#the way this is heavily inspired by new wave but in a very dunes way is so impressive. they really never miss

[lsdunesarchive]

L.S. Dunes - Old Wounds

(August 25, 2023)

[navii-blaze]

The Desert's Torture

     This is not connected to any of my other stuff besides the fact that it is a Linked Universe AU fanfic. All rights and credit goes to the creator and Nintendo. Hope ya'll like it. Btw, I realized that since it is hard to tell which hero is which I made a cheat chart to reference. As you may tell, I took some inspiration from some of the other fanfic authors for this AU.

Hero of Warriors- War, Captain

Hero of the Sky- Sky, Hylia’s hero

Hero of Legend- Veteran, hero of the golden goddesses, hero of oracles

Hero of Hyrule- Ace, traveler

Hero of Time- Time, pops, old man

Hero of the Wild- Wild, cook, amnesic

Hero of the Four Sword/Minish- Four

Hero of Twilight- pup

     The hot sun blared on the heros' backs as they trudged through the wasteland of the Gerudo. They left at dawn, hoping to get to the city before the heat set in heavily, but they misjudged the nature of the foreign desert. Each one of them had shed off their armor and heavy layers, even the most prideful hero took off his prized scarf. The heat sapped their energy, making each sand dune seem like a mountain to walk over. 

 "You know, I've been in some pretty rough environments, heck I've been inside Death Mountain of all places. But nothing like this." The hero of twilight groaned as the sand rubbed between his feet and sandals. The desert back in his time had certainly never been this hot, so hot that he had forced himself to wear his standard Ordonian garbs, minus the shirt part. It would be a lie if he said that he was comfortable with showing off so much skin. The only times when he exposes himself like now was when he participated in wrestling matches. When he changed into his home garbs he couldn't help but notice a couple envious glances towards him, particularly from Ace and Veteran. But he supposed that he couldn't dismiss their jealousy if he couldn't dismiss his own. 

His eyes drifted over to to the youngest of the group, who was for some bizarre reason, full of energy and hadn't broken a sweat yet. Yet as he envied his ability to keep moving, he couldn't help but feel sorry for the hero of the Four Sword. With every question about the kingdom of Hyrule Wind asked him, it seemed like the smaller hero had a harder time walking. Suddenly Ace's voice interrupted his thoughts. 

"Hey look! An oasis!" What was once an exhausted and sweaty caravan of swordsmen turned into an alert and energetic group of young males half running, half still sluggishly walking towards the palm trees on the horizon. Nearly thirty minutes passed before they finally reached the new found paradise. It was abandoned, only a few boxes and barrels showed evidence of any past activity.  After scouting the area, the heroes set down their bags and weapons, with any sense of caution quickly disappearing. Taking the absence of other people as a blessing, they quickly stripped down to their under garments and dove into the cool spring for relief. Groans and sighs of relief filled the still air, occasionally interrupted by a playful splash or two. 

The hero of twilight nearly submerged himself all the way into the water, desperate to get the desert heat off of him.  He shot a glance at his descendant who was listening to the most prideful hero talk of his conquests and battles. Knowing that the captain’s rants tended to go on for a while, he decided against joining the conversation and moved next to his mentor, who draped his arm over Twilight’s shoulders.

“How long do you think we’ll stay here pops?” the hero of twilight felt exposed in such an open area, but the coolness of the spring kept him confined to the paradise in the vast desert. 

The elder shifted into a more comfortable position, “Beats me pup, I think we’ll settle for the night, it’s already past midday, and there’s no telling when our next stop will be.” the heroes spent the next hour basking in the coolness of the spring, no monsters in sight except for a lizalfos camping out a couple hundred yards away.  

They set up camp rather quickly, Time’s and Wild’s warnings of the night chill going through the heads of the heroes that were inexperienced with the extremes of the wasteland.  By the time the sun dipped on the horizon, the oasis was decked out by multiple sleeping cots surrounding a fire made from the wood of a palm tree Wild cut down, and a spark of ever-burning fire magic from a spell Hyrule cast.  

For the rest of the evening and a hour into nightfall, the heroes talked among themselves, mostly concerning how much desert was left to travel.  The hero of Twilight and the youngest of them all stood on opposite sides of the camp keeping watch.  Twilight’s eyes scanned over the endless dunes of sand, the cold breeze blowing bits of sand on his face.  When suddenly movement caught his eye from far off.  He walked over to where the abandoned crates where and climbed on top of one.  The hero took out his hawkeye mask and equipped it, adjusting the lenses until he saw what he had been looking for.  It was the lizalfos from earlier, they had paid no mind to them then, except for keeping an extra eye out for any change in the reptiles’ behaviors.  But now he saw them changing into armor and gathering weapons, moving fast and with intention.  When he shifted his gaze over a couple meters he realized what those intentions were.  Two lizalfos were approaching the oasis, fast and stealthy with their weapons out. 

He took the mask off, cursing at himself for not noticing them sooner, Twilight grabbed the nearest sword and shield and started banging the sword against the metal.  Upon hearing the alarm for intruders, the heroes snapped awake, grabbing their swords and equipment.  Wind ran over to the hero of twilight, his eyes frantically scanning the area.

“What’s happening? Are we under attack?” The older hero nodded and pointed towards the direction of the incoming monsters.

“The lizalfos camp from earlier is preparing for battle, they have sent two scouts this way for whatever reason.  Tell the others the situation and have three archers be ready to draw their bows.” Wind nodded and sprinted back to the other and explained to a very confused hero of time what was going on.  Meanwhile Twilight took out his bow and crouched behind the crates, he looked over his shoulder and saw that Time had picked Wild, Sky, and Wind to take up their bows and find a secluded spot.  The others were sorted out hastily into either a defense or offense position.

An enemy horn made Twilight turn back to where the lizalfos were supposed to appear.  The two spotted from earlier had disappeared behind the dunes, causing the twilight hero is worry.  His worries were soon lessened when his mentor rushed to his side, crouched down with his hand ready to pull out his unbreakable clay-more. 

“I saw the lizalfos just before they disappeared, keep your bow ready pup.” Twilight nodded, and risked yet another glance at his comrades.  To his right stood the most polished of the group, sword out while Ace hid behind a palm tree with an arrow nocked.  Next to the fire stood the hero of the Four Sword alongside with the hero of oracles, both armed with spears.  The youngest hero covered his left, Sky ready at the bow not too far away.  Realizing something was missing, Twilight frantically scanned the area, almost dropping his guard.  A movement from the top of one of the trees drew his attention, and eased his growing panic.  His protege was perched on the top of a tree, how the amnesic managed to climb so fast was unknown to him but that wasn’t of importance right now.  Each one of their gazes focused on where the enemy was said to be approaching.  

“One spotted at two o’ clock,” Twilight snapped back to position from Time’s warning and nocked his bow to his right, still hidden by the crates.  The desert wind blew softly across his face, causing a shiver to run down his spine.  But the wind carried another sensation, a stench of a reptilian odor, coming from his left rather than his right.  It was nearly too late when he recognized the trap, springing out of his position Twilight fired an arrow next to an unsuspecting hero of Hylia, finding its mark in the neck of a lizolfos.  

Stumbling away from the monster’s corpse, Sky had a mortified look as he contemplated what would have happened if Twilight hadn’t seen the reptilian beast at the last second.  Snapping out of his shock, the first hero readied his bow again and now with a fierce look in his eyes, scan for any signs of movement.  As the first wave appeared itself, he started to let loose on the incoming lizalfos.

Twilight was starting to feel overwhelmed by the sudden appearance of monsters, the fact that he was about to run out of arrows didn’t help.  A lizalfos decked out in more armor than the rest jumped out from behind a dune and charged full speed at the camp.  Reaching for his quiver, panic briefly overtook Twilight when he didn’t feel any more arrows.  Cursing beneath his breath, he threw down his bow and unsheathed the sword Rusl had given to him after his quest to save Hyrule.  The hero of twilight leaped over the crates with his sword and shield and was almost brought to his knees by the sheer amount of force the lizalfos brought down on him with its mace.  

He started to feel the effects of his arm and shield taking the burden of the monster’s weight, his muscles straining and cramping from the pressure.  The weight was suddenly lifted as Time brought his sword down on the beast’s head, Twilight cringed as the sound of a splitting skull echoed through his ears.  

The two warriors stood back from the monster, breathless as they looked around at their comrades.  Everyone seemed to be holding their positions alright, Ace had been forced to abandon his bow like Twilight did and now stood side-by-side with Captain.  The hero of oracles had a limp in his leg, and had to fall back a little and use his bow.  

It seemed like only a couple of minutes before all of the lizalfos in the area were finished off by either arrow or blade.  Once Wild gave the sign that the cost was clear from the top of a tree, they huddled near the fire.  As soon as injuries were wrapped and potions handed out, their leader quickly laid out a hastily made map of the oasis.

“Alright soldiers listen up,” Time’s voice quickly caught the attention of the heroes, even Wild’s attention as he inspected Legend’s bruised leg.  “Like nearly every battle before where we have fought together, the next part of this battle needs to be won with precision and caution.  We don’t need to risk anymore injuries tonight.” his hand absently gestured to Legend, whose face was hidden by his large auburn bangs.  Time’s voice distracted Wild, causing the veteran hero to grimace as Wild accidentally tightened his bandages too much.  

While the two silently bickered over Legend’s leg, Twilight paid note to his mentor as he created a battle strategy on the hand-made map.  Or, at least tried to pay attention.  He had been up for quite a while now, back when he was standing watch, he only had fifteen minutes left of patrolling before he could wake someone else up to take his place.  It didn’t help when the breeze stopped blowing, making the atmosphere cool and comfortable when he stood next to the fire.

Holding a yawn back, Twilight just barely made out Time’s instructions before they dispersed into new positions.  Twilight made his way over to Time, a question on his mind that he had been meaning to ask.  But just as he approached his mentor, a high pitched whistle from Wild sounded for the second incoming wave.  Looks like his question would have to wait.  

I kid you not at multiple times while writing this I wrote the same fricken sentence over and over again and it took me like 10 minutes just to proof read it all so that there wouldn’t be an extra sentence in there.  Anyways, school sucks, takes up too much of my time, now I’m debating if I actually want that botany degree or if I can start practicing on a guitar in hopes of becoming a street musician with a day job at Taco Bell.  Life be like that sometimes...  Well, hope you guys liked it, please leave some form of feedback, comments on how I can improve is extremely appreciated. Thx for reading, peace out.

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

How L. Ron Hubbard and Robert Heinlein influenced the murderous cult of Manson.

Charles Manson’s Science Fiction Roots

New Republic       by JEET HEER           November 21, 2017

In 1963, while a prisoner at the federal penitentiary at McNeil Island in Washington state, Charles Manson heard other prisoners enthuse about two books: Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and L. Ron Hubbard’s self-help guide Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950). Heinlein’s novel told the story of a Mars-born messiah who preaches a doctrine of free love, leading to the creation of a religion whose followers are bound together by ritualistic water-sharing and intensive empathy (called “grokking”). Hubbard’s purportedly non-fiction book described a therapeutic technique for clearing away self-destructive mental habits. It would later serve as the basis of Hubbard’s religion, Scientology.

Manson probably didn’t delve too deeply into either of these texts. But he was gifted at absorbing information in conversation, and by talking to other prisoners he gleaned enough from both books to synthesize a new theology. His encounter with the writings of Heinlein and Hubbard was a pivotal event in his life. Until then, he had been a petty criminal and drifter who spent his life in and out of jail. But when Manson was released from McNeil Island in 1967, he was a new figure: a charismatic street preacher who gathered a flock of followers among the hippies of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco.

Manson won them with a doctrine of communal bonding: They would be a family and share in all things, including love. Manson’s made-up religion was a cut-and-paste invention that borrowed from many sources. As The New York Times notes, Manson’s philosophy was “an idiosyncratic mix of Scientology, hippie anti-authoritarianism, Beatles lyrics, the Book of Revelation, and the writings of Hitler.” But the sci-fi component was pronounced. Stranger in a Strange Land provided the Manson family with its rituals (water-sharing ceremonies), terminology (“grokking”), and promise of transcendence (Manson’s followers hoped that, like the hero of Heinlein’s novel, they would gain mystical powers). The dream of mind triumphing over matter was also the sales pitch of Dianetics.

The Manson family, of course, had a twisted definition of love, which they wanted to keep for themselves. For the outside world, they wanted a violent race war, which would end with them ruling over the survivors. Towards that end, the Manson family went on a killing spree in August 1969 that left nine dead and earned them a notorious place in history. ...

Manson went to jail, and remained there until his death on Sunday at a hospital in California’s Kern County. Amidst an ongoing assessment of his historical relevance—the Manson family killings have been popularized, by Joan Didion and others, as the death knell of the 1960s—it is worth revisiting how two books, steeped in utopian ambitions, played a role in a country’s unraveling. It was hardly an accident that Manson borrowed heavily from both Heinlein and Hubbard. No two writers better illustrate the tendency of science fiction to generate cults.

Heinlein and Hubbard first met in 1939 and immediately hit it off. To his wife Leslyn, Heinlein described Hubbard as “our kind of people in every possible way.”  (The friendship between the two men is described in William Patterson’s two-volume biography of Heinlein). They were both prolific pulp writers, contributing heavily to Astounding Science-Fiction, which was revolutionizing the field under the editorship of John W. Campbell. Astounding’s major claim to fame was that it specialized in “hard science fiction,” which was rigorously based on extrapolations from actual science. This claim was a bit self-serving since Campbell always had a taste for pseudo-science, but it’s undeniable that Heinlein’s own work, grounded in his education as an engineer, brought a new level of plausibility to the genre.

Heinlein was in an open marriage with Leslyn, a poet and script editor. He had a habit of encouraging his close male buddies to take Leslyn as a lover. As Hubbard would later marvel, Heinlein “almost forced me to sleep with his wife.” Sharing his wife’s body was a form of male bonding for Heinlein, and it served as a precursor to the communal orgies that he imagined in Stranger in a Strange Land, which helped the members of his imaginary religion form group solidarity.

Hubbard and Heinlein also shared an interest in the supernatural. Together with their friend Jack Parson, a rocket scientist, they investigated the teachings of the occultist Aleister Crowley and tried their hand at black magic.

Hubbard may have suffered from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder following World War II. (He served in the Navy, and later made up stories of his wartime adventures; in reality, military records show that Hubbard’s wartime service was “substandard.”) His attempts to create a new science of the mind, culminating in the publication of Dianetics, can be understood as an attempt to self-medicate. The first article about Dianetics appeared in the March 1950 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction. Campbell was an early enthusiast, crediting Dianetics with helping him cure his chronic sinusitis. (The cure was psychosomatic and temporary.) Many science fiction writers in Campbell’s orbit, notably A.E. van Vogt, Katherine MacLean, and James Blish, got caught up in the Dianetics craze.

Campbell eventually became disillusioned with Dianetics, but moved on to becoming an advocate for other forms of pseudo-science...

Unlike Campbell, Heinlein kept clear of Dianetics. But Heinlein was nonetheless fascinated by the way his old friend Hubbard had created a pseudo-science that eventually became the religion of Scientology. This planted the seeds for an idea: What if someone created a religion like Scientology that actually worked—that did give people transcendent mental power, such as mind-reading and levitation? The result of this thought experiment was Stranger in a Strange Land, which remains Heinlein’s most famous novel. One of the heroes of the novel, Jubal Harshaw, a polymathic pulp writer who is very successful in seducing women, is clearly an idealized version of Hubbard.

Heinlein meant Stranger in a Stranger Land to be a jape, a satire on religion. While Hubbard had turned science fiction into a religion, Heinlein was trying to turn religion into science fiction. But many readers took it all too seriously. In March of 1969 at a film festival in Rio, Heinlein met a charming actress named Sharon Tate. A few months later, she was murdered by a cult that took inspiration from Heinlein’s novel.

No literary genre has been so fertile at generating religions as science fiction. Heinlein’s work was the springboard for many competing sects, and he called himself “a preacher with no church.” Rare among the many intellectual gurus whose fame mushroomed in the 1960s, Heinlein was a beacon for all kinds of people: hippies and hawks, libertarians and authoritarians....

Heinlein’s ability to excite cultic faith among all sorts of groups speaks to the power of science fiction as a literature of ideas, especially during utopian moments like the 1960s, when the future feels open. Heinlein’s book was not alone in gaining a cult following, it was joined by J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, Herbert’s Dune, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Each of these books spoke to a desire for an alternative reality, just as older social norms were breaking down.

As vile and sociopathic as he was, Charles Manson did have a gift for absorbing the zeitgeist, which is one reason he held such a powerful sway over the cultural imagination. Manson picked up Stranger in a Strange Land in the same spirit that he learned to strum a guitar and offer exegeses on Beatles lyrics. It was a way for him to ride the wave of cultural change. Manson remained infamous all these decades not just because he inspired mass murder, but also because he did so by manipulating some of our most powerful myths.

Jeet Heer is a senior editor at the New Republic.

https://newrepublic.com/article/145906/charles-mansons-science-fiction-roots

“In Korea, one even senses a fear, like one induced by the Mafia, among the opposition to the Unification Church, and … outspoken opponents speak of death threats.” Prof. Sontag, 1976

Tahk Myeong-hwan was murdered four weeks after Sun Myung Moon spoke about him as an opponent.

Tahk Myeong-hwan was attacked with car bomb

Tahk Myeong-hwan was offered a bribe of $450,000 to discontinue research into the Unification Church

UC members sent more than 200 text messages to Cho’s cell phone, saying, “We’ll kill you.”

Abducted and beaten up by the Unification Church in Korea

1. Freedom of the Press in Korea – Unification Church style

2. Freedom of the Press in Japan – Unification Church style

Prime Minister Kishi of Japan, organised crime and the Moon involvement in Japanese politics gained protection for the UC

The Mysterious Death of Robert Boettcher in 1984

Donald M. Fraser’s house was attacked by an arsonist just after his investigation into the Unification Church. It was only saved by good fortune.

Moon’s followers poured a pot of urine and feces on the head of a Seoul University Professor of Religion.

In 1975 Korean Unification Church members physically attacked many Christian pastors