Valley Of Decision (Bropocalypse Now, Prequel.)

Thebes, City of the Living. Crown jewel of Pharaoh Seti I. Home of Imhotep, Pharaoh's high priest, keeper of the dead; birthplace of Anck-Su-Namun, Pharaoh's mistress. No other man was allowed to touch her. But for their love, they were willing to risk life itself. To resurrect Anck-Su-Namun, Imhotep and his priests broke into her crypt and stole her body. They raced deep into the desert, taking Anck-Su-Namun's corpse to Hammunaptra, City of the Dead, ancient burial site for the sons of pharaohs, and resting place for the wealth of Egypt. For his love, Imhotep dared the gods' anger by going deep into the city, where he took the black Book of the Dead from its holy resting place. Anck-Su-Namun's soul had been sent to the dark Underworld, her vital organs removed and placed in five sacred canopic jars. Anck-Su-Namun's soul had come back from the dead. But Pharaoh's bodyguards had followed Imhotep, and stopped him before the ritual could be completed. Imhotep's priests were condemned to be mummified alive. As for Imhotep, he was condemned to endure the Hom-Dai, the worst of all ancient curses. One so horrible, it had never before been bestowed. He was to remain sealed inside his sarcophagus, the undead for all eternity. The Medjai would never allow him to be released. For he would arise a walking disease, a plague upon mankind, an unholy flesh-eater with the strength of the ages, power over the sands, and the glory of invincibility. For 3,000 years men and armies fought over this land, never knowing what evil lay beneath it; and for 3,000 years we, the Medjai, the descendants of Pharaoh's sacred bodyguards, kept watch. ~Ardith Bey (Narrating) from The Mummy (1999 Film.)

...

How can you see into my eyes like open doors?
Leading you down into my core where I've become so numb
Without a soul my spirit's sleeping somewhere cold
Until you find it there and lead it back home

(Wake me up)
Wake me up inside
(I can't wake up)
Wake me up inside
(Save me)
Call my name and save me from the dark
(Wake me up)
Bid my blood to run
(I can't wake up)
Before I come undone
(Save me)
Save me from the nothing I've become.

~Bring Me To Life, Evanescence.

...

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco

As I've mentioned and written about many times, I'm a gamer.

As I've mentioned before I ran a crossover White Wolf game for pretty close to 20 years with several different iterations of "My crew" at work when I worked at the casino, and it continued on Discord for a little while after I left that job, too.

Three of the people in my gaming group were my late best friend, my current partner (for awhile) and the dude who sexually harassed her and got himself shit-canned out of our lives and threatened with a good ass-kicking on principle as a result.

Which is a better fate than he deserved. We started out planning to get even but then figured out he wouldn't even get it if we did. Dude was just that stupid.

We've got to take the neighborhood back. We've got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It's right around the corner. It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go." I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't…". You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they're moving ahead on this? Well, they know they're not, they're just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you're just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out. ~Bill Cosby, the "Pound Cake" speech.

My late best friend's main character was an originally Victorian Malkavian Vampire, a bullshit-artist manipulator pretty much modeled as the Mutant Love-Child of the Marquis De Sade and Alex from A Clockwork Orange. 

He basically played similar characters, usually rogues or spellcasters, in D&D.

The sexual harasser's character was a Gangrel Vampire, a very old Mongol warrior based off a bloodline from the Dark Ages setting, I built him to be pretty much indestructible, meant him to be run similarly to dude's usual Chaotic Neutral D&D Barbarians so he was easy for my buddy to play (after both of his more-complicated predecessors ended up remembered as "Regular" and "Extra Crispy" from getting turned to ash fighting a Lore Of The Flames-wielding Devil in the Chronicle's first chapter) and I set him up to be dumb and hedonistic but tough enough to get away with it. Unfortunately I succeeded.

My partner always ran a Black Fury Amazon or Vampire-hunting Silent Strider out of Werewolf The Apocalypse once she saw how much we plundered from movies like The Mummy or its sequel. Most of her characters were basically her with slightly more body hair and actually statistically-quantifiable rage issues and they fit with her vaguely-feminist ball-kicking attitude. She usually ran Clerics or Fighters in D&D.

For reasons that should have been entirely obvious even 20 years ago the bad guys I came up with were very often demonic or vampiric or other kinds of Superatural versions of dudes like Dale Partridge and all These Fucking People that want to try to use some kind of cheat code or demonic powers or magical mojo to bring about some bullshit Apocalypse or variation of the Christian End Times. When you factor in that games like Demon The Fallen are heavily based on stuff like Milton's Paradise Lost it's easy.

My players were very often trying to stop shit like *Checks Notes* current events.

[Addressing crowd after killing gladiator in solo fight] Are you not entertained? ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!?! Is this not why you are here?! [throws away sword and spits at the ground, then leaves] ~Maximus Decimus Meridius, from the film Gladiator.

I find it interesting and a little sad that I lived to see some of us live long enough to become the villains in our own stories.

I'm more than a little disgusted that some motherfuckers idea of freedom is basically the "Freedom" for people to sell their bodies to these dudes.

While the same kind of motherfuckers then want to somehow turn an OnlyFans hoe into a dowdy, dour Christian housewife that is somehow still a freak in the sheets but only for their particular brand of narcissism. 

No, bro, one of these things is not like the other one.

I mean, just to ruin Dale's example my partner wears leggings all the time and while she can historically be a little freaky, the truth genuinely is that she's very Christian and modest by nature and the church background that we have in common is a lot of why we connected like we did. It certainly influenced how that came about and the mechanics of our relationship even now.

You can take a lot of things away from a man. Cigarettes, the gym. You can take his freedom, his legs, but not his feelings. Not his feelings. A man loves a woman. Don't matter what kind of man he is, if he loves her, he wants her. He wants her body. He wants her to want his. So you say to him, "you can never make love again. You will never touch her in that way again. This is the last time. The last time. Forever." If that's not cruel and unusual punishment, I don't know what is. ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series Oz, S1.E2 "Visits, Conjugal and otherwise."

That's not the world all these Bro-CHUD's wanna live in.

They think they're gonna "Preach Jesus" on the streets of Iran in the daylight and at night skulk off to some Wild West brothel type place like Al Swearingen's saloon in the HBO series Deadwood. They're not actually interested in following the Lord's Word, they don't really want to preach from it, let alone practice it. They just want to be adrift on a sea of Dopamine and have Wealth Without Work while living in some big bullshit "Adventure" and Evangelicalism-as-it-currently-is keeps indulging These Fucking People.

Again I used to regularly build vampires like this, undead monsters cursed by God, hungering for blood and sometimes serving evil ancient gods like Set or demons like Mammon. Actual humans ain't supposed to be like this according to any moral code I've ever obeyed.

There is a fucking reason that I've stopped referring to Evangelicals as Christians.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of Evangelicals are closet Baal-worshipers already. Baal originally was a Canaanite fertility god, and there's always been a subsect of Evangelicals in particular that scanned as  a creepy fertility cult.

Mike Huckabee isn't exactly dissuading me from that line of reasoning.

And the worst part is these motherfuckers ain't doing this out of sincere belief in anything.

They're doing it because they think it's funny and they think they'll make money off of it somehow.

Proclaim ye this among the Gentiles; Prepare war, wake up the mighty men, let all the men of war draw near; let them come up: Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruning-hooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong. Assemble yourselves, and come, all ye heathen, and gather yourselves together round about: thither cause thy mighty ones to come down, O Lord. Let the heathen be wakened, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there will I sit to judge all the heathen round about. Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe: come, get you down; for the press is full, the fats overflow; for their wickedness is great. Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision: for the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision. ~Joel 3:9-14

Yeah, I don't think this is exactly gonna work that way. 

Being somewhat familiar with the expected realities of the shit these fucking people are trying to start, I somehow doubt that Poly-market's servers and all these dudes devices and internet connections are hardened against an Electro-Magnetic Pulse with their own independent power supplies, so the joke's on them. Nobody's gonna get paid if any of these idiots win the bet.

And if they expected to, they wouldn't be putting the shit on some bullshit Cryptocurrency betting website. They would be writing it on slips of paper and storing that shit in some secure location away from strategic targets.

These Fucking People all think this is all some kind of a joke, some sort of bullshit "Own The Libs" prank or some perverse fantasy based off of their own narcissism and religiosity.

When the great day of His wrath comes, none of them will be able to stand.

When it's that judgment day in the Valley of Decision, they ain't gonna like it.

But as for you in the here and now? You either believe in freedom or you don't.

And either you're willing to fight for it or you're not.

That may well be what we get judged on.

Слава Україна!

Mon Mothma: Fellow Senators, friends, colleagues, allies, adversaries, I stand before you this morning with a heavy heart. I've spent my life in this chamber. I came here as a child, and as I look around me now, I realize I have almost no memories that predate my arrival, and few bonds of affection that cleave so tightly. Through these many years, I believe I have served my constituents honorably and upheld our code of conduct. This chamber is a cauldron of opinions, and we've certainly all had our patience and tempers tested in pursuit of our ideals. Disagree as we might, I am hopeful that those of you who know me will vouch for my credibility in the days to come.

I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil! When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest. This Chamber's hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza! What took place yesterday, what happened yesterday on Ghorman, was unprovoked genocide! Yes, genocide! And that truth has been exiled from this Chamber! And the monster screaming the loudest, the monster we helped create, the monster who will come for us all soon enough, is Emperor Palpatine!

~From the Star Wars series Andor, S2.E9 "Welcome To The Rebellion."

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We have too many men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon On The Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. ~General Omar Bradley