#Corporate horror

[whereserpentswalk]

My dad just send me this image from his office. I did not receive an explanation other than "I'm sitting next to the pillar of mystery". He is living in the Stanley Parable.

[raconabhorrent]

capitalist-centric horror/corporate horror is such an interesting concept to me. like, the idea of taking something that is so (unfortunately) mundane in many people's lives in our current societal landscape and either perverting it or amplifying all aspects of it to create a horror experience is just so beautiful to me.

games like night in the woods (which technically isn't horror but is still relevant as a game creating a psychologically horrific atmosphere for the point of commenting on capitalism's effects), lethal company, night of the consumers, employee of the month (great game i rlly recommend), mouthwashing, happy's humble burger farm, yuppie psycho and MANY more games that don't fit neatly under a specific category outside of a general conception of what "horror games" are.

those kinds of things are fascinating because of the way they combine traditional "horror" (scary monsters, jumpscares, blood and gore) with the stress caused by something like a normal 9-5 at a corporate office, or the concept of working conditions at a packing plant.

it makes you think about how normalized the conditions we as humans exist in, and how despite that people are calling out that normalcy, whether simply through setting and plot or specifically through intention and subtext. it's definitely a genre of game that i'm excited to see more from and something i really want to think more about

(this was inspired by the jacob geller video essay discussing labor in both NITW and Tacoma)

[froginamoodboard]

Mr Davidson lords in black devotee moodboard

For: @the-interidiot

x x x x x x x x x

[softiedog]

Hey all! We launched a patreon for the development of our new game [in]Human Resources!

If you like any of the following, come give us your support or follow me for additional updates!

-Transformation

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[scp-admissions]

The horror of iceberg's situation should be explored more. To work at a dead end job where you have no support system, but being unable to leave. Gears and Iceberg's story is sweet and tragic, but also has great potential for corporate horror.

[scribbled-dream]

Chapters: 3/? Fandom: Human Domestication Guide - GlitchyRobo Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Characters: Affini Character(s) Additional Tags: Nonbinary Character, Gender Dysphoria, Body Dysphoria, Transphobia, Hurt/Comfort, Bodyswap, Consciousness Transfer, Dom Plant | Affini (HDG), Gentle Romance, Slow Burn, Comfort/Angst, Psychological Trauma, Science Fiction, Utopian Fiction, Cyborgs, Trans Character, Tall Plant Lady Summary:

The lead Analyst of the Terran Accord’s Irian Sub-Orbital Station has their life thrown into chaos with the emergence of an Affini Compact warship. With their mechanical body and corporate implants slowly failing, they are given a choice during a chance encounter with an Affini.

[carica-ficus]

Review: Bye-Bye Babaroga

Author: Ivana Geček

Date: 18/10/2024

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

_________________________________________________

For the first time ever, I decided to skip a few books in my "to-review" pile, and jump to the book I think needs to be brought forwards. First of, it's a horror novella that's perfect for this time of year. Second, it came out very recently, so I'm obligated to hype it up because it deserves some more recognition.

The story follows Kaja, a young esthetician that works at a plastic surgery clinic, who is set off for a team building weekend in a remote cottage, which turns into her own personal hell. Socializing with annoying and potentially dangerous colleagues is bad enough, but the thing she is worried about most is her vicious tormentor that keeps her up at night - Babaroga. Kaja will have to navigate the stressful environment by day, and make sure nobody finds out about her horrible secret by night.

A big theme of this book is the difficulty of conforming to the standards of a heteronormative society. Kaja's queerness is her lifelong struggle, and she has been lead to believe it is somehow making her wrong. This opinion leads to fear, which manifests itself in the form of Babaroga, and Geček uses this character to explore Kaja's internal conflicts, like her opinions about herself and her sexuality.

While Babaroga haunts her during the night, her condescending colleagues terrorize her during the day. Their patronizing remarks and crude comments can't really be considered dangerous, but the obviously tilted power structure puts Kaja in a position where she must be very careful of how she behaves and what she lets on about herself. When she confirms that one of her colleagues, called Butcher, already managed to cover up a botched operation, she knows that her failure to fit in might result with potentially violent consequences.

Furthermore, as an employee in a plastic surgery clinic, Kaja is forced to scrutinize her physical appearance throughout every second of the day. While there are instances when she looks in the mirror and scrutinizes her flaws, she does so in comparison to others and consequently highlights what she would potentially need to change in order to fit in. Her unhappiness stems primarily from the understanding that she's different. Such scenes act as a great commentary on the current beauty trends and the popularization of invasive products and services that primarily cater to a misogynistic, idealistic and skewed perception of beauty. Moreover, it also adds onto the exploration of queerness and its tendency to appreciate physical diversity and celebrate bodies as they are.

Tension and anxiety are riddled through the story, and Geček manages to masterfully convey it to the reader. It all culminates when Kaja finally decides to take the matter into her own hands and face her fear, and then shifts from internal turmoil to external threat. The experience of the story is very rewarding, and the tipping point satisfactory, with the ending being the cherry on top.

I could go on about all the aspects of "Bye-Bye Babaroga" that I adored, but I would need to get into spoilers. I will, however, say that this novella is composed of two parts, and the second one focuses on Babaroga's origin story, which turned out to be a real treat. I highly recommend this novella if you're into (or want to explore) corporate horror, like a pinch of Slavic fantasy, and if you've enjoyed the Substance.

[othernaut]

Character Creation Challenge 2025, Day 4: Corp Borg

Image Archive B6-96 doesn't exist. It isn't located on the second floor of the Southern Watchtower, between Compliance Archive II-01 and the Domain of Ceaseless Summer. No pneumatics travel there; emails never arrive. There certainly isn't a trolley full of proprietary images that have been allowed to rot in stock for six months, lacking anywhere to rest.

Jazz isn't worried. Her department, slashed to a single head, can function just fine, just like this. The lack of managerial direction after the culling doesn't concern her one bit. She hasn't been forgotten. This'll work out just fine.

(They keep finding them in drywalled offices, the bodies. Support for software that's been sunsetted for decades. Withered, single-man departments without responsibilities, without oversight, without food, without air. They drag the groaning things out into the offices by their fingernails. Security still has to walk them out, regardless of whether or not they can stand.)

Just sit back and collect a paycheck. Live the dream. But she can't even effectively freelance - can't create, can't do anything for herself - due to the clause in her contract that owns any work done on company time. And now that everyone else is gone, now that she IS the department, overtime is effectively infinite. Live the dream - unless you can't go home. Until they notice you. Until they remember you can still perform.

Trolley full of proprietary images to B6-96, which doesn't exist. The pencils have been rattling all morning in a soft and subtle earthquake that won't stop. All she has is her own initiative. And she has to make this look good.

Sneakers crunching across the old brown basement carpet as she wheels the trolley through the corridors. Techs are in today, hefting desks and drafting tables out of old offices, wheeling in server racks and PC banks pre-loaded with the latest generative image software. You can still see the long scratches on the walls where the old heads - the layout artists, the physical media guys, the ones who worked in ink and paper - were pulled screaming from their ratholes. A wisp of magenta lurches from the trolley, flickers the fluorescents neon pink for a moment; a pattern of primary color shapes, rods, and squiggles asserts itself momentarily over the carpet. There's a reason you don't let the images pile up for too long.

A heavy jolt hits the building. The lights flicker in their housing, gypsum dust rattles from the walls. Something crashes in an adjacent room; someone curses, automatic and rapid-fire, and it lasts until the lights go out for good.

A low moaning from somewhere far, far below. Motes of light, ketchup red, rise from the carpet around her sensible shoes.

She runs, barreling the trolley ahead of her like a battering ram.

Crowd around the elevators, clustered muffled bodies staring at the blinking emergency lights. Someone cracks a joke about early lunch; sensible chuckles. One of those bodies sinks wordlessly into the unlit floor, black into black, and no one even notices they're missing. Jazz thunders on, riding the inertia of her now-unstoppable snap decision. The task she had appointed herself has become her sole focus, beyond the safety training videos drilled into her year after year. Freight elevator. Her department relegated to the basement for so long that she knows the way by heart. Red light pulsing above the doorway, emergency power - still power. She skids the trolley to a slow, rumbling stop and taps the elevator open.

Inside, another person. Old winter wear, pink windbreaker, battered ski boots - possibly rentals. Wraparound mirrorshades lift to reveal terrified eyes, red-rimmed doe-leather brown. Sheer terror when Jazz eases the trolley into the elevator. He speaks something like modern Swedish, though fucked up and archaic in a way she can't really place. Seems grateful when she hits the button for the lobby. Keeps repeating that he needs to get out, get away, she thinks - she can relate. Snow melts on his shoulders as the freight elevator rumbles upwards. She can't show him the way out, not now, but she does the best she can to guide him to the front doors from the lobby. Eyes watering in a childlike confusion and gratitude, like a baby that's never been struck.

Doors ding open. Security is there, four of them, and they rush in plain and quick and efficient. Taze the stranger in a single motion and lope him out of the box, twitching and groaning. Jazz holds the elevator open with her foot, waiting for them to vacate. A wisp of an old jingle rises out of the compressed art blocks on the trolley, a memory of when there was more soda than just the one, more options than just this.

Nearly crunches over the guy's dropped wraparound shades on her way out. Something weird in the neon blue reflection: not the ceiling, a cloudy sky. Edge of a mountain. Snow coming down. She pauses, just a little, and picks them up. The perspective shifts to a ski lift rising up the edge of an otherwise familiar mountain. A quaint little lodge, winter-frosted, sits right in the heart of what would be Nekker Bell HQ main lobby. Like here, only quieter.

There are figures in the reflection, distorted and small. A snowsuited man fixes skis onto a tiny, overdressed, potatolike toddler. A smiling woman slides by, ear to an old beige-brick cellphone with a thick, wobbly antenna. Some animal leaps around in the snow, golden-furred in little booties and a knitted sweater, like a hellhound with dark, teary eyes and no miasma of hellish stench.

Snowy, achingly prosaic. Mundane.

Another rumble. The freight elevator shifts a few centimeters; something whines in the overhead mechanism. Jazz wheels the trolley through the doors, out into the overlapping shadows and light of the lobby floor. Tucks the shades into her T-shirt, glass in, cold against her feverish skin. A trio of first responders lean against the curve of the front desk, trading indistinguishable gossip, plain and casual, with two of the five receptionists even as the floor shifts and shudders.

Still got shit to do.

*****

Savings: 111¤ Role: Designer Works for: Nekker Bell Traits: Knowledge 20 (3), Flexibility 13 (1), Integrity 13 (1), Hard Skills 7 (-1), Soft Skills 15 (2) Hit Points: 4 Undos: 1

Assets: Just a shirt and jeans (no damage reduction, -2DR for Flexibility tests), Pen (d3 weapon, at max damage it embeds, Flexibility or Hard Skills DR12 to pull it out and do 1 bleed for 1d4 rounds), Backpack (7 items), Bag of coffee additives, 26-day-old sandwich (it's fine) Incantations: Intern Descend (Summon d4 faithful interns, no armor, d2 scratch, worthless) Artifact: Sketchbook (sketch a location to teleport there, roll a d6; 1-2 the sketch is bad and it doesn't work, 3-4 the sketch is okay and it teleports somewhere else, 5-6 the sketch is workable and it functions as intended)

Complicated past: Family curse (soul's mortgaged from birth) Yearnings: Purity (longs to do ART, ACTUAL FUCKING ART) Reason to work in corporation: A grave mistake (artist wants paycheck, the beartrap closes) Reaction to stress: None (just another day in paradise)

Name: Jazz (like the old dixie cup pattern)

*****

I do like a bit of corporate horror. Severance got hold of me hard for a bit; I've always liked the bits of the SCP Foundation that focused on the odd interactions of the anomalous with a normal office building. Corp Borg files that mundane inhumanity into the framework of Mork Borg, and at first it looked like an awkward fit, making nostalgic and, at times, hilarious Mork Borg's ever-present feeling of grinding, inescapable doom. But as someone who's put time in the customer service mines, "grinding, inescapable doom" is a sensation that well fits the vibe in every modern office. And hey, we like lateral moves, here at the reeling edge of culture.

Corp Borg looks and rolls pretty much precisely like Mork Borg; the colorways are identical, the flashy zine-style aesthetics, the assumption that you know what the hell the book is on about when it says "d6 laptop, 50% chance to inflict code-madness for d3 rounds". Fresh new vinyl flesh poured onto the skeleton of Mork Borg; if you know Mork Borg, you know how this thing works. Which sounds on first blush like a faint condemnation, but Mork Borg is a masterpiece of design, and saying that a thing looks and feels just like it is plaintext praise.

That said, the vibes are... kind of off. Corp Borg can slide too hard into the "horror" side of "corporate horror", treating the fluorescent lights and open-plan offices as set dressing for the capitalist demons that carry the weight of the thing's professed awfulness. Part of what appeals to me about corporate horror is that the corporate part is in every way exactly as horrific as the horror part, only in an insidious, achingly slow way - the horror not of a monster peeling off your skin but of willingly lining up, day after day, to have it abraded down to the muscle layer by the gentle scrub of the office-standard belt sander.

(The reason I got out of the customer service mines was that I had one real, good conversation with a co-worker where she revealed a lot about herself and her personality. We had a lot of similar tastes and opinions; she said I reminded her a lot of herself when she started. She had been ground down to a cynical nub, immediately expecting everyone she met to be stupid, irrational and stubborn. She accepted that her day was going to be misery and the paycheck was just enough of a balm to keep her in it. There was no life in those eyes. Two weeks submitted days later.)

That said, there's enough stuff in Corp Borg that you can assemble the pieces into whatever flavor of corporate sundae you're after - if you think coffee Madonnas and stapler fights are too ridiculous, you can play around with endless overtime, with the slow grinding shift of the mutation tables, with the end of the world delivered by email daemon hot and fresh every morning (and please do not reply).

One thing I will unconditionally laud is the starter adventure in the back of the book (which is excellent, and banks on impostor syndrome as its main mechanism of fear, which I adore) and, crucially, beautifully, the solo play rules. I am pleased beyond expression that not only are solo play rules included right in the book, but that it's comprehensive, well thought out, and comes with delightful flowcharts, exceptions and thematic justification. This is a thing I want to praise loudly until it blossoms into a trend, and it's the thing that elevates Corp Borg from a "huh, neat" to something I'm probably going to reference over and over again on bored work nights.

Next up: A careworn dream of the future.

[hyperazraphael]

A Disney executive scrolling through his Tumblr dash sees this post and chuckles sensibly. Adjusting his tie he double-checks the current listed price of the United States which he currently has wishlisted, followed by the other major countries. He smiles and takes a sip of his coffee before liking the post and scrolling on with another chuckle saying softly, "Not yet, Tumblr user kumboochies... not just yet..."

i think we're ALL disney's first openly gay character

[virihh]

One thing recruiters will always have is ✨️the audacity✨️

I went to a job interview downtown (after this man insisted on us having a meeting) and when the interview was nearly over this man held his hands together and said to me with a smile on his face

You won't get a n y benefits

No health insurance, no days off, n o t h i n g

And I just stared at him, I even tilted my head to the sidea little bit and went:

"How so?"

And he said:

You'll get unpaid vacations though

I thanked him and left

And he said:

I'll let you know if I choose you

I didn't laugh in his face because I'm the politest woman that office has ever seen, but ???

[qyootip]

If you have never worked in corporate America, I was in a zoom meeting where an executive was blasting eye of the tiger over his speaker right before announcing a ton of people were getting fired

[exilley]

I do sort of wish western anime fans would analyze anime and manga from a framework of japanese historical and cultural context. Specifically a lot of works from the 90s being influenced by the general aimlessness and ennui that a lot of people were experiencing due to the burst in the bubble economy and the national trauma caused by the sarin terrorist attack. I think in interacting with media that’s not local to our sociocultural/sociopolitical sphere it’s easy to forget that it’s influenced and shaped by the same kinds of factors that influence media within our own cultural dome and there ends up being this baseline misalignment of perception between the causative elements of a narrative and viewer interpretation of those elements. It’s a form of death of the author that i think, in some measure, hinders our ability to fully understand/come to terms with creator intent and the full scope of a work’s merits

[bluemoonperegrine]

"Turn Smile Shift Repeat" by Phantom Planet is pretty much about corporate horror. It's about sleepwalking through modern life being disconnected.

off of my last post: i feel like corporate horror has such a rich seam of possibilities that are just begging to be mined. the helpless, nightmarish feeling of watching your life get chewed up by the implacable machinery of faceless corporations in which you are nothing but an easily-replaceable cog and knowing the whole time that you chose to be here. that you can, theoretically, leave any time you want. mindless, pointless busywork that you're expected to take pride in even when it has no measurable impact. feeling like you're running on a treadmill - always busy, never achieving anything. upper managers who only communicate with you by email. CEOs who never communicate with you at all, and may not actually exist for all you know. you can leave any time you want. but you can't, can you? not really. you still have to pay the bills.

[jaradraws]

DISCLAIMER: the blood is a feature, not a bug 🩸☎️

[literarywizard]

My Unplanned Break From Heart: The City Beneath Has Ended

Most of the session might have been getting back into the swing of things and a combat encounter, but we've finally gotten another session of Heart: The City Beneath under our belts and we'll hopefully have a few more without another skip! Hopefully!

Six weeks after our last session, my game of Heart: The City Beneath has finally come back around again. We even got through a full session, even if our metaphorical table wasn’t entirely full. One of the players couldn’t make it, since they have been firmly knocked out by a pair of sicknesses that have left them unfortunately unable to do much without needing to take a nap to rest up. We didn’t…