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Okay, I'm sick about being a lone lamer with no cabal and no IRL activity... I need to attract the insurgent elements in my city and find possible collaborators... But I have no idea how to go about it... I need ideas, strategies...
I was thinking one possible route would be to create one of those fucked-up "find the clues" websites, with the final "treasure" at the end of the proverbial hunt being a place to leave a message, which I would then be able to read and contact the people who bothered. I would then take appropriate memebombs and go postering with them, each poster showing a tiny link to my silly website...
But that's a fuckload of work. Any ideas that, you know, lazy asses like me can do?

While reading Cram's diatribe on why he puts up posters, something interesting occurred to me:
It seems that everywhere you go, you bump into the strange expectation that what you do has to have some kind of lofty goal; people seem to think if you don't have a Higher Cause in mind, what you're doing is useless.
And yet at the same time, we live in an era of such complacancy and docility as could hardly be imagined just a century ago. People both expect activity to be driven by lofty motivation, and at the same time spend heartbeats watching goddess-damned American Idol.

Either these two trends are simply opposites in a state of dissonance, or they are somehow corelated. As unintuitive as this may seem, the latter seems to make sense in a way.
For humans, like all living things (and most inanimate objects), are not wired to strive for higher causes all of the time. No, we're rather predisposed to hanging out, indulging in selfish pleasure, being lazy and generally not living our lives for impersonal forces or imaginary goals. Yet at the same time the entire thrust of most major Western ideologies of the past 2-3 millennia seems to rest on making people feel guilty for doing what comes naturally to them. Judaism tells you not to eat delicious ham and seafood (and also to thoroughly limit your enjoyment on the Sabbath). Christianity tells you, in many interpretations, to limit your sexual adventures to only the very limited area considered acceptable by the Church. After these had their run for a while (particularly Christianity), the Industrial revolution brought along a new, secular social ethic, which came with a new schooling system, which came with an ethos based entirely on limiting your present indulgence to enjoy future pleasures. Study now so you can succeed later. Do your homework and we'll let you go out tonight.

In small amounts, any of these would be tolerable and probably even succeed in guilting one into limiting themselves, to a point, and focussing on some imaginary goal, to a point. But now I wonder if perhaps at some point we simply overload and go into a state of perpetually unmotivated laziness, believing we should be doing Something For The Greater Good or should even Just Do Something Good For Ourselves, but continually preferring to sit on our asses and grow fat.
I can see this tendancy in myself - the will to ignore whatever has been hammered into my superego and just indulge in inactivity and base physical pleasure. The laziness coupled with an unfaltering belief that I should be doing more than I am, as should everyone else.

Discuss.

I'm at work here so let me keep this short.
In principle, we use the "map" metaphor because it works really well. One facet of real maps, which seems applicable to "maps"/"menus", is that a map can either show a large area, or show an area in detail - it can never do both at the same time.
However, the information age has changed mapping forever. Google Maps and all virtual, zoomable maps to come before (and after) it are entirely unlike classical maps for the simple reason that they are both large and detailed. Zooming enables maps to include far more information than a paper map could ever include, by expanding the medium's capacity for information multilaterally - in height and width, and also in depth.

The question now is whether the metaphor can, in any way, hold, when dealing with scalable maps. Can we possibly map our reality in a scalable way?

Or is this the whole point, that we simply can't, that maps are merely maps?

spontaneously invented this one last night. do not try in the presence of young children. 

INGREDIENTS
1 1/2 pounds fresh asparagus, trimmed and peeled
1 leek, sliced
6 cups water
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 onion, chopped
Salt to taste

DIRECTIONS
1.   Gather the ingredient absentmindedly while doing other things. Start cooking late (you'll need the stress in step 5)
2.   In a large stockpot, combine the water or stock, asparagus and separated leek greens. Heat over as quickly as possible (see step 1) then allow to simmer while you hastily prepare the rest of the ingredients.
3.   In a medium saute pan, heat the butter and oil. Add the leek 'whites' and onion and cook until the onion begins to color (about 8 minutes). You may be too busy doing other things to notice when the time is right, but it shouldn't matter much. When you notice the onion is almost burning, add 1 cup of the warm stock and cook 10 more minutes.
4.   Strain the stock of the asparagus and leek ends. Fill the pot with fresh water, heat as quickly as possible. Add the contents of the saute pan to the boiling water along with the asparagus middles and partially cover the pot. Cook 12 more minutes.
5.   Transfer soup to a blender and puree. Take a pot cover and hold it down on the opening as tight as you can. When the pressure inside the blender causes the top to fly off and, turn off the blender and tend to your burns. Depending on their severity you may want to stop cooking and find medical attention as soon as possible.
6.   Once your burns are under control, strain any puree remaining in the blender back into the stockpot. Add salt, microwave the soup if you were away so long that it's gotten cold. Serve the soup with bread. Take care to keep the hot soup away from your burns.

When all was said and done it *was* delicious. We originally planned to make this recipe but we were too original to do that. And only I needed to go to the emergency room, my girlfriend was only mildly burned on one arm and her 3-year-old babysitee was thankfully unharmed.

-Verb,
sad but true

I stepped out into the night. There was music in my ears. I needed fresh air, needed to get my legs moving, needed to clear my head. I had no plan, no route in mind. I started off in a familiar direction but let myself wander. Soon enough, I was lost. It was like I had stepped out of this city and into another, new to me. I hadn't been out often in the seven months since I moved here. I spent most of my time at home, staring at that old familiar face, ah, that glowing portal - the Internet. Which brings me back to why I was out wandering the streets of this glorious city in the first place. The boredome was getting to me. I must have gone stir-crazy, or perhaps the lack of activity had slowly driven me to depression. The grey skies of this land did not help.

I found myself on streets I had never seen. My legs took me here, and they took me there. Around every corner, a new discovery. Parks unfolded before me, and quiet residential streets, big and small. In one park I saw a miserable two-legged dog-creature skulking through a patch of neon tulips. Was Goddess playing tricks on me, or had I finally gone off that cliff, into the deep void of madness? Or were the drugs doing this, flashing back with these crazy visions? I walked on, not daring to look again. That bastard looked mean. Better let it frolick amongst the tulips.

I kept on marching through the night-time wonderland. Buildings taller than elephants, streets lit up as bright as day, all empty as space. Trees so real but all too artificial. Often I would cross a street where no crosswalk could be found, only to stop in the middle of the street to see which way I should go next. No cars came. I didn't get run over. Before me, a tunnel of sorts. Some kind of passageway, placed between two buildings. Maybe it was a preparation for future construction work. The lighting inside this mystery tunnel, and the green vines wreathed around its entrance, all confirmed my suspicion that something unusual was afoot. On the other end, another park. Had I been flung, I wondered, into some strange green desert, covered in parks, devoid of life?

The music fell on me in waves, engulfed me, flooded my conscious mind, drowned out what passed for a reality around me. Floating on these wave, trembling with every riff, beating with every drum, I marched on, through this urban wonderland. All thoughts of returning to my nest were gone. All that was left was the wanderlust, the adventuring spirit of exploration, and, ah - the music.

It's a sunny day. I step out onto the balcony. I lean on the metal rail, careful not to smother some of the herbs in the plastic planter, as the gentle notes of Gotan Project leak out of my room and into my ears. Looking out onto the roofs and yards below, I feel kind of like the wealthy dictator of some banana republic. "Friends, trashcans, squirrels, lend me your ears!" If I owned a cigar I would be tempted to smoke it. But I don't smoke, and I'm not wealthy. My kingdom is not mine, not as far as anyone else is concerned.
I could be a great dictator, if they only let me try. But the damned squirrels bow to no man.

I just had an interesting thought. In German, there are two ways to say "you" - du is the informal, familiar form, and Sie is the formal address (always capitalized, to differentiate from the other two sies [she and they] - and I'm tragically serious about this). It occurs to me that in Spanish, Italian and in Russian the same kind of system exists. It also occurs to me that in Sweden, this kind of thing was as standard as it now is in Germany, until a few decades ago when people started dropping the formal form and just using the familiar with everyone.
And I wonder... Germany, Spain, Italy, and Russia all have very recent, very clear totalitarian pasts. None of the world's English-speaking nations do. And in these states (at least Germany and Russia, afaik) this kind of mechanism of respect and appeal to authority still exists today. In Sweden, it used to but it's pretty much faded away by now.
Could there be a connection here?
This is a thought I had just now, off the top of my head. Anyone know of any research regarding this matter? Or something?
Also, can we mis-appropriate the du/Sie concept in some comical way?

Apparently, a few months back I bookmarked this post from Play This Thing (indy gaming blog) about a game called Lost in the Static: link
It's a free download (Windows only as far as I can tell) and plays in less than fifteen minutes. It's basically a platformer where everything is made out of static. Very mind-bending.
I remember years ago my dad told me about this study some people did where a field of static with an area where the static has a different pattern was shown to people, who immediately recognized the "different" field as a distinct Thing. Thinking back now this realization about how our visual brain recognizes things was probably one of the things that prepared me for Discordianism, so to speak.
Just thought I'd share this with all y'all, it's a very nice self-MF and very though-provoking, imho.

I think we used to love our things more, before the machines came.
I don't remember any more. Maybe I never did. But I have this feeling, we used to care more. We used to make things ourselves, and we had to fix them ourselves. So we had to take good care of them ourselves, too. Even when we stopped making them ourselves, we still had to take of them for ourselves to avoid fixing them... And slowly we stopped fixing them for ourselves. And slowly we stopped fixing them at all. First they sold us warranties. Then they sold us replacements.
Replacements... You can only replace something unimportant. Friends, family, children, you would never replace them. And I have a feeling, once our things were like that too: important to us. Irreplacable.
I don't remember any more. Maybe I never did. But I have a feeling.
I think we used to love our things more.

"There is no way of teaching or training another person for self-sufficiency. There is no technic for obtaining or transmitting these traits. The only way a person becomes responsible for himself is for him to be responsible for himself, with no reservation or qualifications."
   -Daniel Greenberg, The Crisis in American Education: An Analysis and a Proposal

Parents have gotten lazy, and we're all eating shit for it.
Mothers give birth, drop the little baby on a nanny, and go back to work. Fathers buy the tots gadgets and games so they don't have to spend time with them. And then eventually, when the kid is 5 or 6, they start sending it to school, never questioning for a moment the appropriateness of such an environment to a young person.
Think about it – what kind of capacity did you have for critical thinking at the age of 6? Heck, how critical were you at 8? And at 10? And yet at these very young, gullible ages, children are subjected to a constant bombardment of educational data. Knowing that children at these ages haven't much of a grasp on critical thinking, teachers just present the curriculum as fact. Grade-school teachers do not give the matter much of a thought – the high-school teachers will sort it out later down the road, make the kids think.
Wait a second, these people are going to make the children think for themselves?
Yeah, right. Like that has ever worked. No, the diet of single-minded groupthink meme-soup starts when the kids first enter the first-grade classroom and though new ingredients are added every year, the consistency remains the same. You can't follow an order with "but do whatever you want" and expect someone to actually do what they want. After that order, they can't ignore what you want them to do. No matter what you try, even their attempts to figure out what they want will be driven by their need to do what you say.
How fucked up is all that?
Is it really reasonable to send soft, gullible children into an environment specifically designed to tell them what to think? Is this what we want the next generations to look like? Like the currently up-and-coming generations of mass consumers who might as well choose their personality out of a catalog for all their originality?

[begin]

Everybody thinks solutions are the end of problems. The truth is the opposite: solutions are where the problems begin. And yet, trapped in misperception, everyone goes looking for magical solutions; explanations to dispel all problems; final solutions. Grabbing a broad brush, they paint the world in new colors, making sure not to mention problems their new ideas do not address. Frantically they chase the illusive Theory of Everything. On the way, they create one new theory after another. They believe each of these to be the final solution, the magic formula to get rid of everything that is wrong with this world.

If you're part of the solution, you are the problem.

Everybody gets it all wrong. Instead of just grokking a problem, they try and grok all problems everywhere. Of course they convince themselves slowly this is possible, and then that they have done it. Once they manage to conveniently forget the rest of their problems, now believing they have understood all the issues that matter, they go on to put their theory into practice, if they can.

Look at Hitler and his gang. They thought they had their problems figured out. They cobbled together a Race Theory, slapped on some economical plans, wrapped it all up with fascist propaganda, and sold this lovely package as a remedy to all ailments. Millions bought it, and millions subsequently bit the dust. The Final Solution, they called it. And that's where things really got thick.

Magic is a fickle servant. Never trust a magic solution, and just to be sure, never trust anything that even smells like a magic solution. These so-called solutions are behind all of our problems.

What do you mean, "I'm doing it right now?"
Fuck you.

People do not want to be alone.

It's the driving force behind a great deal of human activity. People will do nigh on anything to avoid being alone. People will look to almost anything they can become part of, simply not to be alone. People hunger for the feeling of belonging. They will latch on to the first political party to come there way, provided they find common grounds with the souls in the movement. Gladly they will toss away their own opinions, just to get into that new in-group.

People do not want to be alone.

When you are alone, any group looks appealing, just because it is a group. By becoming part of a group you imagine you will no longer be alone. Heroin addicts, National Socialists, Anarchists, potheads, hippies, emos, Internet trolls, Discordians, gamers... People do not want to be alone. Think of any group and you can bet at least half the people involved just don't want to be alone. That's why they're there. Sure, it's not the only factor involved. But most people can't even imagine just actually being alone. Hardly anyone can imagine being okay with it. No, people do not want to be alone. They will latch on to some group, just because it is a group. That's why groupthink is so appealing. If you agree with the group about everything, you'll think you're part of it. Especially when it comes to ideology. These days you can be part of a group just by holding the group's set of beliefs. Well, if groupthink is all it will take to escape yourself, to be not-alone... Well that's not such a bad price to pay, right?

People do not want to be alone.

We're all born with the circuitry we need to be together, to be part of something bigger. We all know it, and we all spend inordinate amounts of energy chasing it. People do not want to be alone. But then when we approach sex, we make it into some kind of cold, mechanical act of release. That's not what it's about, folks. People do not want to be alone. Sex, yea all intimacy, is not about release. It's all about connection. When we break down all walls and barriers, when we're naked, together, damn near merging into one biological being, finally we are together, entirely. People do not want to be alone. And yet so many people spend so much time chasing that un-alone, only to shy back from the real togetherness right on the verge of its consummation, all too afraid to let their lover be together with them. People do not want to be alone. They become so engrossed in their chase after togetherness, they miss it entirely and understand it as a selfish act. But selfishness is aloneness.

People do not want to be alone.

Well guess what, buddy, you are alone.
Fuck you.

   It was morning. A new day, and a new start for the flies. Although flies are a tragically short-lived race, they are surprisingly perceptive and philosophical beings, once you get to know them. Having a thousand eyes can be confusing, but it does have its upsides. Seeing as their lives are so short, flies don't bother naming each other. Instead flies call each other by their world-views, summing them up aptly in one word, on the fly, so to speak.

   "We are stuck in sticky goo," said Visionary, "and we can't get out."
   "By why would we?", asked Optimist. "This goo is pure and sweet. I don't *want* to get out!"
   "Bullspit!", said Pessimist. "This goo SUCKS BALLS. I fuckin' *hate* this damned goo."
   "Well," said Visionary, "either way, we can't get out. No matter what we try, this goo is way too sticky, and we will never leave."
   "I wonder how that works," said Speculative, who doesn't have any more lines of his own in this story.
   "Clearly," said Aneristic, "the goo has a very cleverly constructed structure, designed to keep us in. Kind of like a prison. In fact, it's probably just *made to look* like sticky goo, to make it harder to escape. I bet if we study and document it, we'll understand how it works and realize it's not so gooey after all."
   "Open your eyes, buster," said Eristic, "It's goo alright. Real, messy, sticky goo. There's no order here, no rhyme or reason. Just goo."
   The two flies stared at each other, myriad eyes showing nothing but contempt, until Visionary broke the tense silence.
   "Perhaps," he said, "all five of you are right. Perhaps the goo really is goo, but also has a discernible underlying structure, partly designed so as to make us believe the goo is even gooier than it is. Perhaps in some places, around some of us, the goo is sweet and pleasant, in other places rancid and irritating. Maybe, maybe this whole gooey thing is like some kind of amoeba."
   "An amoeba?!", exclaimed the five in concert.
   "Think about it," replied Visionary. "I mean--" and then she gave that odd tremble, the one flies give when dying, and croaked.
   "So it goes," said the five.

Just a thought - why are we accustomed to portraying She Who Done It All as beautiful?

Okay, I may still be prime newb meat, but I've seen you Elder Ones say "someone has to write that damn Lollercaust already" too many times.
Let's brainstorm.
Cram posted in another thread that he will post some materials later today.
Did anyone else have some more specific ideas for this pamphlet, Way Back When?

Okay, so I found the assertion that people often consider certain BIP Bars part of their personality when they're not, very illuminating. In a way, it made me understand very suddenly who I am (and I'm grateful to you who wrote the pamphlet for that, by the way.)
But I've been wondering now if Bars don't still quite directly affect who we are. I'm beginning to think they do.
Case at point, I was recently romantically involved with someone you might label feminist hippie. For a while she had me very cautious about male tendencies towards aggression and over-assertiveness, and while I now realize I got too caught up in that specific reality tunnel at the time, I can't help but notice that I now only like pron where the woman seems to be enjoying herself (this was not a main criterion to me before). My personality seems to have been affected in a rather direct way by a Bar I spent a while building and later discarded.
Or maybe I just haven't really torn off that Bar yet.

Everybody has gone insane. It's difficult to deny now. Everybody is so damn busy trying to create order, they've forgotten order is itself just a comfortable illusion we create to help stomache the chaos. And yet every one has some completely different conception of order; every single person has a completely unique vision for the patterns underlying our reality. This guy says God creates order. That other guy says there is no god, but that order creates itself. Then five million other dudes agree with his basic assumption, but completely disagree on what kind of order that is. And a billion disagree with the guy who believe in God, in exactly the same way. Then a million other assholes just disregard that question entirely and instead focus on how fucked up people are and how they can fix it. This shit is crazy.

How can there be order if it's so fucking hard to find. And if it's so hard to find, who the hell cares about order? We're swimming in freakin' chaos here!

THIS REMINDER BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE BEATABLE SAINTS CABAL
_{You can't beatify us,}
^{but you can sure beat us!}

I'm slowly but surely chewing through Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom and I've encountered some very nice quotes. Makes me think he might have dug BIP.

"Conscience" is a slave driver, put into man by himself. It drives him to act according to wishes and aims which he believes to be his own, while they are actually the internalization of external social demands. It drives him with harshness and cruelty, forbidding him pleasure and happiness, making his whole life the atonement for some mysterious sin.

...we are proud that in his conduct of life man has become free from external authorities, which tell him what to do and what not to do. We neglect the role of the anonymous authorities like public opinion and "common sense," which are so powerful because of our profound readiness to conform to the expectations everybody has about ourselves and our equally profound fear of being different.

I'm gonna do a little something tonight which I've done before. Lacking a cabal (or private photographer), I won't have anything to show for it online, but this is a possible GASM that is extremely simple and rather amusing.

Ingredients:
1 pair of sunglasses per person

Instructions:
Put sunglasses on. Wait for nightfall. Go out and just walk around in public places. If anyone looks at you funny, acknowledge by making a stupid and/or angry face back at them. If you are not alone, try playing hide-and-seek with your co-conspirators while doing this.

Also available as a flash-mob.

[EDIT:]

I'm a newb. I'm the worst kind of newb, too, because I'm not going to read the whole forum before posting my own bullshit here. If that pisses you off to no end, I hear ya man, I hate this shit myself, but I don't need you blasting me for it right here, right now. Save your time.

I've just read the BIP booklet (online) in almost one sitting, after first bumping into the whole project earlier today.

First of all, I wanna thank you guys. BIP is one of the best things I've read in a while. It's powerful, convincing, concise, and intensely Inspiring. It may have already triggered some major changes in my life for the coming years, and I'm very grateful to have read it.
I do however have a few remarks I'd like to make, which are a little negative, and you guys have probably heard them before, but I would be grateful to hear your replies to them personally.

BIP reminds me way way more of anarchist pamphlets I've read (the good ones, specifically), and of Fight Club, than it does of the Principia. This is not, naturally, a problem in and of itself, and it might be taken as a compliment. I'm just not sure how comfortable I am with that as an erisian. PD had tremendous power in its vagueness and in its humor, and both are practically non-existent in BIP. One may say we live in an era far more cynical than the decades that gave birth to PD, but if I'm not mistaken, most of the souls present in this forum were hooked in via PD, and PD is undeniably at the core of all things Discordian (or at least right near it, basking in the core's heat).
I'm not entirely comfortable with the fact that BIP does what it does without making me smile and without actually confusing me. I feel like I've been more punched into Enlightenment than, well, Confused into it, which is how I think PD worked for me. To me, Discordja has always had a real fun, funny, hippy bend to it, which is part of what made me so comfortable with it fresh out of a couple years of playing stuck-up hardline atheist god-basher. It's like Discordia is all "whoo, freedom is fun and awesome and hillarious!" and BIP is like "FREEDOM MUTHAFUCKA, DO YOU SPEAK IT!?" with that glorious afro and a nice handgun pointing into your brain. Yeah, both are about freedom. Yeah, BIP is much more clear to Internet-trained brains than PD may have been. Yeah, BIP can probably hook all kinds of cool folks and haul them in on the fun sooner or later. But am I the only one who thinks this should all happen light-heartedly, with a smile? Isn't that part of the whole point? Do we want hoards of thugs disseminating misinformation without stopping to pick the imaginary flowers?

ALL HAIL ERIS.
  And fire at will now.

EDIT: (+20 min.) Ah, now I remember the smart thing I wanted to say but couldn't remember. What I think I'm missing here in BIP is something to help me take myself less seriously. That was really the power of the humor in PD - it was disarming. BIP seems like a great tool to make people take the world less seriously, but it might make them take themselves dead serious, which, if you ask me, is not much better than just the dead part.
And still, fire at will.