Hard Digest August 20: Early Access Clouds, R.L. Stine, SpaceX, and More

Shitty Cloud Doesn’t Even Look Like an Animal or Nothing

By Ben Sobieck

MINNEAPOLIS — The appearance of an unremarkable cloud in the sky enraged pedestrians in Uptown, prompting a police response in a part of the city known for its music venues, sources confirmed.

“I was in line for a Roadkill Sushi show outside the Apocalypse Room this morning, since the city is condemning it in the afternoon. I accidentally looked up at the sky—I usually try not to—and there it was: the shittiest cloud I’ve ever seen in my life. Just a fuckin’ prolapse of meteorology. It didn’t even try to look like an animal or nothing—not even the easy ones like a worm or a dino nugget. It was the only cloud in the sky, so anyone who wanted a cloud to look at had to look at this one. I was so mad, I punched a guy. He pulled a gun, but then I showed him the cloud, and he said he understood,” said Leo Chmura, who has 22 years of amateur cloud observation experience. “I ate the caps I brought for the show, thinking they’d make the cloud more interesting to look at. Nope. Next thing I know, I think I’m in the pit with Roadkill Sushi, but I’m still on the street and there’s puddles of hair and blood and teeth everywhere. People went cloud crazy!”

The cloud also attracted attention from observers in the sky.

“I dropped the airplane 10,000 feet to get a better look at this thing,” said Ellie Lag, captain of a commercial airliner. “I thought to myself, ‘This has to be a UFO. No cloud is that shitty.’ I’ve seen millions of clouds, many of them beautiful. Not this one. If I hadn’t spent all my weather-modifying spray on that last hurricane, I would’ve chemtrailed a tornado to rip up that cloud as a ‘fuck you.’ It deserved it. I expect this sort of behavior in a nimbostratus cloud, but not a cumulus.”

Dr. Autumn Jesien, a climatologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), confirmed the shitty cloud printed on radar.

“Unfortunately, climate change is accelerating the shittification of clouds. Pleasing shapes like eagles, faces, religious symbols, and the Phillie Phanatic are nearly extinct,” Dr. Jesien said. “However, elephant clouds should return to that part of Minneapolis after the Apocalypse Room shuts down. The ozone layer can finally heal the hole in it caused by all the cigarette smoke.”

As of press time, the cloud successfully morphed into Glenn Danzig and left the area.

“The Horror at Camp Jellyjam” Really Happened to Me – Guest Post by R.L. Stine

By Dan Rice

You all know me, you know how I make a living. For decades, I’ve spooked young and old alike with my charmingly macabre tales of terror. People ask me all the time, “R.L. Stine, how do you come up with all this twisted-ass shit?” to which I usually say, “I’m just one sick fucking puppy.” Let’s face it — slime gerbils, living dummies, saying cheese or dying — you gotta be pretty loco in the fucking cerbesa to imagine all that shit. Cocaine helps, but I can’t give high-grade Colombian marching powder all the credit. If being a psycho motherfucker word-pervert is a crime, your boy is guilty as charged. One of my tales, however, is so dark, so deranged, so utterly batshit insane, even my depraved psyche couldn’t have come up with it.

Confession time — “The Horror at Camp Jellyjam” is a 100% for real fucking thing that, I shit you not, actually happened to me. God help me, I lived it.

Now that I think about it, maybe that’s why I’m such a fucked up basket case to begin with. “Monster Blood,” “The Haunted Mask,” “One Day at Horrorland,” hell, every sicko snuff-story I’ve ever written, they’ve all been my attempt to unpack and reconcile with the very real horror I very really experienced at the very real Camp Jellyjam when I was a boy. I guess it was only a matter of time before I got to getting that real-deal shit down on paper.

I don’t know what got into me at the time — I didn’t set out to do it. When I sat down at my computer that morning, I had no goal outside of cranking out another schlocky gore-porn to make the sicko Schoolastic kids fork over their milk money for another cheap thrill. Maybe someone slipped something in my breakfast Wild Turkey 101. Maybe I shouldn’t have bought my crank from that rando at Deny’s after my regular guy got shot. Or maybe, just maybe, part of me was tired of running.

I needed an inciting incident — kid moves to a new town, school gets a weird new principal, whatever the fuck, you’ve read Goosebumps — and this time the little voice inside me said “Why not use that time your parents moved you and your sister in a Uhaul trailer and the trailer got unhitched and you wound up marooned at that spooky Camp Jellyjam place? You know, with the weird culty competitions and the giant jelly-monster enslaving and eating people?” So I did.

I had every intention of pivoting back into one of my sick-fuck-make-em-ups — vampires, mummies, killer snowmen, whatever gets you off, Jack — but to my astonishment, the truth just kept pouring out. Next thing I knew, my fingers stopped hitting the keys, and it was all there. The sinister counselor Buddy. The King Coins. The giant purple blob monster I, for real, watched eat dozens of children. Before I knew it, the greatest trauma of my life was on bookshelves around the world, available to any 12-year-old pervert with $4.50 burning a hole in their pocket.

I didn’t change the names or anything. If it weren’t for the fact that everyone involved in the story besides me is either dead or in prison, I probably would have been sued to death.

What did I get for sharing my pain with the world? Closure? Catharsis? Absolution? Fuck. No. I was still the same sick fuck shell of a man I always was. The pills, the whores, the near-death brushes with auto-erotic asphyxiation, none of that shit went away, hell I doubled down. Worse of all, if you’ll notice, I kept writing Goosebumps.

Maybe that’s why I’m finally coming clean about what I experienced at Camp Jellyjam. Maybe I’m still just that scared little kid trying to put it all behind me, and maybe now the nightmares will finally stop. Yeah… and maybe priests make great babysitters. I’m at the point where any day without a needle in my arm is a good day. I gotta tell ya, I don’t think today is gonna be a good day.

SpaceX Engineer Explodes at Desk

By Tim Graham

HAWTHORNE, Calif. — A mechanical engineer at SpaceX spontaneously exploded while quietly working on a CAD drawing, according to blood-spattered sources.

“The noise and spray of blood startled me a bit, but you get used to things blowing up when you’ve been here long enough,” said coworker Eileen Fletcher over several loud bangs in the background. “When I first started, my colleagues warned me that things around SpaceX have a tendency to just blow apart. Sure enough, in the first week, my stapler exploded. Then the coffee maker in our break room blew up. And then there are the rockets, of course—everyone’s used to seeing those go up in flames. This was the first time I’ve seen an actual person explode, but I guess it’s just par for the course around here. Now I barely even flinch.”

SpaceX custodian engineer Hal Roder said that all the detritus from explosions translates to job security for him.

“A lot of tech people are worried about being laid off,” said Roder as he wiped mayonnaise from the cafeteria ceiling. “But I’m not concerned one bit. All the wreckage that needs clearing up around here makes me one of the most valuable employees. In fact, they let me hire a few more janitors to expand my team. We’re working overtime trying to keep up with all the broken glass, charred furniture and even splattered biological matter here at SpaceX. And I’m not worried about AI taking my job. Until a robot is able to clean human giblets out of a server rack, my job is safe.”

Most businesses with a chronic explosion problem would not survive, but somehow SpaceX manages to prosper.

“The secret to SpaceX’s success in the face of failure is their many lucrative government contracts,” explained business consultant Gary Hogg. “Name me one other successful company whose products consistently self-immolate. Go ahead, I’ll wait. That’s right, other companies would fold if they were plagued by frequent explosions. But despite it all, SpaceX continues to grow. Meanwhile, NASA is hauled before congress when one of their shuttles blows up every few decades. It just goes to show how far some smooth-talking bullshitters and backroom deals can get you.”

At press time, SpaceX’s custodial division was observed cleaning up the aftermath of the latest rocket explosion with a massive hydraulic broom and dustpan.

Weapons (2025) Wikipedia Plot Summary Review (Guest Column By Guy Too Scared to Watch It)

BY Garry Kerls

Weapons, from Director Zach Cregger (The Whitest Kids U’ Know), starring Josh Brolin (Marvel’s The Avengers Post Credit Scenes), has stunned the box office this past week, leaving audiences spooked and critics impressed. At least that’s what I hear, because this film critic’s severe phobia of anything creepy, scary, and otherwise unsettling, has kept me away from the movies. However, my want to stay relevant coupled with chronic FOMO has resulted in the following comprehensive review of the Wikipedia plot synopsis for Weapons (2025).

The film’s hook revolves around the disappearance of a local third grade class. One night, at exactly 2:17 A.M., all but one student suddenly ran out of their homes–arms akimbo–and disappeared into the night, a scene that would most definitely give me nightmares if I saw it.

Two months after that incident, the teacher of the class (Julia Garner) and a father of one of the missing children (Josh Brolin), begin their own investigations into the strange event. Along with the final remaining child, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), the narrative of the film jumps from one character’s perspective to another, a directing style that would’ve made my brain hurt if I hadn’t been reading the plot on my phone.

We soon learn from Alex’s perspective that his parents, along with the rest of his third grade class, have been bewitched by his great-aunt Gladys. Gladys is a dying witch who uses her witch-powers to control people, a sentence that reads much sillier than the film seems to let on.

At this point in my reading I sighed a sigh of relief knowing I would never have to look at Gladys’ seemingly hideous mug. Her description is chilling and I curse my brain for even attempting to imagine what she looks like.

In the end, however, it’s teamwork that makes the dreamwork. The adults eventually figure out that the single remaining child may actually have something to do with the disappearances, and after a final fight sequence, Gladys meets her demise at the hands of the children she cursed. A stomach curdling rabbit-hole search into dismemberment put the final bow on my experience with Weapons (2025), and I couldn’t be happier it’s over. 5 stars!