Darkora - Nik's Blog

Day One - Death

“I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.” ~Winston Churchill

Rather a morbid topic to begin with, but here goes.

Death to me is just another part of the natural cycle; things die, things get consumed, their energy continues through the chain, the power of death seems to be the one thing that has powered our entire ecosystem - which is easy to say in general because there's no personal ramifications, it's easy to say shit dies because the thing that's dying is merely an abstract.

However when that thing is something or someone you've built an emotional attachment to, that concept becomes a scary one and I will admit that the death of someone close to me is the one thing that I am truly scared shitless of because despite what a large percentage of the population will tell you, we don't actually have the slightest of clues what truly happens when we cease to be on this mortal coil.

While I would like to believe in reincarnation (it sounds like a fantastic concept) there are far too many question, for example; do you get to choose? if so, why aren't there trillions of cats filling up this planet? do you have to start again from the bottom as an amoeba? do you carry on up the chain and turn into something else? what is up the chain from humanity? why am I asking so many questions? when will this topic end? and so on...

I also like the concept of an afterlife but the various different sets of qualifying criteria set out by the great (and tiny) religions of our world make this rather over complicated too, what if they're all true? what if none of them are true? what if just one of them is true? how would you know you've picked the right one until it's too late?

I suppose my best guess at the moment would be the 'you just cease' argument though the only crumb of comfort that comes into this is the idea that all the time someone is remembered, they are never truly dead, to me this makes life worth something.

It sets us each with a challenge; do something that would actually make your life memorable, bonus points if Hollywood make a film about it.

To anyone that reads this who is grieving for a loved one or close friend, my heart goes out to you, take solace in the thought that they are free from the struggle of this world and that all the time you cherish their memory, they are never truly dead.

Love, light and peace

Nik.

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Things found at Mar-a-Lago

An incomplete list of items found in the raid, in progress:

A list of all USA nuclear weapons facility locations

Detailed files of American troop movements and strategies, in envelopes with addresses in Russia, China, and North Korea

Codes to US Government vaults, safes, and Konami video games

D.B. Cooper’s parachute

5500 pages of tax evasion plans, bribes from Russia, and nudes of Barack Obama apparently taken from a White House shower

Empty moonshine bathtub gin bottles and dirt

Jimmy Hoffa (mummified)

Numerous DVDs of digital Trump self-insert My Little Pony hentai

300 lbs cocaine, 100 lbs heroin, 50 gallons of LSD, 8 bins of PCP, and some Ivermectin in an enema bulb

Numerous paintings stolen by Germany in WW2, including a room made of Russian amber and some Fabergé eggs (unhatched)

Several children with sales receipts from Jeffrey Epstein

A blu-ray copy of “The Cars that Ate Paris” by Peter Weir

A rotting bagel with olive loaf

One signed copy of “How To Violently Overthrow America When You Don’t Get Your Way” by William Luther Pierce

Bones of the Lindbergh baby

Several exhumed Popes, and half of a Bishop

A film reel of the pie-fight ending to Dr. Strangelove

A golden ‘Ark’ full of sand topped with two angels and a fedora

Genghis Khan (mummified)

A broken Swedish-made penis enlarger pump

One jar of toenails, one jar of hair, and one jar of what we all hope is mayonnaise

A postcard from a Bassetlaw Love Hotel signed, “Until next time, Milo Yiannopoulos XOXOXO”

A set of Trump-style toupées set on preserved human heads

Ben Shapiro (mummified)

I must object to the use of 'Phobia' in this context. If you identify as trans/homo/whatever-phobic, you are not afraid - you are an asshole.

Five Ways to Spot Somebody Suffering from Transphobia

No country should be allowed control over the internet,

least of all when the techniques they're talking about using are the same ones they decry the use of in China,

If this bill passes it could honestly be a death knell for the internet - please sign the petition.

This Bill must NEVER be passed!!! Spread the word and sign the petition!

"I guess that's your choice Christian Baby, I'll be enjoying my physics based parachute while you smash into the ground, have a nice flight!"

i think a lot about Angua ad Carrot’s personal arcs in Feet of Clay, and as part of how the book seems a lot about identity or claiming your identity via Dorfl and Cheery (Dorfl being declaring that he OWNS himself, and Cheery being the first Discworld dwarf to say ‘I am She’, and both of them starting cultural revolutions by simply saying “I am who I am”)

and the relevant point is that they start out on opposite sides of sympathizing.

Carrot’s reactions to Cheery speaks for itself. And they’re bad, and worse for the fact that it’s Carrot doing it. He comes off as very much the tradtionalist dwarf he was raised as, with quietly acidic comments like ‘I’m pretty sure my mother is a woman but at least she has the decency not to show it’ and other, even nastier things. It might not have been written as transphobic but it sure as hell reads like it. Most notably, it actually gets Angua pretty steamed, given that she keeps things close to the chest and conceals her feelings. It gets her genuinely pissed. It’s unsettling, like his Men At Arms bigotry towards the undead.

But. Carrot is the only one, throughout a large chunk of the book, to treat golems as people. Everyone else considers them mindless machines, and even Nobby and Colon, who are usually totally harmless, flat out try to use Detritus’ crossbow to kill Dorfl when he is offline; nobody trusts golems, who can do nothing but endlessly labor forever and suffer in silence, deprived of even a voice for themselves, and no one admits they are alive. And as Vime later thinks, that the real reason people are so scared of them is that they know they would deserve it if the Fantasy Robot Revolution came for them, after the way they mistreat the golems.

Carrot is the one to believe in Dorfl, to fight for him, and who believes that what is happening to the golems is wrong.

Angua is Cheery’s only friend at first. She’s the one who helps Cheery accomodating herself to more feminine things that are extremely new for a dwarf, she’s even protective of Cheery and desperately hides that she is a werewolf, knowing that Cheery hates people like her. She inspires Cheery towards what becomes the bedrock of the dwarfish openly female-presenting movement, and its a very humanizing and good thing from their friendship.

She’s also, put bluntly, a vicious and even cruel figure whenever golems are around. She openly regards them as non-sentient machines, hates them effectively because it helps her to have someone to look down on as an undead, and she rationalizes their horrific treatment and endless servitude as ‘being accepted’. She even gets mad at Carrot for empathizing with them and not her, specifically, though she does note that she is asking him to be unfair.

Much of their respective character development in Feet of Clay is their subtle growing over the worst aspects of themselves in this particular book. Carrot grows into less of a traditionalist with knee-jerk reactions, and Angua grows to empathize with the golems and view them as people.

Perhaps most relevant is the capstone to both their character arcs?

Using the pronouns Dorfl and Cheery prefer.

Okay, this is it, this is your notice, its time if you haven't already, delete your account, delete your X account now, stop what you are doing and delete it, delete the app from your phone, now.

X serves the political interests of one man, Elon Musk

get off the Nazi app, don't use the Nazi app.