A Goblincore Guide To Life’s website should contain basically nothing but witty, interesting, entertaining marketing copy, brilliantly designed to show off the skills of the authors, their sense of humor, and the unbelievable utility of this book to certain kinds of weird, eccentric, or otherwise unusual people.
Oops.
Although we should point out:
Love it or hate it, it IS free.
We didn’t even invent Goblincore. Not even close. We haven’t even looked up a formal definition before writing this. (Yes, we linked to the Wikipedia site without reading it. I mean, if it totally disagrees with us, it’s a bit late for us to rewrite the book NOW. We’re not even the first Goblincore Guide – that seems to be “Goblin Mode”.
So we’d rather just invent our own version; that’s how we Goblins and Goblin-adjacent beings roll.) But we’ve seen and read quite a lot of the genre/lifestyle, and this comes from our inner Gobbos.
Here’s the deal with “A Goblincore Guide To Life“:
Life is difficult. Figuring it out is difficult. We’re offering some methods to help you work your way through the day-to-day AND the lifelong process of, well, life.
We solemnly promise that if you read ” Goblincore Guide To Life”, and you do not gain from it what we hope you’ll gain—which is some methods you might choose to use, which will hopefully help your brain out as you navigate the World, as well as some laughter, some happiness, and some useful tips for being a sentient being in a strange Universe—we will NOT hire local contractors to paint you green.
Probably.
WARNING NOTE: This really IS a sincere, rambly sort-of letter we’ve written to potential readers. This website does NOT need you to read this whole page and the long digression about Jet Li and the Monkey King in order for you to get the point.
This book contains a few chunks of stuff we have previously published for free, but even if you’ve read all of the thousand-or-so pieces on JeffMachWrites.com, it’s mostly all new, and it is completely Human and Goblin written. In this case, we’re not taking a moral or ethical stand on AI, even though we could potentially do both. We are simply going to say that we really didn’t want to have any authors who weren’t actually sentient beings with whom we could communicate, since we were seeking to give advice and humor to actual sentient beings.
This tome is really a satirical-but-also-real a series of methods and techniques for dealing with Life, The Universe, and Everything, as Douglas Adams put it. We live in an extremely chaotic world which pretends to be a very well-ordered world. his is part of why most people are so stressed so often.
This is also why, although we are heavily influenced by Discordianism and Goblins are far more randomesque than humans, we seek to strive for balance…not Chaos in and of itself. We’d like to be part of a balance which helps you be happier in general, overall. (If you care about philosophy, this book was rather strongly influenced by both Zen and Taoism, but even though Jeff studied martial arts for a long time and continues to do so, he got most of his education on Zen in terms of how not to get too badly beaten up while sparring with other students, and most of his knowledge of Taoism comes, not from original texts or the great Taoist sages, but from The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff.)
You can read a bunch of completely standalone chunks of the book right here.
They’re on our writing blog, so they’re not in any particular order; in the actual book, they’re in a slightly more specific order, but not by a whole lot; it’s a librum of fantasy humor-philosophy-that-turned-itself-in ito-a-guide-to-life-as-we-were-writing-it. It’s not our fault. We blame Elves.
So we are not claiming to have tremendous Goblin street cred, nor to have all of the answers to everything. (We only wish! Instead, we’ve tried to put together ways of finding a slightly chaotic sense of order, or an extremely orderly sense of chaos, in a universe where the outside world is not generally controlled by the inside of your brain…
…But your perceptions of the World, and even your body’s physiological reactions to it, certainly are controlled by your brain. It’s just not always conscious, and quite frequently not the way you’d want to think, if you had your choice.
Our work here is all about more ways and thoughts on how to feel ways you’d like to feel. At least if you’re some kind of eccentric or weirdo, which would be most of our target audience.
We write a lot of satire. We love tricksters. We’ve read only one book that might be considered a translation of a genuine Taoist book by ancient Chinese philosophers, and that was Journey to the West, which is about the adventures of Sun Wukong, the Magic Monkey, a trickster and self-proclaimed Great Sage Equaling Heaven, who incredibly foolishly makes a bet with the Buddha and, inevitably, loses completely. He’s imprisoned for a long period of time until it becomes his job to use his powers and his magical abilities to accompany a very humble monk named Tripetaka in bringing ancient Buddhist texts from India to China. (You might call him a…Goblincore Guide. I mean it would be a terrible name. But you could.)
Tripetaka keeps Monkey in order by offering him a beautiful cap, given to the monk by the Gods when he despairs of ever controlling the irrepressible Monkey. The cap is so lovely that the very vain hairy hominid immediately puts it on. The monk then recites the incantation he was given alongside the cap; the cap then causes Monkey a gigantic headache, and he realizes he can’t take it off. (There’s probably a metaphor in there, but we don’t want to reach too hard.)
The monk is very humble and, while he is quite learned, he doesn’t abuse this power. (If you had control of someone with superhuman powers, would you use it wisely? I don’t think we would. We’re not that smart. Or that humble.)
Thus is created an imperfect-but-workable balance (what life could be perfect?!?) of Monkey’s trickster nature and the monk’s simple sense of duty.
We likewise hope to help you achieve an imperfect-but-workable balance between the part of you that is ‘you’, and the parts of you, or the rest of the World, which often go in directions you’d really, really rather avoid.
Monkey wants to help, but he also has a very powerful urge to do his own thing, and sometimes ignores social graces, rules, and even laws, while Tripetaka is just attempting to achieve his difficult mission while causing a relatively minimal amount of fuss. It’s funny as hell and really fun, and we assume it’s even better in the original Chinese.
…. Boy, we’re sure doing a great job of marketing other books than our own, aren’t we?
Tell you what. What we see in creating this Goblincore guide is the ability to deal with harsh and sometimes unyielding reality with humor and sometimes with constructive chaos. We also see a definitive need for a certain level of order, because chaos and unpredictability are just not things upon which the human brain thrives, and in an age of vast information overload, which we sometimes have called “the data plague”, we have no idea how to reach a perfect balance and keep it without losing a great deal of the positive aspects of humanity in the process.
So we wrote this book to figure it out. For ourselves, as well as for other people!
And we found that figuring it out is not actually a process of getting from a certain point to some final point. It’s just a process of making the process of life easier, and, hopefully, more fun. Actually, not always easier, now that I think about it. I should be honest about that. For example, we are definitely going to suggest that you clean your room. You are free to ignore that; it’s certainly easier to NOT clean your room, and can be quite a lot of work to get any level of organization at all. You can choose whatever you want; it’s your life. If you acquire the book, it is your book, after all. It’s not on a subscription or a license in and of itself.*
So we will try to let the volume speak for itself. It is, after all, A Goblincore Guide To Life, not THE Goblincore Guide To Life. These are just our thoughts, right or wrong. We are going to pick a couple of chapters that we hope you will like and find useful. We’re then going to agonize over whether or not we picked the correct chapters or the best chapters, because we are writers, after all. And that is something almost all writers tend to do.
We think you should read the book. But we are unbelievably biased in our opinions on that, so you really shouldn’t take our word for it.
You definitely, definitely read buy some books, if you are able. We can say that for sure. We would be happy, really happy, if you read this one. But that’s to our benefit, not necessarily yours, and we genuinely do want whatever is better for you. So please make up your own mind.
(I mean, you’re going to do that anyway. But we wanted to at least say please, so you didn’t feel guilty if you don’t buy it.) (Wait, we changed our minds and made it free. The BOOK still says you should buy it. The book is wrong on that point. As if that were the only thing we’re wrong about! We could write a book about…wait.)
Yours truly,
Jeff Mach and A. Goblin