Author Topic: Email Spag's Email Spaggotry  (Read 884 times)

SpagbardCeline

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Email Spag's Email Spaggotry
« on: May 09, 2013, 11:05:49 AM »
Anything submitted to intermittens@gmail.com will come to me, and be posted here.

SpagbardCeline

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Bug Out
« Reply #1 on: May 10, 2013, 02:17:21 AM »
Assassination
Attack
Domestic Security
Drill
Exercise
Cops
Law Enforcement
Authorities
Disaster Assistance
Disaster Management
Time for us to bug out.

Domestic Nuclear Detection Office
National Preparedness Mitigation
Prevention Response Recovery Dirty Bomb
Time for us to bug out.

Domestic Nuclear Detection Emergency
Management Emergency Response First Responder
Homeland Security Maritime Domain
Time for us to bug out.

Awareness National Preparedness Initiative
Militia Shooting Shots Fired
Evacuation Deaths
Hostage Explosion
Time for us to bug out.

Police
Disaster
Medical
Assistance
Organized crime gangs national security
State of Emergency Security Breach
Time for us to bug out.

Threat Standoff SWAT Screening
Lockdown bomb squad or threat
Crash Looting Riot Emergency
Time for us to bug out.

Landing
Pipe bomb
Incident
Facility
Time for us to bug out.

Hazmat nuclear chemical spill
Suspicious package device toxic
National laboratory nuclear facility
Time for us to bug out.

Cloud
Plume
Radiation
Radioactive
Leak biological
Infection or event
Chemical burn
Biological Epidemic
Time for us to bug out.

Hazardous material incident industrial
Spill infection powder
White gas spillover anthrax chemical
Agent exposure burn nerve
Agent ricin sarin north korea
Time for us to bug out.

Outbreak contamination
Exposure virus
Evacuation bacteria
Ebola recall
Food poisoning foot and mouth
Avian H5N1 Salmonella Flu
Small pox plague human to human to animal influenza
Center for Disease Control Drug Administration
Toxic public health agro terror tuberculosis
Listeria agriculture mutation symptoms
Antiviral pandemic resistant wave
Water borne air borne sick swine pork infection
Quarantine vaccine strain tamiflu
H1N1 Norvo Virus World Health Organization
Viral Hemmoragic Fever E. Coli Epidemic
Time for us to bug out.

Infrastructure Security
Airport Airplane and derivatives
Chemical fire electric failure or outage
Bart Marta port authority black out brown out
Port Dock Bridge Delays Cancelled Collapse
Power lines service interruption
Smart Grid Power Body Scanner Transportation Security

Biosurveillance integration center telecommunications
Critical infrastructure
National infrastructure

Metro violence
Drug cartel
Amtrak gang
Fort Hancock San Diego
Gunfight trafficking
Heroin kidnap
Cocaine border
Narcotics Juarez
Meth lab drug trade drug war mexican army
Yuma Tucson Tijuana
Sinaloa Consular El Paso Sonora
Execution shootout
Los Zetas Familia
Time for us to bug out.

Terrorism terror attack Iraq
Iran Agro Afghanistan
Pakistan environmental eco terrorism
Target conventional weapons grade dirty bomb
Enriched nuclear chemical weapon
IED FARC IRA ETA PLF PLO AQAP AQIM TTP plot
Nationalist recruitment pirates extremism
Home grown somalia yemen hamas

Emergency hurricane
Tornado twister
Tsunami Earthquake
Tremor flood
Storm crest temblor
Forest fire brush fire
Cyber security ice botnet
2600 stranded stuck
DDOS spammer phishing rootkit
Hacker china conficker worm
Mud slide or mudslide
Erosion power outage
Brown out warning
Blizzard sleet
Social media
Phreaking scammers
Brute forcing mysql injection
Cyber command

I’m not Kenneth, and this has not been the CBS evening news with Dan Rather. Good night, and have a great weekend.



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John Ohno
http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/
« Last Edit: May 10, 2013, 03:02:56 AM by EmailSpag »

SpagbardCeline

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Re: Email Spag's Email Spaggotry
« Reply #2 on: May 10, 2013, 03:10:10 AM »
It has been more than a hundred years since the fundamentals of quantum theory have been discovered. Why haven’t people internalized it yet?

People talk about it. It still gets a lot of press, and it is still treated as though it’s new. (It, along with relativistic physics, was wrapped into the name “new physics” in the 60s, when it was merely 50 years old instead of 100.) But, their comments (even the ones by physicists) tend to come down to: “it’s strange and I don’t really get it.”

Fuck that.

We have devices that work based on the principles of QM, and we use them daily. Solar cells? QM. 3d movies? QM. Transistors? QM. Cathode ray tubes? QM. How the hell are we going to continue to make basic technical advances when we keep telling ourselves that nobody can develop an intuitive feel for the part of science upon which our basic technical advances have been built since the 1920s?

People say it’s counter-intuitive  So what? Plenty of people believe plenty of counter-intuitive things. For instance, you may have heard that the earth is round, and it is moving through space. Plenty of people believe counter-intuitive things that aren’t even held up by evidence (transubstantiation, the trinity, the hollow earth, the principle of homeopathy, the myth of progress, the coming of the eschaton…) People are perfectly capable of adopting, and then operating within the framework of, counter-intuitive models of the world, and QM does not involve the kind of evidence-filtering and umwelt-warping that far more popular world-models do.

People say it’s mathy. Well, so what? Every time you play tug of war, you are operating on a learned intuition about the behavior of force vectors. Every time you take a step, you are operating on learned intuitions about the acceleration of objects toward earth, and the forces necessary to counter that, and the side effects of having those forces at various angles. We do a lot of math intuitively, and QM is not fundamentally harder. (There’s probability involved. So? You decide whether or not to leave your house, or cross the street, or buy a new cell phone, based on estimations of likelihoods and their interactions.)

I suspect that people avoid QM because they are convinced that it is much harder than the rest of physics, and that they believe this because they have heard things said fifty to a hundred years ago by physicists who hadn’t finished internalizing it. The new generation of physicists who really comprehended this stuff in their gut never came.

If you care about technological progress, avoid telling people that QM is impossible.



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John Ohno
http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/

SpagbardCeline

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Rant #2
« Reply #3 on: May 10, 2013, 03:18:03 AM »
A Rant

It’s 2012. Our cars do not fly, are not self-driving, and are powered by fire.

Even though there were personal robots in the american consumer market in the 1980s capable of:

1) Speech recognition (including voice authentication *and* voice command)
2) Goal-oriented programming
3) Real-time procedural generation of original narratives
4) Fairly nuanced navigation and area-mapping, including self-charging, without vision or navigation beacons
the most advanced personal robot on the american consumer market at the moment (barring kit robots like PINO and the PR-2) is the Pleo, which has support for only #4.

Our computers almost universally depend upon a user interface invented in the early 1970s by XEROX and popularized in 1984 — a user interface now so common that people feel as though no other user interface is possible.

No one has been on the moon since 1971.

The space shuttle is limited to the technology that existed when it was designed (with some exceptions, provided interoperability) in the early 1970s. As a result, at the time of the program’s closure, the space shuttle computers still used core memory.

The general design adhered to by tablet computers was created initially by the dynabook project in 1968, and variants on it can be seen in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The much-advertised SIRI is based loosely on an SRI AI project of the same name. However, Apple’s version is not significantly more complex than Eliza or ALICE.

In 1997, the World Wide Web was clearly a simulation of paper under glass, with the occasional hyperlink or animated GIF for distraction. In 2012, most of the web is still clearly a simulation of paper under glass, but elaborate hacks involving abuse of self-modifying code and incredible wastes of bandwidth trick some fraction of the web into instead poorly simulating the 1970s XEROX user interface inside of itself.

In the 1980s, Steve Mann invented a wearable computer that could detect billboards and replace their content with content of his choice. In the early 1990s, the MIT Media Lab worked on a wearable computer that was context-aware and selectively gave reminders and suggestions via subliminal text display when a complete focus shift would not be advisable. In 2012, Google announced that it would work on a wearable computer project, hiring people from the 1990s MIT Media Lab wearable computer projects. Judging from other Android devices and Google’s other products, this augmented reality project seems like it will probably involve inserting advertisements where none previously existed, rather than removing them (as Steve Mann’s device did).

Whether or not a hyperlink is broken on the web still relies entirely upon the maintenance of the page pointed to, despite all hypertext projects prior to the 1992 Berners-Lee project having solved this problem. Hyperlinks on the web still point to whole pages, or at best single points within pages (given the foresight of the original author to place labels at appropriate points), whereas some pre-1992 hypertext projects supported bidirectional links between spans of content (including multiple overlapping links).

The portable digital music player was invented in the mid-70s. Aside from major storage increases and the occasional feature like video support, portable digital music players have remained largely unchanged in design.

In 1978, a brain-computer interface allowed a blind man to see with the use of a low-resolution digital camera. In 2002, sixteen other subjects had the treatment. It is still not commercially available.

Between 1966 and 1972, MIT developed a mobile robot named SHAKEY that was capable of goal-based reasoning, route planning, environment mapping, obstacle avoidance, object detection, and limited forms of object manipulation.

In 1982, a patent was filed on the use of optical fibers as bend sensors. This was used in a number of ‘wired gloves’, which use bend sensors and accelerometers to report the state of hand movements to a computer. In 1987, Nintendo commercialized a product similar to these devices as the PowerGlove. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a device used by people who could not afford a PowerGlove (or its more technically advanced brethren), which took the form of a hollowed-out 8-ball full of accelerometers with several buttons on the bottom and a couple infrared beacons. This technology was revived recently as the WiiMote (with the infrared beacons moved to the ‘sensorbar’ and the cable removed).

In 1991, HP released the HP95LX. It was the size of a modern PDA, had the capabilities of a (low end) stock PC, and ran a stock version of MS-DOS off ROM. It is possible to run Windows 3.x on these.

In 1990, NewTek released the Video Toaster, a piece of hardware that (when attached to a Commodore Amiga) allowed consumers to perform linear video editing, including real time 3d animation.

In short, there are a lot of very cool ideas that have not been implemented, have not been commercialized, or have not been commercially successful. Some of them are very old but still very cool. All of them are still possible. Remember this the next time you are trying to choose between Drupal and Ruby on Rails for your social networking site for iguanas.



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John Ohno
http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/

SpagbardCeline

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Speculative Fiction and Novelty
« Reply #4 on: May 10, 2013, 03:19:32 AM »
Speculative Fiction and Novelty

I’ve wrestled for a while with the idea that “SF is the genre of ideas”. I have argued on both sides, and eventually come to the conclusion that SF really refers to a plethora of very different genres with very little in common. Recently, I’ve grown fond of Neal Stephenson’s statement that SF is defined by the fact that the characters behave competently and intelligently (even if this is lacking in verisimilitude — after all, the real world is arguably better-defined by accidents and screw-ups than by intelligent and informed choices). Nevertheless, the plain fact is, some SF is truly mind-bending and the rest of it simply isn’t.

What I think it all comes down to is novelty, and novelty concentrations.
We’ve talked about novelty on this blog before. Novelty is Shannon-information. It’s the unexpected. It’s the data point that changes the model. It’s the punchline of a funny joke, or the reveal that retcons all of continuity. The only thing that is mind-bending or mind-expanding in of itself is novelty, because everything else you’ve seen before.
Novelty is not a renewable resource. Not within a single skull, without some major memory problems. Novelty is exhausted immediately upon consumption. Luckily, novelty is not the same as originality. At the time of publication, patents are deemed novel to the patent clerk who approved them, and many patents are for improvements that are obvious in retrospect. Good novelty (or useful novelty) has that funny quirk: it’s obvious in retrospect and entirely unexpected beforehand.
Novelty can be gotten cheaply, in relatively small quantities, under circumstances of isolation of social groups. The character of the yokel shocked by the character of the big city is representative of this, as is the culture clash between European explorers and indigenous Americans during the sixteenth century. But, now that the internet makes large quantities of information easily transferred, the only large caches of naturally (which is to say unintentionally) produced novelty are those things completely undocumented and those things intentionally blocked. People who subscribe to their ‘Daily Me’ and limit their information intake to their filter bubble can still have their mind blown by the ideas of people in different filter bubbles, but such people are rarely habitual novelty-seekers.
For habitual novelty-seekers, the reality tunnels of other people are interesting until exhausted. Speculative fiction comes in at this point, and in this sense it often is the genre of ideas.
Novelty can be generated in different ways. Some of them are fairly mechanical. Burroughs had his cutups, and the Surrealists had their exquisite corpse. Various mind-altering drugs and habits of thought like Dali’s paranoiac-critical method can be used to do to the mind what cutups and the exquisite corpse do to text. These methods are much like taking a computer and banging it with a hammer in the hope that it will become an automobile, and they are successful only to the extent that the brain is a wonderfully adaptable machine capable of making sense out of any sort of noise. A more directed and less wasteful but still fairly mechanical method is to take an existing memeplex, find a likely crux, and reconnect or recombine it. This is more like what glitch musicians do, or what gametes do in sexual reproduction. This happens to be the core of speculative fiction, and what many of the better writers start out with.
Take a model of the world. Zoom in on one piece. Twist until mind blown. Spew the resulting model onto paper, with a narrative glued to it in a bag on the side. Rinse and repeat.
What you get is a synthetic reality tunnel. Speculative fiction authors don’t just write about robots and space ships; they mutate their view of reality systematically to manufacture new ways of modeling the world that are internally consistent but that nobody really subscribes to yet.
The important part is ‘yet’.
Highly popular pieces of speculative fiction get widely read. The model of the world in these stories gets incorporated into the world-models of other people. The novelty seeps away as cultural osmosis sets in.
Many people, for instance, have a view of evolution as guided progress toward a pre-ordained goal. This forms the basis of works as far-flung as 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Starseed Transmissions,Childhood’s End, Altered States, and The X Men. Of course, this model is bullshit, and does not describe evolution at all. Few people realize that it came from a handful of science fiction stories in pulp magazines during the first two decades of the twentieth century, most notably The Man Who Evolved.
Certain ideas are no longer novel at all, purely because they were initially considered extremely novel and therefore reached maximum saturation much more quickly.


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John Ohno
http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/

SpagbardCeline

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In Defense of Trolling
« Reply #5 on: May 10, 2013, 06:58:25 AM »
In Defense of Trolling

Trolling is a public service.

Of course, it doesn’t calm flamewars. However, by causing flamewars, it forces those engaged in them to take on a level of self-reflection they would otherwise not consider. A good troll will not only cause all the irrational emotional reactions, but (as an often unintended but nevertheless socially invaluable side effect) pit those being trolled against each other in a context in which they are exposed to how ridiculous their own beliefs really are.

A flamewar, because it is an ostensibly rational discussion driven entirely by pathos, is a very clear and obvious trace of the irrational or pathological basis at the root of many ostensibly rational beliefs; once someone realizes that some deeply-held conviction is deeply-held because of a single anecdote or some personal psychological need, if they are mature they cease to be emotionally engaged by a simple challenge or a calm discussion of the topic.

There are plenty of accidental trolls, of course. Any culture clash is indistinguishable from intentional trolling, because alternate reality tunnels are alien in unexpected and unconsidered ways. If we were born where they were born and raised as they were raised, we would believe what they believe; until we are challenged with an incomprehensible set of beliefs, we cannot approach our own set of beliefs in a balanced way and consider whether or not they are sensible.

Because alien cultures are getting less and less alien and more and more familiar, the impetus for introspection has become the occupation of two main groups: science fiction authors and internet trolls, both of whom synthesize new and alien worldviews by inverting some detail of an existing worldview and taking it to an extreme.



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John Ohno
http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/

SpagbardCeline

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Reframing the Counter-culture
« Reply #6 on: May 10, 2013, 07:58:11 AM »
Reframing the Counter-culture

OK, OK. So, You Are Not So Smart has caught onto the Situationist-era idea that the mainstream feeds upon the oblique edges, which I suppose means that the idea is no longer new to anyone reading this. It’s accepted.

However, it bothers me that this is used as an excuse to give up on the counterculture.

There *is* a machine. It feeds on counter-culture, and it’s fairly resistant to subversion. It is also something worth subverting, insomuch as it is not perfect.

We live in an information ecosystem. There are particular memes that are much more widespread than others, and they constitute a threat to info-diversity. The dominant memes incorporate more fringe memes into themselves, and there is a turnover.

As much as mammalian hierarchies dominate various counterculture streams, the counterculture represents a novelty-aggregation mechanism that is necessary to the survival of the entire ecosystem. The backlash against mainstreaming is in of itself a useful impulse, not because rare memes are more authentic but because rare memes contain more information than common memes (in the sense that, were they pulled into the mainstream, they would cause a larger change in the world). Because the initial impulse toward counterculture is a dissatisfaction with the state of the world (and a greater satisfaction with the elements of some other memeplex), finding ideas that are much closer to your ideal than the current state of the world and spreading them is a very good way of optimizing the world toward your own tastes. Even the assimilation of extreme backlashes is positive, so long as the extremes even out to some non-extreme situation (it’s good for culture to have crazy nazis around, for instance, so long as there are enough hippies to balance them out, and so long as some external factor doesn’t cause a large and otherwise moderate population to act out the will of the crazy nazis or amplify their own actions). The counterculture typically largely represents a progressive or novelty-seeking counterpart to an embedded regressive or novelty-avoiding population, both of which radically alter the set of ideas broadcast to the large middling population that doesn’t care either way about information theory or traditional family values.

So, yes: everything you love will be sold out. That isn’t a reason to abandon it; just as the end goal of having a child is to have them grow up into a full person, the end goal of supporting some counter-cultural media or idea is to have the memetic payload synthesize with and infect the almost-ubiquitous set of memetic baggage force-fed to the apathetic and ignorant masses.



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John Ohno
http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/

SpagbardCeline

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Re: Email Spag's Email Spaggotry
« Reply #7 on: May 17, 2013, 01:54:07 AM »
From Kerrythornley.com

This is a separate edition to the one this forum is being used to complete.

Intermittens Magazine is now taking submissions!

WHO?

Who's doing this?  KerryThornley.com and possibly you.  Intermittens is the magazine anyone can edit, so this is our turn.

WHAT?

In tune with our site, the theme for this issue is "In The Beginning."

What does "in the beginning" mean?  Whatever it means to you.  Of course it includes information on the beginning of Discordianism.  But it could also include the beginning of a well-known Discordian cabal or club, the story behind the creation of a popular Erisian website, how to begin a successful jake, the creation of a Discordian book or magazine, raising an Erisian child, how you became a Discordian, whatever.

We can use essays, stories, interviews, photos, pictures, poems, quotes, fillers, jokes, etc.  Even ads (joke or for real).  If it's a real ad for a Discordian project, we won't charge but will ask that you buy something through our website's store to help cover our expenses.  But that's a request, not a requirement.

BE PROFESSIONAL.  Or at least be a dedicated amateur.  "I was going to edit this so it would be good but I ran out of time so you can do it" or "here's some random junk nobody liked" likely won't cut the mustard.
 
WHEN?

Like most things related to KerryThornley.com, we don't have any particular schedule or deadline.  If you want to submit something for the magazine, getting it to us by 1 July 2013 should be fine.  We'll probably still take things a little after that depending on what we get.
 
WHERE?

Submit to intermittens [at] kerrythornley [dot] com.  Or look for the email address on our website.
 
IMPORTANT: Put OMAR somewhere in the subject/title of any email you send to us.  That way it shouldn't end up in our overflowing spam box.

HOW?

How do you get paid?  With access to a free electronic issue just like everyone else.  This is a free project!  The issue will be released online for free, and nobody gets paid including us.

How can you keep some rights to your creation?  If you want to copyright your piece or release it under a GNU or Creative Commons license, you can do so.  That could restrict or even prohibit the use of your piece outside of the issue.  But the Intermittens issue ltself will be free to all.

IMPORTANT: We will assume your submission is Kopyleft/Public Domain unless you specify otherwise.  Keep in mind anything you send us may be used on our website or for other projects unless you specify otherwise.  We also maintain the right to edit your piece unless you specify otherwise.  If it's a major edit (in our opinion), we'll run it by you before publication--if we can get hold of you.  So keep us informed if you change email.
 
WHY?

Why do this issue?  Why not!

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD!

SpagbardCeline

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Re: Email Spag's Email Spaggotry
« Reply #8 on: May 24, 2013, 07:00:38 AM »
Word File (with correct Italics) available on request.

Discord in The Dark Tower: Ka and the Chao
By Episkopos Phi'phy Pho'psy, K.S.C., L.S.D.




Unbeknownst to most, discord has been creeping its way into popular culture. In The Truman Show, directed by Peter Weir, a light bulb labeled Sirius falls from the sky outside Truman's house. In Blade Runner, the film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the “replicants” kill twenty-three people during their escape to earth. In The Matrix Reloaded, directed by the Wachowski brothers, Neo can select twenty-three people to rebuild Zion after its destruction. And in One Hour Photo, directed by Mark Romanek, 23 appears on the digital customer queue behind Sai the Photo Guy. Beyond Hollywood, novels and businesses are, perhaps unknowingly, including references to Discordianism. In the Harry Potter novels, a major antagonist is a magician named Sirius Black, and in the real-world, a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer even named a mobile phone after the Goddess of Discord herself, the HTC Eris. Concluding the meaning of, and the reasons for, these Discordian synchronicities is beyond the scope of the author’s present examination. Rather, what follows is an exploration of how the 20th-century, American Discordian tradition manifests within novelist Stephen King's Dark Tower series.
   Prolific horror author Stephen King is, by all accounts, a commercial success. His cultural relics include Carrie, Cujo, It, The Green Mile, The Running Man and The Shining, all novels which were made into Hollywood films. But his self-proclaimed magnum opus, The Dark Tower series, hasn't seen the big screen, probably because it’s published across seven books and over four thousand pages long. King’s masterpiece, The Dark Tower, is an epic hero journey chronicling a gunslinger's quest to redeem himself and save the decaying worlds around him. Drawing on classic western motifs and weird science fiction, King creates an awesome and impressive universe for his readers to inhabit with The Dark Tower novels.
   The most obvious connection between The Dark Tower and Discordianism is Discordia. To Erisians of all denominations, Discordia is the Latin name of the Greco-Roman Goddess Eris, a sexy personification of chaos and worldly strife. But to Constant Readers of King, it’s a castle near the edge of End-World, Castle Discordia, that contains hundreds of magical doorways which open up to different worlds and times. Furthermore, an on-line computer game, based on The Dark Tower series and hosted on King's website, is named Discordia.
   Throughout The Dark Tower, the Law of Fives – that “all things are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to 5” – is observed. In the Fifth book of the series (surprise!), an army of robots kidnap children every twenty-three years, and all good Discordians know that twenty-three is the holiest of holy numerical relations to Five.[1] The first book of the series, The Gunslinger, is told in Five parts. And in the graphic novel adaptation of the Dark Tower, of which King serves as creative director, the first "chapter" is written across Five story arcs. The second chapter of The Dark Tower graphic novels is not only written across Five story arcs, but each story arc itself is Five issues (comics) in length.
   Throughout the books, the protagonist of the story, Roland Deschain, travels primarily with three others and a talking pet: a gang of Five.[2] And Roland's earlier gang, described in King's fourth Dark Tower book, is also Five in number.[3] These gangs, “ka-tets” bound by fate, are held together by a cosmic current King calls Ka, which is some kind of mix between destiny and karma. King's Ka bears similarity to Discordianism's Chao, the smallest divisible unit of chaos in the universe, known too for imposing great influence upon peoples and worlds all around. To Discordians, Ka comes through the Chao; to Constant Readers, the Chao comes through Ka – regardless, both are eternal, turning wheels, bestowing boons on man while trampling unpredictably on their plans.
   Ka's as good a time as any to discuss kōans. Anerists[4] allege (wrongly) that Discordianism is merely a collection of funny kōans, or nonsensical and paradoxical Zen riddles. Even if so, riddles are featured in the third and fourth books of the Dark Tower series, when Roland and his ka-tet are nearly killed by a talking, riddling train. Riddling is a well-respected tradition in the Dark Tower universe; like Discordianism, it's more than just fun and games. Riddles can be the hodge or the podge; eristic or aneristic; disorderly or orderly – represented in The Dark Tower as The Red and The White: agents of evil and good, respectively.
   Throughout the books, Roland Deschain travels in search of the "Dark Tower," an ancient, magical nexus of worlds, built tall of black stone. His world has "moved on," becoming decrepit and desolate, and he hopes to somehow revert and revive the worlds around him from decaying further by reaching the tower. This tower, the Dark Tower of The Dark Tower series, has allegorical and metaphorical significance beyond King's specific narrative (which the present author won't spoil herein).
   The tower, standing tall within a field of thousands and thousands of roses, symbolizes the “alchemical marriage” of the Rosicrucians: linga (the active, male principle) and yoni (the receptive, female principle) bedded together.[5] Through the union of linga and yoni – known otherwise as copulation, intercourse, or fucking – one plus one does not always equal two, but sometimes three or more. This alchemical marriage between man and woman is our only known method of reproduction, without which, everybody we know and love would literally go extinct. Sex has the unique ability to create new life; through the union of two comes three: a newborn, the future of mankind. King doesn't stress this allegory in the series, but any armchair psychologist will agree that erect, monolithic structures are phallic, and budding flowers vaginal, to the human psyche. The Dark Tower, amongst the roses, represents eternal, cosmic coitus, by forces beyond mankind's understanding.
   From a more Discordian perspective, the Dark Tower represents our pineal glands,[6] through which we can communicate a-temporally and non-locally with Eris herself, as described in the first holy book of discord, the Principia Discordia.[7] The different reality tunnels we can travel to, and through, are represented by the field of roses surrounding the Dark Tower. King describes each rose as containing a glowing orb that radiates magnificent light from its center. King confirms each of these glowing orbs is its own universe. They are the different reality tunnels we can inhabit by visiting the Dark Tower – our pineal glands, through which Eris speaks different and conflicting truths to everyone.
   The final connections between Discordianism and Stephen King's Dark Tower series the present author will elucidate regards Roland's nemesis. An antagonist of many disguises (Marten Broadcloak, Walter o'Dim, Randall Flagg), his most infamous is The Man in Black, mentioned in the first sentence of the first book: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." Roland hopes to defeat The Man in Black, an evil magician, to locate the Dark Tower.
   King relates this magician, Marten/Walter/Randall, with a monstrosity of early 20th-century horror author H.P. Lovecraft: Nyarlathotep, otherwise known as The Black Man.[8] Nyarlathotep is one of the archaic, abominable horrors that compose the Great Old Ones in Lovecraft's horror mythos. In the Dark Tower series, King uses Great Old Ones to describe an advanced civilization of the past. Another of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones, Cthulhu, appears in Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's The Illuminatus! Trilogy as Leviathan, a gigantic sea-beast of biblical proportions.
   The Illuminatus! Trilogy, another holy book of discord, features a black mass created by THE BEAST 666 – known otherwise as the Anti-Christ, A.C, or Aleister Crowley – who The Man in Black recites in the graphic novel adaptation of the Dark Tower.[9] Not only that, in the first book, The Man in Black throws Tarot for Roland, and Five books later, it's recommended Roland take Route 93. Ninety-three is a number of THE BEAST 666, and the Book of Tarot is one of his many devices: a corny, aneristic attempt to impose order on the chaos of the universe.
   When the Man in Black cries out – “All Hail the Crimson King!” – this present author only hears another more familiar, more holy, Five-word salute: one to Our Lady Eris, the Goddess of Discord and Queen of Strife... the most self-evident Godhead known yet to manifest. Eris looks at The Man in Black, The Dark Tower, and all her other creations, and is pleased. So on the seventh day, she rests... a beauty sleeping her beauty sleep. Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!





Episkopos Phi'phy Pho'psy, Keeper of the Sacred Chao and Lector of Secular Discord, is Lone Priest of Crocodylus Pontifex, the one true cabalistic disorganization of the High Church of Our Lady Eris, Goddess of Discord, the fairest and prettiest of all.


Notes
1.   23 → 2 + 3 = 5; see “23 enigma” on the Free Encyclopedia.
2.   Eddie, Jake, Oy, Roland, Susannah.
3.   Alain, Cuthbert, Jamie, Roland, Thomas.
4.   Worshipers of Aneris, sister of Eris and Goddess of (Apparent) Order.
5.   Shiva the Destroyer and Shakti the Divine Mother. (Decoded: penis and vagina)
6.   ofgilead (2013, January 26). The Dark Tower. Message posted to David Icke's Official Forums. (https://www.davidicke.com/forum/showthread.php?t=234587)
7.   Ravenhurst, Lord Omar Khayyam, and Malaclypse the Younger. Principia Discordia: Or How I Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her; the Magnum Opiate of Malaclypse the Younger, Wherein Is Explained Absolutely Everything Worth Knowing About Absolutely Anything. 4th ed. Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited, 1990. Page 15.
8.   According to Lovecraft, Nyarlathotep wanders the earth in different forms, one of which is The Black Man: a hairless, hoofed man, dark black with Caucasian features.
9.   The scripter of the graphic novel adaptation, Peter David, joins a growing list of graphic novelists to directly reference THE BEAST 666 in their work. Others include Neil Gaiman (The Sandman), Mike Mignola (Hellboy), and Alan Moore (V for Vendetta).

SpagbardCeline

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FnordFinder
« Reply #9 on: May 24, 2013, 07:02:15 AM »
Fnord Finder (Program)
By Episkopos Phi'phy Pho'psy, K.S.C., L.S.D.




“Fnord” finding program (CC BY-NC 3.0) written in C on Prickle-Prickle, Discord 11th, YOLD 3178. Given a wordlist, this program will output all the words containing the inputted fnord/string. If all the letters of the user-inputted fnord/string appear chronologically, or sequentially, in a word from the wordlist, it's printed to the screen. For example: “clove,” “explosive” and “meatloves” contain the fnord “love”; “monastery” contains “monster”; “whorled” contains “world.”

/*
** GNU/LINUX INSTRUCTIONS
** Navigate to the directory with fnord-finder.c and compile using gcc:
** gcc -o fnord-finder.bin fnord-finder.c
**
** Launch from command line while passing a wordlist to the program:
** ./fnord-finder.bin $(</usr/share/dict/words)
**
** Wait for the program to load the wordlist. When it finishes, it will output
** “What fnord are you searching for?” You then type the fnord/word you want to
** find and hit Enter.
**
** To find words that appear sequentially within others, like "love" in "glove"
** or “hat” in “chat,” simply use grep:
** cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep love
**
** BUGS
** Submit any to spacepope@crocodyluspontifex.com
**
** EXAMPLE
** [user@host:~/fnord-finder]$ ./fnord-finder.bin $(</usr/share/dict/words)
** What fnord are you searching for? illuminati
** illuminating
** illumination
** illuminations
*/
//FILENAME: fnord-finder.c
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
  char line[23];
  int fnord[23];
  int eris;
  int i, j, k;
  printf("What fnord are you searching for? ");
  fgets(line, sizeof(line), stdin);
  for(i = 1; i < argc; ++i)
  {
    eris = 0;
    for(j = 0; j < strlen(argv); ++j){
      for(k = 0; k < strlen(line) - 1; ++k) {
        if(fnord[0] == 0) {
          if(argv[j] == line[0]) {
            fnord[0] = 1;
            eris += 1;
            k = strlen(line);
          }
        }
        else {
          if(fnord[eris - 1] == 1 && fnord[eris] == 0) {
            if(line[eris] == argv[j]) {
              fnord[eris] = 1;
              eris += 1;
              k = strlen(line);
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
    if(fnord[strlen(line) - 2] == 1) { printf("%s\n",argv); }
    for(k = 0; k < strlen(line) - 1; ++k) { fnord[k] = 0; }
  }
  return(0);
}

SpagbardCeline

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Re: Email Spag's Email Spaggotry
« Reply #10 on: May 24, 2013, 07:03:17 AM »
Fnord Finder (Puzzle)
By Episkopos Phi'phy Pho'psy, K.S.C., L.S.D.




A puzzling part of Operation Mindfuck: besides beginning with the letter A, what do all these words have in common?


 
•   aberrations
•   accelerations
•   accessories
•   acerbities
•   adulterations
•   adverbials
•   adversaries
•   adversities
•   advertisement
•   aerialist
•   aeries
•   aerobics
•   aerodynamics
•   aeronautics
•   afterbirths
•   afterimages
•   afterlives
•   agglomerations
•   allegories
•   allergies
•   alliterations
•   alterations
•   altercations
•   alternations
•   amateurish
•   ambergris
•   ancestries
•   aneurism
•   anniversaries
•   antibacterials
•   antiperspirants
•   aperitifs
•   apothecaries
•   appertains
•   aromatherapist
•   arteries
•   arterioles
•   arteriosclerosis
•   ascertains
•   asperities
•   aspersions
•   assertions
•   assertiveness
•   asterisk
•   asteroids
•   asymmetries
•   atmospherics
•   austerities
•   aversions

















Hints:

 
•   beriberis
•   bowdlerise
•   careerism
•   cauterise
•   cerise
•   characteristic
•   cherish
•   computerise
•   consumerism
•   derision
•   feverish
•   gibberish
•   hucksterism
•   imperishable
•   impoverish
•   isomerism
•   liverish
•   mannerism
•   mesmerise
•   pauperism
•   periscope
•   perish
•   peristalsis
•   peristyle
•   pulverise
•   spinsterish
•   spoonerism
•   tenderise
•   tigerish
•   verisimilitude
•   volunteerism

Further Hint: see Fnord Finder (Program)

SpagbardCeline

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Re: Email Spag's Email Spaggotry
« Reply #11 on: May 24, 2013, 07:05:01 AM »
Available as word document (Italics intact)

Kallisti: Or How I Found Goddess
By Episkopos Phi'phy Pho'psy, K.S.C., L.S.D.




I
Anna Plurabelle appears, and speaks.
“I feel... funny, like I’m a ghost and don’t even need food,” she says. “I’ve barely been able to get any in my mouth lately – it seems so... alien."
Is she doing anything about it?
“I'm doing nothing,” Anna continues. “Well, I'm adjusting.”
Is it negatively affecting her well-being?
“Not yet,” she says, “but I suspect it soon shall. But I'm not worried. I don't mind at all!”
Maybe there's some spiritual, or psychic, force working on her...
“Yes,” Plurabelle exclaims! “In fact, I think I've contracted some sort of... virus, from reading Principia Discordia. It's left me with a strong, foreboding feeling.”
Constantly? Concurrently?
“Yes,” she responds. “Unknown Horrors await. All your fears impending... in the future.”

II
The sun shines brightly.
(looks at Anna Plurabelle)
Beautiful. And so elegant.
She looks like every woman I've ever loved, and more. She looks like every woman worth loving – no, she proves every woman is worth loving. I can see every color in her hair, and her skin is glowing; radiating light like... like... the moon: Luna.
Is she the moon, Luna? Is she? Yes. Yes, she is.
Am I the sun? Am I? No. No, I am... human?
She is married to Earth: Gaia.
Anna asks, “May I tell you of our union?"
Please.
Plurabelle closes her eyes, depersonalizes and speaks, “There was a time, long ago, before identification of constellations as personifications of celestial relations; before animals ever recognized themselves in reflections; before we identified merda with waste; when our moon, Luna, married our planet, Gaia; the sun, Sol, serving as witness; they began a new life together, and soon adopted twenty-three beautiful children: adorable amino acids orphaned by a dying satellite, from only-God-knows-when and only-God-knows-where, into Gaia’s tides, for her and Luna to nurture and endow with motherly affection – and with the help of Sol, one of their earliest friends, fatherly guidance; for their precious children meant worlds to them, and still do; though some have grown to believe themselves independent and self-reliant, their parents, Gaia and Luna (and Sol, who’s developed a warm spot for them), continue to care for all their children – even those ungrateful for their daily help – because that’s what good parents do, and these two vowed to spend the rest of their lives together; two heavenly bodies, slow-dancing through time and space, against all odds and probabilities.”
She finishes and opens her eyes.
(stunned)

III
Who is this woman? I can see her, but I'm not just looking at her. I'm looking through her. Worse: I can feel her looking through me. And inside me.
(shudders)
Anna Plurabelle smiles.
Did she just wink? What does she know that I don't? And what was she talking about earlier? Ghosts? What did she mean by Impending Horrors? What book did she say she read? Did she start this? Can she stop it?
Can it be stopped at all?
“I suppose that's up for me to decide,” Anna says. “I feel like I'm under a spell – yet, I retain some control. I'm floating in a drunken trolley, which I can exit at certain times."
Where's it going?
“Exactly,” she replies. “I don't know. There’s no engineer; it’s operating itself. I think manual override is in another dimension entirely! So, I’ve been trying to reach my hands into the fabric of spacetime... if the universe is really made of vibrating strings of energy, I'm going to pluck them to make music.” Plurabelle spins in a circle, jokingly strumming an airharp.
That's string theory?
“It’s like I'm caught at the end of some supernatural bow,” she continues, “played by some invisible hand. It's willing me towards whichever notes He – She, or whatever it is – wishes to hear. I feel like I might be able to control it, but I'm choosing not to.” Anna Plurabelle smiles brilliantly. “I wear the shoes of fate; aren't they lovely?” She giggles and twirls in place, playfully kicking her feet in front of her. “May I ask you a somewhat... personal, question?”
Hit me, baby.
Anna asks – grinning – eyes wide shut, “Did you know that God’s name is Eris, and that he’s a girl?”
(laughs)
No, I didn’t. Isn’t Eris the reason Pluto isn’t a planet anymore?
“Well he’s a girl, and his name is Eris,” she proclaims.
Except, I don’t believe in God.
“But you must have faith,” Anna Plurabelle cries! “All is lost without faith! I sure feel sorry for you if you don't have faith.” Her eyes begin to moisten.
I have faith... just not in God.
She warns, “Don’t you know what happens to those who deny Goddess?”
Probably the same thing that happens to those who affirm Goddess!
Anna laughs and smiles.
Her reputation precedes her. Her enemies are many, but her friends are legion. I've heard her called a liar, a prankster and a teacher – by the same person. She's definitely... funny. Didn't she say she feels funny?
“Yes,” she responds, grinning back.
Is she helping me with something?
“Of course I am, you silly fnord,” Plurabelle responds playfully.
But with what? What was she saying about God? That her name is Eris? I don't even believe in God. I'm a biological reductionist. All phenomena – including consciousness – can be explained by neuronal and chemical activity. All mysticism is malarkey. It's the human tendency to impose meaning on symbols, dogmatized. I’d love to explore spiritual realms, and I want to believe in extra-dimensional, transcendental beings... but I take my beliefs too seriously. I act smart but I’m The Fool. What I know won’t matter when I’m dead. But, what I do, might. So what’s the best way to live life? Is there an absolute truth about life after death? Can it even be known? I don't want to fool myself, but I want to believe in something, and I don't want it to be what others have already found. I want Truth to reveal herself to me. Revelation.

IV
(smiles and looks up at Anna Plurabelle)
She couldn’t really have caught a virus by reading a book; or could she? Is it contagious? Was it the story she told me of Gaia and Luna? Or maybe that thing about the Goddess of Discord? I might already have it, whatever it is. Am I part of it now?
How deep does this go? All the way to the top?
How can I help her? Whom should I blame?
“Whomever pleases you most,” she jokes. “God is like... an octopus; and I am one of her many tentacles, in a dark, vast and starry sea.”
Couldn't there be more than one God? With multiple tentacles connecting to one another?
“Well, I suppose there could be,” Anna replies. “But I'm just one tentacle, and I play my role well. I’m actually starting to enjoy it. I figure life's too short – so why worry?”
Future Horrors – that's why. Future Horrors.
Plurabelle’s tentacle might be able to avert them.
Why did she stop smiling?
Anna Plurabelle begins laughing, menacingly. The clouds darken; the voice of God, Thunder, booms overhead. “I suppose if my tentacle has a will, it ought to act on it,” she utters hoarsely. A shadow falls across her face, and then another across her body. Only her mouth remains illuminated.
“And it has,” she says. “That’s why I‘m here. I've chosen you tonight,” she emphasizes ominously. Her voice trails off in an echo.
I'm chosen for what?
(realizes)
Future Horrors: they’re here... am I... some sort of sacrifice? Alas... Nobody lives forever. Might as well get it over with. I knew it would come to this. Resistance is futile.
Oh, what cowardly thoughts I have before death!
... And what is taking her so long?
The clouds part. Anna Plurabelle smiles and turns away, leaving. “I should get going,” she says. “I feel the trolley gaining speed.”
(watches her walk away)
Her hair bounces so gracefully; and her hips, they sway so rhythmically.
I... I think I love her.
She’s walking away.
(cries out: “I love you!”)
“I love you!" The first words I’ve ever spoken to her. What’s there more to say, anyway?
Anna Plurabelle looks back, grinning. “I know,” she replies.
When will I see you again?
Disappearing into the distance, Anna answers, “Whenever you seek the core of argument!”
The core of argument...
(finally realizes)
The Golden Apple of Discord! Kallisti! Paris was wrong (again) – it doesn’t belong to Venus or Aphrodite... Eris is the fairest! The Queen of Strife! The apple was hers to begin with!

 
V
A force is pulling me backwards.
(panics)
(sees self from above, sleeping in a bed; calms)
(submerges astral body into material body; feels awakened)
(looks at digital clock)
Time scrambles past.
It's malfunctioning.
(notices eleven fingers; flips the light switch)
The room remains dark.
I'm lucid!
I’m dreaming!
(gets out of bed; goes downstairs)
(lets dogs outside; remembers they’ve died)
But they’re alive now!
(goes upstairs; crawls into bed)
(hypnagogically hallucinates; succumbs to dream world)
The sun rises.
(crawls out of bed)
Digital digits still spin on the clock, like reels flipping in a slot machine.
I feel like I’ve hit the jackpot, but I’ll lose this feeling whenever I fall asleep again... whenever I dream again. If I wake in the morning, I will be an entirely new person. And Gods willing, I will dream and wake again. Again and again.
Do you hear me?
Wake up!
Siriusly. Close your eyes, concentrate hard...
And wake up!










Episkopos Phi'phy Pho'psy, Keeper of the Sacred Chao and Lector of Secular Discord, is Lone Priest of Crocodylus Pontifex, the one true cabalistic disorganization of the High Church of Our Lady Eris, Goddess of Discord, the fairest and prettiest of all.

High Priest

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Re: Email Spag's Email Spaggotry
« Reply #12 on: May 24, 2013, 05:10:34 PM »
Here are .doc files for the four previous posts (preserved formatting)