this is a loosely satirical and somewhat more gamey version of the game that isn't really a game. thanks to the creative juices of Bardockwest. The ORIGINAL: http://chooseyourstory.com/story/randomly-walk

I discovered a thing that JJJ wrote. It told me all about this quiz-making shit. I followed the instructions, even though I disobeyed JJJ's opening lines by starting this WITHOUT a basic knowledge of any of that weird scripty shit he recommended. This was low-effort as all hell, don't ever use the classic editor for anything you care about.

AQIMFTBHOIA DLC: THE UPDATE DESCRIPTION

Since some of my questions contained outdated information and I needed to make sure everything was in working order, I unpublished this thing. Since I understand this to be something that generally fucks with ratings, I'm gonna add 5 more questions so you have more of a reason to rate it again. Also, every question now has a stupid answer. These are the ones that are so blatantly wrong/non-answers that they give you negative points... Some are better hidden than others. Aside from most of the endings being revamped, there are two new endings! One is for people who're spectacularly awful at quizzes, and the other is an ending for people who go off the beaten path... By being really  bad at quizzes.

No, I will not add a thing at the end that shows your score. If you want to know your score, you have to dick-measure in the comments yourself. Drill Sergeant Nasty has always been an accurate barometer for how well you did, in my eyes.

In a strange world where World War I hasn't even happened yet, Law and order is the only accepted form of justice. Until NOW.

Enter Mild-Mannered Clifford T. Boot, 2nd class passenger on the world-famous vessel, the Titanic. Haunted by the shadows of his war-torn past, Clifford bought a ticket to the United States of America looking for a new life. But trouble always finds Clifford, and when an innocent widow and her child are kidnapped by a cult dedicated to resurrecting Napoleon, he has no choice but to return to his old ways and save them... Because for some motherfuckers, mass tragedy doesn't come soon enough.

See, there you go. There's actual layers and detail here! You actually criticize things about the text here. The old argument was a box unopened by comparison, here is the meat of it.

Man this is one of the most wretchedly unsatisfying posts I have ever read. Whether the dietary claims are even strictly true is one thing that can be debated in circles forever, as it always will be whenever vegetarians and highly defensive normals are in a room together. Trying to turn the male animals thing into some kind of principle when that really isn't how the industry works anyway is another. But the thing that most offends me here is that, even though I don't agree with many of this guy's philosophical positions-- I'm not vegetarian, and I don't think his diagnoses of history and culture seem correct-- you come out here with the same canned arguments about vegetarianism as anyone else on the planet for no reason except what seems to be a half-assed attempt to trigger him on the most blatant things.

You really came here and tried to post this unironically. Tried, as if a person like Flutter probably hasn't had this very argument in different ways five times before you. At the very least he's probably ignored 20 arguments just like this one before. Look at this dude's post history, most of his time spent on the internet is in places that annoy him for nonspecific reasons related to watching people argue. The story he wrote literally opens up with how pointless and unproductive that kind of approach is anyway, and on that we agree. There are so many ingredients here for a genuinely weird, interesting and entertaining debate or just discussion, and you come out here swinging with this shit, like, what the hell. Boldly defending the majority opinion, just in case you'll finally be the one musket in the gunline that actually aims true and changes this guy's mind. What would we do without you?

This post probably doesn't even register as offensive to him. The message itself is not even offensive to me. Rather, it offends my eyes with its repulsively cliche nature. The complete lack of engagement with the schizopost in front of you, aside from trying to tie the same "but omnivorism is biologically essential in humans" shit he likely already doesn't believe in because it's every conversation about vegetarianism at this point, to classic intelligent design talking points, as if somebody who's entrenched themselves in a position this autistic would see a contradiction here for the first time and one side or the other would suddenly completely give way because you said this. The audacity!

You really came in here, saw a vegetarian manifesto calling the LOTR movies the last stand of Christianity, and the best response you could come up with was "My brain has already decided these positions were stupid before the conversation started so I'm about to ownzone this dude so hard with nutritional theories I learned years ago". You redditor! You absolute fucking bot! Go in the corner and think about what you've done. Think of the opportunity you squandered, confronting a truly one-of-a-kind maniac with the same shit you would use to argue with any 6 year old who says they decided not to eat meat, as if that's even the most significant thing here. Where the hell is the mischief in your soul? Where is your sense of intellectual adventurousness? I would give this post -1 commendations if I could.

I'm not done, and there's more things coming up I take issue with, that's just the first one I could fully consolidate.

That's entirely the wrong mindset to go into a manifesto with, smh. It is not a work to be engaged with idly!

During forbidden arcane inquiries, the vision was revealed to me by the divine many moons ago, and long before this thread. It is as neutral a recollection of what I saw of Crimson as I could muster, I just thought it was on-topic to share in this moment because people were just now wondering what he looked like.

Judging purely from every post I've read, I have a clear picture of what Crimson looks like without even having seen him.

Crimson is an uncategorizable creature visually between the ages of 6 and 65. He is as white as a sheet, mottled with a network of blue veins that lack the vigor to bulge with any pressure, though you can see them twitch and writhe when he's angry. He has wispy, barely-there eyebrows and his sparse strings of hair only begin to grow an inch behind his ears. It is carefully cut in such a way that you can almost tell he WOULD have an obnoxious bowl cut if he had remotely enough hair to create the shape. His forehead is a low, forward-pointing slope ending in squarish corners, giving the impression of a door wedge. It is legitimately concerning for his health that a human hippocampus is alleged to fit underneath it. Clearly his isoceles brow ridge evolved to keep his eyes shaded from the sun, but that is a celestial object he has never seen in his life due to a combination of British weather and subterranean living. The light of the sun is scattered on rainy and overcast days, so that his brow ridge casts no shadow over his beady mole eyes, but they are still so sunken and surrounded by such darkened circles that they appear so even in the frigid, soggy light of the godless British sun.

He has a crooked nose that gives a hatchet-like profile in the way it sticks out from his face, but it's vertically short, so that it emphasizes the huge, tortoise-like upper lip that hangs in a permanent frown over his long green-yellow British teeth. Crooked, twisting, and knotted like epidermodysplasia verruciformis warts are they. His lower jaw is unformed- still half-cartilage, and hangs inarticulately from a mechanical hinge that has been surgically installed under his temple to keep the thing from withering completely and leaving the underside of his mouth as just a dry, foul-smelling tongue. A diet entirely of chicken pulp wrapped in breading obfuscates the need for such a bone, (women in his family would understandably rather feed their children chicken nuggets from birth than allow them anywhere near their body) and it has withered from lack of use. The hinge is slightly rusted, and it squeaks erratically like a shopping cart wheel when he talks. His lower lip hangs limp as it is held up mostly by vacuum force when his mouth is closed. If his upper lip doesn't stick to it, it hangs down from his bright red, bloodshot gums, and slow strings of slime just leak from his mouth at all hours of the day, never once touching his dry unbrushed tree teeth and leathery tongue.

He has no chin to speak of, rather his foul fishjaw is angled inward like a funnel, forming a smooth slope of flesh that slides straight into his fold-laden worm neck with no indication that the bottom of his mouth and the top of his throat are separate components. It is a long thing, hunched forward at the shoulder and held always parallel to the ground, giving the oily strands attempting to form a neckbeard the impression of millipede legs.

His malformed body is simultaneously underweight and obese. His skin sags from its wiry, corpselike frame and pools at a grotesque alembic stomach. His triceps are so atrophied as to make the back of his arms appear actually concave-- sunken in the middle with just the bony prongs of his elbow bones and the bulge of connective tissue at his shoulder keeping the skin from drawing fully in. So stiff and ill-used is the mechanism that he actually can't fully unbend his arms and it hurts him for his elbows to be at angles wider than 90 degrees.

His dry and anemic flesh can scarcely muster a drop of sweat a day, especially given how little he moves, but he hasn't showered in so long that he still smells like a gym duffle bag, and this scent combined with molded cum socks form the humid miasma that kills whatever intruder who opens the basement door unprepared on the very spot.

:)

Hello. I don't think you and I have ever talked before, and if so I can't imagine it was favorably since I've disliked most of your other games so far. However, despite the hilarious audacity of its premise, this thing was clearly very important to you, and, for the first time, interesting to me. So I'll be going out of my way to give you the benefit of the doubt. I haven't read all the way through this story, but it is in part due to certain glaring misconceptions that have interfered with my ability to understand and digest what you're trying to say in good faith-- A task that people farther along than I apparently also have trouble with, so I'd like to get any clarifications straight from the pony's mouth, as it were, before I continue.

EDIT: I just read you're not doing that anymore, but I've been eaking away at this effortpost for entirely too long to not post it. I'll continue my reading forthwith once my brain has recovered the energy.

The issue that sticks in my head the most given what I know about the subject, is that Ancient Greece, and Rome by extension, were oral societies first and literary societies by pure incident. The fact that we can read the words of authors from that period is less because they intentionally wrote things down to speak to the future, though occasionally they did, it's because the writing was the only thing that lived. What we have from that time period is like fragments of bones preserved in reliquaries. But at that time, writing was not meant to be like a longterm preserved form of thought. Rather, its reputation was as a dull but helpful assistant to its older brother art, rhetoric.

This was a time before uppercase and lowercase letters, spaces, or, in the case of the Greeks, even a completely agreed-upon direction of text, because for the most part writing was purely a memory aid. A guy who wrote something down knew how he intended to say it, memorizing the words was the problem. So things like punctuation and other indicators we use to show how something is supposed to be said by someone who isn't the one that was thinking it, were unnecessary. A lot of speeches we have from classical Greece are written "as the cow goes", as in, like, starting from left to right, then going the other way on the next line, then back again, because preserving the fluidity of speech for the guy who wrote this for himself to read was more important than another person being able to read it, and everyone had their own kind of system.

It was a tradition for most people at the time, even highly influential thought leaders, to have all their journals, speeches, and poetry and shit, burned after they died. This was considered important for the legacy of the person, because writing things down, especially at that time, didn't come with the disambiguating power of voice, and delivery, and body language, and all those other things they were used to using in order to communicate with people. Most of what we have from those civilizations were either highly constructed things intentionally written to be published to a select group, usually students, like the big name Philosophers and Homer/Hesiod works we have from that time, or, like the persona; poetry we have by Cicero, salaciously "stolen" from its author before it could be destroyed, like much of Kafka's work.

You seem to make a big point of Ovid being the one to normalize and reify the subversion and complication of mythology, but that just doesn't seem like the case. For one thing, Lucian, one of my favorite writers of that kind of period, had already been dead something like 50 years before Ovid was born. For another, the evidence we have suggests that subversion was kind of the rule rather than the exception.

You seem to acknowledge a little bit that oral mythologies change depending on the storyteller. People knew about this at the time! This was considered a feature rather than a bug. There were a lot of poems and things meant to stay memorized  to carry across generations, yes, but they also weren't meant to represent a literal physical truth in a lot of cases. Not everyone's cultures kept the same stories, and not everyone within each culture knew all of them. Differences in one's recounting of the events are meant to communicate one's individual perspective and belief, and picking apart the story so that you know how best to tell it is like a social bonding activity within the religion. There isn't some "canon" enforced from the top down about what happened. There were consistent versions of the myths written down in order to be kept a long time, but the details could be esoteric. In places where cultic institutions were more powerful, people might be more protective of the way certain stories are interpreted, but like...

Take Hinduism for example, a highly syncretic polytheist religion that's been continuously alive a lot longer compared to most modern examples except maybe the umbrella of religious practices within China and Japan, but I don't know if that part of the culture is nearly as 'alive' as it is in India still. There are far fewer places there where you could hear what I'm about to describe in those places than you could in India. The principle of the practice is that you can only learn so much from the parts of those stories that have been written down. The way these stories evolve and stay relevant is when you learn them the way that the people who still believe them know them, (Unless you're one of the increasingly fundie/literalist Hindutva types, but they have very particular political reasons behind trying to move Hinduism away from that into something more atomized and authoritarian, like the priestly classes before them) which is by listening to like a whole family or group of people discuss the story. Like, the daughter might know one part in the most detail, the dad might know something else, somebody might say something that seems wrong and someone else might correct them, and the story is relayed through a kind of wisdom of the crowd phenomenon. Sometimes only the older men in the family are allowed to tell it, sometimes everyone has kind of a hand in it, the dynamic changes by culture and that also says something important about what the story means. The plot points of the story are widely agreed upon, but differences in how different groups and settings will tell you that story, and how different people within that group will tell you that story, can communicate a lot about their perspective on life and their values as people, which are important. That's what mythology is for, that's not only how these stories spread, but it's kind of their social purpose.  

Ovid chose to be critical of the gods, but he was far from the first. The oldest literary sources we have suggest that the gods were capricious figures, seen more as embodiments of their elements with all the potential harm that could come, and they were frequently more feared than loved. The "good guys" were not really thought of as universally, morally good, and the "bad guys" were not unanimously reviled. There is a classical temple to Cronus, the guy most famous to modern minds as the one who ate all the Olympian gods but Zeus, but also had a lot of other associations and responsibilities in the ancient Greek mind, whose foundation still stands today. Lucian even casts Cronus as an unambiguously pretty good guy succeeded by rich wasteful scoundrels in his Saturnalia, in order to make a point about the treatment of poor people at his time and place. But that's the thing, Lucian was a satirist, but that art is far older than he is. In fact, in many cases, subversion was the point.

The fact that written works can be openly complicated and subversive now isn't evidence that complicated and subversive things didn't exist before they were written, it's not evidence that there was some kind of paradigm shift right before the start of the Common Era. It is maybe a sign that countercultural thinkers were being taken more seriously at one time or another, or had more access to writing and having their work preserved. But that's not to say unorthodox retellings didn't exist, only that literacy and the proliferation of thought used to be a thing controlled by the privileged at one point.

Cults of the gods, the closest to organized churches at the time, had political and pecuniary power in their spheres of influence, (usually specific citystates,) so they had a lot of vested interest in keeping their stories carefully memorized to portray their gods "correctly" and proliferating new ones to justify their practices. But that doesn't mean that there was a tightly controlled orthodoxy. You could get in trouble for espousing certain views too publicly, like a lack of belief in the gods altogether, but often wildly different takes on the same story would coexist and the difference would be like a matter of personal political and religious opinion.

A good example of this is Hades and Persephone. Is it a tragic romance, Beauty and the Beast type of tale, or the suffering of a kidnapping victim eternally bound to a cosmic rapist? The Homeric version is fairly neutral in its depiction and centers most of its narration on Demeter's reaction. Both interpretations of what was left unsaid have existed for about as long as people have been reading Homer, but different versions become more popular at different times.

The story of Theseus and the minotaur is actually a combination of stories based on folklore on the isle of Crete specifically, and between the lines is a kind of subversion for a pantheon of gods whose name we don't even know because what was happening in real life at the time of this story's proliferation was that the burgeoning Cretan monarchy was moving away from the less organized "bull cult" (a separate kind of religion we don't know a lot about before it became syncretized into the system of Hellenistic cults) in order to draw bloodline legitimization from the Olympian pantheon, like most other monarchs were doing or had already done at the time. At a certain point the Greek gods were very popular on that island and/or the bull cult was considered more cringe, and gradually a story arose of Theseus, son of Poseidon, supplanting the monstrous offspring of an impossibly perfect fecund bull figure and kind of stabilizing the rule of Minos, whose own ancestry was meant to be semi-divine. (And a fun note for those who bothered reading this far anyway: the fact that everybody important at this kind of time needed to have at least a famous agreed-upon demigod or two in their family tree is part of why the Gods are so horrifically incestuous. But not all of it! Sometimes it seems like there just had to be a bit of incest around here.)

Anyway the point I'm getting at is that there just seems to be evidence that the complete tapestry of humanity has kind of always existed-- What's changed is who's allowed to be in charge, who those people in charge allow to live, whose word is allowed to appear in record, and why. The idea that they were any more or less panicked than we are, or ever were, might "make sense" from the perspective of someone looking back 2000 years at an alien existence, but it is not quantifiable nor falsifiable. They had plenty of concerns and anxieties, as human civilizations have always had for justifiable reasons, but the relation between Pan and Panic is rooted in far more than just the medium by which information travels and knowledge is stored.

Pan, in the Greek mind, is the god of nature- Nature as defined as a separate thing from Man. A thing we see as beautiful because we have not been traumatized by it-- And, indeed, many people still saw nature as beautiful back then, when they had the experience and knowledge to safely interact with it. But in the city-states? Where the gods and their stories were being recorded in writing for the first time? You generally come there to get away from that sort of thing. Like all the Greek gods, pan was alternately loved, revered, feared, hated, embraced, and avoided, depending on the person and their situation in life. The forest around my house is a welcoming place even at night, but the coyotes in my neighbors' field change the tone drastically.

The anxieties the Ancient Greeks felt weren't some superstition based purely on confusion and the unknown. The ancient Greeks, as humans are all too prone to do, were perfectly content to just make shit up to fill in the blank space of what they didn't know. The etymological root of panic, describes a cacophony of noises in the woods, which, to the Greeks, in an ancient world where agriculture was young and dangerous animals hadn't been massively culled back as they had been even during the dark ages, was a real and present threat.  Pan reigned during a time when a very small minority of the human race lived in what was called "Civilization". Most people around the world at this time were kind of a hybrid between nomadic and agrarian societies, living in tiny little villages or moving between them depending on the season. Identity and cohesion needed to be maintained between these societies to differentiate themselves from those "barbarians". Which is where, before you start interpreting Pan as some underlying panic in all people of this period that distinguishes the literate from the non, it becomes important to understand where we even learned about Pan in the first place-- Who's the one telling the story of Pan, and what are they telling us they believe?

To the kind of person that was able to write down anything about Pan and have it preserved by his contemporaries, Pan represented bedlam, chaos, madness, all that which was not strictly and carefully controlled by civilization. The fact that Pan was also the god of the good things people generally associate with nature is relatively quite positive representation compared to how chaos figures are treated in our far older record of bronze-age religions of city-state societies-- Frequently, a figure that represented the chaos and unpredictability of untamed wilderness had to be killed by the chief of the gods in order to make the world humans live in, and frequently that society would commemorate that event on a yearly basis to celebrate the fact that they were civilized and hopefully encourage fertile fields and the peaceful continuation of life in sedentary civilization.

And the thing about those bronze age civilizations-- By any modern standards, they are hyperbolically fascist. In the framework set up by the religious and cultural norms of Sumer and Assyria, a person's sole value and purpose is the job they are bound to do for the rest of their lives. Some are bound to rule, some are bound to oversee the worship of the gods, the majority are bound to some kind of industrial or agricultural toil. Women are property-- And frequently, men are also effectively property of their father until such a time comes that they take over whatever purpose the dad was fulfilling through inheritance, or, if somebody literally owns their dad, they're also chattel until death, unless it's one of those voluntary/indentured servitude situations or other loopholes. The dictator isn't just chosen by the gods to rule, he is A God, or an aspect of one reincarnated over and over by himself and his children. There isn't just "a year" on the calendar, you're in Year 8, meaning his majesty Ashurban's been emperor of the known world (and by extension all of the cosmos) for 8 years. When he dies (and he might not! Who knows?) we're giving it all to his son and starting from Year 0 again. Your city is your state, your state is your God, your king its living embodiment, and you live only at his pleasure.

There is much ado in the post-enlightenment age about separating church from state; This was before most institutional schools of thought had separated God from Ruler-- The openly oligarchic states of the Athenians and Spartans suddenly seem wildly progressive despite how awful it would have been for a normal person to live there. The image of Pan as a horror, to frighten the common peasant on the outskirts of the state's direct influence into compliance, could just as well be intentional. Of course all the gods can be wrathful, all of nature's forces from the wind to the sea can present terrible danger and destroy what man builds. But Pan? You don't want to cross into or take advantage of his territory in any way. You don't want to trespass into that wilderness when darkness comes. You don't want to happen upon Pan, the swindler, the destroyer, the defiler, the prolific rapist of men and women.

But he was also a rustic fertility god, the protector of shepherds and other folk who would have lived far away from the cities. A lot of these people would have found that interpretation absurd, but they generally weren't the ones holding the pen. I would caution against drawing such a broad conclusion about Pan as your source appears to have done, because that's just the thing-- Whenever a primary source tells you anything about the Greek Gods, they have an agenda. Of course Pan is dangerous and horrifying-- Of course it's bad to be "out there" in the unknown. It's important that the people beneath you, the urban man of letters, feel that way. It's important that you spread the word, so that no matter how oppressive and stiflingly competitive life in the citystate can be, people don't start considering the alternative.

I'm not saying that we avoided some kind of hippy paradise by not abandoning ancient Greece or whatever, but I am saying that the people who were able to write things down are not representative of the vast, vast majority of classical peoples, and that when myths were written down and intentionally preserved it was done so with ulterior motives. In a world where rhetoric is the superior of the arts, considered the only way to truly convince people of something, you write things down when you literally want to control the narrative. And it's a common theme throughout most ancient religions that strictly juxtapose an agriculturalized man against wild and dangerous nature.

I don't think it's acoustic societies that necessarily gravitate to this interpretation. I think it's just  politically useful for hegemonic societies to frame their perhaps flawed authority as the sole alternative to unknowability and death. Surviving bronze age religions don't seem nearly so cut and dry about the issue. Genesis was Jewish first, and a contemporary subversion of this Kaoskampf civilization-vs-nature stories. In that story, creation is inherently good, and the fact that man must leave the garden to toil is almost lamented. Zoroastrianism I'm not very familiar with but what little I have seen asserts that a certain piece of the divine is intrinsic in all life, whether or not there's a mythic distinction between the part of the world that's nature and the part that man makes for himself.

I guess my overarching point is that I disagree with the thesis that acoustic societies were in some way governed by an underlying ubiquitous panic; I think the idea of panic was instead a lot more like the idea of chaos in that it was widely recorded across cultures because it was considered politically useful for the upper classes who were writing down these things. There's no way to know what they were feeling and numerous interpretations that would suggest they felt and thought all sorts of other things that would contradict that kind of thing. I think the only thing I've learned from this thread and the process of writing this damnable post is that autistic societies are prone to an innate feeling of "Uhm actually". Back to reading this storygame I guess.

I'm reasonably confident in my ability to make edible rice (one cup at a time) without looking it up. I have the timers for each part of the process saved on my phone! If you asked me to do it by vibes, rather than by exact minutes on a timer, you may be disappointed.

I would say I'm at a 4 just because I never plan ahead for any reason, but I do cook pretty regularly and have more knowledge of what raw ingredients I'm allowed to eat on short notice than most.

The funniest CYS Injoke is when we pretend for the sake of politeness that Celicni is any one of these things.