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Wednesday, August 14, 2024

Just an Update

I know that I haven't posted anything in months. You can thank my bipolar for that. However, if it's any consolation (which I feel it isn't, given this has been a thing for years now), I'll still be doing Decemystery. God willing, 2025 won't treat me like the past two years have. If it does, I'm going to start thinking my bipolar is tied to a cycle where the first 6–8 months suck while the final 4–6 months don't.


Regardless, I'm sincerely sorry for not doing this sooner. I've felt ashamed and tired from everything that has gone on. I hope and pray that I can live something of a normal life starting next year. If I can't... well, at least I always have Decemystery to look forward to.


    Sincerely, Vertigo

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Mystery: The Case of My Friend’s Missing Dog


Something that I’ve always been adamant about is writing what I want to write. The reason for this is simple: I can’t force myself to get excited or interested in writing about something that another person wants me to write about. I learned this the hard way when someone asked me to write about a cruise ship disappearance and, ultimately, I got nowhere.


As a result, I don’t take requests. I’m open to suggestions, of course. If someone suggests a story, I’ll look into it and consider it, but I’m hesitant to even do that. It’s likely I’ll outright forget about it and move on to whatever intrigues me the most.


Like all rules, though, I’m prone to breaking them. For the first time ever, I’m covering a story at the request of a very close friend of mine—one of my best, actually. She’s a friend who’s cheered me on when it comes to writing and is an all-around great person. I would do anything for her, and she would do anything for me.


As misfortune would have it, this very friend recently lost one of her dogs. Apparently, the dog—a female mixed breed named Mercy—disappeared. For the record, neither of us knows the exact breeds. I don’t know any dog breeders, so I can’t ask for identification, and I’m not about to ask around behind my friend’s back.


Anyway, a dog merely running off wouldn’t be something I wrote about. Dogs vanish all the time. More often than not, they run off for one reason or another, though there are instances where someone steals the dog or a predatory animal attacks and kills it, then takes it off as a meal.


Yet, oddly enough, none of those appear to be the case here.


You see, Mercy was an old one. While it’s not unheard of for people to adopt an elderly dog, neither myself nor my friend have heard of someone stealing an elderly dog. On top of that, the entire town knew her. One would think that if a familiar face—even that of a dog—would be seen by someone. Yet, that’s not the case here.


Several weeks later, there’s been no sign of Mercy. No sightings. No fur. No collar. No tracks. Nothing. It’s like she vanished into thin air.


That brings me to this write-up. After consoling my friend as best I could (which amounted to me talking before saying that the whole thing piqued my curiosity), we talked about how odd it was. Fast-forward to today—March 12—and she messaged me over Discord asking if I’d be interested in writing about this. I was surprised at first but immediately smiled and said something I never thought I would say when it came to a request.


I said yes.


Initially, I had planned for this write-up to be posted after another one, but given the circumstances, I figured it’d be rather cruel of me to let it linger and cover it at a later point. But I digress; come along, dear reader! For the first time in this blog’s history, we’ll be covering a mystery tied to a friend of mine! This is The Case of My Friend’s Missing Dog!

Monday, March 4, 2024

Happy Birthday to Me!

 I turned 28 today; woohoo! Anyway, aside from celebrating my birthday, I'm sick! On the upside, I'm not depressed; just very, very sick. I likely have the whooping cough or something akin to that. Still, I'm writing—albeit slowly. I just thought I'd let you all know.


I find it funny how, at the start of every year since I made this blog, the new year has kicked my ass six ways from Sunday. If I had pattern recognition, I'd think that I'm cursed to start the new year off on the weirdest foot possible. Oh well, back to celebrating my birthday with writing and The Last Epoch!


        Sincerely, Vertigo (who feels fifty years older than he actually is)

Sunday, February 4, 2024

A Small Update

 

I had hoped to have a write-up or two posted last month, but that did not come to pass. The main reason for that, aside from still being quite exhausted from the absolutely monstrous amount of writing I did last year, was my grandmother passed away. While this won't affect my output for the rest of the year (I have no intention of letting my grief get the better of me; I've learned how damaging that can be), I do have to admit that I am more than a little distraught and sad about her passing. So, consider this update to be an explanation for why I went radio silent and didn't post anything last month, outside of my little January update that I do nearly every year.


And rest in peace, grandma. You were the best, and I could not be happier to have had the privilege of calling you my grandmother. May we meet again in the next life.

Wednesday, January 10, 2024

Obligatory New Year Update (I Still Make No Promises Edition)

 Oh, hello there, dear reader! Welcome back to my blog; I meant to do the New Year update a few days ago, but I got carried away with playing Final Fantasy XVI and screwing around with Character AI since it’s proven to be surprisingly cathartic to throw ideas for write-ups, and jokes, off of AI, rather than pestering my friends on Discord with my incessant blabbering. Maybe AI has more of a use than having it draw the stupidest stuff I can think of!


Anyway, I didn’t do one of these last year because, well, last year was dedicated solely to doing Decemystery 2022.3 and Decemystery 2023. This year, however, I plan to do a lot more than just that; let’s get to talking about what’s in store!

Sunday, December 31, 2023

Decemystery (2023) 31: That Time a Russian Managed to Noclip Out of Reality

 

Salutations, dear reader. Welcome back to my blog for the final time this year. This month has been filled with the wildest, strangest, and most unbelievable stories I’ve ever written about in the five years that it’s been around. Or, well, four years if you wish to pretend 2022 didn’t happen, given I only wrote a single movie review that year. Thank you, COVID brain fog, for robbing me of a year of my life.


But I digress. When I put the two Decemysterys together, the capstone entry for 2022.3 remained the same; the Professor Oak story was always what I had in mind. However, the one for today was not what I originally had in mind. I won’t spoil what it is since I’m hoping to use it as next year’s capstone entry, but I will say that I began work on it earlier in the year. I believe in June. I can’t remember precisely because of just how much I wrote in such a short amount of time.


However, I ultimately decided to hold off on finishing it because it would have been disgustingly long. It’s a case that’s extraordinarily personal to me, and I believed that if I’d rushed it, I would have felt so disappointed in myself for not giving it the proper love and care that I believe it deserves. So, that left me in limbo for a bit; I wasn’t sure what I’d use to end this absolute beast of a month off.


The biggest challenge in finding what I believe to be a truly worthwhile case was that this month was a never-ending one-upping of strangeness. Almost every story was just pure, unadulterated: “What in the world!?” through and through. So, in order to find what I felt was a proper capstone entry, I went looking for something that was not only weird but also encompassed everything that made this month special.


That story came to my attention a few months ago, in October, when I was looking at sustained_disgust’s Obscure Unsolved Mysteries Iceberg. We started out this month over there, and we shall end it off there. So come along, dear reader, as we end off 2023—and Decemystery—with That Time a Russian Managed to Noclip Out of Reality!

Decemystery (2022.3) 31: That Time Professor Oak Kidnapped A Child


 

Content warning: this write-up contains mentions of child sexual abuse.


This month has been filled with an absolutely massive amount of weirdness. From space penguins to vampiric caterpillars and tongue monsters to dancing bulls, this December takes the cake as the strangest of them all. Though, as is the case with Decemystery, I’ve saved the oddest story for last. For the capstone of Decemystery 2022.3, I have whatever you can call this story.


Despite being a rather harmless series on the surface, PokĂ©mon has had a bizarrely large amount of controversy surrounding it throughout the years. While nowadays, it’s primarily criticized for the lackluster graphics and, in the case of the two most recent releases, polish, its early days had some other criticisms. From one side, you had PETA lambasted it for animal cruelty. On the other side, you had some religious groups accuse it of being Satanic for teaching evolution.


Today’s story will take us back in time to that time period, a time when video games had controversies that didn’t involve loot boxes and microtransactions. No, it was a simpler time. So to round off this Decemystery, let’s discuss That Time Professor Oak Kidnapped A Child. This one’s going to be a doozy.