Revision as of 04:32, 19 September 2008

The Gods were annoyed

To say the least.

But they had no choice 'cause we had rented the space fair and square. The ink on the contract was dry. The Gods' job was to clear out and spend the week on an all expenses paid booze cruise through the Astral. Our job was to party like it's 2012. Apollo, in his little white vacation shoes, flipped me off on the way out. They had just heard the news, that Limbo Peak had been rented out by Discordians.

[Insert 000's pic of kolonoskopos and hairacles]

See, when Triple Zero and I reserved the place, we wore these sweet masks. I was Hairacles and he was Kolonoskopos. We told them it was a masquerade ball, but we didn't tell 'em who was on the guest list.

When Zeus found out it was Discordians, he got all bitchtits. "Eris worshippers?" he thundered. "Aw Hera, they're gonna foul the pool..." Someone whispered in his ear that skinnydipping was listed several times on their agenda. That old windbag's bitchtits practically burst out his beardhole. "I forbid the pool entirely!" Sure thing pops. Yeah, we'll be good guests. Hey, where do you keep the towels?

See, our Lady Eris is celebrating 49 or 50 years or so since she sent her penguin to freak out those spags Mal and Omar. Since then, it's been more or less a constant party - like something Crowley would envision while balls deep in some ass trance. So in a way, we're celebrating 49 or 50 years of constant partying with an even weirder party.

So 000 and I -- er -- Hairacles and Kolonoskopos tried to contact as many "Discordians" as they could find for this bizarre masquerade bash. And when the party started, they came in droves. They jibbered in Russian. There were mittens and win in every discussion.

Weird people in their anybody suits. We're all over the place like tossed cookies.

[insert the beach etc.discordia ad]

Now there's a lot of "Discordians" out there on the web, and they're not organized really well, so there's no telling how much of the iceberg we crashed. But I think we got a good sampling. It was cool, because all these foreign networks collided. They swapped ideas and put some pee in the idea pot. And this book is the toxic soup that we squeezed out of it.

The idea, originally, was to produce a book really quickly. I had this idea for a booklet I wanted to write about why Discordia is a kickass way of dealing with this crazy decade. I mean, the Principia is practically 50 years old, but it keeps getting more relevant. Even my daily commute to work feels like a stanza from Lewis Carroll. So I put together some thoughts, but I wanted more people to give their spin on things. So I had this idea for a one-shot internet forum.

To make a long story short, we set up the Internet Cyberspace Masquerade (also known as the Party on Limbo Peak). So everybody put on made up identity masks and showed up at this forum. It would only be open for one week, so there was no time for a culture to form. No time for in-group/out-group follow the leader in-joke/bad-joke memetics. Separated from their networks and social backup, people were forced to talk straight. It was an interesting experiment.

And that's the energy which launched this book. A bunch of random factors coming together to form a social collage. I think that's a good thumbnail of the Discordian society right there - there are artists, hackers, occultists, pranksters... in short, the remnants of Norton's Empire. Surrealist tricksters who live on the fringes, colorful iterations at the edge of the fractal. They've got all these great ideas, but those ideas are scattered all over the board. I say let's cut 'em up into kibble and assemble them, collage style, into a ransom note to reality. Let's make a primordial stone soup.

And since the Masquerade, the book has continued to grow. If anything, I want it to stand as a signpost, reminding future generations that though many of our forefathers have fallen (rest in peace Greg, Kerry, Bob, et al), we're still here. We're still doing stuff. Are you?

For those of you who are reading this but have no idea what Discordia is, maybe I should offer some brief explanation. Discordia "is" a religion in some sense, a philosophy in some sense, a joke in some sense, a movement in some sense and a recepie for disaster in some sense. What these five senses have in common is Chaos. The meme at the center is Eris, the Greek Goddess of confusion. She doesn't take much seriously.

something about zarathud and cutups

we found him at limbo peak

he was like, "I don't want to be known as a square."

Well, yours is the fourth season, I said, drawing a square in the air.

So we gave him some scissors and let him go to work.