Why my computer is magickal

[LuciferX]

[quote author=Bebek Sincap Ratatosk link=topic=32540.msg1178682#msg1178682

... he and a couple other college students sold these boxes to other college students so they could make free calls home... using money and skills from that adventure the two other students went on to build a PC in their garage, then hired John to do some work for them. Their names were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (the second Discordian I ever met).

 
[/quote]

Which is why I just wrote my red box in BASIC, and distributed it freely 

[Triple Zero]

Got a citation on Woz identifying as a Discordian?

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Got a citation on Woz identifying as a Discordian?

Linux Expo 1999 in San Jose CA. I was riding in his HumVee with Emmett Plant (we were running the 'System Toolbox' website at the time as well as working on a now-defunct open source game called 'Time City'). They were chatting about it in the front seat and I thought it was a stupid joke. Same event, the day before and John Draper was sitting in our booth blathering about Eris and how he wanted to run a voice over IP project based out of India because the developers were so much cheaper. I assumed he had way too much LSD in his life and ignored most of it.

For perspective, one of the guys from the original Homebrew Computer Club gave Emmett and I some weed and I was so freaked out I made him toss it down a storm drain. I was not at all Discordian back then. 

[Placid Dingo]

I had a hunt to verify as well. No luck, but there is what seems to be a story of Steve Jobs using the Turkey Curse.

[M. Nigel Salt]

For the record, it's completely plausible, as a ton of the old-school computer geeks in the Bay area were Discordian back then. Pigdog Cabal was still going strong, and I think all of those guys were programmers, and there were a ton of other cabals at the time. You could buy a copy of the PD off the shelf at most bookstores.

[LMNO, PhD (life continues)]

Why else do you think you could reset old PCs to the Discordian calendar back in the day? 

[chimes]

I ate a burrito at Chipotle the other day.
Written on the bag was, "Recycling turns things into other things...Like magic!"
Same logic in the OP.
If you want to call that magic, that's cool with me, but that doesn't make it miraculous (a break in how the universe works).

Sure, though, if it helps you get all giggly, then the universe is completely magical.

[stelz]

Magic: not knowing WTF just happened. 

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

For the record, it's completely plausible, as a ton of the old-school computer geeks in the Bay area were Discordian back then. Pigdog Cabal was still going strong, and I think all of those guys were programmers, and there were a ton of other cabals at the time. You could buy a copy of the PD off the shelf at most bookstores.

Also, I think these guys took the idea a lot less defining than many Discordians seem to today. From the conversations at Linux Expo, I kinda assumed that 'Discordian' was a joke used by atheists that thought saying atheist was boring... same for the first few SubG's I met.

I had no idea anyone even thought it was a philosophy until I read RAW and some other stuff about two years later.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I ate a burrito at Chipotle the other day.
Written on the bag was, "Recycling turns things into other things...Like magic!"
Same logic in the OP.
If you want to call that magic, that's cool with me, but that doesn't make it miraculous (a break in how the universe works).

Sure, though, if it helps you get all giggly, then the universe is completely magical.

Right, its not about breaking the laws of physics. The origin of the term hacker (at least according to hacker lore) meant a person that could make furniture using a chainsaw. They understood the tools and materials so well, they could use it to do something that seemed absurd/unlikely/impossible.

Hacking, the old geek usage, was about knowing a thing so well you could make it break the perceived laws of the system. Even the modern usage (when not applied to script kiddies) references someone that knows programming/systems/people/protocols well enough to trick them into doing something that 'shouldn't happen' (like a web form that asks for your name and address, being tricked into giving you all the passwords on the site).

In modern 'magic' guys like Hine, Carroll, Farber etc.talk about magic as 'hacking your brain'. There's an interesting book called 'Mind Hacks' which dumps all the magical terms and describes many 'magic' practices in a scientific way. When you think about it, stage magic is a very good example of hacking the perceptions of the audience.