Messages

I have to agree on the appellate court in this case.  Having a bunch of people come out of the closet in the military, only to have DADT upheld by SCOTUS, would be very bad for the plaintiffs.

Also, fuck Obama for making this necessary.

And you realize that if he doesn't take this to the SC, that the next 'Tea Party' President could?

Personally, I'd rather see it go to the top and either get kicked out and done with, or hope that Congress will repeal it before then.

Letting it sit, only means that the next administration could bring the mess back to the surface. I don't think Obama has a better option... unless it would have been pushing Congress to deal with this two years ago. Granted, he was trying to stop the country from entering a great depression, but I think Congress may be capable of dealing with more than one thing at once... though thats just a theory.

Optimist.

This is the "but Obama is really smart and during his campaign also really charismatic so he must have a big trick up his sleeve to make it all right within the next two years"-optimism, right?

HOPE

That would be 'Eternal Darkness', and it almost had a friend of mine convinced that our dead friend (who's urn of ashes was in the closet.... hey it was his apartment) was messing with him on purpose. Probably shouldn't have been playing in the dark, come to think of it.

Mindfucks include:

that game did SUCH a good job of what it was trying to do. I love games which interact with you on a level outside of the game. It reminds me of Metal Gear Solid where you're talking to Psycho Mantis and he talks about the other games on your memory card. Or he asks you to put the controller on the floor so he can move it with his mind (AKA he vibrates it).

Eternal Darkness drove my already mentally unstable roommate up the wall. He'd stand up to swat a fly on the screen and have a FIT when he realized it was INSIDE the game. Or the camera angle would turn so gradually that you wouldn't even realize you were looking at the screen crooked.

He really almost lost his shit when it looked like the gamecube reset itself and cleared his memory card. Then ZZZZT you're back in the boss fight blinking in headlights.

I'm really impressed with games that have managed to do that - blur the line between the game and the real world.

In Metal Gear Solid 3, your health recovers naturally over time.. the recovery is based on the PS2 cpu clock. You recover faster if the game is off. So if you're in a tight spot and have no healing, the best thing to do is to save the game, go away for a bit, and come back to where you left off. I was killing time by doing laundry and realized that by doing my laundry I was actually playing the game. Having a cup of tea with my mom was a game activity.

I didn't play a lot of the metal gear game for the PSP, but it had a cool real-world interaction too. In that game you were recruiting soldiers onto your squad. You'd find them through game play, but you could also discover them by trying to connect to a new wireless network. So the most effective way to play the game was to take you PSP and walk around down town scanning for wireless networks. I used to play it on the bus to work, and often I'd be able to pick somebody up if we were stopped at a red light for a while. I was coordinating my game play with the bus route - isn't that crazy?

The Metal Gear games are filled with mindfucks, and neat little play mechanics, like that...
One of my favorites is towards the end of Metal Gear Solid 2, when you start getting really bizarre codec calls from the Colonel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS8-B6H_I20

Worth watching for the codec calls, It might be a little bit of a spoiler, but the game does get much much weirder after this part.

The vid doesnt show the fake Game Over screen, which is also pretty fun.
FISSION MAILED.

Also, some of the codec conversations towards the end of the game, when you realize exactly what it is that you've been talking to all this time, are pretty awesome.

Sadly, Lincoln is a gold-mine for shit like this.
For example: Kitten in a Bong
There are a lot of terminally retarded people here.
... and none of them can drive, either.

Oh, there was also the college student here who made a big deal about his campaign to not wear seatbelts.
He later died in a car accident, which he would have survived, had he been wearing his seatbelt... the other person in the car survived, he did not.

I think there is a link to that on this board somewhere, this is where I remember first reading about that, anyway.

I cant help it, I have problems.

Spare me.  Your oompaloompa monkey problems are not Our concern. 

I expect a more detailed response. 

Why can't you be more like the others?  They never give me these problems.

I tried, I really did, but I don't think I can keep taking the PILLS.
I did, for a while, and I really appreciate how they turn down the volume...
but I keep losing time, and everything tastes like cardboard.
Its not that I want to feel, really, I mean it.
... but they were interfering with my performance at work.
... and I dont know what I'd have to think if they had to shut off my box.

I cant help it, I have problems.

Hmm, for starters, I'd like to state that your writing is specifically one of the things that has kept me invested in this community over the years. When I first read them, I felt a kind of odd congruence, because your style of writing (the approach) seemed extremely similar to mine... so much so, indeed, that I chose not to share many of my writings with this board. Perhaps I was a bit intimidated, but also worried that anything I did would be too derivative, I had a schtick and you do it better than I do. What I have done since then, and why I do not write, will become clear when I share my perception of discordia in the following paragraph. Forgive me if this is unwarranted, but I do feel you are asking us specifically to speak up, so I will do so as candidly as possible.

but this turned out to be way to long... so I will post in in a different thread.

Self Expression

this kind of started as a response to I am no longer here.

but I've decided to post it in its own thread in respect to its length, and giving other people room to respond to Sepia.


I'll begin with how I discovered Discordia, or rather... who I was when I discovered it. I was a youth in the wilderness, I was angry and I was confused, I guess if were to label myself then I might have called myself a punk as its analogous to the crowd I ran with, the tribe I affiliated myself with... except that even back then I was aware of the danger of labels, and their use as tribal affiliation. I was however, frightened of the world and its traps, I was failing in school because of simple frustration, and the psychological torments of my childhood were finally beginning to rise from their dwellings within my subconscious and manifest themselves in awful ways. They tortured me, and at the very beginning, I feel that I was without identity except for those issues... they defined me, and they steered the ways in which I defined myself. Outside of school, I read prolifically, and I wrote not-quite-so prolifically... but it was raw and savage, steered by my desire to turn my frustration into a kind of beauty... I desired creativity more than anything, or rather, I was a bundle of raw energy that steered its fury into various mediums, I made arts, I put words together, and I projected it through the speakers as a garbled mess. I went on loooooong night walks through the city, to witness sometimes its horror and its beauty, but also the simple beauty of being alone. I imagined things, terrible things, the spiders would talk to me (dead fucking serious, about this, actually) and I usually didn't like what they had to say. The wind in the trees menaced me, I was haunted by unseen voices, my subconscious was truly a terrible miasma which plagued me. I rarely took drugs, suffice to say a certain amount of mental illness runs in my family, and I had suppressed a great deal of pain. I was never abused, I just had some interesting life experiences, which effected me more profoundly than I realized.

Over the years, I've dealt with the traumas of my youth, I've become a more stable person... but I'm not ready to skip ahead to this point yet. We're still pre-discordia in my narrative, although back then I believe I was a true discordian in spirit, but I had not yet discovered this particular tribe. Initially, Discordia approached me, or rather a manifestation of Eris... A girl, a good friend, who provided the initial strife which shook me awake. I ditched the one sided, soul sucking, co-dependent relationship I was in and fell deeply in love with this friend. My overtures to her took place over many years, and we were occasionally more than friends, but what I wanted from her... simply to be with her and no one else, to dedicate myself to her completely and serve her loyally, to use her basically in order to identify myself; this was not congruent with her wishes, and simply was not possible. So for a second time, she became the embodiment of Eris, she violently jarred me awake from my waking dream, and told me firmly "Think for yourself, Schmuck"

... and after that, she became my muse. She moved away, driven by a fury similar to but also dissimilar from my own, although we kept in touch and (remain friends to this day). When I say she became my muse, I mean this quite literally. At times, when I was driven creatively... my internal dialogue spoke with her voice, I'd sense her presence in the unseen patterns of this universe, I tasted her scent on the wind at times and it drove me mad. Of course I knew even back then, that these phantasmagoria are subconscious projections, but this was the shape and form of them, and my love for this girl continued to drive me, albeit in a different form. Maybe its simply that I didn't want to let go, the sound of her voice, her smell, her passion & drive, the idealized version of her that existed in my mind was a way of holding onto the bliss I felt when I was with her... but it was intermingled with her message, the one that said that I needed to realize for myself, it was driving me towards expression but also towards self awareness and definition. I was aware of the divergence here, that this muse was not the thing it represented itself, but a kind of abstract creation which was sparked into life initially by my worship of her.

So that's how I found Eris. Shortly after this, I found Discordia.

At this time, I was post high-school. I was out in the world, I lived in many different houses with many different people, but never alone. I could never afford solitude. I don't know if I ever wanted it. I still externalized my internal strife by putting myself, intentionally, into chaotic situations and surroundings. I had quite a few interesting experiences in this time, and I may have been more sure of myself than I was a few years ago, but that was still the omnipresent factor in my life. I could never avoid it, because it was at the core of my being, but the way it manifested itself in my life was overpowering.

When I found these boards initially, they were much different, and so was I. I was more Erisian, which is to say that I deified Eris, because she was analogous to my muse. The posters were different people, even those that still post here, although if any of you (besides Roger, whom I'm certain has always been here) are the same people from those days... I might not even know, since the changes in user names and tenor of this board has been difficult for me to keep track of. Back then, I might have been more willing to speak, and I probably spoke brashly without consideration of the consequences of speaking. Self expression was something more unrestrained for me back then, although to be honest I made few attempts at it here, because the chaos in my life was the venue of my expression... and when I came here, I mostly listened. It was good to see a structure of belief that fit me well on multiple layers. As a child, I had been deeply influenced by eastern religion, the closest thing to a religion that I had to a religious affiliation was Taoism, although my parents were both rabid born-again christians... probably the thing that initially led to my love of A:Horror films and B: Death/Black Metal. I considered myself to be a Taoist Pantheist, and still did even after "converting". Anyway, the point is I found these forums, I read our literature and liked some of it... I thought the Principia itself was something I had been looking for for a long time, kind of a modern absurdist taoism, and I embraced it fully. I was never really taken in too much by the fnords and all that junk, so when the rift between the pinealists and the rest of it happened, it wasn't hard for me to avoid that trap. Besides, by then I had begun to grow up a bit more.

As for what Discordia meant to me then, its difficult for me to put into words precisely, I know who I was back then and communicating that is probably the best I can do. As far as what Discordia means to me NOW, well, I think I agree with Sepia quite a bit here... I can see why I was intimidated a bit by you, and why our styles seemed so similar to me. We come from a similar place, from Burroughs fringe, the primary work of discordian literature, for me, was NAKED LUNCH. It, I felt more than anything, was raw human experience... and it illustrated precisely, I feel, the role of the machine in our day to day lives. It was, of course, Burroughs personal filter... I'm sure (Sepia) you and I see the world through a different filter, I feel that we share a great deal of the same reference material. It is a shared subconscious belief, in that you and I most definitely agree, and its one that we've all been actively participating in shaping. We can try very hard to define it, but its impossible to define absolutely, because by our own faults of humanity we will always project ourselves into it... how can we do anything else?

So now I've shared story, a long story, not the whole story, but a story with you none-the-less. In doing so I'm breaking one of my cardinal rules, KYFMS, you see... I don't like to share. I've learned that this level of sharing, this kind of openness, makes one vulnerable. It leaves you open to attack. This place has taught me that just as much as the rest of the world. Sometimes, we have to break our own rules, sometimes we have to break out of our own molds. My own manifestation of Eris taught me that many years ago, and I'm still learning that lesson every day. In order to advance, in order to learn, we have to leave our comfort zone... the time when my comfort zone was chaos was a long time ago, it seems, and I'm a better person for having moved past that.

Since then, there have been times that the tenor of this place has been too violent, too confrontational, too abrasive... for me to really actively seek participation. So Lurked Moar, and Moar, and Moar, and Moar... until finally I was silent, or when I did speak it wasn't so much to contribute as much as to just assert that I'm still lurking. I still find it worth my time to come here, because amidst all the braying noise, there is meaningful content... lights that shine so very brightly through the din, and Sepia, you are one of those lights.

LA Dee Dee Da Dee Dee Da....

Oh, and as for my friend, we still keep in touch and we're still very close friends. She lives in D.C. now, pursuing a career. There is a reason I chose her as my muse so long ago, because she's brilliant, flawed (human like all of us), but brilliant. As for my muse, well, I don't hear it quite as loudly anymore... and it very rarely wears the same shape and form that it used to. Sometimes it makes me sad, and I wished I could have held onto that thing forever, but I can't remember that smell, and that voice isn't appropriate anymore for the purpose it once served. I have my own voice now.

Besides, there is another woman in my life now, and I think she dislikes sharing just as much as I do.

Every time I see a thread like this in the menu, I think its going to be "How Discordianism got my groove back"

4.  God is real, and he eats your soul when you die.

All music is shit to god
He thinks we're a bunch of babies
He has no patience for all our noise
He makes great big plans to destroy us.

All of his stuff uses loads of piano.  It was his instrument.  He's arguably one of the top 3 pianists of the 20th century.

Elton John, Billy Joel, and...? Who you got third? Keith Emerson? Steve Winwood? Rick Wakeman? Joe Jackson?


Also, where do you stand on Kraftwerk?

I'm willing to bet he is not on the side of Kraftwerk.

they and a one or two others were my introduction to electronic. fucking love em.

Dok, you don't like ELO I'm guessing?

One of the best bands ever, IMO.

Fun Fun Fun
On the Autobahn

You're all overlooking the real villain of contemporary music - autotune.

god yes.  While I love the technology able to adjust a frequency without degrading the quality of the signal (LOL right?) I hate how it's being used in modern music.

Autotune has potential, its just awful when its used for its intended purpose.

I'd love to get the chance to play with it, I wonder if its possible to autotune the sound of machinery to whalesongs... for example.

I've long toyed with the idea of getting a little chibi Kali ollying over Shiva on a skateboard.

Yeah, what LMNO said. Looked into Gnosticism out of historical curiosity. Basically, Old Testament God is still a god, and created the material universe, but is evil. Jesus is a manifestation of the "Good" god. Again oversimplification, but it gives you the gist.

I've already decided, though, that whatever ultimate reality/high god/whatever may or may not exist is just amoral, in that, it does not share the same values we do.

Why should it? By projecting morality onto it we're forcing our own anthropomorphism onto it. I always felt that if something akin to a deity exists, its essentially nothing more than the singularity that exists at the beginning of the universe, at the moment of big-bang, and at the end... the logical conclusion of entropic decay and expansion.

Assuming some kind of creation mythology, the very act of creating free will negates omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience; introducing any kind of random element means sacrificing all of those things. Such a deity could only exist alone, otherwise any kind of free-will doesnt exist.

Perhaps there is some kind over-arching pattern which defines the universe, patterns within patterns, things that could be expressed mathematically that can help us understand the universe as we see it. Such a pattern could be deified, but its not an anthropomorphic being.

We're so hung up on the minutiae of our definitions here that we miss out on the big picture. Religious belief has been, in the past, a kind of bridge for us to be able to attempt to understand some of these things on an intuitive level. Religious dogmaticism and religious institution, has traditionally been a means of societal control, and usually not one that promotes understanding on any level.

In modern times, the entire atheistic movement has less to do with understanding, and more to do with backlash against the religious control of the past, kind of like black metal. Understanding of religious thought itself is something that might benefit us, and various thinkers have pursued this (I'm looking at you Jung), but just brushing religion completely to the side dismisses the fact that it has (at least in a few stages of human history) been a beneficial force to our development. Its hindered us too, and we're beginning to develop to the point where our religious beliefs can be bridged with science. The two dont have to be mutually exclusive.

As much as I dislike religious institutions, the extremist elements of the Atheist movement do more to fomenting dissent than they do to advance human intellect. You know, people like Dawkins and Sagan express a great deal of wonderment at the sheer majesty of the universe, and its great... I imagine they share the same kind of emotional impact when they look at a giraffe, that is expressed by ICP, but the difference is simply that they are willing to try and understand how that giraffe came about. It doesn't hurt their brain to ask questions. The people who carry the torch for these people, dont always have the same approach, they're just accepting a different flavor of dogmatic stigmas.

Anyway, I think others in this thread have put more succinctly why the label of Skeptic is more beneficial and appropriate to scientific thought than the label of Atheist. Why Agnosticism is less biased than Atheism, because both Atheists and Theists essentially are at odds over the definition of a word, which in and of itself, is vague and multifaceted.... not to mention completely irrelevant.

while you were typing 10 new replies have been posted. You may wish to review your post.

Wait? What?
Aww, fuck it, lets just hit post.

Response to the summary of your post:

Exactly. If there is some sort of deity that created the universe, it would by necessity not be like us. We're only special in that we have civilization. Why should a god of that stature have the same morals we do? We don't have the same values as an ant does. We're glorified monkeys.

Black metal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-89JLgrBSs
Lyrics fairly relevant if you can make them out

Sagan=cooler than Dawkins, and much friendlier as an atheist. Plus he came up with the original FSMism, and left it in a paragraph rather than dragging it out. Again, see old school atheists vs. "New Atheists"

Last note- Black metal should never be mentioned in the same post as ICP. God forbids it.  

Ihsan is a Laveyan Satanist, which is a couple steps above labeling yourself as an Atheist, IMO. and IX Equilibrium is one of the best Emperor albums.

I really just wanted to compare ICP to Sagan. I think there is a common ground between Miracles and Cosmos, but it should be fairly obvious where the former falls short of the latter.

... and the black metal comparison is meant to illustrate atheism as a backlash against religious institutionalism, a better specific example might be Varg Vikernes with his church burnings. 

There is a farm in Waverly Nebraska, which is like five miles from Lincoln where I live, that makes these.
They're called Smart Chicken, and they're fucking delicious...
Sadly, all of the grocery stores around here just carry the normal chicken products, but not their chicken sausages and brats.
Its a travesty.

I wont eat anything but organic free-range chicken,
Have you ever been to a Tyson plant?
I have.

Yeah, what LMNO said. Looked into Gnosticism out of historical curiosity. Basically, Old Testament God is still a god, and created the material universe, but is evil. Jesus is a manifestation of the "Good" god. Again oversimplification, but it gives you the gist.

I've already decided, though, that whatever ultimate reality/high god/whatever may or may not exist is just amoral, in that, it does not share the same values we do.

Why should it? By projecting morality onto it we're forcing our own anthropomorphism onto it. I always felt that if something akin to a deity exists, its essentially nothing more than the singularity that exists at the beginning of the universe, at the moment of big-bang, and at the end... the logical conclusion of entropic decay and expansion.

Assuming some kind of creation mythology, the very act of creating free will negates omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience; introducing any kind of random element means sacrificing all of those things. Such a deity could only exist alone, otherwise any kind of free-will doesnt exist.

Perhaps there is some kind over-arching pattern which defines the universe, patterns within patterns, things that could be expressed mathematically that can help us understand the universe as we see it. Such a pattern could be deified, but its not an anthropomorphic being.

We're so hung up on the minutiae of our definitions here that we miss out on the big picture. Religious belief has been, in the past, a kind of bridge for us to be able to attempt to understand some of these things on an intuitive level. Religious dogmaticism and religious institution, has traditionally been a means of societal control, and usually not one that promotes understanding on any level.

In modern times, the entire atheistic movement has less to do with understanding, and more to do with backlash against the religious control of the past, kind of like black metal. Understanding of religious thought itself is something that might benefit us, and various thinkers have pursued this (I'm looking at you Jung), but just brushing religion completely to the side dismisses the fact that it has (at least in a few stages of human history) been a beneficial force to our development. Its hindered us too, and we're beginning to develop to the point where our religious beliefs can be bridged with science. The two dont have to be mutually exclusive.

As much as I dislike religious institutions, the extremist elements of the Atheist movement do more to fomenting dissent than they do to advance human intellect. You know, people like Dawkins and Sagan express a great deal of wonderment at the sheer majesty of the universe, and its great... I imagine they share the same kind of emotional impact when they look at a giraffe, that is expressed by ICP, but the difference is simply that they are willing to try and understand how that giraffe came about. It doesn't hurt their brain to ask questions. The people who carry the torch for these people, dont always have the same approach, they're just accepting a different flavor of dogmatic stigmas.

Anyway, I think others in this thread have put more succinctly why the label of Skeptic is more beneficial and appropriate to scientific thought than the label of Atheist. Why Agnosticism is less biased than Atheism, because both Atheists and Theists essentially are at odds over the definition of a word, which in and of itself, is vague and multifaceted.... not to mention completely irrelevant.

while you were typing 10 new replies have been posted. You may wish to review your post.

Wait? What?
Aww, fuck it, lets just hit post.