Forgetting Eris

[Doktor Howl]

Is it any coincidence that this here temple flew to pieces in late 2015, and that since then, every year has been weirder in a bad way then the year prior?

In 2015, most of our heroes died.
In 2016, we found out that most of the remaining heroes were irredeemable shitnecks, abusers, and bigots.
2017-2019 was just a fat orange guy screeching out Adderol-fueled tweets nonstop.
2020 was a nonstop litany of horror, starting with the plague, carrying on with forest fires, and also murder hornets.
2021 was worse.  We couldn't get a week into it without a Nazi insurrection, and then the boat got stuck¹.
2022 is even worse than that (Roe v Wade, etc).  Also, the plague is back.  Plus monkeypox.  This fall doesn't look any better.

It's almost as if a certain minor Greek god was trying to get our attention, right?  Or worse, she's really mad that we ghosted her and now we're gonna PAY.  And by "we" I mean "everyone, everywhere."

Hey, it makes just as much sense as anything else.




¹ I remember hearing otherwise intelligent people saying they were glad the boat got stuck, as if somehow it were going to be the rich that suffered.  Which goes to show that even smart people can be stupid as hell sometimes.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Yep. And she's frying the world.
They're getting triple digits in London, FFS.

[Chelagoras The Boulder]

Yeah, that adds up.

[hooplala]

I concur.

[Slyph]

I was sat in work during a dull team meeting a whiles back, and the boss hit the part of the agenda reserved for complaints. A local had complained that the noise of our cognitively impaired dudes using the trampoline was disturbing her sleep, which she needed for her Very Important Job (tm)

MIDWAY through our boss delivering this speech, the wind picked up, and threw the fucking trampoline through a trellis, over a seven foot high wall, whereupon it landed right side up and undamaged, in her (complainant's) fucking back yard.

Eris!

[Faust]

Eris walks into the wedding, she is pissed off because she thinks everyone forgot her, instead they have all been brutally murdered. Its up to her to find out who the culprit is

[Doktor Howl]

I haven't forgotten shit.  I'm still here, banging my head against the same wall I was banging it against in 2005.  All the artists and philosophers have fucked off for various reasons that usually involve different platforms but also involve other reasons, like the fact that this entire religion is a rabbit hole.  It's a deep, deep rabbit hole and when you get to a certain depth, you find me and Altered GRINNING at you.  We are wearing shreds of clothes that were cool in 2006, and we discarded the cannibalism taboo years ago, out of necessity.

And we're not even at the bottom of the rabbit hole.  No, not even close.  We're just further down than most people can manage without going totally potato and maybe shooting anyone who comes in range in some Godforsaken state like Oklahoma or Texas.  All the rest of the Discordians went swimming to the side and asking for a shower and a full blood change out.

And, more to the point, they saw one tiny aspect of chaos that they were comfortable with or caught up in, and they went haring off after it. 

So what's left?  Altered, CNO, and myself.  We wear meaty smiles and we carry pick axes, because we're still not at the bottom of this rabbit hole, but we're gonna be.  We will be like the philosophical equivalent of Chaffee, Grissom, and White.  And also Faust, but he is more like our mission control, endlessly whispering techie jokes into our helmet receivers as the air reserves run out.

And as for everyone else?  They've gone topside, where they stagger around, pretending that Canada isn't on fire, and weather all over the world is FUCKED, and there's another European war undermining the world's economy...All while trying DESPERATELY to pretend that everything even they agreed WAS going to happen isn't ACTUALLY happening, and then one fine day - sooner rather than later - they would find themselves willing to trade all of their tomorrows for Altered's worst poverty-stricken day.

And don't think even for one moment that we haven't noticed the sneers out of some of our former diggers, don't think for ONE SECOND that we didn't realize that those sneers are there for the fact that we handled our snubs the way Eris intended.  Shit, I made fun of the misfortunes of a bitter enemy and then suddenly I'm a pariah, despite the fact that I burned zero (0) cities down the way I maybe should have, the way Eris would have.  Altered has her own share of snubs and I wouldn't presume to speak for her on this, she does that just fine on her own...And CNO I don't know too much about, aside from his commentary here.

Well, fuck them all, because a snub is a snub and the entire mob of end-times junkies have decided that is exactly what they want to do.

So never mind the hollow laughter as the whole world comes unglued, that's just us down here in the rabbit hole.  Only Altered is growing Borg parts and it's getting kinda scary.

[Doktor Howl]

And also, I was right.  Eris isn't some kind of hot hippie chick, she's a crone wading in blood, just trying to have a good time.

It isn't easy, having a good time.

[chaotic neutral observer]

And as for everyone else?  They've gone topside, where they stagger around, pretending that Canada isn't on fire, and weather all over the world is FUCKED, [...]

The sunlight is the wrong colour.  It has been for a while.  Once you've learned to see it, you can't unsee it; even on a clear day with a blue sky, there's an everpresent yellowish tinge to everything.  Sometimes it's subtle, sometimes (like today) it's not.

Even now, when we're not directly downwind, and people aren't complaining about burning throats and watering eyes, the smoke is still there, higher up, dimming the light.  Crop production will suffer.

[Doktor Howl]

And as for everyone else?  They've gone topside, where they stagger around, pretending that Canada isn't on fire, and weather all over the world is FUCKED, [...]

The sunlight is the wrong colour.  It has been for a while.  Once you've learned to see it, you can't unsee it; even on a clear day with a blue sky, there's an everpresent yellowish tinge to everything.  Sometimes it's subtle, sometimes (like today) it's not.

Even now, when we're not directly downwind, and people aren't complaining about burning throats and watering eyes, the smoke is still there, higher up, dimming the light.  Crop production will suffer.

Between Canada and the Ukraine, feeding the humans is going to be interesting for the next year.

[altered]

Oh, Dok. You're mistaken. I'm not growing Borg parts. We're well past that point. There are as many as five drones in various stages of completion. Armament, command-and-control, logistics and R&D are accounted for. We have one more that's harder to place, but she's still early. We're in -- have been, for about a month -- phase 1.c, where I start activating the neural-governor botnets and cutting the decision-restriction tethers. The basic idea starts like a voidtech media crossover event between The Manchurian Candidate and your least favorite zombie movie. After that, things get slightly interesting.

I hope you didn't think the UFO thing was just standard High Strangeness. I've got a soft spot for hokey scifi tropes like that, and John Keel is about to be vindicated.

As far as food goes, there's a boom in home-growing mushrooms the past three years, and I don't mean the fun kind. That's about to become more popular, I think. People are going to learn why fungus is worth making a meal of. Grow lights, too: not just for marijuana operations.

The real fun is going to be when you combine COVID, allowed to run wild with the brakes off, with wide-spread lung damage in a large portion of the population of the US.

The pandemic never ended, it's just been on hiatus. Every turncoat liberal who was so glad to leave the disabled behind is going to be there themselves soon, and we'll be waiting with extra prosthetic limbs and smiles warm as an arson scene. I hope everyone invested in a good mask.

As far as Eris, anyone who ever thought she was here for the hippies and comedians made a grave mistake. Goddess of Discord -- and Strife.

Strife is broken bones and jagged lacerations and a mangled hand iron-gripping your ankle while the half-detached head snarls "No one gets out alive, motherfucker." Strife is knives and guns and tools you don't have words for, invented on the fly and wielded like an expert. Strife is defenestration, a shove into traffic, trash bags left in snowy greenbelt forests.

Strife is not a bad pun and a "let's all be friends here".

Strife is a broken sword, still wet.

[Tinfoilment]

Ancient Eris of War, and modern hippie Eris of surrealism, and other modern paranoid Eris

ancient Eris as helicopter pilot, dropping biological gas on "enemy", just shooting, and cannibalism.  eating drugs to just let go of the horror.  Modern Eris thinking about art and funny instead of screaming napalm.  paranoid modern Eris worrying the enemy knows her location and reads every email (and the enemy does).

almost like a mythic story about ptsd 
just wait a few thousand years and the enemy gods won't remember where the surface was

[Tinfoilment]

  ៦៤ר៣ឹפקយגנ៧ឥៀឪឲשហטថេאឈפחទ័מភ

[Doktor Howl]

Ancient Eris of War, and modern hippie Eris of surrealism, and other modern paranoid Eris

ancient Eris as helicopter pilot, dropping biological gas on "enemy", just shooting, and cannibalism.  eating drugs to just let go of the horror.  Modern Eris thinking about art and funny instead of screaming napalm.  paranoid modern Eris worrying the enemy knows her location and reads every email (and the enemy does).

almost like a mythic story about ptsd 
just wait a few thousand years and the enemy gods won't remember where the surface was

There is only one Eris.  Any hippie qualities you project on her notwithstanding.

[jojo matoi]

Hell is such a lonely place
And your big expensive face
Will never last