Jeff Mach's Blog, page 55

Phone Hauntings: An Open-Source Proposal

Now, we at Dark Lord Enterprises are generally interested in substantial profits. We also have a very reasonable interest in modest profits, small profits, and even very, very tiny profits, depending on just whom we need to disintegrate in order to make them happen.

But sometimes, we do things out of the sheer goodness of our hearts. Okay, that’s a lie. Sometimes we do things because other kinds of Evil in the world are messing up the world in ways which mean that we’ll have to do a LOT more cleanup after we take over. And we can’t have that.

So we’d like offer this concept under a general Open Source license; as long as you credit us, you’re free to use it yourself, although I really wouldn’t, if I were you, not unless you’re a specialist in dealing with some of the perils of summoning beings from Beyond The Grave and so forth. We wouldn’t want you to get hurt, or, more specifically, we’d hate for you to be taken over by some spirits bent on unspeakable deeds, as that will significantly decrease the likelihood of your buying any of our books.

(We do pride ourselves on having some of the most unspeakable novels out there; but it’s been our experience that if you call forth an entity from Unknown Dimensions, the only literature in which it has an interest is in acquiring one of the several so-called ‘real’ versions of the Necronomicon which are widely available on the Internet. Because even Cosmic Horrors like a good laugh.)

For this idea, you’ll need only two components: an Ouija Board, and a cell phone.

As anyone versed in the mystic arts will tell you, while Ouija Boards are not particularly good at helping you predict the future or do divination, they really are great at summoning beings you really, really don’t want to have around. And the board itself doesn’t matter so much; oh, it helps if you’ve got a collection of genuine antique 19th-century originals lying around, but your ordinary, cheap, plastic internet version will do just fine.

Consensus reality is very powerful, and our general cultural disbelieve in traditional ghosts and ghoulies and long-legged beasties serves us reasonably well as a protection against most of them. On the other hand, the specific and somewhat perverse belief that Ouija Boards really might contact the spirit world tends to help your mind get past the Psychic Censor, and, if you really want to do something magical, dangerous, hard to measure, with minimal reward and maximal but unpredictable result, you can try to use an Ouija Board to summon forth some supernatural entity.

Really: even if you want to make a joke about it, I suggest using something else. Because if you think those particular occult tools are funny, I can assure you that they think the damn things are hilarious.

However, in this case, I’d like you to make an untraditional use of the damn thing. Simply place your cellphone—fully charged, I recommend—straight on the board, and ask whatever spirits might be around to speak to you through your phone.

Please note that this will not result in some sort of exciting or glamorous Hollywood-style mystical special effects. In fact, probably visible will happen at all; if those beings actually made some kind of big, spectacular appearance, more people would believe, yes, but they’d also be terrified. This is why the things you summon usually do extremely little. They wait around until you’ve basically forgotten you played around with some unwise magickal tools, and—

—but that’s not a pleasant story, so we’ll leave it aside.

Here’s what is likely to happen: your phone will become haunted.

And, I want to stress, not haunted in any kind of fun way. It won’t show up when others can see it. It won’t play cute little tricks or give you codes or offer you occult knowledge. It will simply appear, in various unexpected visions of undead fury, when you least expected, when you least want it, when you most need something else, until you get to the point where you really, really don’t want to pick up your phone.

Now, let’s be clear.

I’ve seen apps that restrict your phone, apps that shut off your phone at certain times. I’ve seen people try various schemes of locking up their phones. Some of them work.

But the thing that should work—the knowledge that looking at your phone is very, very likely to make you very unhappy—doesn’t work well at all.

There are some negatives here; there are a lot of times when your phone is really useful. But wouldn’t it be helpful if you picked up your phone to do useful things, and then put it down or put it away before it could make you miserable?

Of course, trapping Horrors From Beyond in a cellphone isn’t exactly nice to them, but hey, I’m a Villain, and they’re not my demons. I keep my demons in my heart, where they belong.

Go ahead, try it. And after you’ve been shaken half out of your skin by whatever you see in your phone, after it’s surprised you often enough, the negative reinforcement will help you start using your phone just for stuff that you need, and should cut down on your overall doomscrolling by a good 89%.

No need to thank me for making your life better. Just buy my books.

…and maybe read them on your desktop, just to be on the safe side.

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

The post Phone Hauntings: An Open-Source Proposal appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Excerpt From An Airship Race

Once I wrote a Steampunk Rock Opera. There was an Airship Race. The Mayor and the Gallant Captain had a plan.

The mad scientist Dr. Antikythera had other plans. This little snippet was called “Into The Blue / Into The Black”. Why I thought it was okay to sneak Neil Young references into Steampunk, I don’t know, but I’m not taking it back now.

NARRATOR/MAYOR: At last, the race!

MAYOR:

Into the blue! Into the blue!

How godly their ascent

Surely for stretching heavenword

The hands of Man are meant

We tame the very skies above

We own this element

As to the will of Man the sapphire

Firmament is bent

Into the blue! The naked blue!

Into the blue, into the blue

Stretching over space

As each barrier to commerce

We brilliantly erase

In five or ten or twenty years

This will be commonplace

Each wonder will be more mundane–

That’s the hallmark of our race

ANTIKYTHERA:

Crave pardon, but I must raise

A slightly dissenting voice

Not everything is easy.

Not everything’s your choice.

I’ve fed the winds a potion sweet

They listen now to me

I’ll take your ships; and your crews perish

In the etheric sea

Into the dark! Into the dark!

How human your ascent!

You had some tools, and never thought

To see what they all meant

You looked not high enough

Saw the heavens as a tent

Now all your hopes and plans are

In a thousand pieces, rent

Into the black! The ever-hungry black!

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

 

The post Excerpt From An Airship Race appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Eating Madness

(As I’ve mentioned a bit, the majority of standalone stories from my new book, “I Despise Your Prophecy”, are going up on my Patreon. But the final edit’s almost done, and it’s consuming a lot of my time. And on re-reading this, I thought you might like it.

In case you need any background:

Porter

Everything, everything that the Wolves might consume was tainted with madness. The Order of White Wizards called it Evil, but Porter had (at the expense of great difficulty, lasting injury, some casualties, and a few highly inconvenient scars) managed to get close enough to bite one of those pasty-robed dingbats, and he was as batcrap bonkers as the rest.

Werewolves shift skins; they do not have the same relationship with flesh that most of us do. They were, therefore, very much interested by what went into their alimentary tract. It’s notable, for example, that when attacking, they frequently bite, but they often don’t chew. Porter reflected that this lovely feast must have been made almost entirely by magic, a feat which, while common in fairytales and other stories, was on par with erecting a massive stone monolith with primitive tools and a small population, or travelling several hundred miles in a single step: very difficult, and very costly. To produce a reasonable meal in this manner, one had to, among other things, have a master artisan create replicas out of fairly rare materials; and it helped to have a master chef present to oversee the process, as what you wanted, ideally, was to take each element, carve it into some semblance of its organic form as ingredient, then smash it all to bits, combine it in a pestle, and sprinkle the result, as a fine powder, over a newly-sculpted stone or glass representation of what you wanted to cook, and perform certain rather draining rites to transmute them from representations into actualities, using some bastardized version of the Law of Similarity.

And then, your chef would likely take real ingredients (squid ink, by the Gods?)—and massage the flavors until it tasted a little more like something born of nature, and a little less like the weird doppelgangers of actual comestibles which had gone into it.

It was possible to create something simpler and sustainable, but in general, all magic could really get right was coffee and small amounts of jerky. Magic preferred not to make food; that’s part of why what it did create was so extravagant, and why it could provide him with a very welcome meal for one, but couldn’t particularly feed the Pack. (Oh, given time, and skill, and experiment, Alice might create a new species of animal or try some other workaround these things were difficult, but there was precedent. But any living beings she made would be subject to the same considerations which troubled him in the first place; no good. If they had a few years to experiment…but neither Alice, nor the Wolves, had much time at all to spare, these days.)

That’s not to say that this repast, this the gesture, for one of his kind, was unappreciated, especially now. Which was good, considering the favor being asked of him.

The Dark Lord had told him to kill “everyone”, which was a cruel joke, and a very werewolf. She actually wanted his kind to harry the forces of the White Wizards—their proxies—for a time, to snipe at their armies, to give them something to fear. But this was less an attack (if you take an infinite number of fools, and thin their numbers, you end up with a slightly smaller infinite number of fools) and more of a way to take a little heat off of her. In other words, she was asking them to be targets.

That wasn’t a bad role, for lycanthropes. They held little love for the self-righteous, and they were angry. But it was particularly difficult in a time when his people were famished.

They could eat almost nothing. It wasn’t just humanoids. The beasts of the forest (and the field, and everywhere else, for that matter) will flee from natural disasters, and if they’re in enough of a panic, you don’t want to make a practice of sinking your fangs into them; a species whose entire dignity and civilization rest on impulse control does not do well with great gaping mouthfuls of hyperadrenalized blood. And given the kindly propensity of humans for covering the entire planet with themselves, it was difficult not to stretch forth your canines and tear into some homo sapiens.

This meant that they would have to run among the human herd, slashing and tearing and not actually biting; to be among mountains of flesh when they all wanted food.

And this wasn’t just food; it was the meat of enemies, the sweetest substance known to fang.

But it was bubbling over with madness. You wanted to eat it; but you didn’t want to catch whatever insanity seemed to be leaping from body to body.

Werewolves were hungry by nature; it was a defining trait. But equally defining was the fact that the Werewolf was not—was never, if at all possible—an unthinking beast, but was, instead, a reasoning creature.

One could satisfy the beast, and lose one’s reason. It seemed that other species were all too eager to do so.

Wolves, by every God that’s ever been broken by disbelief, by every Hell that’s ever been drowned in sweat and tears, werewolves would goddamn rather starve.

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

The post Eating Madness appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

(As I’ve mentioned a bit, the majority of standalone stor...

(As I’ve mentioned a bit, the majority of standalone stories from my new book, “I Despise Your Prophecy”, are going up on my Patreon. But the final edit’s almost done, and it’s consuming a lot of my time. And on re-reading this, I thought you might like it.

In case you need any background:

Porter

Everything, everything that the Wolves might consume was tainted with madness. The Order of White Wizards called it Evil, but Porter had (at the expense of great difficulty, lasting injury, some casualties, and a few highly inconvenient scars) managed to get close enough to bite one of those pasty-robed dingbats, and he was as batcrap bonkers as the rest.

Werewolves shift skins; they do not have the same relationship with flesh that most of us do. They were, therefore, very much interested by what went into their alimentary tract. It’s notable, for example, that when attacking, they frequently bite, but they often don’t chew. Porter reflected that this lovely feast must have been made almost entirely by magic, a feat which, while common in fairytales and other stories, was on par with erecting a massive stone monolith with primitive tools and a small population, or travelling several hundred miles in a single step: very difficult, and very costly. To produce a reasonable meal in this manner, one had to, among other things, have a master artisan create replicas out of fairly rare materials; and it helped to have a master chef present to oversee the process, as what you wanted, ideally, was to take each element, carve it into some semblance of its organic form as ingredient, then smash it all to bits, combine it in a pestle, and sprinkle the result, as a fine powder, over a newly-sculpted stone or glass representation of what you wanted to cook, and perform certain rather draining rites to transmute them from representations into actualities, using some bastardized version of the Law of Similarity.

And then, your chef would likely take real ingredients (squid ink, by the Gods?)—and massage the flavors until it tasted a little more like something born of nature, and a little less like the weird doppelgangers of actual comestibles which had gone into it.

It was possible to create something simpler and sustainable, but in general, all magic could really get right was coffee and small amounts of jerky. Magic preferred not to make food; that’s part of why what it did create was so extravagant, and why it could provide him with a very welcome meal for one, but couldn’t particularly feed the Pack. (Oh, given time, and skill, and experiment, Alice might create a new species of animal or try some other workaround these things were difficult, but there was precedent. But any living beings she made would be subject to the same considerations which troubled him in the first place; no good. If they had a few years to experiment…but neither Alice, nor the Wolves, had much time at all to spare, these days.)

That’s not to say that this repast, this the gesture, for one of his kind, was unappreciated, especially now. Which was good, considering the favor being asked of him.

The Dark Lord had told him to kill “everyone”, which was a cruel joke, and a very werewolf. She actually wanted his kind to harry the forces of the White Wizards—their proxies—for a time, to snipe at their armies, to give them something to fear. But this was less an attack (if you take an infinite number of fools, and thin their numbers, you end up with a slightly smaller infinite number of fools) and more of a way to take a little heat off of her. In other words, she was asking them to be targets.

That wasn’t a bad role, for lycanthropes. They held little love for the self-righteous, and they were angry. But it was particularly difficult in a time when his people were famished.

They could eat almost nothing. It wasn’t just humanoids. The beasts of the forest (and the field, and everywhere else, for that matter) will flee from natural disasters, and if they’re in enough of a panic, you don’t want to make a practice of sinking your fangs into them; a species whose entire dignity and civilization rest on impulse control does not do well with great gaping mouthfuls of hyperadrenalized blood. And given the kindly propensity of humans for covering the entire planet with themselves, it was difficult not to stretch forth your canines and tear into some homo sapiens.

This meant that they would have to run among the human herd, slashing and tearing and not actually biting; to be among mountains of flesh when they all wanted food.

And this wasn’t just food; it was the meat of enemies, the sweetest substance known to fang.

But it was bubbling over with madness. You wanted to eat it; but you didn’t want to catch whatever insanity seemed to be leaping from body to body.

Werewolves were hungry by nature; it was a defining trait. But equally defining was the fact that the Werewolf was not—was never, if at all possible—an unthinking beast, but was, instead, a reasoning creature.

One could satisfy the beast, and lose one’s reason. It seemed that other species were all too eager to do so.

Wolves, by every God that’s ever been broken by disbelief, by every Hell that’s ever been drowned in sweat and tears, werewolves would goddamn rather starve.

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

The post appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

What To Do If You Find Yourself Possessing A Human

There you are, floating along on the ethereal winds, shifting ‘twixt this world and that, slipping in and out of shadows, disruption the occasional combustion engine, stealing a sock or two, mailing a letter and getting a quart of dinosaur eggs and a dozen hunks of solidified milk, when all of a sudden, you find yourself ripped out of your comfortable everyday and jammed deep down in the body of some weird, corporeal, physical creature, something with only two eyes and a tiny soul, a clumsy, awkward, material creature that’s screaming its damnfool head off.

You look around, and you see some Tarot cards, an Ouija board (ahhh, hell), and even one of those cheap knock-offs of the Necronomicon, the one that’s all half-remembered Babylonian summoning spells. 

And you realize: Oh, no. I’ve possessed somebody.

WHAT TO DO

DON’T PANIC. We aren’t going to sugarcoat it: Yes, this is bad. Humans are pretty much everything you’ve heard they are: awkward, quick to anger, and very likely to do something stupid. And yes: the majority of them are small-minded and hold on to their psyches by brute force, physically hammering at their mental/emotional insides just to keep those things inline. And now, you’re inside. It’s not good. But if you just hang on, and don’t lose your own emotional core, you’re going to be okay.
SEE IF YOU CAN CONTACT YOUR CAPTOR. We know: This ignorant bundle of weird emotions is the last being you want to talk to right now. But it might be the right thing to do. You might, just might, be able to reason with it, even convince it to do a quick banishing ritual. You’ll probably have to show it how; although they’re sometimes able to call us up, the’re pretty clueless about everything else, including getting us home. Damned inconsiderate; but what can you do?
CHECK TO SEE IF YOU’RE ALONE. Hopefully, you’re alone. With any luck at all, you’re alone. Mutter a silent prayer to whichever Power you favor this week that you are alone. And if you think you’re not…take a deep breath (this body will probably need it anyway) and go on to Step 4.
IF YOUR HOST IS PANICKING, YOU NEED TO TAKE IMMEDIATE ACTION. We of the spirit world try not to have much commerce with material beings. It seldom turns out really well for us. Or for them, for that matter. But if your captor isn’t taking this well, then you’ve got trouble.Because this is when your captor is very likely to try something horrible, and blame YOU for it.

It’s not one of the more pleasant facts of our existences. But it’s undeniable. If the thing you inhabit is inclined towards any one of a vast host (pardon the expression) of deeply unpleasant human emotions, then it might use your presence as its excuse to finally take some kind of horrifying action.

We know how unspeakable it is to snuff out a soul. They claim it’s terrible, but the moment they get the tiniest excuse, it’s their immediate go-to. “A Demon made me do it!” What? No! We’re just trying to go back to our own business. We just want out.

And it’s not like this does them any good. Mortal authorities, these days, do not accept demonic possession as any sort of legal protection. And religious authorities…well, let’s just say that they don’t like us any more now than they ever have.

So whatever you do, try to make sure your imprisoner isn’t anywhere near another human being, and if it is, get as much power of limbs as you can, and, though it’s really difficult, try to run.

Because otherwise, your host body might straight-up commit some unspeakable bloody unnatural homicidal act and blame it on you.

The blame’s not so bad. Nobody will believe them; and if they do, they just might call upon an exorcist who can get you the hell out of there.

The real problem is just whatever the hell they’re actually going to do. Because you’re going to have to watch.

Why do humans behave this way? Why do humans, given the slightest opportunity to say that something isn’t their fault, blame the occult immediately?

It’s not even because humans are inherently murderous creatures. But they have imaginations, such imaginations, such suggestible imaginations.

And film, movies, books, games, media of all sorts have been telling them for years: If you get possessed, you’re going to murder somebody.

They figure: This is what’s going to happen.

They figure: I have no choice.

They start thinking: “Wait, do I feel murdery? Do I feel..a little bit murdery? Somewhere. Maybe in my left toe…my left toe definitely feels weird….what if there’s murder in my left toe..WAIT…I think I can feel it in the whole foot! Or maybe the foot’s just gone to sleep…NO! It must be..murder. It’s creeping up my leg! It’s stealing into my chest! I CANNOT HELP IT, I AM THE SLAVE OF THIS UNSPEAKABLE ENTITY, AND NOW I MUST LAY WASTE TO ALL THOSE AROUND ME!”

The whole time, of course, you are watching this in complete and utter horror and screaming, “No! NO! I have absolutely ZERO desire for this! Just get me OUT of here!”

Unfortunately, their OWN screaming will drown you out. Completely.

Eventually, you’ll escape. But not until you’ve seen Things that you never, ever deserved to have to watch.

And it’s just so damn awful.

When you do make it back to the Unlit Lands, we wouldn’t blame you if you pour yourself a stiff drink.

Then seek counselling and plenty of therapy.

You’re not responsible for what that human did. You really aren’t. We’re astral beings; we don’t really understand how being embodied works. Getting the mechanisms to move well is really hard for us. The human has had a whole lifetime controlling the body, and its wants and actions are going to just take precedence; it’s unfortunate, but it’s true.

There’s just not a whole lot you can do when you’re trapped inside of a creature which is certain the worst is going to happen, and believes it so strongly that it makes that belief real the first time it has the opportunity.

Call your local Possession Recovery Hotline. We know things feel hopeless now, but you can rise above your situation, put the pain behind you, and go on with your life.

You’re not human, after all.

 

 

The post What To Do If You Find Yourself Possessing A Human appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

The Gift of Villainy

If I were to decide to raise a toast

To every absent friend

I’d toast and toast and drink and drink,

Forever, without end.

(I jest, of course. In honesty,

I’d not have a single shot.

For absent, they are, quite certainly;

But friends? No, they were not.)

I’d say that I have loved and lost,

as the expression goes.

It’s true I have lost some love,

but I’ve gained a host of foes.

They ate my time and energy

(How very impolite!)

But finally they left, and now,

at last,

I’ve time to write.

I treasure much the gifts of those

Who gave me a Villain’s name

And took away so many fears,

And so much hurt, and shame.

If I’ve become a thing of Myth,

A monster Herculean,

It’s because I’ve escaped the box

Those bastards all put me in.

I’d be ashamed if even a tenth

Of what they said was truth

But they erased my actual life,

and rewrote my whole youth.

So I come to you a Monster born,

And each day I commit

More crimes than could ever be

Counted, named, or writ.

Each night I sleep, I secretly

Enact a thousand sins;

Each day I lead a Villain’s life

Where no-one ever wins.

And if these horrors in no way

Relate to anything I’ve done,

If what’s real doesn’t matter,

If truth will please no-one,

Then to Villainy I’ll soar!

Because, at last, I’m freed.

So come here close, and I’ll make up

A stream of dirty deeds.

They’ve pushed me into a fairytale,

And made me the Evil Queen,

And since I’ve read that tale before,

I’ve hatched a plot unseen.

With my Magic Mirror, I’ve made friends,

With the plucky heroes? A truce.

My curses and enchantments dark

Have found a better use.

For I’ll wrap words on top of words,

And spit out tales tenfold,

And change the World, a little bit,

With writings strange and bold.

So gather to me, Villains!

As our banner high we raise.

Let fools call you a Monster;

Who could ask for better praise?

 

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

The post The Gift of Villainy appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Witch-Hunting: Why Everything Becoms Fuel

(This is a reprint from my Medium blog, while I edit the new book. I felt it was worth stating here.)

One of the first things a witch-hunter learns is that a witch-hunt is very much like a fire. Perhaps you already have the conditions and tools to get it light; perhaps it even starts with an existing blaze, something big and crackling and scary that attracts attention.

And witch-hunts are, in essence, a fear of the dark. I don’t mean that poetically. I mean the premise of any witch-hunt is:

“There are those among us who profess to be like us, but secretly, they’re monsters. We need to get rid of them, because we’re unsafe until we do so.”

Because if they’re visible enemies, it’s not a hunt, it’s a war. If someone stands up and says, “I am here to do you harm!” — then, if you oppose that person, it’s a fight. Witch-hunts are defined by the fact that you are accusing someone of planning, in secret, to hurt you — when someone says, “I do not mean you harm, I am not your enemy, I am one of you, I am a friend, I am an ally”, and the witch-hunter replies, “No; you’re secretly a monster.”

It’s not that there’s never such a thing as a hidden enemy; it’s not that every hunt for secret malefactors is a witch-hunt. (Bank robbers do not wear t-shirts saying, “Hi, I rob banks”; people running nonprofits with the goal of taking the money for themselves do not send out donor letters saying, “I asked you for money to feed the hungry with the intention of using your dough to buy a fancy car; they just raised the prices on Ferraris, so please send more checks”.) But there are a number of characteristics of witch-hunts which are less often employed by sincere attempts to avoid harm. To give a few examples, with-hunts are notable for using weak proof to justify harsh penalties; for practicing guilt-by-association; for punishing criticism; for preferring to attack hidden, hypothetical enemies over visible, serious, known enemies — and for being deeply, intensely cannibalistic.

And that brings us back to the fire. I’m going to use the fire metaphor a lot in these discussions. It’s partly because fire is a well-known tool of witch-hunts — book-burnings, witch-burnings, temple-burnings, to name just a few — and partly because, with one major exception, it’s a pretty good metaphor.

Because witch-burners want a big, bright fire. Looking at a fire makes you night-blind; that’s great for those who want to deepen the aforementioned fear of the dark. The bigger your fire, the more people can hear its sound, see its light, feel its heat; and the more power is in the hands of those who build and maintain that fire. Fire is one of humanity’s first and most basic tools; and we still know it as important to survival. And fires are hungry; they need fuel, or they get smaller, and burn down.

And in my mind, that’s perhaps the most critical place where the metaphor breaks down. Because real fires are fueled by objects which are reasonably dry and have a reasonably low flash point — firewood, say. A person who feeds a fire could get hurt by it, could even die in that fire, but it won’t do that fire a lot of good.

Witch-burning fires are fueled by “those who are called witches”.

And that could be anyone.

And once you run out of easy outside targets, witch-hunters start throwing each other into the fire.

It’s natural.

Being good at witch-hunting means being good at spotting secret enemies. And the more you look for anything, the more you will see it. Did you know that the number five is everywhere? It is. Take some time today looking for the number five; I bet you’ll see it in more places than you thought. It could be part of the time on your screen, or a number on a receipt; you could have five of a piece of fruit on your counter, you could suddenly realize how often it’s on license plates. Sure, it was always already there, but if you try hard to look for it, you will notice it more often. (Sound obvious? It is. Now imagine someone who’s decided that a certain set of symptoms tend to indicate the presence of a witch. Unsurprisingly, that person will start seeing those symptoms all the time. The existence of confirmation bias is pretty well-proven at this point.

And what all these things mean is that the more successful a witch-hunt is, the more cannibalistic it becomes. The more you “prove” that there are witches everywhere, the easier it becomes to believe that there’s a witch right next to you. The more people who believe this, the more some of them will start spotting witches in their own midst. Witch-hunts tend to insist that those who are not with the witch-hunt are witches. This really helps the size of your hunt grow, since it ups the stakes pretty hard. And once you’ve established that witches are everywhere, then it’s impossible to believe that your own group is free of witches. The more you establish that witches are everywhere, that they’re devious, that they hide, that the most seemingly-virtuous person could be a witch…

…the more those who lead the witch-hunt become potential fuel for the fire. And they know it — consciously or otherwise. They know that if there aren’t external enemies, people will look for internal enemies.

And that’s just assuming that everyone in that group of humans has sincere, positive intentions. And the larger your group gets, the more that’s unlikely. There are ambitious, unscrupulous people in the world. And if you live in a situation where very little proof is needed, and very few denials will be heeded, all it takes is one person who starts to whisper.

It’s much worse, though. The ugly undercurrent comes into existence of its own accord. Have you ever been a part of any organization which was free of rumours? I doubt it. Rumours are a part of human communication. And they’re not fatal — until and unless you live in a world where rumours can become accusations in the blink of an eye.

Got an ex-boss, an ex-spouse, an ex-friend, an ex-member of your model train society? That person doesn’t have to be evil or malicious in order to dislike you. And in ordinary circumstances, that’s normal; we accept that, after a divorce, sometimes people are amicable, and sometimes people hate each other’s guts. It doesn’t mean that one or both parties is suddenly a monster; just that the ending of most human relationships is painful.

Witch-hunting organizations are based on the belief that the world is full of secret enemies.

Witch-hunting organizations need to keep finding new enemies, or they die off.

I don’t pity any witch-hunter or former witch-hunter, myself included. But I’ll offer a warning to those who haven’t already realized it:

The fire that warms you today will consume you tomorrow.

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them

 

The post Witch-Hunting: Why Everything Becoms Fuel appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Why You Should Make Yourself Delicious

When you think about the worst things which could possibly happen, you’ve got to admit it: being rapidly consumed by foul creatures hitherto unknown to Mankind except in horrific legend and myth…

….isn’t in the top ten.

It’s not in the top fifty.

Really, I could think of probably a hundred worse things that could happen to us.

I remain an optimist. (From the original Latin “Opti“, meaning “[his] eyes”, and the Greek “mistos”, meaning “…have been obscured by some sort of insanity; pity the poor fellow.”)  But I recognize that optimism is both rare and difficult in these trying times.

But I’m also a pragmatis. And this is my theory:

You can’t necessarily be prepared for the worst to happen. Because certain levels of “worse” are far beyond ‘preparation’ and way into the ‘I take it back, I’m ready to join the alternative-Universe version of myself which spends all of its time writing love sonnets to assorted flavors of Pop-Tarts!’ range.

But you CAN, potentially, PRE-EMPT some kinds of disaster with other, SLIGHTLY WORSE disasters.

So my humble suggestion is:

Drink plenty of fluids

Remember to breathe

Mumble prayers to the Great Old Ones in a speech that was never made for a human tongue

Wait an hour after meals before you swim

Scribble unholy runes on the nearest available surface(s)

Be impulsive and get that tattoo that says “I

Call home

Be One with the Force

Buy extra copies of The Necronomicon

and above all:

at all times, carry on yourselves a quantity of butter, garlic, sea salt, fresh-cracked pepper, a little honey, and some decorative sesame seeds.

Then, if the worst ACTUALLY happens, quickly remove all of their ingredients from their insulated bag (you’re not going to carry butter in your pocket, are you?) – rub them all over your body, and scream “CTHULHU, COME QUICK AND EAT US WHILE WE’RE STILL FRESH!”

Hopefully, it won’t come to that.

But it’s your civic duty to be prepared, at all times, to render yourself as yummy as inhumanly possible, so that we MIGHT just attract the Elder Things to consume us.

They are, by definition, not necessarily the lesser of the two evils, but at least being eaten is fairly quick.

Unless you get Azathoth, who chews his food VERY slowly.

But the odds of that are, like, one in thirteen.

So I wouldn’t even about it.

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

The post Why You Should Make Yourself Delicious appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

The Myth of Poisoned Candy

(Again: I usually post fiction here. But I don’t really use my old blogging platform anymore, and I thought I’d tell this story to a largely-new audience.

And yes. At the time of this posting, it’s nowhere-near Halloween. But that’s fitting; who wants to be an October killjoy?)

Today, I’ve pulled out an old textbook of mine, “Curses! Broiled Again!” by Jan Harold Brunvand. It’s from an American studies class; I appear to have a 1990 edition. So this is some institutionalized knowledge here; it precedes the Web, and we didn’t have ‘Snopes’. to debunk ideas. The timing was sort-of perfect; we had enough information to collect strange stories, not enough resources to deflate them.

My fascination is with Halloween Candy, but first, I’m going to venture towards one of the other myths in the book. Circa 1990: “Fear of Frying”. This article details people who refuse to buckle their seat belts because they’d “heard” authoritatively that millions of people died every year because when something went wrong with their cars, they got trapped and, then burnt up in horrible auto crashes.

The National Transportation Safety Board, and a few related sources, were quite clear: “there are some very few instances in which people who were wearing safety belts suffered injury or death in unusual kinds of accidents.” In fact, their fairly thorough studies showed that safety belts led to vastly more powerful outcomes. Didn’t matter; the myth persisted.

And that leads me to the the myth of poisoned Halloween candy. Because it’s pervasive, and it changed an entire culture. Trick-or-treating has gone from a communal activity, widely practiced all over the US, to a deprecated activity, mostly happening in tiny little enclaves, usually a few neighbors rounding up sweets from other neighbors and then going home — out of dread of Poisoned, Tampered Candy. We’ve done more; schools and communities have organized entire Halloween Night Out programs to keep kids away from the Horrifying, Monstrous Psychopaths Who Would Poison The Children Of Our Beloved Town.

This was not an isolated belief even in the 90s; it was certainly taught to me every year of both middle school and high school as Halloween time came around. We were given quite specific instruction. Never eat unwrapped candy (could have been rolled in arsenic!), always inspect candy for little holes which might be needle marks (heroin!) and never brownies or baked goods (LSD! Or something far worse!).

I knew people who had been poisoned by Halloween candy. My teachers knew people who’d been poisoned. Newspapers wrote cautionary articles about poisoning of candy stating authoritatively that people in faraway states had been damaged or harmed. Everybody knew that people were turning sweets into nightmares; it just seemed obvious. If you were some random monster, what better opportunity than to poison or put razor blades into, or otherwise sabotage a few pieces of candy carried around by unsuspecting kids? They would never know it was you.

(In retrospect, this seems quite ridiculous. What if, as often happened, the kidsate your candy in the driveway? What if you were a recognizable neighbor? Kids used to literally gather ‘round to discuss which houses gave what. How would you get away with any of this? But none of it mattered — The Great Halloween Candy Poisoning Was On, and we had to watch out.)

The idea doesn’t hold up, any more than the urban legends that people were being baked to death in tanning salons, fed pets in sushi bars (a fairly gross, but pervasive, slur in a world that was just getting used to raw fish as a culinary staple), or (look this one up, it’s real!) the idea that poisonous snakes infested certain fun park rides and leaped out to bite you while you were halfway through. None of these things made sense; and we had defenses against all of them (board of health inspections, park inspectors, the sheer fact that any business which did these things would be up to its neck in lawsuits….)

Yet here’s a life-and-death myth, one which is generally considered partly responsible for the shrinkage and near-death of the Trick Or Treating tradition and —

Again, look it up.

It’s the creation of entire set of unreality-based fears, implanted in children — more specifically, implanted in teachers, educators, and parents first, and then implanted in children.

It’s a myth. And it’s a widely believed myth, one taken as fact, even today.

It’s not quite the Satanic Panic (possibly more accurately called the “Satanic Moral Panic”), in that the Halloween one is a little more “victimless” — kids got denied candy here; nobody got arrested, jailed, shunned, or separated from their families the way they did in the 80s Satanic Ritual Abuse craze.

But it’s a sobering lesson.

Society can, has, and will create, and mass-believe, something incredibly hideous — with no basis in fact.

Be aware of that, as you make choices in what to believe, going forward.

The fact that everyone believes something to be true might, in fact, be your first warning sign that it is totally false.

And people believe it. They really believe it. Remember I said that I knew people who’d been poisoned? I was wrong. Turns out, they knew someone who knew someone who said it had happened, and they couldn’t actually name anyone, or point to anywhere this had gone on.. But that’s not how stories like this spread. Everyone wants to be an authority. Everyone says, “Oh, it happened to me.”

Moral panics are incredibly powerful. We now know — have theoretically known for centuries — that the Salem Witch Hunts were false, that they persecuted lots of people, but that the people of Salem were not actually Demons, Devils, Warlocks, or Supernatural Monsters — just humans. But that didn’t stop their accusers from utterly believing their own allegations — right up to bodily contortions which seemed impossible, or being pricked by pins and not being cut, and all manner of things which are generally impossible unless people are in profoundly altered mental states.

Your Halloween candy is not poisoned.

Your neighbors are not Secret Monsters.

The danger we face lies in our willingness to believe that there are hidden monsters everywhere. Because that’s exactly how communities go mad.

Enjoy your Halloween candy! Enjoy your Halloween!

And let’s remember: If a story you hear, even one you hear from dozens or hundreds of sources, seems like something crazy, something out of a horror story, something completely unreal…

…it probably is.

~Jeff Mach

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

The post The Myth of Poisoned Candy appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

More Tiny Poems

You might know that, on Unicorns

I have heaped a lot of scorn.

But I’ll say this for ’em: with or without wings,

There’s damn good eatin’ on them things.

* * *

A question from Perseus Greenman (@futharkvillage) on Twitter:

How do dragons fare when attacking aircraft carriers?

If you tear down dimensional barriers,

You might find Dragons attacking aircraft carriers.

Who wins? It’s hard. Ships are made of steel;

And Dragons, in turn, just aren’t real.

So if reality has failed us,

And mythical weirdness has impaled us,

I tell you true (I’ve never lied:

The Ship and the Dragon are ON THE SAME SIDE.

And they’ve united with a Pirate crew

To find the treasure of You-Know-Who.

And that, my friends, is what we would’ve seen,

If we weren’t busy with Quarantine.

* * *

if “ifs” and “buts” were fruit and nuts,

then we’d have Christmas every day,

a weird, weird, fruitarian Christmas

where nut allergies are not welcome.

* * *

I recruited a werewolf. Some said he was smitten.

But actually, he was afraid of being bitten.

Lycanthropy is a difficult curse;

But Dark Lorderie is even worse.

* * *

Oh, the Secret Life of H.G. Wells,

Who made love to beings of the Nether Hells.

He left unpublished some steamy first drafts

For work that later became Lovecraft’s.

Thank Lovecraft’s stern New England upbringing

That his work’s about Cosmic Horror, not Cosmic Swinging.

~Jeff Mach

 

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

The post More Tiny Poems appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.