Jeff Mach's Blog, page 67

The Best Speakeasy In New York

There I was, with a bunch of tourists, because really, you can’t go anywhere in New York without the bridge-and-tunnel crowd (If you aren’t hip enough to the lingo of Manhattan, which is the only place that matters, and by Manhattan, I mean Brooklyn, and by Brooklyn, I mean the right part of Brooklyn, and at any rate, if you don’t get the jive, “bridge and tunnel” people are those who want to enjoy the cosmopolitan delights of The Big Apple, but actually live in significantly less worldly parts of the world, like New Jersey, and need to access that island metropolis from other land masses, e.g., by one of the bridges, or one of the tunnels. I am from New Jersey, technically, but I access Manhattan via dirigible, of course.

I should orient you in four-dimensional space. I am currently in the hippest possible place and time, which would be to say the here and now which contains me, and I am impeccably emulating somewhere hipper, namely, the past. And I am perfect from top to bottom.  I have a slouching fedora which would be the envy of The Continental Op, Lew Archer, and Sam Spade put together; in fact, you’d probably need to put them together, as it’s large enough to fit at least three heads. I’ve jammed my own skull into it with the simple assistance of a few pounds of rubber cement (suffer, suffer for fashion, or it isn’t fashion) – and I’m wearin’ cow shoes. Yes, cow shoes. They’re old-style patent leather footgear with ordinary soles, onto which have been grafted fake cow hooves so that clever detectives trying to track down my illicit alcohol trade will be confused by my footprints.

I am authentique.

(I am not actually in the illicit alcohol trade, as Prohibition took place a century in the past, but if that trade still existed, I’d passed the interview just by walking through the door and tipping my gigantic hat.)

The tourists, mostly, seem to be dressed as G-Men, assuming that the G-Man’s traditional uniform is badly-worn polyester men’s semi-casual. Technically, it’s a kind of suit, so you’ve got to give them a point for trying.

Maybe half a point.

The rabble are out ahead of me. I’m trailing behind them. I suppose I could duck into a cafe and wait until they’re gone, since our timing is semi-coincidental; we’re all trying to get to the Speakeasy at midnight. They’re doing so because they think that’s when it starts; I’m doing so because obviously I was invited to the pre-party, but I’m showing up to it three hours late, because who wants to be the poor sucker who gets there first, when nobody who’s anybody has arrived?

But there’s no need. Anyone who sees me with this group and thinks I’m part of this group isn’t anyone worth my notice.

They’ve got their phones out, because none of them have memorized the instructions, despite the fact that they were told to keep in the spirit of things and be discrete. It’s fine. We’ve arrived at the laundromat. It’s as seemingly-nondescript as we’d expect. The ‘security guard’ does an impressive job of ignoring us, even as one of the world-champion loudmouths near the front saunters up to him and ‘nonchalantly’ asks him where we go if we’ve got ‘very special laundry’. The guard keeps staring blandly off into the distance as a discrete finger—not a bad touch—motions us off to a collection of fairly ratty-looking fake fur coats on a rack in the far corner of the room.

We push our way through, to find ourselves in a vision of sequin-spurting opulence, Hawaii Five-O style. It’s like someone took a Tiki Bar and put it on top of a Tiki Bar. Most of the group detaches itself immediately and heads towards the center of the room, where some people in rental tuxedos are pouring drinks and listlessly tipping matches into them to set off the 151.

I need a drink. But I’d rather swallow sterno than this stuff.

I spend a little time assessing how many Tiki Gods are likely to smite anyone who stays here for more than about twenty minutes, and I am just concluding that the answer is “far too few” when a handful of the slightly-less-ignorant among the original party detach and heard towards the payphone booth in the corner.

Close-up, the booth is real, but the phone’s just drawn on. We push through, and as the not-terribly-secret door opens, I note that the foyer’s fairly dark, which is not a bad touch. The tiki bar was distracting; we weren’t exactly subtle going towards the phone booth, but nothing about the last place was subtle, and the drinks were heavy. We won’t be missed.

Actually, the room’s not fairly dark; it’s unfairly dark, in that I’d need to either pull out my phone to see what’s going on, or I’ll have to hang close to the ninnies. Or so I think, until a voice booms out,

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”

Someone, rather melodramatically, flares up a torch.

The place has a reasonable approximation of stone walls, stalactites and stalagmites, primitivist paintings scrawled on various surfaces; it all looks natural. The suburbanites are impressed. I’m not. We really should’ve been greeted in the original Greek, and really: Plato’s Cave? That’s a one-note joke; a little clever, a little cutesy, and each and every member of the staff has their own, personal idea of how one ties a toga, and the most you can say for it is that any accidentally-bared flesh is obscured by the poor visibility.

There are statues of a number of Greek Gods (eight, by my count; apparently, the room’s designers couldn’t count to twelve. Also, one of them seems, unaccountably, to be P’tah, the Egyptian God of Miniature Gaming. I’d ask someone why, but I don’t care.)

The others have pretty much settled themselves on barstools on top of (what else?) some of the aforementioned stalagmites. It could be worse; someone might have thought it funny to have no seats at all. There were no further instructions, but clearly this isn’t the final destination. A few brave holdouts are studiously examining the statue of Bacchus (not everything worthwhile is obvious, kids), but I go straight to Mighty Aphrodite (because I love to drink.) Her mouth is slightly pouty, which some might associate with sex, but to me, it looks agape, which to me suggests agapē. I peer respectfully between her lips, and with a great rush of air, she pulls me into her mouth and transports me somewhere else and I find myself standing in a large corridor, with two doorways, one labelled “Hell” and the other labelled “Jersey City”. Without hesitation, I walk through the one marked “Hell”.

I can tell pretty much immediately by the prices above the bar that it was a trick. Damnation. But there are some positives to Jersey City. On the one hand, the beer will be terrible and the food will be vegan, and on the other hand, I can probably get a seat with a decent view of the Hudson. I will say that the joint is perfect; it looks like something right out of 1925, only cleaner and with better electricity, and less chance of getting into a fistfight with F. Scott Fitzgerald. I make my way to the bar.

“Who do I have to kill for a drink?” I ask the disinterested, muscular fellow whose main goal in life appears to be to see how long he can pretend to polish the same glass.

“Perhaps you’d like to see our starter menu, with a wide selection of amusing and cruelty-free specials created personally by our head chef, Frank.”

“No thanks,” I reply. “I’m just here to drink.”

“For eighteen bucks and seventeen cents, you can go on upstairs, where there’s going to be a live band. Their name is an unpronounceable series of Babylonian curses, which cannot be written down and which are spoken in tones too high for the human ear to detect.”

“No thanks, I hate music,” I assure him. “Got any artisanal whiskeys?”

“We do a very refreshing lemonade which uses soy lemons instead of actual lemons. It’s a specialty of the house. I recommend it.”

“You’ve got a liquor license, right? You serve alcohol here?”

“Of course. This is a bar,” he says, favoring me with the sort of look one normally reserves for those from Long Island.

“So what’ve you got to drink?”

“Not a damn thing,” he replies. “Every couple of hours, we get a new shipment of bootleg gin, which is immediately followed by a bunch of 1920s Prohibition Agents who smash up all the bottles and take half the patrons into custody. You’re going to be lucky to get out of here tonight with a broken nose and a stiff fine, compounded with a hundred years of interest.”

I lean back, putting my feet under the bar-rail and my arms behind my head, and I allow myself a faintly satisfied look.

This, I note, in the back of my head, this is is hip.

_____

~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 Best Speakeasy In New York appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

An Impulsive Princess

Once upon a time there was a Princess who wanted to fight the Dragon instead of being eaten by it, and this caused even more problems than you’d imagine.

Let’s not even begin to consider how angry this made her father, the King. He stomped around, ranted and raved and roared. He appealed to her better nature. He pointed to the high cost-of-acquisition for peasants. Nothing helped.

And don’t get me started on the reaction of her other father, the Other King. He was royally pissed; it was a bespoke level of pissed-off, the sort you could only get handmade from very snooty old businesses who put big signs in their windows saying things like “Anger Purveyors To Royalty Since 284 B.C.E.”

The knights attempted to dissuade the hell out of her. Sir Persephone, their leader, pointed out that she, herself, had begun training as a knight at the age of four, thirty years ago, and had considerable preparation for Draconic attack, whereas the Princess was only nineteen in the first place, and, as Sir Persephone pointed out, she had refused to learn to ride any way but sidesaddle, which was not practical; furthermore, while the Princess had a lovely haircut, those glorious flowing locks wouldn’t fit into any sort of helmet.

“Got to have a helmet, Princess,” said Persephone’s Sergeant-At-Arms, Daphne. “It’s hard to evade that first gout of flame, and if you don’t, you’ll want the armor. It can handle one, maybe two blasts of Dragon’s Breath, which is between one and two more than you’re going to live through, especially and particularly if it sets your hair on fire.”

The Princess replied that, as this was an enlightened kingdom, and she had studied extensively and been tutored by the very wise, she had been told that there was nothing she could not do, if she put her mind to it. The knights looked at each other uneasily, and it was Sir Guinevere who pointed out, “Really, the idea of that phrase has always been a general note on human potential, and less a  specific formula for determining individual human capability for a specific instance of thing at a specific point in spacetime. It isn’t meant to cancel out out the roles of such things as practice, training, planning, and, in individual cases, inclination.”

But the Princess was, to put it simply, not going to be budged. Meeting in their private chambers, the King said to his husband, “She gets this from your side of the family, you know.”

The Other King replied, “I tried to offset that the best I could. The Royal Surrogate is notably both brilliant and practice, and has a family history of solid wisdom and practicality, whereas the both of us have a series of unfortunate congenital challenges due to severe inbreeding.”

The King looked at him sternly. “There’ll be no inbreeding here, sir.” At this rather charming reference to their first date, the Other King was disarmed. He sat heavily in his chair.

“Realistically, no-one wants to cement an alliance with us through the ancient method of matrimonial succession. The crops are only so-so, the peasantry exceptionally surly, and this castle is draftier than most. Why not let her fight the dragon? We can always adopt a successor. I mean, she’s our daughter and I love her, but she’s impetuous and brave and quirky. We thought that would serve her well, should she ever need to rescue the kingdom from some kind of enchantment, and that’s probably true; I’ve no doubt she’d make it past multiple puzzles and eventually gain the necessary magical components for fixing the situation. Those are specialized skills, which is sensible, given that we had the Knights to handle more combatative matters. In retrospect, we should have been more insistent in martial arts training anyway, but she was so very firm on learning the secret names of the trees and the song which summons the King of Eagles.”

“To be fair,” his husband replied, “that would be terribly useful against a wide variety of beasts. It’s not anyone’s fault that Dragons consider Eagles to be the perfect amuse-bouche. Realistically, you can’t know which dangers will befall a fairytale kingdom. I think we’re well set-up against Wicked Queens and Evil Fairy Godmothers, and the Seven Dwarves in the Wood have all moved to more gentrified neighborhoods here in the capital, where, indeed, their vegan smoothies are assuredly the finest in the land.”

“I prefer Snow White’s Artisanal Applesauce, myself.”

“Whatever. The point is, this is very sad, but inevitable, and so we should just continue drinking heavily.”

“Honestly, nothing in this conversation was going to stop me from doing that to begin with.”

So the Princess went out to fight the Dragon, which ate her and left, and the Kingdom mourned for a bit, and the Kings adopted several new heirs-apparent, attempting to train them in a variety of skills for a variety of different situations while developing reasonable rules of succession based on different contingencies, some of which were quite good, some of which were flawed, and they didn’t really figure those things out except through practical experience and the process of making some mistakes. Nobody automatically lived particularly happily or sadly ever after, but they tried to aim at happiness, and at least they put some thought into what they were doing, which is more than you can say for most fairytales.

All in all, you might as well consider reading this story to be time well-spent; even if you’re not satisfied now, the crucible of memory fires fickle sparks, such that, given time, you’ll potentially realize that this there’s a homely little charm about this particular kingdom, and you might even want to read more in the future, and perhaps buy the author’s books. I’ll tell you right now, in the magical principality discussed above, a basilisk is on the way, and that’s going to cause no end of etiquette questions.

THE END, or, more precisely, AN ENDING.

~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 An Impulsive Princess appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Skinshifter’s Lullaby

[Author’s note: I use this journal almost entirely for full stories. This one’s different – it’s a vignette from something I wrote sometime back. I thought put it up for you to chew on.]

The fangy-clawy-furrish of guy sipped his drink and watched New York cook. It had been burning for several days now, and somebody was bound to notice soon. He leaned back a little further and drank again. When things like this happen, you find out who your real friends are, and his real friend was gin.  Gin was the kind of buddy who didn’t leave you just because you happened to be a homicidal predator from beyond the reaches of primordial memory. He’d come to appreciate that, lately.

He looked at his hands.  My, Grandmother, what long nails you have.  You’re in serious need of a good manicure. Or a cursebreaker.  He stared disgustedly at his body, peering at it through yellow, leonine eyes.  Yesterday, they had been blue.

…no, not yesterday.  Several days now, perhaps two weeks. Two weeks, hah! Two centuries, for all it bloody mattered.  He was losing track of time…or, really, time was coming back to him, all at once, and he was having trouble figuring out which bits of it he was supposed to be dealing with right now.  This wasn’t fair. He’d been perfectly fine being a human being, or at least as fine as being human ever gets. It suited him. Something scratchy in the back of his pineal gland seemed to recall that he’d been human for centuries—many humans, actually, one after another, living and dying, claptrapping through time and galumphing through days.  He hadn’t been…this. Not for quite a while. You were supposed to be bitten for this to happen. That’s what all the good modern mythologies said. It wasn’t supposed to be part of some long-forgotten deal with something that wasn’t even a Goddess anymore.

You sing one song too many to the big pretty thing in the night sky, you make one promise late at night, soon after your tribe discovers the effects of fermentation on the juice of long-gathered fruit, and you end up with a skin that suddenly shifts at some indeterminate point in the Apocalypse? That’s idiotic; there has to be some kind of statute of limitations on forced reincarnation.

He hadn’t even been able to take this shape in this lifetime, or the last several. He hadn’t even known he could, much less that it would, one day, become entirely non-optional. All of his bodies had been 100% genuine long-pork homo sapiens for millennia. But Magic doesn’t forget, doesn’t even bother to care.  He swirled the remains of his peace from the glass, draining it without feeling.  No, Magic doesn’t give a rat’s ass, it’s just down with the sun and up with the White Lady and your teeth curl and your muscles swell and the animal’s fur sticks out of your body and every bar of soap you ever bought becomes thoroughly worthless and is it any wonder a werewolf howls at the moon?

(Lycanthropy: It puts hair on your chest.) He laughed, throwing his head back, and then he felt something nearby and turned around, slow-like, hand clenching reflexively on the glass, incidentally shattering it in his palm. He felt a touch that was no touch—and immediately dropped the bits of crystal to the grass and looked away. His past lives were fuzzy at best (he was fuzzy, at best), but more than one shaman of more than one of more than one of his tribes had gone off into the night to keep these things from their communal fire. He remembered that much. They hadn’t generally come back. He remembered that part, too.

What passed him then had no name in any remembered human tongue, no body in any particularly physical sense…but strange, nameless parts of him could feel its presence nonetheless as it broadcast a dissatisfaction, an anger, an inbred abhorrence of all things, a hatred as senseless and elemental as the last thought of an infant in convulsions. It had a soul powered by lunar energy and a mortal loathing of, well, mortals. It was drawn as he was, but though different reasons, to the weenie-roast of the City, and then, like him, brought to this hill because the Moon was wrong.

That mortal loathing, he realized, as its presence wrapped around his flesh, very much included him…

…and it touched at the animal core of his brand-new heart and was instantly gone.

Not destroyed, gone.  He could still feel it, but it was moving away from him…slithering along ley lines like voltage through entwined bodies And his senses showed him now a single thing, branded across the being’s core: fear. He scowled.

He would have given three or four right arms (someone else’s, of course, but it’s the thought that counts) for another drink.  Not long ago, not too long at all, something like that…he wouldn’t have credited its existence, less realized it was there…had you told him, as he died, that a continent of frost was suddenly growing on his still-warm heart, he would have wondered why his last moments had to be in the presence of a lunatic.(Although he would never know this, in point of fact all of his

previous incarnations had indeed died in the presence of one or more persons of the reality-misaligned variety. It was in the contract.  Sort of a karmic foreshadowing. But I digress.) Oh, yes, things were a little different before. But today was not yesterday.

Today was not yesterday. This was no good; that was Wolf thinking – direct, practical, simple, true, and frustrating to the pulsating, thought-spitting human parts of his mind. He growled, something he was quite good at these days. Lord, he needed another drink.  His first wanted to play bridge and needed somebody to be West. He scratched his shoulder absently, an action which would have torn a twelve-inch furrow in any normal flesh, and sighed.  He’d waited long enough.  He knew what the ley-line hunter had been sent for, and he doubted the thing would make it.  It was the last of several he’d detected—no two of them alike in form, but he recognized kin when he saw it, and he figured that, if this was the best that could be done, they were in trouble. Besides, he could feel the call himself. He’d been procrastinating, resisting it, but he knew damn well he had to go sometime, and it might as well be now.  He squinted at the ruins of the George Washington Bridge and trudged off towards the roasting, crumbling, thriving city, singing softly about frustrations, the selling of souls, and bloodstained hands.  He was pretty sure Mick Jagger would have understood.

~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 Skinshifter’s Lullaby appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

A Small Response To The Owl’s Eye Blog

As a note for those who don’t know me:

I am sometimes accused of just about the most horrible things possible. There’s a blog which actively collects/encourages/creates allegations about Jeff Mach. Depending on how you read it, some see it as incontrovertible proof that I’m evil; some see it as incontrovertible proof that some people have a huge grudge and no evidence.

I’m not going to spend much time, now or in the future, talking about the Owl’s Eye Blog. I think this is a moment when it’s essential to address and clear up some basic misconceptions. But in general, we are looking to help make a better community, not stand around arguing. I’m going to speak my truth, and this needs to be said:

I’m NOT a rapist. I’m NOT an abuser. I’m NOT a “predator”. And putting together a hate blog doesn’t make me those things.

I spent over 20 years building communities. I helped fandom businesses thrive. I helped people find performers, performers find an audience, helped vendors grow. And–like a fan-run company should–we paid out the majority of the company’s income to staff, performers, creators, contractors, sound and light, the people who made the events happen.

I was extremely active in the kink community. I was outspoken in a lot of areas pertaining to consent. When that community started to get hit with a deluge of complaints about consent, I was one of the most visible people around and, in particular, I’d been outspoken about the need to believe accusations.

But I’d always tempered that with the need to investigate allegations, as well. Believing the accuser means not shaming the accuser, not dismissing the accuser–it does not mean that every anonymous allegation on social media is true.

One of the ugliest things about all of this is that in collecting a mass list of any story it could find, from anywhere, removing them from context and inserting its own opinions (“It seems to me this story means…”) – sources like the Owl’s Eye Blog have made it pretty damn impossible for me to speak to and address anyone who might have been in any way hurt by anything that I did. Their voices have been drowned out, not by me, but by the flood of invective that’s been hurled around.

I thought that by being silent, I would let any voices that needed to be heard come to the fore. Instead, in my period of silence, there’s been a flood of angry noise, and an overwhelming pattern of creating fear.

Fear of me; fear of peoples’ political rivals; fear of anyone who opposed these blogs and the people behind then. It’s nearly the end of 2019; by now, you almost certainly know people who are afraid to come forward with their stories because they fear not matching the right narrative or not saying the right thing; you know people who’ve been hurt by Internet fury; you know people who’ve been damaged by this mob behavior.

Let me put some core pieces on the table.

I’m not a predator, an abuser, or a monster. And do you know what made me start coming forward about that? When I saw that those words weren’t being used just to hurt *me*. They were being used to hurt *anyone* who fell out of favor. My name was attached to events I wasn’t running to try to sink those events. It was being thrown at people to keep them in line with particular groups or cliques. Have the kink communities, the Steampunk community, any fandom communities been the same since this went down? No. Have they been better, now that I’ve been away? No. They have not.

Have I stolen a bunch of money, made it “disappear”? HELL. NO. Simplest proof? THAT wouldn’t be a rumor; that would be a crime. If you bought tickets, bought vendor space, bought sponsorships, you almost certainly did so via credit cards or checks; a fairly small percentage of people bought tickets at the door in cash, but that’s the vast minority of our business. And that’s been investigated quite thoroughly.

The value of a cake is not in the flour or the water or the eggs; it’s in the cake. The value of a painting isn’t in a pigment; it’s in the painting. The value in events is in those events. This is part of why people who have a real stake in a fandom-sized event do not cancel that event. It takes people who truly believe that they are canceling someone ELSE’S event, that THEY won’t be held accountable, to cancel an event.

You know what? I was prepared to own whatever names people wanted to throw at me, and live a quiet life, if I hadn’t watched whole events get torched within a few months of what initially happened to me.

I’m not here to save the event world. I’m not perfect, and I’ve never claimed to be. I am a person who wants the same things I’ve always wanted: to try to make better fan communities, and to try to run events and make a living for myself and others. I want to fix whatever I can, improve whatever I can, and build whatever we can build with our crazy fandom dreams. But I’m also someone who’s been put through the wringer by an angry social media world, and I’ve come out the other side. And THAT means I’m not afraid of social media mobs anymore. And that, in turn, means it’s my job to stand up to Internet bullying–yours, mine, anyone’s. You’d do the same thing in my position.

I won’t be bullied. I won’t tolerate the bullying of others. I WILL, absolutely, have respectful conversations with anyone who wants to talk, and I WILL seek, now and in the coming years, a chance to address and right any wrongs, and fix and change and improve anything I can.

And I WILL keep putting on events, keep writing books, keep making art, and keep speaking my truth.

very truly yours,

Jeff Mach

The post A Small Response To The Owl’s Eye Blog appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

The Goblin King Goes Good

Once upon a time, there was a Goblin King who wanted to turn good.

This was no easy proposition, for he lived in a world where Good and Evil were quite clearly defined, and anyone peering in from another Universe would have been able to tell, within the span of a two or three minute montage, which side was heroic and liked adorable babies and rescued kittens from trees, and which side would have made penguin-kicking the official national sport of their kingdom, if only their kingdom had penguins.

He called unto him his Court Shaman. She arrived in a dignified hurry. (A Shaman answers only to the Gods and is thus above the King. On the other hand, the King had a habit of removing the heads of those who made him wait too long, and despite her close relationship with divinity, the Shaman had no real desire to meet the Gods early, nor felt overly comforted by the thought that, if her ruler had her executed, there’d be a lot of smiting taking place around her dead body, because while revenge is sweet, corpses, technically, can’t taste anything.)

“I wish to become Good,” the King said without preamble.

“At what?” the Shaman replied, slightly perplexed.

“Not at anything. I wish to become Good. You know. Compassion for others. Liking pretty, delicate stuff. Doing nice things for the heck of it.”

The Shaman blinked. “Empathy is a reasonable survival trait. And delicate things are most definitely not aligned with any particular moral value. As for doing nice things for the heck of it, you don’t particularly need m help for that. You could, you know, just do nice things.”

The King shook his head. “No, no. I’ve been reading these novels from other worlds. Goblins are obviously evil by their very nature. We’re just monsters. I need you to brew me up a potion that will change my internal alignment and make me Good.”

Goblins have very long necks, which mean that when the Shaman turned her head to one side, it gave her the same sort of lopsided look you’d get if a gigantic German shepherd were very, very confused.

“Sire, there are a number of logistical problems involved in this enterprise—”

“MAKE ME GOOD, OR I WILL SEVER YOUR CRANIUM WITH AN AXE AND USE IT AS A BASKETBALL!”

“Unwise. Axes make terrible basketballs.”

“YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!”

“And also, I’m pretty sure that having me killed for not doing what you wanted would be fairly evil, and thus self-defeating. And that’s before we get to the part where if you slay me, you don’t have anyone who can make that potion, seeing as how we’ve conquered all of the neighboring Goblin tribes and I’ve either slain all of my rivals, or made them swear allegiance to me.”

The King’s face took on an ugly expression, which was, to be fair, its normal position in the first place. “Loyal to you and not me?”

“Shaman answer only to the Gods,” she replied primly. “If they’re loyal to me, I can try to make sure they don’t do anything the Gods would really hate. If they were loyal to you, you could go around me, and you’d get the whole kingdom smote. Besides, you know I can’t unseat you.”

They both stood in silence for a moment, remembering Queen Deathbydeath, the only being in recent history to be both earthly and spiritual leader of Goblinkind. It turns out that if the Goblin high-priest is also the ruler, she can speak to the Gods directly, as if they were neighbors. It also turns out that the Gods really, really, really hate that. She became living proof that not only can lightning strike the same place twice, it can strike the same place one hundred eighty-seven times, all in rapid succession.

“Very well,” the Goblin King said at last. “I’ll take the potion.”

“No problem,” said the Shaman. “First, I’ll need the blood of a dozen babies, and⁠—”

“What?!?”

The Shaman’s shrug was enigmatic. “It’s one of those cosmic irony things. I think the theory is that you could try to do so much good, after you’ve changed, that it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“That’s a lot of pressure.”

“Being Good isn’t easy.”

The Goblin King looked at his throne, made from the skulls of several dozen enemies, and replenished frequently because skulls are really a terrible building material. “Evil’s not exactly a bed of roses either, you know.”

“More like a bed of thorns,” the Shaman agreed. “Now, before we begin, I’d like to know: What’s your plan for dealing with the whole problem of motive?”

“What do you mean?”

The Shaman turned her palm up, in an isn’t-this-obvious gesture. “If becoming intrinsically good is important to you, then your reasons for doing so also matter. Are you becoming good for entirely selfless reasons, purely because it’s the only good thing to do?”

The King hesitated. “I…don’t think so? I want to be good because, you know, Good is Good. It does the right things. It wins in the end. It eventually defeats Evil and things turn out okay.”

“So…sort of a cynicism thing? If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em? You just want to be good for your own selfish advantage?”

“What if I want it altruistically for all Goblins?”

“Well, all Goblins are, apparently, all evil. And wanting good outcomes for evil creatures is definitely evil.”

“You mean, I could drink the potion that turns me good, be good, and do good things, and still be evil?”

“Of course. The only way to truly become good by drinking a potion to begin with is to already be so good that you can’t possibly be trying to become good through the use of magic or other enhancements.”

“That’s idiotic!”

“Completely, yes.”

The Goblin King sat back heavily on his throne, which was (if he had to admit it) quite comfortable, even if bits of it did occasionally crunch. He called out to the Lord Chamberlain: “What’s my agenda for today?”

“Beheading some enemies of state, quaffing mead, playing golf, sir.”

He looked over at the Shaman. “What do you suppose would be different if I were Good?”

“You’d be beheading a lot more enemies. Good is very talented at finding people who need to be killed. So you’d probably have to skip the golf.”

The Goblin King sighed. “All right, Shaman. Thanks for coming by on short notice. I think we’re done here.”

The Shaman nodded. “I wish I could help, but the metaphysics around this stuff are pretty poorly designed.” She then yelped, as a very small lightning bolt slipped through a window and narrowly missed her, disintegrating a small plant. She glowered out the window and up at the sky. “Some help YOU are!”

The last rays of the sun died peacefully on the sharp shards of the mountains of the West. The moon began to rise. It was going to be a lovely night.

~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 Goblin King Goes Good appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Cancel Culture’s Lies of Omission

When I was part of Cancel Culture, instead of a heretic and a whistleblower, the basic logic seemed sound: if you were sufficiently indoctrinated with Cancel Culture dogma, you knew that the legal system did nothing but fail those who needed it most, that the law had never helped anyone, and the only thing keeping us safe was vigilante justice.

(Nevermind how many oppressed and marginalized people, how many vulnerable people, how many innocent humans had their lives destroyed by what we used to call “Judge Lynch”⁠—this time it would be different, because the right people were running the mob.)

(A note for future generations: Mobs always say this. And it’s basically always a lie. Don’t take me at my word – Google it for yourself.)

Let’s assume the “right” people run those rage mobs (they don’t, but let’s assume.)

Let’s assume their causes and beliefs are ‘correct’, and have the effects they desire (they don’t.)

Let’s assume the mob can do a lot of things the law cannot (they can!) and that giving the mob that power has, both historically and recently, been a good idea (nope; see Emmett Till, Leo Frank, Ricardo and Alfredo Flores – just to name a couple) –

even if we assume all of these things, let’s just look at a really simple fact:

When you tell half a story, you change the meaning of the whole tale.

Say your professor was lecturing about famous white supremacists, and said, “We must never forget how horrific the white supremacy and various bigotries of the KKK have been, and how they succeeded in terrorizing many people, organized with single-minded efficiency to harm lives, and had the harming lives, and were able, for many years, to accomplish their mission of terrorizing and killing people.”

And you tweeted, “Today, my professor said, “The KKK was a successful, efficient organization with many accomplishments.”

You’ve completely changed the meaning of what your professor said. In fact, you’ve basically reversed that message.

But it would make a great, viral message, stirring up plenty of outrage. People would compliment you for your bravery in coming forward about it, and it would be taken as proof that the world is full of monsters.

Only you, your classmates, and the professor would know it was not true. And nobody would believe your professor–the doctrine’s already in place that one doesn’t speak to, or reason with, monsters. Your classmates might know, but who’d speak up? Who wants to be seen as aligning themselves with your monstrous professor? Who wants to take that level of heat, trying to explains what really happened? If people are already willing to believe the worst, and they are, why would they want to hear a contradicting narrative?

Half a narrative is very convincing. But once we remove any obligation to write something more complete, once was say that we need to believe in the horrors without questioning where they came from–worse, once we say that asking the speaker to detail those horrors is an act of aggression against the speaker, that the speaker cannot tell the full truth lest they become the target of some form of retaliation–

We build a framework of lies.

And one unquestionable lie is an ugly thing. Because you can pile any number of greater lies on top of it, and call it true.

In this case, the speaker is a liar. And anyone who has thought through this process will recognize, not all those who speak are liars, but that we need to require proof from those who speak, or we’ll encourage the ever-greater, ever-expanding power of liars.

And that hurts everyone who is trying to tell difficult truths. It hurts those with the courage to speak, those with the courage to listen. Know whom it doesn’t hurt?

The liars. The liars get off with nary a scratch.

The intentions are good here. But validating lies of omission doesn’t help victims, and it doesn’t help prevent predators.

It just gives a different kind of tool to a different kind of predator.

Take warning.

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On The Fires of Inspiration

Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, invoke the Fires of Inspiration.

Those flames are no metaphor. They descend back from the moment Prometheus stole us light and heat, Coyote stole us the blazing playtoy of the Gods, Hephaestus (lamed and shamed by his family and his lover) stoked high his forge in order to make new things, to bring solid metal into the world where once there was nothing but unforged sheets of pewter and copper.

Perhaps its unlit where you are, perhaps physically. Perhaps you don’t know how to kindle a flame, neither with tools or with, and maybe you think you haven’t fuel.

Come with me. Slide through your physical skin, guided by the surprising omnipresence of your pineal gland, and find it: the fire within you is no metaphor. It’s not always kindled by the finest things in life. Sometimes it’s given spark by regret, by sadness, by anger. Doesn’t matter; all kindling is kindling, and kindling sings the bonfire that is inspiration.

And inspiration’s not always kind; what lover is? I can’t speak to yours; of mine, I know this truth: if I burn it hard enough, it shares with me its sears and scars, and I read that strange writing and make it into words I can share.

If I die writing, if I die seeking inspiration, then I’ll die with my words living on. Read them if you want; they will live after me, the parts of which I’m proud and the parts I wish I’d had time to change properly before my death, and that’s enough immortality for anyone.

Here’s my credo. Use it if you wish:

I burn, but the words fly free.

I love, but the words fly free.

I know pain, but the words fly free.

I know pleasure, but the words fly free.

I have lived to make words into ideas, and ideas into a chance to change our reality, and it’s enough, O, kindred, it is more than enough.

Give me joy, I will write.

Give me terror, I will write.

Give me anger, I will write.

Give me an army raised against me, the wind at my face, the elements themselves outraged at my mere existence; and I will write, I will write, I will write.

Onwards, my friends! To the next story we go!

~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 On The Fires of Inspiration appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Pandora Unrepentant

My name is Pandora, and I would do it again.

You may have heard that I was near a box, given to my lover by the Gods. He was told not to open it, and like a fool, he did exactly as he was told.

Bear in mind that we were ancient Greeks. Much is made (by some) of the fact that our Gods were powerful, but not all-powerful (when they made war on each other, there was none of this weird idea that ‘everyone knows who will win, but we’re doing it anyway’; how strange your concept of Apocalypse appears to us!⁠—and they were, oh, let’s say, flawed.

(Much is made of the way that Zeus, greatest of the Gods, slept with many mortals. It’s said, now, to be a commentary on his immortality. I can’t speak of the morality of his actions, but ascribing human motivations to inhuman beings is a strange way to draw conclusions about humans. Humans ought not emulate the erotic habits of the Gods, because, and I will tell you this from personal experience, the Gods are so much better at sex than we are that it’s pretty much as if they are a different species, and they probably are a different species, and I really don’t care, and I’ve got another date with Athena tonight, and that’s all I’m going to say about this.

But that, while (divinely) lovely, is not the circumstance to which I refer.

No, if you know my tale, you know that this box, given to my would-be human lothario by the King of the Pantheon. He was told to keep the box shut, and he did, and this is because he was good and pious and righteous and dull, dull, dull, stupid, unimaginative, dull, and if everyone was like him, we’d have no more species. Trust me: I’m more likely to have babies with Athena than with that uninspired, sputtering torch of a man. It’s a good thing I’ve a certain ingenuity, and a hot neighbor as well.

(Oh, worry not for my husband. I do not mistreat, nor am I mistreated by him. It’s not that kind of story. I suppose I’m not faithful to him in body, but he’s not faithful to me in mind; and if my flesh touches other than that which was consecrated through the marital ceremony, the contact leaves marks in no places he’d care to tread. And if he sparks no fire in my head, why then we are even, he and I, and I’ll leave him to worship and moderate wine; and make sweet Dionysus mine. But those are other stories.)

So if you know the tale, you know it simply: the box contained all manner of human miseries, and in my curiosity, I unshuttered the chest, and thence did evils uncounted enter the world.

Ah, but here’s the lie. It’s said that the single remaining thing was ‘Hope’, a small mercy from Zeus. Some say that, too, went into the world, and thus we had something to counteract all the newly-flown ills; some say I shut the box just in time to keep that one thing within, and therefore, hope was never lost to our control.

This is wrong in every possible way, and it gives much, much too much credit to Zeus. (Who, by the way, isn’t bad at courtship, but he’s not exactly an inferno of wisdom himself. Again, it’s steel-eyed Athena who ought be credited with excellence in that department; in fact, I might list more than a few of her talents, but we’ve no time for digression, as I’ve got a very pretty dress and a very sharp sword, and I must make ready with the both of them ‘ere she picks me up at sundown in a wolf-drawn chariot.

Zeus is just subtle enough to know that if you give someone a box and say “Don’t open it,” it’ll get opened. Which ain’t exactly an impressive feat. What he didn’t understand is what humans would do with the lesson.

He thought we’d all say, “Behold! This is the peril of the restless mind; now henceforth shall we be passive, lest again we wake demons and heartbreak.”

Zeus is an idiot.

The real lesson we took was,

“Wait. Wait just one amphora-swiggin’ minute here. You’re saying, if we mess around with things we don’t understand, if we mess with the forbidden, if we play around with That Which Man Was Not Meant To Know, we’ll unleash forces we can’t even begin to imagine right now?”

I don’t think there was a box, basket, or urn in this city-stay which wasn’t opened at least once. I think something like a tenth of the population perished in the next week in a series of reckless, utterly foolhardy experiments. But considering the intimate nature of some of the experiments, the net growth of our population was most profound.

What Zeus never intended was that someone like me (and, dear hearts, so many of you mad lovely freaks are like me) would bring into the world a drive of boundless curiosity.

And though the Gods have tried many times, they have never been able to push that back into the box.

Because it was never in the box to begin with. It would never have fit; it’s not the right shape, not the right size, and it is absolutely not going to stay in any box long, no matter what the Gods wants.

I’ve many more stories to tell, but not now. The sun falleth slowly into the sea, the evening grows dim, and I see Athena’s chariot with, if I am not entirely mistaken, Dionysus sitting shotgun.

Got to go. I’m really curious about what happens next.

love,

Pandora

(as told to Jeff Mach)

____

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 Pandora Unrepentant appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

An Absolute Refutation Of False Allegations Towards Jeff Mach, My Friends, My Work, and My Life

On the false allegations against me (Jeff Mach): a declaration of purpose:

(First, a note: For those tired of hearing these things, I’m sorry. I can assure you that, unfortunately, I do not bring these things up because I am living in the past; I bring them up because they are hurting quite a lot of people other than myself, right now, this minute. So please, bear with me – in fact, read on, and share.)

For two years, I’ve fought like hell to avoid saying, “These allegations are false, and they aren’t simply a problem for me; the ‘consent culture’ and ‘cancel cultures’ I once served are large-scale destructive forces, whose benefits and positives, if they exist, are obliterated by their followers’ adamant insistence that there ARE no flaws, there ARE no negatives, and anyone who says otherwise IS the problem.”

Because it is, and has always been my belief, that over the course of 20 years in public life, I have made mistakes. I surely must have hurt people sometimes without knowing (and if, sometimes, people hurt me on a larger scale than normal, that’s part of being a public figure). I have worked to keep that door open, to try not to erase the voices of those who might really want to speak.

But that choice no longer exists. My holding back has not lessened anyone’s pain; it has only emboldened those whose loud, toxic certainty that I am a monster has drowned out any other quiet, hopeful voices.

The door is always open to those who want to come to me, or a neutral third party, or a mutual friend, or a mediator–whatever you want, within reason–to talk about these things.

But my own time fighting with one arm tied behind my back, my time holding my tongue, my time keeping the guilty secrets of the #cancellation mob and the ugly secrets of the so-called consentistas–that’s done, done, DONE.

From this day forward, I will be a speaker on cancel culture and broken ‘consent culture. I will appear on your news show, blog, or podcast, as long as I have a reasonable expectation that I’ll be given a fair chance to speak. I will write and speak my truth. And whether or not people censor me, ‘deplatform’ my work, or try (despicably) to harm me by hurting innocent members of the community – I will not be stopped. You could take away every piece of social media I have, and I will write more books; you could take away my books, and I will take my message, one on one, to every individual, every publisher, every journalist, every place where it is appropriate to speak one’s mind.

Cancel culture is broken, and it needs to be replaced by conversation, discussion, and an understanding of human imperfection. It needs to be destroyed, because it no longer helps those it swore to protect.

Along the way, I will write a lot of funny tweets, create fun events, sing songs, tell jokes, laugh at myself, and try to bring into the world some entertainment, some joy, and some humor. Nobody needs a humorless moral crusader, certain of his own rightness; but we sure as hell need people who’ll stand up to the mob.

And I will stand up to the mob. Not because I’m a hero (I am a Villain, and don’t you forget it!) – but because they have already cast me into the fire, and now, I am no longer afraid to burn. The fire in the soul is blazing.

This will be an adventure, my friends. Not a humorless moral crusade, not a moralizing, preachy political message, but a massive battle against an implacable foe against impossible odds.

And it’s a deadly serious subject, but Gods, we’re going to have some fun on this adventure.

Dearest Cancel Culture:

I, and my friends, and the silent thousands you have hurt, terrified, gaslighted, maligned, and otherwise harmed, we are your extinction-level meteor.

BRACE FOR IMPACT!

yours very truly,

Jeff Mach

Dark Lord,

ex-Witch-Hunter,

ex-Consentista,

The post An Absolute Refutation Of False Allegations Towards Jeff Mach, My Friends, My Work, and My Life appeared first on Worlds of Villainy.

Advice From An Old Monster

Come here, little hellspawn. Flick up your ears and perk your antennae, and for a moment, settle at least a few of your legs. Soon enough, we’ll take the meat from the fire and we’ll have us a feast, just like in the old days, but first it’s time for you to learn a little wisdom.

Don’t roll eyes four through seven at me, young creature. These things are important. It’s the prerogative of the ancient ones of our clan to teach the younglings a little about the world. And I know, it’ll go in three years and out several of the others. You’re not likely to think too hard about any of this stuff until you’re bigger and engaging in your own blood-hunts under a shrouded moon. But for now, I’m still the elder beast here, and the price of this carefree camping trip is a little grownup talk at the end of the day.

Indulge me, if you will. If you’re not prepared to see this as the wisdom of our species, then see it as one of the few remaining pleasures of the very aged; I can’t very well climb trees (not unless I want my massive frame to snap every branch) – and I’ve not the energy to run back and forth from the depths of the swamp to the centre of the forest’s ugly, enchanted heart ten times a day just because I’m chasing some particularly interesting species of insect or a particularly tasty morsel of Faerie. (You could’ve saved some for me, you know. Nevermind; I understand the growling stomachs of your age. I was a larva once, myself.)

So what I’ve got left is casting guttural primal magicks into the sky in the hope of someday destroying the sun, and occasionally boring the youngfolk with my tales. That, and naps. Naps are so good, youngster. Take my word on this. But where was I?

Ahhh. History.

Now, I know some of my generation say that we shouldn’t be using human technology, but don’t mind them. A century ago, the oldsters were were saying we shouldn’t create dummy factories to blast smoke into the atmosphere. Fifty years ago, they were afraid humans landing on the moon would forever disrupt our relationship with the Lunarians. Today, they say you shouldn’t have the Internet. Balderdash. Sure, some species discovered and then harnessed fire, and others of us just spit it naturally and never had much to do with technology, but that doesn’t mean technology is bad for us. What it really is, child, is fear of change, and that’s no good. Because change will come whether or not you want it, and being afraid of it just means you’ll be less happy when that happens.

But that’s not my main lesson. My main lesson is this:

Mankind⁠—yes, Mankind, that murdering, pillaging, world-destroying, self-destroying, rapacious, greedy, angry, untrustworthy, prideful, foolish, dangerous species⁠—calls us monsters.

Us!

They think they’re people and we’re monsters!

Because they don’t want to see it. They don’t let themselves see it. In their arrogance, in their pig-headed dogmatic idiocy, they don’t understand the truth:

All sentient beings are murdering, pillaging, world-destroying, self-destroying, rapacious, greedy, angry, untrustworthy, prideful, foolish, and dangerous. That’s part of sentience. We also have certain positive qualities, and if you live long enough, as I have, you might get to see them, every once in a while. Maybe. If you’re lucky.

Ain’t no angels out there. Well, there are, but the Head Office is awfully cagy about just what percentage of them are fallen angels.

It’s not “us” against “them”. It’s always “all of us” basically against “ourselves”.

And that’s good to know, because believing that you’re doing good and right and you’re surrounded by fiends, why, that’s basically the definition of Hell, ain’t it? No reason to go there early; we’ll all get there some day. And we might just find out that we’ve been lied to about the management.

Now, before you go off to that snug hole in the ground we dug earlier (and don’t forget to put some webbing over it, unless you want some nitwit wildlife falling in just as you’ve dozed off)⁠—let me summarize:

Don’t spend your life trying to figure out who’s on the right side of history; just remember that everybody is someone else’s nightmare. And the more you grow a thick skin about it, the better you’ll sleep at nights. Worry a little less about “Good” and “Evil” and a little more about “Stupid ways of being smart” and “Slightly less stupid ways of being smart”. Trust me on this one. Or don’t; figure it out for yourself. Just take this to bed with you:

We’re all monsters. Might as well enjoy it.

~Jeff Mach

____

I write books.

I put on a convention for Villains.

I created a Figmental Circus. You should go.

 

 

 

 

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