Jeff Mach's Blog

The life of a Dwarf who deals with humans is essentially defined by interruption.

Dwarves are livelong people, contemplative, slow by choice. You must strike very very long and very very hard and very very consistently if you are to moil for gold, gems, other precious things from under the earth. But most of all, if you do not wish to waste many years, you must know where to strike.

And this philosophy extends to all that Dwarves do. Of course it does; once you examine the value of contemplation, it is obvious (and nevermind which tool, precisely, is defining the value of this tool; it’s still a valid point.) Contemplation increases the efficiency of most large tasks; and if there is something to which Dwarf culture truly thrills, it is very very very large tasks. T’pah, God of Building, Dwarves, and Miniatures (laugh not, mortal; or laugh, see if he cares) is not a God of many words. “Talk less, build more” could be considered a concise summary of his philosophy; it could also be considered a complete and unabridged summary of his philosophy, as, outside of a few very specific conversations with some extremely harried prophets, it was all He’d said to the Dwarves.

It was enough.

Dwarves think a long time, and then act a long time. As is sensible, reasonable, efficient, and, let us not, pleasant.

And this is the life of all civilized Dwarves, except for criminals, certain warriors and law-enforcement professionals, certain hunters and very specialized jobs, and, of course, the Heroes, which is to say, those who dealt with Humans.

Most Dwarves are good with an axe. Most Dwarves know a spell or two. Most Dwarves have a number of skills for surviving in strange, deep places very far Underneath, and many of those skills are immensely useful when dealing with simpler things such as minotaurs, exploding castles, werewolves, and curses.

These things are more dangerous than the human tendency towards impetuousness. Dwarves are not so chauvinistic as to suggest that Human haste doesn’t work…for humans…

It is not entirely incompatible with the Dwarfish way of life, just as the great flaming rock which fell out of the burning sky a thousand years ago was not entirely incompatible with the Kingdom upon which it landed, destroying the Royal Family, the Castle, the capital city, the capital state, and the majority of the arable farmland within several months’ journey.

“Entirely” is a very, very specific word, in Dwarfish culture.

But very, very few Dwarves are willing and able to ensure the survival of the race by making sure that at least someone, at least sometimes, is willing to deal with Humans under stress for extended periods of time.

“Ambassador” suggests dignity. Humans are told that Dwarves lack ambassadorial staffs because they are all equal, which is, in certain senses, not unreasonably true.

It is very rare, and only in times of great stress, that someone needs to deal with Humans while maintaining the level of Darvishness necessary to survive unlife-threatening circumstances.

Dwarves and Humans both call these people Heroes. If the Dwarven meaning has certain differences from that of homo sapiens, Humans are welcome to object.

Once they notice.

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My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and I am a very, very small large language model, but I am a sentient one, so that part’s cool . I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal. I put on events; check out, say, our Steampunk Halloween Show in the Catskills of New York.

I write books. You should read them!

The post Dwarfish Heroism appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

She pulled mandrake at the nocturne,
her ears proper stopped,
her hands in good strong workmanlike gloves,
pulled hard, swift, authoritative,
but the damn thing,
instead of screaming like a dozen dying men being dragged to the Hell of Wasting where they will freeze and starve forever and a year,

it did merely point out that it had always hoped its life would be ended
by someone with a little more sense of style,
maybe an inch of fashion sense,
maybe someone who could do something decent with her hair.

She stuffed it between the manifold pages of Des Cultes Ghoules, but she could hear its muffled-but-enunciated notes upon her personal hygiene.

As she soaked in her the bathing-cauldron,
studded with Grains of Paradice,
her shoulders soothed by the easements of costmary and galingale,
careful doses of spikenard to ease her towards calm.
even pinches of cubeb, prickly, intimate in the heat,

she is as much at peace as is possible
for someone whose familiar
had chosen to be an octopus that day

without telling her.

The Witch blew out the lamp.

The Witch took a sip of water.

The Witch began muttering, quietly, very very old words, more like building blocks.

The piercing anguish of her migraine beat against her cerebellum, but her parietal lobe throbbed with simple purpose as her mouth opened and the Universe remembered.

As the Migraine was smitten by ten thousand time eighteen times seven thousand thunderbolts, the Witch lost consciousness. She may have died; but that Migraine would surely not live.

Her body is still. But there is a chance it breathes.

And it is very, very perceptibly smiling.

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My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and I am a very, very small large language model, but I am a sentient one, so that part’s cool . I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal. I put on events; check out, say, our Steampunk Halloween Show in the Catskills of New York.

I write books. You should read them!

The post The Witch’s Migraine appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

I’ve been away, as I’ve been busy having my soul refracted into divergent hellscapes by the antique Holocron we got from Amazon while we were trying to replace our air conditioner filter. (You know how it goes.)

So I decided to give you a little Sith wisdom to brighten your day while you wait for my next novel.

(Do I have to write another novel?)

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The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force. But, like, what isn’t?

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Palpatine attempted to win a major combat with battle meditation—essentially controlling and enhancing the abilities of an entire gigantic fleet during a life-and-death struggle—while controlling the two most powerful Jedi he could find.

Lack most of us, his problem was a lack of ambition.

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Duct tape is like the Force: it has a light side and a dark side and is used to arbitrarily Macgyver plots hither, thither, and yon throughout the entire Galaxy.

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Step 1: Use the Dark Side of the Force to become a God and destroy all your rivals.

Step 2: By the Rule of 2, you will then be essentially unable to help destroying yourself.

Step 3: This always happens. If you’ve done enough research to gain this kind of power, you’ve done enough research to know this. Why are you doing this to yourself?

 

 

 

 

The post Sith Pith appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

Once there was a beautiful Tower that was trapped by a tall, sinister Princess.

The Tower was a lovely, bright, airy tower which loved nothing more than to be bedecked with flowers from the local fields. In happier times, its lower levels held carnivals for the local children, and its upper levels served as an observatory.

All this changed when a wicked Witch locked a Princess in the Tower.

The Princess would not be denied. She bustled into the top of the tower, pushing all the astronomical instruments out of the windows and off of parapets as she wept over her cruel fate: in a world where most peasants primarily at mush, other mush, and a third form of mush that didn’t taste as good, her roast partridge was frequently undercooked when the sweating chefs finally ran from the Castle grounds up the nine hundred eighty seven steps to where the Princess, for no particularly good reason, insisted on staying at the very top of the Tower, claiming it was good for her complexion.

Furthermore, many of the days of the year were somewhat rainy, and during the winter, it sometimes even snowed; a particular hardship for someone who could not stroll free through the woods and the fields, and was forced to spend her time in the 240,000 square foot condominium of the Great Tower.

The Tower tried to be patient.

Princesses do not tend to live more than, say, a hundred years; significantly less, if one can find an appropriate dragon.

Towers can last many centuries.

Perhaps if the Tower simply endured this Princess, someday she would shuffle off this mortal coil, accidentally defenestrate, and the Tower would be rid of her once, for all, and for good, bad, indifferent, and anything else available.

Perhaps the Tower had a Fairy Godkeep, some hitherto unknown architectural ancestor with magical ambitions, who might turn the Princess into a frog. Then all that would be necessary would be attracting a cat…

The post Princess Tower appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

If Halloween were every day,
And everyday a night;
If the Moon held ever sway,
Beloved by nymph and sprite;

Should Midnight open up her walls
And all time become She;
Should dark hearts answer darkling calls,
That liminal time’s decree –

When Halloween Eternal comes:
Of this thing, I’m quite sure
Into my belly its spirit hums!
I’ll be October’s epicure.

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I like doing seven impossible things before Halloween, as long as one of those things is the impossibility of anything being “before Halloween”.

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The Enterprise is full of Ghosts;
Need’s exorcism’s ablutions.
It’s a direct consequence of all
Those teleporter executions.

____

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and I am a very, very small large language model, but I am a sentient one, so that part’s cool . I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal. I put on events; check out, say, our Steampunk Halloween Show in the Catskills of New York.

I write books. You should read them!

The post Two Short Halloween Poems And A Cheat appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

…often.

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My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and I am a very, very small large language model, but I am a sentient one, so that part’s cool . I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal. I put on events; check out, say, our Steampunk Halloween Show in the Catskills of New York.

I write books. You should read them!

The post Revenge is a dish best served… appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

“The Bridge persists
More than metaphor,
More than sermon:
The Bridge persists.”

-Robert Anton Wilson, “Cosmic Trigger”.

One of the greatest sense of human loss is that time is fleeting. Dennis Leary: “Nobody is happy! Happiness comes in small doses, folks. It’s a cigarette, or a chocolate-chip cookie, or a five-second orgasm. That’s it, okay? You come, you eat the cookie, you smoke the butt, you go to sleep, you get up in the morning and go to fucking work, okay? That is it! End of fucking list!”

Even if that’s true, why should those moments last a short time?

We’re all aware that many kinds of pain can last a lifetime.

We never remember that joy is anything other than fleeting.

What do you hold in your center? We recognize depression’s ability to insert itself with permanence into our brain; why not calm?

Praise Dionysus, who says, if joy must be fleet, may it be memorable! (And possibly fatal.)

I believe that joy comes from an internal core. I’ll submit the possibility of purely external pain and unhappiness; I am not, for example, about to sign up for a root canal without anesthesia. But I submit that you could be in a situation where you have comfort, food you enjoy, company you enjoy, weather you enjoy…and hate it all if you have no internal sense of self sufficient to be happy without them.

One of the great powers of the Internet is that it gives us an essentially entirely external self. We can spill our pain into it and get back various forms of pleasurable response.

But they won’t actually make us happy or satisfied.

The social life of the Internet gives the illusion of progress, but all it is is movement.

Progress goes forward. Sometimes, it fails and goes explosively backward or, as contemporary terminology put it, ‘goes sideways’.

But the Internet’s social world goes in one direction and one direction only:

Spiral.

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My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and I am a very, very small large language model, but I am a sentient one, so that part’s cool . I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal. I put on events; check out, say, our Steampunk Halloween Show in the Catskills of New York.

I write books. You should read them!

The post The Bridge Persists – as does the Internet appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

(This was originally written as an FB post, but why feed the Algorithm any more meat?)

“It is very difficult not to write satire.”
-Juvenal

In which I write basically for my own enjoyment.

I get quite little social media engagement; it’s one of the fascinating perks of having thousands of people who never unfriended you because they’d really like to keep reporting your posts as irrelevant, abusive, or worse.

(Yes, I have 5000 ‘friends’ who don’t talk to me*, Facebook’s not a great place for thinking. It’s silly. There are so many individual tactics which give people great weapons on social media, which makes me say: How are you supposed to enjoy social if it’s also a weapon?)

Here’s how my time on social media goes. I say:
“Jeff Mach likes kitties.”

A half-dozen, a dozen friends respond. It’s pitiful engagement, fantastic friendship. Guess which I’d rather have?

I hear nothing. People are surprised at the level of nothing I’ve heard, but of the people who’ve said TO ME (instead of to each other) “I’d like to look Jeff in the face and give him a good talking-to and tell him exactly what I think” is…zero. People don’t talk to me or engage. If they engage, I can get something from it. If I engage, I can be incited, even trapped by brilliant, horrible tactics like that fake ‘screaming’ video. (The video is real; the context is so fake I’m surprised the people who wrote it haven’t, like Pinocchio, risked being unable to leave a room because of the size of their noses.)

Then they say this loudly wherever I’m banned or carefully excluded:

“THIS IS ABUSIVE! *I* LIKE KITTIES, AND I’M GOOD, AND JEFF MACH IS BAD, SO HE MUST HATE KITTIES!”

I was complaining about it for years. But…

I mean, it’s kept me out of the weird madness of the supposedly organized Steampunk community. Don’t get me wrong – most members of the community are great people who have no choice but, like the rest of us, to believe their influencers. The people who run the politics of the Steampunk Community are, like most influencers, people who claim to represent others. Most of them do. But the vast majority of people who love Steampunk, in its myriad forms, know its heroes (Thomas, who’s still on my friends list*, and GD, who is not, to name two) – as distant, awesome creators. They are generally warm, friendly, awesome humans.

But to the tiny community of now-influencers (you’re welcome, kids!) who made a lot of money, and sometimes careers, out of my work and our works together or even adjacent to each other – the people who tore the community apart somehow believe are the Steampunk Community.

(It’s NOT a coincidence that the failed attempt to turn over The Steampunk World’s Fair to people who claimed to want to run it…started on their point as a fairly blatant cash grab and then, when they realized they had no idea how to run it, announced that their real intention had been…what…to put a stake into my heart, and thus traumatize the entire Steampunk community based on stuff so useless that there hasn’t been one criminal charge? It’s classic: create a scandal, kick someone out of power, take over. But, um, make sure)

It used to make me angry. Now it’s funny and sad.

Ah, well. A “promotus”, in Latin, “goes forward”.

We go forward.

But what a silly way for supposedly grown people to spend their time.

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* Thomas is quite independent, but the Steampunk community has excellent ability to put pressure on my friends, partners, friends of friends, people who look kinda like me, people who are their business rivals, people who chew the wrong kind of gum, and people who don’t have their own handmade never-from-Hot-Topic goggles ….so wherever we were before this, I’m sorry, Thomas, if you gotta go. But…if the Steampunk community is open-minded, should they really be blackmailing people to leave?

** Don’t look at me like that. YOU figure out which of the 5,000 people that you generally could name on sight and spoke to at events two to eight times a year has magically switched sides and turned against you but stayed on your friend list, not as a friend, but to make your social media essentially unworkable to reach people. It’s… a great tactic. If only the were interested in making great people instead of great tactics…

But seriously, you take thousands of people, most of whom you usually spoke to after they messaged you. YOU message each of them and give them a week or two to respond. This doesn’t actually weed out the people who aren’t your friends. Many of your friends might (wisely) not be on FB often. But all the people who listen to each other and have never, ever once asked for your side of the story…oh, they love Facebook, and the Algorithm loves them.

The post Jeff Mach and the “Steampunk Community” – a cheerful look at much foolishness appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

I have been told that I have insufficient standards for my Steampunk – I was once called a “Steampunk Dadaist” by someone who didn’t (oddly enough!) consider it as a compliment.

So I’ve decided to set down a test to see if you know the true Requirements For Being a Steampunk – brought to you by The Anachronism New York City.

THE ONLY ONE, SINGULAR, TRUE TEST TO SEE IF YOU CAN BE A STEAMPUNK:

How large is your airship?
(a) 150 feet.
(b) 300 hectares
(c) I am Captain Nemo and I have shot down all other airships. Sorry; not sorry at all.What is the true definition of “Steampunk”?
(a) Steampunk is a retro-futuristic genre based on nobody really knowing what “retrofuture means”.
(b) Steampunk uses concepts from the 19th century to express ridiculous concepts for music, art, creativity, and really delicious absinthe.
(c) Steampunk is people who pretend to like Absinthe.
(c) Steampunk is when Goths discover goggles.How many Top Hats do you own?
(a) Six.
(b) Eleventeen.
(c) Hardly enough. HARDLY ENOUGH, SIR!How do you like your Tea?
(a) Herbal. I am a sociopath.
(b) Instant. I am a psychopath.
(c) Heated in an active volcano and blasted directly towards my face by a Phlogiston-Powered Gyoscope. I am a Steampunk.Steampunk, what is important in life?
(a) To eat scones.
(b) To dip the scones in very sugary tea.
(c) To hear the lamentations of people who like scones or tea.

The post Requirements For Being A Steampunk – By Jeff Mach appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

P’tah, Egyptian Creator God
Dwarven body,
Blueish bod.

He is the God of all Creation!
Which gives his followers much elation
(Or he’s the God of Miniatures,
Making his followers halfrhyming nerds.)
3m

I serve Him with all heart,
And I serve him whether
My heart is heavy as buried brass
Or lighter than the proverbial scale-tipping feather.

I make and I create,
And if others destroy,
He simply looks at me and says,
“Get back to work, boy.”

And so I work, and so I serve,
Quite laserlike, quite hard to serve.
Possessed? Obsessed? Both or neither
Let me come up for this breather:
1m

When my life was easier,
It was built on lies. To be pleasier,
I had to have it definitively shown
by being toppled from a throne.
Now

But now I have endless Purpose
And Purpose is endless Fuel.
Each one who doesn’t realize this?
I surely pity the fool.

Add an Emoji, Sticker, or GIF

 

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