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91
Intermittens written submissions / Re: Discordianism Sucks
« Last post by ElSJaako on May 12, 2013, 04:21:52 PM »
Credit to El Sjaako
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Intermittens written submissions / Discordianism Sucks
« Last post by ElSJaako on May 12, 2013, 04:21:34 PM »
  • How can I be a good person?
  • Why is my penis smaller than that other guys penis?
  • Where did I leave my keys?
  • What the fuck is wrong with you?
  • Do I really need to pay my bills, or is that for other people?

Religion has tried to answer these questions, and more, with various levels of success for a long time now. Discordianism has been around for 55 years. Maybe we should have a look to see how well it's done.

Discordianism answers all of the above questions. Usually with "Fuck it. Let's go have some fun". That could be seen as a problem.

If ignoring the important questions in life is my sin, Discordianism is my enabler. Instead of thinking about the existence of god, I think "If god does exist, he's probably a crazy woman, And his name is Eris". Instead of worrying about my health, I eat hot dogs wrapped in pancakes. My body is a temple, but I hate churches. Instead of caring about trash disposal, I tell my neighbors playing Sink is a religious right.

So why am I still a Discordian? It has it upsides. It lets me feel more open-minded than an atheist without any real consequences. It lets me make awkward moments even more so by using that time to give out pope cards. And I really like the book.

In the end, all I can do is assume that ignoring the important questions in life is not a sin, and I should go have some fun. After all, if they were actually important I'm sure something would go wrong if I didn't think about them.
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Intermittens written submissions / My Five Discordian Rituals
« Last post by Adam Gorightly on May 11, 2013, 09:52:14 PM »

Discordian Rituals take many forms, and can be either lump free, chunky or smooth textured. Many humans perform them (those Discordian Rituals) without even knowing they’re Discordian, so to speak. For instance, as a long haired dope smoking teen, I’d oft times visit Fresno’s Fashion Fair Mall, and above the urinal in the restroom in said mall (a urinal can double as an irreligious artifact) there was a chalk board replete with chalk of course hung upon the wall so that we pissing human males would scrawl lewd crudities there as opposed to the walls of the stalls where “for a good time call” such and who. Anyway, with said chalk—and without premeditated thought—I wrote “Jesus is pregnant!” This was Discordian Ritual #1.

My second Discordian Ritual occurred once again in magical Fresno when a colleague and I ingested LSD and went out trippin’ in the streets of our fair city. At some point in our adventure, one of us made the comment: “What if we saw a UFO right now, no one would believe us,” which made us laugh somewhat uncontrollably. Shortly after uttering those immortal words, Eris called down a surreal squadron of psychedelic UFOs which blew our minds for all of time. This was Discordian Ritual #2, although I didn’t know I was Discordian at the time. Hail Eris!

Ritual # 3 was also initiated by psychoactive substances, this time those crazy little mushrooms that Eris transported to Earth. The set and setting for this ritual was out on the beach at Half Moon Bay when the spirit of someone named The Monster Tamer entered my body and gave a stirring recitation of every monster he had battled and destroyed, a blow by blow account delivered in dizzying detail—from Frankenstein to Wolfman, to name just a few. This was Discordian Ritual # 3. (You really had to be there.)

Discordian Ritual number #4 occurred when I lived in an apartment in Clovis and sculpted a strange bust of a tormented little green creature with pointed ears named GLIB. When I moved out of the apartment I left GLIB on a shelf in an empty closet along with a copy The Book of Mormon for someone to find and freak out on, which though I didn’t know it at the time was also a very Discordian thing to do and may well have lit up the pineal gland who ever discovered this creature sharing a shelf with Joseph Smith’s holy book.

Discordian Ritual # 5 actually occurred after I became a Discordian Pope when myself and some friends who didn’t realize they were Discordian—but now understand that they may or may not be—conducted a ritual in the parking lot at the very same Brunswick Shrine where Mal and Omar saw the chimp and Eris and you know the drill.

So there you have my five Discordian Rituals. I could probably name another 23, but not right now fnord.
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Intermittens image submissions / Re: Intermittens 11 cover art
« Last post by ElSJaako on May 11, 2013, 12:32:44 PM »
I like that a lot.
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Intermittens written submissions / eat
« Last post by Magister Ludi on May 10, 2013, 11:15:38 PM »
Eat, you. Yes, you. This is the all-seeing eye on the food pyramid, the ever-oily orb over your diet. The empress of Snackdom, khan of organic Bolivian potatoes and almost organic deep-frozen potatos. This is the scythe that combs golden crops of transgenic corn, the weedforce behind soy. This is the dish and this is the saucer. A tablespoon of teaspoons. The catch is where your heart is and the stomach's a lonely hunter, an avid listener to the calls of media, to all-pervasive visual food, empty food, manly food and homo food and beautiful food ads by beautiful editors of beautiful models on eternal regime. Now wish. Control your intake. Let it loose. Rinse, repeat. Chew, chew, chew on the chilis and Cheetos and chutneys. Swallow Martinis and chamomile tea. Stop, quick. Put it on hold. Do not wait on weighty issues. I see you nitidly holding your hunger in wrath and frustration, crisply as the last crisp dives into your guts, crystal clear on the toilet seat of the usual pub, releasing old beer to sip a fresher pint, getting rid of breakfast with a twinge of pleasure and the mellow pride of a food processor. Here are your buttons, here your levers. I'm the engineer to your mechanics, the catwoman to your engineer. I can see you on trains skipping lunch, in your comfy cradles dreaming of Coke, in retirement homes tired of purées and diabetic treats. Dedicate me your pukes and your ulcers, all your menial homages. Every nourishment. Every satisfaction. Every bite of every fang of every blessed denial. Mind your harvest parties and your fastings, mind your bodies, mind away the minds. Mind these dictinct, separate units. Put this mindlessly into your body. Throw that away. Try with the triangle chart. Eat alike, piss alike. Engage in intercourse. Take a shower. Listen. I can see you. You can be fit enough, fair enough. You can change yourself as you will. As I will. Volition rules. Evolve within a lifetime, trust me, become pretty pretty and pretty please. Trust me, for I am the knower; trust me blindly, for I'm the beholder; see that you trust me, the all-seeing eye on the food pyramid, the all-C-ing I on the sphinx.
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Intermittens image submissions / Re: Fractal Cult Images
« Last post by ekskÿ on May 10, 2013, 03:27:50 PM »


here's the rest...
http://oakcloud.tumblr.com/tagged/apophysis

i can render most of them again in whatever size you'd like; and with transparent background for easy overlaying.
let me know if you want any of it.

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Intermittens written submissions / Re: Fractal Cult
« Last post by ekskÿ on May 10, 2013, 03:16:54 PM »
Quote from: oakcloud


life sure is simple - just don't mix that up with easy

-your friendly neighborhood freak
[/quote]

i found that picture sometime during winter; did some digging just now - it's by Henck van Bilsen and from a book called Sock of Doom. thought that info might be useful.


happy to see a new intermittens in the making. i'll post some of my stuff in the next days.

98
All Else / Re: bbcode error
« Last post by ElSJaako on May 10, 2013, 11:42:26 AM »
An infinite number of fractal cultists walk into a bar. The first says “I’ll have a beer.” The second says, “I’ll have half a beer.” The third says, “I’ll have a quarter of a beer.” The fourth says “I’ll have an eighth of a beer.” The bartender says “sTOP”, pours two beers, drinks them both, and takes a screenshot.

I sure hope that's a countably infinite number of fractal cultists, otherwise you are going to have a mess.
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Intermittens written submissions / Reframing the Counter-culture
« Last post by SpagbardCeline 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/
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Intermittens written submissions / In Defense of Trolling
« Last post by SpagbardCeline 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/
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