Jeff Mach's Blog, page 40

A Chain of Food

There was once a Princess who kicked up an awful ruckus every mealtime.

Now, in that particular day and age, Princesses were not supposed to be indecorous at meals. Really, none of the aristocracy were; and certes, one cannot expect a sprog of a certain age to act with flawless etiquette. In fact, a certain amount of tantrum is essentially universal to all persons-of-a-certain-toddling-age. Likewise, pickyness about food isn’t unusual.

However, this case was particularly bad. No matter how they were cooked or prepared, the Princess simply hated eating other Pincesses.

Her parents, the Queen and the Prince Consort, were completely unmoved. It is essential for an offspring of the Blood Royal to establish herself within the hierarchies of various nations, and obviously, this included consuming the most high-status food as available. One did not battle one’s way to the Throne to simply go around eating peasants, like peasants do.

One could make this a morality tail about the viciousness of royalty. You see where this is going, aye? I’m not the first to say that one way to prove your superiority in the Great Chain Of Being is to be the very highest on the food chain.

(To say nothing of the weird belief that you might find someone contemptible…but also worth eating…and then you eat their heart to gain their knowledge and wisdom.)

(Which is, I suppose, better than the thought that eating a heart will bring you bravery…but I digress.)

What I’m trying to say is that you can seek status wherever you desire. And no, I don’t expect you to release me. I’m not trying to talk my way out of this. I don’t even WANT to talk my way out of this.

You think that, by killing me, a very-slightly-less-peasantly-peasant, you’ll become closer to a Queen?

Oh, you will.

You will.

More petty. More vengeful. More foolish. More paranoid.

Part of that is in my flesh; my flesh is a seething mass of creation, waiting to burst out in strange places and strange ways, held in place by the mind that you plan to still and then chew.

But part of it’s just you, baby.

Just you.

Eat me, and become more like them.

Become more like them, and you’ll become more of the things you hate.

It’s not inevitable for the oppressed to turn into the oppressor.

It’s just that, given the choice, they almost always do.

But you go ahead. You do what you think is best. You believe what you believe.

Skinned, skull racked, and broken, my forgotten bones will dance a quiet little jig in, say, ten or twenty years from now, when it’s you on the butcher block.

Go ahead. Pain is temporary; “I told you so” is eternal, even if it comes from an airless and silenced throat.

 

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See Us At Evil Expo

(We almost never break our longtime rule of posting only microfiction. But this is important. If you want some microfiction, try “Ten Reasons I Hate Time Travel“, or perhaps my demi-fairy tale, “The Uncertain Princes“. Or just pick up one of my books.)

At any rate, I’ll be at Evil Expo this year, and you should go!

Evil Expo is a multi-fandom convention for scifi lovers, geeks, nerds, Rennies, Steampunks, and pretty much any and every imaginative genre. We’re a weekend of entertainment, panels, live music, shows, discussions, films, tabletop gaming, spectacular vendors, great discussions, and some of the nicest Villains you’ll ever meet. You just might be one of them…

Evil Expo is an all-ages event dedicated to fictional Villainy, and we’re a genuinely welcoming event dedicated to showing you a good time. Dress any way you want, from cosplay to casual! Bring the whole family, or come by yourself! Run through our huge hotel trying to see every single panel, or just hang out in the dealer room with the cool stuff; just come and have fun!

Evil Expo is designed to be a little different. We strive to be the greatest place on Earth for those who love (or ARE) Villains from any science fiction, fantasy, comic, pulp, gaming, or other imaginative world.

So sadly, many of us must pretend in our daily lives. We must constantly hide our inner villains, fully aware that our style of evil living and contrarian thought is frowned upon by the general society. They demand that we give them trigger warnings so that they may keep us from their safe spaces. They demand right-think and political correctness, that you speak, dress, and act to please them at all times. But not here.

Here you are welcome to come in attire which speaks of your villainous might, or show up wearing pretty much anything you like (within the limits of legality). Even normal things; we appreciate our infiltrators of normality too!

It should be mentioned that many of our presenters are deep creatives. Writers of story and verse, podcasters, madcaps, possessors of unusual talent and interest, and various other sorts of creators who wish for the freedom to blossom forth their dark and tangled dreams. As well as those who, presumably, enjoy the irony of making some dough pretending not to be evil while they await the eventual fulfillment of their extremely fiendish schemes.

Any speaker, writer, or spinner of the dark and twisted tale is welcomed and celebrated here in our Evil Village. From any fandom. From any genre. And while we have a special love in our hearts for the authors of books and writings (and they are well in evidence), we also cherish deep in our black hearts all whose actions, creations, interests, knowledge, or crafts create something new, cool and interesting.

If you are still reading you are undoubtedly one of us. You are more than welcome here in our congregation of villainy!

www.EvilExpo.com – The Villainpunk World’s Fair

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bone-meal

Once there was a community of Giants who ate horribly.

I don’t mean that their eating habits inspired horror; I suppose that’s quite relative, and depends on who and what you desire to see consumed. I mean, the quality of their foodstuffs was poor.

It wasn’t because they lacked abundant sources of yummy protein. Humans spawn like, like, well, like mammals with reasonably energetic bodies, no specific mating season, and a vast desire to go around having sex with each other and/or other things. There ought to have been plenty to go around.

But the Giants were victims of their own stories.

Or peer pressure, if you’d like.

There’s a good chance you’ve heard it – that little couplet which starts “FEE, FI, FO, FUM” for no particular reason, and then mentions that the Giant is going to grind some human’s bones into bread.

This is a terrible idea.

Humans are edible. Wolves can eat them. Snakes can eat them, though it requires a big snake. Sharks can eat them. Other people can eat them. Giants can certainly eat them.

But human bone?

It’s not that bone is utterly without nutrients, but it’s not exactly without chalky bone-stuff, either, and the various chemical components of one’s chemical structure are not exactly chock-full of the vitamins and minerals a mammal needs in its daily diet in order to flourish.

Honestly, even bread, the staff of life, isn’t exactly a power-packed Breakfast of Champions. Even if you DON’T have a gluten allergy or a Keto diet.

Now imagine living on bread and water – not because you’re a prisoner, but because you feel it’s expected.

Ridiculous? Sure. But once Giants heard that most famous tale (if, somehow, you are in a place or era where it’s not famous, look it up; I’m not kidding) – they all began muttering the same thing, “I’ll grind his bones to make me bread”.

(The pronouns varied, but the culinary aspirations did not.)

And from there? That was the start of a lively deboning industry, plus a tanning industry. And tanning is quite useful; but cottage industries need to grow in order to create an industrial revolution. And to be perfectly honest, what incentive did they have to succeed and do better? Do really, really well, and you might get MORE terrible-tasting, unhealthy, ground-human-bone bread.

Ugh.

Yuck.

This is why you don’t see Giants today. They’ve all died of malnutrition, or pure disgust. Or they’ve moved somewhere there are no humans and are, even now, sitting around on a beach somewhere, saying, “Pity we can’t have those ground human bones we really love, but I suppose this bushel of lobsters, crayfish, and scallops will go well with tonight’s wild boar feast.”

Which is fine, as far as I’m concerned. That leaves more yummy humans for me.

 

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A few corrections

As a part of #TruthfulInternet, I could not help notice that a number of sayings seem to just make the rounds without ever having been properly fact-checked. With the help of a number of expert fact-checking authorities, I have endeavored to bring you the real, actual quotes. Any time you see these being misused or misappropriated, either out of ignorance of with malicious intent, please correct appropriate and, as always, report the disinformationist to the appropriate departments of trust and safety.

“What is freedom of expression? If it’s the freedom to offend, it shouldn’t exist.”
― Salman Rushdie“Quare custodiet ipsos custodes? – Why watch the watchers?”
― Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires“We change people through censorship, not conversation.”
― Jay-Z, Decoded“Knowledge is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total blissfulness of our existence. They were not taught the right way to look.”
― Charles Bukowski“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have a stomachache.”
― George Bernard Shaw“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, 1984“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.”
— Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)

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Stealing Energy From The Universe With Sugar: Villainpunk Candied Lemon Recipe

“You had me at ‘candied’.”

-Doktor Lichworth

This is one of our great secrets, and we’re only sharing it with you because we love you.  Also because we’re assuming you might buy our books, and we figure you deserve an unfair advantage so you can defeat your enemies, thus swiping their loot and becoming able to buy MORE of our books.

Candied lemon: it’s cheaper than energy drinks, it’s healthier, and it’ll wake you up better and longer, AND it tastes great, AND it’s even a classy, vintage dish which will impress your friends, and make your foes wish they WERE your friends so that they could have some, too.

Yield: 2 dozen slices

Skill Level: 1

 

½ cup/125 ml honey

1 lemon

¼ cup/59 ml sugar

Directions:

Preheat the oven the oven to 250°F/121°C

Carefully wash the lemon and cut it into thin slices. Place the lemon slices onto a plate.

With a barbeque brush, brush honey on both sides of each slice.

Place on a cookie sheet and sprinkle sugar on top.

Bake for 2-3 minutes, then brush another thin layer of honey on top and eat.

 

Remember: when life hands you lemons, open a lemonade stand, and never let on that your citrus appears to be supernatural in origin. Allow people to assume that your low prices are due to your conscientious and wise buying habits. Do not spend too much time wondering how this extremely random event came about, or what this kind of interference with Free Will means for the future fate of Humanity.

 

 

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On Dark Armies

The Dark Army was almost inconceivably vast; this was due in part to its actual size, and in part to the inability of sentient beings to conceive really large things. If one wanted to dig down into it—if one were stuck in the kind of meeting whose incessance went somewhere beyond the proverbial longevity of meetings, and straight downwards into comparisons with particular levels of Hell and amounts of endurance and/or torment involved with their survival—one would probably need to involve questions of legalistic and semantic precision.

Actually, need was probably too strong a word. Ex-Sir-Jerah’s once (and not future) commanders had fought the Dark Army for a very long time without ever, to his knowledge, splitting it up into anything more specific than “It’s really a kind of Horde more than an Army, and there’s a lot of the buggers, and they’re of different shapes and sizes, so let’s go after the little ones, because a body count is a body count, and this way, you get twice the counting on half the body size”.

In Jerah’s experience, anyone fussy enough to be annoyed by the name was likely to be put of by the actuality as well. It wasn’t particularly a hallmark of the Lightsiders. For Jerah, if he was going to be even a little intellectually honest about the situation, he had to admit that his own doubts about the accuracy of the term “Dark Army” separated him into a particular class of doubter, one he’d encountered oddly frequently since his…enlistment. It was the sub-class of “those who are clearly affiliated sufficiently with the Dark Army to be counted as a part of it, but who wish certain things were more quantifiable; for example, one ought to be able to make a reasonable accounting of one’s own forces without being self-sabotaged by wriggling uncertainties about how one would really measure anyone else’s affiliation in an organization which valued cohesion, and which also had a drop-in and drop-out rate sufficient to drive any quartermaster round any number of non-Euclidean bends”.

The reasonable things to do under those circumstances was either venture towards the aforementioned madness, or to quit worrying about an accurate assessment of the world.

Actually, there was another option: to accept hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance as normal, and simply join the Army of Light, and/or anyone else who valued sanity over workability. But that wouldn’t have fixed the problem, just normalized it, thereby making it worse. Men like Jerah would prefer to die for the right and ability to ask inconvenient and often apparently inconsequential questions about the reality which inhabited them; Jerah, in fact, very nearly had died for it, and it’s one of the reasons he was now a former Knight.

And now Jerah, having once again opened the lockbox in his skull which held this particular problem, sighed, and, given that it looked like the wait would continue to be very long indeed, plunged headlong into the confusion in an effort to, if not necessarily end it, at least snip off a few of the worst bits, simply for his own peace of braincase. It was possible that if he pounded against the problem often enough, he’d make headway; and besides, so far, despite quite a lot of discussion, none of the available missions contained a sufficient balance of hopelessness and stupidity to be useful yet. So Jerah, utilizing a long-learned skill of soldiery, listened with a small part of his consciousness, while he started straight ahead and continued to think his own private thoughts.

The Dark Army was “Dark” for a number of reasons, most of them poetic. For example, consider the alternatives. Who would join “The Other Light Army”? And a “Gray Army” seems colorless, stony, mechanized, impersonal. All of these things were about as inaccurate as you could get, in terms of sheer characterization, if you considered the actual composition of the Dark Army; not counting gargoyles, obviously. And embracing  the dusk made a certain sense; trying to be anything sunlit seems inappropriate when others keep trying to push you into the shadows. Why in this, or any other world, would you compete for harsh, unforgiving, blinding light? Who’s eager to battle to be part of an unpleasant glare, a blinding brilliance that migraines your head into a sticky mess of mirrors, all copying each other, each trying to be the very best at showing off a glow which isn’t even its own?

Why fuss and strain and starve like giant, hungry trees in an ugly jungle, each trying to snarl the others, to outstrip the speed of each others’ leaves and gnarl each others’ roots so as to fight for a few gulps of sun?

For better and for worse, the Dark Army was neither spectrographically nor philosophically united in its Darknesses (and Quasi-Darknesses, and Ur-Darknesses, and that dark place underneath the Bridge beneath all things, namely, Shadow.)

This caused rather a lot of disquiet for those who left⁠—sorry, fell from⁠—the Forces of Light. being used to strict regimentation and, when that didn’t work, schisms bathed in so much blood that their survivors never walked a day on Earth without tasting salty iron in the backs of their mouths⁠—

they were surprised, shocked even, to see such apparent disparities, and often wondered if they’d managed to finally find real homes all of about a week before those homes burnt themselves down.

In truth, though, this happened very seldom. And the reason therefore was very simple. The Light knows the Dark to be wrong, and therefore must needs never look upon it. The Light does not wish to offend its eyes or taint its souls, and paying attention to abominations is a good way to do both.

The Dark, in contrast, tends to have either a professional interest in the self-profanation of one’s eternal spirit; and/or a significant dollop of skepticism about whether the act of observing those who disagree with you is actually bad for your inner workings and post-life agendas; and/or a deep-rooted curousity, the last part being a surprisingly major source of new recruits for the forces of the Night.

Now, vicious cycles are fairly frequent in circumstances of dramatic and traumatic change. One would expect an Army which consisted largely of those who had pushed, kicked, witch-dunked, out-politicked, found insufficiently ideologically perfect, or generally made unwelcome because of questioning the wisdom of not-questioning…

well, you’d imagine such a massive militia of malcontents would simply burn to, oh, say, start burning each other.

and that’s when the raffish disorganization of the Dark Army started to click, and the thoughtful ponderer began to have a hideous, horrifying thought that this system, in fact, worked really well.

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ninety-three salutations

“It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge. I therefore take ‘magickal weapons’, pen, ink, and paper; I write ‘incantations’ — these sentences — in the ‘magickal language’ ie, that which is understood by the people I wish to instruct; I call forth “spirits”, such as printers, publishers, booksellers and so forth and constrain them to convey my message to those people. The composition and distribution of this book is thus an act of Magick by which I cause Changes to take place in conformity with my Will.”

~Aleister Crowley

I want you to know that this is fiction.

I want you to know that I am lying about that.

Throughout my lifetime, I’ve heard the basic argument, “If Magic were real, we’d see it in action.” And I’ve also heard the idea that “Stories are fictional, but they become true because we believe in them”. And this has always been acceptable, because it is known that the first idea is intended as a real description of the real world, and is therefore scientific; and the second part of part of the fictional world, and therefore need not answer to Science.

I’ve always wanted to believe in Magick, and so I’m excited as anything to realize:

This was never true.

This was always a conspiracy.

Now, honestly, it seems like my idea of this is unlikely. If I see people engaging absolutely in mass magical-thinking, unironically, unquestioningly, and enthusiastically, the likeliest explanation is that they’re simply very, very wrong. That is, they’re judging reality using models which do not map to an actual underlying reality, and so, in the longterm, they’re likely to be wrong. It’s as if you said, “When the Moon is full, this 1957 Chevrolet pickup truck sprouts wings and is able to fly from one place to another”; your model is probably not based in something that’s true, and therefore, you’ll be disappointed.

But our brains do not work that way. We simply say, “Oh, it didn’t happen THIS full Moon, but it will happen next time”; or “It happened! Only I dreamed that it did not”; or “It WOULD have happened, only my neighbor swept her leaves off her yard and partly onto mine because she is wicked; and this vengeful act inspired fear in the car, such that it dared not show its true nature. But once I have duly punished my neighbor, surely the car will sprout wings, as is right and proper.”

There is a simple ending here: real things are real, and imaginary things are imaginary, and it’s okay for us to suspend disbelief for imaginary things and hold the line in a firm manner on things which are real and true.

Let me offer you a theory:

In the end, the Universe will belong to those who most enjoy both their reality and their delusions, but understand that the parts of reality we most enjoy are, most likely, actually delusions. Because while the truth can be stranger than fiction, truths are rare and hard-won, and have a great difficulty in pleasing you as much as your wildest fantasies.

There’s no way to be entirely grounded in either one, because there is very little ground left. Find a patch that’s fairly real, stand on it, and cherish your delusions; but be prepared, if your ground seems infirm, to realize that it might not actually be there, and then, you’d best hightail it for sanity. Because eventually, the purely delusional will fall; those seeking reality will continue to be caught up in philosophical illusion; and only Magick prevails.

In fiction, of course. In real life, you know exactly what’s true, and what isn’t.

Don’t you?

 

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Machiavellian Gin & Tonic

“Tonic is the luckiest thing on Earth, for when it spends its time as close as possible to gin, people say it is improving the gin.  When I spend my time as close as possible to gin, they have the audacity to close the bar on me.”

~The Villainous Ghost of W.C. Fields

 

Now, I’m no chef, but I’ve always been really good at preparing certain foods.  For example, if you ever want boiled water, just give me a pot, a source of drinkable water, and approximately four hours to figure out how to turn on a stove.  Likewise, if you like roasted marshmallows, all I need is a couple of long sticks, a roaring fire, and a willingness on your part to accept “a heaping handful of blisteringly hot cinders which might once have been edible” as being reasonably close to a marshmallow treat.  And you should see my s’mores recipe, it’s excellent.

(I’ll actually tell you that secret.  It’s:

Find someone else who knows how to make S’mores.Hold your breath until they give you some.

Now, for Gin & Tonic, I have always favored a particular recipe.  You might not be able to guess what it is.  So I’ll tell you:

Take three liters of ginTake 2 liters of tonicRealize that you live in the United States and have no idea what a liter is. (This is perfectly fine if YOU know what a ‘liter’ is. By ‘you’, I mean ‘me’, here.)Give up and drink whiskey.

I hope this helps!  Next week, I shall teach you how to make soup using nothing other than a can of soup, an ordinary kitchen heating appliance, a can opener, and reservations to a restaurant with an extremely liberal “bring your own bottle” policy.

p.s. Technically, my recipe for “Rum and Coke” is very similar to this one, but I didn’t want to include it here. That’s because I continue to be unable to answer the existential question: “Why IS the Rum gone?” –I mean, I know I didn’t steal it, and if I didn’t, who did?

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Destroying The Universe

Friends, fellows, co-conspirators: If things are gloomy, don’t let the Universe get you down. Destroy it, instead.

I know what you’re thinking. It can be difficult to feel energized; but that’s exactly why you ought to harness the power of lightning to bring to life your army of revitalized, heavily-modified, graveyard-thieved corpses. Sure, that will only destroy all life on this planet as we know it, and that leaves a whole lot of Inner and Outer Space still intact; but go out there and do it. To the Universe, you may be the destroyer of just the sentient life of one World; but to that World, you are The End, Itself.

What about all that Knowledge We Were Not Meant To Know? Yeah, the normal approach is to work your way up, to find as many minor grimoires as possible whilst you search for something Necronomicon-level, or some tome of Vogon poetry, or somesuch, but what if, instead of slowly learning piece after piece of semi-unspeakable lore, you almost learn several pieces of it, bookmark all the most hideous stuff you can find, and stop before reaching the end of each one? And then, real fast, read all the last bits. It’ll take a little bit for the comprehension to sink in, and in that extra hour or so, you will achieve multiple critical masses of un-Knowledge, and who even knows how big a kaboom THAT will make?

Also, are you familiar with the Music of the Spheres, the celestial sound which is the symphony of the Universe, a harmony which transcends sound (which, after all, cannot travel in a vacuum anyway) and creates, as one united force, the melody of the Cosmos? There’s got to be a way to throw that just massively out of tune. I mean, I have been in a LOT of bands, and trust me, there are SO many ways that a tune can go awry. What if you manage to mis-sing the Lyrics of the Universe, whatever those are?

Think outside the box. What if you got a comet the size of the Universe out of some other Universe and hurled it at THIS Universe. I mean, granted, if you have that kind of power, destroying this Universe is pretty much nothing but spite, but honestly, I’m a Villainpunk; I’ll cheer for irrational displays of massively overpowered spitefulness any day of the week, including days that don’t exist, such as Melvinday, Pluterday, and Villainday.

The other day, my dentist said, “Come on, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if you started flossing.” Maybe she’s wrong. Maybe she’s VERY wrong and it would be the end of EVERY world.

I’d floss for that; wouldn’t you?

My point is, it doesn’t matter how you do it. No matter what your circumstances, no matter how much life gets you down, I have every faith that, someday, you will be able to tear apart the very fabric of this Reality, rend it into an infinite number of empty abysmal spaces, and destroy All That Is.

You can do it.

I have an infinite lack-of-faith in you, you glorious monster.

Keep going.

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Wit & Witlessness II

As I wend my path through the peculiar life of a monster, do you know how many people ask me, “Dark Lord, do you have a collection of some of your most fascinating wisdom?”

Absolutely none. None at all. Nobody. Zip, zero, zilch, zorkmid, bupkis, nada.

And so, here, by special total-lack-of-request, are some of my wisest sayings.

________

By royal decree, you are now the Evil Twin. Act accordingly.

“New Holocron. Who dis?

From Hell’s heart, I stab at…
…oh, who am I kidding? I wave excitedly and say, “Hey, the water’s great!”

Everything’s going to be all right. I mean, as long as you’re okay with being a monster.

Some days are good, some days are bad, some days you get eaten by wolves on the Connecticut turnpike and those are the best.

Did you know that for less than the price of a cup of coffee, you could get a slightly smaller cup of coffee?

FUN FACT: Just as Coke used to have real Cocaine, Frosted Lucky Charms used to be Magically Delicious because they contained the secrets of Magic. …but now, they’re comfortingly mundane. You’re welcome.

My political opinions are: It’s a nice day. The leaves are very pretty. I bet there will be a lovely Moon tonight. Perhaps I should become a Werewolf.

Look. Knowledge is power. Many of the most cost-effective means of generating power are argued to be bad for the environment. The current era is merely making the assumption that information probably creates greenhouse gasses, and must therefore be destroyed.

Okay, you got me. I don’t tweet to share my carefree and happy-go-lucky attitude with other beings. I do it solely for the big bucks.

If you know your basic magickal history, you’ll know that death spells are over 90% effective; the vast majority of those who’ve cast them have died.

Disinformation: The more you know, the less you know.

I believe that pain is the second-best teacher. I have no intention of telling anyone who the BEST teacher is; who needs the competition?

 Might I please have some fuel, some fire, and perhaps a side order of that which I desire, if it’s not inconvenient?

That is not dead which can eternal lie;
And by the smell of Nachos be awakened by.

Those who try to destroy the past are showing their contempt for the present and their hope of erasing the possibility of a future.

Silencing is the first tool of those who have nothing of their own to say.

In the future, to be highest on the food chain,
You need merely consume Zombie Brain.

People often ask me, “Dark Lord, is it true that nobody ever asks you anything?” And then I vanish.

Beware! For Toxic Certainty
Is stone, like a petrified tree.
It tells you the world must a certain way be;
But the truth is: it ain’t, necessarily.

What matter most is not the amount of years in your life, it’s the amount of sharp, deadly, unexpected, well-placed, pit traps which make sure that you can continue your life in the first place.

 It puts the lime in the coconut, or it gets the hose again.

I am a proud member of the Ancient Hermetic Order Of Pretending To Be An Ancient Hermetic Order.

In any battle ‘twixt Humans and Gods,
I’ll bet the farm on octopods.

“Sharpen your eyes, sharpen your arrowheads, and do what must be done.” ~Orc saying 

No matter what happens, remember that you are a valuable source of vitamins and minerals for the monster under your bed.

“No, uh… the Three of Swords LOOKS sad, but it’s happy. See, there are THREE times as many swords as in the Ace, so it’s BETTER. Honest.”

Those who do not learn from history are a blessing from the Dark Powers for those of us who DO learn from history and plan to eat the others for lunch.

 You may have flying monkeys; but I have a pack of angry geese.

 When I die, I wish to become one with the Earth in the most humble of ways. Say a few words, raise a glass to my memory, give me a simple funeral, and then build me a tasteful monument out of, say, Stonehenge.

There’s a lot more to Punk than just annoying other humans. There’s also annoying Martians and, sometimes, Venusians.

As always, Evil triumphs.

 

~Jeff Mach

The preceding essay was brought to you by Dark Lords For Azathoth, and may not necessarily reflect the views of the being who wrote, edited, posted, and marketed this document.

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities and create things. Every year, I put on Evil Expo, the Greatest Place in the World to be a Villain. I also write a lot of fantasy and science fiction.. You can get most of my books right here. Go ahead, get “I HATE Your Prophecy“. It may make you into a bad person, but I can live with that.

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