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I love it. Thanks. Btw, most of those pdfs seem to convert cleanly to ascii using pdf2text. I'm using epdfview, since it's the only pdf viewer that seems to work nicely, but it renders very cleanly there.

Meh. Jesus was a pretty cool guy -- became gnostic demiurge and doesn't afraid of crucifiction. Too bad most christians have no idea who he is.

Are these .txt or some other format?

On the flip side, it would be rather interesting to change your name to something obscene and then not change it back. Just to watch people try to skirt around the name.

Not that I'll do it, but it's an interesting idea.

NB: I haven't read this thread (I'm not sure which one it is).

Genesis is interesting if you consider it the output of machine translation (according to historians, Genesis is actually translated into hebrew from caananite, from akkadian, from sumerian, with heavy censoring from the deutronomists in the ugartic stage between caananite and hebrew).

Holy-Moses-Eating-Out-a-Burning-Bush, this post just brought back terrible PTSD memories from my Linguistics units courses. Biblical linguistic history should mold and rot in a sealed filing cabinet in the deepest depths of hell reserved for intellectual travesties.

I actually like dead languages. Especially ones that have been dead or so long that barely anyone know that they exist. I also use my cursory knowledge of sumerian (which no one can correct me on, because no one else even knows that much) to "prove" that <insert your favourite monotheistic abrahamic religion here> was translated incorrectly in these places, totally fabricated much later here, and still noticably dating from a particular period aside from minor details like how many gods they have and whether or not their penis size is documented.

Actually, I agree about his short stories. If they're short enough, you can stay awake just long enough to finish one.

As for the bits of the bible to read, you forgot the heretical bits. Some bits of the book of Enoch are supposed to be good, and I hear some good things about the book of Jubilees. Genesis is interesting if you consider it the output of machine translation (according to historians, Genesis is actually translated into hebrew from caananite, from akkadian, from sumerian, with heavy censoring from the deutronomists in the ugartic stage between caananite and hebrew).

http://www.mindmeister.com/maps/show_public/11465415?password=kallisti
If anyone wants to contribute to my totally incomplete map of Operation Mindfuck, go ahead. Also feel free to fuck it up. The password is kallisti.

I got it overnight in rtorrent. Azureus should work too.

I have to say, if you find it important to have books in a style that keeps you from falling asleep, stay away from anything by PKD (especially prior to A Scanner Darkly, which is the first book he wrote off cocaine) and also anything by Asimov. IMO, they have the most absurdly NORMAL (and therefore boring as hell, since they don't have a voice and they sound like a newspaper reporter post anal-editing), despite having interesting ideas.

Also, if you find anything by an ex-WWII-military person about "the hidden power of believing" (I've come across several books like this, all exactly the same except for the title and the author), don't bother getting it: it's basically the simplest tenets of chaos magic written in boring language, and puffed up with enough invented anecdotes to make it barely fill a small book.

So, "This shit is fucked" is better than "The American Political System is in serious need of an overhaul"?

How about "American politics is totally fucked. Somebody needs to fix it."


Btw, what I never got about this essay (I've read it a number of times over the years -- it was in the back of the version of 1984 I read in 7th grade) is that Orwell never followed his own advice. In fact, in 1984, he demonstrated via newspeak how his own advice could be followed WHILE controlling language and politics through language. Language has a lot of bandwidth, more than you'd think -- his suggestion is to remove half the bandwidth by speaking overly simply, but the bandwidth is there whether or not you want to use it, and if you don't use it, the content that isn't there will have artifacts imposed upon it.

Plus, Kurt Vonnegut's novels give a good example of using the full bandwidth while seeming like you're not using much at all. William Gibson's novels are a good example of using half the bandwidth while seeming like you're using several hundred times the maximum.

It's always just you. Solipist.

Ah, but if only one person spams the 1995 discordians from the past, how will we annoy them enough to join forces against the order?

Manta Obscura: I'll make up a list once I get home and can look at the comics, but there are a lot of really obvious ones.

Also, anyone notice that one can register an email address to be posted to a blogger.com blog? Also, google groups listservs work. You can also add the blog email to a listserv (without even needing to have the blog accept membership), and blogger posts can also be sent to YET ANOTHER email (which can be the listserv if we feel like spamming google out infinitely).

I dunno. Maybe jake them, or recruit them into a gasm. We'd be hard pressed to spread a gasm more effectively than by joining two entirely separate groups of discordians -- the old guard, which was sending jakes by post before most people knew what a modem was, and the new guard, which hands around places like this.

I have been reading The Invisibles, and I noticed that a lot of the people posting to the letters column were obviously discordians. Furthermore, a lot of them left in their full addresses. Anyone want to jake some discordians who still use the US Postal System circa 1995? It's only been a little over 10 years, so it's more likely to work than some of the addresses listed in the Principia and other discordian works from that era (California Dept of Furniture and Bedding?)