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Intermittens written submissions / Re: A few Dingo Works
« Last post by PlacidDingo on May 13, 2013, 08:55:02 AM »
Also, the text from here is good for use; http://placiddingo.com/?p=331
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Intermittens written submissions / Clever Merry and the Naughty Headmaster
« Last post by PlacidDingo on May 13, 2013, 08:17:08 AM »
Clever Merry went to Illuminated Truth State High School. Her Headmaster, Mr Duncan-Duncan was a very naughty man.

In her first year, she noticed the school swimming team were full of kids who did very little work. They had to pass all their tests to prove they were ready to swim for the school. Merry didn’t understand how they could all pass their tests if they never did any work.

Then, a year later it turned out that Mr Duncan-Duncan had been passing all the swimmers no matter how badly they did on their tests. What a clever Merry! What a naughty Headmaster!

When she was in grade three, Merry saw that the team for the Spelling Bee was doing much better than ever, but the Team Captain couldn’t even spell his own name. ‘This is odd’ thought Merry.

Then it turned out that Mr Duncan-Duncan had been providing the answers via headset. What a clever Merry! What a naughty Headmaster.

Merry made a choice. NEVER AGAIN! would she be played for a fool. NEVER AGAIN! would she be tricked by that naughty Headmaster. She kept her eyes peeled, and soon she could see the extent of  his villainy. When the school sports day was cancelled because of predicted bad weather that never arrived, she knew that Mr Duncan-Duncan must have paid off the weatherman. When Jimmy Key broke his leg falling off the deck, she knew he had probably been pushed. And when there was a new room set up but unused she knew it was to be a holding pen for the naughty students to await medical experimentation.

Mr Duncan-Duncan watched Merry out his window, handing out fliers that accused the school of adding hormones to the drinking water.

“Well,” he mused to himself, as he applied whiteout to the school captain’s geography mark, “It was easy enough to get away with all this before… but now, it’s a cinch!”
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Intermittens written submissions / Dagney Shrugged
« Last post by PlacidDingo on May 13, 2013, 07:39:30 AM »
“I’m after a man whom I want to destroy. He died many centuries ago, but until the last trace of him is wiped out of men’s minds, we will not have a decent world to live in.”

“What man?”

“Robin Hood. He was the man who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. Well, I’m the man who robs from the poor and gives to the rich – or, to be exact, the man who robs the thieving poor and gives back to the productive rich.”

Dangney looked over Ragnar’s frenzied features and raised an eyebrow.

“What are you,” she said in an unimpressed, crisp clear tone, “some kind of asshole?”
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Intermittens written submissions / A few Dingo Works
« Last post by PlacidDingo on May 13, 2013, 01:17:10 AM »
All credited 'Placid Dingo'


I Heart Intangibles

You used to get your sausages from the person who killed the pig. They lived down the road, and you knew them, and you knew their kids were in school and you’d have conversations with them when you were buying your sausages. You had an emotional connection.

Industrialisation meant that you could then get your sausages and everything else from a supermarket, maybe from a company miles away full of people you didn’t know. You didn’t have an emotional connection with any of them. Go to the person you know, or get your sausages from a paper bag. It’s hard to make friends with a paper bag.

So, they gave it a face.

Now you didn’t know the person whose face was on the bag, so they made sure you met them before you even saw the product, through advertising. Suddenly it wasn’t your local butcher or your local paper bag, it was the butcher or farmer Joe.

People can form emotional connections to intangible concepts. Sports teams, religions (some religions in some sense), political groups… all form a sense of unity and community through a focus on a third thing. People are being brought together through a shared relationship with a TV show or a religious figure or a sports team.

This isn’t a problem as long as you don’t let the map become the terrortory. While we treasure and adore the ideas we form emotional connections with, we need to remember they’re ideas. They’re concepts. They can’t love us back.

The people that become part of our community can. Our fellow Broncos supporters, our Game of Thrones fans, our Communist Comrades build a culture, language and a set of rituals that we can engage in together to bring us all together. We’re like a group sitting around a campfire, singing songs to the flames. When it comes time for a hug, you need to remember- it’s the person beside you who’ll appreciate it, not the fire.

So for us as Discordians, we’ve formed a relationship through a deity generally considered explicitly a symbolic or metaphorical entity. I think we might need to remind ourselves that we are a collection of wonderful, curious people who are brought together by Eris…

But she can’t love us back.
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Intermittens written submissions / Re: ddate
« Last post by PlacidDingo on May 13, 2013, 01:00:40 AM »
I like the idea of the code being included.
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Intermittens written submissions / Re: Editors thread for IM11
« Last post by PlacidDingo on May 13, 2013, 12:58:35 AM »
Editor will make most of the creative decisions for the edition, what goes in what stays out.

They are responsible for putting it all together, basically.

They can do the formatting themselves, outsource, etc, whatever works.
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Intermittens written submissions / Re: ddate
« Last post by High Priest on May 12, 2013, 05:48:24 PM »
ddate was recently removed from util-linux hosted on kernel.org. In version 2.23 in fact, the most recent version. If you read the 2.23 Release Notes it says:

Quote
The command ddate has been REMOVED from util-linux.  You can find it here:
https://github.com/bo0ts/ddate

We could include a link to the ddate code at the bottom of this article.
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Intermittens written submissions / Re: ddate
« Last post by ElSJaako on May 12, 2013, 04:30:57 PM »
Credit to El Sjaako please. There is a version with slightly more boring facts at: http://www.abnormail.org/ddate/
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Intermittens written submissions / ddate
« Last post by ElSJaako on May 12, 2013, 04:30:09 PM »
One of the subtle fun things about being a discordian is seeing Discordianism popping up in unexpected places. We got a dwarf planet named (possibly), got a TV-show host to make some vague references (probably), and there's a copy of our holy book in the JFK assassination archives.

But one of the nerdiest places Discordianism used to turn up is on almost every linux computer. There was a program included by default called "ddate" that calculates the discordian date. I'll give you my output right now:

Code: [Select]
Today is Prickle-Prickle, the 65th day of Bureaucracy in the YOLD 3178
Ddate was on almost every system because it was included in a useful package of common programs call util-linux, and this package was installed on every system. Unfortunately the current maintainer of util-linux has decided that ddate is a "crazy thing" and has recently decided that it should be removed from linux by default. He did this on June 8, 2012. This K. Zak (Fun fact: "K. Zak" is the Dutch equivalent to "A. Hole") doesn't like us having fun.

Ddate was written on the 65th day of The Aftermath in the Year of Our Lady of Discord 3157 (23 dec 1991) by Druel the Chaotic (Jeremy Johnson), obviously in a fit of pre-christmas religious fervor.

In early 1994 Lee Harvey Oswald Smith, K.S.C. created a package of discordian softwares that he called "The Emperor Norton Utilities":
Quote
The Emperor Norton Utilities is a collectionm of Discordian software. It is the software equivalent of Discordian sainthood. The utilities include mainstays such as ddate, M-x dissociate, and chef, as well as anything you may care to nominate. Indeed, it can contain entire operating systems (such as Linux) and even hardware devices (such as the software-controlled Amiga power light). The documentation for this software consists of the Principia Discordia, the Ludwig Plutonium Hymnbook, Kibo's signature and that sign in California which reads STOP CASTING POROSITY", as well as other sacred tracts too numerous to mention.
(M-x dissociate is a script for transforming any text into potentially humorous garbage. Chef does pretty much the same thing, but in Swedish. Kibo is someone worth looking up, if you haven't heard about him)

In 2002 Göran Weinholt defended ddate beautifully:
Quote
  > People with more traditional moral values might not
  > appreciate a reference to or advertisement for this movement
  > being present on their system.  However, because it is in
  > util-linux, they will not be able to selectively remove it
  > (unless they write a script that is to be run after every
  > upgrade).
 
  I for one will not stand for this. I personally use ddate, I use it in
  some scripts, I know other people do the same, and I know some Debian
  developers would be annoyed if ddate was removed. There are even programs
  that use ddate, e.g. freecraft and the games that use its engine.
 
  I will be very sad if Debian can't include ddate because an imaginary
  user with "traditional moral values" means more than real users.


 Unfortunately, 10 years later, his plea was not heard, and ddate is out of default linux, and on most systems you need to add it yourself.
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Intermittens written submissions / Re: Editors thread for IM11
« Last post by ElSJaako on May 12, 2013, 04:22:36 PM »
What exactly will editing entail?
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