Arkham, MA—Good evening, gentle readers. My name is Baron Von Hallens. But let me warn you, if I hear one more David Lee Roth joke, I will lay waste to the entire state of New Jersey! Unless Sandy beats me to it. I have been an immortal for six centuries and I have not seen worse politicians since Ambrosio Spinola back in the 1500s. That guy made W look like Stephen Hawking on ginkgo biloba.
Considering the current state of intelligence during this time period, you are probably unaware that periodically vampires slip into a torpor. In this partial-hibernative state, beyond even the reach of Zoloft, we can sleep for decades. Take that, makers of Ambien! It’s sort of a vampire’s version of a Saturday morning sleep in. I have recently awakened from such a slumber and have found the world has become a horrible place in my absence, except for Survivor. I love that show.
As you can imagine, when I awoke, I felt depleted and starved, so I went on a killing rampage. I had just cornered my hundredth or so victim, a rather rotund man wearing some peasant cloth over his girth which read, May The Fourth Be With You. I was intrigued, for this is the same date as my rebirth, so I allowed him to beg before feeding.
He told me he worked in something called an IT department, which I assumed had something to do with monsters. He begged for his life and in return promised to help me control a place known as the World Wide Web. Interesting. I assumed the IT they were raising must be a nest of giant Shelob-type spiders.
Naturally, I was intrigued. He said he must first build me an identity. I told him I already had one and then he laughed and laughed…well, until I tore off his finger. His whimpering and quaking form got back to work and he assured me that soon I would be able to control this web. First, he made a cartoon version of my face and sent it into this mysterious web.
He set up site after site, but I was barely paying attention, because Survivor was on. He showed me his glowing signals that looked like a window into the abyss or one of those damn paintings my old friend Van Gogh used to paint…before I bit off his ear. Soon I knew this web would be mine and thousands of new victims would be caught in my Internet of doom!
But there were problems. He spoke of such things as an army of Followers that would soon be mine, but when I looked with the help of this little tweeting blue bird, I saw only nine victims had followed me to their demise. And on the ‘Book of Faces’ things proved even worse!
I demanded to know what the problem was, but my new ghoul only hid behind the sofa and tried to offer me something called True Blood, which tasted like sugar soaked in urine.
He explained how hundreds of people pretended to be creatures of the night and, to the masses, I was just another of these poseurs. Spam he called it. This was not going well, especially when they started calling me Nosferyahoo and Spam the Impaler. The insolence!
After teaching him to eat flies, rodents, and those disgusting creatures you call house cats, I made my henchman get back to his task. My ghoul worked until his fingers bled over those foul square letters, but when I awoke the next evening, I saw my followers had only risen to twenty-two! Damn that blue tweeting bird! I demanded that he change the image to a bat, but he said this was beyond his puny powers.
I shaved him bald with a shard of glass, made him eat his own fingernails, and forced him to watch American Idol, but nothing seemed to work. He told me he would try Reddit, but they almost immediately banned us for Spamming. I haven’t eaten solid food for centuries and now this!
We tried other sites, like something called StumbleUpon, which sounded better suited to promote zombie prey, but my ghoul said we should throw everything at the wall to see what sticks. On the third try, my ghoul friend stuck to the wall…or, more accurately, parts of him did.
Then I took up the torch and discovered The Daily Discord. Ahhhhh, Discord! The floodlight of intelligence within a sea of flatulence jokes and pictures of your damned cats doing wacky hijinks. With the Discord behind me and the creatures of IT…the Web will soon be mine! What is that you say? We have only gotten a hundred page views so far. Well, it is a start Mr. Gates, it is a start.
Happy Halloween!
