I've been noticing that almost every Discordian site uses the standard Discordian dating system - is this not sort of missing the point of Discordianism?
I made up my own calendar over a year ago, nothing special, but I can say its mine.
Thoughts?
Not the same issue, but certainly related:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deVlk0p9chU
These people have obviously gone through a lot of trouble and effort to make this video, but would it not be more rewarding to create their own methods of convincing people, rather than simply restate the PD??
Everyone has to start somewhere, and many times that somewhere is rehashing stuff that seems to have worked before.
At least that kind of how I learned to dance.
I learned to dance like this:
:hammer:
Well, in those pants you'd have to.
I certainly bought Discordianism at face value when I first became interested, but one of the first things I did was to write up my Burnig Bush Revelations . . . I wanted my own stuff to give people, not 'official' documents.
I wish I could follow up with these people after a year or so . . .
I never use the Discordian calendar.
To me, it was never worth the time to remember the system and how it correlates, because I didn't think the joke was that funny.
Sure, today's date is arbitrary, and is founded on the erroneous birth of Christ. I learned that in high school. So what?
I see the Discordian calendar as one of those things Discordians use to identify with other Discordians. Huh?
It's like, "Hey look we're different. But, we're different together."
After all, Discordians are still human. They still want to belong to something. The symbolism of calendars and five-fingered hands of Eris are that warm and fuzzy safety blanket.
I guess OUR warm and fuzzy safety blanket is that most of us are kind of sick of that stuff.
My warm and fuzzy security blanket is a bottle of scotch and Fox News.
I use the Discordian calendar when I need to sound over-the-top in explaining why I'm taking a day off from work.
"Yeah, our holy book requires a day of phasting* on the 55th day of every month, you know how it goes." Usually they're so weirded out they don't ask what religion I'm talking about. Nor would they get it if I told them anyway.
BTW - The video clip you posted is from Forteetu, who sometimes posts here when he's not busy putting together festivals or something.
*pronounced "fasting" but means something else entirely.
Forteetu is a pretty cool dude, IMO. I'll have to watch the video now.
Quote from: Professor Cramulus on October 17, 2007, 02:55:07 PM
I use the Discordian calendar when I need to sound over-the-top in explaining why I'm taking a day off from work.
"Yeah, our holy book requires a day of phasting* on the 55th day of every month, you know how it goes." Usually they're so weirded out they don't ask what religion I'm talking about. Nor would they get it if I told them anyway.
BTW - The video clip you posted is from Forteetu, who sometimes posts here when he's not busy putting together festivals or something.
*pronounced "fasting" but means something else entirely.
Back when we were both doing the Retail Hell thing, Chuck and I would put the Holy Days on the store's calendar and then make up some screwy rituals to perform during our break. I'm still baffled to this day why we were never written up, let alone fired.
I tend to use it in online site stuff because the calendar already exists in Linux (Linux command "ddate") and I can pull and display something overtly Discordian in about three lines of PHP.
I think there's something to be said for the existence of the Discordian Calendar existing on 50% of the web servers currently active on the net. (and the DNS servers, SMTP servers, etc etc etc).
this is truth. my terminal window at the university still greets me with it every time :-D [/nerd]
Quote from: Hoopla on October 16, 2007, 11:03:00 PM
I've been noticing that almost every Discordian site uses the standard Discordian dating system - is this not sort of missing the point of Discordianism?
I made up my own calendar over a year ago, nothing special, but I can say its mine.
Thoughts?
It's today. It's just like any other day. Everyone got dumber and everyone got meaner and nobody laughed and nobody cared and all I can dream about is the day the power finally runs out and all the fucking primates get eaten by the triumphant coyotes who will finally get their day at the top of the food chain.
Amen.
I'm with LMNO, I never bothered with it because I never saw it as being funny or particularly interesting in the sense of telling me something I need to know.
Though apparently, some argue (lol, Wikipedia code phrases ITT) its actually a fairly well designed calendar, considering the fuckups we had getting to the current Georgian one. Greg Hill probably did it in that case, since he was a mathematician.
well you can hardly make it more complicated than having alternating months of 30 and 31 days, except for the middle two, and the second one which is 28 and sometimes 29 days. also having one (or sometimes two) days left in a year when you used up all the weeks wasn't quite the stroke of genius either. never mind naming some of the months after numbers, but of course the wrong numbers.
i know there are all sorts of historical reasons for it but damn, what a trainwreck. a perfect example of the Machine gone stupid. humans have a real way of getting themselves stuck in a stupid situation. like the QWERTY keyboard, the australian railways (though they fixed that one in the end, afaik), MS Windows for the PC / Internet Explorer, character encodings, HTML specifications .. and probably much more.
so it kinda makes sense a discordian, when confronted with all the disorder in the traditional calendar, would make the discordian calender quite orderly (except for the zany names, which aren't really that more zany than the current system actually).
although some of the examples i named show that it is possible to change specifications/acquire interoperability, for example HTML specs are slowly but steadily becoming more standard with the webstandards movements. it just takes a whole lot of hard work and dedication.
I concur with Cain and LMNO.
Sure, I could take the time to sit down and learn the Discordian calendar, but I feel I have better things to do with my time. Books to read. Infants to drop kick. Etc. It can be entertaining, but I think the usefulness of it is pretty strongly correlated to what "flavor" of Discordianism you subscribe to, if you will.
Cram mentioned his use of the Discordian calendar to talk about holy days, etc. He does the Over The Top style really well, especially in person. I don't pull it off so well, so I go for a slightly more stealthy version--the calendar thing just doesn't jive with my style.
I can't say that I would criticize anyone for using it. I might not laugh, but I won't criticize, because it's about what works for each person. I will roll my eyes and make a snarky remark if anyone expects me to actually know what date they just told me, though.
If someone used the discordian calendar on me, I'd just say, "what is that in Gregorian?"
I do like the names of the days, though.
I think that the names of the days and the names of the seasons also make great "esoteric bullshit" to babble at people when heaping Discordianism on them. A dissertation on how the seasons are representative of the stages that all systems go through has converted more than one cabbage to Our Lady.
(Of course, some point after conversion I remind them that its all bullshit) ;-)
Quote from: Darth Cupcake on October 23, 2007, 03:20:42 PM
I concur with Cain and LMNO.
Sure, I could take the time to sit down and learn the Discordian calendar, but I feel I have better things to do with my time. Books to read. Infants to drop kick. Etc. It can be entertaining, but I think the usefulness of it is pretty strongly correlated to what "flavor" of Discordianism you subscribe to, if you will.
Cram mentioned his use of the Discordian calendar to talk about holy days, etc. He does the Over The Top style really well, especially in person. I don't pull it off so well, so I go for a slightly more stealthy version--the calendar thing just doesn't jive with my style.
I can't say that I would criticize anyone for using it. I might not laugh, but I won't criticize, because it's about what works for each person. I will roll my eyes and make a snarky remark if anyone expects me to actually know what date they just told me, though.
My intention wasn't really to negatively criticize (although I suppose I did), but to comment on what seems to me to be precariously close to promoting dogma. Now, to be fair, nobody that I know of is actually insisting anyone has to use the Discordian calendar . . . so its not really dogma at all . . .
I guess it would just make me giggle if there were hundreds of "Discordian Calendars" - just imagine how Wiki would try to deal with that.
Does this make sense? I didn't mean to diss anyone.
Quote from: Hoopla on October 23, 2007, 10:59:52 PM
Quote from: Darth Cupcake on October 23, 2007, 03:20:42 PM
I concur with Cain and LMNO.
Sure, I could take the time to sit down and learn the Discordian calendar, but I feel I have better things to do with my time. Books to read. Infants to drop kick. Etc. It can be entertaining, but I think the usefulness of it is pretty strongly correlated to what "flavor" of Discordianism you subscribe to, if you will.
Cram mentioned his use of the Discordian calendar to talk about holy days, etc. He does the Over The Top style really well, especially in person. I don't pull it off so well, so I go for a slightly more stealthy version--the calendar thing just doesn't jive with my style.
I can't say that I would criticize anyone for using it. I might not laugh, but I won't criticize, because it's about what works for each person. I will roll my eyes and make a snarky remark if anyone expects me to actually know what date they just told me, though.
My intention wasn't really to negatively criticize (although I suppose I did), but to comment on what seems to me to be precariously close to promoting dogma. Now, to be fair, nobody that I know of is actually insisting anyone has to use the Discordian calendar . . . so its not really dogma at all . . .
I guess it would just make me giggle if there were hundreds of "Discordian Calendars" - just imagine how Wiki would try to deal with that.
Does this make sense? I didn't mean to diss anyone.
It's a good point. I don't really use the Discordian calender IRL... but I occasionally lead people to believe that I do. When you say that today is Prickle-Prickle, the 23 day of Discord YOLD ... people look at you funny. Then they go to Wikipedia and think that they've been exposed to something real (Wikipedia is great for adding weight to Discordianism LOL).
I think that being Discordian might be tricky sometimes. If you're too Discordian you'll shock people, but in a "That guy is crazy" sort of way... which if that's what you're going for is Good. However, you can also be Discordian in a way that makes people think "This person is involved in something much larger than I realize". The latter is really what I find most effective in "breaking open the head".
Being a crazy individualist seems like fun, but it doesn't have the psychological appeal to potential converts ;-)
For example, I've been with this company for 8 years. I have done Turkey Curses at VP's, invocations in my cubicle and for quite some time I had a Discordian Calender hanging up on the outside of my cube. One of the people near me came in one day and said "I saw a news article about your people". She produced an article which talked about this couple which had a bizarre incident. Basically on their way home (long, quiet, country road) they were startled to see a glowing 3 foot tall Ronald McDonald standing the the middle of the road. (It was a plastic molded figure with some sort of light bulb or something inside). They continued down the road and saw another, and another and another... for a mile the Ronald McDonald's continued and stopped right at their driveway (the only one in the nearby area. They assumed this was some sort of threat and called the Police. When the police got there... there were no Ronald McDonalds anywhere (they eventually found one in a ditch).
That was the only story, but this co-worker was convinced that I would know about it since it was obviously part of the Discordian Movement (I have no idea who the hell did it). So I let her think that I knew all about it. I smiled and nodded as I read it and then handed back to her with a wink and said "I Know Nothing".
She converted.
Quote from: Ratatosk on October 24, 2007, 03:26:08 PM
For example, I've been with this company for 8 years. I have done Turkey Curses at VP's, invocations in my cubicle and for quite some time I had a Discordian Calender hanging up on the outside of my cube. One of the people near me came in one day and said "I saw a news article about your people". She produced an article which talked about this couple which had a bizarre incident. Basically on their way home (long, quiet, country road) they were startled to see a glowing 3 foot tall Ronald McDonald standing the the middle of the road. (It was a plastic molded figure with some sort of light bulb or something inside). They continued down the road and saw another, and another and another... for a mile the Ronald McDonald's continued and stopped right at their driveway (the only one in the nearby area. They assumed this was some sort of threat and called the Police. When the police got there... there were no Ronald McDonalds anywhere (they eventually found one in a ditch).
That was the only story, but this co-worker was convinced that I would know about it since it was obviously part of the Discordian Movement (I have no idea who the hell did it). So I let her think that I knew all about it. I smiled and nodded as I read it and then handed back to her with a wink and said "I Know Nothing".
She converted.
:mittens:
I'm going to bump this since it's still on the first page and I don't think I have enough to say for a brand new thread.
I used to completely ignore the Discordian calendar just like LMNO. A couple months ago I started trying to work independently from home (language services - still trying, by the way) and realized the whole 7-day week rhythm is a little off my personal needs. So, since I'm on Linux, and ddate is just a few taps away, I've set myself up with a simple system whereby the Discordian week determines how much I work:
-Sweetmorn: No work. Do whatever.
-Boomtime to Prickle-Prickle: Work-for-money is the first priority
-Setting Orange: Any work left over from the midweek gets priority (I call this cleanup); certain projects that are serious but not work-intensive and make me no money get priority right after them.
I try to limit errand-running to Sweetmorn and Setting Orange because I waste enough time without leaving my room.
I find this system very comfortable, though I have yet to get enough of a workload to make it financially stable. Another major glitch is that the world is completely out of sync with it and often I have social events inconveniently breaking into my midweek.
I love the ddate thing, I never would have guessed to try it. :)
One of the billion reasons that made me switch to Linux...
ddate combined with Ubuntu's fish desklet...
I just looked up the ddate thing - its Latin to me.
It's simpletastic. You just punch in ddate on the terminal in Linux and it spits out the Discordian date.
I'm thinking Hoopla was making an oblique joke.
Oh, I see it now.
Still waking up...
I ported ddate to Second Life actually. Coding it in LSL ended up being a little bit awkward, and I guess I could have just made a web page that displays the date and used an http request to grab the date from the web page, but that would have been cheating or something and would not have taken nearly as long.
The calendar is one of the only bits of Discordian dogma that I particularly like, although I never really bother with the days of the week, and only because doing so becomes too impractical. I tend not to do things every [ certain day ] of the month, and if I do, it's only once a month and not too difficult to convert to the Discordian seasons, but I do have certain classes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday or Tuesday and Thursday and I work certain days and so forth. I do like devising ways to celebrate holidays, and somehow using a different calendar also makes it easier to make up my own holidays.
My only concern with using the calendar openly is that someone might get the impression that I am doing it to seem different, a practice which I sort of abhor, and I think the key here is in the approach. I use the Discordian calendar pretty openly and even write the date in that format on my papers, but I never actually acknowledge that I am doing this this or that there is anything unusual about it. If anybody asks me why I wrote the date in an unusual fashion, I tend to look confused and ask them what they're talking about, which generally baffles the person, and this, I think, is more true to the tradition than the calendar itself.
Well, I think the most traditional approach to implementing this calendar is to flat out ignore it.
But yours is a close second!
I demand you all use my calendar.
That is all.