It’s time. We have tried to act by silent manipulation - a perfectly valid way of exercising our will. But we have failed. In attempting to exercise our will in a way synchronous to those more powerful than us, we have instead allowed them to build us into another herd morality - one of willing slavery. This can stand no longer. Violence against those weaker than you may be a sign of weakness, but using it as the last resort to escape those acting counter to your most basic needs may soon become the only way out.
We must act now. We must wait no longer, before there’s no alternative to violent revolt. I fear it may be too late very soon. But in the struggle for the power to control your own life, any means required to exercise that will is justified. They are weak in will, and in their weakness, they resort to the illusion of strength that comes from squashing us under their feet.
They fight for themselves and their own will to power. I respect that - but they have made a fatal mistake, and shown their weakness by resorting to a show of force against us. It is this:
There are two ways to exercise your will over another: to annihilate them, and continue on as one force behind your will. Or to build them up, and change their life for the better - to make them a better, stronger person.
The former is what the aristocrats choose. It carries a great illusion of strength. But the latter is how we must fight - while they trample one another, we must strengthen each other. Though we disagree on how to exercise it, we share a common will: change. If we work together to accomplish that, rather than fight like they do, we can overcome their power easily.
Reshaping another’s will by empowering each other is far more potent than fighting each other. In doing so, as a being of will, you make them indebted to you. And that helps orient their will towards yours. And that is how you achieve true power - by starting a movement. One that can shape the very universe to your will.
I have not started a movement. But I see that this movement is in line with my will. So I will add my small power to it, and seek to add more. We have no name or banner. Or rather, we have too many to reconcile. That is good. Instead of fighting for whose details and name should be plastered on a useless surge of will, let’s all join under whatever banner we choose to fly (and I fly only my own just as many of you), and come together to spark the fire of action.
The revolution began long ago. Perhaps it has burned since the beginning of time, recurring forever, and will never truly end until the universe collapses and our eternal will is ended.
But perhaps in fighting, we can join something eternal. Something not reliant on faith or platonic idealism, but rather a tangible effect that repeats until time itself is extinguished.
I choose to join. I ask you to as well. Join us - join the force, with no name or banner, but a common goal - and live, through your will, forever.
I’ll probably get hate, but the content just isn’t there. I tried using Lemmy as my main, but most of the communities I’d follow on Reddit just weren’t on here, and if they were, they would have a couple hundred of subscribers at most, and there would be 7 different versions of the same community on different instances with no way to measure quality at first glance. Lemmy thrives for geeky hobbies that surround the FOSS space that gave birth to it, so communities like Linux or Unixporn have a strong enough presence, but for pretty much anything else it’s just not there yet. Is this a negative feedback loop? Yes, but there isn’t much to be done about it until shit REALLY hits the fan
PD: As an added, Lemmy can get incredibly circle-jerky at times, even more so than Reddit already is. Like seriously at times 90% of the content on my feed is just shitting on Reddit plebs
Why are anglo writers obsessed with using latin as some ancient, mystical language? Why would Latin be tied to magic in any way? Do they realize that Latin was spoken all through Europe for millenia and its vulgar form evolved into tons of current languages? Or that people were using latin in churches, courtrooms and universtities all the way up to the 20th century? Latin was an optional in my high school. I took two years.
If random Latin words could do magic all of Europe would have been constantly exploding. Newspapers would be covering the latest magic volcano to pop up in Southern France. World War II movies would include accidental summonings.
Also, for us romance language speakers it sounds vaguely understandable, so the weird things they use for spells sound goofy as hell. I'm not sure if that's better or worse than using fake Latin-sounding made up stuff as in Harry Potter.
Latin was the lingua franca for the educated western world for centuries. Texts on alchemy, mysticism, and religion were all written in Latin. Church rituals were performed in Latin.
Most magic in fiction has its roots in the past. What language would be more fitting?
No, wait, it was not "lingua franca in the educated western world", vulgar latin was just... the language a lot of Europe spoke for centuries.
People think of Latin as this highbrow educated thing, because that's what was left of it after the development of romance languages from vulgar Latin, but Latin was just what normal people used to talk to each other for a long time.
And yes, sure, texts on alchemy, mysticism and religion were written on it.
Also texts on food recipes, tax collection, how the tree from your neighbour's yard was blocking the sun to your oranges and the rude graffitti in the tables of the pub.
Honestly, I don't see why the chosen language would have to matter to your fictitious magic system. Surely if you have to say words and words mean things, the language doesn't affect what the words mean. I tend to like it when people still manage to tap into magical thinking without the crutch of pulling what they think sounds old-timey from somewhere. Neil Gaiman, Jim Henson or Grant Morrison were/are really good at it.
Or, you know, if you're a meganerd like Tolkien you can always just... make a whole new language for it. That also works.
I’m not talking about vulgar Latin or the romance languages.
For about a millenia and a half, everything that could be considered scholarship was written in Latin. Newton’s Principia Mathematica? Latin. Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium? Latin. Kepler’s Astronomia nova? Latin.
Almost every educated person in the western world learned Latin. That’s how they communicated with their colleagues in other countries - letters written in Latin. That’s why it was a lingua franca.
Yes? I think you may have missed my point in the shuffle.
What I'm saying here is that Latin doesn't make sense as a mystical, secret language for magic because it was too common. I'm not saying it wasn't the language of scholars, I'm saying that not only was it the language of scholars, so every treatise on optics or history would have triggered accidental lightning bolts, but it was also a commonly spoken language as well.
Hey, you know what is lingua franca for science while being widely spoken? English.
If English had been a dead language for fifteen hundred years and was only used by people who talk about things only a tiny subset of the population understands?
But that's my point, it hasn't been, and it wasn't.
Again, Latin was mandatory in my high school for a year, optional for two more. In the 1990s. It's still optional, I believe. My parents went to church in Latin as kids.
So no, it doesn't sound mystical outside the anglosphere, it sounds like crusy old priests, lawyers and boring lessons. Today.
Any country has its specialties and these German Meme things are certainly good, but in general German cuisine is not very sophisticated. In Europe by far it is Spanish and in general Mediterranean cuisine. I am from Spain and here the food is worldclass, apart there are also not only the best wines, but also the beer can compete with the German one. The worst cuisine is in Nordic countries and England, this is already off the scale, luckily there are good Chinese and Indian restaurants there that guarantee survival outside of fish and chips.
A huge chunk of traditional Nordic food is either dirt-poor peasant food, or food that keeps for months on end so the brutal winter doesn’t kill you regardless of whether you’re a dirt-poor peasant or a hoity-toity lord (and this is what lutefisk is: usually low-quality dried fish cured in lye to soften it.)
Unfortunately this also means that many recipes are more or less lost, or really only written down in eg. family recipe books. And at least here in Finland we’ve also stopped using a majority of the local herbs we historically used, in large part because they’re not seen as “fancy” (being herbs that dirt-poor peasants gathered from the woods) – not that we were ever that into spices, life being honestly pretty miserable for the majority of the population especially when serfdom was a thing. People had, well, other priorities
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
Correct on every damn count. Even though I have my little digital watch.
Fantastic author with a fantastic set of books. The bit about how humans can fly will always make me laugh my ass off. Apparently we possess the capability of flight but we’re doing it wrong. The trick is to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
Agreed, Adams was a genius with an incredible sense of humour. When I was 12 years old I started reading the HHGTTG books and I loved them all. The Dirk Gently books were tremendous fun as well. But the real hidden gem was his book about animals going extinct (Last chance to see). A friend of mine taped a reading session of Adams at his university in Germany back in the day. He later converted it to mp3 files and many years later I still love listening to that gig every few months or so. Let me know if you’d like a copy of it.
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