The Write Wing This Week - 27 May 2023
The community dissolved by the dark magicians
This week’s roundup will be a bit more scattered … I had a fair bit on my plate, my academic past coming to haunt me with obligations, and then another death in the family that required my presence. Hence the lack of regular posting, for which I apologize to my readers, and especially my supporters! You deserve better of me. I’ve got a few pieces in the pipeline which I still need to finish and polish, which should be going out over the next few days. In any case, this roundup might also be a bit less comprehensive than previously - if I missed something you wrote, well, I just didn’t get around to reading it. Substack is an embarrassment of riches.
With that said, get that french press brewed, and let’s get on to the links!
First up, because why wouldn't I start off a roundup with a roundup,
of Better Barbarians has his long-promised recommendations post up: THE REACTIONARY'S ROUNDUP - 21 MAY 2023, in which, in memory of This Week In Reaction, he awards what I believe is Substack's first Silver Circle. You'll have to click through to see who got it, though. And yes, believe it or not, I do sleep. Like a dolphin: one hemisphere at a time.In last week's roundup I introduced the new Iron Ring Award with the quip that I chose iron because iron rules gold. That was just a lazy off-hand line I threw out there without expecting anyone to take it too seriously, but
of The Cat Was Never Found picked it up, riffed on it, and ran with it … and ran with it, going way farther than I thought was possible in Magic Rules Iron, subtitled "When the blacksmith fails, the wizards come out to play."
The essence of this is the distinction between ordinary weapons design - which Mark personifies with the blacksmith - and disruptive innovation:
When I use “magic” here, I mean an extreme form of asymmetric weapons design, based on experimental technologies that are totally unavailable to your enemies. As I said in the podcast, I think the last time that magic ruled iron was the invention and use of the atomic bomb. That project also typified another quality of magic weapons development, which is that the majority of the work is done in deep shadow (a theme I suspect Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film “Oppenheimer” will explore).
I am become death, destroyer of worlds.
Of course, as Mark observes, the magic doesn't last long: once you have Become Death, the next day the enemy figures out which part of the hat the rabbit is hidden in and therefore also becomes Destroyer of Worlds, and you're both back to being blacksmiths.
As to what he expects next:
But this isn’t the kind of magic I’m referring to when I say “magic rules iron.” Nor is it born from a single tradition, like the nuclear bomb was. Rather, what has risen up to rule is a hydra of disciplines and technologies, all stemming off the common root of transhumanism.
Mark opens his discussion with an examination of military psyops … which is probably the oldest form of dark magic in history, when you think about it, but the possibilities for propaganda opened by AI are almost endless. Next up is CBDCs - again, money magic is old magic, but money that watches you, knows where it is and what it's being used for, and occasionally evaporates is something very new, and not in a good way for anyone but a witch king.
The real show, he thinks, is at DARPA - the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - which has a menagerie of monsters whose catalogue is of encyclopedic dimensions. Most of this is kayfabe, he admits, much less impressive than the breathless headlines imply. Still … what happens when the gates are thrown wide open? Something Mark suggests our mortality-fearing transhumanist liche overlords may well be desperate and mad enough to do?
There must be a way to live forever in meaty form. And so the blacksmith is being purposefully humiliated and drained, leaving no option but to go all-in on magic. They believe they’ve been granted access to that penultimate magic circle, which is why they so often speak and act in such strange and seemingly self-defeating ways. When you think you’re on-deck for immortality, you'll do anything the wizard says.
Relying on magic tricks, however, is an unstable strategy. You might be able to dominate a room with hypnosis, but if the marks twig to your tricks you're liable to get run out of town.
But, like all periods of magic rule, I predict it won’t last long.
Let’s have a look at PSYOPS first. A great deal of ink has been spent on tallying their successes, especially in recent years. But what’s curiously missing is a meta-analysis of their failures over the years — and in particular their failures to remain hidden, without which there’s really no point. In doing so, I think we would see the curve bending sharply upwards since the birth of the consumer internet.
There's a lot more to it than that, and you should read the whole thing. Mark is skeptical that the magic will work out for them, and I tend to agree. The V-2 and the Messerschmitt 262 did not win Germany WWII … on the other hand, rockets and jet engines have changed the world completely, and largely for the better. They've at least made it a more interesting place. So while it's likely their evocations will detonate in the faces of these sorcerer's apprentices, I'm looking forward to what comes after.
Giving Mark an Iron Ring for this seems wrong, so instead I shall award that most magical and cataclysmic of metals, and bestow on this essay the very first and a very special Iridium Torq. Wear it with pride (but not that kind of Pride).
There’s more than one kind of magic, and while the modern world suffers from a surfeit of black magic, we’re also starved of the white. At Ghost in the Machine
writes Modernity and the Death of the Romantic, in which she discusses how modernity has brutally murdered our sense of romance and what this has done to our art. She doesn't mean romance in the flowers and hearts sense, although that is sorely lacking for many if not most and surely related. But rather, in the Byronic sense - the mystery, adventure, and grandeur of life, slowly bled away by a million little cuts of efficiency, safety, MCU expanded universe Funko-Pops, and vapid social media dopamine cycles. Personally, I think it's the supremacy of left brain cognition, leading to the disappearance of the actual in the hall of mirrors of endless abstractions. She ends with "If we want to have a future apart from the pods and the bugs, we must find a way to resurrect romance." Amen.
Next he has some Thoughts in the last days of my professional academic life, Academia: Eine Abrechnung. Euggypius has been slowly extricating himself from the tar baby of academic life, which first began to horrify him when he endured the convents of degeneracy and madness that have taken over American academia, and alienated him completely when his German research institute tried to force needles in his arm. His descriptions of his academic life always hit me like a punch in the gut. The wounded idealism, the disdain for the hollowness of it all, the teeth-grinding longhouse tyranny of Head Girls … it's all painfully familiar to anyone who's ever been trapped in the ivory tower. It seems he's finally made good his escape. Congratulations are in order.
Finally, he covers the yawn as Western media attempts listlessly to stir new panic about surging infections in China, studiously ignores what is actually happening there. No one cares anymore, but I'm happy for the media to keep clout chasing like this. It only makes them look more ridiculous, and that can't be a bad thing.
Good news, everyone!
has brought back Seeking the Hidden Thing. First he explains What Happened and What's Next? Briefly: he made a promise, and he didn't keep it. To come back, he had to make a new promise: that his Substack will pay for itself (without getting him arrested). Let's help him make that happen.To celebrate his return, Kruptos has a fresh essay up this week: The Loss of Community and the Role of the State in a Mass, Market Driven Society.
Community - that sense of belonging, of a place where everybody knows your name and the streets are safe - sounds good, but do we really want it? It requires order, and order implies rules, and rules demand that you don't always get to do what you want … which the autonomous, atomized self experiences as an intolerable imposition.
So what ionized humans into this high-energy plasma of anonymized selves? Mechanization and the free market. And this breakdown of community ties in the universal solvent of finance capital has consequences. Quoting Alan Ehernhalt’s "The Lost City: the Forgotten Virtues of Community in America":
Once the pressure of the global market had persuaded the Lennox Corporation that it had the moral freedom of choice to make air conditioners wherever in the world it wanted to, the bonds that had tied it to a small town in Iowa for nearly a century were breakable.
The amorality of the market is inextricably interwoven with the dissolution of community;
Personal autonomy. No one telling you how to live your life. No one in your business trying to tell you right from wrong. “Why should it matter what I do as long as I am not hurting anyone?” This is the attitude of someone conditioned by the market, as well as the intellectual, spiritual and technical milieu which makes the mass market possible. We like our choices. There was a reason that the growing proliferation number of options, in employment, in where you could live, the friends you could keep, the entertainments you could enjoy, the products you could purchase, was so appealing to people. A whole world of freedom was opening up. Within a few generations, two or three at most, the idea of “liberty” shifted from a freedom from state oppression such that the citizens of a society could gather together and determine their own affairs; to something wherein each person should be granted the maximum amount of freedom to make as many personal choices as is possible, without limits or restrictions. Anything which restricted personal choice became oppressive and authoritarian.
By contrast,
A real community has a kind of, shall we say, metaphysical reality. It is there all around you. It provides order. It determines who your friends will be. Your role in life and your career are likely chosen for you. Where you worship. Whom you worship. All decided for you. Whom you will marry. Where you will eat lunch on Sunday afternoons. Your social calendar. All chosen for you. You merely have to fit in and assume the role which the community has provided for you.
That's not all. Communities don't afford much in the way of privacy. Everyone's all up in your business and you can never escape your past. On the other hand, the price we pay for privacy in our suburban redoubts is loneliness.
The dissolution of community didn't happen all at once, and at first, it wasn't at all a bad thing. But the bill comes at the end:
There was a kind of golden age, enjoyed mostly by “Boomers,” those who belong to the post-WW2 baby boom generation. They were able to take advantage of the increases in the freedom of choice and opportunity that the erosion of community gave them, but within a context in which people still more or less conformed to the values of community life. But now the bill is coming due. Increased social chaos seems to blossom all around us. People act without restraint and expect that whatever moral choices they make will be validated. But at the same time, the social disorder presses itself upon us more and more making the streets and subways dirty and unsafe. Drug use abounds. People are lonely. Men and women finding themselves living solitary lives. Some find solace in video games. Others in white wine and their cats.
This is of course untenable. Some basic level of order must be maintained. Since communities no longer exist in any meaningful sense, the only entity with the capability to enforce order is the heavy and impersonal hand of the state.
Kruptos argues that people don't really want the unconstrained freedom of unlimited choice - when they have that, decision fatigue sets in. So they just do what the propaganda screens say, with the result that all of these autonomous selves become a mass of unprecedented homogeneity. And of course, as to privacy? Authority? Morality? Well I'm sure you can fill in the blanks, dear reader.
Since the state can't be reformed, it's on us to rebuild community, in whatever way we can, if we're to have a parallel society in which to take refuge from the maddened leviathan.
Kruptos' essay wins this week's Iron Ring, hands down. You should read the whole thing, and subscribe. But if you'd rather listen, he's got the audio up here.
Kruptos wasn’t the only one to be writing about the intersection of community, politics, and markets this week. You might have heard of this National Conservatism conference that just wrapped up in the UK, which was apparently a big deal.
attended it, and covered the conference for Aporia magazine: Special Report: Who are the Nat Cons? Helen thinks that Mary Harrington could stand to read something that isn't Donna Haraway, and maybe try to write a bit less like Judith Butler. She also thinks the NatCons need to be having more debates, in particular on the free trade vs protectionism issue, because as it is they are very light on actual policy recommendations. Here's the problem as Helen sees it: nice things, like more houses to raise families in so we can increase the birth rate and not go extinct, cost money; free trade policies tend to generate money very well; but they also seem to be incredibly corrosive to precisely those traditional, grounded lifeways that make family formation possible in the first place (which was precisely Kruptos’ point). Wat do? Helen doesn't know. Neither do I. It's a great question.
Despite the good news,
isn't fully sold on victory yet: Bakhmut Taken, Wagner Victorious, Rolo Skeptical. Seems Prighozin would rather be anywhere else at the moment - even Somalia. Next up, Rolo seeks psychiatric assistance in The Belgorod Rorschach Test. Then, Prigozhin Reveals Tens of Thousands of Dead and Wounded on Both Sides in Aftermath of the Battle of Bakhmut.Rolo also has two podcast episodes up this week, neither of which have anything to do with the Ukrainian war: Red List 25 - The Conspiracies of Early Christianity w/ Laurent Guyenot and Red List 26 - The Etheric Body W/ Tom Montalk. I haven’t had a chance to listen to the episode with Montalk yet, but the last one was very good. As to the Guyenot episode, this wide-ranging episode was furiously interesting. They go into the mystery surrounding the birth of Christianity, the true identity of Christ (my own favourite hypothesis, that Divus Julius was the model for the Christos, makes an appearance, and Guyenot didn’t think it was crazy), the debate over whether Christianity started as a Roman plot to subvert Judea or a Jewish plot to subvert Rome (why not both?), the superiority of the Orthodox over the Catholic and Protestant traditions given its greater doctrinal flexibility and resulting ability to accommodate the more philosophically and mystically inclined, pagan influences within the Christian tradition, the phantom time hypothesis, and so much more. Hard recommend.
Speaking of podcasts, no new writing from Myth Pilot's
this week, but he does have My first podcast to share. I haven't listened to it yet, but I certainly will be soon.Others are writing about the big news in Bakhmut and the big Ukrainian counter-offensive. The legendary Jim of Jim's Blog doesn't normally comment on the news of the day, but makes an exception to say a few words about The Great Ukrainian Counter Offensive. He thinks that while they're certainly scoring tactical victories in their attempt to turn the war of attrition back into manoeuvre warfare, they keep getting stuck, and those tactical triumphs aren't translating into strategic advantages. Jim goes on to observe that wars of attrition typically come to negotiated settlements … but the agreement-incapable GAE lacks the ability to negotiate. So this could stretch out for quite some time.
would like to announce that a Big Milestone Is Here! And a Message From Your [Replicant] Author. The milestone is that he's reached 10k subs, the bastard, but the essence of the message isn't what you'd expect. No, he isn't turning on paid subs - they're already available - but he is going full time. He also has a few words to say about allegations that he's an LLM, a collective, or a collective using an LLM (or would that be an LLM using a collective), which were occasioned by his prodigious 35,000 word per week output. Along the way he describes how he's able to do that, which any writers reading this might be interested to hear about. Speaking of that insane level of text generation, he's got a SITREP 5/20/23: Bakhmut Falls, Artemovsk Rises. What's Next?, another SITREP 5/24/23: UA's Desperate Border Stunt Ends With Large Losses, and not one but two paid subscriber weekly mailbags. None of which I've had time to read but if you want to get into the weeds on Russia and the Ukraine war, he goes into detail and brings receipts.At his Dark Futura project Simplicius discusses The Acceleration. From Bud Light clowning the strongest beer brand on the planet to Target spooking parents and investors thanks to a trans marketing campaign designed by a literal Satanist (yes, really) to Northface and Ford embracing the devil's rainbow, the social decay seems to accelerating with no end in sight. Simplicius prefers the term Luciferian, which he considers more accurate. He argues that the primary dynamic driving all of this is the decoupling of dirt and cloud people, with the latter living in a hologram insulated from the consequences of any meaningful reality test. The acceleration emerges due to the insular feedback loops within elite circles, which draw ever further from the base reality inhabited by the rest of us, leading to increasingly frenzied and frustrated attempts to push the new transhumanist reality onto the increasingly recalcitrant, revolted, and revolting plebs.
Apparently British trains have a dedicated carriage for silence, which is very British. In The Future of the Quiet Carriage
explains why he doesn't think that will last much longer. Can't be implying that thoughtful contemplation or study is somehow superior, after all - wouldn't be very democratic.Speaking of rancid elites, what do elites look like when they pass the smell test?
at H2F Man reviews a leadership book on Executive Presence: what is it, how can you develop it, do most people even need it, and are our current institutions even compatible with it? Looking around at the human quality of our leaders would suggest 'no' in answer to the latter question.Maybe the problem with our elites is that we elect them? Over at The Neo-Ciceronian Times
says that Democracy is not Better than Monarchy. Well he’s a monarchist, so you knew he’d say that … but his arguments are, as always, worth your attention. The strength and size of the state are not the same thing: the latter sets the sphere of governmental influence in society, while the former determines the state's ability to act decisively within that sphere of influence. In a monarchy the scope of the king's influence is severely limited, while his freedom of action within that area of responsibility is relatively broad. Citizens of a monarchy frequently enjoy great latitude in their personal affairs. The late-stage bureaucracies of Western democracies, on the other hand, recognize no limits on their scope - they stick their noses into everything, but are relatively ineffectual, the result being the widespread impression that we are tyrannised by clowns. has translated Chapter 17 of Lobaczewski's Logocracy, on Parliament, which is up at Political Ponerology. Lobaczewski favors a bicameral system which strongly resembles the American Congress. asks Why is 'woke' not going broke? Sure, it's a white pill that the Bud Light boycott is seeing some impressive success, enough that Target has been spooked into hiding its boy's tuck suits in the back. But let's be real: the overwhelming majority of the entities pushing anti-white bigotry and gender derangement aren't seeing any hit to their bottom line, and even when they do - even when that hit is severe - the people running them do not care. Waldburger is on point when he emphasizes that the solution to this is replacing the rotten elite with a new one. That won't happen via market forces, it won't happen via normal politics, and it won't happen by owning the libs with facts and logic. As Waldburger says, we need lions. points out that "The Globalist American Empire is run by nursing home residents" and that it's long past Time to Flush the Geriatric Turds. Morgthorak thinks there should be an age cap of 60 for president - which would disqualify Biden, Trump, and RFK Jr. I've got no problem with that but I think he's too generous. Alexander conquered the world in his 20s. Our septuagenarian satraps clutching at power in their decrepit claws could learn a thing or two from Cincinnatus … although as Morgthorak observes, their blundering is accelerating the collapse of the GAE, and in any case time comes for us all. One way or another we'll be free of them soon enough.Over at A Ghost in the Machine,
shares some useful advice in Fighting Leftist Lawfare. We’ve been watching the left rule by summons and malicious prosecution for years now. If you live in a red state, why not do the same to the local pseudopods of the blob? Daniel provides a form letter to send to AGs. Surely they can’t all be owned by Soros? Later in the week Daniel asks What Does This Clownworld Mean? What does it mean that we live in an Empire of Lies ruled by liars and populated by lie believers? Nothing good, that’s for sure.
It took
six months living in Latrino-America for the bumpy truck rides and starved dogs chained to rooftops to break him of The Taco Truck Delusion that the demographic change of the US will just mean more tasty taco trucks. It can be a bit overwhelming down there, for sure. Surely there must be a happy medium between the Latin Hammer of chaotic poverty, and the Anglo Disease of micromanagerial tyranny that prevailing in the strip mall parking lot formerly known as North America.Following up on pushback from readers outraged that he didn't denounce the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as forged Hate Speech in his earlier piece on pre-JFK conspiracy theories,
of Notes from the end of time discusses Fear and Loathing on the Internet. He isn't going to feed the egregore by putting up the sign in the shop window. And neither should you if you want to keep your fears from being used as a control panel for your mind. In Contagion, Conspiracy, and COVID he looks at the 2011 Soderbergh movie, in which the antagonist is a misinformation-spreading conspiracy theorist, in light of a roundup of COVID conspiracy theories at the Alliance for Science. Most of those conspiracy theories turn out to be true, of course. I think it's fair to say at this point that regime enthusiasts are conspiracy deniers. Next up: The Joy of Fear, in which he looks at the way that fear - of viruses, Nazis, what have you - is deliberately inculcated as a social control mechanism.In addition to his excellent ongoing series at
's Not on your team but always fair, has an essay up at his own blog Lorenzo from Oz: Marx was neither an economist nor a social scientist 1, subtitled Portentous metaphysics is not the basis for understanding social patterns. "If one is going to be any sort of social scientist one has to grasp the role, dynamics and functionality of embedded learning. To systematically reject it, which is what the “ruthless criticism of all that exists” does, is to substitute one’s ideological project for genuine enquiry and understanding." Lorenzo has written of embedded learning before, by which he means essentially Chesterton's Fence: the great body of wisdom hard-won by innumerable generations through trial and struggle which is woven throughout the language and customs of a culture … and which the Culture of Critique seeks to unwind completely. Lorenzo goes on to demonstrate that Marx completely misunderstands - or is perhaps entirely blind to - the principle that value is largely a function of relative scarcity, which undermines Marxist "economics" at the foundational level. Part 2 is also up this week, subtitled He was a student of Hegel. Lorenzo argues that the Hegelian tradition is neither that of Athens (reason), or Jerusalem (faith), but of a third and generally forgotten origin of Western thought: Alexandria, which is to say gnostic hermeticism. James Lindsay has made a similar argument, as Lorenzo notes. Although I've also encountered the argument that Marxism is a form of secularized messianic Judaism or desacralized Christian apocalypticism. Marxism is a hot potato no one wants to take responsibility for.Lorenzo has had a busy week, also publishing chapter 19 of Worshipping the Future: Diversity Inclusion Equity as bureaucratic pathology. Points for using the correct ordering for the baleful trinity. Lorenzo reviews the universal pathologies of bureaucracies - hoarding authority, insulation from reality tests, substituting process for efficacy, and so on. This is only pathological from the perspective of those outside the bureaucracy, whether citizens subjected to its grey tyranny or sovereigns struggling to ensure their servants serve them: like a tumor feasting on a wasting body, the bureaucracy's pathologies are quite wonderful for the bureaucrats. DIE is perfectly suited to appeal to the eternal bureaucrat's favorite sins, because it provides the perfect set of pretences for a massive bureaucratic power grab. All of this, Lorenzo points out, has happened before, in the Roman empire … and with disastrous consequences. Christianity, he notes, served exactly the same bureaucratic function in the late Roman empire that wokeness does today. Uberboyo was recently annoying Christians by making this same argument.
In his second piece in the series The U.S. Was Wrong to Enter World War II,
argues without resorting to historical revisionism that American participation in the war had absolutely nothing to do with saving European Jewry from the Nazi beast. If anything, the narrative that the war was motivated by opposition to anti-Semitic persecution is the historical revisionism, here.Two compilations of all the shit that's fit to poast from
at the New Right Poast this week: #63. Can I BE any more of a recipient of patronage? and #64. The Year of the Shrug. In #63 they branch out into long form content, featuring a very special blog that's dear to my heart. As for the year of the shrug? "Someone calls you a racist transphobe? Hit ‘em with a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Ultimately, who gives a shit?" I've been doing that for years now. They expect you to defend yourself, "No that's not racist!" Just plays into their frame, because you're implicitly admitting that if you were racist you'd agree that's bad. The shrug inflicts marxcissistic injury. Bluescreens the NPC operating system. They also cover a bird site kerfuffle over whether beating your kids is lindy or not, which … *shrug*
The Pop Cult
The first taste is free. Go on, you know you want some.
offers a class on Storytelling 103: Opening Sentences, Hooking the Audience. For all the talk of contracted attention spans, people are still quite capable of binge-watching Netflix shows for 8 hours at a stretch, or reading high fantasy epics that sprawl across ten volumes. What the short attention span means is that you've only got a momentary window to catch a reader - lose it, and they'll move on to the next dopamine bump, forgetting all about you. Billionaire Psycho has gone through hundreds of books, and analyzed their opening passages in light of several proven strategies for hooking the reader's attention. thinks that It's Not About "Lore" when it comes to the missing element in the abominations vomited up from the Hellmouth's studios. They aren't failing to respect the source material for their adaptations out of ignorance. The diversity casting isn't incompetence. They are systematically defacing the cultural legacy of the West, whether recent or antique, out of sheer malice. It's the spirit, not the details, that they are getting wrong … deliberately. A black mass isn't satanic because it inverts the symbols of the faith, chants the Lord's prayer backwards, and so on - it's satanic because it has desecration of the sacred at its spiritual core.More cultural criticism over at The Lake of Lerna from
: The Apology of a Yakubian Ape, subtitled "In the words of dear Uncle Walt - to all who come to this happy place, I apologize in advance." Why does Yakubian Ape spend so much time thinking about the pop cult? Because you can't escape it. Like microplastics in your sperm, it gets everywhere. And like microplastics poisoning your balls, the degeneracy in the pop cult poisons every soul it touches. He's playing into the game just by giving them attention, he admits - when the pop cult is finally slain, it will be apathy, not revulsion, that puts it down. Which sounds right to me. I had no idea who Zendaya was until maybe a week ago; my strategy with pop culture, especially when it comes to its music, has been to essentially ignore it and fill my time with good stuff that doesn't suck, pretty much since I was a teenager.
Pulped
We have a few entries in this week’s fiction corner.
tries his hand at fiction at the Grey Goose Chronicles with Chapter One - Fear the Beast. It's an ice age ghost story, atmospheric and evocative and violent and sprinkled with the kinds of details only a paleoanthropologist could provide. As the title implies there will be more, and I sure hope so - I've been hoping the Herbalist would do something like this for some time.The Pulp Vitalist
has a story set in the same universe as his previous alt-history science fiction work The Last Son of Rome up at the Soaring Twenties magazine: A Message for Avaricum:By train, it was 900 miles from Rome to Avaricum, and in between, lay the dark frontier of Europa. Lands filled with savage and barbaric tribes. Populated by men, that a mere hundred years earlier had fought open battles with hatchet and sword, now lived by the gun.
Also at Soaring Twenties is a some Dungeons and Dragons-inspired high fantasy from
, The Stone of Rán:Hardly daring to breathe, he could now hear his own heartbeat in the deafening silence between water drops. Without the light from his wand, the tunnels were an oppressive, heavy black, and every plink of water seemed to echo for miles until the silence returned. The hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention, and he couldn't help but feel like he was being watched. As he calmed himself, his mind wandered back to the conversation he had with his master, Crimeaon, two days earlier…
When she isn’t doing legal and academic commentary,
has been writing a fantasy novel, The Hidden People, which is now up to Chapter 13: A Brother Is Found. The whole thing is available for free on her web-page. Here’s the summary:Joanna and her two brothers are doing their best to live a normal life, but it’s a challenge. When they were growing up, their Mama hid them from authorities and didn’t send them to school, until they were taken from her care in their teens.
However, when Henny, Jo’s oldest brother, disappears in the middle of the night, and Jo has to find him, she starts to wonder - what’s true and what isn’t? Has she really fallen into a different world? Or is this all just a dream? And if it’s real, can Jo really trust Annurin, the hunter who’s captured her, and who’s bringing her before a mysterious “King”?
My dear readers, that’s all for this week!
Thank you to everyone who’s been sharing these roundups! I’ve been told that they are proving effective in generating readerships for new writers, especially, which is immensely gratifying. Just a friendly reminder to
An especially large thank you to my paying supporters. You know who you are. You, my tharks, my jeddaks, are the aristocrats of the soul who make this project possible. Without you, this wouldn’t be happening. Rise, equestrians and optimates, and take a bow, for in your generosity there is much glory.
And should you wish to join this elite group, there is nothing to it. All you need to do is
=== grid vandal
gridvandal would be a neat neologism for the upper cadre of the worshippers of St Gretchen of Aspberg (patron saint of the Cult of Thermageddon),
It has a vaguely Norse/Scando sound, and would fit nicely in a sentence in which the local jarl of the griðvanðalir declared "climate deniers" subject to fjörbaugsgarður and skóggangur (lesser- and full- outlawry, respectively).
Perhaps on a new Dísablót, dedicated to propitiating a particularly malevolent dís. Hilariously, dísir means both 'ladies' and what the Greeks would call άρπυιαι 'harpies'.
All of the foregoing would be much more readable if Substack's $7/hr Reddit-tier H1b coders had enabled EM and I tags in comments. Fuckers,
Thanks bro, very honored! Admire your writing very much.