Well after several weeks of dilligent effort, it’s finally done.
Lesser Poop is a DIY Discordian Magazine of “Bathroom Reader” style content. Lesser Poop contains low brow humor, awful jokes, really short stories, exercises to mindfuck yourself, and much more. Most of the art is by Cramulus. Most of the text is from the principiadiscordia.com/forum community.
I am strongly advising people against buying the hardcover version of the Principia Discordia I have brought out ’til further notice.
My publisher has done a bunk and run off with the money. I wish it were not true, but it is. Exposure Publishing/Diggory Press have walked off with the only cash I have to keep POEE online.
I have now published the paperback version through Lulu http://www.lulu.com/content/683873 . It will be available on Amazon in a few months, but if you buy through Lulu http://www.lulu.com/content/683873 we will make more money.
Please, for the love of whatever (maybe this community, maybe something else) tell everyone you know, who may be interested.
Thanks, people.
Syn out.
Naturally, this sucks beyond words, and its terrible that his publishers have done this to him. So for now, if you are thinking of buying a hard copy of the Principia, please buy from one of the above links. Furthermore, if you already have the PD, but have some spare change knocking about, consider donating some in order to keep POEE running. Its a great Discordian resource and site, and deserves our help.
This is absolutely my favourite site of the moment. For real. I have spent hours, with which I could have done a lot better things, reading it and laughing quite often at the descriptions within.
To quote from the main page:
Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means “stereotyped and trite”. In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries. We are here to recognize tropes and play with them, not to make fun of them.
The wiki is called “TV Tropes” because that is where we started. Over the course of a few years, our scope has crept out to include other media. Tropes transcend television. They exist in life, as we will be quick to tell you. Since a lot of art, especially the popular arts, does its best to reflect life, tropes are likely to show up everywhere. We want ’em all.
As someone who enjoys writing myself, a site like this is incredibly useful. But even for the casual reader or watcher of television, its a really great site and I cannot recommend it enough. If you want to visit, please follow the link.
Just so you know, thanks to the kindness of Iason Ouabache, several Discordian e-books have all been uploaded to The Pirate Bay. Naturally, all these books are Kopyleft and thus free to download or distribute as you see fit.
The full listing is:
Principia Discordia
Aeternus Ille Discordia
Apocrypha Discordia
Apotheosis Psycherotica
Black Iron Prison
Book of Eris
Condensed Chaos
Discordia – A Little Game about a Lot of Chaos
Metaclysmia Discordia
OMITTERRE LIBELLUS
Principia Entropius
Summa Discordia
Wise Book of Baloney
Please help seed these torrents, if you can.
http://www.megaupload.com/es/?d=27X5LIHF 227 MB download
Download mirror:
http://www.mediafire.com/?mdcyy3zlswz – Part 1
http://www.mediafire.com/?4xyydjxngwn – Part 2
http://www.mediafire.com/?2ugg32x9syb – Part 3
Titles are:
The Structure of the Mind – Ben Goertzel
The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences (1999) – Robert A Wilson and Frank C Keil
The Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology – Edited by Charles Spielberger
Putting a new spin on groups – The science of of Chaos – Bud A McClure
Billion Dollar Bunko – Simon Lovell
The Changing Images of Man by Stanford Research Institute
Derren Brown – Behind the Screen
Derren Brown – Pure Effect
Get Anyone to do Anything – David J Lieberman
Undoing Yourself – Christopher Hyatt
Theory of Power – Jeff Vail
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature – Matt Ridley
PsyOps and Ethics – Michael Aquino
Propaganda – Edward Bernays
Prometheus Rising – Robert Anton Wilson
The role of cognitive and socio-cognitive conflict in learning to reason – Katiuscia Sacco and Monica Bucciarelli
Secret Incunabula.org paper – Joesph Matheny (?)
Society of the Spectacle – Guy Debord
Stealth Marketing – Jay Abraham
Strategic Information Warfare (RAND corporation) – Roger C Molander, Andrew S Riddle, Peter A Wilson
The Strategic Game of ? And ? – Unknown
The Power of Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold – Robert Levine
The Selfish Meme – Kate Distin
The Advertised Mind – Erik du Plessis
The Art of Memetics – Wes Unruh and Edward Wilson
The Authoritarians – Bob Altemeyer
The Origin and Evolution of Cultures – Robert Boyd and Peter J Richerson
The Psychology of Entertainment Media – Edited by L. J. Shrum
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
Think Two Products Ahead – Ben Mack
This Is Not A Game (extract) – Dave Szulborski
All these books are pretty heavy on psychology, NLP and marketing, and are low on actual pranks and tricks. The idea is more to condition your mind to think about how other people think, then exploit that knowledge.
While some of you may remember that I was not totally impressed with the conclusion to John Gray’s book, Black Mass, I nevertheless found it a good and enjoyable read, which tied up the links between utopianism, religion, the Enlightenment and secular extremist movements rather well. Gray’s got a lot of perspective in his worldview, which I like. He instinctively understands both the historical context of the movements and how that applies when considered in the current context of events.
Which is why I am enjoying his book review/Comment is Free article. Gray committed the hideous crime of knocking down a few New Atheist sacred cows, and so the usual suspects have come running, howling and moaning with their usual strawmen about atheist inspired terrorism, totally ignoring the context of the argument or addressing any of the issues.
I have yet to see a commenter actually address his point about repressed religion being much like repressed sexuality, or the origins of secular liberalism being tied into the history of Christianity, and Nietzsche’s critical attacks on this. I have yet to see someone either deny that belief in such secular follies as free markets, global revolution or the global spread of democracy and progress are any less ridiculous than belief in a god, or try to claim they are in some way different.
Sure, the comments page may be filled with 300+ screaming monkeys trying to make Gray look like an idiot, but if they think they succeeded in this task, they’re only fooling themselves.
Even a committed agnostic such as myself can take pleasure in such a spectacle.
Japan has decided to beat France and the United Kingdom (both who have similar proposals) to become the first country to ban file sharers from the internet.
Oddly the agreement to do so has not come from the Japanese Government, but from Japan’s four internet service provider organizations after pressure (not surprisingly) from the record and movie industries. According to Torrent Freak, the agreement would see copyright holders tracking down file-sharers on the Internet using “special detection software†and then notifying ISPs of alleged infringers. File sharers will initially receive a warning for a first offense, then be disconnected for subsequent offenses, eventually be disconnected from the internet permanently (it wasn’t clear whether the agreement is a three strikes proposal).
The process will formally commence in April and will primarily target users of Winny, the most popular file sharing network in Japan.
(via Techcrunch)
Needless to say, I’m not impressed, and I very much doubt this “special detection software” can tell the difference between a legitimately downloaded file from a P2P network, and an illegal one. Consider for example the latest NIN’s album, available for free download. Not to mention it puts copyright holders in charge of investigating infringements. I can’t see that going wrong at all, oh no….
On a related topic, Matt Mason, the author of The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism has an interiew which you can download here (mp3).