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<blockquote data-quote="Dlsharrock" data-source="post: 4223164" data-attributes="member: 55833"><p>I'll tell you one thing, being dead sure gives you a fresh perspective on life.</p><p></p><p>Ok, there's the novelty stage. You get to hang out with Elvis, ask God what it was all about, tourist stuff. Once you settle in, though- once you get past the whole shock/wonder/philosophy of actually being a bone-fide stiff, you start to see things with pin-sharp clarity. Let me tell you about it. <em>All</em> about it.</p><p></p><p>The trouble with humans (I know this, because I used to be one) is this: you're too marginalised by time. You need that beginning, middle and end, and if you don't have it, you lose all point of reference. Which is gonna make it real hard to explain exactly what it's like to be dead.</p><p></p><p>Life: it's all about the process; all about the sequence. Short stories, movies, politics, books, life, war. He started it, she started it. He called me a name, so I threw a punch. He <a href="http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=34118" target="_blank">ground my face into the dirt</a>, so I kicked him in the nuts. He threatened my pride, so I took his land. He killed my baby, so I bombed his people.</p><p></p><p>Violent stuff eh? But you can't blame it all on the equilibrium. Round here, there's no such thing. If you were here with me, instead of expending the precious seconds of your life on this internet forum, oblivious and happy in that land of the living you cherish so much, you'd get this whole thing instantaneously. It takes some real convolution of thinking on my part to make it work, believe me. See, in life, there really is no comparison to the timeless, non-sequential nature of death. For you, even the most immediate moment is still a moment. Even the most infinitesimal quantum second is still a measure of time. </p><p></p><p>If Death's like anything, it's like that. Click your fingers - gone. The whole 'majestic' span of all things condensed to a point smaller than a singularity, and then its over... Jeez, I can see your brain straining at the seams from here. Forget about it.</p><p></p><p>Anyway, once you lose the luxury of time, you lose the t1t for tat. Night follows day, he said/she said, bears no relation to reality here, not even the reality of rationalisation (we don't have that either). You ever hear the term 'seeing the light'? Aren't the dead supposed to 'move into the light'? Maybe that's ghosts, I forget. Well, let me tell you - the light's extraordinarily bright around here. No filters. No shadows of thought shading rational hypocrisy, no word-forged nooks and crannies, no place for those nesting lies to hide. A spade is, without exception, a spade. That kind of lucidity can be very intimidating.</p><p></p><p>And the cold truth lurking beneath the shadows of logic? People are violent, sadistic and blooded. Life: it's a sudden flash of brutal existence, reason stripped to the core, results unwinding like random ribbons of blood flying loose from a ragged wound. </p><p></p><p>Here the veil is lifted, the filters removed. Welcome to Death. That was your life. What did you think? Nasty, wasn't it? What's that? Bits of it were ok? The bits where you lied to yourself? Lied to others? Did a convincing job, didn't you? So good you convinced yourself. Well- guess what. There's no fooling the soul. Filters removed.</p><p></p><p>You look disappointed. Maybe you were expecting paradise? You imagined us all here, little gods, basking in the divine joy of the supreme being, <a href="http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=34120" target="_blank">magic sparking from our fingertips</a>? Maybe you have something else in mind? Some kind of alter-reality you can mould to fit your petty Earthbound dreams? Man, that would be sweet wouldn't it? I'd have me an <a href="http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=34121" target="_blank">Austrian villa</a>, all icicles and turrets, and a room filled with naked porn stars, and maybe some kind of robot to fix me up with burger banquets and tend to my every whim; a roaring fire, skiing like a pro and sex on tap!</p><p></p><p>Wake up doofus. I'm here to answer your question, remember? Why waste my breath on whitewash? Go find a hardware store and a priest if that's what you want. This is death, not fairyland.</p><p></p><p>The other cold truth is this (and this will really fry your nuts if the rest hasn't already) the universe has a real problem, and that problem is YOU. The Universe thought death might sort out the problem. But death failed miserably as a solution, in fact it made things <em>worse</em>. Can you believe that? What a hoot! So we got our strife here just like you’ve got yours there. We just don't allow ourselves the luxury of fantasy or logic, and there's the only difference (well, apart from the whole incorporeality thing we‘ve got going on). It's not about us against you, you against us, or us against us. Conflict is bunk. It's every man for himself and you'd better get your gear wired down because when you get here you'll find out real fast that being a newbie is no excuse.</p><p></p><p>Take me, for example. I thought I had a pretty good life. Now I'm here I realise, in fact, that I had a pretty awful one, and regret most if not all of it. The majority of my actions were detrimental, mostly resulting from my own insensibility to consciousness, responsibility and, above all else, charity. No, the image you just conjured in your head is not the sort of charity I mean. Get rid of it. That's the rationalist, narrow-minded image of charity right there. Equilibrium really rules you doesn't it? Listen dude, I'm talking about charity to Creation. Recognition of and (unpaid) dedication to Universal lore, embracing of the whole, not just the miniscule aspect you lifers call home. What the hell is Earth anyway but a spit-ball compared with the vastness of everything else. But let's not externalise too much. I'd hate to scare the crap out of you before I've even gotten to the best, most terrifying bit. So for your sake I'll play along - Earth really is the most important peckerwood in the whole intergalactic megaverse and God spends every ounce of his being worrying about you guys down there, just like you spend every moment of your waking day worrying about that speck on the left testicle of the ant that lives in your garden, mmmkay? </p><p></p><p>Back to me though. I was this fat, spotty, pretentious, self-centred geek. Spent half my time playing games online, the other half moaning about the suckiness of those same games right here on Enworld. I Larped (you should've seen me, <a href="http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=34119" target="_blank">what a disaster</a>), I dungeon-crawled, I nitpicked and analysed game systems, campaigns and RAW. I studied every detail, every inch, of worlds, locations and people that existed only in my head, or, worse, in someone else's head. And all the while, the real world thundered by and I, oblivious to its deafening roar, simply played on. Life was a game. Dice were my friends. Disembodied voices, manifest as text and smilies on my computer screen, represented the greater part of my contact with human life. What a sad, pathetic individual I was.</p><p></p><p>Then one day, while taking the bus to work, some guy with a backpack, several pounds of improvised explosive and a whole manure pile of righteous indignation sent me and everyone else occupying the top deck on a one way trip to never never land. As wake up calls go, it was pretty damned impressive. Unfortunate really that I should come out of it in a body bag or I’d have been a changed man.</p><p></p><p>The bomber’s here too, by the way. And man, is he disappointed. There's been a lot of encouragement for me and him to interact, to 'repair the shattered aspects of our souls'. I don't know if either of us are getting anything out of it, but he's sure as hell catching on real quick that there are no virgins in the afterlife. What a maniac. Imagine blowing yourself up for the sake of sex (we don't have that either, by the way).</p><p></p><p>So, I've meandered a bit, and I forgot the core principle, or the point I was trying to make - aka, the truly terrifying bit. No. That's not strictly true, I didn't forget. I just decided to keep it to myself. I've kinda warmed to you, so consider yourself off the hook. What can I say. I'm a sucker for a great fantasist <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /></p><p></p><p>The truth is, you don't wanna know about life after death. You don't wanna know that life is actually just about as good as it's ever gonna get for you. And you know why? Because time is a dreadful thing. It drags, don't you find? No more so than when you're waiting for the end. All the worse when you have to start from the beginning.</p><p></p><p>The least you want is certain knowledge that when the end finally comes, everything's gonna be great. That, and comfort in knowing there's a point to the story, that when you started this whole thing there'd be an outcome. There's nothing worse than a story that just fizzles away to nothing halfway through. </p><p></p><p>And everyone likes a happy ending.</p><p></p><p>In the tradition of equilibrium, this is the end. I'm due a whole heap of trouble for this. Not just because I hacked the spirit of the Enworld server (yeah, go figure, computers have souls. And if you think that's scary you should hang around for, oooh, about twenty years, then we'll talk) but because we're really not supposed to incite flawed logic in the grandeur of creation, or screw around with lifer's heads. It's gotta be all 'hey doofus, I'm thinking of a name beginning with S, first part sounds like weave, or leave, or heave‘. Communion favours ambiguity, but what can I say; I was a facetious, argumentative, non-conformist in life. Being blown to bits didn't change much more than the relative location of my limbs.</p><p></p><p>On which note, some parting words: </p><p></p><p>A body is not the sum of its severed parts.</p><p></p><p>You can have that for your signature if you like. Just don't forget to give credit where credit's due. Don't make me come down there and haunt your sorry ass.</p><p></p><p>[SBLOCK=Message for Mods]Can someone delete this. I can't find the account. Looks like trolling - the stuff about Enworlders as sad, pathetic individuals is particularly offensive: Morrus[/SBLOCK]</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Dlsharrock, post: 4223164, member: 55833"] I'll tell you one thing, being dead sure gives you a fresh perspective on life. Ok, there's the novelty stage. You get to hang out with Elvis, ask God what it was all about, tourist stuff. Once you settle in, though- once you get past the whole shock/wonder/philosophy of actually being a bone-fide stiff, you start to see things with pin-sharp clarity. Let me tell you about it. [I]All[/I] about it. The trouble with humans (I know this, because I used to be one) is this: you're too marginalised by time. You need that beginning, middle and end, and if you don't have it, you lose all point of reference. Which is gonna make it real hard to explain exactly what it's like to be dead. Life: it's all about the process; all about the sequence. Short stories, movies, politics, books, life, war. He started it, she started it. He called me a name, so I threw a punch. He [URL=http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=34118]ground my face into the dirt[/URL], so I kicked him in the nuts. He threatened my pride, so I took his land. He killed my baby, so I bombed his people. Violent stuff eh? But you can't blame it all on the equilibrium. Round here, there's no such thing. If you were here with me, instead of expending the precious seconds of your life on this internet forum, oblivious and happy in that land of the living you cherish so much, you'd get this whole thing instantaneously. It takes some real convolution of thinking on my part to make it work, believe me. See, in life, there really is no comparison to the timeless, non-sequential nature of death. For you, even the most immediate moment is still a moment. Even the most infinitesimal quantum second is still a measure of time. If Death's like anything, it's like that. Click your fingers - gone. The whole 'majestic' span of all things condensed to a point smaller than a singularity, and then its over... Jeez, I can see your brain straining at the seams from here. Forget about it. Anyway, once you lose the luxury of time, you lose the t1t for tat. Night follows day, he said/she said, bears no relation to reality here, not even the reality of rationalisation (we don't have that either). You ever hear the term 'seeing the light'? Aren't the dead supposed to 'move into the light'? Maybe that's ghosts, I forget. Well, let me tell you - the light's extraordinarily bright around here. No filters. No shadows of thought shading rational hypocrisy, no word-forged nooks and crannies, no place for those nesting lies to hide. A spade is, without exception, a spade. That kind of lucidity can be very intimidating. And the cold truth lurking beneath the shadows of logic? People are violent, sadistic and blooded. Life: it's a sudden flash of brutal existence, reason stripped to the core, results unwinding like random ribbons of blood flying loose from a ragged wound. Here the veil is lifted, the filters removed. Welcome to Death. That was your life. What did you think? Nasty, wasn't it? What's that? Bits of it were ok? The bits where you lied to yourself? Lied to others? Did a convincing job, didn't you? So good you convinced yourself. Well- guess what. There's no fooling the soul. Filters removed. You look disappointed. Maybe you were expecting paradise? You imagined us all here, little gods, basking in the divine joy of the supreme being, [URL=http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=34120]magic sparking from our fingertips[/URL]? Maybe you have something else in mind? Some kind of alter-reality you can mould to fit your petty Earthbound dreams? Man, that would be sweet wouldn't it? I'd have me an [URL=http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=34121]Austrian villa[/URL], all icicles and turrets, and a room filled with naked porn stars, and maybe some kind of robot to fix me up with burger banquets and tend to my every whim; a roaring fire, skiing like a pro and sex on tap! Wake up doofus. I'm here to answer your question, remember? Why waste my breath on whitewash? Go find a hardware store and a priest if that's what you want. This is death, not fairyland. The other cold truth is this (and this will really fry your nuts if the rest hasn't already) the universe has a real problem, and that problem is YOU. The Universe thought death might sort out the problem. But death failed miserably as a solution, in fact it made things [I]worse[/I]. Can you believe that? What a hoot! So we got our strife here just like you’ve got yours there. We just don't allow ourselves the luxury of fantasy or logic, and there's the only difference (well, apart from the whole incorporeality thing we‘ve got going on). It's not about us against you, you against us, or us against us. Conflict is bunk. It's every man for himself and you'd better get your gear wired down because when you get here you'll find out real fast that being a newbie is no excuse. Take me, for example. I thought I had a pretty good life. Now I'm here I realise, in fact, that I had a pretty awful one, and regret most if not all of it. The majority of my actions were detrimental, mostly resulting from my own insensibility to consciousness, responsibility and, above all else, charity. No, the image you just conjured in your head is not the sort of charity I mean. Get rid of it. That's the rationalist, narrow-minded image of charity right there. Equilibrium really rules you doesn't it? Listen dude, I'm talking about charity to Creation. Recognition of and (unpaid) dedication to Universal lore, embracing of the whole, not just the miniscule aspect you lifers call home. What the hell is Earth anyway but a spit-ball compared with the vastness of everything else. But let's not externalise too much. I'd hate to scare the crap out of you before I've even gotten to the best, most terrifying bit. So for your sake I'll play along - Earth really is the most important peckerwood in the whole intergalactic megaverse and God spends every ounce of his being worrying about you guys down there, just like you spend every moment of your waking day worrying about that speck on the left testicle of the ant that lives in your garden, mmmkay? Back to me though. I was this fat, spotty, pretentious, self-centred geek. Spent half my time playing games online, the other half moaning about the suckiness of those same games right here on Enworld. I Larped (you should've seen me, [URL=http://www.enworld.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=34119]what a disaster[/URL]), I dungeon-crawled, I nitpicked and analysed game systems, campaigns and RAW. I studied every detail, every inch, of worlds, locations and people that existed only in my head, or, worse, in someone else's head. And all the while, the real world thundered by and I, oblivious to its deafening roar, simply played on. Life was a game. Dice were my friends. Disembodied voices, manifest as text and smilies on my computer screen, represented the greater part of my contact with human life. What a sad, pathetic individual I was. Then one day, while taking the bus to work, some guy with a backpack, several pounds of improvised explosive and a whole manure pile of righteous indignation sent me and everyone else occupying the top deck on a one way trip to never never land. As wake up calls go, it was pretty damned impressive. Unfortunate really that I should come out of it in a body bag or I’d have been a changed man. The bomber’s here too, by the way. And man, is he disappointed. There's been a lot of encouragement for me and him to interact, to 'repair the shattered aspects of our souls'. I don't know if either of us are getting anything out of it, but he's sure as hell catching on real quick that there are no virgins in the afterlife. What a maniac. Imagine blowing yourself up for the sake of sex (we don't have that either, by the way). So, I've meandered a bit, and I forgot the core principle, or the point I was trying to make - aka, the truly terrifying bit. No. That's not strictly true, I didn't forget. I just decided to keep it to myself. I've kinda warmed to you, so consider yourself off the hook. What can I say. I'm a sucker for a great fantasist :) The truth is, you don't wanna know about life after death. You don't wanna know that life is actually just about as good as it's ever gonna get for you. And you know why? Because time is a dreadful thing. It drags, don't you find? No more so than when you're waiting for the end. All the worse when you have to start from the beginning. The least you want is certain knowledge that when the end finally comes, everything's gonna be great. That, and comfort in knowing there's a point to the story, that when you started this whole thing there'd be an outcome. There's nothing worse than a story that just fizzles away to nothing halfway through. And everyone likes a happy ending. In the tradition of equilibrium, this is the end. I'm due a whole heap of trouble for this. Not just because I hacked the spirit of the Enworld server (yeah, go figure, computers have souls. And if you think that's scary you should hang around for, oooh, about twenty years, then we'll talk) but because we're really not supposed to incite flawed logic in the grandeur of creation, or screw around with lifer's heads. It's gotta be all 'hey doofus, I'm thinking of a name beginning with S, first part sounds like weave, or leave, or heave‘. Communion favours ambiguity, but what can I say; I was a facetious, argumentative, non-conformist in life. Being blown to bits didn't change much more than the relative location of my limbs. On which note, some parting words: A body is not the sum of its severed parts. You can have that for your signature if you like. Just don't forget to give credit where credit's due. Don't make me come down there and haunt your sorry ass. [SBLOCK=Message for Mods]Can someone delete this. I can't find the account. Looks like trolling - the stuff about Enworlders as sad, pathetic individuals is particularly offensive: Morrus[/SBLOCK] [/QUOTE]
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