volunteering on the fringe

[Triple Zero]

recently I've been on the lookout for some volunteer work to do, since I'm currently on welfare (been on and off, since my burnout), and it's good to get off my ass, out of the house, and do something useful that's not too stressing.

((on one hand, I'd rather do humanitarian volunteer work (refugees/immigrants, sick, handicapped, poor, addicts, elderly or people that are just lonely for some reason) but I feel I'd better save that for a time when I got my own life well on track. at least now I know how easy it is to get involved.))

what I AM (most probably) going to do though, is work for some kind of online fringe magazine / event volunteer/business. They organize events about the "hidden news" (conspiracy stuff), paranormal and spirituality, for example this month there's a talk about crop circles. Never knew this shit was going on in my city. Well I might have seen it, but dismissed it as I saw the entry fee was 10 euros (volunteers go in for free of course), but despite this hefty fee, the guy I talked to claimed they get an audience of 50-150 people.

the online magazine (not going to link to it yet) is only slightly more down to earth, they publish and link articles in five (ZOMG23) categories: durability/environment (solar power good, nuclear power bad, wind power good, etc), spirituality (mayan dreamspell horoscope!), the "hidden news" (conspiracy stuff), pseudoscience (aka "the edge of science", ESP, water-memory-emoto nonsense, etc) and health (alternative medicine). It gets loads of pageviews and is apparently quite well-known in the alternative/paranormal/spiritual/etc circles.

the easy stuff they want me to do is to put articles (that are already selected) in the queue of their custom blog/CMS software, so they'll have a queue of articles, and can insert any urgent or recent events in between. another thing I can do is editorial work (spelling, style, etc). And they also have a bunch of articles they want translated from English to Dutch.

at first it seemed the guy I was speaking to was quite on the level, saying he doesn't just want to publish all of the conspiracy theories, telling me some of them are simply made up or completely unsourced, and others are written by people that are so angry that it's hard to take them seriously even if they are right.
this all sounded very reasonable, up until we got into what he considered examples of what are reasonable stories and what not, terms like MK-ULTRA and other secret CIA projects came up, and then he told me he also doesn't want to know everything. not anymore. some of it was just too awful. at first I thought he spoke about secret torture prisons and stuff like that, but then somehow more horrible, cause I asked him, how do you know what's worth knowing? the Holocaust was horrible, yet I think everybody should learn about it.
except, no, apparently the CIA is still doing mind-control and they're harassing people with microwaves and somehow transmitting sounds into other people's heads, giving them commands, making them perform actions. one of his friends "got too deep into the subject matter" and they started harassing him with microwaves (apparently of the heat weapon kind they developed for crowd control, but remotely pinpointed exactly at people's heads from great distances) ...

... since this was an introductory meeting, to see if we liked working with eachother, I didn't really want to raise the subject of how he could tell this remotely induced schizophrenia (which it basically is) from the regular kind of schizophrenia. ... or whether he really thought this is too awful to "know" about, but knowing what is happening to Bradley Manning right now is not.

Anyway, given that I can swallow or just ignore the bullshit a littlebit, this sounds like it's going to be heaploads of fun, right?

Plus, it seems to be my Discordian Holy Duty to follow along with this, yeah?

I started this thread because I

1) wanted to tell about it

2) alert you that, I'm fairly sure it will be possible to publish some of our stuff in there. given that I'll translate it to Dutch, it's fairly well sourced, I suppose general Discordian news would go under "spiritual", since we're not much to do with durability or care for alternative medicine, and our "hidden news" is either horrible truths (may or may not be fit for publication) or conspiracy pranks (likewise)

3) I am really going to need to pick the brains of some of the people here that know a thing or two about "hidden news", conspiracies, secret CIA mindcontrol projects and all that abovetopsecret stuff. Because to be fair, if that guy is going to continue telling me things like the CIA remotely microwaving people's brains, I'm going to have to nod and think "whatever" by default, but secretly in the back of my mind I'll keep wondering which parts are bullshit and which parts have a kernel of truth, and I don't have time to research all of that. Fortunately I know that some of you practically eat this conspiracy shit for breakfast and might be able to fill me in on the facts a bit quicker than I can dig through the swampy molasses of conspiratard bloggage.

[BRAINFART]I'd also love to do some "timewave zero" style computer simulations correlated with tarot cards or whatever, to publish in their pseudoscience section. It'd be a challenge to first create some art, pretty pictures etc, then write an artistic story around it, making it more "significant" in some sense, all the while maintaining my integrity--this last part is most important. the easiest way to achieve it, is to create pretty art based on random numbers, then use pseudorandom numbers from some source of implied significance (road traffic data correlated with weather patterns or something), quote a few paragraphs about synchronicity by Carl Jung but make no further claims whatsoever.[/BRAINFART]