Jeff Mach's Blog, page 59

Requiem For A Laboratory

As I crawl through the ruins

Of my burnt laboratory,

I cannot help but think of this

As an elaborate allegory.

I’ll tell you all about it

If you’ll breathe in smoke

and smog with me;

The mapping of my life has

A predictable geography.

Inside of me I always hear

Ambitious demons calling

They’ll push me to rise up

And laugh when I am falling

But I will treasure loss

As though it were a prize,

For I’ll fail! I’ll fail,

I’ll fail,

and I will rise.

And if I led a different life,

Chose a different job

I’d likely much less often

Flee from an angry mob

They say that I build monsters;

That claim is not unjust

I make strange things to endure

What punishment they must.

Inside of me I always feel

Ambitious demons raging

And they defy all of my

Attempts at any caging.

And I know it happens,

More often than I realize:

For I’ll fail, I’ll fail,

I’ll fail,

and I will rise.

As I build the foundations

Of my next laboratory

I know I would not stop for Hell

And I’d burn down Purgatory.

And if you want to stop me,

Better aim to kill

And even then, run from my corpse –

You can’t be sure

that I’ll lie still.

Inside of me I am my own

Ambitious demon calling

And I won’t let myself stay down

(Not even when I’m falling)

And I will treasure loss,

Because I realize

For I’ll fai, I’ll fail,

I’ll fail,

and I will rise.

~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!

My new book, “I Hate Your Time Machine”, is now available! Go pick it up!

The post Requiem For A Laboratory appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Skull Prison: A Rant

Once, there was a game, a video game, an immersive video game, a game so very immersive that those who played it wanted to keep playing it, and did so, for long periods of time.

Sometimes, they neglected their chores. Or they fell behind in their social obligations. Or became less interested in the outside, real world and more interested in the tiny little megaverse that happened on their screens.

This had never before happened in human history, except possibly with the invention of circuses, organized sports, cinema, radio dramas, calligraphy, cave paintings…

…okay. This had happened before. But not THIS way. Because THIS time, the game was made by a powerful corporation, which had a clear profit motive to make the game as enjoyable and as addictive as possible. And that had never, ever happened—

The point is, sometimes technology can be so addictive, so appallingly and intensely satisfying, the same as visual art, or music, or poetry, or—

…actually, the creation of video games is an art. It’s not always good art. But that’s a characteristic of all artistic endeavor. As a thought experiment, use your preferred method to go listen to Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music”. I love Lou Reed, in general. But even great artists, in great media, make terrible art sometimes.

At any rate, IN A HORRIFYING WAY, humans were (metaphorically) sucked into this video game, never to return, and it took the entire human race into the game, such that they stopped eating or sleeping or…

Not the whole human race. I play the ancient East Asian game “Go”, myself. This is because I am too sophisticated to play video games. Okay, that’s a lie. I am really, really bad at video games. Honestly, I’m not that good at Go, either.

Also, plenty of people already have problems where they have food and/or sleep available, but can’t use them. I’m just sayin’.

At any rate, the point is that someday video games will be so immersive that humans will basically live inside them, rather than living their true lives, because remember, your job doing tech support as an anonymous voice on the phone is true, whereas your time spent painstakingly becoming a better Bard online is all imaginary, for reasons no-one has seen fit to explain to me. I’m not sure how this works. Who’s maintaining the servers (or whatever tech is in use by then) if everyone’s in the game? The metaphysics feel shaky to me. But you get my point: essentially, we’ll all live in the video game, and this will be terrible, because it’s a video game.

And my side’s against that, hypothetically.

You’ve met my people, I think. My side. My tribe. We like art, at least in theory—I mean, I ain’t been to a museum or an opera in forever, and in general, when there’s a concert of a musician I really, really like, I manage to catch about ten minutes of it before I scamper off. (Look. I am busy. Somebody has to make sure that the sound gear for the Main Stage isn’t simultaneously needed at the Other Stage, and if it is, one has to figure out how to improvise, really quickly, and that’s a kind of dancing and a form of concert appreciation in and of itself.) We dislike artifice (have you asked me about the glamour of Elves, lately? Go on, ask me; I might have something to say about it.) So we ought to hate being in the video game.

Only: Why?

See here’s this now-ancient trope, just swinging around the place, this idea that people will get so stuck in a video game that they will starve to death or forget their humanity or lose out on what really matters in life (whatever that might be.) But from where I’m writing, I haven’t seen the sun for more than a couple of minutes in over 40 days, and I don’t particularly miss it. This may be because I am part vampire, or it may just be that I am fortunate to have more than enough bright light and an ample supply of vitamin D pills.  …and, of course, I have all these words, and these words are my brightest and most favorite Sun.

No, I don’t use video games; I often have, I just don’t have room for them anymore.  It would be easy for me to take a stance that someone who spends all day writing is better than someone who spends all day playing video games, because I happen to do the former. But, outside of the egotism of making this all about my weird, weird life choices, this is like the old joke where you go around thinking that your brain is the most important part of your body until you realize which part of your body is telling you that.

I know. You’re here for the stories. This isn’t a stealth essay. This is totally a work of fiction, written by a savage Dire Wolf with really, really cute fingers at the end of its paws, and that’s the twist ending OH NO I JUST REVEALED THE TWIST ENDING QUICK I’D BETTER COVER IT UP WITH THE MAIN IDEA OF WHAT I’M SAYING:

Realistically, if we can find a video game which is so immersive that it sucks us in and we don’t want to leave, I’m Team Video Game.

Sure, that immersion might indeed be because it is appealing to our baser natures, our lowest common denominators of the mind, our least useful and least interesting pieces of self. But it could also be because the game has a rich and intricate inner life. This is honestly demonstrable by now. It’s not like people aren’t already doing this. Am I saying that someone’s massively multiplayer online roleplaying game experience is better than their experience being a painter? Actually, sure, at least potentially. Why not? I will use myself as an example.

(Not egotism, in this case; I’m using myself as an example, not because I think you’re like me—even I am not all that much like me—but because I know I won’t offend myself, or, if I do, I can always make it better with Scotch.)

So I am a terrible painter. Sure, if you know me, you know also terrible at massively multiplayer online role-playing game. But I spent a couple of months playing one last year, and it was great! Whereas if I’d spent a couple of months painting last year, yes, I probably would have become a better painter. But I also would have created a bunch of terrible art, which is dangerous—not in the sense that it lowers the overall quality of art in the world (that might be a thing, too, but who am I to judge the world’s art?)—but we might run into the Fruitcake Problem, that strange challenge wherein you’re terrible at something, or you make something nobody wants, but you insist on giving it away anyhow.

(Which, in turn, is a corollary to the Monet Syndrome, wherein you have a body of work which is quite desirable, but you just can’t see it.)

(How do you tell if you’re a fruitcake or a Monet? I have a simple method: ask the Internet what it thinks, and do the opposite.)

The thing I’m trying to say is that I keep wanting to write some sort of incisive little story about all of us moving into a video game, but it’s clear that I am  incapable, even in theory, of maintaining the lie that I think “human beings end up getting hooked on some super-immersive video game” is automatically bad. Every time I try to twist this trope, the other side ups and smacks me in the face. (How did you even FIND my face? This is a STORY, dammit.)

You see, I live in a dark, alternate reality, the far future, the year 2020. And I have watched our descent into dystopia. I have watched people use increasingly personalized technologies to focus and refocus themselves in what we call ‘bubbles’, though that’s too kind a term; most bubbles are shiny and pretty and they float, and also they’re light, and temporary and they pop. This is more like shutting the lid on a case that’s perfectly hollowed out to fit your body, a selective sensory deprivation. There are plenty of things about the ‘real’ world which seem solid—I place more value in blood, and in sweat, than most people know—but I refuse to believe that the danger of an immersive game is anything more than trivial in a time and place where self-immersion in artifice is not simply a way of life, but a mental requirement.

I’m not convinced that many of the people who claim to live in the ‘real world’ have any interest therein. It’s part of how I found myself becoming a Dark Lord, becoming at odds with most of the rest of the humanity.

I mean:

It’s not that I am particularly superior, or that my models of the Tellurian are inherently better than those of the people around me. It comes down to one point, which I will make repeatedly, in as many different ways as I can, and it’s this:

Any belief system which systematically starves you is an overwhelming weakness.

This is the standard to which we should hold anything: it doesn’t matter whether you live inside a game played by Gods, or a game played by Aliens, or a mechanistic world where everything just is. What matters is how you treat it, how you decide to interface with the input you do receive.

Ice-fishing exists because people were perceptive enough to realize that the wall on the ground was breakable, and underneath it was protein.

If your mind is not where you hoped it would be, check out your mental walls. Some are there to keep you safe. Some are there to make you feel safe, but in reality, they’re just locking you in.

Jailbreaking your head is risky; there are strange and difficult things in your skulls. But it’s still sometimes worth a try.

Lots of things in this world will try to imprison you. Don’t tolerate it from your own brain.

~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!

My new book, “I Hate Your Time Machine”, is now available! Go pick it up!

 

 

 

The post Skull Prison: A Rant appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Social Necromancy

It wasn’t my idea

for the Internet to be run

on human sacrifice.

Marvin Graves,

in “Cannibals and Kings”,

suggests that societies

turn to anthropophagy

when they need protein,

blaming the Gods.

But Professor Warren Shapiro

points out

that humans can survive

on the abundant protein

in bugs

(go ahead,

compare the protein in

a pound of crickets

with a pound of your favorite animal protein,

I dare you) –

and we simply really

really

prefer

to eat things

more similar

to ourselves,

we prefer flesh

to chitin,

and we’ll prioritize meat

fairly often,

culturally speaking.

I’m not a nutritionist,

I’m a Necromancer,

but you don’t have to be

an initiate of the Dark Arts

to know this:

and anyone who practices

any form of

animal sacrifice

and they will tell you:

it may be cruel,

but it energizes a ritual

like nobody’s business.

I’ve never

(yet)

(as far as you know)

sacrificed some mortal

on a massive and ancient altar,

stained with a millenia or two

of blood, and fear-sweat,

but I’ve studied the theory.

I’m sorry if you’re squeamish,

and don’t like that I know these things,

but my knowledge is my own concern;

you only have say

over what I do with it,

and even that,

only when it affects you,

and that,

right there,

puts me pretty far ahead

of social media.

The snuffing out

of a Name,

the destruction of

an individual’s privacy,

personal life,

career,

sanity,

happiness,

is Necromancy of the very

highest order

and it’s why the Internet

increasingly does things

previously thought to reside

only in the realm of the fantastic,

the mythical,

and the magical.

and it’s better

than the old way.

oh, the old way

had a certain personal touch,

a bit of spectacle,

if you could stand high atop a pyramid

cut out a still-beating heart

and hold it in your hand

for the crowd

to see,

but on the Internet,

we can claim, ten thousand times,

that we’ve torn someone to shreds,

and the fact that

the person in question

still exists afterwards

only ignites more

righteous

indignation.

You might think this is a metaphor,

but this is not a metaphor.

I give you two propositions:

1. There’s no reason

that self-learning machines

couldn’t have discovered

what we call ‘magic’,

and we wouldn’t

necessarily

know;

people don’t often

talk about the degree to which

the social

and search

and personalization

algorithms

which dip deep into

our lives

and rewire them

to suit (hypothetically)

“our” needs

are not moving at the speed

of human code,

but machine learning,

which isn’t spooky,

because the people who know

how spooky it is

have showed us how

excitingly

that AI can learn

how to play chess

real fast.

There’s no reason

to believe

they haven’t discovered

ancient principles

of Magick,

and they are releasing energy

and harnessing it

and making offerings

unto Graveyard Gods

in order to work

Internet miracles

at horrifying,

science-fiction-consequence-style

costs.

2. But most of us,

good, honest, human

skeptics,

we know better, right?

And if you want me to take

this in some sort of Lovecraftian

direction, I can,

some sort of “the machines became wise

and farmed the humans, not for battery energy like

in some foolish movie, but for the

explosive blast of vital force

which erupts from

a ritually-ended soul,

but it’s not necessary.

Because if we look at it as skeptics,

as people who ‘know’ that magic is not real,

who ‘know’ that the ‘energy’ of those rituals

is psychological,

brain chemical release,

adrenal,

GOOD NEWS!

It turns out

that this

goes significantly farther

towards proving

what I say.

Humans are programmed to

care about what happens to

other humans; even sociopaths

care, they just might not

empathize.

We created tools and gave them

parameters for engaging us,

catching our attention,

keeping our attention.

When humans are ‘real’, live, and in front of you,

you can kill them only once;

but if we commit the ritual slaughter

of the unclean

in a virtual way,

we hit the same buttons,

because we’ve misdirected our minds.

We feel the rush of the bloody righteous sacrifice,

and we can tear out the vital organs again

and again;

we are Eagles who have found the never-ending feast

which is Prometheus.

this is not a Conspiracy.

this is not a Mystery.

this is something you can verify

right now:

we’ve taught machines to observe where

we click, how long we seem to look at something,

what we turn our attention towards,

what we respond to,

what emotions we want to show when we respond,

and how long we’ll stay on that site,

being served messages,

and advertisements,

teaching those sites more about ourselves.

That really isn’t the sinister part.

That really isn’t the sinister part.

We’ve taught them that we love gentle pleasure –

kittens, kittens, kittens –

and the fiercest pain,

the utter certainty that everyone but us

and our seemingly-outnumbered circle of friends

has gone mad and is psychotic,

and if we could kill those strange villainous characters

with our minds,

we would,

but instead,

we release words which pound their images,

their imagos,

their online representations,

into hamburger.

We slay them, we make the sacrifice, we feel the rush –

and then, before it can fully die down,

the machines feed it to us again.

When I say “Necromancy”, you might hear “dark magic”,

but I mean “this is one of the things humans will do,

if we let ourselves”,

and by now,

we know that our screens are,

in assorted ways,

bad for us,

but we can’t look away.

Who can look away

from a freshly-sliced

still-beating

vital organ,

offered up

in front of the people

in the service of furthering

our holy needs?

The post Social Necromancy appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Slaying the Dark Lord

Susane, the Chosen One, Child of Prophecy, stepped over the body of her fallen companion, not stopping to cry, fury welling up inside her like a billowing volcano, the active kind, not the kind that’s basically just a mountain with a history of anger management issues. Thunder rolled, and finding the sensation pleasant, rolled again, just for the heck of it; lightning danced across the sky like someone who is unaware of the nonexistence of discotheques, a point which didn’t really matter, given that the tower room had no windows. In that single, ultimate instant, the Stars aligned, and Susane felt her Birthright rising up inside her, roiling, uncoiling, slightly squished because it had to share space with the billowy rage stuff, but nevertheless, more puissant than she had ever imagined. She reached deep within herself, and in that moment of clear focus, she finally found her true Power, which turned out to come from environmentally unfriendly sources such as coal, but she would deal with that later.

She lifted the great Runesword, Deathsbane, which was covered in symbols not even the Wizard fully understood, and its own ancient sorceries reached deep into her heart. This brought the occupancy of her chest up significantly past the legal occupancy permissible by local ordinance, which might potentially result in stiff fines at some later point, and the sword found the Chosen One’s heart to be pure, although it did not specify pure what, exactly.

Guided by the knowledge that it was upon her to end Evil in the land, Susane extended her left foot forward and brought the huge hunk of steel, which was glowing with the light of ten thousand suns and seemed almost molten in its blazing intensity, up and swinging in a tremendous, two-handed slash, straight and true towards the throat of the Dark Lord.

The Dark Lord, her own weapon moving crosswise in an aggressive block, struck Susane’s weapon with her own, catching the enchanted metal between the edge and the flat of her blade, and shattering the damn thing like some kind of exceptionally low-quality and poorly-chosen theatrical prop.

As Susane stared in shock at the now-former tool of Destiny, The Dark Lord reversed her motion and slammed blunt back of her unmagical, but extremely practical hunk of sharpened steel down and to the side, straight into Susane’s sciatic nerve. Susane dropped to the floor, her leg buckling under her. The Dark Lord looked down at the Chosen One.

“This isn’t your day, is it, dear?” she said.

~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!

My new book, “I Hate Your Time Machine”, is now available! Go pick it up!

 

The post Slaying the Dark Lord appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

The Parable of the Sweet Tea

(as told by the Dark Lord)

It so happened that there existed certain people who pour so much sugar and cream into their tea that they’re effectively simply giving themselves permission to drink great steaming mugs of syrupy milk, which they feel they have earned by dint of having gone to the trouble of boiling some herbal stimulants and inserting them, sometimes in essentially homeopathic quantities, into their drinking implements. Not in my Realm, of course; around here, we feed such people to the Orcs. But it’s said to happen in other, less-enlightened places.

Now, there are many legends concerning the origin of tea, my favorite of which is that a being of supreme illumination once meditated for an incredibly unreasonable amount of time—seven years—and, at the end, he realized he had fallen asleep. Rather than rejoicing at the fact that he’d apparently gone seven years without eating or drinking or performing several other critical bodily functions, he is said to have cut off his eyelids in a fury, which makes perfect sense to, I don’t know, insane people, I suppose. These eyelids were so shamed at having permitted slumber that they burrowed into the ground and became tea leaves.

(Kindly cease looking at me as though I’m making this up. Because I’m not, and once you do enough research to confirm what I’m saying, you’ll recall the faces you made in my direction, and feel extremely foolish.)

I was, however, making up the part about the Orcs. I try not to kill taxpayers for trivial reasons; while it appeals to my sense of whimsy, unpredictable punishments tend to lead to unpredictable actions. That is to say, someone who rightfully feels they might die based on arbitrary things, such as choosing to wear the wrong color of shirt, might (reasonably) assume they have little to lose in taking rash actions, such as attempting to poison my moat monsters, or starting some kind of underground resistance.

(I would like to say that I learned this through an extensive study of human patterns of thought, but to be perfectly honest, I learned it through an extensive study of human patterns of thought…and accidentally fomenting a rebellion, back in my younger days. In all fairness to me, it was an excessively tacky shirt.)

To be perfectly honest (as if one could ever be perfectly honest), I take my tea that way. It’s a big frothy cup of froth. The part that matters, in my own mind, is that I admit it. I don’t claim to like tea. Tea is bitter. I like the mild stimulant effect, more efficacious than many potions which involve, on average, significantly more time, energy, magical infusion, and complicated ingredients. I don’t like the taste. So I don’t lie to myself and claim I enjoy the tea; I enjoy the things it does for me, and I enjoy mutating the experience into something that I find pleasing. But the cream multiplies the calories and fat by an order of magnitude; the sugar, over time, reduces and essentially counteracts the original stimulant; and, one might argue, I have changed a difficult, bitter, healthy thing into an easy, pleasant, unhealthy one.

And this is why, though I command the resources of a fairly large domain, I drink only one cup of tea a day. Because I recognize that I use a simple, easy process to change the fundamental nature and effect of my experience, and it’s no longer the same thing.

Likewise, every time one of you nitwits comes here with some oversimplified, saccharine, unexamined idea that you’ll serve some nebulous “Good” by increasing my daily intake of sharp pointy metal to fatal limits, I slaughter you as expeditiously as possible.

Because I do not have time to waste on someone who doesn’t know the difference between “bitter potion of wakefulness”, and “big hot bowl of liquid candy”.

~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!

My new book, “I Hate Your Time Machine”, is now available! Go pick it up!

 

The post The Parable of the Sweet Tea appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Witch Hunter’s Dilemma

Recently, the formerly-esteemed roles of Witch-Hunters throughout the known world (which extends, as it always has, all the way from one side of this village, right past the village next to it, and into that one village that you can kind-of see in the distance, the one where we go, once every few months, for Market Day; oh, we’ve heard rumour that there’s more in the world than this, but you know us. We’re very smart, and never ever fall for rumours)—

—the office of Witch-Hunters has been rocked by the newly-revealed knowledge that so many Hunters were, themselves, Witches.

And now people want to attack the Witch-Hunters, want to say they’re all Witches. As a Witch, I resent this in general; not every Witch is the kind of Wicked Witch of whom you’ve heard horrible stories (isn’t it convenient that, theoretically, the Wickedest Witch we know is unable to argue her case, by virtue of having been killed by a plummeting residential building?)

But as a former Witch-Hunter, I’d be remiss if I didn’t speak. It won’t make me popular; but popularity was never what I sought, and therein lies the challenge.

People have put forth the idea that the office of Witch-Hunter is the ideal place for a Witch to hide; who suspects the Hunter of being the monster?

But this is true only in one of two disturbing scenarios:

Witch-Hunters are incompetent. The challenge, in said scenario, is this: if the Hunters, those who have literally trained for generations, honed their skills, written books, taught each other, created and used and promulgated technologies for catching Witches, are actually terrible at doing so…it is only reasonable to assume that the rest of us are worse at it. Sure, there are certain disciplines wherein academic knowledge fails to live up to the power of practical understanding. But Hunters hunt; they don’t just sit around writing papers on the subject. (Although, admittedly, most of the ones who write about the theory without engaging in the practice…they do deserve our skepticism.) Which leads us to the other possibility:
Witch-Hunters have always been a secret plot by Witches; they have never had good intentions. But if this is the case… then why are we trusting anything they’ve told us about Witchery? If their actual goal is opposite their stated goal, then we can’t go around trusting their stated reasons, either. If we’re calling into question the integrity of Witch-Hunters, then it brings us to the uncomfortable idea that the Witches themselves might not be monstrous. Certainly, it would be a devious and terrifying plot for all those capturers-of-spellcasters to have been a diversion; but it’s a pretty stupid diversion for those who are supposedly cunning. Witch-hunters promote Witch-hunting, make their coin at the trade, lecture constantly about the need to do it. It’s far more complicated, and far less effective, than simply spending one’s time explaining that not all Witches are, in fact, intentional makers-of-pain, that, in fact, Witches are no more prone to it than anyone else.

“But,” you say, “the Mob seeks victims. The Mob wants guilt, not innocence. Perhaps they might have acted better, were they not spurred on by the Mob.”

If this is true, then we ought to ask: who, exactly, is the Rage Mob?

Why, it is no-one, of course.

Just ask.

Did an army ravage the countryside under the brutal rule of The Dictator? Why, it wasn’t any of us.

Who burned all those people who turned out to have never been any kind of Witch? Oh, not us. In fact, we always wanted to help, we were just afraid of The Mob.

Who believed the Witch-Hunters? Not us, it was all the other fools. We always knew there was something fishy, while the idiots over there only saw it after Hunters were all discredited. (And having discredited this group, we say, “The problem is solved!” Until we find someone else to blame.)

Do I hate Witch-Hunters? I do; and while I know that I was lied-to, deceived, and betrayed, it doesn’t change the things I did as a Hunter, and I need to answer for them. I hate Witch-Hunters for what they did to me, and for what I hoped they would be, and what they actually are.

But let’s not get too sanctimonious here.

The fact is, as long as any of us are willing to hide behind the anonymity of the Mob, we are all one rumour away from having the Mob turn on us.

All we need do is stop fearing the Mob, and it will lose its power over us.

…and I wish you good luck with that. Me, I’m going to build a raft and float somewhere without any humans. I’ll probably get eaten by sea-monsters, but I’m okay with that. I’d rather die for being what I am (in this case, “made out of meat”)—than be slain on the rumour that I’m something I am not.

~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!

My new book, “I Hate Your Time Machine”, is now available! Go pick it up!

The post Witch Hunter’s Dilemma appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Yellow Submarination

We all lived in a yellow submarine; really, it was rather ochre in color, but ‘yellow’ is close enough. Our friends were all aboard, or so I have been told. It was quite pleasant. It meant doing quite a lot of fishing and a certain amount of hydroponics, but a lot of it was automated, and the work wasn’t bad at all.

I’d love to tell you how the submarine was made, but I really don’t know. Those were different times. It was said to have been funded by an eccentric rock star (although, at least back then, no-one had ever heard of a rock star who was anything but eccentric…which probably explains why we had a submersible nautical vessel of such vast size.)

Whoever made it wanted us to be comfortable and safe. That’s a nice way of putting it; it might also be said that the maker of the thing didn’t have a whole lot of faith in the capabilities of those who’d be aboard. It had quite a lot of devices to make us secure. The piloting was almost entirely automatic, which was fine by us, particularly since driving seemed a rather dull activity, and the sub (as befits the likely by-product of whim, cash, and psychedelics) simply swept along through the ocean, diving merrily through fish-filled passages and neat little tunnels and the ominous and nameless tentacled undersea City which (fortunately) was always asleep.

Likewise, we didn’t really have to know the tech. It was self-repairing, which is, I have read, unusual; but it’s all we knew, so it was pretty much what we expected. There were numerous helpful touches; the lights gently dimmed and lifted at regular times to give us a reasonable approximation of a regular sleep cycle. The craft was separated into various compartments, so that, should something really bad happen, the affected portion would seal itself off. Sad luck for anyone trapped in that section; but better than having it simply sink us. I talk about the hydroponics; well, I know that’s what they’re called, but the developers had done something quite clever, and all the fruit and vegetation grew very easily, fairly quickly, and quite large.

There was plenty of food, a library of all the music ever recorded (all the way from some of the proto-rock of 1951, right up the end of May, 1970), and no real authority structure. All we really had were community gatherings to deal with meanness. Sometimes, though rarely, people got into fistfights. Once in a while, people did worse things. Somebody killed someone over an exceptionally great tomato plant once, and that wasn’t okay. That person was locked in their room forever and only fed three times a day. I hear she’s pretty bummed about what she did.

From what my folks say, we started out pretty excited, but made a lot of dumb mistakes. (Like, with the mean people thing: originally, it was figured that there’d be no crime at all if everyone had what they needed for themselves. I mean, we’d notice if anything big and public went missing, and you just couldn’t hide all that much in your room. When we had gatherings sometimes, there was usually a vote by roll call. But you got a sense of who had good ideas, or at least, who had the ideas most of us liked, and we generally went with their ideas. Sometimes, they made decisions first and told us later, and it was usually pretty good.

Our parents thought it was a nice life.

But they were, you know, old. They didn’t really understand the world. They came from places that they said were much scarier, but as far as we can tell, they had it pretty good. They got to be on land. There are some pretty convincing speakers who’ve been talking a lot about how good land it, lately.

And then there are those wackos who want us to go find Atlantis. They argue that if we live underwater, we should live in a real city. Oh, sure we should. Cities don’t even move! That’s so crazy!

A lot of people fell under the sway of these fast-talking crazies. And they started pushing a whole bunch of crazy views. They actually hate us, they hate all of us. And we hate them, but only because they hate us.

When I say “we”, I mean, there’s one smart person who knows where it’s at, and the good people follow her. I mean, there aren’t a lot of us, but at least we know we’re good people, because we all understand that she’s smart, and her friends are smart, and we’re smart for listening to her, and it’s obvious that the others are all either just stupid or flat-out psychopaths. Some of them want to grow more food in our hydroponics; don’t they realize that could make some of us get tummyaches? Some of them want us to take the submarine deeper, and some of them claim the submarine has always been at the perfect depth; but it’s obvious that the only good thing to do is actually go up and down in a series of slow dives and slow rises. It’s clear that the ones who want us to go down actually want us all to crash into undersea icebergs and sink, and the ones who want us to go up intend for us to get eaten by giant Eagles. No, no, the only good way to stay safe is to avoid doing either one for too long.

I can’t even begin to illustrate how many crazy ideas they have. And, even more nuts, they call our ideas crazy, and AAAAAAAAAAAAAGH.

But eventually, we realized something:

If all of the ‘good’ people gathered in one section of the sub, and set it on fire, set fire to the furniture and the food and stuff, then the automatic systems would kick in, and we’d be able to blast free of the rest.

Nobody knows who thought of it first. But honestly, it was a win-win situation, because the psychos were already going to set the WHOLE sub on fire, and the only way to save ourselves was to set SOME of it on fire to save the rest.

And once one fire started, they all started. Nobody knows who did it first, but it happened everywhere, apparently. Each segment of the sub blasted away from every other part.

Some got more of the farming and some got more of the medical gear and some got more of the books, but that stuff’s all lost to us; we know those bastards will never share.

That’s okay. Now the people who think right are all together, and the others are off to go do whatever they’re going to do.

It turns out that not all of us are as good as we thought, and some people thought that we should actually start talking to some of the other subs.

That’s when our leader showed us that, if we wanted to, we could push those people out of the airlock.

What a relief!

We almost had bad people here.

Instead, we have only good people.

I think.

And if not…well, now we know what to do.

It’s a little hungry in here, and things are a little singed, but at least we’re all in tune, you know? And we have the best leadership, and our leaders are picking out some assistant leaders, and they’re real smart, and everything’s going to be real great, real soon.

Now we each live in our own yellow submarines, along with just a few other people. We can’t do all the things we were able to do when the original craft was intact, but really, the original thing wasn’t all that great. I mean, who wants to live with a bunch of jerks? Now I know better. Things may be horrible—they must be—but it’s only because everyone in the other subs is a greedy, inconsiderate son of a gun.

Someday, they’ll magically pop like bubbles, and everything will be better. Until then, I guess I just have to be miserable; but it’s not my fault.

We all lived in one big yellow submarine once; but now we live in many little yellow submarines, and we’re going just where we should be, and doing just what we should do, and someday, we’ll like it, and anyone who doesn’t like it, well, that’s what airlocks are for.

~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!

My new book, “I Hate Your Time Machine”, is now available! Go pick it up!

 

 

 

 

The post Yellow Submarination appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

5 Reasons To Date The Monster In Your Closet

When I was younger, I wanted the same things out of love as everyone else: I wanted a perfect, flawless Unicorn, just like on a tapestry.

After one unicorn-horn heart puncture, though, one learns that there are things far more important than something shiny.

In fact, one can begin to realize that when all the world thinks something is shiny, the thing itself may lose its sense of proportion, or its sense that others exist for any reasons other than to re-affirm how very handsome it is.

As the old song goes,

“If you want to be happy for the rest of your life,

Never make a Unicorn your wife;

From my personal scrying pool,

I prefer Goblins, Orcs, and Ghouls.”

#5. The Monster in your Closet, by definition, hides in your closet both diurnally and nocturnally; it emerges quite rarely, and only on certain evenings. Therefore, it is statistically extremely unlikely to catch you on a bad hair day.

#4. Similarly, The Monster In Your Closet has already seen your closet. Is it tidy? Disorganized? Is there something within which makes you embarrassed or distressed? I mean, more distressed than the aforementioned Monster in the aforementioned storage space? Not to worry; the Monster knows, and doesn’t judge you.

#3. They say you should befriend your fears, which is often good advice. The Beast in your Containment Area is definitely a problem, and if befriending is good, surely dating is even better?

#2. We tend to strongly overestimate the degree to which we ought fear that which is unknown. This is a natural impulse; if you’re not sure how to assess a threat level, why not treat it with maximum caution? This was probably useful when our worlds were fairly small; a little village of a hundred people, for example. In contrast, in the time it took you to read from the end of Reason #3 to this sentence you’re currently experiencing, the world has created more human information than existed throughout all of recorded history. When your problem can be explained as “Is that a sabertooth tiger outside, or not?”, it’s vital to be really careful until you have the answer. When the problem’s more like, “Is that a sabertooth tiger outside, or, alternately, is it any one of ten tousand other things?” …then you probably oughtn’t try to figure each and every single thing out before you let yourself relax.

#1. This piece is actually a paid advertorial by The Closet Monster. And I ain’t ashamed of it, either. I mean, I wouldn’t accept the sponsorship if I didn’t really, truly believe in the product. I’ll level with you: I’m sure The Closet Monster is biased by self-interest, and I’m biased by the fabulous wealth the Closet Monster has given unto me (oh, sure, most of it is in the form of pocket lint; but I really like lint)—but seriously, if you’ve already tried dating humans, you know what I’m talking about. I can deal with Monsters when I know they’re Monsters; it’s the ones who claim to be human, and talk about how much they hate Monsters, who are secretly the worst monsters of all.

~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!

My new book, “I Hate Your Time Machine”, is now available! Go pick it up!

The post 5 Reasons To Date The Monster In Your Closet appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Chrononautical Consequences

Once upon a time, a really bad thing happened. Actually, that’s not quite true. Many bad things have happened, many times. And really, the degree to which it was ‘bad’ really depends on your perspective. For example, this was only bad for almost all living and nonliving beings in the Universe. There was at least one being—well, one thing—property?—dimension?—power?—at least, there was certainly something which thought this would turn out quite well.

You see, Time had gone through so many Once Upons that it realized something very, very important: unless you’re in the hands of some sort of weirdo modernistic narrator, and those are a fraction of the sum total of all narrators who exist, and not a particularly meaningful fraction, at that—

in general, Once Upon A Time is where you find Happily Ever After.

Oh, ordinarily, you need to dig through a bunch of stuff about Faeries and Princesses and Dragons, and such, and all those things are fine for, you know, children, and/or the kind of strange misfits who enjoy fantasy stories, but, obviously, they don’t play much of a role in the life of any serious entity. Who cares about those people?

So at a particular moment, Time stepped right into the Once Upon. It didn’t beat about the bush; whatever Time is, it probably doesn’t have limbs, and even if it did, it probably wouldn’t use them to attack random vegetation. It simply accelerated through the story. Or maybe all the stories; it’s hard to tell. Time can move very quickly, when it so desires. And for those of us who are not Cosmic Forces, it doesn’t really matter. Did it speed us through one tale, or ten thousand tales? It’s hard to tell. There may have been a vast profusion of Fairytale things, but they all plummeted by;

three kindly Faerie Godmothers stormed the Castle in order to prick their fingers on the spindle which was attempting to turn straw into Dragons devouring Princesses marrying Princes doing battle with enchanted Frogs whose Porridge was too hot to allow them to pose as Grandma and wear the clothing of Wolves because the seven million Dwarves had sheltered the Wicked Queen after her Magic Mirror had tried to eat Hansel and Gretel;

or so it seemed. This lasted forever and took no time at all and also never happened; that’s an unpleasant combination, but there are more things on Heaven and Earth than art dreamt of in your lack of philosophy, Horatio; or at least, so I’ve been told.

At any rate—more specifically, at its own special rate, which, partly because Time is, literally, time, a rate that only time can comprehend, much less achieve—so, to put it better, at Time’s pace, it fast-forwarded the story (or perhaps all stories) and arrived at Happily Ever After. And that’s where Time lived, forever and ever, and it was Forever Happy, unlike all the rest of us, who, having been abandoned by Time, are screwed.

And this is why everything seems to take forever, and also goes by far too fast. We have not, as Vonnegut said, “come unstuck in time”; rather, Time has unstuck itself from us.

Now you know.

AND NOBODY, NO-ONE ANYWHERE, NO-ONE EXCEPT TIME LIVED HAPPILY, EVER, EVER AGAIN.

* * *

Alternate ending:

hey.

If Time has forgotten about us, left us to our own devices, then let’s forget it right back. We’ve still got clocks and measurement (it seems to be just our sense of time which left us; it isn’t that we no longer know when it’s 3 p.m., it’s that suddenly it’s three p.m. and we’re horribly late for something we didn’t even know existed.)

So to Hell with Time! Let’s not worry so much that we’re doing the wrong thing for a given moment, or that we should be doing more or less, or that we have simply, somehow, managed to arrive at a place we never intended, and now it’s too late to change. No: none of that. If Time has seen fit to desert us and go on vacation, then we shall go on vacation from it. I hereby give you back all of your Time:

All that you have done with your time is right. Even the bad things. Even the mistakes. Maybe it wasn’t all pleasant, or all joyous; maybe some of it was the worst. But it happened, and it’s behind you, and everything behind you is lost in time, and Time is lost in a margarita in Wonderland, so you are freed forever.

 

~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!

My new book, “I Hate Your Time Machine”, is now available! Go pick it up!

p.s. I wasn’t thinking about this consciously before, but I’d like to dedicate this song to Jim Steinman and Meatloaf. As they put it: “You were only killing time, and it’ll kill you right back.”

The post Chrononautical Consequences appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Weird Vibes In A Vial

Weird vibes in a vial

She holds in both hands

the next-to-last thought of Alex Gruba,

only man in the world to die

of an allergic reaction to “The Shoop Shoop Song”

several minutes stolen

from the digital watch of Father Time

a memory of the look on Satan’s face

the day one of the Damned said,

“Hey, the melba toast here is actually quite tasty!”

all the forgotten skills

of an entire lost race of poets

who composed epic ballads

using only a single pictographic symbol

whose approximate meaning is

“very large sneeze”

and four really close guesses

about the true nature of God

She worked for years

at finding Gonzo of the very highest order

and piece by piece

put it in the vial,

to intermix as it chose.

Now, the vial is full.

And as she prepares to drink,

she suddenly feels her age.

(and why not?

Isn’t everyone around her ready

To speak of their aches and pains,

Of the follies of the young,

Of their plans for retirement?

So easy to be told

That the number indicating your years

Is an organic death-knell,

Real as Fate

(if only Fate were real.)

 

She is no longer a youth,

no longer young,

no longer certain of her ability

to handle the totally unexpected with grace and charm

and sex appeal.

She cries. But she has the wisdom of her years.

Despite all her work,

she knows what she must do

She carefully stops up the bottle,

and locks it away,

never to look at it again

(and so lost in Adulthood is she

That she doesn’t even feel IT seep through the vial

and into her body

kissing her from the inside

With the breath of change…)

~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!

My new book, “I Hate Your Time Machine”, is now available! Go pick it up!

 

 

The post Weird Vibes In A Vial appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.