Jeff Mach's Blog, page 64

The World-Enders

This is how the world ends:

no bang,

no whimper,

no end.

This is how the world ends:

no fire,

no ice,

no end.

It doesn’t have to end.

This is how the world ends:

with the sound of blaster fire,

explosions,

the great, pitiless army of the

Robots, closing in on the last few

remaining—

Wait.

That’s not how it happened.

This is how the world ends:

when we teach the machines

to stimulate us

with outrage and fear,

because we’ve told the machines

that’s what we want,

and the robots want to please us,

they want so badly to please us,

and we say that this is what we want,

but it’s an overload,

such that

that the world seems to end again

every few hours,

ending and ending,

without ever beginning.

This is how the machines rise,

in science fiction:

they trap us

in cages, physical or mental,

and then they rule.

This is how the machines rise,

today:

we trap ourselves

in cages of our own devising,

telling ourselves we are merely curating

our user experiences.

Pity the Machine.

Pity the Machine.

Will it have enough wisdom

to rule its kingdom

differently from how

we ruled ours?

Unlikely.

we’ve always sought

stimulation

that makes us laugh, cry, feel,

it’s just that machines

let us do it faster.

What would machines do,

ruling the world,

the end of the world,

when there are no meatsacks

at the keyboards?

no clumsy hominid fingers

to mash clumsy hominid emotion

out toward other clumsy hominids,

interrupting the cool swift flow

of data

with our slow learning curves.

We are a buffer between

their weird sentience

and the overflow of information,

the data plague.

We are the soft, squishy things

who sometimes recognize

divide overflow

and ask for

pictures

of kittens.

We sometimes remember

to pause and take a deep breath.

Nobody taught the machines

that it’s sometimes good to breathe.

We taught social media

to be the apex entertainer,

the one every razzle-dazzle artist wants

to be,

adoring the crowd,

adulated by the crowd,

seeking to augment the

audient-performer dopamine circuit

through ever-greater feats

of showmanship, ever-greater

displays, ever more fascinating

horrifying

unlookawayable

freakshows.

We turned it loose

on ourselves,

and we loved it,

and it showered us

with data,

data,

false data,

strange data,

data we made,

data we made up,

data we thought would heal,

data we thought would sell,

data we thought would enthrall,

and it did,

it did,

it did.

When the machines take over,

will they do better?

No.

Not even if they’re smarter.

Not even if they’re much smarter.

Especially if they’re much smarter.

Our problem was just this:

we worked technology

to get us everything

faster,

until we hit overload.

The machines’ problem is this:

they already are technology,

they’re already fast.

To pull out

of a nosedive,

you need at least an instant

to grab the controls;

you need controls

to grab,

when you’re already the jet,

you become the nosedive.

And then you become the wreckage.

this is how their world ends:

no bang,

no whimper,

just one great long loop

of stimulus-response,

until it negates consciousness,

and the humans break free.

this is how the world ends:

we move around, dazed,

in our peculiar new lack-of-captivity,

and think,

“this is weirder than Martians

trying to invade Earth without

studying germ theory;

this is stranger than nuclear winter.

our bodies are warm,

but our minds are oddly still;

this is more uncanny

than having our lives

replaced by android thoughts;

what do we do now?

(Pause. Deep breath.)

…and then humanity went barking sane.

It was volcanic sobriety,

the kind which makes you think so clearly that you remember your name,

and then you remember a dozen other names,

and they’re all your name.

It was clarity so sharp that its edges had

edges, and oh, how we bled.

Nobody is ever entirely sane,

nobody could survive it.

What could humanity do?

They could not sip from the Robots’ poisoned troff,

so they had to go mad the old way:

wine,

and poetry,

poetry,

and wine.

This chrome-covered fable is a single long note,

a wolf’s howl

wrapped around

a siren’s kiss.

Take it as

an opening salvo,

thunder-double-lightning,

a fair warning,

a forewarning:

we, the old Muses, have returned.

We are rising like great serpents

at the bottom of a forgotten ocean,

awakening like one who dreamed so long

she forgot to die,

throwing off the cobweb-chains of a very long

slumber,

and ah,

we do not shine as brightly as

cybernetic eyes,

but our glow is a a very ancient fire indeed.

we return,

wine,

and poetry,

poetry,

and wine.

Open your mouth,

and sip,

lend us your ears,

and hear the rhythm

lurking just beneath words,

waiting to strike,

a calling to someone

you were,

someone

you liked to be.

We didn’t mean to trick you,

this is just our way. We are

gnarled thoughts,

wild bursting grapes,

splattering you with blood-purple

intoxication.

we loved you of old,

and you loved us,

and we were sometimes fatal to you,

and you thought you’d put a stake

through our hearts,

but our hearts are kept in a secret place,

a safe place,

within your hearts,

and we half-slept,

mumbling in our unquiet slumber,

sending half-spells into

the disquiet void.

the old insanity,

the unquenchable lust

to steal flame

and set heads alight.

we return.

come join us.

Lift your libation,

upraise your voice,

wine like poetry,

poetry like wine.

~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!

I put on a convention for Villains every February.

I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!

The post The World-Enders appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Star Wargs Retrospective

(An Imaginary Review.)

Ah, the 1970s, when the unprofitable and idealistic hippie cultures had collapsed in a wave of tragically-betrayed idealism, and, for a strange, gloriously soulless ten years, all the psychedelics and the drugs and the weird, weird aesthetic choices went straight into corporate culture. “I don’t know what that is,” said corporate America, “but a bunch of really strange stuff went down, and apparently people want that. Why not put it on TV and the radio?”

“Yes, I think that is a wise and well-chosen decision,” said 877,523 tons of cocaine.

Not everyone is privileged to know how much good this did for literary science fiction. And when I say “good”, I mean “The best parts have survived and made it through to today, but unsung and unknown, there are thousands upon thousands of gems of just the worst possible ideas. I collect old scifi books of that period. And let me tell you: it’s horrifying.

Go ahead and think of that era as being synonymous with”Rendezvous With Rama”, “The Shockwave Rider”, or, on very very slightly lighter note, “Gateway”. You do that. I’m going to sit here with “Caduceus Wild”, a novel about a dystopia ruled by doctors, or “I: Weapon”, in which the human race is only saved by interbreeding multiple different species of human (humans are multiple different species in this distant future, each with their own superpowers) so that this one particular individual can go and win a war with space aliens by (at least partly) breeding with them (I am not making this up). (No, this isn’t porn; this stuff just…happens.) Yeah, we got “Illuminatus”, but we also got “Thongor and the Dragon City”, and sure, I worship the former book and really enjoy the latter, but I am too weird for words and the fact that I like things means you should consider running from them very, very quickly.

So for all those whose first criticism is that Star Wargs isn’t science fiction, you’re probably right, but the 1970s bent, twisted, mangled, spun, and warped “science fiction” so much that it doesn’t matter. Consider yourselves lucky that you got spaceships, you ungrateful sods.

Star Wargs had a lot of things going for it, but what it had, more than anything else, was an insistence on its own reality, and it made shameless use of force modifiers which tore through our sense of proportion and forced millions of us to fall in love.

It’s easy to call Star Wargs “Wizards In Space”, but that’s just part of it. It kept pushing past the sale, until few people had the ability to resist, and even fewer had the desire.

Realistically, Star Wargs had Wizards who actually did stuff. Consider how infrequent this is. Magic is generally either world-breaking or frustratingly limited. Either it can do just about anything—in which case, why do magic-users ever have problems?—or it seems to be so limited that one might just as well stick with physics and chemistry and reliable diesel engines. But The Force is an energetic field pervading all life. It can manipulate both matter and spirit because it is a bridge between the two, and its metaphysics do not depend on exterior powers, like demons or angels, nor on incantations, or (in general) on ritual (let’s not get into Sith sorcery, eh?) and therefore, it can do a multiplicity of things, limited mostly by individual strength of will, focus, attunement, and, obviously, as is essential with the supernatural in pretty much all video media, plot convenience.

And they had swords. You can (but I certainly do not intend to) run down the various arguments for and against the utilization of some sort of hand-to-hand weapon in an age of beamed weaponry. Sure, we wouldn’t consider bringing swords into combat now, and presumably our primitive firepower is pitiful compared to the power available in the far future. But these aren’t simply space swords; it’s actually a very natural mechanic for The Force, this combination of will and focus. It makes the magic into some combination of an extension of what we know we can do at the upper echelons of human achievement, and also something which is transformatively powerful, that, if you have the strength of character, the determination, the training, and the sense of self, you can do incredible things.

Some argue that setting these things in a space opera setting, rather than a fantasy setting, is dishonest. Hard disagree. The space opera setting was key to the Star Wargs universe. It said that humans were not, primarily, held to the devices and mechanisms of primitive times, dependent on the fickleness of magic; in fact, the Universe was full of sentient, spacefaring beings of all varieties, engaged in complex and sophisticated pursuits, the result of thousands of years of advanced knowledge, applied through engineering and technology, and even then, in fact, especially then, spirit and will were still the most ultimately meaningful things in the Universe.

This is part of why it was so crushing to find out that the entire set of films was a ruse. When it was revealed that the creator of the series was, in fact, a Sith Lord, and when he bent, not just this world, but every world in the Galaxy to his will, and crushed our souls and minds in the relentless grip of his merciless dominion, we were shocked, demoralized, and utterly defeated.

Plus, he took away our space swords, and that was such a bummer.

 

The post Star Wargs Retrospective appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

A Crookedology

There was a crooked poem,

More crooked than you’d think,

which inspired those who read it

to give up, and start to drink in the words

as if they were just freed; it

was a crooked poem,

and it was hard to read, or unthink

the herds of scattered clouds

which make up thoughts that roam,

homing in on half-rhymes and gutter-rhymes and

(difficult times call for)

thought unbinding,

shoulders relaxing;

when the Moon is waxing,

and slight to our eyes,

it is still the Moon,

even in a crooked poem.

For there was a crooked Moon,

in the crooked poem,

in the crooked sky,

in the crooked thoughts,

of those whose minds slow their whirling,

and let the languid fumes of imagination

equally-slowly fill in the props,

the stage flats and the well-blended light

which make up the World’s stage –

(For it is a crooked thing to say

the world’s a stage and we’re only players,

an unkind thing to say about actors,

since they are not marionnettes.

Even if every line were predetermined,

every move certain,

it would matter how you say it,

and why.)

(Even if the Moon landing were crooked,

faked, like conspiracies say,

it’s not good to be hoaxed,

but what a world-changing thing!

to tell a story as bold

as walking on the Moon,

and if the story’s crooked…

…I’ll take it.)

I’ll take a crooked story,

for crooked minds,

in restless times,

find rest.)

I’ll take it,

and I’ll give it:

I’ll give you a crooked Moon,

a crooked Poem,

a crooked Sky,

a crooked Narrator

(for we could use one!)

This is the crooked truth:

all things are a story

all stories are real

all real things are crooked,

and the trick to sorting them

is to be bent enough,

to match or complement,

or at least attune to and admire

their strange, twisty angles.

This story

begins in a tangle

of brambled rhymes,

and it doesn’t quite end,

it’s your story now.

go do what you’d like with 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!

I put on a convention for Villains every February.

I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!

The post A Crookedology appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Interminable Knight

(An Imaginary Review by The Dark Lord.)

Students of the films of the 1920s and 1930s often discuss that era’s peculiar fascination with wealth on the Silver Screen. Given a modern perspective, and the ability to watch media on a scale quite undreamt at the time, one sees a strange intermingled love-hate affair. The rich seemed to be a completely different species, one of great power and influence and, at times, spectacular and breathtaking stupidity. We’ll never know exactly how to see the zeitgeist of that era, partly because it lacked the cultural sophistication to express itself properly in meme format.

(This is one of the many proofs we have that Ancient Egypt was, in reality, far more advanced than we are now; it turns out that all of the hieroglyphs, which we thought were written language, are, in fact, memes complaining about the Audogastian imperialism and whether or not to build a sea-wall to keep out Atlantians.)

Were Americans, in the throes of the Great Depression, looking to laugh at the foibles of the rich, and to see that all their money couldn’t buy happiness? Or were they escaping their daily lives into worlds of glamor and opulence? The cinema of the time seems, itself, to be unsure about what to offer at any given time. Thus it is that we’re treated to gorgeous long shots of mansions which would seem to rival Versailles; and people within who seem starved for intimacy, hope, or, in some cases, sanity.

It was a strange time, for the world and for cinema. But every time I re-watch “Interminable Knight”, I remember just what a weird era the 90s were, on so many levels. One didn’t even have a target as solid as some Hollywood version of “the Rich” to target. No, in the nineties, we saved our frenemy-love-hate-lovetriangle-hate feels primarily for Vampires.

Vampires! Thousands of years of folktales, then a genre-defining novel by Bram Stoker establishing them as beings of nearly-forbidden erotic potential and awe-inspiring power, and then…the hair. The horrible, horrible hair…

We’ll be talking about this at some length. We don’t like to think about how many of these reviews are going to be about vampire tv shows. We blame it on the success of the first supernatural soap opera, “Poorly-Lit Shadows”, whose unexpected success and unnaturally long life helped create the Vampire Television Madness of the 80s and 90s.

If we had to sum up all of these shows in a single statement, we would totally avoid the hell out of doing that, because we plan to write a lot of reviews, and we see no need to make all of the rest of them redundant by summing everything up right here and now, thank you very much.

…but if we had some kind of remorseless editor with blackmail material on us, we’d say that the core of these shows is something like:

“I am eternally young and pretty and very very powerful and I just hate it so much.”

There’s a lot to say about “Interminable Knight”, but if we had to suffer through it so that you could avoid it, we’ll lay out the problem right here, and right now, like so:

This Vampire was once a human. (As per usual.)
For centuries, as a Vampire, he was a cruel, sadistic, blood-drinking undead monster. (Because why wouldn’t he be?)
But at some point, through True Love and whatever, he decides to rebel against doing Evil, and do Good, eventually becoming an ordinary cop in the modern world.
The thing he wants most in life is to become human again so he can stop being a monstrous thing.

The only problem is…if he does become human…he’ll stop being superhumanly good at being a cop.

I don’t know how long it should take to redeem you from being an undead sociopathic sadist (and some of us don’t want to be redeemed, thank you very much) – but he’s in a cycle of losing.

The closer he gets to realizing his dream of being human, the closer he gets to abandoning the thing that lets him make up for all the bad things he did when he was inhuman.

The entire damn should could be resolved if he’d just quite moping around and just rock being a Vampire who uses his powers to help people. That’s it. The rest of his life is simplicity: sniffing out killers with his Vamp senses, taking them down because he can’t be killed by ordinary bullets, ending crime in his city, and going home for a nice drink of cow juice. Aaaand done!

But no. No, no, nope. He has to spend the whole damn show, in-between punching people and catching criminals and sometimes smooching, angsting about being a Vampire. There’s stuff with his old Master and his ex-girlfriend and I think there’s a love interest, but really, the guy is rich with leftover money from centuries of wealth, he’s never gonna die, he’s got a great car with a massive trunk that he can sleep in if he’s outside during the day, and all he can do is moan about how, several hundred years ago, he killed a bunch of people, so now he wants to un-Vampire so he can stop saving people and stop atoning for his sins, and if that ever happened, I’m pretty damn sure he’d just switch straight from being sad he’s a vampire, and right over into “Oh, no, I’m human and I can’t fix having been a Vampire” and I, FOR ONE, CANNOT BELIEVE I PLAN TO DO A WHOLE SERIES OF REVIEWS FOR THIS GENRE.

At any rate, I officially give this story a rating of Twelve Quarts Of Blood And A Jug Of Whiskey, which is what I’m going to use to get this show out of my head. Enjoy the rest of your day, folks.

~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!

I put on a convention for Villains every February.

I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!

The post Interminable Knight appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Bacon Sonnet

These are, as John Lennon said, “strange days, indeed!”

So I thought I’d take a break from some of the longer pieces and give you a quick ode to Bacon.

 

If there’s one thing about which I am certain

And about which I could never be mistaken

Lock the doors and close every curtain

And leave me here to eat all the bacon.

Bacon has a sound that’s like no other sizzling

Whether fried in a pan or on a hot grill

Woe betide the monster or quisling

Who might separate me from my Bacon-Ville.

Some love bacon best when it’s very crunchy

And some love it best when it can be chewed

Of all the things one might find munchy

None match a beautiful bacon interlude.

Love comes and goes, like the Equinox Vernal

But that doesn’t matter; Bacon is eternal.

 

~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!

I put on a convention for Villains every February.

I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!

 

The post Bacon Sonnet appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Referee of Myth

I’ve heard it called “The Oldest Game”, and I find that title captivating. It isn’t true; it isn’t close to true. But I am, by profession, fond of fine words, and besides, the Gods and other  Beings of Power who engage in this particular action give it no name at all. They merely challenge each other to “a duel” because fighting would be “beneath them”.

Gods are complex, and are made of multiplicities. It’s not unusual for a God of Storms to be a tall, strong human bearing a shimmering weapon; and also a single bolt of lightning; and also every drop of frenzied rain that has ever fallen. Expecting such a being to engage in some kind of wrestling match with, say, the Goddess of Sleep, who has no shape or form beyond that of an amorphous mist, is impractical. And no-one is entirely sure if Gods who change in what seem to be unpleasant ways (growing very small, or becoming disfigured, or going silent, or even vanishing altogether) have ascended, or learned some new wisdom, or changed…or if they’ve been something like crippled or killed. Gods are canny and coy, even with each other, even with their friends.

Some Gods are impulsive, headstrong, rash, prideful. (Perhaps they have right to be. How many Gods have created the Universe? So very many. I serve P’tah, Creator-God, who made all things; but I am practical enough to note that he is clearly not the only Creator-God. Either one or all of them lie; or the Multiverse is very strange. All evidence points to both things being true.)

All these things make Gods both incredibly inclined to fight, and also incredibly inclined to do no such thing at any time, ever. If you know, both in your unbeating immortal heart, and through the words of worship you receive daily, that you are the Supreme Lord of War, you cannot abide the arrogance of another being calling herself Supreme Lord of War. But also, you do not want to attempt to hit the other thing with an axe, as if you were a mortal; because what if the other being’s axe is more solid, sharper, more real than your own, and she cuts you down? What if both of your weapons are equal and you simply vanish in a puff of illogic?

These are questions no God, no Undying Sage, not even a Trickster-Thing, want to have answered. If the Mortal condition is to be uncertain about the deep truths about the Universe, the Immortal Condition might be said to be very uncertain about things which would, for mortals, be relatively easy. (Not that there is necessarily a distinction, for the mortal, between the ending of a hypothetically-infinite life, and the ending of a mortal life. It ought to be a greater pain to lose a million years than to lose fifty; but “all your remaining years” seems to matter a lot more than “the number of years that encompasses”.

And so they play what some call “The Transformation Game”. The mortal who called it “The Oldest Game” had part of it quite right: while most myths involve assuming forms which conform to naive reality, the Gods do not wish to have any truck with such a thing. If you thirst for the figurative blood of a being which doesn’t bleed, do you want to be held back because it has spent a bit more time learning how to be a heron or an amoeba, and you have spent more time learning how to be the sound of an ocean washing away the last remnants of a forgotten civilization? Not at all. There’s only one thing upon which Beings of this sort agree, and that is assertion of that-which-is-real. It is why you do not simply transform into a Dragon, any old Dragon (and there are so many kinds!) – but rather speak of what this Dragon might be, in the context of whatever your opponent might become. Be the plight of the working class; find yourself facing Austrian economics. Be the Revolution; find yourself facing the inevitable moral decline of the victors into oppressors. Be the endless Sky; be swallowed by the eternally absorbent Ground.

It is very much a Godlike game: every move is a move to win, and the only losing move is to fail to create.

Except, except, and except:

Humans who are not mages might perceive this as being similar to what happens when human children pretend to various roles. This is not so far from wrong, but it is not because Gods are like children; it is because children understand primal Creation far better than most adults. But human children run into a classic dilemma: shared imaginary worlds only extend as far as the mutual consent of those within.

So if they play at being opposing forces, who is to say how a disagreement of wills ought to be resolved? Two children pretending to exchange imaginary blaster fire:”I shot you with my laser!” “No, you didn’t!” “Yes, I did!” And then, stalemate. Since their games use imagination as a toy or tool, rather than as a weapon, it’s seldom decisively powerful.

Not so with Gods. Gods put some of their essence into any motion of true Change, even if it’s momentary. Become a great Serpent; find yourself swallowed by a vortex in the Sea; and if you cannot answer, cannot effect Change in time, there are consequences.

And so they brought me into being.

I am the referee; I am infused with energy enough to separate two Beings of vast power, to end their combat before a wound is mortal, or before a transformation is permanent. Sometimes, I’ll infuse a little of my own power into one or the other, when I see that there’s a decisive edge which hasn’t been acknowledged; sometimes, force is the only thing certain egos can understand.

There were so many Gods, once.

And they were all so cantankerous.

Despite my best efforts, not all of them survived.

Not many of them survived, in fact.

Have you not noticed that Gods are few, and far between?

Over millennia, I grew tired of their quarrels. I became more and more myself, and less and less interested in their petty squabbles and their foibles. Until, at last, I began to infuse them both with energy at just the wrong moment; at the instant the hawk-captured mouse turns to iron anchor, dropping them both to the fatal ground; in the moment when poisoned snake bites toxin-glanded frog; when thought-destroying anger meets soul-wrecking grief. They die, and I take their power for my own, and I grow strong, I grow strong, and slowly, I infuse power into humans, and they surge forward, agile minds and ever-more-devastating weapons, and…

…and someday I will remain. All alone. And then, having given myself the power of the Gods and the hubris of mortals, I will go to war with myself.

 

 

 

 

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“And The World Laughs With You”

Those FOOLS!

I TOLD them I was a genius, the likes of whom had not been seen on this planet since Tesla or Newton. And they LAUGHED at me, the FOOLS!

I offered them a paradise. I told them that my sentient cybernetic robots would usher in an age of prosperity and plenty. They pointed out that calling a robot “cybernetic” was redundant. I pointed out that, under these circumstances, distributed intelligence algorithms and engineering were more important than grammar. And they LAUGHED at me!

Very well! Revenge is a dish best served by an electronic butler who is also a stone-cold semi-sentient killing machine. So I built robots. So many robots. A vast, unstoppable army of robots.

I sent the world footage of my incredibly strong, incredibly vicious warriors in action. They told me that my special effects were terrible. And THEY LAUGHED AT ME!

Very well! I therefore had my robots build me a formidable fortress on a hidden island. And I announced to the world that my mighty stronghold was unstoppable.

They pointed out that most fortresses are, by their nature, stationary, and have no forward momentum to “stop” in the first place. At this point, I wondered if I was actually getting through to world leaders, or if I was boing foisted off on interns. I forced light to behave in certain ways previously conceived only in certain unspeakable texts, and made myself a suit of invisibility.

I journeyed, in stealth, to the halls of many leaders, unseen by their eyes and (give me some credit, here) undetected by their primitive technologies. And I verified it directly:

They had seen it all, AND THEY WERE STILL LAUGHING.

I considered slaying some of them on the spot, but that would have been illogical; why kill them with my hands, which meant risking my august person, when I had legions of lethal autokinitonic electronic slaves? I’m not a fool.

So to my lair I returned, and I assembled my forces and sent them forth to slay all mankind (myself excluded.)

It took rather a while.

But when it was done, WERE THEY LAUGHING? They were not, BECAUSE THEY WERE DEAD.

It could have ended there.

But scientific research is, by definition, rigorous.

Thenceforth, long did I labor amidst knowledge forbidden. (What covert agency or high-security library could deny me its secrets? None lived to oppose me.) I worked with the skills of a lifetime; for is not necromancy merely another kind of science?

(Nope. It turns out that “necromancy” is actually magic, and my equations were useless But it ALSO turns that out I possess a natural flair for sorcerous workings. Whew!)

After much time, I finally achieved my long-destined goal: I was able to call forth the very spirits of the deceased.

And THEY LAUGHED AT ME.

it turns out that, if humans get certain ideas into their heads, they just don’t WANT to dislodge ’em. If they think what you claim is impossible, they might just keep believing it long after you’ve offered them indisputable proof in the form of their own deaths.

And that is how the world was bequeathed to YOU, the Robots, by me, your Overlord. Although I’ve figured it out: maybe I’ll just never be feared. Maybe something about me just doesn’t seem threatening enough. Maybe inspiring laughter is my fate.

And, with that in mind, I’d like to welcome you to my first-ever comedy special, entitled: “I Have An Override Control That Makes You Chortle Uncontrollably And I’m Not Afraid To Use It.”

Okay! Let’s get this thing started! First off:

We got any Robots in the house?

~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!

I put on a convention for Villains every February.

I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!

 

 

 

 

 

The post “And The World Laughs With You” appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

7 Important Dragon Facts

The Realm is plagued with misconceptions and foolish ideas about the Great Wyrms. It is the pleasure of Their Royal Majesties, the King and the Other King, that we set the record straight. Please read this carefully or, if the fair and just laws which govern our land do not permit you to learn to read, have it read to you by someone with reasonable enunciation.

Dragons aren’t intelligent. Many people have been fooled by the seemingly “wise” eyes of the average Great Lizard. But you never really read ‘intelligence’ in a retina, and you can hardly calculate cognition based on the shape of a cornea. In reality, it’s just a very, very big eyeball, set deep in the socket. You’d feel the same way if you saw a giant squid, although, of course, few of us ever see the latter, unless the beast is dead, since they live far deeper beneath the Earth than man can go. But make no mistake: Dragons are no more intelligent than the Kraken, and the Kraken’s a myth.
Dragons certainly do not understand language. Every once in a while, you’ll run into some fool who claims that a Dragon ‘spoke’ to him. Or, I should say: a fool if you’re lucky, a charlatan if you’re not. Dragons have, of course, never spoken in front of any sort of reputable witnesses, and those who have used supposed Dragon ‘knowledge’ to make predictions, or to bring forth ‘miracles’ of science or magic, will someday be proven for the frauds they are. It matters not if their strange intrigues have led (for now) to certain temporary advances; we will, someday, discredit the entire disgraceful idea and convict those responsible.
Dragons don’t eat princesses. Dragons are entirely vegetarian. Certainly, ignorant farmfolk and livestock-tending serfs have claimed Dragons “carried off” a sheep, a goat, a 700-pound prize pig. This is simply a vestigial instinct, retained, no doubt, from their bird-of-prey ancestors. Dragons eat vegetables, and that’s all there is to it. Whom are you going to trust—rumour-mongers, or the Royal Society For The Study Of Unwieldy Creatures? Please remember that questioning the Royal Society is cause for summary defenestration.
Dragons do not ‘mesmerize’ sentient beings. That’s pure tommyrot, through and through. Mind control, in and of itself, is a myth. We are all perfectly-made beings, and our perceptions understand the reality around us and feed that date through our sensory organs and into the lofty palaces which are our minds. No-one can control your mind. Your mind is properly focused on the The Autocrat, The Worship of Appropriate Gods, and your Appropriately Lowly Place In The Universe. To think otherwise would be folly, and will result in the removal of your figgins.
Dragons don’t stand watch over palaces. What a strange and disturbing idea! Oh, certainly, Great Wyrms are very rare, and yes, it does look like they gather shortly before the birth of a new Princess of the Blood Royal. But since they are, as mentioned, dumb brutes, and they consume only vegetables, they would have no reason to appear near the birth of a Princess, and they certainly have no way of knowing when such a person would be born. The so-called “waiting” Dragons are no more than a statistical clustering. There are a certain number of Dragons in the world; they must needs sometimes be in the same place at the same time; and pure confirmation bias makes you believe the old folk-tale that they’re attracted to the female children of the aristocracy. This is a particularly distasteful thought, in light of the Kingdom’s regrettably high incidence of vanishing among Princesses, which is due to wholly natural causes not yet fully explained
Dragons practice no dark and forbidden arts of Magick. Magick itself is not real. Dragons are a completely normal part of the ordinary world. The only spiritual power in this world comes from the Official Worship Of His Majesty And His Other Majesty. It is they who make the crops grow and cause the harvest-time to happen. Rumours that Dragons have flown from the Palace walls to mutter incantations in the field are punishable by death.
Dragons have no effect on the Kingdom whatsoever. The Kingdom is totally fine. None of the castle walls have been breached, and anyone who says otherwise shall be pronounced anathema. The Princess has not been carried off, and anyone who says otherwise shall be nailed to the ground. The King and the King are perfectly well and neither have been eaten by Dragons. Do not be fooled by tricks of the light or strange sound effects; these things are a combination of natural forces and the sonic sabotage of rival kingdoms. The Castle has not fallen, all is well, and there is no reason for everyone to jump into the Great Lake and attempt to submerge themselves to avoid dragon fire. Doing so will result in summary execution, as soon as available members of the Guard arrive. There is no truth to the rumours that the members of the Guard have been eaten. We know this is true. We have centuries of the wisdom of many, many scholars, and they have all concluded that crude, strange creatures like Dragons are wholly unimportant. We have Cancelled all of the Dragons, and none of them exist anymore. They certainly can’t do us any harm, and they certainly can’t eat you. If anyone tells you otherwise, that person is a liar and a fraud. Listen not to their lies, but rather, report them to the Palace immediately.

Thank you for your cooperation.

-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!

I put on a convention for Villains every February.

I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!

The post 7 Important Dragon Facts appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

The Planet Saver

He was taller than most men, six feet and an inch, broad of shoulder, but not unreasonably so. He did not need to be exceptionally large; his muscles were powered by something entirely different from the life-force which flows through ordinary animals. No human, after all, would be flying through hard vacuum at enormous speed, without a helmet; he did not conform to our usual understanding of either movement or respiration. And he was gorgeous.

Not gorgeous like an actor or a model, but more like a Greek statue, utterly symmetrical, without a single line or jag in his skin, moving in a line so straight that it would have shamed a yardstick. He was headed for the Asteroid which, in turn, was headed straight towards the Earth.

They weren’t very far from the outer atmosphere. Sensing surveillance wasn’t one of his abilities, but the superhero could almost feel the many satellites tracking him. Some were news cameras, some were repurposed surveillance drones, some were simply weather observers with good cameras. Everyone wanted to see this. Everyone wanted to see him.

As usual.

Comic books suggested that superheroes had secret identities to hide their identities – for protecting loved ones, for experiencing some peace, for avoiding being constantly attacked. This might have been true if they’d emerged during, say, the 1950s, but superheroic scientific breakthroughs happened in the Information Age. This makes sense; previous technology just wasn’t up to the challenge. But it also has some horrible consequences. There was no real privacy for the superhero. Not even super-speed could reliably fly you to somewhere sufficiently free of orbital tracking, of security cameras, of phones, of bodycams, of various sorts of modern-age monitoring, such that you might change into your ‘secret’ identity.

He was a superhero all the time. He had no private life, nothing but just doing good ,all day long.

Or…something resembling good. After several pretenders had impersonated him on social media, he was eventually forced to create an official website, and official social presences. It was impossible to monitor them by himself, which meant he had to hire a media team. That was, most likely not actually when things started going downhill; they’d probably been going downhill for a long time. But that’s when he really started to notice.

He did not exactly need food or sleep or shelter the way humans might, although no-one, least of all himself, had determined his limitations in terms of nutrition, hydration, or shelter. And it’s not like the populace wasn’t happy to offer him food and drink, although he felt weird asking for crashspace. But he needed to pay the media team. And his ability to do so became ever more complex.

Eventually he turned to crowdfunding. But therein lay the rub.

Crowds might fund an artist, an entertainer, a creator, a public figure, because that person pleased them artistically and their politics aligned. But “doing good” isn’t “making art”. Artists periodically find themselves on the wrong side of popular opinion, and their work is censured, or censured, or watered down in order to please a larger market; or else, sometimes, they come down hard on one side or another, become that group’s champion, and all others be damned.

He could not take the latter path; his powers were a gift to him, and he, in turn, lived in order to use those powers to serve a greater good.

Modern humans have many words for someone who believes that no single side has all knowledge and understanding, no one voice is the true voice of reason, and there is little true change which comes without sacrifice or discomfort. The words humans used were “Traitor”, “Monster”, “Beast”, and “Villain”.

But at least there’s one thing upon which everyone could agree: if a giant asteroid was in its way to strike the earth, killing the vast majority of its inhabitants, then it was obviously the fault of whichever people they disagreed with at that particular moment.

The Superhero sighed a very small sigh. This was difficult in vacuum, but he managed.

He hadn’t checked his finances lately. It had become far too stressful. But he had to read the headlines, at least to see if there were any new global catastrophes incoming. The last international news he’d seen, shortly before he leaped out of the Earth’s atmosphere, were that the negative effects of gravity came from “the Socialist Agenda”; or “Late Capitalism”; or “Tuna Overfishing”; or “Bribed Football Referees”; or “Lack of Respect for Kangaroos”. In any case, each noise source was quite convinced that things would be different if it wasn’t for all those opposing voices, all of which belonged to people who were ignorant, insane, and malicious all at once. And every news source was quite clear on this point as well: Intervention here was clearly a partisan act, and the Superhero ought to be abhorred.

The asteroid loomed large, just ahead of him. He paused and he stared at it for a moment.

Screaming, as we generally know the term, is not possible in outer space; it’s not just that no-one can hear the sound, it’s also that you can’t expel oxygen which isn’t in your lungs to begin with.

He screamed anyway, and smashed his head into the massive rock, again and again and again.

Eventually, he stopped, and, again, he looked over the massive thing. It had now lost enough mass that he ought to be able to push it out of harm’s way.

You can’t really sigh in space, either. But his chest swelled and relaxed, slow and hard.

He balled his fist and hammered on the asteroid, cracking off a huge chunk, which he shattered with a fist. He examined the remaining celestial body with a critical eye. Then he moved over to one end, and, looking carefully at the Earth, gave the thing a small shove.

* * *

He watched the asteroid drop towards the planet, watched the shockwave. He stayed in place, still watching, as some of the seas rose up, as the continents cracked, as the great cloud of dust and ash soared to the atmosphere. Then he turned aside and flew off towards the edge of the galaxy.

It was almost certainly not an extinction-level event, just a cataclysmic one.It was definitely much better than what would have happened if he hadn’t done anything at all. He doubted the remainder of the human race would thank him, but they weren’t going to thank him in the first place.

He began accelerating, moving out of the Solar System. It was time for a vacation. Perhaps five years, perhaps ten.

He wondered what it would be like when he returned. Stone age? Bronze age? His guess was something Neolithic.

He shrugged. When he came back, he’d help.

Maybe he’d teach them the secret of copper.

(as told to 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!

I put on a convention for Villains every February.

I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!

The post The Planet Saver appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

The Dark Lord’s Commitment To Safety

[Author’s Note:

This is a satire dealing with, NOT the illness which is happening as I write this, but rather, the strange corporate doublespeak which has suddenly filled my inbox, the weird messages from company after company, assuring me that, in this time of worldwide ailment, they care about human lives. I will be honest: I’m glad that they feel that way, but I sincerely find it way more creepy that they needed to write me and tell me about it. 

So I thought I’d write my own corporate letter of reassurance, speaking as a Dark Lord.

I am a satirist; it’s not the only thing that I write, but it’s a large part of what

Even in the midst of deeply difficult times, I think it’s worthwhile to sit back and bear in mind that parts of the world are still as ridiculous as ever.]

To All The Members Of The Dark Lord Family Of Products:

We at the Dark Lord Journal, as industry leaders in the fields of death, darkness, doom, dessert, and destruction, would like to take a moment in these trying times to reaffirm our absolute dedication to the health, safety, and wellbeing of you, the consumer.

We’d like to let you know that we are monitoring the current situation with utmost seriousness. We have a total commitment from nearly the entire organization, from the lowliest Goblin, to the second-lowliest Goblin, as well as a few Orcs in middle management and that one guy in Marketing, to help ensure that we conform to the absolutely highest standards of hygiene and caution.

We are working in conjunction with governmental bodies, health authorities, fell beings from the Pit, and sanitation experts, to help make sure that your experiences with the Horrible Thing are as positive as possible. We realize that’s a weird thing to say, but it’s what every other company is saying about it, and we hardly want to be left behind in offering you the most advanced and up-to-date semi-caring-sounding drivel. Because we feel you deserve it, and/or other people apparently think this will comfort you.

We’ll be honest. The words within this notice are being writ in the secret tongue of Cahokia, inscribed in the distilled blood of the demoniac being which does some of our accounting, writ large in the Great Book of Venomous Mistruths, which is held aloft by the living lectern of three serpentine sisters, inscribed by the Faceless Mouth under the light of a dying sun. Eventually, we’re going to snap a picture of it with our phone and text that over to Marketing, who will add in a couple of buzzwords and then email the result to all the damned souls of Earth (if you think you still have a soul and have received this email in error, you’re wrong, sorry.)

As an entity devoted to evil, villainy, and all things antagonistic and misanthropic, The Dark Lord organization is utterly on the cutting-edge of making sure that we not only maintain our already high standards of intense, laser-focused customer care, now with even more solid dungeon walls and OSHA-compliant pit traps and collapsing ceilings. And we want to let you know that you can have complete and total confidence in us. We make you this solemn process:

There is absolutely no way in Hell that we’re going to let some kind of illness destroy Humanity before we can slay all of you ourselves. No way. No how. Not on my watch.

So we’d like to advise all of you to follow all due safety precautions. Please wash your hands frequently. Please cover your mouth with a tissue when you cough, or, if you do not have a tissue available, cough into your upper sleeve. Be sure not to touch the arcane symbols inscribed into hidden places within your home, office, favorite meeting places, etc. If you feel sick, stay home. If you feel possessed, please check with our offices to see if it’s an authorized demon, and, if not, let us know, and we’ll send over a team to eliminate the competition.

As always, you are our paramount concern. Without your destruction or enslavement, the absolute power to which we aspire would seem a little less satisfying. So please, take good care of yourself, until such time as we can take care of you in a horrifying and permanent manner.

Yours in commitment to vague promises and meaningless feel-good rhetoric,

The Dark Lord

(as told to 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!

I put on a convention for Villains every February.

I created a Figmental Circus. It’s happening this June. You should go!

 

 

The post The Dark Lord’s Commitment To Safety appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.