Oh, and if you are interested in contibuting to either or both broadcasts, please inform me of your interest within the next few weeks. If nobody wants to submit anything, I'll need to know soon so I have time enough to pivot plans.
Hello friends,
A bit different than prior special broadcasts, this year I'd like to compile a series of ghost stories from Greenkeys members for Halloween, and I would also like to open the Santa Tracker vignettes to GreenKeys members to write. This merits a bit of explanation to understand what's needed for anyone interested, so I've divided the detail into two walls of text below.
Halloween Broadcast Ghost Stories
If you haven't yet experienced one, each Halloween I run a broadcast of a properly spooky story as if being broadcast in realtime (
see here for the recordings
). This year I'd like to do an anthology of short, spooky stories shared by fellow Greenkeys members, assuming there are enough GKers interested in transmitting their stories into the void. If you have a good ghost story like but not limited to the following, please consider sharing it:
- One passed down to you -- you know, the kind often told around campfires, or perhaps swapped while you served in the military or some other close-knit group
- One that actually happened to you
- One you make up special for this broadcast
- One you heard from some other source-- news story, YouTube video, popular culture, &c
Topics can vary:
- Ghosts & spectres from the other side
- Aliens & government experiments gone wrong
- Ancient dark magicks and the kinds of entities they might attract
- Deranged and disturbed sociopaths & scientists (perhaps they're one and the same!)
- Rusty, possessed teletypes hungry for the fingers of your average Greenkeyer
- Really anything that spooks your nooks-- also feel free to be humorous (if in a macabre way) if horror and terror aren't your thing
I'll compile them into the broadcast, and it will make for a good Halloween night. I may need to make minor edits to stories for grammar, spelling, continuity, and brevity, so please don't be offended if that happens. It's just a part of how an anthology works. I do also need to reserve the right to reject a story if it's egregiously inappropriate for general audiences, overtly political (let's have one refuge where it's not constantly shoved down our throats), so long it dominates the entire broadcast, &c.
Please email me your story(ies) no later than October 2. There's no hard limit on how long a story can be, but probably best to keep it less than around 10,000 characters to leave room for others. If you want to submit multiple stories, feel free.
Santa Tracker Broadcast Report Vignettes
If you haven't yet experienced one, each Christmas Eve I run a Santa Tracker ITTY-like broadcast where brief updates are issued every so often describing where Santa was last sighted on his festive sojourn around the globe. It's like Google's or Norad's trackers but with text, through ITTY, and more fun in my estimation. These updates are more than just basic reports of where and when he was sighted-- they are meant to be short vignettes describing what Santa was doing or something that happened to the individual who spotted him, to make it a bit more real and much more enjoyable to read.
If you'd like to submit one or more reports for the broadcast, please come up with a brief vignette that does the following:
- Includes the city, state/province (if applicable), and country where Santa was spotted
- You could select your home town, for example, or some major city, or use Google Maps and some online research like I do to find obscure towns and learn about their nation's Christmas traditions and culture to come up with a creative vignette; I will take care of calculating WHEN this happens since Santa follows a fairly tight schedule.
- If you don't care where the vignette takes place, I will take care of selecting the location-- just use a placeholder for the location like this: <LOCATION>
- Briefly describes how the person/people making the report spotted Santa
- Was it a little boy who snuck downstairs and spied Santa's boots whisking up the chimney? Was it a little girl who fell asleep on the couch to be awoken as Santa accidentally knocked over her tree? Was it a man who had forgotten his belief in Santa until a sleigh flying at astonishing speed careened overhead, leaving him windswept and lost for wordS? Was it a ham who stumbled across what he claims is Santa CQing back to North Pole Headquarters on 12.25 MHz reporting an uncomfortable but manageable run-in with a seagull? The possibilities are endless.
- Need some inspiration or wish to see how the typical vignette goes? You can go through one of the previous broadcast textfile sets here to get some ideas of how and where Santa's been in the past (skip to file 14 to get through the test messages). You could also pipe the same broadcast recording to one of your machines for the full teleprinter experience here.
As with Halloween, I may need to make minor edits for grammar, spelling, continuity, and brevity, and I need to reserve the right to reject a vignette if it's egregiously inappropriate for general audiences, overtly political, (Santa might invade the airspace of North Korea to shed a bit of needed light but doesn't leave reindeer crap in certain politicians' stockings as much as I might like him to), &c.
Please email me your vignette(s) no later than November 13. Try to keep each vignette less than about 650 characters tops; multiple vignettes is fine.
Maybe people won't be as interested in participating as I think, but I won't know until I try. Be creative, and have fun. A premature happy Halloween and merry Christmas to one and all.
-
Jordan Spencer Cunningham