The Damned Lies Project

Hello my muse,

My dancing goddess of wisdom

My radiant scarlet beauty

My perfect counterpart of joy and love

My inspiration

My obstacle and my mirror

My transformation

You who question what I hold dear

You who reinforce my passion and inspiration

You who clean out my thoughts and consume my mind

You who sing through my body

And dance through my heart.

 

Hello my lover,

My shared passion

My touch which touches back

My heated breath shared between two

My ever ecstasy mirrored

My equal and opposite reaction

My twist of limbs and sheets and minds

You who share my intimacy

You who turn my every thought to fire

You who are the only one who can quench me

You who show me sensations far beyond everything I know

And show me what is past that.

 

 

 

Hello my partner,

My counterpart

My best friend

My support

My mischievous collaborator in crime and in life

My companion

My dinner partner

You who question me and support me

You who join me in things I love

You who bring me along in the things you love

You who understand me – from deepest fears to deepest desires

And love me for them.

 

Hello You,

Who I have never met

Who I’ve looked for in every woman I’ve ever met

Who lurks just beyond the edges of reality

Who I can see in the farthest reaches of my mind in dreams I can never remember

Who I know so deeply in feelings I can’t understand

Who has never thought me mad for looking for you.

 

Hello,  Hello, Hello.

I wish I could find you.

I wish we would never part.

 

Today I pondered the existence of Godel/Escher/Bach slash fiction.

Not for any length of time, mind you, but for just a moment, the thought wandered across my mind and I gave it my focus.  And then I let it go, cast off.  I didn’t want to think about it.  I didn’t want to think about the nature of it.  Even moreso, I didn’t want to think about the possibility that somewhere on the deep, dark corners of the Internet, such a thing actually exists.  The horrifying idea that someone had the same thought before me, but liked it and decided to put their time, energy, and imagination into making it come into being.  I choose not to think about it.  We all choose not to think about it.

That’s really the crux of it.  We love the Internet.  We use it all the time.  We extol its awesomeness, its freedom, its free-flowing cat pictures, web comics, worktime time wasters, and multiple ways to buy movie tickets.  Yet all of us above average users know without saying it that for every shining part of the internet we love, there are those places.  Places where people are exercising their freedom to talk, create, and build a community over things we’d rather not think of.

Of course, some of its subjective.  What you might not want to think about might be different than mine; we might be disturbed by different examples of Rule 34.  But the web still contains so much that is just uncharacteristically strange that it’s hard to fathom.  It may not be actually disturbing to us, more the strangeness that someone thought of, created, and conveyed it to others in good faith is mind blowing.  This ranges from the more common, such as Cookie Monster depicted as a drug addict (for cookies) to the exceedingly rare sorts, such as Harry Potter slash fiction where the author was inspired by the Legend of the Overfiend so that Harry is a hundred feet tall with multiple fifty-foot long dongs destroying the city to find the place where Malfoy has kidnapped Ginny and turned her into a demonic sex slave cyborg Mary Sue.  No matter how odd, strange, perverse, or disturbing you find some internet mashup of things, you can be sure that somewhere there’s something worse.  Those of us smart enough stop when we are wide-eyed in WTF moments.  Those unwise enough continue will find themselves sleepless and exclaiming that they don’t want to live on this planet anymore.

And such is the dual nature of the Internet.  There is the Internet we know and love, helpful in actual practicality or in its ease of wasting time with.  And then there is the dark side, never out of reach.  Only a few clicks or a typed URL away.  We are using the same internet that has this deep dark strangeness, but we look away.   It’s always there, waiting in parts of the internet we refuse to look at or explore.  Our browsers might as well be stamped with Here Be Dragons.  But only in the strangest moods do we look or click on links from that whacked out friend.  And what we see may make us laugh, confuse us, or downright disturb us.  But that is humanity.  Ladies and gentlemen, that is your internet, in all its glory.  That is the thing you use every day.  And on it, there are Dragons.

Also, slashfic of dragons.

Generations ago, settlers colonized a new planet. Of the technology they brought to the planet is the ability to create a new body to transfer consciousness to, giving them a functional version of reincarnation. Over the generations as the population has increased, technology was withheld from the people. The world entered a dark age, and the ever-reincarnating First members of the original crew have hoarded the technology and set themselves up as gods, named and modeled after the Hindu pantheon. They have reintroduced that religion to the world, using mind probes to “judge” people at their 60th birthday to determine what kind of body they should reincarnate into. They say they will slowly reintroduce technology “as people are ready”, but instead, they have consolidated their power, destroying new technologies such as the printing press as soon as they are invented. They have also manipulated the reincarnation system, so that those who are dissidents find themselves in an unfavorable body or prevented from reincarnation at all.
Enter Sam, one of the original crew, who has ruled as a prince in a far off kingdom after leaving the world’s counsel in disgust after the first talk of godhood. He is appalled by what he sees of the new system, calling it a fascist oligarchy. He starts a movement to oppose the gods, taking on the name and persona of the Buddha to set the wheels turning on revolution. What follows is a war among “gods” and men, bringing in “demons” bound generations ago: the original energy-based inhabitants of the planet.

Overall this is a great read and it has many interesting ideas. It plays fast and loose with Buddhism and Hinduism, so those with strict conceptions of those might find this a little blasphemous. It is also very related in the “60s scifi” tone and writing style. In addition, it feels anachronistic at times, when both gods in men both in heavenly palaces or in dark age villages just light up cigarettes and begin smoking in the middle of the conversation. In the 60s, when smoking was much more accepted, this may have seemed normal, but reading it today it’s very jarring.

Wherein there are rumors most amusing and secrets most dangerous.

There are a few pervasive rumors about the UT Campus.  Three in particular come to mind.

First, there is a small population of albino squirrels around the campus.  This part is not rumor, that’s fact.  The rumor or folklore is that if you see one of these rare but twitchily cute beasties right before an exam, you will get an A.  This rumor is more wishful thinking than anything else, but when stressed and freaked about an upcoming exam, you too might find yourself crouching by some bushes with some bread crusts from your sandwich making cooing noises for the rarest of all squirrels.

The second rumor is that there is a catacomb of steam tunnels running under and connecting the entire campus.  At first hearing, this doesn’t sound unreasonable.  Most large facilities have steam tunnels running under them which may connect two adjacent buildings so they can share boilers, waste channels, etc.  However, upon the realization that the UT Austin campus is 423 acres large, this moves from “obviously likely” to the “maybe plausible” category.

The third rumor was always an odd one for me.  According to this piece of folklore shopped around parties and side conversations as truth, there is a secret nuclear reactor under the RLM building.  The Robert Lee Memorial building was always one of the strangest buildings on campus.  Home to all the hardcore full frontal science courses, it was a tall behemoth, rising above any other building at that time.  A veritable tower of science, it was the place of indentured servitude for science students and a confusing maze of boredom for other students.  The first few floors of the building had escalators which you had to take to get up them.  The higher floors required an elevator that did not stop on the earlier floors.  The building went up to the sky and deep into the ground.  With the foreboding sciency way the building looked and the wily, laconic nature of most professors who had offices within, the idea that there was a secret nuclear reactor below wasn’t that much of a stress.  Why they kept it in the heart of a populous city made no sense, though.

These are all the rumors that many UT students learn.  Whether we accept them or not is up to us.  None of them are really verifiable nor do they really affect your UT career (unless you have a phobia of nuclear meltdown, in which case, sorry, they already have your tuition check). But they were always around and always made you wonder.  What was happening on this particular night was that I was learning some rumors that not every UT student hears. Read the rest of this entry »

What if the Pied Piper of Hamelin was a homicidal madman with magic powers that had long ago swore to kill Peter Piper? What if long ago when they last met, the Pied Piper was responsible for crippling Peter Piper’s wife, Bo Peep?  These are the sort of questions answered in Peter and Max: A Fables Novel.
Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein we explore Toy Joy, paranoia rears its ugly head, and things fall apart.

Before us was Toy Joy, bathed in a holy light, the destination of our pilgrimage.  We three wise men had traveled across streets and realities far and wide, traversing a multitude of trying situations that our drug addled brains made far worse.  Before us lay our goal, our destination, our holy land, the song, the sign, the alpha and omega of our desires.  With only an endless moment spent gawking at its exterior, we rushed inside, like air sucked in through an open door.  The door dinged as we made our entry.

Inside the toys very nearly jumped off the walls at us.  Stuffed animals lined some of the shelves, so packed that taking just one down would start an avalanche of fake fur and plush that would bury lesser men.  Even a dexterous step to the side would be a failure; the pile of stuffed animals next to you would provoke embarrassment as you mumbled something to the other patrons and staff as you fumbled to somehow try to get the animals back onto the shelf, effectively resetting the trap for some other unfortunate victim. Read the rest of this entry »

Mr. Chesney operates a yearly tour where he takes tourists from our world into a magical world where they embark on the full hero experience: a wizard guide, monster attacks, thwarting an evil army, and finally defeating the Dark Lord.  The problem is the residents of that magical world hate these tours; the tours deplete food, ruin farmland, kill locals, destroy towns, , and otherwise disrupt the world.  Unfortunately, Mr. Chesney has a very powerful demon he is more than willing to unleash on any of the world’s inhabitants who try to disobey him.  This year, the most powerful wizards, thieves, priests, and nobility have called a meeting to do something about it.  They consult with the Oracles, who give them one instruction: if they want the tours to stop, they need to appoint the first person they see as Dark Lord this year.  That person ends up to be Derk, a middling mage who would rather be creating new creatures than pretending to be a Dark Lord.

Thus begins The Dark Lord of Derkholm, Diana Wynne Jones’s satire of fantasy novels.  While a fully featured story in its own right, it pokes a great deal of fun at the fantasy novel genre.  The popular clichés of the genre are taken on: prideful dragons, aloof elves, greedy dwarves, bard colleges, and of course wizards.  Showing them as fully fleshed out people rather than one-sidedcharacters shows their strengths and flaws.  Seeing them stumble over themselves to make sure planning for well-staged and totally faked tours across their realms shows more of the lunacy of some of the more common fantasy tropes.  What Jones does effectively is give a certain loveable humanity to the characters, even while poking holes on our favorite cliches and illusions. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein there are chicken fingers.

The Drag, covered in lights and sound, hipsters and Drag rats, students and slackers, was a cornucopia for enhanced and garbled senses.  However, it was not unknown or unfamiliar to us.  As students, we spent a fair amount of our time on the Drag.  It was dangerously off-campus, but at the same time close enough for a short walk.  Things happened there, and even if they were the same old things for the Drag, they were new to us.  Consequentially, a walk down the drag on drugs was a revisiting of familiar places. Read the rest of this entry »

Most apocalyptic novels deal either with the apocalypse itself, the survivors just after, or the skeletons of society centuries after – scavengers, bandits, and backwards tribes.  A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller is different.  This book tells the story of the dark age of mankind after the apocalypse and humanity’s slow movement back towards knowledge, civilization, and society.  It is not surprising that the message is also much about humanity’s resistance to knowledge and its tendency to repeat its ignorance and war over and over again. Read the rest of this entry »

Wherein we go west like young men.

When we last left our intrepid heroes, there were three of us just beginning to trip balls.  We had inadvertently discovered the destination for our quest:  Toy Joy, the kitchy toy store not far from campus.  Our next step became getting there.

Toy Joy was theoretically within walking distance, but it was not an idle walk.  Twenty to thirty minutes for a normal person, depending on the speed you walked and how urgent you were to get there.  For drug users, such a time estimate was impossible; it would be a feat worth talking about if we even arrived at our destination.  There was a route we could have taken through the heart of campus which perhaps would have been more direct.  This would have taken us across campus, through looping paths, steps up and down, either plunging through or circumventing campus buildings.  That could have been quicker, but it was a less interesting walk.  We particularly did not want to walk through any buildings we had classes in while on acid, just for the poor associations in our drug-addled minds.

The route we took was more L shaped.  Five blocks to the west, then about ten north.  The north trip would take us along the Drag, a long stretch of lights and sound.  This would be far more interesting than plowing through campus, especially when said light and sound would be augmented by our current mental states.

We set out the west exit of Jester dorm, walking down the steps with a sense of purpose.  It was still dinner time, so there were a fair amount of people on the street and the sun was setting.  This again was different from previous trips, all taken at night time where pedestrian density was less and far more used to nighttime revelers.  We each did our best to not look suspicious, to look like stupid college students rather than stupid college students on drugs.  In retrospect, I’m not sure anyone would have been able to tell the difference. Read the rest of this entry »