A little Halloween hell hound for you. (And surely I wasn’t the only one who played this game when I was younger? Would you rather: go without sight, sound, touch, taste, smell? It has become rather less funny to me now that my hearing is actually weakened, in particular because hearing was NOT one of the senses I ever thought about giving up.)

I’m in California this week working from the Google HQ, and so am slightly more harried for time than usual (what is this “driving to work” so many people seem to do? I don’t like it). Is that redundant – “harried for time”? Probably. In a better frame of mind I’d edit the sentence, but today you’re getting Full Stream Of Consciousness, so we can all ponder together.

If you’d like some additional Halloween reading, I have two earnest suggestions for you:

1. Carmen Maria Machado’s story “The Husband Stitch” in Granta. In equal parts chilling and affecting; I really love this.

2. Or, if you’ve got ten thousand hours to spare making it impossible to ever sleep alone again, check out Jezebel’s Annual Spooky Story Contest, which is going on now. Some terrible, done-wrong part of me looks forward to this thread ALL YEAR (to be clear: you get all the stories by reading through the voluminous comments section), and here it is.