Scourged (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #10)

by Kevin Hearne

Besieged,

Read this

I wonder if they have a fancy law or name for the principle that Humans Ruin Everything for Profit. Maybe that’s just capitalism.

Ya that sums it up

sort. It had taken her sixty ounces of beer to relax the tight control she kept over herself, and once she sobered up, she might not want there to be any living witness to her moment of vulnerability.

I just love this personality

“Because there’s a narcissist with a bunch of cronies who wants to burn down the whole world—your piece of it included—for no other reason than to stoke his own ego and profit besides.” “So, kinda like an American president, then.”

Coyote does not pull his punches

Me skills with nuances are often limited to being just aware enough of their existence to know that I’m probably missing them.

A feeling I know well

“No, he runs a bubble tea shop in Twatutia.”

Talk about a good life

If you’re a brave lad tunneling through a mountain, you’re not going to be terrified of something with a knife when you have a pickaxe. No, those miners had reason to be afraid, because kobolds can move the earth and collapse a mine, or pick up handfuls of magma to hurl at Druids’ heads.

Good to know more of the folklore

“Look! I make no plans for the future but to go back to my forest home again.”

That is about how much I can plan

“What? My secret desire to live on nothing but breakfast pastries? My growing addiction to anime?”

So glad I am not the only one

Pick a system—any system, legal or ecclesiastical—and you’ll start to wonder at how anyone could think it was fair. And then you’ll realize it was never meant to be fair but rather was intended to protect the interests of the powerful, and then you’re wading through a swamp of cynicism and your day’s ruined.

Stop reading my mind i know

Why should Gaia care precisely how people once behaved in Taiwan, or about the spiritual life of a mayfly in Connecticut, or about the deviant proclivities of an alley cat in Kathmandu? She will endure so long as the life upon her keeps reproducing. The violent tides of creatures eating, shitting, and fucking each other are what keep her alive. She’s not going to impose morality on that.

I like Gaia

I think my instinctive rejection of judgment comes from meeting too many people who say on the one hand that their chosen deity shall judge us all but then they judge me anyway, rather than leaving it up to the deity they profess to believe in and trust. That’s using religion to cudgel people into conformity, and it grinds my gears.

And the reason I don't want to go back too Christianity

I suppose what I’d really like to understand is our collective urge to focus on differences rather than similarities. I know our brains sort and categorize by default because that’s a survival mechanism—that mushroom’s good to eat, that one will kill you, that one will have you seeing wacky shit like mangoes and papayas complaining to pineapples that millennials are killing the fruit-juice industry. But despite this hardwiring, there has to be a way of thinking that will allow us to see nonlethal differences and celebrate them rather than point at them and judge them unworthy. For we seem to be ever running toward dystopias rather than the other way.

Those were a couple of the big colonial powers, along with the British, French, and Dutch, who used gunpowder and disease to make the world such a European bollocks.

Acurate to the loss of diversity

The problem with this is that I’m arguing with a force of nature. Humans have few redeeming qualities from nature’s point of view. I can’t appeal to Pachamama’s appreciation of art or music or theatre when she’s honestly not a fan of any of that.

Ouch that says a lot honestly and none of it is wrong

Huge part of the human economy is based on just in case, you know that? Insurance, condoms, diapers—it’s all just in case.”

Not wrong

<They are waiting for their chance. We must be vigilant.>

Like Obreon and squirrels

The danger of growing old is growing comfortable and complacent at the same time. We should seek out the new and strange and applaud it and throw wild fecking parties whenever it walks into our lives. We should be building roads in and out of our own wee heads rather than erecting walls around them.

A lesson we must work hard to keep up always

Siodhachan said Ragnarok could well be the end of the world, but I’m right glad he cocked that one up. If anything, it feels like a new beginning.

The true meaning of Ragnarok was to be the end of one world to birth another

<Remember Bingo the beagle, Atticus? He was worried about Dúghlas drinking so much and he had to save his human. I’m just doing the same thing here. Plus I’m worried about your bladder. It’s so tiny,> he said.

It comes around

“You often see the good you do as bad and just as often make terrible decisions in service to what you think is good. You are so wonderfully damaged.”

Sums him up pretty well