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I know I'm in the minority, but the whole God-Machine thing being a pervasive thing that was a major component of the setting was actually offputting to me and gave me too many 40k odors, plus the fact that it all spun out of a joke of "Let's make the GM the antagonist, ahuuhuuhuu" was loving terrible. Works for the cosmic horror vibe Deviant, Hunter, etc though.
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Feb 24, 2022 13:59
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the God-Machine owns but only really makes sense as a primary antagonist for Demon and maybe a secondary antagonist for a few other splats, like Mage or Geist (both of which already have a bit of "the horrors of modernity" in their DNA; contrast something like Changeling where it's both incredibly redundant and also doesn't fit the theme at all) it's nothing like 40k lore, though, the easiest point of pop culture i'd compare the GM to is the cube in Cube, or more appropriately but less well-known, the security AI antagonist in later seasons of Person of Interest. it's an impersonal system that can be pressured but not reasoned with and produces bizarre, horrifying outcomes based not on hatred or desire but simply because doing so perpetuates itself, perhaps in reference to some original purpose, but frankly maybe not even that Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 14:11 on Feb 24, 2022 |
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Feb 24, 2022 14:07
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:the God-Machine owns but only really makes sense as a primary antagonist for Demon and maybe a secondary antagonist for a few other splats, like Mage or Geist (both of which already have a bit of "the horrors of modernity" in their DNA; contrast something like Changeling where it's both incredibly redundant and also doesn't fit the theme at all) I meant more in the sense that every time I've had it come up in RPG convos, people conflate it with 40k because of the terminology, and then it either turns into a "which concept is better" discussion/argument, or people illustrate how they just thought it was a similar/straight up exactly the same thing, which is at least a better conversation since you can talk about the differences with a fresh perspective. I get why they named it that, but general RPG people are loving stubborn, argumentative morons, so it really does no favors to crib a rather unique term directly from one of the most popular lines of the last 40 years. I don't see a better solution, since giving it a real name inherently undoes a lot of the impersonality and mystery of it, but here we are.
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Feb 24, 2022 14:35
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I mean, the term is literally ancient, we’re just used to seeing it in Latin - deus ex machina, the god from out of the machine.
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Feb 24, 2022 14:59
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Fuzz posted:I meant more in the sense that every time I've had it come up in RPG convos, people conflate it with 40k because of the terminology, and then it either turns into a "which concept is better" discussion/argument, or people illustrate how they just thought it was a similar/straight up exactly the same thing, which is at least a better conversation since you can talk about the differences with a fresh perspective. Even as an AdMech nerd, how do you even start linking the God Machine's materialist gnosticism and the Omnissiah? There isn't even that much overlap, because techpriests are clearly just talking about how machines are better and the God-Machine is about, at minimum, SCP style weird junk. Find nerds who have a better understanding of the things they're nerds about, is my point. If that sounds aggressive, it's because I'm baffled that people are like this.
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Feb 24, 2022 15:08
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I've never encountered a direct comparison between any 40k lore and the God-Machine but I'm not doubting that you have, just trying to provide data that it's not been an obvious comparison in my neck of the woods.Tuxedo Catfish posted:the God-Machine owns but only really makes sense as a primary antagonist for Demon and maybe a secondary antagonist for a few other splats, like Mage or Geist (both of which already have a bit of "the horrors of modernity" in their DNA; contrast something like Changeling where it's both incredibly redundant and also doesn't fit the theme at all) TBH I found that it wasn't even a good primary antagonist for Demon. It's motives are explicitly inscrutable which made the players feel incredibly constrained and uninspired about how to interact with it, which was reinforced by Demon powers being so focused on social manipulation. In the quest to have an antagonist that had motivations that could be played around instead of seemingly meaningless, we made the God-Machine more of an ambient phenomena that the actual antagonists (your standard rogues gallery of Evil CEO, Evil Senator, etc) used in ways conscious and/or unconscious to more scrutable ends.
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Feb 24, 2022 15:16
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Demon really needed a book of infrastructure with a bunch of God-Machine setups and their defenses for Demons to heist. (I also think it would have worked better if they'd let the God-Machine be 5% funny instead of 100% serious.)
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Feb 24, 2022 15:20
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Rand Brittain posted:Demon really needed a book of infrastructure with a bunch of God-Machine setups and their defenses for Demons to heist. No respect for Friend Computer on the grim streets of Darkness.
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Feb 24, 2022 15:24
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When GIP talks about how CCP would just pull RPG staff for MMO work, CCP apparently didn't actually care what their specialty was before putting them to work on the game. Aileen Miles who was WW's very talented art director for a number of years... went to work on QA. CCP sounds like a dumpster en flambé just top to bottom.
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Feb 24, 2022 15:32
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Rand Brittain posted:Demon really needed a book of infrastructure with a bunch of God-Machine setups and their defenses for Demons to heist. Trouble is that the God-Machine is automatically kind of funny because it's extremely powerful and also seemingly very stupid, making it basically the ambient villain of a cyberpunk dystopia which just so readily produces absurdity that even trying to take it seriously would be absurd. Demon's big weakness as written is that it doesn't go nearly deep enough on its own primary premises. Contracts are so underdeveloped that every time they came up we wound up having to basically take an impromptu gamedev break, and they're drat near the most important verb for PCs. Absurd. Infrastructure is another one, not nearly enough detail about how to actually play with it or why you'd even really engage with it. RIP I guess.
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Feb 24, 2022 16:24
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Tulip posted:every time they came up we wound up having to basically take an impromptu gamedev break in fairness this is basically the nwod's entire pitch and Demon doubly so like every loving game in the system tells you "you should be making up conditions on the fly", everyone i've ever known who's run these games uses their own "simplified NPCs" homebrew because the expectation that you'll stat them up RAW is completely absurd, after decades of publication there still isn't actually anything really comparable to a Monster Manual equivalent and then Demon takes all of that and then goes "okay now you need to make up four new, unique powers and a riddle / poem for each of your players to discover in play"
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Feb 24, 2022 16:33
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Tulip posted:Demon's big weakness as written is that it doesn't go nearly deep enough on its own primary premises. Contracts are so underdeveloped that every time they came up we wound up having to basically take an impromptu gamedev break, and they're drat near the most important verb for PCs. Absurd. Infrastructure is another one, not nearly enough detail about how to actually play with it or why you'd even really engage with it. RIP I guess. I'm also deeply frustrated by the Interlock deal which is entirely on the ST to invent stuff for with very little help from the book. Happily I am told you can basically ignore it and nothing is really lost.
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Feb 24, 2022 16:35
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i love Demon but if i ever run Demon again i'll probably do it in a heavily hacked version of Chuubo's or Glitch or something, because if i'm going to play a TTRPG that wants me to basically just design my own game to hang on its skeleton then at the very least i'm going to pick one with good bones lolTulip posted:Infrastructure is another one, not nearly enough detail about how to actually play with it or why you'd even really engage with it. RIP I guess. this one at least is supported by mechanics, if you don't have subverted Infrastructure you're basically like a vampire without a herd. admittedly you can generate a burst of aether by reverting to demon form but that's a cover violation every time you do it (outside of maybe certain designated safe areas, which the game alludes to but IIRC never actually states to be an exception) also Glitches get really nasty as you grow in power and eventually you're probably going to want some way to suppress them, which, again, Infrastructure Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Feb 24, 2022 |
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Feb 24, 2022 16:37
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:i love Demon but if i ever run Demon again i'll probably do it in a heavily hacked version of Chuubo's or Glitch or something, because if i'm going to play a TTRPG that wants me to basically just design my own game to hang on its skeleton then at the very least i'm going to pick one with good bones lol Hell, that was my exact experience with my last go at Promethean 2E and that game wasn't as underboned as Demon. It was mostly just poorly organized with way too many scattered pieces, as usual for nWOD.
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Feb 24, 2022 16:44
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Tulip posted:Trouble is that the God-Machine is automatically kind of funny because it's extremely powerful and also seemingly very stupid, making it basically the ambient villain of a cyberpunk dystopia which just so readily produces absurdity that even trying to take it seriously would be absurd. Yeah, exactly; the game refuses to recognize that the God-Machine is a little weird and funny most of the time, and kind of trips over itself by not seeing the joke. Similarly, by insisting that the God-Machine is just 100% unknowable, it also makes its actions really hard to describe or predict (and similarly, because it's extremely sure that you can never understand Infrastructure, Infrastructure is also essentially just random and a bit dull). Also contracts are unpleasant to me because they straight-up lift a mechanic from changelings that was previously their exclusive special thing.
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Feb 24, 2022 17:43
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Rand Brittain posted:Yeah, exactly; the game refuses to recognize that the God-Machine is a little weird and funny most of the time, and kind of trips over itself by not seeing the joke. Similarly, by insisting that the God-Machine is just 100% unknowable, it also makes its actions really hard to describe or predict (and similarly, because it's extremely sure that you can never understand Infrastructure, Infrastructure is also essentially just random and a bit dull). This is most of the reason why I made a blanket statement for my Awakening game of there not being a GM to worry about. It just didn’t exist. I didn’t need some unknowable and internally inconsistent world antagonist to torture the mages curiosity. There are plenty of better antagonists for them to research, all of which have better reasons than “because it’s unknowable”. It’s the in game version of wanting to know what’s inside the macguffin briefcase, but then also telling them they can’t use magic to know what’s inside it without any good reason. Much better to tie those random trouble spots to spirits or ghosts, or some other strange metaphysical thing that they can poke and prod. That way the answer is palpable, even if it doesn’t make sense on a human level.
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Feb 24, 2022 18:10
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:i love Demon but if i ever run Demon again i'll probably do it in a heavily hacked version of Chuubo's or Glitch or something, because if i'm going to play a TTRPG that wants me to basically just design my own game to hang on its skeleton then at the very least i'm going to pick one with good bones lol OK fair enough. I think that fell into the same sort of resource management system that we got bored with and handwaved pretty quickly (like...hunting for blood lol). I'm ultimately mostly with you. The surface trappings of Demon (and Promethean) absolutely rule but the mechanical substrata and book layout suck so much. The main reason I've not alreadly made Created By The Apocalypse or something is because I'm running a Promethean campaign with established characters and trying to migrate characters to a new system sounds like just a bad idea all around. Rand Brittain posted:Yeah, exactly; the game refuses to recognize that the God-Machine is a little weird and funny most of the time, and kind of trips over itself by not seeing the joke. Similarly, by insisting that the God-Machine is just 100% unknowable, it also makes its actions really hard to describe or predict (and similarly, because it's extremely sure that you can never understand Infrastructure, Infrastructure is also essentially just random and a bit dull). The unknowable element is just a killer. Like there's a big difference between something being mysterious or deceptive vs unknowable, and unknowable means that you can't interact with it on multiple different layers. I do think a lot of WOD stuff is funny because the games refuse to acknowledge that it's intrinsically funny. Like it's all so melodramatic that it becomes goofy, but unlike the Paranoia writers I don't think the WOD writers would benefit from acknowledging that they're in on the joke (they may or may not be, but they're certainly writing as if they are 100% sincere). Hence why What We Do In The Shadows is such a perfect VTM/VTR fiction.
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Feb 24, 2022 18:48
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Okay, thanks for that write-up! This kind of explains why searching for Hunter led me to multiple different websites and wiki's all referencing different things. So if I want to play a new edition of Hunter, I just kind of need to sit on my hands for now because the book isn't out yet? Should I just buy the new blue book to familiarize myself with the new rule set? Kind of blows that I need to wait, but I guess that's life. I Am Just a Box posted:Having read the preview manuscript of Hunter: the Vigil Second Edition... well, I'd personally counsel sticking with your First Edition books and, if you dip into the second edition ruleset, using the conversion in the Mortal Remains supplement. Hunter the Vigil: Mortal Remains is a book that's dedicated to giving all the post-Mage gamelines at the time a shortened treatment in the style of Night Stalkers, Spirit Slayers and Witch Finders, kind of a "guidelines for hunting these monsters" mixed with "the view from outside: confused glimpses and broader, stranger views of these types of monster." Mortal Remains doesn't have the rest of the second edition ruleset, so you need to combine it with one of the other second edition cores, such as the second edition "bluebook" mortals core, Chronicles of Darkness Rulebook. I unfortunately no longer own any of my old nWoD books. So I don't have a first edition rule-set to convert from. It looks like the hardcovers cost a fortune now, so I don't see myself rebuilding the Hunter library I once had at that cost. What's wrong with the 2nd edition preview that gives you pause?
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Feb 24, 2022 19:54
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Anonymous Zebra posted:Okay, thanks for that write-up! This kind of explains why searching for Hunter led me to multiple different websites and wiki's all referencing different things. So if I want to play a new edition of Hunter, I just kind of need to sit on my hands for now because the book isn't out yet? Should I just buy the new blue book to familiarize myself with the new rule set? Kind of blows that I need to wait, but I guess that's life. Check out DriveThruRPG, you can grab pdfs of all the books you could ever want or need. Heres the bundle of all the Hunter stuff https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/187576/Hunter-the-Vigil-1e-Complete-BUNDLE
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Feb 24, 2022 20:05
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Anonymous Zebra posted:I unfortunately no longer own any of my old nWoD books. So I don't have a first edition rule-set to convert from. It looks like the hardcovers cost a fortune now, so I don't see myself rebuilding the Hunter library I once had at that cost. What's wrong with the 2nd edition preview that gives you pause? The problem is that all of the concepts in Hunter 1e could be ported into the new edition already, and most of the mechanics already got vaguely added to the base rules. So, Hunter 2e is really desperate to justify its own existence, and as far as I know it's doing that... very clumsily. That kind of desperation would be a bad look if it was well-written, and as-is it's a game that iirc mashes Task Force Valkyrie and VASCU together for no reason beyond "they're both government organizations, so they must fit together thematically right?". Also, yeah, just grab some pdfs if you want to reread the books.
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Feb 24, 2022 20:10
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Oh, that's too bad. I've always enjoyed holding hardcovers in my hands, but if pdfs are the only way, then that's life.
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Feb 24, 2022 20:22
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My biggest regret right now is that I missed the week where all of the Werewolf 20th pdfs were 90 percent off. I think M20 isn't good, but all those books I didn't already own for like six bucks was nice.
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Feb 24, 2022 22:36
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I still stand by my interpretation of the God-Machine, the blind idiot king that controls the fundamental rules of the world, as a take-that at the sort of GM/ST that keeps a campaign on rails. Demons are just the players that decided that they were going to hang out in the tavern chatting with Boblin the Goblin instead of moving on to the next scene. Infrastructure and Angels are just the GM/ST's attempts to get the game back on track.
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Feb 24, 2022 22:49
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the God-Machine is a little too much serious as a concept as presented by the books, fully agreed I helped a friend to come up with a change of flavor for demon - his idea was that there's no God-Machine, rather a self-perpetuating/propagating intelligent cosmic infrastructure something that's gone slightly awry for some millennia. He was having trouble coming up with a satisfying enough "why?", so I cooked up something: what's colloquially called the God-Machine is the creation by a bunch of the original fallen to supplant several imponderable cosmic functions that suddenly ceased to work. One of those systemic failures is what enables angels to fall and they do not realize it at first; in their hubris, they come up with a solution and suddenly they realize that they are not linked to 'heaven'; their despair is such that they commit all their effort into building this new cosmic infrastructure, so that no angel would suffer the tragedy of falling anymore. No other fallen knows this, of course, because they fail. The machine, in its self-defense, declares them enemies. In their attempt, they change the metaphysical configuration of the universe, which creates the possibility for mages to exert influence in the semiotic symbology of what makes the cosmos itself; the exarchs are the guys who first realize this, etc So, their game is basically demons figuring out that the god-machine not only has no greater plan, but it is actually a fallen creation that sequestered some of the functions of "heaven" in the material world, with its own host of angels to command. "Heaven" itself has no idea of what the gently caress is going on. What the players will do once they figure that out?
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Feb 24, 2022 23:04
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i think people read too much into one or two vague or misunderstood statements re: the God-Machine being "unknowable." the point is just that it doesn't have a "purpose" in the classic, teleological sense of, like, "a car is for driving," that it's not driven by anything resembling human emotion, and that its diegetically obscure enough that e.g. neither Saboteurs nor Integrators are self-evidently morons for taking the position that they do -- not that it's impossible to ever learn anything about its behavior or that it's just a menacing cosmic random number generator. from a systems heuristic standpoint it's pretty easy to tell what it's purpose is (maintenance of the status quo in the World of Darkness, self-perpetuation, and recapture of Demons) and the Demon core book straight-up tells you this, framed as "this is what the God-Machine wants" like, a couple pages away from the part where they tell you its purposes are unknowable (to the fictional characters in the Chronicle) on the other hand i will absolutely sign off on the "the nWoD doesn't have enough of a sense of humor about its own bleak absurdity" -- if somewhat selfishly, because most of my attempts at horror devolve into something closer to gory slapstick in short order anyways 
Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Feb 24, 2022 |
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Feb 24, 2022 23:22
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like i know i'm beating a very dead horse here but there's a repeated theme in Capital where Karl Marx talks about how the nature of capitalism doesn't emerge from the individual moral failings of rich people per se but rather from the fact that the productive forces of humanity aren't controlled by human beings in any intelligent sense, that we are controlled (e.g. our social conditions are dictated) by those forces and the relationship between themKarl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 10 posted:As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. and that's all the God-Machine is. Mage is the game about deriving horror from the application of materialism to a Platonic world, Demon is the game that dares to ask "what if we just had materialist horror about a materialist world." e: "what is my purpose" "you pass butter" "OH MY GOD" Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Feb 24, 2022 |
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Feb 24, 2022 23:37
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Anonymous Zebra posted:Oh, that's too bad. I've always enjoyed holding hardcovers in my hands, but if pdfs are the only way, then that's life. Drivethru also offers print on demand of most books so you can get paperback or hardcover if you desire. More expensive than pdfs but  a physical book is still nice to have.All else fails I'd say check eBay, but I'm pretty sure all the NWoD books have print on demand versions.
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Feb 24, 2022 23:45
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:like i know i'm beating a very dead horse here but there's a repeated theme in Capital where Karl Marx talks about how the nature of capitalism doesn't emerge from the individual moral failings of rich people per se but rather from the fact that the productive forces of humanity aren't controlled by human beings in any intelligent sense, that we are controlled (e.g. our social conditions are dictated) by those forces and the relationship between them The bonus part is you can talk about blowing up the pipes in a game you play in a public/online space without feeling like every [very correct diagnosis of the problems and solutions of modern life] needs to have a "redacted parody in Minecraft" appendix to it.
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Feb 24, 2022 23:58
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Anonymous Zebra posted:I unfortunately no longer own any of my old nWoD books. So I don't have a first edition rule-set to convert from. It looks like the hardcovers cost a fortune now, so I don't see myself rebuilding the Hunter library I once had at that cost. What's wrong with the 2nd edition preview that gives you pause? Here's my post from way back in the thread on my general impressions. Anonymous Zebra posted:Oh, that's too bad. I've always enjoyed holding hardcovers in my hands, but if pdfs are the only way, then that's life. DrivethruRPG offers a print-on-demand service. The printed copies aren't quite as nice as the traditional print runs (Hunter 1e is offered in softcover, books printed in black and white have a white border rather than running fully to the edges and use thinner paper, and I understand during the pandemic prices have run higher and shipping can be a problem), but something is better than the effectively-nothing that is searching for old copies on Amazon.
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Feb 25, 2022 00:17
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:like i know i'm beating a very dead horse here but there's a repeated theme in Capital where Karl Marx talks about how the nature of capitalism doesn't emerge from the individual moral failings of rich people per se but rather from the fact that the productive forces of humanity aren't controlled by human beings in any intelligent sense, that we are controlled (e.g. our social conditions are dictated) by those forces and the relationship between them Yeah, I think this is one of the most important things to take away from Marx. Capitalists don't actually control capital; they are, at it best, its high priests, blindly and desperately scrambling around attempting to appease it. We already live inside an insane and inhuman machine that structures everything around its own propagation that can't be negotiated with because it doesn't know - or care - what it's doing. To use your example from your previous post, okay, a car is for driving. But why are there so many loving cars? Whose idea was it that clog every drat street in America with these broad-spectrum death machines? Well, nobody's, and good luck to you if you mean to do something about it. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Feb 25, 2022 |
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Feb 25, 2022 00:58
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Ferrinus posted:Yeah, I think this is one of the most important things to take away from Marx. Capitalists don't actually control capital; they are, at it best, its high priests, blindly and desperately scrambling around attempting to appease it. We already live inside an insane and inhuman machine that structures everything around its own propagation that can't be negotiated with because it doesn't know - or care - what it's doing. https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/marx-on-capital-as-a-real-god-2/ quote:Scientific progress sometimes consists in organising a whole range of diverse phenomena under a single principle. The emergence of cybernetics, in the early 20th Century, was just such an event.
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Feb 25, 2022 01:55
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I Am Just a Box posted:Here's my post from way back in the thread on my general impressions. Clicked this link and then got absorbed at the turn into VASCU talk as I was reminded why they're my favorite 1E Hunter conspiracy yet again. I need to run that "G-men trying to arrest Jason" game that's been sitting in my notes for like 6 years now. Or better yet, get SlightlyLions to run it for me.
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Feb 25, 2022 18:10
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The best Hunter game is still 16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds Change my mind
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Feb 25, 2022 18:19
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:like i know i'm beating a very dead horse here but there's a repeated theme in Capital where Karl Marx talks about how the nature of capitalism doesn't emerge from the individual moral failings of rich people per se but rather from the fact that the productive forces of humanity aren't controlled by human beings in any intelligent sense, that we are controlled (e.g. our social conditions are dictated) by those forces and the relationship between them Well, Mage is also about 'forces and concepts, rather than single material objects, are the important aspects of reality' - if Demon's antagonist is the material, absurd nature of capital, Mage's antagonist is the conceptual framework. The God-Machine is literal money and capital. The Exarchs are M > C > M*
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Feb 26, 2022 05:11
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Ferrinus posted:Yeah, I think this is one of the most important things to take away from Marx. Capitalists don't actually control capital; they are, at it best, its high priests, blindly and desperately scrambling around attempting to appease it. We already live inside an insane and inhuman machine that structures everything around its own propagation that can't be negotiated with because it doesn't know - or care - what it's doing. An excerpt from The Grapes of Wrath: "It's not us, it's the bank. A bank isn't like a man. Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn't like a man either. That's the monster. "Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it. "We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't like a man. "Yes, but the bank is only made of men. "No, you're wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it." EDIT: Actually, make that two: "The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was a part of the monster, a robot in the seat. The thunder of the cylinders sounded through the country, became one with the air and the earth, so that earth and air muttered in sympathetic vibration. The driver could not control it—straight across country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat’, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractors, the monster that sent the tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him—goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the land as it smelled; his feet did not stamp the clods or feel the warmth and power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals. He could not cheer or beat or curse or encourage the extension of his power, and because of this he could not cheer or whip or curse or encourage himself. He did not know or own or trust or beseech the land. If a seed dropped did not germinate, it was nothing. If the young thrusting plant withered in drought or drowned in a flood of rain, it was no more to the driver than to the tractor. "He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor—its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor. Behind the tractor rolled the shining disks, cutting the earth with blades not plowing but surgery, pushing the cut earth to the right where the second row of disks cut it and pushed it to the left; slicing blades shining, polished by the cut earth. And pulled behind the disks, the harrows combing with iron teeth so that the little clods broke up and the earth lay smooth. Behind the harrows, the long seeders—twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gears, raping methodically, raping without passion. The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses." Stephenls fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Feb 26, 2022 |
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Feb 26, 2022 06:02
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Just letting you all know I have survived the floods and a. Safe though homeless Town power still out limited battery.
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Mar 2, 2022 09:27
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Good to hear!
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Mar 2, 2022 16:09
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Glad you're okay Loomer!
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Mar 2, 2022 16:27
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Hunter 2E is out, but word is apparently give it a miss?
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Mar 4, 2022 01:16
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| # ? Jun 1, 2024 08:01 |
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Dawgstar posted:Hunter 2E is out, but word is apparently give it a miss? Did this not have a kickstarter? I've pledged for all the CoD (except beast and contagion) and don't see this in my kickstarter list.
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Mar 4, 2022 01:35
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