Hey! I’m alive! Can you believe it? Me neither!

Anyway, where the hell have I been, what the hell am I up to? Things. To be fair, depression has sapped my energy for most of the year, which is why I haven’t been streaming regularly, and why there hasn’t been any posts here, but I’m still alive, still doing stuff, it’s not all sad naps.

For example, I’m launching cornsquid.com. This is a cryptid/paranormal/supernatural focused website with a skeptical slant, and a bit of humor. You’re probably familiar with my history as a ghost hunter, and my displeasure with the countless idiots that caught the tiniest idea of what ghost hunting is, and made their fame on YouTube doing it wrong. Well, cornsquid.com is going to be a short form media site that highlights claims that many use as evidence, and picks them apart, and lays out what is and isn’t fact. We’re not yet fully operational, but plans include a “pokedex” for various cryptids in the US, possibly expanding to include the whole world. We’ll also have guides for watching the skies for UFOs (and yeah, I’m still calling them UFOs, because UAPs is just the same thing with a fancy name to confuse people), guides for what to do if you actually encounter a ghost, cryptid, or potentially extraterrestrial thing, and basically how to do the whole paranormal investigation thing without being an absolute embarrassment to science in general.

What’s a corn squid? Well, if you google it, you’ll probably see cute little crocheted Etsy of creations of squidish corn beings. Well, the idea has been around for awhile, and I am not the person who originally coined the name, nor am I even associated with the character at all, but I do recall years back having a conversation with someone about the existence of “drop bears”, the fabled Australian cousin of the koala that’s hyper aggressive and ambushes tourists from the trees. Basically a tall tale to frighten the tourists. Well, in that discussion, someone mentioned corn squid as the Midwest equivalent. A creature, squid-like in every way, save that its habitat is the cornfields of the Midwest United States. Of course this thing doesn’t actually exist.

Anyway, the domain was available, and on a whim I thought that would be a great mascot for my cryptid debunking efforts, our own fake cryptid.

So I set to work making up “lore” for this fictional monster, and fed bits of that lore to Bing’s AI Image Creation tool, and it spat out lots of icons and wallpapers of squid fighting Bigfoot and aliens, being hunted by Native Americans, and running for office, and all sorts of nonsense. I’d use real artists, but I can’t afford to pay them. And lacking the talent to create the art myself, AI proved to be a useful solution.

I won’t be using AI for other assets for the site though. Our research will be done by real people, and all of the short form media used to present the findings will be done by real people. Maybe not artists, cause I’d certainly be excluded from that category, but at least real people.

So, if it’s corn squid related, its probably AI generated, but for everything else, we’re using the very real nonsense people made up entirely on their own.

Keep your eyes out for that and other cool things I’ll be doing, hopefully, as I have the energy for it.

Oh, and Happy Halloween! Be sure to properly and safely celebrate, as it’s good for your community.