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Yeah dude these keep kicking ass! I love the trippy happy faces


nitpick: spellcheck the word Excellent, last bubble

*smirks*
upon rereading I realized that

...you give the guard your id,

is talking about an ID card, not your id, as in id/ego/superego.

Still fits though.

That's really sad Jenne. And really well written by the way - the description of the heat and the buildings was really vivid.

*hugs*

"Klok"

Is it like this?

My OBNOXIOUS JERK CABAL was born, in part, when a bunch of my friends spent long periods of time being very very sarcastic assholes to each other. After months of being perpetually sarcastic, we actually experienced a cognitive flip. It was a prime example of language sculpting reality. My cabal-mate Squire Candyass called it the "terrible/awesome" phase.

"So I failed my Junior Seminar class."
"That's awesome!"
".... yeah, it is awesome! How'd you do on your chem final?"
"I aced it."
"Oh, that sucks. You want a beer?"

We'd get really excited about injuries and illnesses, and really depressed about good weather. It was a supremely weird period because somebody would leap out from behind a bush and slash you with a kitchen knife and you'd thank them. Someone got sick and threw up all over the living room and you'd high five them as you hauled out the mop. I remember scrubbing a floor with a grin, saying "I fucking love cleaning up puke!" and sort of meant it. That kind of shit was happening nonstop.

After months of this, we had to make a collective reality check. We found ourselves unable to communicate with others because our sense of humor was so far out of whack. That's just the tip of the ice berg, but suffice to say that in hindsight, I can only describe that period as disreality.

Copious use of hallucinogens, of course, made the period that much more bizarre and personally significant.


'zat what you mean?

 

I think you're definitely on the right track, TOG.

If we coordinated a cohesive message across cities around the world people would probably start taking us much more seriously.  You know our audience and potential contributors are out there, we've just got to find them.

I just got goosebumps reading that.


See also:

Okay... can you dig up anything on the Melioration Principle? It's a behavior psychology idea which basically states that organisms engage in whatever behavior gives them the best reward. And they keep doing that until a competing behavior offers a better reward.

You can use this to describe specific things - like at what point do you stop scratching an itch, or at what point do you stop eating the steak and take a bite of mashed potatoes
But I'm toying with writing an article about how this affects broad things like why we're Discordian and not something else. Or perhaps how seeking rewards and reenforcement is a bar of the Black Iron Prison.

A literature review would be helpful.


according to a brief google search, Richard J. Herrnstein, Drazen Prelec wrote a paper on Melioration as it relates to economics. That might be what I'm looking for.

just because somebody is a neophile doesnt mean they know what to do with new information

Very well said.

how else can you define a old North American who still thinks that russia is going to invade the country
or people who have otherwise made up their mind before the issue for consideration has even appeared?

Anybody see Jon Stewart last night? He was talking to Senator John McCain
(this guy:  :pow: - he's running for the republican primary)

McCain was fighting an uphill battle. Stewart's audience is very firmly anti-war. They even booed McCain when he said "the troops know this is a good cause. If you ask them what they want to do, they'll tell you they want to stay until it's finished properly." (my friends in the military feel that way too. Pretty rude to boo him there if you ask me)

McCain's major point was that we have a new general now, and a different plan, and that we should give it a chance. Generally, the American people are dissatisfied with the war, and we should try to finish it, but that doesn't mean we should dismiss every idea that doesn't involve leaving. Without derailing this into politics (which certainly isn't my point), I'd accuse much of the current young American left of this sort of neophobia. They've bought into Jon Stewart's cynical vibe and they won't hear anything else. Doesn't matter if Bush suddenly gained the ability to shit platinum bricks and singlehandedly restore the economy - they're going to hate him at every turn.

So yeah, I hear you LHX. Since this passage is in the BIP pamphlet, I wanted to direct this dissatisfaction in a way which, on some scale, helps people out.

--answering your question to LMNO myself--

Nobody IS anything. It's not any given person fits neatly into binary categories like
0: neophobe
1: neophile

It's more of a continuum. I tend to like new donut flavors, but I tend to dislike new seafood. (I hate the sea and everything in it - except for pirates and treasure. oh, and tentacles of course). I'm definitely more neophilic on the weekends than I am on Monday at 11 AM.

This sort of thinking, that we're all basically Greyfaced, is helpful because it drives home Grant Morrison's idea that initiation never ends. One can't just discover the bars of the prison and then rest on his or her laurels. One must constantly jailbreak from cell to cell.

I realize that in my youth I was somewhat grayfaced about my interpretation of Discordia. That was back in the Fnord23 days. I would have stabbed anyone that told me to stop obsessing over those played-out old memes. My exposure to this commutiny helped me escape from that, but I'm trying not to let myself get too complacent and comfortable with this version of Discordia either.

Okay, a few years back I read a magazine article which talked about this paper I've been trying to track down.

Basically they had two groups of kindergarteners who drank water bottles at lunch. Group A was composed of kids who got new water bottles every day. Group B was composed of kids whose parents refilled the same bottles every day. They tracked these kids over the years, and by grade 5, group B's test scores were significantly lower than group A's.

They cited the plastic molecules in the water having a sort of retardation effect over time. The conclusion was that you shouldn't drink out of the same bottle for more than a month or so.

Sort of reminds me of the lead used in Rome's aqueducts and the theory that Romans were gradually retarded.

I've been using this article like mad in conversation, but I'd like to read the actual reference behind it so I'm not totally talking out my ass. If you could dig that up somehow, I will give you a cookie.