CZM Book Club: Cool Zone 2055: The Battle of Ogre Hill

Cool Zone Media itself has reached back out from thirty years in the future to bring us reports on the Dino War. Here's where we're at. Hello, and welcome to Cool Zone twenty fifty five. How to Survive the dinoh Wars. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and today we are continuing our report from our very own Mixed Bunny Face Murder, who is currently trapped behind enemy lines in besieged Catalonia.

We're all praying for you, Mixed Bunny Face Murder, or you know, fighting for you, which is generally even better than praying, although I guess I'm podcasting for you, which is probably somewhere in the middle of those two in terms of efficacy. Actually it's closer to praying, because it's really just kind of hoping someone else intervenes. Well, there goes my moral high ground. Anyway, where we last left our stalwart non binary, horny journalist, they'd shown up in

Catalonia just before the Vishnu shields went up. They saw the exodus of Barcelona, where everyone who relied on electricity for their anti fascist work or their you know, being alive was rescued by boat over to Italy. Then mixed bunny face Murder went off to the front, embedded with the notorious thag hags the Stegosaurus riders, but noticing those undeniably sexy dreadnought out of the corner of their eye.

But before we talk about that, I want to talk about something else that is undeniably sexy riding dinosaurs into battle against the worldwide threat of fascism, which you can learn to do by contacting our number one sponsor, Dino Cadence. That's right, Dino Cadence. You don't even have to put your money where your mouth is with Dino Cadence because all of their classes are one hundred percent free, one hundred percent free. The revolution needs us all, it needs soldier.

Sure it also needs dental technicians. Chewing up fascists is hard on a dino's teeth. In the old days, we used to say behind every frontline soldier is ten support troops, but in the age of the Dino War, that ratio is more like fifty to one. So to learn how to help in whatever capacity, contact Dino Cadence today. Now back to mix Bunny Face murders story. A dino camp is a strange place to be. It turns out. I can't give you too many details because the art of

war is the art of deception. But I can tell you that it feels like living in a zoo. It's funny how quickly you get used to de extincted animals. Being around stegosauruses and velociraptors doesn't feel entirely unlike being around rhinoceroses and chickens, especially since both stegosaurus and rhinoceros are more or less impossible to spell, and there's not

really chickens and zoos. But let's imagine, so you feel like you're in a zoo, only instead of tigers and bears, it's sabertoothed tigers and arctoduses, so tigers and bears just bigger and too fier. I have to admit I have long had my doubts about the efficacy of our animal friends in war before. Why do we resurrect long extinct animals only to throw them in front of enemy fire? Is there a reason? Besides it looks cool to ride

an up armored ancliosaurus. Why not just use dumb dumb tanks and machine guns and humans, all of which also operate all right under vishnu conditions. It's been a nagging question at the back of the mind of probably a solid third of the anti fascist world. No one wants to question it too openly because no one wants to pick fights right now with anyone who isn't a fascist, and we all know morale is a terrain of struggle. But look, I've had my doubts about the efficacy and

also the ethics of using dinosaurs in war. I no longer do dinosaurs are effective in modern non electric warfare. They saved our lives at this camp in fact. And as for the ethics, it's a messier question. But the thing is, it's not really ethical to send anyone into war yet war is here, whether we wish it was or not. If we are to stop the destruction of the last remaining ecosystems and the animals in those ecosystems, then all of us need to fight together, human and

animal alike. Are there power dynamic problems absolutely the same as there are between different humans in a war. We just do the best we can. Maybe that's enough, maybe it's not. On the journey out to the front, I spent a lot of time with a particular unit of thag Hags, Like every little micro click in this war. They've got their own name, the Sons of Aragorn. It's five men, three of whom are trans and one of

whom is an Omni man. Look, I struggle to keep up with all the new genders, but as I understand it, it's a way of identifying as not a man in the modern sense, but instead the medieval of when you're comparing man to beast. It sounds problematic to me, but I'm in my thirties, so what do I know. The Sons of Aragorn are obviously named after Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, but they're also named in a different tradition.

There was this indigenous North American anarchist who was most active in the nineteen nineties and the twenty oughts, named Aragorn, whose parents had named him that in everything because his parents were hippies. He was a contentious fellow. He made a lot of frenemies, but he laid a lot of the groundwork for some anarchist political theory that has meant a lot to a lot of people in the years

since his passing. He died in the year twenty twenty, and in the twenty forties, his particular brand of cantankerous anti fascism found a new following. The Sons of Aragorn started off as a motorcycle club actually in the US. Most of its members expatriated to Catalonia during the independent struggles there, but the names stuck in English, even though

they mostly speak Catalan in the unit. Now, I wound up friends with these Sons of Aragorn, and I'll have you know I didn't even do it because I was trying to sleep with any of them. But in the end I slept with all of them. And you can listen to more details about that in the full uncensored version of this report over on Under the Pants and Under the Ground A stegosaurus unit usually has seven members, five humans and two stegosauruses. Riding a stegosaurus is a

particular skill. They are often considered the hardest ground based dinosaur to ride, because you have to ride lying flat, hidden between the armored plates. It's like bull riding. People say, but I've never ridden a bull, and I've never ridden

a stegosaurus. Though I have written a stegosaurus rider, but I can't tell you about that because family friendly podcast, as if telling you about the horrors of war is better for young listeners than telling them about some of the most fun you can have before you die and

the aforementioned hours of war. But you know what else is apparently family friendly advertising, just in the middle of telling you a serious story, just cutting away to things that require critical thinking in order to reject that's somehow family friendly. What a good system. This podcast is brought to you by the Tourist Bureau of Toledo. No, not the one in Spain you'd normally imagine as a tourist attraction.

That one is overrun by Nazis. You might have heard that Toledo, Ohio is overrun by Nazis too, But we are delighted to tell you that since December twenty fifty four, Toledo, Ohio has been ninety eight percent Nazi free. That's right, ninety eight percent Nazi free. So come on down to Toledo, where the slogan is. We have most of the stuff that every major city has, like a zoo and some

parks and restaurants. While Solito's claim of being ninety eight percent Nazi free has been independently verified, Ohio is considered by the International Travel Advisory Board to be a frontline region in the international War against fascism. Visitors and migrants are advised to remain armed and be prepared to chip in in case of invasion. Of course, nowhere on Earth is truly a haven, and it will take all of

us working together to defeat the nationalist threat. This podcast is proudly sponsored by the Council for the Protection of Bats and Rural Anti Fascists. We like bats, and so should you be nice to bats. We like rural anti fascists, and so should you be nice to rural anti fascists. Turning off the outside lights helps reduce light pollution, which helps bats and reduces your risk of being targeted by

mortar fire by fascists, which helps rural anti fascists. Most rideable dinosaurs fill a niche somewhere like cavalry and pre modern warfare. They're big, scary mounts dinosaurs, but at the end of the day, they're conveyances for armed riders. It's the riders who do most of the fighting, not so for stegosaurus riders. Each dino is equipped with a deadly phagamizer on the end of its tail, making them just

about the deadliest of the quadrupeds in this war. Since they are both fast and stable, they are excellent at countering zombie hordes, so the rider's job basically still hold on and direct where the thing goes. The other three members of the unit are support. You generally have a designated sharpshooter, a combat ternarian, and a scout, any of whom are prepared to serve as backup riders should it become necessary. Because they work and fight as a unit,

kill counts are measured collectively across the entire unit. The Sons of Aragorn are currently in second place among the thag Hags with seventy nine confirmed zombie kills, six confirmed human kills, and two confirmed unclassifiable biospawn kills. The latter were two pseudo giants that they took out in what gets called the Battle of Vallenore because the unit with the highest kill count gets to name the battle after

it's one. In all that fighting, they've lost one human private Gimli, and one stegosaurus, Firefoot, which is also apparently a Lord of the Rings reference. They promised me that Firefoot was a horse and Lord of the Rings that carried some horse rider guy. They explained it to me like six times. But you know, Lord of the Rings fans, nothing they say makes sense. The only fag Hag unit with more kills than the Sons of Aragorn is the Eldian Wall, who are at ninety four zombies, thirteen humans,

and one unclassifiable biospawn. They're a larger unit, though, of seven humans and four stegosauruses, so it's not really fair to compare them directly. Or maybe I'm just bitter because the Eldian Wall is so famously cliquish that they only speak Elvish with each other, which doesn't even make sense because their name is a reference to an anime and not Lord of the Rings, and they only speak a dialect that they develop themselves, so even if you learn Elvish,

you can't talk to the Eldian Wall. They don't hang out with anyone. And yes I'm bitter because I think they're Veterinarian is very cute, but none of them will be friends with me. So I'd fallen in with the sons of Aragorn and they had watch duty. The first night. I was there alongside one of the mother Hens. So I'm just sitting there kind of bored because you're not

allowed to talk much while you're on watch. In the chair next to me, this older transwoman named Marta, one of the aforementioned mother Hens, idly scanned the horizon with a night vision monocular while seventeen little velociraptors played at her feet. Nearby, my friend Aeomer the omni Man is leaning against a stegosaurus named Guillermo the Pony. It's a hot night, which probably goes without saying because it's the

twenty fifties and I'm on the Iberian Peninsula. I'm trying to read The Fellowship of the Ring in Catalan to impress my friends, but it just isn't doing it for me. I couldn't get through it in English either. Then Giermo hears something lifting its head suddenly and alert Stegosaurus's remarkably sharp ears What your elf ears hear? Eomer whispers to his dino friend. Guillermo points with his nose off towards the horizon. Aomer signals to Marta, who stands up in

gestures at her terror chicken children. She makes a circle gesture, then points in the direction Guillermo is looking. The velociraptors take off quietly, running full tilt towards the horizon, disappearing over a nearby hill. I hear a scream, a human scream, which is cut off short. A few minutes later, the murdered chickens return, dragging two men behind them. No, not men, Nazis. I say that, not to dehumanize them. Nazis are verifiably human.

I actually recommend verifying this yourself. You can cut them up and count their organs. I say that they are not men, that they are Nazis, to deny them their masculinity. What is a man? Discourse seems to switch around like every three years, But I am with the feminist masculinist thinker Ambrose gutfish and what he said in twenty forty seven during a speech at the Conference for the Reclmative Abolition of Human Gender in Amsterdam, he said, quote, what

is a man? If we refuse to accept that there's a good gender and a bad, then we are forced to reckon with the idea of positive masculinity. It's hard to do because most of the traits associated with positive masculinity, guarding, caring, accepting risk on the behalf of others, positive like non coercive leadership, etc. Can just as easily be offered to positive femininity. Both the idealized woman and the idealized man are protectors and providers. So how can these be distinct

masculine and feminine traits? The answers become recursive. Well, it's masculine guardianship when a man does it. Rather than fight this complication, we ought to embrace it. There is no such thing as a man, and therefore we can create man in our own image. To that, I say, a man is a guardian, but a respectful one. A man is a nurturer, not a controller. A man seeks to help others become their best selves by providing a safe

environment for people to discover themselves become themselves. The fact that you could define a woman the same way is immaterial. A man is equal to every other person of every gender and does not accept artificially imposed hierarchical authority. A Nazi, therefore cannot be a man end quote. Is this a semantic argument? Yes? Do I believe it? Also? Yes? Does my opinion about what counts as a man matter since

I'm not one myself? No? Was I thinking all of this while watching tiny little dinosaurs drag two uniform members of the Iberian PHANLANX on a hot Catalonian night. Oddly, yes, one of the soldiers was alive still and was screaming bloody murder into the night. The other was dead. Both were by uniform and equipment scouts. A sniper team one velociraptor showed up about two minutes later, dragging an anti materiel rifle slowly by the muzzle. A fifty cow these

days mostly used to snipe dinosaurs. Marta walked up to the surviving soldier. Will you talk, she asked, No, he answered, Do you have a god? She asked yes, he said. She let him mumble his way through the Lord's prayer. When he finished, she stepped over him a small knife in her hands. He looked up at her and called her a travello, which isn't a nice way to describe her gender, and she cut his throat, much like our sponsors are slashing prices. Eh eh. This podcast is brought

to you by Straight Edge. Don't drink, It's bad for you. Not drinking is cool. Go straight Edge. This podcast is brought to you by Lemmy's Licorice Liquors. Are you tired of feeling sad? Borrow some happiness from the future by drinking alcohol. This podcast is brought to you by the

Association for the Appreciation of Gas Station Drugs. Just because we don't have gas stations really anymore is no reason to stop consuming drugs that aren't regulated because they're too new and experimental to have gotten onto the radar of any regulating body. This podcast is brought to you by Happy Henriette's Harm Reduction Habit Habitat. Have you been doing too many gas station drugs trying to find a way

to manage your habit? Just need some harm reduction supplies and hired of people judging you for going out to get them. Come on down to Happy Henrietta's harm reduction habit habitat where will help you get sorted, because remember, whatever your opinions on drug use are people who use drugs need harm reduction. And we're back. After Marda slit the man's throat, she looked up at me, visibly shaken.

His last words could have been amen, she said. Only then did I notice the Saint Marina's pendant around her neck, a patron saint venerated by a growing number of trans folk Catholics. Later I discovered why she'd killed him instead of taken him prisoner. This was absolutely against standing orders. Essentially, a growing number of soldiers have started a campaign against torture. The Nazi said he wasn't going to talk, and it was quite likely that coercion would have been used, so

she killed him. The first thousand or so soldiers who performed this sort of mercy killing were court martialed out of the Internationalist forces, but this only made the movement stronger, and command has largely given up on enforcing this rule. Their argument is, essentially, if we torture our prisoners, how are we better than the fascists that we face. Others have argued that torture is nothing compared to the evil performed by the other side, who take not just the living,

but also the dead and make them suffer. I didn't have time to ask Marta much about her decision and whether or not her folk Catholic faith tied into that decision, because even before the Velociraptors returned with their prey, Aomer has set about waking up the camp. It was good that he did, because ten minutes later, the zombies crested the hill, and for the first time in my life,

I saw battle. According to war propaganda standards, I'm supposed to tell you that it was somehow both terrible and glorious that men prove their metal, women prove their worth, and non binary folks prove their I don't know note worthiness. According to literature standards, I'm supposed to tell you that it was the worst thing in the world. That I shit myself with fear, and everyone cried to their mothers as they were dragged away to their doom by the

unfeeling undead army. What's fucked up is that both of these things are true. Well, I didn't shit myself in fear. I actually learned that I'm all right in a crisis, compartmentalizing terror deep into my belly so that it can wreck me later. But there was terror, and there was glory, and I maybe enjoyed it a little bit too much. Maybe there's something wrong with me, or maybe I'm just well suited for the world. I live in the world of war because there is no outside in a worldwide

revolutionary war. A Nazi zombie attack a classic one like the one we were in. It has a few stages. First, the scouts, a sniper team or two. They report on century location and are meant to kill a few of the largest dinosaurs. MARTA's minions took those two out. Then the runners, the screechers. These are a sort of half

zombie half biospawn. Look, I am not actually sure how they're made or exactly what the difference is between a zombie and a biospawn, but these things out whatever these creatures, like their name implies. They run and they screech. They are shock troops. A few hundred came out of the hills shrieking in pain. They are not particularly effective combatants. They're just there to demoralize people. The camp didn't demoralize within moments, the machine gun nests were staffed and pikes

filled in the gaps. Dino riders get most of the cred and most of the action, once again mixed. Bunny face murder has hand encoded the code for an emoji, in this case a winky face. But in World War three point five, like every war ever, infantry does most of the work. Shriekers are no match for machine guns. Then came the artillery. Mortar shells dropped all around us, blowing holes in tents and people our own returned fire. Dead bats, unholy flying biospawn came shrieking down through the sky.

Pterodactyl riders went up after them, and the big cats leapt into the air, bringing the bats down out on the horizon. The horde shambled towards us. Many still wore internationalist uniforms. Somewhere in that horde, most likely with someone I'd known, someone I'd cared about, who'd fallen in battle and been resurrected to fight against US. Machine Guns opened up, of course, but many of the nests went silent as

mortars found them. Everywhere. Machine guns went silent, The thag Hags went to work stegosauruses ripped through the enemy ranks. It was chaos. It was hell. I shouldn't have enjoyed myself. There is something fundamentally broken in my head. Then, last of all came the enemy, the real enemy, the people. The Iberian Phalax rode into war on horseback and signature style, with lance and rifle and fucking Conquista door helmets and huge Christian nationalist flags, waving a big old cross held

at the front. For a moment, I thought we were lost. For a moment, I imagined what it would be like to be killed by zombies and then resurrected as one. For a moment I was scared. Only a moment. See the Fanlax's tactics have grown stagnant by that point. They'd had so much success elsewhere that they had routinely underestimated our numbers, our morale, our training. Our camp was fairly well naturally protected by the hills, but there was one

obvious weakness, one obvious direction from which to attack. It had been planned that way on purpose. There was a second camp tucked away into the hills, where our own shock troops lived, the Dreadnought Camp. So while we were dealing with the screechers and the mortars and the horde. The Dreadnoughts were waiting when the Phalax crested the hill, riding noble and tall on their destriers. I don't know what a destrier is, but it sounds like a fancy

word for a horse, so we'll go with that. They thought they were walking into victory, or at least into an even fight. Never ever get into an even fight. You fight either when you know you're gonna win, or when you have to. If it's an even fight, you don't have to, and you shouldn't. They started towards us, certain we were tied up with their biospawn. The Dreadnoughts came crashing in on their flank, war horns, blowing swords,

rattling rifles, blazing sauapods, screaming, and just annihilated them. A woman in full medieval armor dove off a dinosaur's neck from twenty feet in the air and crashed into the soldier carrying the cross. Within twenty minutes, the Phalanx was routed. Raptors big and small, mounted and riderless ran them down. Our victory was absolute, much to the dismay of the Dreadnoughts. Only six out of their six hundred died in the fighting. Even the Swan diver limped away from battle with nothing

more than a sprained shoulder. Their dreams of Valhalla will have to wait for another day. There's a saying among the troops here that it's bad luck to brag about your own deeds, that if there is boasting to be done, it ought to be done by your comrades instead. So I'll tell you only that while a reporter's job is to report, it's it's easier to report when you're not dead. A shotgun served me better than a pen that evening. A unit of four Artillerians got the highest kill count

that day. They were a unit of grouchy old veterans from the Bosque separatist movement. To it a penchant for explosives and mortars. They called themselves the Bosque Space Agency. I guess because they like blowing Nazis as high into the air as possible. Given the honor of naming the battle, they called it the Battle of Ogre Hill. And I don't have access to the Internet, so I don't know what that means. As for what happened in the aftermath and where we stand today and how I fell in

with the Dreadnoughts. I suppose you're gonna have to wait for another episode of Actually, I don't know what Margaret named this current series because this is a one way communication thing where I write encrypto notes to her. So let me just try and guess what Margaret named this. It's gonna rhyme, but it's not gonna be very clever. Cool Zone twenty fifty five. Now is our chance to thrive? Did you name it that, Margaret? That would be just

like you, you know, Killjoy And now here's Margaret. We're done with the quoted part. Uh, thank you. That's it for cools Own twenty fifty five, How to Survive the Dino Wars, which is a perfectly cromulent name. Thank you very much. And if you enjoyed this podcast, I want you to go back thirty years in the past to when I released the third book in the Danielle Kine series. That's right, it was in twenty twenty five, I believe. I think it was March twenty twenty five that I

put out The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice. No, wait, that's when we kickstarted it, And did you know that even before that, people could sign up for notifications on Kickstarter about when the Immortal Choir holds every voice would be released, And in order to do so, they would just have to had googled Immortal Choir Kickstarter and they would have found it and then signed up for notifications. It wouldn't that have been great? I hope that thirty

years ago, in twenty twenty five, people did that. Anyway, catch you all next week. It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources where it could happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.