There is a fine line between IP infringement and inspiration. Behaviorists would tell you that no thought can be created from thin air and that every idea comes from stimuli of some sort. Cognitivists would have us believe that thoughts, ideas and creativity comes from the divine complexity of our brains that can conjure content from nothing at will and at random.
Who’s right? I don’t fucking know. Maybe both, to some degree. Regardless, there are elements of Project Sidekick that I can consciously and unconsciously say were written by me after some sort of life event I had.
The most blaringly obvious is all the bible references. The Amalekites. The way Project Sidekick Part Two starts and ends every chapter like the books of Kings. All of this came to be because I was reading the whole bible front to back every day in 2024. I took a lot of notes. I researched many questions. Since the bible is public domain, I copied some shit and took some major liberties.
The Amalekites are mentioned several times in the bible as antagonists. However, when I read the bible (and I read several translations) I couldn’t see what they had done as being that bad. The Amalekites lived in the Negev desert and were the first to attack the Hebrews as they made their exodus from Egypt. But hey… wouldn’t you? Think of it this way… You live in the fucking Negev desert. There’s barely any resources there at all. Then, suddenly hundreds of thousands of people come in and start using up all the resources and claiming that this is their land given to them by God? Well, I’d be pissed too.
Besides being the people who first attacked the Hebrews in Exodus, the bible doesn’t really go into specifics about who the Amalekites were. The bible also never explains why several prophets declared them evil and said that God has ordered their permanent erasure from the world, FOR-EV-ER.
They were just trying to hold on to the land they inhabited since the time of Esau. You should check out “House of David” on Amazon Prime. In that show they depict the Amalekite King as a weird-ass barbarian zombie-looking dude.
There is some speculation that the peoples of Edom mentioned in the bible who practiced sorcery and could turn into animals/giants were the Amalekites, but no passage directly says that. However, several times, prophets and kings ordered the Amalekites destroyed for good. The prophet Samuel tells King Saul to kill every last man, woman, child, and animal of the Amalekites. To wipe every trace of them from history. This doesn’t happen immediately, but it does happen. The Simeonites attack and finish off all the remnants of Amalekite peoples, history and any archeological evidence of them. There’s not a trace of them except in the bible.
Here’s what is more messed up…
The Amalekites were possibly Hebrews. They were the descendants of Esau, Jacob’s brother. It’s possible they were Hebrew, but were made to appear evil by the winner of the wars, the returning Hebrews. I mean, you have to justify a genocide somehow, right?
And thus… I chose the Amalekites to be the ancient people who are tied to the heroes and villains of the story as their originators. I think the bible gives them a bad shake and it was fun to give them a better history and a better ending.
To be continued… read about the fights between Jacob and Esau. It’s really weird. We tend to revere Jacob, who is openly a sneaky little shit. And we are told to hate Esau and his kin for being lied to and tricked by his scheming little shit of a brother, Jacob. The bible doesn’t hide these facts, read it yourself. It’s weird as hell.
More to think about…
The World of Phineas Brand 
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