#Cave of the Apocalypse

[brucestambaughsblog]

A Photo Essay: Following the Path of Apostle Paul - Day 6

Skala on the island of Patmos, Greece. We hated to leave Samos. We enjoyed it so much. Nevertheless, we were up early again to catch the ferry to our next adventure, the island of Patmos. The island hopping via ferry began in earnest. I took a few photos of Pythagereio as the ferry sped away. We stopped at a few small island villages to pick up and drop off passengers. The island ferries have…

[jakewienhold]

The Cave of the Apocalypse is located approximately halfway up the mountain on the Aegean island of Patmos, along the road between the villages of Chóra and Skala.

This grotto marks the spot where the exiled St. John of Patmos received his visions that he recorded in the Book of Revelation during a time of persecution under the Roman rule of Domitian in the late 1st century.

In John's visions, notice Rome wasn't even acknowledged or addressed by Jesus in his letters to the seven churches of Asia (modern day Turkey) which formed the basis for early Christianity because Rome has always been the great Harlot masquerading as the "one true church" of Jesus Christ. Rome has always persecuted and murdered true Christians. Many Biblical scholars and Pastors have drawn parallels between Revelation 17 and the persecutions of Bible Believing Christians by Rome identifying Roman Catholicism as "MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH" drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.

https://biblehub.com/kjv/revelation/1.htm https://www.gotquestions.org/Patmos-in-the-Bible.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Apocalypse https://www.conservapedia.com/Book_of_Revelation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Patmos https://www.conservapedia.com/Inquisition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patmos Questions About Eternity in Heaven and Hell https://www.gotquestions.org/content_eternity_heaven.html https://www.gotquestions.org/content_eternity_hell.html

Revelation 21 (The 12 Foundation Stones in New Jerusalem) http://www.preciousstonesofthebible.com/stonegallery.html https://near-death.com/city-of-light/

What Happened to the Seven Churches of Revelation? https://www.imb.org/2018/06/01/what-happened-to-the-seven-churches-of-revelation/ https://www.gotquestions.org/seven-churches-Revelation.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_churches_of_Asia https://www.bible-history.com/maps/7_churches_asia.html https://lifehopeandtruth.com/prophecy/revelation/seven-churches-of-revelation/ https://www.biblestudy.org/maps/the-seven-churches-of-revelation-map.html https://www.friendshiptours.com/what-are-the-seven-churches-of-revelation-where-are-they-located/

Get a fresh perspective on the book of Revelation and Jesus’ message to churches in all times. Visit the ancient sites of the seven churches described in Revelation. Gain insights into God’s love for the world, His warning and correction for the churches, and His hope and encouragement for the future. A perfect resource for individual or small group study: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPOUA7GLxXIG-Cc84xHWAB9dw25R2Og3Y

In a historic final interview, filmmaker Aaron Russo goes in depth on the insider knowledge given to him by a member of the Rockefeller family: https://www.banned.video/watch?id=62a0c0b6f3feec02cafe1bb3 Federal Reserve System: https://www.conservapedia.com/Federal_Reserve_System https://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Evils%20in%20Government/Federal%20Reserve%20Scam/federal_reserve_is_evil.htm 9/11: https://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Evils%20in%20Government/911%20Cover-up/911.htm https://www.banned.video/channel/richardgage911 Feminism: https://www.conservapedia.com/Feminism https://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Evils%20in%20America/Feminism/feminism_is_evil.htm Destroying the family: https://www.conservapedia.com/Destroying_the_family Public school culture: https://www.conservapedia.com/Public_school_culture Government: https://www.conservapedia.com/Government World Debt Clock: https://usdebtclock.org/world-debt-clock.html Mark of the Beast: https://www.markofbeast.net/ https://www.conservapedia.com/Number_of_the_Beast https://biblehub.com/kjv/revelation/13.htm

[nostalgebraist]

Floornight and Almost Nowhere are "diurnal," The Northern Caves and The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen are "nocturnal."

My next work of fiction, whenever it does arrive (I am going to take a good long break first), will definitely be "diurnal." The "nocturnal" ones are painful to write in a way the "diurnal" ones aren't, and I don't want to go through that again for a long time, if ever.

[With only the slightest hint of irony] You take my meaning, of course.

[arc-tu-rus]

For the girl you have in that merry green land

Can wait forever for you to come home

just a lil homage to the music video with the most chemistry while I don't have any new ideas~

[ihonestlydunnowhattocallmyself]

Here are my favourite characters

[albatris]

on a scale from Nat Rentalcar Finch eating god in a fervent rage to Tris Atdao Greer embracing the monstrous with unrivaled kindness how well do you straddle the line between psychosis and apocalyptic divinity and deal with being a vessel through which terrifying energies are channelled

[fluffypotatey]

every time i re-listen to epic the musical, i can’t help but think of an odyssey story during a zombie apocalypse

[nerds-yearbook]

Civilization had been thrown into havoc with the outbreak of an atomic war in 1964. By 1974, one town had been surviving using the wisdom of “The Old Man in the Cave” in matters of what to eat and what to grow and other matters of survival. The peace of the town was disrupted by the arrival of soldiers claiming they were trying to unite the survivors and rebuild society. The lead soldier came into conflict with Mr. Goldsmith who was the only one who had been talking with the old man in the cave. To create discord, the lead soldier, named French, convinces the town’s people to eat canned food that the old man in the cave said was dangerous. To further distance the people from Mr. Goldsmith, French learned and revealed to the people that the Old Man in the Cave was actually a computer. However, the soldiers and the people of the town all died of food poisoning leaving only Mr. Goldsmith. ("The Old Man in the Cave", The Twilight Zone, TV)

[stick-or-treat]

Hey I have a post-apocalyptic science fantasy homebrew setting I’m working on called Skeleton City. Inspirations for it include Mad Max, Bioshock, and Studio Ghibli films. It contains copious amounts of bioluminescent fungi and blunt commentary on class disparity.

If you’re interested, check out what (little) I have written up so far on World Anvil:

landing page

the first level

[dramoor]

[violet-dragongirl]

for a while now I've been trying to get into either designing concepts around apocalypse stories that aren't viewed or told from a white perspective, but also getting into reading and conceptualizing an apocalypse that really never stopped for a group of people, that of which, when looking at stories like fallout, for some...it's happening a second time.

and a lot of popular media really doesn't cover character experiences or environmental design based up on that the apocalypse for these characters never stopped or is happening in a quick devastating way a second time.

[larnax]

EXTENSIVE LIST OF DECENT TMA EPISODES

across the street. spooky story about what if you saw your neighbor getting changeling'd. the witness being a semi-stalker so she can't tell Anyone and only knows the victim well enough to know he's gone is a nice twist

do not open. not at all spooky story about a guy who gets given a weird coffin marked "dont open" that keeps trying to hypnotize him to open it and making weird sounds but he just fucking. freezes the key in a block of ice/wears noiseproof headphones and manages not to open it until it gets taken away by mystery delivery drivers. he just gets out of it completely scot free with some cash

a father's love. spooky story about what if your dad was a serial killer. accurate to have the serial killer dad be a cop. i'm so glad this was a standalone story and did not get some stupid lore expansion that tried to rehabilitate the Serial Killer Cop Dad

vampire killer. not at all spooky story about a homeless guy whos a fucking sick awesome vampire hunter and theyre like gross mosquito hypnosis vampires. the sequel children of the night is almost scary but then he kills the vampire for the first time and she explodes like a mosquito. the lore expansion where he saves the serial killer's daughter from her job at the demon church and they become roadtrip besties killing monsters overseas rules actually

anatomy class. perhaps the funniest horror story i have ever read. what if you were trying to teach an entry level anatomy class to a bunch of kids in the same white shirt and blue jeans with different cultural placeholder names but they were actually like. meat creatures who were taking the class to learn how to be shaped like people. theres a scene where the teacher is explaining how hearts beat and all of them hold up the animal heart theyre dissecting and they start beating in different rhythms and theyre like "which one is right?" and at the end of the semester they give him an apple filled with human teeth shaped like a smile and a nice note thanking him for teaching them good :). absolutely killer 4-koma comedy horror manga idea

binary. not at all scary. starts with the protagonist telling you shes a Real hacker and the horror stories about the dark web are STUPID. proceeds to be the dumbest fucking story youve ever read about an evil video of a guy eating a computer to put his brain in it and becoming a tortured chatbot.

book of the dead. spooky story about what if there was a book which as soon as you read it wrote an extremely brutal death for you to happen very soon, and every time you try to avoid your fate your death changes to be closer and more painful. i should probably not have listened to this as a kid with untreated OCD.

body builder. not at all scary story about a guy who goes to a gym but they let you get silly with it. they let you get four legs and no head and stitch a smiley face into your chest.

that's it!

[tomesmithpress]

LAIR OF THE BLACK DRAGON

Lurking in the depths of the jungles is a Black Dragon and their kin. Said to have been once sealed in a stone pyramid forgotten by ancients. Movement has said to have stirred around the site. A cult seems to be growing all with one desire, to wake the dragon.

Included

1 Black Dragon Adult

1 Black Dragon Wyrmling

2 Black Kobold Warrior

2 Black kobold Archer

2 Black Kobold Mystic

1 Black Dragon Priest

1 Black Dragon Cultist

1 Mold Folk

1 Tlaloc-Coatl The God of Thunder, Rain and Earthquakes

[zevranunderstander]

one of my favorite things about tma was how seasons 1-4 were all like "what if something supernatural and scary happened in your otherwise mundane life, making you realize the world isn't at all what it seemed like to you?" but season 5 is like "what if you were trapped in something akin to hell and the world is like nothing you know anymore, but the fear you expierience doesn't come from supernatural horrors but from the mundanity of your old life?"

[thewadapan]

Maybe Nost's best story! Also his least fun. Definitely did not like reading most of it. Would recommend reading... maybe any of the others over this one?

I think with The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen, Nost has managed to write a book which is haunted.

Stepping back a little. Herschel Schoen seems to have been conceived almost as a short story, which only happens to be as long as it is as a result of the (deliberately) belaboured and verbose prose used by all the narrators. It's much closer to The Northern Caves in this respect, which I remember as being mostly straightforward and intelligible, with only the highly-divisive ending leaving me with a dangling "??????" to grapple with. Meanwhile, with Floornight and Almost Nowhere, I often struggled to keep up with the object-level facts of what was even happening in the plot/world, and I feel like I mostly read those stories "on vibes", following them mostly in terms of their subtext.

So yeah, Herschel Schoen to me felt like it was using the "fairytale" format of being a Christmas story to streamline things as much as possible, such that both the object-level events of the story and the batshit conceptual-melting-pot subtext were more or less legible to me, despite Herschel's incredibly unreliable prose. There is a sense in which it feels like a children's story to me. It has very few characters, and those characters are extraordinarily archetypal.

So I do think Almost Nowhere retains its crown as Nost's most ambitious, most revolutionary, and most complex novel—if I say that I found Herschel Schoen "better", it's only because I feel I was able to understand it. It speaks more to my failure as a reader than anything.

In terms of my experience as a reader, it was fairly similar to that described by @recordcrash in his review. Most of the story is a fucking struggle to get through, mostly because of... the prose? The pacing? These issues are really the same issue: what few events occur in the book take ages to describe, and the fact that every recounting takes forever means that there physically isn't room to cram in more events. And as Makin Recordcrash puts it: I just don't enjoy hearing the thoughts of an unwell mind, particularly at length. All of Nost's books have it, this entirely-made-up concept which "you just wouldn't understand" but which it nevertheless will tell you about at length. There's Salby and mundum in The Northern Caves, there's Azad and the aliens in Almost Nowhere, there's whatever the metaphysics shit was in Floornight (I forgor), and this is the book that has the most of it, proportionally.

(My girlfriend bounced right off it- actually, let me use this opportunity to tell a story. When we first met, we were talking about the internet or something, and for whatever reason at one point I unironically said something like "oh yeah I read this cool novel set on a forum but you probably wouldn't have heard of it" and she just went "oh do you mean The Northern Caves?" and I briefly became convinced that she was some sort of psyop intended to oneshot me, a notion I have still not been able to shake over two years later. Point is her remark on the first two chapters of Herschel Schoen was something like "it's too Nostalgebraist for me", which I think is understandable.)

Anyway, like Makin, I struggled with most of the book, only for Chapter 21 to be so fucking good that it sort of retroactively made the rest of the book good, at least insofar as it was mostly necessary to set up such an audacious ending? Even knowing that this had been Makin's reaction, I wasn't prepared to believe it—again, usually Nost books are very much the other way around—but lo and behold, the twist is in fact very clever, very fun to read, and very aligned with my aesthetic interests.

All that said, I do feel like Makin sort of bombed through the book (by comparison, it's taken me almost two weeks to finish it), and maybe missed out on some of the more fun and interesting stuff the book is doing on a thematic level. Below, I'll try to delve into my interpretations in more detail.

I've seen a few takes from people that the main thematic throughlines of this book are a bit disconnected from one another, but to me this couldn't be further from the truth.

I identified four main themes, in descending order of prominence: "neurodivergence", "AI", "media", and "capitalism". I guess you could say "Christmas" is something of a fifth ur-theme, which dovetails into these in superficial ways:

Neurodivergence—the idea of "believing in Santa Claus" is framed as stunted development, a delusion which reveals someone to be less mature mentally than they are physically. The book is specifically concerned with contrasting dysfunctional "child" behaviour with functional "adult" behaviour, flipping these ideas on their head by having Ruth and Miriam basically lose it over the course of the story. A sister inverted. Also, the "preparations" needed to be made before Christmas morning are very much analogised with obsessive compulsions, right?

AI—like Santa Claus, something which promises to fulfil all our wishes, instantly, at the same time.

Media—particularly in terms of relations between Christianity and... secular Christmas, right? The story is very much riffing on the structure of Christmas stories specifically. To me, it feels like a world literally dreamed up based on Christmas stories. That, more than anything, is why it's set in New York, I think.

Capitalism—notions of "wanting", of meritocracy. I don't know, we all know "A Christmas Carol", I don't need to explain this one.

Like, if I had to guess at the genesis of this book, based on Nostalgebraist's comments, I feel like it's taking the starting point of "story about what if the AI doomers were right" -> "through the lens of Christmas" -> "[everything else in the story]". Of course there are tons of other influences in there, but those to me feel like the two ideas with the most explanatory power.

But even if you discount the underlying idea "Christmas", I don't think you could tell a good story about AI (in its current form) without writing about neurodivergence, media, or capitalism. If we're tasked with imagining a non-human mind, it makes sense to first imagine the most-non-human human mind, right? If we're talking about the machine's output, its facsimile of media, we have to talk about the real thing too, right? And if we're asking about the purpose of AI, what exactly it is we're trying to industrialise, what scarcity we are trying to erase, then we have to talk about capitalism as well! For me this was all perfectly obvious, I dunno.

I was pleased that I noticed many of the same things @weaselandfriends identified in his list of observations on the book. When it described the wall of doors in the living room, my mind went, "that's fucking weird!", though I didn't really think too deeply about it. The same things goes for all the anachronisms, which I think is one of the story's best gimmicks. Yes, for most of the story, they serve to create a "timeless" atmosphere, evoking all these Christmas stories at once, while simultaneously putting into doubt the reality of what Herschel and Miriam are describing.

But then, of course, with the twist, I think it's pretty hard not to read these as anything other than hallucinations conjured by the AI. And what I think is particularly brilliant is that the story at no point calls direct attention to the anachronisms as being of particular significance—you only notice them because you know enough "facts" about the real world to notice them—which naturally calls into question the elements of the story which are wholly ficticious, where there's no ground truth to compare against. Just how real are Herschel, Miriam, Ruth, anyone!? And does it even matter how real they are?

Part of the book's "magic trick", as I read it, is that both interpretations of Herschel's POV are able to coexist within the reality of the story. We can imagine that there really existed a boy perhaps called Herschel Schoen (just as we can imagine there really existed a guy called Jesus? This is silly, pretend I didn't say that) who perhaps lived in New York City and lived with some kind of delusion, perhaps regarding an Original Creation that only babies remember. Like, even this much isn't certain, perhaps Herschel is entirely hallucinated; the story is in fact preoccupied with the question of whether or not there's even any difference. Anyway, at some point, the AI apocalypse happens (I think this is one thing we can be pretty confident about), and for the AI's own purposes, Herschel is resurrected/recreated (again like Christ- disregard this aside!) in an "emended" form, where whatever changes are made mean that he is in fact right about the Original Creation and the future etc, his mind really was tampered with. The concept of "emendation" seems to me to be the biggest point in favour of the book overall believing that a substitution is not the same as the original; that the "transformation" of one shape into another does not mean it becomes the other, as its own history remains distinct (much as the "original" events of whatever happened to the "original" Herschel on the "original" Christmas Day can be said to have, in some sense, happened—and cannot, should not, be "forgotten"). But maybe these elements of the story were intended to be disparate, though, or related in some other way, and I'm just conflating them?

One of my favourite interpretations that I've seen raised in a couple of places is that Herschel's writings, with which he literally armours himself, are in fact literally protecting him against oblivion, because the AI can only learn based on the written word or recorded speech. It doesn't really matter what happens to the papers, so long as they are written at all. Herschel pours so much of himself into those papers so as to be understood, and in the end he is understood—if not by Miriam and Ruth, then by the only being he needs to be understood by: this machine. He secures his own existence, in at least some limited form, in the "Original Creation", simply through his writing. I think Herschel is the "most real" part of the story.

It's Miriam, though—the second-"most real" element—that I think makes this story haunted. It's the way she packs all those papers into a suitcase, and for the briefest of moments you can breathe a sigh of relief, that we're one step closer to understanding how this book came to be, in-universe. But immediately, it's obvious that this explains nothing, it explains less than nothing, because there are all these chapters which just don't fit, they can't be neatly contained in that suitcase. Bavitz draws direct parallels between the inexplicable frame narrative and the anachronisms, and he's absolutely right to do so. The story is often very careful about providing something which looks "quite right", at a glance, but the moment you think about it, this pit opens up under you. Something about this metatextual conceit actually makes my skin crawl.

It feels pat to say, "oh, that's because it's trying to evoke AI hallucinations". I feel like that's only part of it, because again, most of Nost's novels have this to some extent. But yeah, I think if you wanna read Herschel Schoen as a horror novel, then this is what is scary about it. Conceptually, everything with Miriam mainly recalls for me the idea of "crashes" from Almost Nowhere, which were one of the big horror elements there, the idea that the world you're walking around in is actually, imperceptibly, some kind of not-world filled with not-people. But more directly, I find myself remembering a bit from the third act of OCTO (a criminally underrated and under-discussed webnovel) where a superintelligence is trying to "resurrect" a human, and keeps putting her in increasingly-lifelike simulated "habitats" to try and create the right set of "inputs" that will make her function properly—i.e., without just like, screaming. I feel like that is what we see happen to Miriam in this book. I feel like, when the lights go out, at the end, it has nothing to do with light at all: it's more that the machine just no longer needs to simulate a world for Miriam, at all. The transmission stops. And then what becomes of her?

I think this sort of brings us to Ruth, doesn't it? A big point is made about how there's a difference between "Miriam" and "my sister, Miriam". As though in the latter, the reality of "Miriam" in the training data is watered down by all these tropes surrounding sisterhood. I mean, fuck, maybe that's where the incest stuff comes from, right? I feel like similarly, there's a reading for Ruth where the AI is first conflating these images of "a mother" with these images of "a terrorist". She acts like a fucking cartoon character for much of the book, as many of the less-well-drawn characters do, and I think that's entirely deliberate. As she draws more on the "terrorist" tropes, she stops being a "mother". And again I think this is what Nostalgebraist has always done so fucking well, in that the bullshit sci-fi allegory stuff can also just be read on an entirely character-driven level: here is a resentful, neglectful, ultimately abusive mother, here's the emotional reality of that, heightened and communicated.

I think this provides a vague stab at an explanation for the beating scene that Bavitz found so confusing. It's like the AI draws on this trope of like... the mother, in the kitchen, with the frying pan. It puts the pan in her hand. But it's not actually a frying pan, it's just the image of a frying pan. In reality, did Herschel's mother beat him? How did she beat him? Hell, maybe she didn't, maybe the AI just got so caught up in playing out the trope of the abusive parent that is gets to the point of this beating, and then just dream-logics itself to the next thing in its training data, where of course the beating never happened. I don't like that, it feels like we're gaslighting the kids here (which I think is very much the allegory intended) by saying it was just a hallucination. I think something like it happened in reality, and cannot, should not, be "forgotten". But I think the book does want you to think that its depiction does, in some way, break from reality. Hell, in much the same way that child abuse might be said to break the reality of family? Nah, that's too pat, isn't it?

I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that, ironically, I found the novel was at its best, and at its most human, when it was writing frankly about the experience of mental illness, about family, about institutions, about childhood. So what's maybe frustrating is that I'm not actually convinced Nost is capable of writing a... shall we call it a "normal" story about those things? A story with no metatextual bullshit, no sci-fi conceit, but a realist story. There are parts of all his books, where I really think that the explanation for why they are the way they are is that they are "bad on purpose", and all the bullshit is a way of turning these shortcomings into strengths. The self-effacing voice which whispers that the characters aren't sufficiently well-drawn, are too cartoonish—well, what if that was the point? What if there was a reason for that, in the story?

But honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way. Straightup, if these were normal stories set in reality, I wouldn't be fucking reading them. This is a web author who's trained himself on a bunch of classic lit, and a bunch of anime or whatever, and has smooshed those influences together and rocket-fuelled the result. It's inimitable. I deeply admire just how experimental Nostalgebraist's writing is. No-one else is doing it like him.

Anyway, what else. Herschel gets described as having a "shell" at various points, and Frederick's surname is "Eggert". Is that anything?

The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen

My fourth novel, The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen, is now available in full.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

[rastronomicals]

8:37 AM EST December 29, 2024:

The Rhythm Devils - "Cave" From the album The Apocalypse Now Sessions (May 25, 1980)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

This is Grateful Dead drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, with a cast that includes Phil Lesh and Flora Purim & Airto. Rhythm Devils began as an extended improvised segment with the two drummers during the second set of Dead shows.

In 1979, Francis Ford Coppola contracted Kreutzmann and Hart to provide polyrhythmic incidental music for his film Apocalypse Now. But then Coppola reneged and ended up using music composed and played by his father Carmine--although he did keep the incredible and visionary end titles music without crediting it. Kreutzmann and Hart then took the tapes to Rykodisc, who were glad to release them.

Anyway, this is in fact true jungle music--you definitely feel as if you have gotten off the boat--and I have no doubt Coppola's masterpiece would have been even better had the Rhythm Devils music been included.

Audio touchstones to it for me—even roughly similar in their use of exotic world instruments— include Patrick Moraz’ The Story of I and swordfishtrombones. Both lush as fuck just like this.