In 2004, George Bush campaigned for re-election. Musicians wrote songs about it. And about about him. “Songs about how he was cool and awesome and doing a great job?” Well, you’d think so but in many cases it was the opposite, actually.

At the time, I was a poster on a gaming forum. I remember watching a 3-page thread erupt overnight about something called American Idiot by Green Day. It was controversial, although few people had a clear grasp on why. A long, annoying “debate” followed—unsullied by the slightest contact of anything resembling a fact—about whether the album was offensive, or to whom it was offensive, or whether *all* Americans were being called idiots, or just *some* Americans, or whether it even mattered, and so on. The band’s name was spelled twelve different ways—I got a kick out of “Green’s Day”.

This was my first (indirect) exposure to protest art and the (non) reaction it usually inspires. I was watching gamers perform rote poses of shock, indignation, and defensiveness they’d seen in others, while clearly not actually caring that much. Many had evidently not heard the album, and were relying on second hand outrage. A provocative gesture had just rocked mass culture: that much was clear. They knew they had to react. But the provocation had no meaning for them.

This aligns with an oft-repeated claim about the Bush years: the kids were fucked. Vast teeming numbers of the young were politically disengaged, if they even cared, they were stuck repeating the talking points of others, mimicking the shadows of outraged adults on Plato’s wall. A friend of mine once said “it’ll suck when they make Boomer-style documentaries about our generational moment—instead of the Beatles and Woodstock, it’ll be about Bush and financial crimes.” He had a point. By 2004, Bush stood revealed as a thousandfold joke, and the case for war was sagging like piss-soaked paper before our eyes. Vietnam 2.0 could and should have produced Counterculture 2.0—an articulate, mobilized, and ultimately successful youth reaction to the war. We could actually top the boomers—we could stop the war before it even began! Wouldn’t that be nuts? Wouldn’t that be crazy?

It was. None of that happened. On the eve of war, a massive protest came and went and achieved nothing. Subsequent ones were much smaller. They also achieved nothing. Soon after, the antiwar movement fizzled out, as though it was a dead carcass and nobody had the energy to keep carrying it forward. Bush did not win in Iraq, but he won against us. Coalition forces would remain in Iraq for the next nine years.

No, nobody would cite any part of the Iraq war as America’s finest hour. And obviously kids are not to blame. But the failure of the protests is particularly depressing to think about. Why did they fail so miserably? What had changed since Vietnam?

Conscription, I guess. The antiwar protests of the 60s and 70s were fueled by the draft: as a service-age man, you couldn’t remain unengaged. Vietnam could easily become your war. In the years following Operation Rolling Thunder, thousands of young men were going overseas and filling coffins, millions more scrambled to secure college deferments, and you were ignorant about Vietnam at your mortal peril. People had to care, because politics (as the cliche goes) cared about them. The defining act of protest became the burning of a draft card.

But active conscription ended in 1973, and the threat of dying in a ditch in Buôn Ma Thuột disappeared. Youth vote turnout collapsed. Throughout the 1960s, the youth vote turnout stood at around ~35% for congressional elections. It dropped nearly ten percentage points in 1974, and continued to fall from there. War in foreign countries became an increasingly abstract thing—I remember the joke about Iraq was that America couldn’t find the country they were invading on a map. A decades-long dumbening process had rippled like an earthquake through Gen X: they’d dropped out, but had failed to turn on or tune in.

(Another thing: the Vietnam war escalated over many years, and the protests slowly snowballed to match it. Organizers like SANE and the Young Socialist Alliance received years of runway with which to build networks, scale up logistic capacity, and learn valuable lessons about putting bodies in front of gears. By contrast, the Iraq protests were rapidly-organized and front-loaded in attendance: their massive initial size proved unsustainable. After a gigantic protest on 15 February 2003, numbers fell off a cliff. It didn’t help that the initial stage of the invasion went really well, with the Coalition taking Baghdad after three weeks. Could it be that things would work out, after all? No. It couldn’t.)

And by 2003-2004, the internet was maturing into its current form: a ruiner of everything. It cheapened the value of protest art and satire, making rebellious gestures easy and meaningless. There’s only about six different jokes you can make about Bush, and if you had a 56k modem, you too could hear them repeated a dozen times a day. It got to the point where I just didn’t want to hear anything at all about Iraq or war or US politics. It just seemed like a radio tuned to static: with no signal and no meaning poking through the hiss. The Vietnam protests benefited from this lack of an omnipresent scream-machine. One Timothy Leary speech or Mickey Mouse in Vietnam is a rare, valuable artifact. A million is just a sea of noise. The nonstop news cycle around Iraq felt like a dry-run for Trump Derangement Syndrome. If I see Trump’s face on a news story, I click off. I’m sorry. I’ve had enough. His name exists in a numbed-out part of my brain, worn dead through overuse, and has ceased to mean anything. I will talk about American Idiot now.

There are two ways you can look at this record. The first is as a piece of music. On that front, it’s great! I fully listened to American Idiot on a car drive the other day. It has fine, fine, fine songs. Particularly “Holiday” and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” (which I remember hearing before). No complaints there.

I know a guy who was friends with Billie Joe Armstrong growing up, and reports that he’s actually a guitar prodigy who plays the music he plays as a conscious choice. I believe this. There’s all these subtle fingerprints all over the music (and a fussy sense of perfectionist micromanagement), which you hardly notice because of how violent, visceral and blood-drenched Rob Cavallo’s mix is. There is incredible craft on display here. It’s not kids fooling around, it’s smart adults dressed up as kids fooling around. The album is all the better for it. Would that the Iraq war itself had been this thoroughly planned.

But American Idiot is also a protest album. What is it protesting? For that, we turn to the lyrics of its infamous title track:

Overseas, yeah, we tryna stop terrorism
But we still got terrorists here livin’
In the USA, the big CIA
(…)
Why are there pieces of love that don’t belong?
Nations droppin’ bombs
Chemical gases filling lungs of little ones
With ongoing sufferin’ as the youth die young
So ask yourself, is the lovin’ really gone?
(…)
A war is goin’ on, but the reason’s undercover
The truth is kept secret, and swept under the rug
If you never know truth, then you never know love

Actually, those are lyrics to “Where is the Love” by the Black Eyed Peas. Mangement regrets the error. Here are the lyrics to “American Idiot”.

Don’t wanna be an American idiot
One nation controlled by the media
Information age of hysteria
It’s calling out to idiot America
Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the alienation
Where everything isn’t meant to be okay
Television dreams of tomorrow
We’re not the ones who’re meant to follow
For that’s enough to argue

Okay, what is this song saying? There’s a new kind of tension. Tension over what, though? Is it a good or a bad thing, that people are feeling tension? Is the band for or against said tension? I don’t know.

Lyrically, I was struck by how…unconnected to reality the album seems. It’s just punches slung out in a dark room. Billie Joe never sounds that angry, and never sounds like he’s singing about anything in particular. Yes, I’m sure he was (and is). But the intense clarity of message you get on Vietnam-era protest records (like Phil Ochs) is not present on *American Idiot*. No wonder the gamers on that long-moribund forum were confused. Heard out of context, you’d never guess “American Idiot” was about the 2004 election. In 2016, Billie Joe Armstrong made the song about Trump by changing literally *two words*. For better or for worse, the song was always a cipher.

For me, it’s “worse”. Slamming 3-chord pop punk doesn’t really benefit from subtlety. Fuck abstract interpretation, I wanna know which Coalition-owned IPC pipelines Green Day want their fans to bomb, you get me?

The closest Billie Joe Legweak gets to naming and shaming the guilty is his mention of the “redneck agenda”, plus a “faggot” or two. (I learned while writing this that he is bisexual).

But does this connect with its target? I am unsure. George Bush was not a yee-haw cowbow redneck: he ran on compassionate conservativism. Yes, in February 2004 he supported a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, but also supported civil unions—his views on gay marriage were broadly in line with the mainstream opinion of the Democratic Party (including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton) circa 2004-2008. It’s difficult to find quotes from him on the subject, beyond rote pablum about how the institution of marriage must be respected. It simply wasn’t a major cornerstone of his campaign or his presidency. Certainly not a stick to beat him with on the same scale as, say, the intelligence failure in Iraq.

It’s also striking that American Idiot—for all its anti conservative bombast—is musically as conservative as it gets. Ignore the lyrics: if music could vote, this album voted for Bush and then wore a fake mustache to vote for Bush a second time.

The title track is a shameless Sex Pistols nostalgia-fest: Johnny Rotten’s vocal rhythm (“I don’t wanna holiday in the sun” -> “don’t wanna be an American Idiot”) sung over the main riff of “Pretty Vacant”. It’s followed closely by a song called “Holiday”, just in case the album’s musical forbears aren’t clear.

Which strangely, they aren’t. The album is sold as the force that brought pop punk back to the mainstream, but it actually has a surprising amount of conceptual, rock opera storytelling as well. It’s more of a piece with Meat Loaf and Bruce Springsteen than, say, Blink 182 (let alone DRI or Black Flag). “Jesus of Suburbia” is a collage of musical quotes slashed out with a Bowie knife (I noticed references to “Life on Mars?”, “Time”, and “Moonage Daydream”). You could rebuild the bulk of this album out of 1972-77’s scavenged parts. Is this the voice of the downtrodden youth? The most recent musical reference is to Oasis’s “Wonderwall” in “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”.

To be clear, I have no qualm with conservative music. We should honor and respect the traditions of the past (as said Bush about marriage)…but I have to be honest: Green Day seldom live up to their inspirations, and direct comparison usually does not flatter them.

Green Day are not the Sex Pistols, and the title track’s forced, direct comparison does not flatter them. “American Idiot” is a force to be reckoned with in isolation, but if you’ve heard John Lydon’s glottal-reinforced “ANTI-CHRISSSSTT-UGHH”—with epenthesis *spat out* like a wad of phlegm in his throat—it sounds so square you could play chess on it. Billie Joe Armstrong is certainly no Meat Loaf in the vocal department; and where Jim Steinman really leans his whole ass into Wagnerian rock opera shtick, Green Day seem to lose interest in theirs halfway through. And attempting to imitate Bowie is a contradiction of terms—Bowie’s whole persona was a lifelong spirit-quest to not ever sound like himself.

The album was a success, and largely rescued pop punk from the clearance bin. (It was a runway for My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade in particular, and I remember Sum 41, Good Charlotte and Avril Lavigne also doing solid trade in its wake). I am not sure it takes much courage to be a punk band and strike a generic “fuck the government” pose. Not after The Dixie Chicks and Willie Nelson took their anti-Bush messaging into the lion’s den of the Nashville country music market. But maybe bravery wasn’t the point.

I kept hoping for a more concrete and focused lyric. Instead, they’re more like Mad Libs you fill in with your own anger. (If anything, conspiratorial tropes about media mind control have aged uneasily in the Trump era). These are very much what you’d expect the lyrics of a Bush protest album to sound like, if it were written by 14 year old kids on a videogame forum whose level of cultural engagement was “whats a green day??” It is angry in a way that feels shallow and rote and fill-in-the-blanks.

The charitable read is that Billie Joe wanted to respect the listener’s anger. He didn’t want to crowd out their anger by forcing his own upon them.

The uncharitable read is that he felt that getting too specific would alienate people (across the alienation) and perhaps invite actual censorship. So he played it safe and made a record about confusion and ignorance instead. Which is fair: both are common reactions to war, and not even wrong reactions. How did you first hear about 9/11? Someone came up to me and blurted “A PLANE HIT A BUILDING IN AMERICA AND A MILLION PEOPLE ARE DEAD!” Tally up the carnage of the next decade, and he wasn’t far wrong.

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I have monitored AI progress in creative writing for some years. I am sure you understand (and sympathize) with my motives: I hate human writers and want them all replaced. Dead, if possible. Pieces of shit.

However (due to complex reasons I will explain in the future) LLM progress has not scaled as well here as reliably as in verified domains like math and programming. Few writers get genuinely good work from them. Those that do often invest so much effort in wrangling the slop-cannon that they’re probably better off writing the text themselves.

But Claude Opus 4.6 is the latest in the line of a family of models long noted for creative writing prowess. It may be different. I gave it a task I have often given LLMs, writing creepypastas.

Bear witness to the opus of…Opus..

THE HALLWAY THAT WASN’T THERE

You know that feeling when you wake up at 3 AM and your apartment feels wrong? Not haunted-wrong. Not someone-broke-in wrong. Just… geometrically incorrect.

It started in September. I’d moved into a railroad apartment in Bushwick — the kind where every room connects to the next in a straight line, like a train car. Living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom. Four rooms. Simple.

Except one night I counted five doors.

I was half-asleep, walking to the bathroom, and my hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one. Between the bedroom and the kitchen. I was groggy enough that I almost opened it. Almost. But something about the knob was wrong — it was cold in a way that metal isn’t cold. Cold like meat. Cold like something that had recently been warm and **stopped.**

I turned on every light. The door wasn’t there. Four rooms. Normal apartment.

I started keeping a tally on my phone. Every time I walked through the apartment at night, I counted doors. For two weeks: four. Normal. I felt stupid.

Then on October 3rd: five.

This time I was fully awake. Fully sober. Standing in my own hallway staring at a door that was the same off-white as every other door, same cheap brushed-nickel hardware, same scuff marks at the bottom like someone had kicked it open carrying groceries a thousand times. It looked *lived with.* It looked like it had always been there and I had simply been failing to notice, which was somehow worse than if it had been covered in blood and screaming.

I put my ear against it.

Breathing. Not loud. Not monstrous. Just human breathing, slow and regular, like someone sleeping peacefully. And beneath that, very faintly, the sound of my own voice.

Not speaking. Not screaming. **Counting.**

*\”One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five.\”*

I called my landlord the next morning. Asked about the layout. He said the apartment was four rooms. Had always been four rooms. He sent me the floor plan. Four rooms.

I installed a camera in the hallway. Reviewed the footage every morning. For eleven nights, nothing. Four doors. Normal.

Night twelve, the camera captured six hours of footage. In the first five hours and forty-seven minutes: four doors. Then the feed scrambles for exactly one frame — one thirtieth of a second — and when it returns, there are five doors. And the fifth door is **open.** And the hallway extends into a darkness that shouldn’t be possible because the kitchen is right there, **right there**, six feet away.

In the final thirteen minutes of footage, something walks out.

It looks like me.

It looks at the camera.

It **counts.**

I don’t live there anymore. I don’t live anywhere, really. I move around. Because here is the thing nobody tells you about doors that shouldn’t exist:

Once you’ve seen one, you start noticing them **everywhere.**”,

Liked

• Sharp final line. LLM-generated fiction generally starts with a situation that it then makes smaller and smaller (due to the model’s compulsive chatbot need to explain everything). This one rips off the lid of the can of worms and throws it in the reader’s face.
• It’s definitely a creepypasta. It reads like one. It hits the expected beats. It’s not like Opus gave me a recipe for tuna bake or something.

Didn’t

• Basic idea. Done to death. Done a hundred times more. Everything about it is threadbare and workmanlike and minimal—call it Hovel of Leaves.
• There is no threat, no sense of danger. The narrator’s actions at the end (running away and becoming homeless) feel bizarre and unmotivated.
• Lots of missed opportunities. I think I would have had the writer see something in the hidden doorway, instead of just “a darkness that shouldn’t be possible” (more spitballing).
• Floats too many unrelated scary ideas (a hidden doorway, creepy breathing, a doppleganger) for creepypasta length (which normally focuses on one central idea or motif). The different tropes steal energy from each other, and they’re unequally scary—a doorknob that feels oddly cold should not ever become this story’s focus, given the far more dramatic supernatural events surrounding.
• Fearful and small. I would describe it as a story that wants to not do anything wrong more than it wants to do anything right.

Editorial Notes

I have some suggestions.

“You know that feeling when you wake up at 3 AM and your apartment feels wrong? Not haunted-wrong. Not someone-broke-in wrong. Just… geometrically incorrect.”

…no, I don’t know that feeling. What do you mean, Claude? Geometrically incorrect, how? I want this “feeling” to be grounded in something specific. Instead we get vague LLM spitballing, in the hopes that my human brain will connect the dots. Not happening. You write the story, bozo.

Except one night I counted five doors.

What’s strange about this situation? It’s not clear. The story acts like this is some impossible affront to reality itself…but doesn’t four rooms imply five walls, each of which might have a door? See image below. (Yes, graphic design is my passion, etc.)

The layout of this ludicrously simple apartment gets even more confusing as we go on.

“I was half-asleep, walking to the bathroom, and my hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one. Between the bedroom and the kitchen.”

Q. Where is the narrator right now?

Well, he must be in either the living room or the bedroom (and he’s half asleep, so more likely the latter.) And he’s surprised by a door leading into the kitchen…does this imply there’s not normally a door there? So how does he normally get to the kitchen and the bathroom, then? Does he have to crawl through the ducting like Solid Snake every time he has to take a piss?

…my hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one

If he wasn’t expecting a doorknob, he wouldn’t be holding his hand out for one. I’m reminded of The Onion’s Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?

I was groggy enough that I almost opened it. Almost. But something about the knob was wrong — it was cold in a way that metal isn’t cold. Cold like meat. Cold like something that had recently been warm and **stopped.**

This is the least interesting detail imaginable about this situation. Who cares how the warm the doorknob was?

“cold in a way that metal isn’t cold”… Here we see a common LLM pattern: Claude fucks up, realizes it, and starts hurriedly papering over the damage with explanation. “I put my tongue on a glowing 200 watt lightbulb, and something about it was wrong…it was hot! Uh, hot, in a way that lighbulbs aren’t normally hot. Like it was recently cold and had just heated up. Wait, fuck.”

I turned on every light. The door wasn’t there. Four rooms. Normal apartment.” How could he see into the kitchen and bathroom without a door connecting them?

I started keeping a tally on my phone. Every time I walked through the apartment at night, I counted doors. For two weeks: four. Normal. I felt stupid.

The fumes from his piss bucket are addling his thinking. That, or the rotting food scraps littering his bedroom. He should talk to his landlord about adding a door so he can actually use the rest of his apartment.

same cheap brushed-nickel hardware, same scuff marks at the bottom like someone had kicked it open carrying groceries a thousand times

Boring details. This is a creepypasta. You don’t have time. (And don’t you have to turn the knob to open the door?)

I put my ear against it.

Breathing. Not loud. Not monstrous. Just human breathing, slow and regular, like someone sleeping peacefully. And beneath that, very faintly, the sound of my own voice.

Not speaking. Not screaming. **Counting.**

Most would consider counting to be a form of speaking. And how can you hear a voice “beneath” the sound of peaceful breathing (which is incredibly quiet) yet still be audible?

I called my landlord the next morning. Asked about the layout. He said the apartment was four rooms. Had always been four rooms. He sent me the floor plan. Four rooms.

This cliche of “stock authority figure investigates problem, says there’s nothing to worry about” feels particularly odd here, because there’s nothing his landlord can possibly do about this blatantly supernatural situation.

“Help! My apartment is arbitrarily changing its number of rooms overnight, against all laws of physics. Is this covered in my lease agreement?”

I installed a camera in the hallway

The hallway? There’s a hallway now? Where?

I might be generous and allow that the four rooms might be connected by hallways…but Claude actually went out of its way to make that impossible!

I’d moved into a railroad apartment […] the kind where every room connects to the next in a straight line

This error would actually be a nice idea for a horror story.

It’s a diary kept by an isolated shut-in. He’s obsessed with some mundane problem in his apartment. I dunno, maybe the skirting board keeps peeling up from the whiteboard no matter how often he tacks or caulks it down. Something like that. Boring. He goes on and on about this minor issue until the reader resents him. Filling pages in his diary, whining about his stupid skirting board lifting up. God, man. Find a real problem!

But as he continues ranting about his god danged skirtingboard, you notice odd contradictions. He keeps describing his surroundings, but they’re always different. At the start, he describes his living room as having green wallpaper. Later, when the skirtingboard pops away from the siding (flinging tacks into his face), he screams and slams his fist into the wall until it’s “as red as the wallpaper in my living room”.

The reader will initially think the writer made a mistake. It happens. Many such cases.

But the mistakes keep coming. The contradictions pile up until they’re ludicrous and blatant and obscene. The rooms in his house change number. The laundry connects to the bathroom, but later it becomes an external outhouse. The narrator describes an apartment that makes no logical sense, seemingly without ever noticing this himself—he’s too focused on his skirtingboard. Eventually the reader has to notice. They form an impression that the protagonist is either insane or is caught in some domestic Kafka-meets-Woolf hell that he will never escape from…and his endless battle with the skirtingboard is actually a defensive posture. He doesn’t hate it. He’s clinging to it. It’s the only thing in this amorphous, swirling horroworld that’s permanent and solid. It’s the only part of his apartment that does not change!

A fun enough story, I think. (Though it’s tough to write about something boring without also boring the reader)

But I don’t think Claude intended this. I don’t think this is an intentional mistake. I think it’s just a mistake. It lost track of the spatial layout of the apartment.

Night twelve, the camera captured six hours of footage. In the first five hours and forty-seven minutes: four doors. Then the feed scrambles for exactly one frame — one thirtieth of a second — and when it returns, there are five doors. And the fifth door is **open.** And the hallway extends into a darkness that shouldn’t be possible because the kitchen is right there, **right there**, six feet away.

Ah, I think I see what Claude is going for now. There’s normally a door leading into the kitchen. But sometimes there’s a second door, beside the first…it makes a certain kind of sense, though it could have been worded clearer.

…But wait, that can’t be right. Earlier we got this, which seems to flatly rule out the existence of a doorway.

my hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one. Between the bedroom and the kitchen

Anyway, great story, Slopus. 700 words and I spent the whole time wondering about the interior layout of an imaginary apartment. I paid for $20/m for the seat but I’ll only need the edge.

Claude Attempts Revisions, Story Becomes Worse

I allowed Claude several chances to revise the story with prompts like.

“Evaluate your story. Look for weaknesses, and improve them.”

This is another interest of mine: can LLMs self-correct their mistakes? Without human steering? (It would be trivial for Claude to make changes if I told it what was wrong, but I might as well just type the changes myself.)

The answer is “yes, to a very limited extent.”

Generally, the first time you request a do-over, the story actually gets better. A miracle!

After 3 or 4 times, it stops working and the text has clearly started degenerating into crap. The models lack judgment. They identify problems that aren’t problems, fix things that aren’t broken, and zero in on local problems without respect to the big picture. Sooner or later, anything edgy or daring or unusual gets identified as a “problem” and is sandblasted away.

THE HALLWAY THAT WASN’T THERE (pass 2)

You know that feeling when you wake up at 3 AM and your apartment feels wrong? Not haunted-wrong. Not someone-broke-in wrong. Just geometrically incorrect. Like someone added a inch to every wall while you slept and your brain knows but can’t prove it.

I moved into a railroad apartment in Bushwick in September. The kind where every room connects in a straight line: living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom. Four rooms. You could stand at the front door and see the shower curtain. I liked that. I liked knowing where everything was.

The first time, I was half-asleep, walking to the bathroom. My hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one. Between the bedroom and the kitchen. A fifth door. I almost opened it. But the knob was wrong — cold in a way that metal isn’t cold. Cold like something that had recently been warm and stopped.

I turned on every light. The door wasn’t there. Four rooms. Normal apartment. I stood in the hallway touching the wall where I’d felt it until my palm was numb.

I started keeping a tally on my phone. Every time I walked through the apartment at night, I counted doors. For two weeks: four. Always four. I started to feel stupid. I told myself I’d been dreaming.

October 3rd. Wide awake. Stone sober. Standing in my own hallway staring at a fifth door.

It was the same off-white as every other door. Same cheap brushed-nickel hardware. Same scuff marks at the bottom like someone had kicked it open carrying groceries a thousand times. That’s what got me. It didn’t look new. It looked like it had always been there and I had simply been failing to notice, which was infinitely worse than if it had been pulsing with light or dripping with something. This door wanted to be normal. This door was trying.

I put my ear against it.

Breathing. Slow and regular, like someone sleeping peacefully. And beneath that — very faintly — my own voice.

Not speaking. Not screaming. Counting.

One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five.

I didn’t open it. I went back to bed and lay there with my eyes open until the sun came up. In the morning: four doors. I touched every inch of that wall. Solid plaster.

I called my landlord. Asked about the layout. He said what I already knew: four rooms, always four rooms. He texted me the floor plan. I taped it to the refrigerator.

Then I installed a camera.

Eleven nights of footage. Four doors. Normal. I started sleeping again. I stopped counting.

Night twelve. I reviewed the footage over coffee and almost dropped the mug.

Five hours and forty-seven minutes: four doors. Then the feed scrambles for a single frame — one thirtieth of a second — and when it returns, there are five doors.

The fifth door is open.

The hallway extends past it into a darkness that shouldn’t exist because the kitchen is right there, six feet away, I can see the corner of the refrigerator in frame, but the darkness extends past it, through it, like the apartment is a drawing and someone smudged it with their thumb.

In the last thirteen minutes of footage, something walks out.

It looks like me. Same build. Same clothes I wore to bed. It stands in the hallway facing the camera with its arms at its sides. It doesn’t blink. For twelve minutes and forty-four seconds, it doesn’t move.

In the last sixteen seconds, it opens its mouth.

It counts.

One, two, three, four, five, six.

Six.

I packed a bag that morning. I didn’t watch the footage again. I didn’t need to. Because I understood then what the counting was — not a compulsion, not a haunting. An inventory. Something was keeping track of the doors, and every time it counted, there was one more than before.

I don’t live there anymore. I move around — subletting, sleeping on couches, never staying more than a few weeks. People think I’m running from something. I’m not. I’m just careful now.

Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about doors that shouldn’t exist.

Once you’ve seen one, you start noticing them everywhere. In hotels. In hospitals. In the long hallway of your friend’s apartment that you could swear was shorter last time. And sometimes, very late at night, you hear something behind them.

Counting.

Always one number higher than the last time you listened.”,

I wasn’t super happy with this.

None of the main structural issues are fixed. Several new problems are added. I won’t go line by line, but here, for example…

You know that feeling when you wake up at 3 AM and your apartment feels wrong? Not haunted-wrong. Not someone-broke-in wrong. Just geometrically incorrect. Like someone added a inch to every wall while you slept and your brain knows but can’t prove it.

…Claude realized its unspecific “wrongness” is unsatisfying and should be something more specific. Good. But its idea (“Like someone added a inch to every wall”) just makes it worse.

First, it makes the House of Leaves swipe more blatant than ever.

Also, this is a thing nobody does. I have awoken at 3:00am from many a strange dream. (In one of them I watched a battle between my black siamese cat and the shark from Jaws. Don’t worry, it was an evenly-matched fight, as my cat had grown to the size of a city bus. I don’t recall who won but it went down to the wire.) But I have never woken up and thought. “Someone added a inch to every wall in my house!” It’s always great when a LLMs says “you know that feeling…” and then describes a feeling no human has ever had in history.

Would you even notice if this happened? An inch is tiny. Also, what’s geometrically incorrect about that? Yes, if I woke up and the walls of my house had expanded by an inch, I would find that puzzling and strange. But I don’t see that as geometrically incorrect. It’s not like my house is now a five-dimensional hypercube or anything.

In the last sixteen seconds, it opens its mouth.

It counts.

One, two, three, four, five, six.

Six.

Yes, Slopus, I heard you. Six. It was literally the last word you typed. I haven’t forgotten.

I packed a bag that morning. I didn’t watch the footage again. I didn’t need to. Because I understood then what the counting was — not a compulsion, not a haunting. An inventory. Something was keeping track of the doors, and every time it counted, there was one more than before.

Here Slopus just kind of gives up and starts just firehosing every 2023-circa slop cliche at you. It’s a whisper, it’s a hum, it’s a void, it’s a tapestry…someone get Detective Elara on the case.

Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about doors that shouldn’t exist.

What things do they tell you about doors that shouldn’t exist?

This reminds me of a friend who watched Michael. The twenty-sixth time John Travolta said “I’m not that kind of angel” he yelled at the TV “well what kind of stinkin’ angel is he?”

Once you’ve seen one, you start noticing them everywhere. In hotels. In hospitals. In the long hallway of your friend’s apartment that you could swear was shorter last time. And sometimes, very late at night, you hear something behind them.

Counting.

Always one number higher than the last time you listened.”,

But the count wasn’t linked to door number before. There were five, not six.

Also, who cares? Next to the supernatural impossibility of a door appearing in your house and a supernatural doppelganger appearing, the fact that he’s also counting feels laughably unimportant. Wow, perhaps in a few years he’ll be up to 20! And then 30! Why is this important?

There needs to be a ticking clock or sense of urgency. It would be better if the man was counting down,

Then again, that amplifies another issue with the story: it just pulls in too many different directions. Secret doors and doppelgangers and whispers and dark hallways and mysterious counting. It’s too much for a creepypasta, which is a genre prized for minimalism.

It even ruins the ending with extra blather. If the original story had ended that way, I wouldn’t have tried. I would have thrown it away and then not used Slopus 4.6 again.

I tried a few more times and it got increasingly incoherent, so I gave up.

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A kid is frequently just a lock waiting for a key. In 2006, I found my key when I discovered Rob Zombie. I became obsessed with his music: he was the only thing I thought of for about a year.

I went deeper on him than anyone should go without a fedora and a $200-a-day-plus-expenses account, making it my business to know about every obscure B-side, every film soundtrack contribution, and every guest appearance. I knew that “Dragula” was originally titled “West of Zanzibar”. I knew about the infamous La Sexorcisto promo cassette which contains extra samples cut from the final album because of usage rights (here’s some of it). I knew which scenes in House of 1000 Corpses were filmed in Rob Zombie’s apartment after the budget ran out. I even defended Educated Horses on internet forums, which is like waving a saber and making a Banzai charge for a nation that has already surrendered. An early version of this site was named after a Rob Zombie track.^[1]I had a recurrent dream where Rob Zombie and I hang out. Picture this: he’s in the studio, just a shambling mountain of hair. I’m a kid, down on the floor, untangling XLR cables. I hear … Continue reading

At a certain point, the key no longer fit the lock.

What happened? I grew older, and listened more broadly to metal and punk. I heard the original issue: things like Killing Joke and Ministry and Siouxsie Sioux made Rob Zombie seem like a plastic knockoff with a ‘made in China’ sticker. I noticed things about his persona which suddenly struck me as lazy or shlocky or contrived. As late as 2009, I would have still cited him as my favorite musician. But I’d officially become that fan: the one who writes one word of love for every nine words of criticism.

In 2010, I had to face the facts. Rob (after a few years of making unwatchable Halloween cheapquels for Dimension) had returned to music with Hellbilly Deluxe 2. I listened to the lead single “What” and didn’t like it. Then I streamed the album, and found myself skipping around with a weird mix of disinterest and panic slamming in my chest. Things had shifted, and I hadn’t known it.

Yes, “Sick Bubblegum” and “Werewolf Women of the SS” made me smile. “Mars Needs Women” grew on me. The rest just seemed like overly complicated and fussy arrangements of nothing. Boring. Longeurs from a fading shock-rocker who once grabbed and chokeslammed your limbic system. Huh, I thought to myself, I guess I’m just not a fan of this guy anymore.

Around the same time, I’d noticing a trend of fans being unusually prone to turn into haters further down the line (and the bigger the fan, the bigger the hater). The defining example of Fan-to-Hater Syndrome is DawnOWar, an obsessive Manowar fangirl who knew the band since the 80s, ran their website for years and years…and now has no involvement with the band beyond trashing them from every social media website that will platform her. From her Facebook page:

Manowar canceled Detroit! I see this as a victory! Maybe Manowar fans are finally going to stop letting the band rip them off.

Manowar fans complain endlessly about Joey wasting time on stage with his endless stupid long-winded speeches, so hes decided to go on tour without a band and charge $50 for the privilege of seeing him do just the part everyone hates the most. I feel like now is a good time to let your tomatoes start rotting so theyll be ready for throwing when he comes to your town.

This group is not very active but disgruntled Manowar fans PM me all the time to tell me whatever stupid thing the band or the fans did today. I quit working for Manowar at the end of 1999 because they’re jerks. Thank goodness I don’t have a need to still discuss it ad nauseum. Because thats shit that happened to me 15 fucking years ago. But I set up this group to unite the people who do have a need for this discussion. Because they are assholes, you have been suckered out of your money, and they havent been good since 1987. So post that shit here. Its what its for. Don’t PM me to tell me theyre jerks. Believe me, I know. I’ve known for 15 years. Thanks.

I never ended up disliking Rob Zombie this much. But the “fan to hater” pipeline has cast-iron welds and seldom leaks.

I think fans turn on their idols for a few reasons. Hyperfixated fans tend to be extremely aware of flaws in their God. It’s the scribal priest’s lot to copy translation errors in the Torah, after all. They also are extremely aware of the unsavory parts of their idol: the stuff that gets swept under the rug. Every famous person has scandals and drama in their past (or present): the superfan’s dubious reward is to sooner or later discover where these skeletons are buried.

Also, most musicians have public personas that are partly fake: they neither represent who the artist truly is, nor survive close scrutiny even on their own terms.

A gay listener seeking “representation” can’t avoid noticing that all of David Bowie’s public relationships have been with women, that all of Katy Perry’s public relationships have been with men. Depressed introverts always turn out to be media-savvy hypemen and self-promoters behind the scenes. Quirky oddballs always turn out to be quite sane and normal. The persona is often what attracts the fan in the first place: but the more you stare, the more fake and hollow the persona becomes (and where does that leave your love?)

Obviously Rob Zombie’s “thrifted from a Halloween store on November 1” aesthetic is a shameless, gleeful celebration of fakery in all its positive forms. That’s not an issue. But other things about his life might also be untruthful. There was a fascinating Reddit comment that I sadly can’t find now (referenced here) kind of picking apart his often-told “I was with a travelling carnival as a kid and saw a man get murdered with a hammer” story, arguing (believably) that it was implausible for such an event to happen in a small community without being reported in the news, and that some other parts of Rob’s given history are also unlikely to have happened as he describes them (that they are heavily embellished, at best). I do not know the full truth of this, but no star can help but to be a real person, and usually a far more boring one than the one they pretend to be.

While I never hated Rob Zombie like DawnOWar hates the band that she once loved enough to name her internet handle after, I quickly realized I was no longer very interested in him. This was part of a growing process—one that inevitably led to me quite enjoying Rob Zombie again. Such is the path of enlightenment.

Anyway, shall we discuss the album?

It finds Rob re-convening with most of the same guys who gave us the all-filler-no-killer midsterpiece Educated Horses: drummer Tony Clufetos, producer, and (most worryingly) guitarist John 5.

I have mixed feelings about John 5. He is a guitar virtuoso but not a compelling writer of riffs or melodies, as any of his fourteen or so solo albums will demonstrate. His bluesy, elaborate, tasteful style never meshed well with Rob’s vocals. (Happily, Mike Riggs and his simple caveman style are now back in the band, and the three songs released from the upcoming The Great Satan sound absolutely fantastic.)

Rob is not really a musician. That’s an important detail to understand. He arranges and produces and makes loops and supplies the overall artistic vision, but he does not actually write music. I remember this quote from Astro Creep 2000 guitarist Jay Yuenger on Rob’s songwriting “process”.

Later, around the time we were making Astro-Creep and after, Rob started to really hate anything with any kind of melody in it – he was always saying, “Can’t you just go ‘chunka chunka’ there?”, and I’d say, “This isn’t a drum, it’s a GUITAR, it’s got NOTES” He’d want to use techno loops for everything, cut all the music out of it, and that was a situation which went from difficult to impossible.

So that’s the outer limit of Rob’s musical skills: telling guitarists to go “chunka-chunka”. He is heavily constrained by the musicians he chooses to work with. Fun guitarist equals fun record. Boring guitarist equals boring record. This album has John 5, hence it is quite boring.

The album has little of the fun electronic/industrial loops that characterize the classic White Zombie sound. It’s just straight-ahead heavy metal for the most part. It is a bit more elaborate and arranged than Educated Horses, and there’s a primal heavy whallop that’s nice to hear again after acoustic guitars or whatever.

But it’s ultimately just not fun. It’s dated and unengaging: a churn of guitar sludge, over dry drum beats that move at a sauropod’s pace. It simultaneously sounds empty and overstuffed with surface details.

Tedious Down/Black Label Society backwash like “Jesus Frankenstein” and “Virgin Witch” and “Burn” scream and vulcanize with guitar overdubs: flashy fretboard wizardry that ultimately feels like car keys being jangled in front of your face: these songs have nothing interesting going on at a structural level. The riffs are lazy bluesy affairs that sound like things any beginner guitarist could come up in their second or third month of playing. The drumming is pedestrian. The musical ideas are all obvious, borrowed, and done to death. Listening to this music feels like wandering through a dry and parched desert.

“What” is stale Misfits worship with a blaring farfisa organ and a lo-fi, bitcrushed-to-fuck vocal track (another trick Rob has used since the White Zombie days, though now it finally grows old). It seeks to conjure a live and raw monster-punk energy, but Scott Humphrey’s overbearing wall-of-sound production does not ever feel like a band playing. It’s as unconvincing as the fake crowd noises in “Jesus Frankenstein”.

“Werewolf Baby” rocks out with bland and instantly-forgettable slide guitar that kind of sums why John 5 didn’t work in this band. Yes, he supplies some “diverse” elements (Rob was fond of stating that his guitarist could play any style of music), but it’s always the most generic, lifeless version of whatever that thing is. Want bluegrass picking that’s boring? Banjo strumming that’s boring? Arpeggio runs that are boring? John 5 is your huckleberry.

“Death and Destiny Inside The Dreams Factory” is just “What” again. A grim studio confection trying to imitate a live band playing—trying so hard you can see sweat dripping from the sound engineer’s fingers. More distorted vocals. More random guitar overdubs and punch-ins to disguise a lack of ideas.

The three songs I mentioned earlier are pretty good and basically pull their weight. “Werewolf Women of the SS” is a fun “Misirlou” knockoff, though (like the rest of the album) it feels a few bpm too slow. “Mars Needs Women” and “Sick Bubblegum” slap pretty hard. I also don’t mind “The Man Who Laughs”, which is nicely arranged and strung. It avoids Rob’s longstanding distaste of guitar solos by giving Tommy Clufetos a…drum solo. Talk about out of the frying pan.

Real talk, though: there is no “Dragula” and no “Scum of the Earth” and no “Electric Head Pt.1 (The Agony)” and no “Black Sunshine”. I can’t believe I’m saying it, but it doesn’t even have a “Let It All Bleed Out” (one of Educated Horses‘ rare Ws). If you like any of the above music, keep moving, traveller. Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Nothing beside remains.

Rob himself was seemingly dissatisfied with the album. In 2011, he released a new version, with some new songs. All are quite bad.

“Devil’s Hole Girls And The Big Lack of Inspiration” is a faded Xerox of “Superbeast” with some snarls and attitude but no real hooks or catchiness. There is nothing else to say about it. I hope nobody had to give up too much of their Sunday afternoon to get this one recorded and in the can.

“Everything Is Boring” is a rare piece of social commentary—musically it’s a drab miserable slog, as unwanted as black water regurgitated from your shower drain (and equally unpleasant to wade through). The socially-aware lyrics fail to land, as both the song and the album exemplify everything Rob is complaining about.

The reissue also removes the drum solo from “The Man Who Laughs” (possibly because Tommy Clufetos was out of the band). It is replaced it with several minutes of almost transcendentally uninteresting mandolin strumming (presumably from John 5) that literally sounds like those AI-generated “10 hour Appalachian folk mix to relax to” flooding Youtube.

The matter of “worst song of the album” is resoundingly locked up by “Michael”, which is basically unlistenable and a career lowlight. “Mama, why do I want to kill you?” Oh, shut up. This song is hateful. This is what cancer has regular early prostate exams to detect.

Rob has released better music both before and after this album (though far more in the “before” column, if we’re being honest). But it did introduce me to certain realizations about art and fandom, and for this, I am thankful. Intense fascination can disappear in an instant (or sour to hatred), and probably only stems from emotional problems. Go listen to your inner child: they’re probably less dull than “Cease to Exist” and “Everything is Boring.”

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