you get invested in the story and get instilled with a general sense of unease, which I find interesting considering I was terrified of such things less than a decade ago.

One lovely side-note of my past and childhood was that I was plagued by a creature in my nightmares, I have yet to find out what he might be or what he represented, but it was a formless, shadowy, human-sized figure. It has no discernible features except for two blazing red eyes, while I can't describe them as more than two points of red light, not unlike that thing outside the window in the original Amityville Horror, but when you look at it you're overcome with dread and paralyzed with fear.

Interestingly enough, a lot of 'lost episode' or 'hidden game feature' creepypasta's feature fanart including a similar setup, darkened monochrome scenes with pitted eyes that glow as if with blood-tainted hellfire. For a while, this was very unnerving for me, going to read/listen to the Lavender Town Missing Frequencies story when off in the 'recommended for you' section I see this staring back at me:

Which for several months made me paranoid about what was just behind my shoulder for about 4 hours after I saw it again.

After a while, I'd gotten back into creepypastas and found the wiki dedicated to gathering them in one place and finally sat down to fully read more famous ones like "Ben Drowned (Majora's Mask)" and "Lost Silver (Pokemon)." Eventually I'd made my way into the "Lost/Missing Episodes" section and saw this bugger again. I'd decided to man up and read the story behind the image, which honestly didn't really have anything to do with the image at all, and unsettling in other ways, but it seemed to take the edge off the image itself.

EXPERIMENT STAGE

I plan to play around with the various pastas that deal with this black-image-red-eyes scheme seeing what about it makes it so unnerving to me.

HYPOTHESIS STAGE

Depending on how and who is in the class, I imagine something between silent understanding, to attempted dream interpretation, to flat out laughter if the experiment goes awry.

EXPERIMENT STAGE
I'm going to present that backstory as well as introduce a few creepypasta images/idea to educate the class to make sure everyone's on the same page. What I'll then be telling about is how the experiment went.

The experiment itself will be getting into the mood by reading a few creepypastas, and then attempting to watch Squidward's Suicide, and then try to carry on with my nightly activity without running frantically to a door or light switch.

RESULTS:
Well, lets set the scene: It's 2am, I've been up two hours past my bedtime, the reading's relaxed me to almost sleep, yet my mind's in a half-paranoid state from the actual readings. My room's window is open and the porch door is open in the living room because I live in a 3rd story apartment and it's been FREAKING WARM the past week. As I get to a crescendo in the video a slight breeze kicks up outside , nothing too bad, it'd been doing that all night, but the pressure difference in the rooms threw my previously-shut door open rather loudly.

I screamed like a little girl and slept entirely under the covers that evening, any regrets for doing that I had wore off over the next few days.

Things that have maintained perpendicular orientation.

This class was certainly different from what I expected, even with the stories, tales, and recounts of previous classes. First day of class was certainly memorable, when my idea for an egg project that I'd held over from last semester had been shot down with the introduction of the bead.

Singing bowls, man, those things are something. Well enough that I find that a bowl can make a resonant tone like that, then find it could be used on any old bell? Mind = blown. A close second to this discovery being all the fun stuff I learned about large cats and their associated hybrids (and how much free time science apparently has)

Of the class so far, I can say I like how open-ended the assignments can be. (if not flat-out BS'ed) I like to be able to flex creative muscles towards other goals/assignments while not having to worry so much about how the grade will turn out. It's how I feel the educational system SHOULD be, gauged on an individual basis, not a group standard.

I'm hoping that the class finally starts to warm up to each other and be a little more social. I realize that such a large class makes this difficult, but a little friendly topic discussion beats being talked at any day.

Class afterthoughts: 3/5

Half-sleep is interesting. Your mind's partially engaged, occasionally taking in snippets of the world around you, the rest of the time it's making brief movie clips from those snippets. Needless to say this got weird with the art critic that thinks calling an art piece phallic is a compliment.

The potter sounded like my kind of guy, doing art because he wants to, rather than he has to, and screw and ulterior motives, he's just relaxing. I like to art for the sake of art sometimes, so I can understand. However I find it irritating when, like the art critics, despite the pieces' stated purpose, find deeper meaning that's simply not there. I call this "Scarlet Letter Syndrome" since I felt especially in that novel the english teachers were reaching for meanings that simply weren't there.

In summary it just enforced my thoughts as thus: 

Keep on art'n potter dude.

Something Unexpected

Fluttershy reminded me that I needed to set aside some "me time" to unwind every now and again. I had other pony merch laying around, and my room is absolutely riddled with LEGO figures. I had the idea to do something I hadn't done since I had my Transformers all those years ago: partner them all up and have an all-out battle royale.

Pictures in the album here show who all was at the start of the match. It took a while to get back in the swing of things, but eventually I was voicing and narrating the characters like I used to and was having a blast! However, after about a dozen contestants removed, I realized it was 4am and that I needed to get some sleep so the battle is still on.

When it concludes, the winner will be posted here, but until then enjoy the mental image of pastel ponies battling each other with (relatively) giant robots.