Bring me the Head of the Mocking Man!

Bring me the head of the mocking map maker! Bring me his bones, his skin and his hair

He mocked me! The one person you are not supposed to mock!

THE SECRETS OF THE MOCKING MAN

He lives within a creaking gloomberg of ramshackle rooms, a rookery of old dreams, far to the west in a city where the sun sets and the light flames gold before the eve; in that funky dwelling he scampers hither and yon, peeping at reality through lenses, sticking up his head, staring at the city. From there he corresponds with similar rank fellows, a network of curious ghouls spread across the land, ferreting each other mail, cracking epistles scratched in yellow fly paper in a garbled hand. (In these he has mocked me!)

There in a quarter drenched in ravens and disturbing smells, where the pie-shops glisten in the afternoon smog, wrapped in stinking mundanity, climbs a curious house, perched above the like an drunken panther in a tree. It looms; dark but unserious, eyeing the city from under slanted eves which cackle like witches in the rain, propped up and joisted by wrenched beams that howl in the high winds from the amethyst sea.

Within lairs the Mocking Cartographer, ensconced in a warren of maps, each more deadly than the last. Like a rube Goldberg machine in there it is, or a dolls-house labyrinth. 

THERE, in a room which is not a room, in a house which is not a house slinks that cartographer of smirks. 

He thinks himself invulnerable for each of his enchanted maps has the power to drink in adventurers , invaders and thieves, trapping them in tiny parallel pearls of alternative sense. Each one a dungeon or labyrinth, castle or some other scene of "adventure"- the distant sky nothing more than an impenetrable painted board, the characters within nothing but feigned recycled mummers prancing through their sorrows. Here are snared the Mock-Mans foes, to be freed only on completion of the test, or else plucked from the parchment like a wriggling ant! Dropped into a jar - a collection of miniscule derps, trapped in jam! 

In the house of the Mocking Man, one never knows if one has opened a door to a True Room, or been enchanted and ensorcelled into some comedic jiggerypokery.

For the Mocking Man mocks us all.

He mocks the wise and the deluded, the heroic and the dark, he mocks the Knight and the Thief, the Soothsayer and Sage, he mocks the very principals of adventure itself! The agon of the hero! The pathos of the monster! The luciferian ego of the villain! All reduced to nonsense in his glimmering eye!

He is probably mocking you right now!

Therefore! I have set;

A BOUNTY ON THE MOCK-MANS HEAD

A bounty of wonders itemised by  part. 

For each section of the Mocking Mans body I shall return an equivalent selection - in precious materiel; bones of gold, flesh of ebony and ivory, clothes of spider silk and silver leaf, skin of tessellated jade, hair of spun ambergris, each eye a great gem, the brain a moonstone, largest in the world! The tubes I will exchange for amber guts. Any stools recovered for quartz.

Bring me the flesh of the Mocking Man!

YOU WEREN'T THERE MAN (but you were)

Good News! My Kickstarter has Funded. 

Plus  with the help of my printer I have once again re-defined the meaning of success to include things I have already done. Goals are being achieved and a complete product including every artist is within tantalizing reach!

500 copies printed          £9,110.00 

Daniel Grady layout £12,710.00 

Simones interior art £13,270.00 

Scraps Art          £13,430.00   <<<< WE ARE HERE!!

Maria Ku as consultant £13,990.00 

Jason Thompson £14,540.00 

Jez Gordon          £14,870.00 

Peter Mullen          £15,370.00 

Amanda Franck £15,650.00 

Daniel Puerta          £15,760.00 

Valin Mattheis           £16,640.00 

Dirk Detweiler Leichty £16,920.00 

Ana Polanšćak £17,250.00 

Alec Sorenson          £17,500.00 

Instead of writing short fictions where I pretend to be a Troll King I have been advised to sell my latest Book by actually talking about the book. I am not sure how to do this.

I pull out the book, I leaf through it..

and I am trapped - this time by a review of Amber Diceless (Wednesday July 2018), Section; I Read a Book, Subsection; Games - first entry of this subsection.

"It stumbles into our Age of Rust like a charismatic megafauna into a rotting theme park" very clever patrick

then remarks on the nature of complexity "Amber has 4 stats, 3 kinds of universal magic power, no dice and it takes 250+ pages of US Letter Size to tell you what to do with them"

Lets flip again...

Page 241 Section; Uncertain Worlds, Subsection; Modern Heroes/Modern Monsters, entry; "Best Enemies”, (Saturday 23 January 2016), paragraph 2 "THE CARAPACED GOD"

"Bow to me heroes, for only by my will is your reality maintained!"

Clad in infinite unending onion-rings of trans-uranic iron teased from the torn hearts of worlds spiralling to nothing in the flensing horizon of a Cherenkov-strobing black hole. Armour flaked and abrading with the touch of unspeakable eons yet ever growing by the substance of his own dark thought. Each layer riveted with unique gnosis etched in sacred languages invented by prophetic monks. From his palace of shadow and slow-decaying waves at the end of all realities the Carapaced God rules and turns his hidden eye to earth and is displeased. Perhaps he wishes a continent moved, a second sun created, a nation drowned or time revered. or simply the slate of history wiped clean. Seeking some alteration he sends forth his sombre legions. Insect Priests, Twilight Knights, Tense Fetish Nuns and looming PanzerSnaegle. The heroes oppose him yet he is an enemy that can never truly be defeated for should he fall, all reality would collapse into screaming chaos."

.......

Would you believe that having it in front of you. Having the whole thing in front of you in print, in a single, coherent text you can access at fingertip, feels substantially different than just leafing through a blog?

Did we only dream such incredible events? But lo, the dreamer looks down at their hands and finds some token, a gem or a leaf of page or something to indicate that yes, it was real, that all that crazy stuff did actually happen.

ANOTHER FLIP!

Page 197, Section; False Readings, no subsection, entry; "Knights of the Snail" (no date given).

"The Queen was dead and the King of the Curlicue throne was sad.

All day he slept and wept and, as the sun fell through the empty air towards the terminating line of night, he woke and pushed away his salt-encrusted sheets and walked to the balconies deepening void to stare into the dying summer light, while the Fool, Ham Floret waited in his shadow tensing his legs to leap in case the king should try to jump.

The King did not jump. He simply looked into the gathering gloom, counting the drawn storms as they marched across the velvet horizon and the sun bled red across the land."

.....

Time, in this book, the ten years of its making, does not really exist. it has been re-arranged, and so all the changes in personhood and style which took place across that decade are living next to each other, like the differing generations of an extended family, living in random houses on a terraced street.

Open a door and what will you find? 

FLIP!

Page 410, Section; I Read a Book, Subsection; Games, “Quest of the Mist Golem by Delvers Dungeon, Full title; Quest of the Mist Golem, Module QMG1, Mist Hold”, Wednesday 5 October 2011

Several paragraphs down;

"There is a mini hex map with nothing on it. For a journey which we've already been told only takes a day and which will be 'uneventful'.

Every night mist rises from the ground near the tower and kills everything in it. So you can only gain access during the day. you are also safe from the mist in the tower, so no time limit there.

There is some rather boring treasure, except that some of it is black coral. I would just dump the rest and have the evil wizard paying his Gnolls in Black Coral. It's vaguely poetic."

Harsh words Patrick of 2011!Cruel even, would you survive such criticism?

FLIP!

Page 559, Section; Cryptoculture, Subsection; Star Trek, Entry 'Complex Objects Moving through Space', part two 'Opening My Doom-Wings Takes a While' Friday 13th March 2015, Subsection 'Nemesis'

"aand the azteking is back in the opening shot. It still doesn't look quite right. 

Ah crap there is more shuttlecraft dicking around on-planet. There is at least a half-interesting pov shot. But then an awful stunt.

Shuttles crashing, shuttles being too fast, shuttles having little shuttle adventures, all these are bad signs"

....

Simply an extended or in depth-review of a youtube compilation video showing every Star Trek film only through its effects shots and nothing else, or, when uncovered in the Borgesian labyrinth of Patricks Mind Palace, something more? A reference? A clue? A little fractal spark that leads you on a goose chase through the text? Somewhere in Rome Tom Hanks looks at a wall and whispers "oh my god".

To some extent what you are buying is not a book, but a palace, or really more a ruin, where the ages and towers and layers have been mixed up by overenthusiastic Victorian archaeologists who just blasted through a bunch with dynamite and re-built other parts the way they "should be".

...

 

"From the blue beautiful self-indulgent 70s mystical V'ger to the clenched, grey-black desperate-to-be-cool CGI of Shinzons hateship, it seems fitting that we end where we began: watching a physical thing unfold for fucking ages."

...

How can I explain to you why I thought this would be a good idea and, furthermore, why I thought people might actually buy it?

Ego? Of course. A desire for just a little more imagined immortality? Yes. But, more fundamentally, are you the kind of person who walks down the alley by the side of the shopping centre and explores the rear of the warehouses, peeking through ancient security doors and eyeing the brick work? What if someone was living in that wooden add-on that seems stuck to the roof of a building half-way up? It looks like it’s been there for 50 years. No-one would know they were there. 

Are you someone who plays on the swings or are you more interested in that strange gap between the hedge and the security fencing at the back of the park?

FLIP!

Page 650 Section; Kleinplastik, 'The Loss of Silence in the Mortal Realms’, Wednesday 29th May 2019 (I fiddled with it a little after that point. Subgroup; The Music of the Band. Paragraph 15

"The forming and grouping of a skirmishing Warband is quite different than with most other kinds of wargame. Most other figures resonate or 'play' together in regular groupings, they feed off each other and carry their identity in relation to each other."

The spine on my giant test print is already cracking, BUT YOURS WILL NEVER* CRACK! A casebound tome! A fine Wilabin cover! Eternal and pure! A mystery to unfold, a curiosity to boast of or a folly to regret, its up to you.

 The KICKSTARTER for my incredible book SPEAK FALSE MACHINE is at about 97%!!!!!!

But first... 

The Popinjays of Knarr

Knarr! The jewelled city hanging in vermillion crowds like a balloon in a kids dream. 

Mistress of Adventures lost behind the rains of time. A Versailles of the mages, the crown city of multiversal nobility, streets very literally paved with gold, where pocket realms trapped in gems are gambled on baccarat games. A city without an underclass as all the servants are mind-wiped, time-looped Kings and Queens released into their home causalities at the end of service with a pocket full of magic dust or occultum coins brought forth from Knarr.

Coffee houses, swept-hilt blades, long-stemmed pipes and bone cigarette holders. Beauty spots, feathered hats, exquisite bows, puffed sleeves and brocade. Fine dining, late arrivals, tiny glasses, potent drinks. Exquisitely sensitive taste. High couture, connoisseur culture, (honour culture), highly strung, razors and ridicule, monocles and business cards; "my man here has the details".

Here the popinjays gamble for magic lamps, the keys to polar fortresses, the maps of labyrinths, small kingdoms held in glass spheres, or enchanted in paintings, or lost continents hidden behind teleport gates, or micro kingdoms in jars, or lands grown from the dreams of a sleeping child.

Swordplay; its an age of exploration, the multiversal spiderweb highway. But this is not a city of the explorers, or of those who fund the explorers, not even those, but those who back the backers. An army falls or rises, a realm burns or glows with light, all pieces on a board, marks in chalk, news for the coffeehouse.

Bejewelled are the swordsmen of Knarr. Perfumed and pungent, wealthy beyond reckoning. Most travel with an ogre butler who takes care of basic needs and holds the mirror when they re-apply makeup in the morning (what kind of gentleman can't apply his own mascara and beauty spot?). The butlers never fight of course, what would be the point? ad of course, returning home without ones jewels would be a crippling shame in the transient city of Knarr. To return home after having been mugged, or ransomed, or having to pawn a jewel for food, one could never show ones face in society again. Life would be over.

Of course its fine to lose these things and get them back, of course of course, that adds wonderfully to the tale; tied up in a sorcerers cave, captured by orcs, tricked by a Pixie, so long as you get the jewels back by the end, all is well. Better than well even, the greater the disaster the finer the tale, so long as you get them back.

Treasure is all very well. Most adventurers treasures are less than a Noble of Knarr starts out with to be frank. One returns with a chest of bloodstained gold, a broken crown, a half-burnt magic text, for the aesthetic of the thing.

These are the treasures valued in Knarr, the correct treasures, the proper adventuring treasures. It doesn't matter if its a goblin riding a pig, in fact that might be better, so long as the story behind it is good. In Knarr, so incalculable is the Wealth of everyone that treasures are like a kind of fashion, an art of selection and display. The display halls of the Palaces of Knarr hold whole dragons hordes, with the dragons bones too, not for their monetary value but for the quality of the experience, the classical nature of the adventure (neo agonists might turn up their noses at such a predictable display; "another dragon, oh my" but it is a classic for a reason).

So tour the multiversal swordsmen of Knarr, roughing it in micro-realms, hanging around in taverns, volunteering as caravan guards or for the city watch during a siege, trying to bump into wizards or hermits, practicing their duelling, hopping onto pirate ships, or getting marooned, (in a sense they could leave at any time, but in another more accurate sense, they could not, as to return to Knarr with an adventure incomplete, unresolved, or to go home beaten, would truly mean a kind of social death, and to be ostracised in the transient city is to die, to become nothing, even less than nothing. For wealth and power mean nothing to those whose streets are paved with literal actual gold. Nothing coin buys back a reputation once it is lost. Nothing can end the ridicule, and it is ridicule the Popinjays of Knarr fear more than lesser souls fear death.

 (The KICKSTARTER is still going, is at 90-sometthing per cent AND, I am reducing the print run to give a greater likelihood of being able to produce an artistically-complete book. We are down from 2000 copies to 1000, soon we may be down to 500, which, paradoxically, makes getting a book with full art and layout more likely. REDEFINING SUCCESS PEOPLE!)

Cults of the cuts of the Oceanic Star

So deep was the blue of the Oceanic Star that, with each fresh cutting of the gem new cults sprang up like grass, some focused on the stone-to-be, some raging in resentment at the losing of the stone-that-was, others worshipping the fragments, (of these, so many it would tire the tongue to tell of them all).

It was the quality of light, all agreed, though none who saw it could say precisely, exactly, in words,

just what it was.

Some compared the stone to sea-smoothed jade, not in its texture, for its surface, ever since the first cutting, was diamond-bright, but in its depths, as the texture of the light it held_. Soft, dark, as if it had a grain. Shadows pooled in the depths of the gem as if it were a shallow sea.

The Oceanic Star was first hauled from the belly of a mine so deep it touched the fire of the earth. Black with murderous fumes; great fan-towers heaved out the stinking air and flung it high, forcing down into the depths what must have seemed little more than breathable smoke, turning miners black from lung to limb, but vari-coloured at the limb-tips. The rainbow-handed quick-living  miners stained, perhaps by the curious chemicals of the mines rare ores, or simply poisoned by rare earth  or other toxins, fingers purpling and iridescing before they died

Here came forth the Oceanic Star, discovered by its glimmer. Nearly a boulder at first, black and stained, but curiously weighted. The miner who recovered it, famously,  received as their reward, one gold coin and two days off.

Careful cleaning bared shining adamant; the scales of a crocodile rising from a muddy bank. A gemstone, huge, a diamond perhaps, a sapphire, though coloured like no other seen before or since.

CULTS OF THE FIRST CUT

• The followers of the True Shah
• The Cult of the Inner Sea
• The Cult of Depth
• The Cult of the Coin
• The Cult of the Ocean Star
• The Painters Cult

Cut for the Shah, broken into several stones, its mass reduced by two thirds, the centre stone and largest still the biggest in the world. Almost un-wearable. Heavy, rounded, set in gold. When worn; well out of scale, like a child wearing their mothers things.

Thus was the Shah marked and his greatness maintained. Interpreted in a thousand paintings. (Famously a small conflict broke out over access to the precise pigments of blue demanded by the empires two greatest painters, even then, the blue caused bloodshed.)

Here the central stone gained its name; the Oceanic Star. Symbol of a landlocked Imperium burning on the plexus of the god-selected potentate. The Star flattened every other gem in that unserious panoply. There it was the night sky, a storm, in day so blue it was near-black at night so pale it seemed to hold the moon.

Here the Shah idled years away in contemplation of the stone, calling forth philosophers and creaking fools, madmen, prophets. 

"A prize to he tells me truly of the colour of the star, the star my son shall bear and be Shah after me"

O jealous son. O long-lived and indolent pa-pa. The Shah was hurled from his own tower, followed by his books. The son became a king through foreign gold and foreign guns, the price of which was either half the nation, or the gem.

And so was born the first (major) Cult of the Oceanic Star. The followers of the True Shah, who believed he did not die, or chose to die, or hid the secret of his death amongst the books with which he was buried in a secret tomb, but he, or his wisdom, or his True Line, shall return and he will come from the sea. The Star is required, the true star, not its false and altered selves, the True Shade must be known, it can be found in old illuminated texts and the nation shall be renewed.

Till then, the bombings continue.

CULTS OF THE QUEENS CUT

• The Cult of the Shah 
• The Cult of the Divine Path
• The Cult of the Worm
• The Cult of the Order of the Star

The Star was surrendered to the Reasonable Mercantile Incorporated Gentlemen, and by them cut again. This was the Queens cut. The Star was re-shaped, reduced slightly in its gourd-sized roundness. Such stones were made for crowns, not to bounce on the chest.

It was delivered to the Queen of a far-away land, a sea-girt realm, rich in trade, investors, a line which must be pacified lest they interfere, and what better for that than the worlds greatest gem?

So, of Sea-Land the star became the crowns own Jewel, set amidships on the royal brow. Perhaps it never saw the sea, but in this cold, grey land, spread with white light it is said the Star grew colder, its texture changed, though its facets multiplied.

Borne darkly on a crown, wrapped in hymns, pinnacle of orders of decayed knighthood the star grew bright, blazed even, in this deeper darkness, astounded as it had not before, awed where once it seduced, now like starlight, or clear water, or like a spark. The Queens cut had no depth, did not exist in this world, could not be measured by the eye, was pure light alone.

CULTS OF THE THIEVES CUT

• The cult of the Head
• The cult of Transport
• The Performers of Mysteries

Revolution! The Queens head falls and in the chaos the Star disappears from history, red-flagged wood-shoed anti-tyrants rampage through the royal apartments, the powder store, the dungeons, the files and luxuries. Everything is packed up, itemised and sold for the revolution! the people need arms!

Amongst this, somewhere, the crown loses its star, only a blank space remains.

It takes a century for even half of the truth to come out. Darkness bears its fruit and in the last will and testament of a later age a strange "sapphire" emerges from the gloom of a merchants bequest

"a stone unlike any other" - the auctioneers say.

From there; trade and museums, court cases and newspaper drives, advertisements and arguments. Seen now, in this penultimate cut, by more eyes than ever, trapsing past in museum queues, photographed and visualised

What of the colour? the texture? the light? Mediocre, say the gem cutters and the aesthetes. Sky blue, sparkling, tangible, like bright ink, wowing the crowds, pleasing the photographers. Pop culture writers make book after book, but it does not burn in darkness, it has no depth.

CULTS OF THE LAST CUT

• The Cult of Meat
• The Cult of the See
• The Cult of the Eye
• The Cult of the Dream

Delivered by thermic shock and high intensity bombardment, what little forces remain did not make it to the site in time. Not even looters survived the bombs.

The last cut shattered the star into an asymmetric curl of radioactive light. No longer anything like a gem. More akin to fulgurite or broken bone.

There it lay, a long while, buried in bone-ash and powdered brick until finally cold claws drew it forth once more into the light of a red sun, but the light of the Oceanic Star, lost since the Shah, or perhaps even before, returned now; deep, dark blue, shifting, endless and consuming, lit now from within, burning the hand if left there long, blinding the eye if gazed upon too much, sacred once again, though physically a mess. The dream of a forgotten ocean, the only living blue in a dead, red, world.

The Troll Kings invisible hands..

..twitch, ghostly but for its rings; hoops and bands of Rheingold set with gems from plutonian realms. chalcedony, oryx, Martian pyrites, amber fossils from the toxic beds of Venusian seas.

The king half-slumbers, half-wrathful and half-sad, vast and earthlike, invisible but for silken robes stitched from the campaign tents of emperors, the barding of dead grail knights, the wedding dresses of a thousand brides woven with their golden hair.

Fat the troll-king is. Fat with eaten women and brave men, and bitter his cold breath.

Adored he would be.

https://www.instagram.com/davidthierree/

"Am I not... " he breathes out, in a murmur like interstellar static.

A pause.

The crown, a crown of splintered diamonds shining like glass, woven together with the unending labour of a hundred thousand enchanted spiders whose curse and purpose is only and entirely to weave their webs endlessly around the spiked crowns hoop and attach it firmly to the Troll Kings invisible head, that it might not fall, cascade down down down onto the sea-stone fall and there shatter, erupt like crystal waters, like a meteor of light, and drown the petitioners in a sea  of bloodstained gems.. (each spider was a hero once, the Troll Kings foe, this being his just punishment for those who would place limits or reductions on the Troll kings wealth), the crown, tilts, rises!

A gasp runs round the hall! The King is sitting up! He is, well not rising, but he is straightening his magnificent spine! Not for a century, not for two, has the Troll king even raised his head. Noble lines have lived and died and chronicles been written and been lost in the hundreds of winters since that last and mighty raising of the brow.

"AM I NOT..." (one thousand salt-stained copper-clad troll knights draw to rimy hunchbacked attention, some waking up for the first time in a decade).

".. a KING???" the Troll King cries.

The hall is silent. What does this mean?

One hundred ageless elf-maids languishing in one hundred gilded cages hanging from the Troll Kings stolen stars while their ever-gold hair grows ever down (for only when it grows long enough to stroke a goblins head below will they be set free), start, awaken, glance curiously amongst themselves. Is he having a stroke? they think.

The college of goblin sorcerers, so old and mad their ears have been plaited into mobius strips under their chins, shiver, shaking tomb-dust from their hunched backs, grit their sharp yellow teeth, one snaps their man-bone pipe, one has, unnoticed, at some point become a mushroom.

The gold bird captured in an onyx mirror held only by the shadow of a sleeping silver girl, herself locked within a crystal coffin which is locked within a crystal coffin which is itself so locked, seven-times-seven times, each lock made by a dwarven smith who was strangled with his own beard and the key given to a seperate deamon each, the gold bird chirps!

"WELL?????" the Troll-King whispers, barnacles crunching from his armpits and rear as he shifts in his cold and granite throne.

None speak, until one, the Crone Sycroax, the Troll-Kings mistress of maladies, the storm-stirrer and milk-curdler, the baby-stealing witch and his sanest advisor, hauls her sagging paps from her silver bath full of cold and curdled cheese and says;

"Aye. A King. King you be and so it is."

"AND YET..." the earth shakes, the murmur of weeping gods issues from the toothed vault behind the throne, thunder deafens. He is getting up! the Troll King is rising!

No. No it is safe yet. He is merely setting his great feet, slippered in ebony caravels which set sail for forgotten lands, as if he might stand, he is not standing yet.

But still! What a cataclysm!  What horrors? What if he stands up? What should be done? None there know for it has never been seen or recorded in even the glyphs of aeonic time.

"AND YET" the Troll King speaks, and ear bones shatter spontaniously in several adjacent lands "WHERE ARE MY ADORERS?"

Then. Slowly, horrifically, like the end of empires, the King stands!

Several go mad at the sight. 

Dust, virgin bones and unknown of Archean life cascade down his mighty silken gown. He stands! The hundred-thousand-diamond crown rises to the level of the lowest elf-maids cage. The invisible mitts sweep hanging elf-hair aside like a curtain of gold. The head turns! Slowly, like a cannonball rolling. This way! That way!

Where the invisible gaze passes, gold coins turn to wizards and run away cackling, teeth shatter or turn to stone, bones turn to glass, gain sentience or are engraved with impossible prophecies beneath the flesh.

"AM I NOT ADORED?" 

The Troll-Kings bitterness forms springs of raw vinegar which spurt up like geysers from between the sea-stone cobbles of his hall, (each a hill), picking some goblins and sweeping them away.

"I SEE NO LEGIONS. I SEE NO CHOIRS. WHERE LIE THE TRUMPETS AND ARMIES? WHERE THE POETS AND MANDOLINS? WHERE THE APES AND MAIDENS? 

The Crone-Thing Sycorax stands in her bath, dripping cold cheese. All who see her nakedness go blind and die.

"They are passed O King." She says.

"PASSED?"

The Crone coughs up a teratoma, examines is with one beady eye, smiles and puts it back in her mouth, chewing carefully.

"Those were the poets of your youth, O King. Those were the armies of the summer when the world was young, and the maidens of the dawn. Now is the night and the dark. Now is winter and the end of all but stone. Dust are your adorers. Forgotten is your name."

"DUST?" whispers the invisible king, "YET I SLEPT BUT FOR A MOMENT."

"Hggggh" grunts the witch, and shits a bloody stream into her bath of cheese. "Ahhhhh. No King. Worlds have burned in your sleeping. Towers fallen and been raised. New stars shine. But not for long. The world falls, soon to die."

"AH." Whispers the Troll-King, and sighs out a dozen ghosts who weave through the hall like streamers of pale fire. 

"AHHHHHHHH."

The Troll-King sits so slowly and tectonically that mountains nearby tilt by a degree towards his weight.

"IT WAS ONLY A MOMENT THEN. A MOMENT OF GOLD."

In other news, the Kickstarter is going... less well than hoped for..

Leading to some more modest and hopefully achievable goals..

Which you can find out about in Updates HERE!!!!

Six Crimes of an Analog Future

 There is a post under the image bit first BACK MY KICKSTARTER AT LEAST CLICK THIS LINK!!!

1. Crypto stolen from Concorde in Daring Rocket Heist!

A regular large volume transfer between Bank Suisse and the Bank of England was interrupted yesterday as Concorde was boarded mid-flight. 

The encryption keys representing the funds to be exchanged are always transferred with the greatest possible security but it seems a group of international criminals discovered a weak point - the Supersonic flight between Geneva and Gatwick itself!

Sources close to the British Government yesterday admitted "we were caught out". When originally conceived, the sheer speed of the Concorde itself made the transfer impossible to interrupt, in the air at least, and all security was based around the ground stages. But long term developments in low-earth satellite jet messenger services have lead to a small, but unregulated, market in very high-speed high-altitude rocket Jet engines.

The criminals intercepted Concorde over the English Channel and, matching speeds, managed to board the supersonic jet. They then took the solid brass cryptography keys, each individually engineered in extreme secrecy by Swiss masterminds, and purloined them. Apparently unable to return to their rocket the gang leapt from Concorde and were allegedly picked up by a hovercraft in the channel below.

Evidence of the complex planning for the crime was traced to a 'film set' on the French Riviera in which a scale-model of the Concorde jet had been constructed and apparently used to rehearse the heist under the cover of producing a motion picture.

2. Pirates exchange fire over Sealand Transmitter!

The 'air wave wars' turned hot yesterday as a fleet of Pirate Radio Station boats clashed with Royal Post Office security forces over the Sealand Transmitter. Allegedly shots were exchanged and some injuries have been reported. 

'Fans' of the Radio Pirates claim that the governments own policies, in particular the 2023 'Air Wave Security and Regulation Act' have forced smaller and non-regulated stations into smaller and smaller ranges of the transmissible spectrum with more and more complex and expensive circuits needed to decode the transmissions.

"This is the slow strangulation of a free Press by legal means" claimed the head of the Pirate Party yesterday, "information wants to be free and the People want direct news sources regardless of government control. Whomever controls the wavelengths controls the truth."

The Royal Post office issued 'regrets' about the use of force and denied any deliberate intensification of the situation on their part. "Pirate Radio boats have only grown more dangerous" claimed the Post Master General "both paid security forces and, we regret, the possibility of lethal force, are needed to preserve the security and stability of the public air waves for the good of all."

3. President Taped by Bicycle!

The American Secret Service yesterday claimed that attempts had been made to 'bug' the recent Camp David summit by use of an all-metal bicycle containing rare earths. The Sketchy Scooter they said, had been precisely constructed to absorb and record vibrations in the wavelength of the human voice. This creepy contraption apparently slipped through the U.S. spooks net as it contained no electronics and no moving parts other than those of a normal bicycle. The system was entirely solid state, powered by the movements of the bicycle itself and recording the vibrations inside its rare-earth-impregnated chassis as a kind of solid-tape, to be retrieved and decoded at a later date by unspooling the bike chassis. The Secret Service confirmed that they believed no Top Secrets had been lost as "The President does not discuss policy while cycling".

4. Cambridge "Crime Zone" Still Draws Critics

The five-mile 'low-noise' zone around Cambridge University has drawn criticism again after levels of petty crime and several assaults occurred over the previous month.

The 'Teks' at the big 'U' confirmed the renewed need for the 'Zone' and even asked for an extension. "We test and develop the worlds most advanced and subtle circuits and the more complex they are, the more vulnerable they are to EM interference. Last year an illegal TV crashed one of our most expensive research projects with its irregular transmissions. This is a matter of not just our technological development but our security."

Cambridge locals are split on the matter; "Its quite nice really" claimed one OAP. Just like the old days. No buzzing and I like the horses. I don't mind paying for telegrams. Life just moves at a slower pace here." But voices close to the Cambridge Plod were less pleased; "Its like a bl**dy nineteenth century rookery round here. No radios, no telegram. Crims realised they could do what they want here and the state can't see them. Then they started moving in en-masse. Its not just the hawkers, thieves and pickpockets, all the London Gangs have set up their HQ under our noses. They know there's no transmissions, so no bugs, no telephones, no evidence! They can organise without trouble right in the heart of England!"

5. Ceefax King "Steals" the Louvre

Elon Musk the "Minidisc King" yesterday claimed to have "acquired" the Louvre. That is, to have the physical copies of super-high grade transmissions of its whole stock of art and culture. 

The batty millionaire says he wants to make the Mona Lisa Free and add the entirety of the Louvre to his information transmission network for all of his customers to enjoy  whenever they wish, in high-definition colour. 

"It will be like being there." Claimed Musk.

The French authorities are in a stew and a major legal battle has broken out over the terms of their deal with Musk for the discs with the art. "The image itself is valuable" said the director. "Just as a photograph should not be included in a book without permission, curation and copyright, neither should Musks "accessible transmissions", he is just selling pirate art books over the air waves and that was not our agreement.

6. GPS Maps "May have been altered" Government Claims

Drivers have been vindicated recently as the Government has admitted that the GPS maps of Southern England "may have been altered". Controversy has been stewing for a year as drivers in the South have found themselves lost in wrong turns and going down bad alleys. HMRC and the contracted corporation that engraves the maps on super-shin sheet  Googleplex navigation, had previously claimed that any errors were within bounds and the "slow but natural changes in road building" were the cause.

Conspiracy Theories pointed to an alleged break-in at Googleplex's Engraving Centre in late 2022, a break-in in which it was claimed nothing was taken. The seemingly batty concept that someone may have sneaked into the building and re-engraved the core maps for that area before they were updated and couriered out to users of the GPS system (mainly hauliers, travelling salesmen and other long-distance travellers) has now been vindicated. The identity of "who changed the maps" and why, remains an "open question" Govt spokesmen yesterday said.

'Speak, False Machine' Kickstarter is LIVE!

The Kickstarter for 'Speak, False Machine' a Brick of Culture, is now up and running!

Its a big book collecting and organising most of the blog posts from the first ten years of False Machine. 

How big? Fucking huge; pinched crown quarto and over 650 pages and half a million words long. 

Grab it if you want a Weapon of Words to wield against the oncoming dark, (or if you desire a curious level of intimacy with my mind) and if you can't afford that, back the PDF (which is cheap).

MEDIA

As usual I have made zero media plans and have no marketing budget. 

If you want to help spread or re-link the Kickstarter I think the best times to do so are now and in the final few days.

If you have ideas or desires for blog posts you would like to see over November, or interviews or anything else that might drag me into the light of public attention, you can let me know here, on my socials or at pjamesstuart@gmail.com

FUNDING LEVELS

We have a bunch of funding levels at which the quality of the book will improve, including pieces from a range of OSR-adjacent artists so check those out if you are interested.

I only need 590 rich and/or crazy backers to hit every art and design goal! Its theoretically possible!