Jack of Harts

Two years ago today, armed Hamas fighters crossed the border between Gaza and Israel to kill over a thousand Israelis and abducted over two hundred people from around the world, including Americans, dragging them back into Gaza to hold them hostage.

Joining the armed Hamas fighters were accredited journalists riding on their motorbikes to chronicle the assault and immediately broadcast it to the world. And Gazan civilians joined the attack as well, though who is a civilian and who is a Hamas fighter can be a fuzzy line. They don’t wear uniforms and carry ID badges after all. Though I do understand that they sometimes wear beepers that sometimes blow up thanks to Israeli shenanigans.

Because this is the modern world and everybody has cell phones, Hamas fighters, Gazan citizens, and accredited journalists were all able to broadcast across the world the attack as it happened. We saw them rape young women to death. We saw them chopping body parts off for fun. We saw them dragging horribly injured people back into Gaza as hostages. They celebrated everything they did to people who were living at peace with them.

And two years ago today, young people across the world went out and demonstrated in favor of this attack. Celebrated the attack. Waved Hamas flags in America and throughout the rest of the world. Chanted the old chant about driving the Jews from the river to the sea, because they wanted to see all Jews dead. Two years ago today, some of us realized an evil we thought was long extinguished in our culture still existed and still was willing to stand up proud and demonstrate in favor of killing Jews.

Two years ago today, we all saw evil in action and we saw evil people celebrating it. Two years later, Americans are still held hostage by Hamas. And evil people still celebrate it.

Never Forget the evil in the hearts of men.

The Magical Land of Oz was always full of color when I was young. Brightness and beauty that hid terrible and powerful things that would seek to take it all away. The good people were great and the bad people were terrible, and all around them was great beauty that hid it all from normal eyes.

When it came to the image I wanted to use for substack, I wanted to play on that. I went to dezgo.com and brought up the Flux art generator and prompted it for what I wanted. I wanted an image of an emerald city behind hills of emerald green grass in abstract art style. I wanted an angry metal man wielding an axe. I wanted a cowboy wearing a brown duster. There was a great deal more to it than just that. Many more prompts that I worked with over a week to get the source images that I wanted. I deleted most because they just didn’t work, but in the end I kept between a dozen and twenty of each that I liked. The final cover image takes what worked the best out of all of them and assembles them in one piece with some image editing by me.

Captain William Carter confronting the Terrible Tinman in the Magical Land of Oz with the Emerald City in the background.

And of course I had to hand that final image over to Grok’s Imagine to see what kind of movie it would make out of it just for fun. It’s amazing to see something I imagined brought into full motion. Follow me to the other side of the rainbow to see that if you dare…

The Art of Oz the Great and Grimm on jackofharts substack

Twisted Fairy Tales and dark roots of old fables are at the heart of this week’s Raconteur publication. Terror and horror as lessons are learned and things go wrong.

I sent in a tale for this anthology but mine was not sufficiently dark to get in. Twisted? Yes. Horror? No.

But if you are a fan of Steve Diamond’s flavor of horror, you will probably like this anthology. He selected each story in it after all.

Check out Glitched Grimm, if you dare…