The tragedy is that we don’t recognize how intractable these political climates are with a sudden timely realization, but rather as a slow burn—imperceptible until only after the damage is done.
And while the Projekt shows us that some German Jews were making arrangements to emigrate in the early months of ’38, we also learn of the businessmen who believed, or at least told themselves and others, that the growing animosity toward the Jews wasn’t alarming enough a reason to leave behind the family business. We can watch, day by day, the slow erosion of rights, peeled away one at a time: the seizure of Jewish businesses, orders that restrict the movements of Jews, rules about what kind of artwork can be shown. We watch the pincers close in a way that simply isn’t possible if you’re living it.
In many cases, even for those who did feel a sense of alarm it was still subdued and it was difficult to understand how a series of unfriendly bureaucratic rules could eventually lead to Kristallnacht only 10 months later: On Jan. 31, the Projekt’s website highlights a postcard from a Jew on vacation in the French Riviera. Jews were still going on vacation rather than selling all their belongings and leaving. But three weeks later comes one of the earliest of many heartbreaking letters: Writing to a friend, a young lover contemplates being apart from his beloved because his family had decided to emigrate and hers had chosen to stay behind.
The Projekt’s mission isn’t to highlight how German Jews didn’t get the picture. In fact, they may have understood it too well: Anti-Semitism felt like a fact of life and therefore was nothing to be alarmed by. Most of them simply didn’t believe that there was any credible reason why things would suddenly surpass normal levels of anti-Semitism and go from bad to catastrophic. You’d have to have been crazy to have predicted such a thing as the Holocaust. The story of 1938Projekt is more than just a catalogue of the final days of the European Jewry. It is the story of how easy it is to become inured to the progression of a deteriorating situation.
Through its lens, we see the time more clearly for what it was: not just another brief chapter in the thousands-of-years-old story called anti-Semitism, but a tinderbox heating up with the passage of each day. It’s easy to look now and see a series of warnings plastered onto the walls of the past, plain and clear for all Jews to see, only for fools to ignore. But if someone were to tell you about a shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and swastikas graffitied on the Upper West Side and Nazi marches and Jewish cemeteries being defaced and a president who calls himself a nationalist and ordinances that dissolve the rights of immigrants and of the queer community and a caravan of refugees, and told you to leave behind your family business and your belongings and your home and move across the world to a place where you didn’t know a soul and didn’t know the language, would you? You’d have to be crazy.
Of all the aberrations that have squirmed their way from outside time and space onto the material plane, there are none quite like the Mimic. It is certainly not the greatest of them, nor the most powerful (either in raw strength or intellect). Yet it is (at least to the average adventurer) one of the most feared, and rightly so.
The thing that sets Mimics apart from most of their alien brethren is that most aberrations come into our world with little to no understanding of it; or, if they do comprehend our ways, they simply do not care. Creatures like the Gibbering Mouther, the Grick, or the Choker – these fiends hunt, kill and feed almost mindlessly, making full use of their evolved weaponry but without the slightest concern for the humanity that fears them.
The Mimic, however, is more insidious. It has learned the habits of humans – particularly the foolhardy breed known as “adventurers”, who are fond of going out into the world in groups of only five or six – and is capable of… well, mimicking any object that might serve to disguise itself until prey draws close, ensuring a quick death to any who fall into its trap.
Some have claimed that the Mimic is like any other camouflaged animal – that its transformations are merely opportunistic, dumb imitations of form simply to hide from prey. But seasoned hunters swear differently; that within each Mimic’s actions there lurks a streak of genuine malevolence, or, even worse, dark humour. What’s more, survivors of one Mimic attack will often become obsessed by the threat of another – every pot, chest and chair becomes a potential threat that must be investigated thoroughly. More than a few such adventurers have descended into madness.
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This one’s inspired by the various breeds of octopus that can alter the colour of their skin (as well as – seemingly – its very texture) to more effectively camouflage themselves. There’s a specific breed known as the Mimic Octopus that adds another layer to this subterfuge by actively pretending to be other creatures – poisonous sea snakes, flatfish and lionfish to name a few examples – in order to scare off predators.
I spent a while trying to grade the transition from tentacles into wood so that it was sufficiently smooth. I’m not sure if I like it 100% but I at least enjoy looking at it for the colours right now! For some reason I really like using blues and purples for wood.
chuck tingle, two time hugo award nominee and author of such erotica classics as ‘space raptor butt invasion’, ‘i’m gay for my living billionaire jet plane’, ‘bigfoot pirates haunt my balls’, and ‘there’s a bitcoin in my butt and he’s handsome’ just published a short story about the importance of consent and how it’s okay to have a loving relationship without sex if you want to???
that’s lovely on its own but it’s also called ‘not pounded in the butt by anything and that’s okay’, which is my favourite book title ever
I honestly thought this was a shitpost. This had too many words in it that dont make sense together to be anything less. But no. its real. this is the cover:
Plot Designing 