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January 26, 2025 29 mins

Margaret from the future describes the terrifying battle of ogre hill.

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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to cool Zone Media
book Club, which I was supposed to introduce differently. I
was supposed to chant book club at you, but there's
no way for me to change that now because instead
I introduced it this way. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
and this is the podcast where you don't have to

(00:22):
do the reading for your book club, because I do
it for you. And what you're reading in your book
club right now are missives from the future. That's right.
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

(00:45):
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

(01:09):
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

(01:33):
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

(01:58):
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.

(02:20):
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

(02:40):
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

(03:02):
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.

(03:23):
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,

(03:45):
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?

(04:06):
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

(04:27):
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.

(04:52):
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,

(05:14):
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

(05:35):
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

(05:57):
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

(06:19):
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,

(06:39):
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

(07:01):
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,

(07:25):
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

(07:49):
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

(08:10):
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.

(08:30):
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,

(08:52):
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

(09:13):
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,

(09:36):
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

(10:12):
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

(10:33):
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

(10:54):
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

(11:16):
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

(11:40):
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

(12:01):
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

(12:23):
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

(12:45):
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

(13:07):
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

(13:29):
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

(13:49):
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,

(14:11):
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

(14:33):
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

(14:56):
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

(15:20):
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

(15:43):
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

(16:05):
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

(16:29):
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

(16:53):
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,

(17:17):
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

(17:39):
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

(17:59):
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

(18:20):
any regulating body. This podcast is brought to you by
Happy Henriette's Harm Reduction Habit Habitat. Have you been doing
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to manage your habit? Just need some harm reduction supplies
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(18:43):
whatever your opinions on drug use are people who use
drugs need harm reduction. And we're back. After Marda slit

(19:10):
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,

(19:36):
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,

(19:57):
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

(20:19):
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,

(20:40):
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

(21:00):
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

(21:23):
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

(21:48):
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

(22:11):
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

(22:36):
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.

(23:00):
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

(23:21):
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

(23:41):
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.

(24:05):
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

(24:25):
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

(24:46):
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.

(25:10):
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.

(25:32):
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

(25:58):
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.

(26:20):
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,

(26:41):
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

(27:01):
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

(27:25):
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.

(27:46):
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

(28:08):
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,

(28:31):
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.

(28:52):
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

(29:15):
it could happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com
slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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