Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Overly Sarcastic Productions"
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Douglas Adams, in "Life, the Universe, and Everything":
“The alien ship was already thundering towards the upper reaches of the atmosphere, on its way out into the appalling void which separates the very few things there are in the Universe from each other.
Its occupant, the alien with the expensive complexion, leaned back in its single seat. His name was Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged. He was a man with a purpose. Not a very good purpose, as he would have been the first to admit, but it was at least a purpose and it did at least keep him on the move.
Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was --- indeed, is --- one of the Universe's very small number of immortal beings.
Those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope with it, but Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed he had come to hate them, the load of serene bastards. He had had his immortality thrust upon him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of rubber bands. The precise details of the accident are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, and many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying.
Wowbagger closed his eyes in a grim and weary expression, put some light jazz on the ship's stereo, and reflected that he could have made it if it hadn't been for Sunday afternoons, he really could have done.
To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously, taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally outliving the hell out of everybody.
In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.
So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear at other people's funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general, and everyone in it in particular.
This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing which would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive him on forever. It was this.
He would insult the Universe.”
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One thing about these old gods (stories generally, for that matter), is they're a network of resonant intuitions. A storyteller has an idea that came from who-knows-what intuitive connections, and the audience says, "Yeah, that sounds about right."
The ones that sound the "rightest" (presumably having the most in common with how the world seemed to work to most people), and the stories people are most curious about or eager to hear (maybe dealing with problems that they still haven't figured out the best way to deal with), end up being told often enough and similarly enough, to be made "canon".
If something like the "true" story of a chaos god is incoherent, well, maybe it's just incoherent, because it grabs a patch from here and a patch from there as different aspects of an idea are explored.
Imagine the parable of Plato's Cave, where the thing that's casting the shadows on the wall is in itself a mosaic of a multitude of shadows, in an infinite regress.
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