Jeff Mach's Blog

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.

___

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

____

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.

____

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.

___

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.

_______

* 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

 

The post Purpose: A Tiny, Silly Ode To P’tah appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

I am undead, but I’m autistic.

When I point out that it’s very, very hard to kill the Undead, I’m not taunting you.

I may be indulging my desire to be mildly pedantic, but I’m not taunting you.

If you didn’t want me to keep coming back

and coming back

and coming back

and coming back

you,

um,

shoulda just stayed my friends and not stabbed me in the back, you know?

You knew me.

You knew I wasn’t ever, ever going to stop.

And all you did was become more sick, more foolish, more insane, more spiteful, and more hateful.

You, um.

You think you can really really hurt the Undead?

You can. But it clearly hurts you, too. If I cared about either thing, I’d think I was winning.

I care about making stuff. You care about destroying stuff.

You can seriously hurt me until I’m dead, friends.

It can’t possibly hurt as much as being you.

The post It’s Very Hard To Kill The Undead appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

There was a secret banker, more of a Uranium-sniffer, actually, and he was Rumpelstiltskin. He was the one who introduced the gold standard (which, again, was actually Uranium; it’s a long story.)  The Gold Standard was very important, but like most people, we don’t know anything about it.

(Yes, we do. But seriously, did you come here to read about the Gold Standard?)

Rumplestiltskin did, indeed, have the power you’ve heard about. Had to, really. From all the stories, it’s obvious that he was stuck somewhere in the mortal realm. One could almost feel sorry for the guy. There he was, no connection to any major part of human culture, no religion, probably some sort of creature stuck between myth and the visible world, looking neither quite entirely human, nor entirely of the Hedge.

And he had many, many miserable years.

So the stories where he could spin straw into gold? You’re quite correct; that’s true. Well, gold-plate; he was better with platinum and nickel, but do you think anyone every tales about that?

But really, it’s more accurate to say he could spin straw into currency. Now just picture his life.

How many thousands of years spinning straw into beads and shells? Sometimes in places where they didn’t have any straw to begin with, which made it even weirder. Eventually, he had to introduce horses into unexpected places just so there’d be a reason for straw to hang around.

And do not, really, truly, do not get me started on what happened when he was spinning straw into barter. You ever sit down to begin magically transforming the dry stalks of cereal products into currency, only to find it emitting one rooster, seven eggs, a bit of scrimshaw, and (dammit!) more seashells?

“I wish I had magic powers!” is a common cry of everyone who doesn’t have magic powers.

Rumple did, indeed, visit and torment orphans. He didn’t really like to do it. But he knew that if he did it long enough, one day, one of them would figure out his game, figure out his name, break the spell, destroy the power, end his pain…

…poor Rumplestiltskin. They all knew his name.

And they would never say it.

 

The post Rumpled Stiltskin appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.

Shambling Mound

The happiest moments I have foundWere being engulfed by a Shambling Mound.No rent, no politics, no screen:It sure is easy, being green.White DragonsDragons of WhiteAren’t very bright.Who cares what they knows
When they leave you froze
Whenever you just block their light.Symbiotic JellyThe Symbiotic Jelly
Is less sexy than Gene Kelly.The Gelatinous TetrahedronThe Gelatinous Tetrahedron
Doesn’t even deserve a second line.Yuan-TiWhen I discover a Yuan-Ti
I become unbearably jaunty.
Sure, it’ll eat me, and scatter my bones
But I’m halfway safe from Indiana Jones.

___

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 write books. You should read them!

The post Dungeon Doggerel Is Possibly Infinite appeared first on Jeff Mach Writes.