Jeff Mach's Blog, page 11

Cryptid Night

Then there was that day when the UFOlogists
Met in the same place and time as the cryptozoologists
Skip the psychoanalysts
Hide your head, and freeze.

Mothman and the Lizard-People
(Of course they both exist, you sheeple!)
Were last seen in that old church steeple
Exchanging cornbread recipes.

A gaggle of ancient astronauts
Were writing a check with a ton of naughts
To the Loch Ness Monster (whose sashimi
Is absolutely beyond dreamy.)

The Minhocão’s helping The Beasts That Time Forgot
Have worms for 500 Tequila shots
Meanwhile, the ubiquitous Greys
Have started a rave that might last for days.

Why be surprised? By break of day
They’ll all of have melted discretely away
Why spend the night arguing? Rather a waste
When, at sunrise, they’ll all be displaced.

It’s sappy, it’s simple, but it’s nonetheless true:
If you’re going to eat others, start
with those less weird than you.

_

“It’s a little-known fact, but Unicorns are something like 20% paint, and their horns are stolen exclusively from endangered species.”
― Jeff Mach, There and Never, Ever Back Again

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In Brief Defense Of Cannibalism

Why are there modern day, blanket objections to cannibalism?

It surely can’t be because it’s “uncivilized”. We have a much clearer vision of how particular cultural norms do not, necessarily, define “civilization”. We’re hardly going to impose one set of cultural values arbitrarily upon several other cultures or their heritage, are we?

And it surely can’t be geographic. You can find cannibalism on just about every continent. You can find it everywhere from the Aztecs to the family of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

There are concerns about certain kinds of transmissible illness, but proper cooking, and a certain selectivity about precisely which parts one eats, can reduce that concern significantly, just as we no longer need to consider trichinosis a major barrier to the consumption of pork.

Nutritional? Hardly. A properly-nourished human, by definition, contains many (if not most) vitamins and minerals essential to healthy human life. Can you say the same about a hunk of soybean-based protein?

Situational? Sure. One can’t simply go around taking people home and consuming them, unless, obviously, it’s a weekend. But that’s fine. We simply need a reasonable framework for deciding when to do such a thing—for example, as with certain other kinds of ethically-harvested meat, we might engage in this sort of feast only after someone has passed away from natural causes. I mean, if we can agree—even be urged—to donate our organs after death, whyever can’t we agree to donate our entire bodies?

No, I think the answer is something quite ugly, and, in my eyes, unfortunate.

I think the objection to cannibalism is that you are ALL TOO DELICIOUS.

I think somebody in power figured it out.

Because most people don’t have the opportunity to learn. And most people assume that if they DID have to learn, it would be in a situation of extreme difficulty.

Which it was.

And somebody would probably have to die.

Or several somebodies.

And we all figure that if we had to do it, we’d do it and apologize to the family and try to forget it.

We definitely don’t go around thinking we’ll believe it was actually kinda good.

We most assuredly didn’t think it would be excellent: tender, sure, but much less like pork, more like a beef with perhaps a Korean flair, a certain sweetness, a smoky aftertaste, an…

At any rate, I don’t think humans should start eating humans. Because it would be morally wrong. Although it would reduce supermarket checkouts significantly. And shopping mall crowds. And amusement park lines. And…

…and it would be terrible, as we’re all quite aware.

People taste awful.

Honest.

_____

“It’s a little-known fact, but Unicorns are something like 20% paint, and their horns are stolen exclusively from endangered species.”
― Jeff Mach, There and Never, Ever Back Again

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You could find more of my books and other work here on Amazon.

The post In Brief Defense Of Cannibalism appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

Monster Manual Doggerel II

Abominable Yeti

The Yeti’s career
Is full of pauses
They spend three months of the year
As mall Santa Clauses.

The Black Dragon

The Black Dragon’s evil
Disgusts and befouls me
But I admit the acid
Is better than Owlsley

Awakened Shrub

The Awakened Shrub, the Manual states
Is a Shrub that some crazed Wizard creates
The Wizard lets the plant leave the ground
And move itself, and emit sound

Now if I were that shrub, I’d need a mender
‘Cause the first thing I’d do is find a blender
And five minutes after entering life’s movie
I’d see if life was better as a smoothie.

Revenant

In a situation not too hilaric
A Revenant once ate our Cleric
Its soul then lingered unnaturally
Months on our couch? Thirty-three!

Stone Giant

All Stone Giants want is to be left in piece
To relax in contemplation
And disturbing them’s only a good idea
If you really like tenderization.

(You can read more of these over here.)

_____

“It’s a little-known fact, but Unicorns are something like 20% paint, and their horns are stolen exclusively from endangered species.”
― Jeff Mach, There and Never, Ever Back Again

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You could find more of my books and other work here on Amazon.

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Some Things Faeries Regret About Entering The Mortal Lands

Many Fae are reluctant to enter the Mortal places. Some of this is because Mortals are large and loud and clumsy and uncouth. Some of it is is because in the Mortal realms, you can die, which is a really, really terrible idea. If you could stay in Faerie lands, not talk to idiots, and not have to die, you’d probably chose that over pushing yourself painfully through some tacky little mirror, making yourself known to Mortals, avoiding being trapped in a Circus (HOPEFULLY. THIS time)…and going about whatever mission Tatiana’s inflicted upon you.

Nevertheless, it’s entirely possible to entice Faries into the mortal world by either annoying them or pleasing them. That is, if they’re around, annoy them. Leave out liverwort and paper-pressed thyme, and they’ll REALLY get annoyed. Then they’ll stick around just to piss yhou off.

Or leave out sugar and whiskey. This will make them feel poitively towards them, but it will not make them friendly. Be honest: would bacon and whiskey make YOU friendly?

But it doesn’t matter if they’re friendly or not. They’re here to do a job. And here are few of the things that annoy them:

They’re going to die. I mean, everyone in mortal lands dies. So every ambassadorship to human realms is death.They grow four extra wings. Ordinarily seraphim and Faeries look very little alike; but spend a couple days in Mortal lands, and soon your body will start generating extra wings to cover up the sheer embarrassmentThey have to pretend Elvis is dead. Which is terribly depressing.They have to deal with mortals.They have to deal with each other.People keep writing about them.

Nevertheless, the Queen commands, and the Fae obey. Many of them ripped through a rather large portal in the 1970s. Most of them got work in academia. Most of those bitter supernatural creatures, formerly immortal and now condemned to death, are providing you with most of the information you take in about your reality.

I bet, thinking about it, this doesn’t surprise you in the least.

_____

“It’s a little-known fact, but Unicorns are something like 20% paint, and their horns are stolen exclusively from endangered species.”
― Jeff Mach, There and Never, Ever Back Again

You could go here to join my mailing list.

You could find more of my books and other work here on Amazon.

 

 

The post Some Things Faeries Regret About Entering The Mortal Lands appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

Thirteen Rejected Fairytale Concepts

13. Snow White and the 7 Hard-Drinkin’, Hard-Smokin’, Extremely Masculine Gay Dudes On A 1970s “Iron John” Retreat Where They Spend The Entire Time Refusing To Let Her In Their Tree House

12. The Red Shoes Which Make You Dance Uncontrollably And Also Form Words In The Air, Making Them Simultaneously The “Read” Shoes, And If You Think That’s Funny, We Can Probably Get You Help.

11. The Pyrrhuloxia Who Would Peck Your Eyes Out If You Got Her Name Wrong

10. The Gingerbread-And-Arsenic Man

9. The Three Little Pigs and The Hundreds Of Carnivores Which Tried To Eat Them And Eventually Succeeded

8. Goldilocks and the Ominous, Increasingly Small Circle Of Sharks

7. Hansel, Gretel, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover, and the Snozzberry Tree

6. The Emperor’s New Cursed Battle Armor

5, The Elves and the Shoe Reseller Who Didn’t Understand Certain Nuances Of International Copyright Law

4. Jack and the Military-Industrial-Beanstalk Complex

3. The Pied Piper of a City Uncomfortably Close To Where You Live

2. The Napping Person Who Woke Up, Took One Good Look Around, And Went Right Back To Sleep.

The Princess and the Radioactive Isotope.

_____

NOTE: All references to “Jack” are with the kind permission of the Department of Reassuring Fairytales That Fairytales Aren’t Real While Simultaneously Insisting On Overseeing Most Of What You Do With Them”, without whose kind assistance, we wouldn’t have a blog.

_____

“It’s a little-known fact, but Unicorns are something like 20% paint, and their horns are stolen exclusively from endangered species.”
― Jeff Mach, There and Never, Ever Back Again

You could go here to join my mailing list.

You could find more of my books and other work here on Amazon.

The post Thirteen Rejected Fairytale Concepts appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

Flux Capacitory Consequences

“Thank goodness!”, cried the Professor, “We’re just in time to deactivate the Time Machine!” “But, ma’am, aren’t you worried about the flux capacitory consequences?” “No time to worry!” she shouted, “we have the rescue the President!”. The Professor pulled the switch. Sparks flew and danced, some of them doing both at the sane time.

“Thank goodness!” cried the professor “We’re not in time to deactivate the Time Machine, but we can use it to go back in time to before when we would have needed to do si!” “But, ma’am, aren’t you worried about the flux capacitoriy conseuences?
No time to worry!” she shouted, “we have to rescue the Vice President!” The Professor pulled the switch. Sparks crackled and snapped.”

“Oh my goodness!” yelled the Professor. “We’re not in time to capacitate the fluxation, but the Vice President is already inconsequential. That’s when the Time Terrorists struck.

“I’m on strike!” yelled the mother of the twin time-travelling flux capacitator groupies. “You can sort out your own love lives!” The ancient wise woman watched sparks fly and deactivated the Time Machine.

She shook her head. Predicting it was easy. Knowing it, and living with it, that part she wouldn’t trade you for a chicken farm on green soil.

Time travel is the fourth-worst way to rescue the President. But if she kept working at it real, real hard, she might see it become the third-worst in her lifetime.

One can dream.

She deactivated the time machine, but it was too late / too early / too late / too much of a time which wasn’t definable by “time”.

She deactivated the time machine at the same time as the time machine deactivated here. “I’ve done it!” they both cried, simultaneously. Then each paused in disgust. Which one timeported them backwards twenty minutes? It doesn’t matter. They had to get this right. It had to be perfect, goodness nows.

“Goodness gracious!”, she shouted, reundemeterializing…

_____

“It’s a little-known fact, but Unicorns are something like 20% paint, and their horns are stolen exclusively from endangered species.”
― Jeff Mach, There and Never, Ever Back Again

You could go here to join my mailing list.

You could find more of my books and other work here on Amazon.

The post Flux Capacitory Consequences appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

Eleven Things To Brag About With Your Future City

11. There are absolutely NO homeless people. That’s because there are no homes. You can’t lack something that doesn’t exist in the first place, can you? The “giant piles of nighttime warmth” are much cheaper.

10. Not everyone is murdered as soon as they set foot out their front door. Many people are murdered at work, in flophouses, in theatres, in fancy hotels… but your front door is usually pretty safe, as long as you avoid the pit trap and the rusty spikes.

9. We have the best Home-cooked meals that money can buy. Granted, “Home” is the capital of our fair land and is over 4700 miles away. So by the time the food reaches us, it’s a tad cold, and might be a bit inclined towards food poisoning. But who would let their prejudices interfere with that?

8. Our Media is thoroughly unbiased. It only ever thinks, acts, speaks, and reports on that which is right and proper. It has no inappropriate bias towards equating insanity with truth.

7. We have increasingly fewer ideas. Thank goodness! Think of all the ideas we had in those wild, wacky, pre-Occurrence times. We never got a chance to digest them. Now, we have far far fewer ideas. Oh, more ideas EXIST, but we’re sufficiently protected from them.

6. Giant Mollusks: Sometimes they eat us, sometimes we eat them, but one gives us protein and the other helps us have a sustainable population. Win-win!

5, Music has gotten a great deal more interesting since the official declaration that there is no such thing as a C#.

4. The number four, as always, continues to be a problem, but at least we can get through it quickly.

3. Imagine the Dark Times when nobody wore mullets!

2. We forgot most of the things we were hoping to remember, but we also forgot what it felt like to feel however we felt before now..

Join us. We may be broken, but we’re broken in predictable ways. Can YOU say that?

_____

“It’s a little-known fact, but Unicorns are something like 20% paint, and their horns are stolen exclusively from endangered species.”
― Jeff Mach, There and Never, Ever Back Again

You could go here to join my mailing list.

You could find more of my books and other work here on Amazon.

 

 

The post Eleven Things To Brag About With Your Future City appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

Incredibly Unhelpful Magic Items

Rod of Blunders

Crossbow, +5 Against Anything Immune To Crossbow Bolts

Vorpal Banana Pudding

Eleven and a Half Sided Die

Portable Chasm To The Center of the Earth

Girdle of Giant Strength and Even Bigger Dislike of Wearing Girdles

Potion of Children’s Cough Syrup

Belly Button of Vecna

70,000 League Boots

Book of Vaguely Unpleasant Details

Tome of Thoroughly Useless Information

Codex of Things That Are Not Helpfully Organized In A Codex

Horn of Blasting the Fourth Wall

_____

“It’s a little-known fact, but Unicorns are something like 20% paint, and their horns are stolen exclusively from endangered species.”
― Jeff Mach, There and Never, Ever Back Again

You could go here to join my mailing list.

You could find more of my books and other work here on Amazon.

 

The post Incredibly Unhelpful Magic Items appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

The Bard Who Tried Not To Bard

Once upon a time, twice upon a time, many many times upon a time but never in this place there lived a Bard.

The Bard tried very hard not to be a Bard. She had attempted to become a Sorceress, but instead of reciting darkling spells of guttural speech in tongues not meant for human mouths, she had a tendency to sing “A Hedgehog Can Never Be Buggered At All” and do a very sharp little two-step.

She attempted to be a Thief. But she never did get the idea that not every Adventurer’s job is a performance. To be perfectly honest, she was great with the picklocks and the pickpocketing and the whole rest of Thievery. But she never did get the hang of the part where you don’t run back into the middle of the room and start taking bows.

She made a very reasonable effort to become a Warrior. She was pretty good at that, as well. So good that she…broke into song. Which was fine! For certain battles! But really, really put a damper on stealth. Also, it turns out that certain opponents are attracted to singing warriors. The less said about the Mermaids, the better.

She tried to become a Chef. She totally succeeded and opened an excellent restaurant, then realized that would be of absolutely no avail while she was adventuring. So that did succeed, technically speaking, but it didn’t do a whole lot to improve her career trajectory.

She worked at being a Druid for a while. She really liked the part where you sing to the trees, and the part where you sing to the birds, and the part where you sing to the giant disembodied mouth that is devouring the Forest and…

Finally, the Bard decided to stop denying her nature and become a Bard.

The next day, the Kingdom outlawed all musical performance, for both combat and other reasons.

So it goes.

_____

“It’s a little-known fact, but Unicorns are something like 20% paint, and their horns are stolen exclusively from endangered species.”
― Jeff Mach, There and Never, Ever Back Again

You could go here to join my mailing list.

You could find more of my books and other work here on Amazon.

The post The Bard Who Tried Not To Bard appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

Feeding Elves

The Human King gave a great warm smile
With a flourish, he signed the page
He beamed down at young-looking Elf before him
(who was six times his age.)

“It’s marvelous to have you return
To diplomatic affairs.
To concern yourselves with nations,
Their triumphs and their cares.”

“Yes, totally,” the Elf replied.
(He seemed a bit distracted.)
He didn’t seem to care if it was signed
Or utterly redacted.

The Human King tried again.
“We’ve some Elven wine.
Uncorked after a century,
With a feast to drink and dine!”

The Elf almost smiled.
He was almost polite.
His teeth were very sharp.
His teeth were very white.

“Look,” he said wearily.
His voice was not unkind.
“You seem all right, for a Human sort.
So let me ease your mind.”

The Elf leaned back. “From time to time
We inspect the lesser stock.
To make sure you’re breeding healthily,
And run meaty in the hock.”

He went on: “It’s difficult
To keep Mortals from our lands
There are so many magic keys
In so many greedy Mortal hands.

“And since we’re immortal still
This Fairy law’s worth noting:
Of neighbors you can eat your fill
If you survive the voting.”

The Human King did not reply.
His troubles were abecedarian.
He realized the Elves were not, in fact
Apparently vegetarian.

“So thanks for the wine,” the Elf replied,
“And thanks very much for the feast.
But we’re really here in Human lands
To check the quality of your deceased.

“Thriving harvest! Bumper crops!
Good hydration! Carrot tops!
‘Ambassadors’ are our elite;
They’re the ones who inspect our upcoming meat.”

The King was skilled in politics.
No expression from face to toes.
“Very well,” the King replied,
“We’ll eat at your place,
I suppose.”

_______

“It’s a little-known fact, but Unicorns are something like 20% paint, and their horns are stolen exclusively from endangered species.”
― Jeff Mach, There and Never, Ever Back Again

You could go here to join my mailing list.

You could find more of my books and other work here on Amazon.

The post Feeding Elves appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.