Written by Jonathan Wojcik

10/31/13: Halloween Wrap-up!

  I was only a little over seventeen, maybe eighteen when I started what would eventually become Bogleech, and today, I turn a flabby, pasty thirty years old. I was intent on making this the greatest possible Halloween season for everybody who's stuck with the site or even just discovering it, and to that end, I've tried a lot of new things. I've broken a personal record with over fifty seasonal articles, churned out around 200 unique drawings, I built an elaborate costume I might be able to show you fairly soon, I broke into "game" design, of sorts, my mini-figure has shipped, I was able to share a number of special projects and I wrote more fiction than I ever have in any other three-month span.

...And it still doesn't feel like enough Halloween.

It never can.

"Enough" Halloween is a physical impossibility.

   Truth is, I had still more planned than I ever had the time to complete this year; crazy ambitions that I suppose you'll just have to see the next time you can buy all the monster cereals together again. I did, however, far exceed both the output and diversity of seasonal content for any previous year, and now we're going to recap the site's 2013 interactive horror event, piece by piece, all on one convenient page!

   The first week of August, I cobbled together my very first twine story, a surreal choose-your-path adventure starring the Luminous Big Ghost Heads. Those who work out the correct ending to this story are awarded with the first of five secret codes, or PRIZE WORD 1/5.

   On September's marvelous gift of Friday the 13th, 2013, Bogleech.com temporarily redirected to Borfladge, an alternate-reality weblog with its own alien logic. Scattered across its three feature articles and dozen-some minor links are the pieces of PRIZE WORD 2/5, though you do need to sort them out from a couple of fakes.

   Designed, coded, hosted and co-written by Chris Wolf with my own illustrations and additional writing, Burgrr was the central hub and focus of all these shenanigans, expanding heavily upon a horror canon I began establishing earlier in the year, which, while not explicitly mentioned, also encompasses my SCP-1904 and SCP-726.

PRIZE WORD 3/5 was available directly from the site, while two pieces of word 5/5 were hidden a little deeper. Complete words could be redeemed through the "contest" link on the front page to unlock chapters in a more coherent horror narrative I wrote myself.

   Beginning as a Halloween-themed countdown to the release of Pokemon X and Y, Pokeween eventually ties in with both Burgrr and Borfladge, elaborating further upon both settings before offering up PRIZE WORD 4/5.

   Finally, you're not likely to have missed me plastering this everywhere I could, but it's here for completion's sake. DON'T GET SPOOKED is an illustrated, textual horror-comedy adventure game including over a hundred of my own lame drawings and additional, more attractive artwork by my significant other Revereche and friend Witness the Absurd.

Tying together Burgrr, Borfladge, my comics, my flash cartoons and more, any of DON'T GET SPOOKED's three possible endings will also land you the final piece of PRIZE WORD 5/5 and an additional secret message!

   I've skipped who knows how much sleep, probably done a piss-poor job of keeping myself nourished and powered through two bouts of fever in two months to put all this together. I know some people didn't really care about any of this silliness. Some people even actively disliked when any of this special content intruded on their enjoyment of reading my dumb opinions about things, but it's all worth it to know that even one person felt a little more Halloween spirit this year, and I have it on good authority that it was probably more than one. That's the only real reason I ever smear my ideas onto the internet at all, really. It's all just in the hopes that to somebody, somewhere, maybe something I did turned out to be the most fun they had that whole day.

Stay tuned for another announcement over the next day or so!