Black Iron Prison v3 thread

[AFK]

I would hope if there is yanking or pruning of other people's material that it comes up for some form of discussion. 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I am talking about people, such as Cain, who want to remove/replace their own work in the book.

[AFK]

I am talking about people, such as Cain, who want to remove/replace their own work in the book.

I was more referring to LMNO's comment.  But yeah, I would understand an author wanting to yank or alter their own work.  I'm talking about Spag A saying we should yank Spag B's work. 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I am talking about people, such as Cain, who want to remove/replace their own work in the book.

I was more referring to LMNO's comment.  But yeah, I would understand an author wanting to yank or alter their own work.  I'm talking about Spag A saying we should yank Spag B's work. 

I couldn't agree with that kind of revising.

[LMNO]

I say we scrap the whole thing, and slip a copy of Mother Goose between the covers.

[AFK]

Is Jack and Jill Kopyleft?   

[Cramulus]

This is a continuation of the Black Iron Prison v3 discussion which started in the fucking wikipedia thread.



The story so far:

We were talking about wikipedia, and how the info about Discordia on there needs a lot of help... but there's not exactly a lot of good material to replace it with. Which led us to talking about the stuff we've made, and how we could get it cited properly.. and that led to talking about making our stuff better...

and then Nigel was like,

One thing I would really like to see is a Golden Sphere of Possibility version of the BIP, to be published in the same volume. If authors would be willing, perhaps, to riff off their own pieces but make a "light and shiny" version, and then they could be published together back-to-back. I think it would beef the book up enough to justify a real ISBN-having version.

She later said that if she had a few hundred bucks, she'd open her own publishing company.

It will probably cost me about $400 to get started, assuming ALL I am doing is acting as a gateway/financier to get the books published and available through Ingram. My original goal was to do it when all my debts were paid off, which would have been last month if Moxley had stuck around. At my current rate, they won't be paid off for six more months, but even so, that's not a terrible timeline, especially if we want to fatten up the BIP.

It would bring my heart much joy to see more Discordian works of literature by our little band of troublemakers published. So it would basically be a vanity press for Discordians... oh well! It would still be out there.

and then Ratatosk was all like

I am concerned... almost every thread that could have degenerated into Drama and fighting... instead, seems to have churned out useful and thoughtful dialog.


WTF GONNA HAPPEN?!?!?!

So... BIP and GSP, published back to back, with some kind of illustration in the middle...

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Ok here is a draft of my "A Story In Five Parts". Initially I had thought of sticking it in the Great Googlie Mooglie Edition of the BiP (5 segments throughout it), but I think it might be better in the GSP. Please PLEASE critique, criticize, etc both content and form... If it sucks, please say that as well



A Story In Five Parts (Rough Draft)

Following two blasts from the siren, Bob woke up like he did every morning. He heard the other prisoners stirring in their cells and the loud metallic clunking sound as their guards opened the hall door and entered with trays of food. The routine was well known and comfortable, like a pair of old shoes. After breakfast and a tall latte, he wandered over to the corner of his cell where the walls were a strange beige and where he spent most of his day. Not that he actually accomplished much in this corner, usually he just sat there. Sometimes he would shuffle some papers or draw a few pictures, but this was just busy work that kept him from being terribly bored.

The siren sounded again and Bob's mouth began to salivate, "Lunchtime!" he said happily to no one in particular. The food was bland, lukewarm and the same every day, but it gave some break to sitting in the beige corner.

Later, the siren bleated again and the guard called out, as he did every evening, "Lights Out!" and the fillaments went dark. Bob crawled under the blankets and like every night since he could remember, fell asleep in his cell.

The siren let out five long "WHOOP" noises and Bob immediately woke up. The siren never made five noises in a row. Occasionally, when there were inspections it would be three times, but five? He looked around, the room was dark and still. No one else was awake. Bob laid back, assuming that the siren call had been in his head. Then once again, the siren called out: "Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!" and Bob was immediately awake again. This time someone was obviously standing near the back wall... messing with something.

"Excuse me, " Bob ventured, assuming that the person was a prison employee, "why are you in my cell?"

The man turned around and looked at him for a moment, "Cell? What the heck are you talking about?" He then refocused on his odd task of fiddling with the wall.

"Cell," Bob said, "my prison cell. You are in my prison cell and I would like to know why."

The fellow scratched his head, looked at Bob curiously and sighed. "Oh, sorry, I hadn't realized you were still in the Black Iron Prison." Noting the confused look on Bob's face, he sighed, walked over and sat on a stool, which Bob was sure hadn't been there a moment ago. The man leaned forward and studied Bob closely for a moment then said, "Well, look... you're not in a Prison, per se. You have never really been in a prison. This whole thing, the prison, the guards, the other inmates, the food and even that annoying siren, its all in your head, its your prison that you made out of every decision and experience that you've had in your life."

Bob, at this point, decided someone was trying to make a fool of him. He stood up and walked to the cell door. "If this is in my head," he said, "then I should be able to walk right through it, yes?" Saying this, Bob stepped into the door and smacked his head on the bars.He staggered back, shook his noggin and then looked at the man. "See," he said, "they are real bars and this is a real prison."

The man rolled his eyes, stood up and walked right through the wall. He looked back through the bars and smiled, " I said you weren't in a Prison per se, not that you weren't trapped. See, its your bars and your prison. You made it, you maintain it, you keep yourself inside it, doing the same thing, thinking the same thoughts, exploring the same concepts." He paused and looked at Bob slyly, "When was the last time you had a brand new thought? When was the last time you had a brand new experience? When was the last time you cut loose and did something that you have never done before?"

Bob was taken aback slightly, mostly because the stranger had walked through a solid wall, but also because he was suddenly very uncomfortable with how comfortable the cell actually felt. "Lookit", the man continued, "can you tell me what crime you committed that got you put behind bars? Can you tell me how long you're here for, or how long you've been here?"

Bob strained to recall the arrest, the trial, the sentencing, but there was nothing there. He tried to remember how long he had been here, but that too seemed so far distant in his memory, no valuable information was forthcoming.

"I don't understand" Bob said, his voice shaking a little, "If I'm not in prison, then where am I and why do I think I'm in jail?"

The man smiled, "Ah, now that's a good question. It betrays the potential for independant thought! First, as I said, you are in a 'prison' of sorts. You are in what some smart people call "The Black Iron Prison". The prison of your own reality, well your own interpretation of Reality anyway. You're not alone in this either. Almost everyone starts out here and most people never leave. Some people don't even see the prison walls and bars... they just putter around follwing the sirens, sitting in their little beige boxes and shuffling papers. They don't see that they're trapped, because they can't, or don't see ANYTHING outside of their own little area, not even the walls or bars. It's very hard to escape a prison, if you don't even know that its there."
------------------------------------------------------

Night in the prison had always been pitch black and fit only for dreaming. Now, Bob realized, he could see clearly, even without the lights. He thought about what the man had said. He certianly felt trapped, but maybe he was just losing his mind after years in prison. Though... what if this guy was right? What if he could escape this, (what did the guy call it?) "Black Iron Prison"."

"I'd like to get out", Bob said wistfully.

"There is no 'OUT'", the man shook his head smiling, "because you aren't really 'IN'."

As he spoke, Bob began to think that maybe Reality wasn't a prison after all, maybe it was simply an inescapable tarpit, holding everyone within its grasp, slowly dragging them further and further into the black abyss of death. The prison walls shifted, the bars were suddenly vines, the bricks faded into the trunks of trees and the floor, OH GODS, the floor had become a steaming, bubbling, stinking pool of thick tar; tar that had a strong hold on his feet, his ankles and to his horror, it was slowly sucking him down.

The man was standing on top of the tar, looking at him quizzically. "Well, I'm not sure I've seen anyone go from bad to worse, quite that quickly." he said with a smile.

"Help me, for God's Sake!" Bob screamed, "I'm being sucked in, I'll die!!"

"We all die, you dummy, you can't escape it, you can't stop it, so why worry about it?" He grinned, "Besides, the only thing sucking you down right now is, well, you."

Bob tried to clear his head as the tar touched his knees. He concentrated, "not a prison, not a tar pit... DAMNIT!" The tar had his knees now and the heat was beginning to make his balls sweat. "not a prison", he thought, "not a tar pit!" But what, what else could it be?

The man smiled and grabbed Bob's wrist. "Let me help you out where you need it. Come on, come with me," he said smiling at the poor schmuck.

In an instant, they found themselves in some sort of small room with lots of buttons and levers. "This is one of my favorites," the man said with pride. "This is my Yellow Submarine, its a lot like the Black Iron Prison, I can't go outside of it, I can't escape it while I'm here... but I can control where it goes, how it moves and what I can see." He pushed a button and a wall slid away to reveal a magnificant scene which Bob supposed was deep beneath the ocean. "In Reality," the Man said, "what you're looking at is deep under the seas of normal human consciousness. This is how I explore the hard to get to parts of my brain."

Bob was astounded, "But, if this, like my prison is just in your mind, why not go out there and explore freely?"

The man looked serious for a moment and tapped the window, "Out there, Bob, is Everything that Exists, Existed or will Exist... every frequency of light and sound, every smell, every taste, all of it at the same time. Out there, I would be crushed in an instant, the pressure alone would utterly destroy me. However, I can still explore a lot of it, one port window at a time, from the safety of my submarine."

Bob thought about this, the guy was still trapped, kind of, but this was at least a nicer prison than the one he had.

-----------------------------------------

"Of course," the man continued, "this isn't the only vehicle I have." He caressed the control panel of his little submarine. "She's just one of an infinite number of possible vehicles."

Bob, nodded, still concerned that he was, perhaps, insane. The man shrugged and moved his hand across Bob's field of vision. They were immediately somewhere else.

"This is my Silver Spaceship." The man looked quite proud as he said this, "it's one of my newest."

Bob walked over to the portal and peeked out. Planets zoomed by, stars, astroids and moons tumbled past him at a frigthful speed, so close, it was surely not real. "These planets have to be light years apart, what sort of nonsense is this?!" he exclaimed.

The man shook his head, "It's metaphor man, that's not real Outer Space. Out there, is the Outer Space of Possibility. See that planet over there?" Almost immediately, the ship changed course and hovered close to the surface of a beautiful forested planet, with pristine lakes and gentle rolling hills.

Bob gasped, as he caught sight of a... well it can't be a... "Is, err, is that a, a, um, a Unicorn?" Bob finally stammered.

"Of course," the man said, "what else would a white horse with a horn in the middle of its head be?"

"But, they don't exist." Bob said.

"Well, they exist on that planet in the Outer Space of Possibility. They may not exist anywhere else though, I don't know." he turned the ship and coasted toward a large planet, "That planet over there is full of Pookahs. I don't think they ever leave that planet, but sometimes, people claim to see them on Earth."

Bob was startled as a teapot floated by and he could read the small silver nameplate attached to the delicate china, "B. Russell".

---------------------------------------------

"Reality," the man continued, "exists. It just doesn't exist in the same sense that most people think."

Bob was far too stunned at this point to argue.

"See, we all have limitations. But, often, a lot of the limitations that we THINK we have, may be artificial. You thought that your prison of scheduled alarms, lattes and that beige corner were inescapable, didn't you?"

Bob nodded silently.

"Exactly. Those weren't real limitations, they were just the places that you stopped exploring what might be out there. It became comfortable and safe, predictable and stable, right?" He looked at poor Bob, who seemed about to explode under the complexity.

"So I'm free, but I'm not really free?" Bob finally asked. "I can pretend to get out of Prison, but NEVER ever really get OUT?"

The man paused and studied him, "Well yeah Bob, you can do several things. You can go back to your comfortable prison and shuffle papers, eat when the bell rings and behave like a Pavlovian pooch, or you can break free of that tiny corner of reality and live in a much bigger cell, maybe seeing every constraint, every limitation and everything that you cannot do, as bricks, morter and bars of a much bigger prison that you have some control over."

Bob smiled, "Well, a bigger cell is surely better."

The man grinned, "Yep, it is. But, thats not your only option." He paused and studied Bob, "What do you think about the trip so far?"

Bob grinned, "It's amazing, mindblowing, I can't believe how free I feel. Now that I know that I don't have to go back to that cell, back to those alarms and that crappy food. And at least I'll be in control of the decorations now. No more beige, ever again!"

-----------------------------------------------------------

Driving down a dirt road, the Muddy Brown Humvee bounced through pot holes and skidded across mudflats. Bob hung on to the "OSHI" bar for dear life and the man was laughing, mad as a hatter, behind the wheel.

"Wheehoo! Now this is the life, eh Bob?!" he shouted over the thudding sub-woofer and the roar of the engine.

Bob held on and didn't speak. It dawned on him that outside the window... Correction: outside the window, in between the huge splotches of mud, was some part of reality. "So, how's come the best I can do is a bigger cell, and you can go mudrunning?" he looked at the man, who stopped laughing for a moment.

"My friend, no one said that a bigger cell was the best you could do." the man waved his hand to indicate the Humvee, "this is a constraint, a container, a set of limits and controls. It a thing that prevents me from ever being 100% free." He paused and sighed, with thelong exhale, things went fuzzy and suddenly they were back in Bob's prison cell. Of coure, it wasn't the old cell, it was new and huge and furnished with the most interesting things.

"See Bob, we can be here, if this is where you want to be..." a flash and they were flying through Outer Space, "or here..." Bob looked out the window and saw a planet suddenly turn into a puffer fish, "or here, in my submarine."

Bob smiled as he suddenly got it. "You mean, the constraints are only a prison, if I see them as a prison?"

The man smiled, "Exactly! You see Bob, no matter where you think you are..."  he reached toward Bob's forehead and pulled from the center of it a round glowing yellow ball of energy, "you are always and forever here, in the Golden Sphere of Possibility."

The sphere began to expand and grow both in size and intensity, surrounding Bob with brilliant walls of this amazing sphere expanding and expanding... all under his control, all following his command and his thoughts.

Somewhere outside of this beautiful and brilliant new place, he heard his hosts voice one last time, though this time it was at a higher pitch, an almost a female voice with a lilting laugh...

"Remeber Bob, You have built for yourselves Black Iron Prisons, but even so... I am chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are free... in some sense."

[P3nT4gR4m]

I have an idea that might help with mining this forum for material. Could somebody create a mod for the board that allows "meta tagging" of any individual post, by an logged in member?

That way we could just tag shit as we go along or during any old thread expeditions and the tagcloud could, eventually, grow to a stage where finding a whole bunch of already written articles on a given theme is a piece of piss.

One of the disheartening things about writing for this board is that, even the best thing you've ever written, is gonna sink into obscurity within a couple of months. Be nice to think that some of my shit might resurface at some point in the future.

[Cain]

That's a good idea.  I know VBulletin has that functionality...but obviously we don't want to pay through the nose for that software anyway.  I would hope rigging up something like that on SMF would not be too hard.

[LMNO]

BIPv3.0 should include our later ideas, like Shrapnel, et al.

[Cramulus]

I have an idea that might help with mining this forum for material. Could somebody create a mod for the board that allows "meta tagging" of any individual post, by an logged in member?

Ahahahha project OMGASM is approximately 11 months ahead of you!

Use delicious.com.  (formerly del.icio.us) Tag with "OMGASM, BIP3" and the GASM Feed will automatically list them
http://www.principiadiscordia.com/gasmfeed

likewise tag images on flickr with "OMGASM, BIP3" and it will automatically display them in that cute way that it does

[P3nT4gR4m]

Okay, take that and make the tags user definable. I'm thinking searching tags for "the machine" or "GSP" and being given a list of all the article-class posts which have those tags attributed to them. Articles would, of course, have numerous tags, collated from numerous members who all feel that something deserves a specific tag, perhaps with a weighting on the tag, which increases as more people attribute it to the piece. That way the results could be "tagranked" depending how many times a tag has been applied to one post, by different people.

I guess what I'm saying is that once you have a couple of thousand items collected under the headings "litgasm" and "omgasm" this is the next level of categorisation. It'd be quite a big database but an incredibly simple one. Unfortunately I don't know anything about interfacing with SMF so there's not much I can do, short of designing a table structure which would go along the lines of:

Code Select Expand

Table - PDTaglist

Fields..
TagID - Autonumber - primary key
PostID - Integer -  (indexed) - Reference to post number
TagName - Text (indexed)
Weight - integer - number of times this tag has been added to this post



There, I'm done.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Spheres and Bars

From sanity to senility
since we climbed down out of the tree
We all are trapped in the B.I.P.
except for those that choose to see
A Golden Sphere of Possibility

It could be the Sphere is in our minds,
that what we seek is what we find
and the gold we hold is what we mined
From hopes and dreams and Hippie lines
To Build our Sphere of Possibility

Perhaps, in a somewhat different light
Sphere and Prison may both be right
Depending on our own inner sight
both models might bring us delight
It seems to me a possibility.

There might be little that we can do
We do seem trapped, that much is true
Which model you like seems up to you,
Prison Bars may be golden too
and snares are made of possibility

From sanity to senility
Since we climbed down out of the tree
we are stuck with what we think we see
But in the end, perhaps we are free
I mean, it is a possibility....

- Ratatosk

[Golden Applesauce]

I support this idea.  I'll toss up Ruts and Slopes (although that needs major revisions to stand on its own as an essay) and The White Labcoat Approach.

I'm working on a comic script that deals with the BIP; it's about half done, and then I'll need editor(s) and artist(s).

I think I've got one more good rant in me, about the joys of being a spectator; we'll see how that goes.