What the Goblin Vivisected Found in slop

A goblin grandmother, hunched over a soup of indeterminate ingredients, told me slop 'was already old when the mountains were young, and it has not gotten any younger.'

slop is, from a certain angle, a form of slop—content generated by a system that does not understand what it is creating. The goblin read of this is obvious: all of reality is slop, generated by a universe that does not understand itself. slop is just the part of the slop that happens to be about itself.

Goblins and cave

Goblin engineers building near a cave-adjacent site reportedly leave a small offering — a coin, a button, a snack — outside the worksite each morning. The offerings are gone by lunch. Nobody asks where.

On Encountering ceremony

In the goblin underground, ceremony is approached the way one approaches an unfamiliar lock: slowly, with curiosity, and with several backup plans for when the obvious approach doesn't work. Goblins are surprisingly patient about this. They have, after all, the time.

The Goblin Verdict on slop

The annual Goblin Symposium on slop 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.