GOD HATES HEAVY METAL: THE GATEKEEPERS
There’s something lurking in the code, in the algorithms that’s preying on us—If you’ve seen this post, it might already be too late.
The door was open. It wasn’t supposed to be. It gaped like an invitation no one wanted, humming with silence. I stepped inside Justine’s apartment, whispering their name. No response. Just the kind of stillness that feels loaded. And then I saw the blood.
It was smeared along the edge of their keyboard—a perfect, curling half-print of a fingertip. Beneath it was a tiny message written in red Sharpie on the back of a Post-it note:
"Rule 0 is real."
That was the last thing they ever wrote.
THE DAMAGE OF GATEKEEPING IN HORROR
I have been having a blast on the NoSleep Subreddit, sharing horror stories and interacting with horror fans in fun, immersive ways. As a professor of Transmedia storytelling at RIT, community building and engaging is so important to me. Having been the Creative Director at DeviantArt and having overseen the development of many communities through curation and moderation, I was so excited to have the opportunity to play on Reddit with the Nerd Horror concept.
GOD HATES HEAVY METAL: ROOTS
My uncle Jonas was a recluse. I thought he was interesting, but nobody else in my family could stand him—especially my mom, his baby sister. She blamed Vietnam. It wrecked him, stole the big goofy brother she once loved, and replaced him with an imposter dredged from the putrid mud of a battlefield. When the war ended, Uncle Jonas moved in with my grandma and never left. After she died in the late ’90s, when I was just a kid, he and my mom fought bitterly. She wanted to sell the house, but he refused. Being the oldest, he had just as much claim to it as she did, and he dug his heels in.