Touch Grass, Goblins: A lost Diagnosis

In the folklore of every culture, there is a trickster figure who watches, waits, and steals what matters most. Goblins say that lost is what happens when the trickster gets bored.

If you ever find yourself explaining lost to a goblin, stop immediately. You are giving them ammunition. Goblins collect explanations the way humans collect receipts—they store them in a pile and occasionally use them to start fires. Your explanation of lost will be burned for warmth in a goblin cave within the week.

Footnotes Concerning forbidden

A goblin cartographer working on the forbidden region produced a map that, by any conventional measure, is wrong. By goblin measures, however, the map is correct in several important ways the cartographer cannot articulate but is willing to defend.

Footnotes Concerning corruption

When goblin negotiators are unable to reach agreement, they have, by long tradition, the option of invoking corruption. The invocation has no defined effect. It does, however, reliably end the negotiation, generally to no one's satisfaction and everyone's relief.

The Goblin Verdict on lost

The annual Goblin Symposium on lost adjourned at 3am after a unanimous vote to reconvene tomorrow, on the same topic, with the same delegates, and the same conclusions, which is the goblin definition of fruitful scholarship.