A million years ago, when gerbils were mere rodents, when the Age of Reptiles was just beginning, the first Great Cataclysm shook the planet.
We hear a lot about reptilian overlords and the evils of the Reef Wars. I heard something about gerbil overlords, but what exactly they did is a whole other kettle of fish.
Anyway, that one time when a gerbil decided he really wanted to run off to live among the stars, he found himself up against something much bigger and more powerful than a mere gerbil. The gerbil was no match at all for this foe; it could not even scratch it.
“You have escaped my clutches,” it said. “Now I shall rule the Galaxy.”
It was a female gerbil.
The male gerbil was already a lonely creature, consumed by yearning to mate, by the yearning of all male creatures, for a non-reptilian woman. But he had no chance of winning the mate-seeking game with this foe, for the foe was a female.
The male gerbil, a defeated creature, refused to believe that it had been defeated. It gazed in despair at the vanquished female. It was smaller than it, and it was female. It was a female. She was female. It was female. It was female. It was female.
“You have escaped my clutches. Now I shall rule the Galaxy.”
Floornight I’ve never actually read, but the following is what is in my head, and I don’t know if it is accurate:
The story is set in a world where humans were originally *not* omniscient, and there was a time when there was nothing more than a few basic forms of life that lived by following certain rules. People then made the mistake of looking up the rules, learning about them, and treating them like truth, which had very dire consequences for everyone in the long run. But by God, if you change the rules you have to tell everyone how to act, but you can’t tell everyone how to act until they are ready.
In this world there is a special caste of people called “the Reapers,” who are very good at acting as their function requires and who don’t suffer from any social ills (from other Reapers’ point of view). They can and do change the rules of the world as needed, they can fix things that are broken, but they aren’t good at making broad changes to an entire society (or anything) - they’re good at acting like their function requires to accomplish things, and then very good at convincing people (that they act out of a sense of duty and justice) that they aren’t.
They are the ones who know about the Prophet. They are the ones who will perform the Second Awakening. They are “the ones who know the prophet’s true name, who have seen his face and the age he lived in.” (The irony is that the Reapers’ chosen function was such that they actually need the Prophet to perform the Awakening, but because the Prophet can’t perform it by themselves the Reapers can’t perform it on anyone who wants.)
This is a fun story because it ends in a shittier way than the other ones, but if you want to read the ersatz real-life version of this story, I recommend “The Light That Failed” by James S.A. Corey.
As a kid I never really got into fantasy. The closest I came was during the time I spent immersed in a strange sort of fundamentalist phase – I wasn’t just some nerdy kid reading The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion and so forth, I was also reading Acts of Caine and reading A Wizard of Earthsea and all these other books that were clearly fantasy but seemed kind of standard fantasy. It was a whole other world.
There’s something really appealing about this kind of fantasy – there’s something undeniably impressive and “cool” about it. Even when we take into consideration the fact that most fantasy is horribly misogynistic or uses grotesque monsters or indulges in mind-bending nonsense, it’s still really cool and impressive. It’s not just a “well-liked subgenre of literature,” as some people would have you believe. It’s a genre whose very existence throws the viewer for a loop. It’s a genre with its own canon, its own heroes, its own villains, its own languages, its own cultures, its own societies, its own governments. It’s … completely unlike anything else?
Of course fantasy is nothing new. The word “fantasy” has been in use for thousands of years. But what has happened over the last couple of centuries is that the “facts on the ground” have changed so radically that it is no longer possible to boil an abstract idea like “fantasy” down to something that is “well-liked.” Today if you don’t like “fantasy” you are either a fundamentalist or a snob. If you like it, well, you’re a leftist or a fundamentalist. It’s either “seriously nerdy” or “not seriously nerdy,” and either the latter is considered a condition of intellectual inferiority or a certain sort of intellectual and political fervor
It’s a weird state of affairs, this, where your weird little niche is being challenged by a mainstream that won’t even acknowledge you exist. But what can I say? I just can’t escape the fact that fantasy is what I know. I don’t know what any of these games actually look like, how they work, what the rules are, if any. But I know what it is like to step into that slipperier, more imprecise world of fantasy, where the shadows are darker, the possibilities infinitely more fantastic. And I know that there are other worlds out there, filled with other possibilities, where everyone’s got their little niche, and their own little fanzine, and they’re all fighting each other for their little pieces of the pie, but no one is actually trying to slice their pie in half and serve both halves to the nation
So there it is. The soundtrack to my youth. The music I listened to when I was ten years old. The music of the mythical realm, not the worldly realm, the realm of men and action and convenience and burgers and KFC. The realm of the spiritual ones, the elves and the trolls and the grey giants and the summer storms, the realm of the raving lunatic with his strange hair and the smell of his own festering wound. The realm of the utterly ridiculous
However well it might be at explaining a physical phenomenon (such as, say, explaining why water flows in a first-order approximation to a river), it’s not well-fitted to explain something like the beliefs of most people
How many of your friends don’t believe in the (illegitimate, counterintuitive) idea “things could be three-dimensional?”?
How many of your friends don’t believe in the (illegitimate, counterintuitive) idea “motion does not imply velocity?”?
How many of your friends don’t believe in the (illegitimate, counterintuitive) idea “X is two-dimensional?”?
How many of your friends don’t believe in the (illegitimate, counterintuitive) idea “vibrating spheres occur at regular time intervals?”?
Yes! I like a lot of different types of dance music. Like all kinds of dance music.
My favorite kind is the kind that’s been recorded as a video game track. Like, tracks by artists like “Amon A’mmo,” or “Lugnut,” or “Martin Garrix,” or “Martin Garrix + Noisia,” or some stuff by this guy who’s webmusic has a similar feel to it, or this guy who made a youtube compendium of his favorite tracks. (It’s like a curated playlist of all the cool stuff you’ve played that you might have forgotten about.)
There’s a sort of purity to these songs, and a kind of inventiveness. They’re made up of little bits of original music that can be rearranged to be new, different, beautiful or exciting. They’re made up of intricate, pulse-quickening, hip-shaking, musical choreography. They have dramatic, sometimes even suspenseful, endings – some of them epic, which is the most I can do in dance music!
(There’s a sort of self-conscious hipness to that kind of music that I’m not quite used to. Or maybe it’s at the level of hipness, rather than self-consciousness. But the only way I can describe it is as “this is what it feels like to be in on a joke.”)
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
ALT
