Happy New Year!

Life remains, as always, under construction.

Merry Christmas!

Flaucher, Munich, late Christmas Eve

A breather in Refugium

Father Ling is happy to support the group while they recuperate, setting them up in Sue Snell's hotel. As soon as Mal feels fit, he starts to sell the group's loot to Chaucer and Jaxxon Tomorrow, a stranded merchant in the village. The scorpion worshipers carried some fine gear: A Steyr AUG goes to Zed Memphis, while Dan Hawking keeps a scoped hunting carbine - "two rifles are better than one", he says. Rod insists on keeping the M79 grenade launcher because "it underlines his natural authority", even if he has no ammo for it. Nor knows how to use it. Secretly, he thinks that the fat barrel of the weapon makes him look like a mean hombre, and that's the image he wants to project after all he's gone through. That still leaves some guns and knives, some ruined sets of armor and some gear. With skill and patience, and always only hinting at the great service the group did to Refugium when they took down the raiders in Bakersfield, Mal is able to turn the loot into ammo and useful gear. He also picks up some low-priced grenades from Chaucer, who seems to be glad to be rid of those things.

Rod spends much of the time with Lla Viper. The girl had promised him some lessons in the fine art of preparing poisons, and she keeps her word. For hours, the two are crouched over pots and pans, "bottling death", as Lla says. Rod watches and learns - it is not quite what they teach in the Institute, but only a fool would disregard Lla's skill. In the evenings, the villagers see him out in the fields, training the fast-draw trick that makes Zed and Mal such dangerous persons.

Zed spends idle days on a bed in the hotel, endlessly disassembling and cleaning his guns, sharpening his knives, waiting for his leg to heal. Dan just watches, and waits.

Meanwhile, life in Refugium goes on: Once or twice, a trader arrives, spends a night, and returns to the routes in the West. The farmers work the fields, while the monks follow their inscrutable routine in the old correctional facility. One day, after a few weeks passed in this happy fashion, Rod thinks that Zed's leg is whole again. The plaster came off a week ago, and the man from Memphis is yearning for action. A comparably large caravan under master trader Balthasar Cut is in town, making its biannual run to Refugium, supplying it with fuel and ammo. The bustle might be useful for all kinds of things, but Rod and Mal have something different in mind. In the evening, they walk up to the correctional facility, its wall covered in the names of travelers, and ask Chaucer for another audience with the master of Refugium. It is time to lay the cards on the table.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Smile or Die

This book takes a incisive look at the (mostly American) culture of "positive thinking". Tracing the roots of this world view to a backlash to Calvinism, that, perversely, incorporated Calvinism's penchant for psychic self-flagellation, Ehrenreich analyses the effects of positive thinking in business, religion and academia.

On a gaming tangent: This is the thinking heavily satirized (and lethally enforced) in the Paranoia RPG, where open critical thinking, dissatisfaction and unhappiness in general is grounds for immediate termination. Unsurprisingly, everybody smiles in Paranoia.

This is not a book that offers the reader comfy shudders of doom and gloom. Ehrenreich would rather see us all happy. But she makes a convincing case that positive thinking is used as a highly sophisticated means to squeeze more work (and tacit compliance) from workers at the cost of their own well-being, that it put powerful and dangerous blinders on key decision makers in the ongoing economic crisis and that it, ultimately, is not going to make you happy and successful. Instead, the industry-grade variants described in the book tend to lead their adherents into a sugary solipsism characterized by unrealistic expectations and self-reproach - if you fail, you didn't think enough happy thoughts.

4.5 of 5 crucified motivational speakers

Highly recommended

Lego is aggro

Just what the doctor ordered. Via who killed bambi.

Refugium

Refugium is another addition to the scorched earth materials, a correctional facility from the Long Ago turned into a monastery.

A tradition to be proud of

Don Alphonso describes 700 years of wikileaks in his blog at he F.A.Z. He puts Assange into a tradition with reformers and whistleblowers since the late middle ages, and I heartily agree. It might take two or three centuries, but the Australian (as figurehead and symbol) will get his highly deserved monument.

Big Gee

The Good Lord made many creatures, and many plants, and he created man in his image. But as a good Christian, Dan Hawking also knows that the Adversary got his hand into creation as well, that he made creatures in his image, to test the righteous and bring destruction and despair into the world. The abomination that crashed into the Bakersfield Christ Risen Church was testament to the Adversary’s power. It burst through the main entrance like a locomotive, a tempest of claws, barbs and legs, its armor black as night, riven and pitted by decades of fights. The grandfather of all girtabs, an emperor scorpion with a body like a pickup, as old as the sun, rushed into the cavernous auditorium. It pushed aside seats and rubble like a ship cresting the waves. The whole building shook with Big Gee’s entrance. Dan was hurting very much then, thanks to Big Gee’s little brothers and sisters, but he knew what he had to do and raised his rifle to his shoulder. And he thought that it was true: They never stop growing.

In the old correctional facility, Ling asks, again, still incredulous, “As big as a van?” “If you don’t believe us, send your people to Bakersfield,” Mal says “Dan and me peppered it with high-powered rifle rounds. Rod and the girl just got away. Zed was still on the balcony over the auditorium, where he went after Prophet. I shot one of its legs off with my FN FAL, but that just seemed to make it angry. It crawled up the balcony, where we had our little shootout with Prophet’s gang – and it made the balcony collapse. Which took Zed with it.” Zed continues “I fell right in front of his pincers, but he seemed distracted by the balcony coming falling down, so I got away before he pulled me to pieces.” Also, my fucking shotgun jammed on me, twice – but he does not tell this to Ling “When he finally came after me, I ambushed him and put a twelve gauge slug right into his kisser. Boom!” He slaps the table “That gave him pause. He crawled away from us and just pushed through an old emergency exit – he basically put a new hole into the wall.” Rod goes on “On the second floor, we had freed the girl and made our way downstairs. But by then, those pheromones we had splashed around during our fight had attracted the girtabs in and around the church. They hunted us. We shot about a dozen of them, but I still was stung. A most unpleasant experience, basically, the toxin overloads your cardiovascular system and you go into shock after a minute or so. After we had driven off the scorpions, we had to stop in the ground floor of the building. I just could not go on. While Dan and the girl watched over me, Zed and Mal went after Big Gee and finished it off.” Zed goes on “That we did. We tracked him outside. That was like following the tracks of an army. But those tracks ended suddenly, just at one of the walls of the church. He went up that wall and lurked on the roof. It was the devil’s own luck that the roof held him. And just as we came to that wall, he jumped us. Literally jumped us. He got Mal here pressed into the sand, and got my leg between his pincer. Broke it, too. But I still got my shotgun between his, whatsit, manacles?” “Mandibles.” “His mandibles. I pulled the trigger, and that was that. His corpse still lies next to the church, if you need to verify our report.”

And that was that, Dan thinks, outside, in the sun, periodically giving the evil eye to the camera watching the space in front of the gate. Zed pulled Mal from under the monstrous cadaver. Everyone in the group was a mess, in different ways, so we patched ourselves up. Zed was quite lucky, with a clean fracture. That thing could have ripped his leg clean off. We looted the Prophet’s fighters, and some fine loot it was. We took the girl – Lla Viper, an unusual name – and went back to the jeep. We tied the bike to the roof, and although he made the painful face every time he stepped on a pedal or the jeep hit a hole larger than a thimble, Mal got us back to Refugium.

Interview in a prison cafeteria

“And what happened then?” Mal Porter, Zed Memphis and Rod the benefactor are sitting in one of the large cafeterias that once served the facility’s prisoners. The walls are stark concrete, all tables and chairs are bolted to the floor. Red, man-sized letters on one wall say “PLEASE KNEEL WHEN SHOTS ARE FIRED”. In one corner, a surveillance camera scans the hall. The men look a bit worse for the wear. Zed’s left leg is in a plaster cast, Mal sports a number of bandages, patches and band-aids and moves with the slow deliberateness of a man covered in bruises. Only Rod looks as if he had a good last week. The man asking the question is an old Asian man in a monk’s habit with a sparse crown of silvery hair and perfectly trimmed beard. While he asks, he powers up a laptop. He is Father Ling, the “primus inter pares” of Refugium, as he would say, or the “big cheese” in Zed’s words.
While there are other inhabitants of Refugium in the cafeteria, the interview seems to be closed to the public at large. Mal answers: “Well, it was your standard setup. A trap for the car and some shooters on the roofs and at the crossing ahead. A classic ambush.” Zed cuts in “Not wholly standard. The stuff they splashed on the car? That was no poison, but it attracted all the girtabs in the vicinity. The scorps came out of the sand, lots of them, and attacked the car. That would have made anyone nervous, and those shooters would have had an easy job picking us off while we dealt with the scorps. Of course, I was up front on the crossing on my bike, and the others were leaving the car in a hurry, when Rod here screamed that the stuff was nerve poison.” Rod gives a tiny, lop-sided smile. “Well, my mistake. But getting away from the car was for the best. Mal here got to high ground and took care of the attackers on the other roofs, while Dan Hawking and me cleared the ground floor of scorpions.” “Where is Hawking now?” “He is outside, watching the car.” And he got the worst of it, Mal thinks, the girtabs took him down in the old wooden church, when I hosed the church tower with the MACs. Rod had to inject him with his last dose of aesculapin, and Dan still can’t remember the minutes just before he collapsed under the mass of claws and stingers. Mal continues “It was hard going. They were very well equipped with all the guns they got from their previous ambush. Assault rifles. One of them had a grenade launcher. Anyways - Zed engaged the men at the crossing. In summary, we were able to kill those attackers that we couldn’t drive off, and took one of them prisoner.” Like the other attackers, the man was mal-nourished, but fierce, sporting a crude painting of a scorpion on his chest. He lost his left hand many years ago, and fought Zed with a primitive prosthetic hook and a knife, before the man from Memphis knocked him out and handcuffed him to a car wreck. Mal goes on “We questioned him, and he told us some things. About a dozen of his gang were still around after our little tussle, well armed after taking down that group of scavengers. One member of this group was still alive. A girl. The gang had made a camp in an old community building at the other edge of the town, that’s where they held her. They had fed the others to Big Gee. At that time, we didn’t know what he was talking about. We thought that the gang was practicing cannibalism. He also told us that they followed a man he just called Prophet, and he was scared of him – Prophet made poisons and the fluid which attracts girtabs, he planned the ambushes and he somehow controlled the scorps in Bakersfield. Sounds like he got himself a little cult following him around, while he followed Big Gee.” Ling stops typing “Where is this prisoner now?” “We let him go”
The gun in the girl’s hand, tracking the one-handed man as he vanishes in the darkness
“We got the jeep out of the pit and hid it in the ruins. Then we decided to have a look and find out if the last prisoner was still alive.” “That is a very noble thing to do.” Zed says “Well, that’s what we do where I come from. I reconnoitered the building, some religious structure with a big ass steel cross in its front yard, all cube-like. Said Bakersfield Christ Risen Church out front. It’s quite sizable, with a theater that seat two- or even three hundred people. Then I got the others and we infiltrated.” And we infiltrated the hell out of it, Mal thinks. Zed went in with is large combat knife drawn, moving from one sentry to another. Not easy going, not at all, but at times rather slippery. “We were able to stay hidden until we got to the second floor. There we got into a firefight with Prophet and his surviving men. That was fucking furious, real up close. Textbook definition of point blank. Prophet had himself a laboratory of sorts, bottles and bowls, some burners, and lots of hacked apart girtabs. The girl was there, too. They had her in some cage made of shopping carts. Of course, with Mal here spraying the place, and with the Prophet’s gang shooting, something was going to break. Prophet smashed some of the bottles on purpose, before he made is exit.” Ling raises an eyebrow “He was able to escape?” Zed goes on “We had him. We had him. All his thugs were dead. He was running like a hare, Mal would have put him down if not for his vest.”
“So why didn’t you stop him?”
“Someone ran heavy interference.”
“Who?”
“Big Gee.”

Elene

Elene, a dangerous little camp close to Chicago, has been added to the scorched earth materials post.