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Intermittens: Issue 1
Our new Monday feature is INTERMITTENS. Come check in on Mondays to get swatted on the nose with a rolled up magazine.
Intermittens is a periodical journal of Discordian diarrhea – an incontinent splattering of juicy ideas and corny jokes. Originally produced by the irreverant spags of the Peedy cabal, Intermittens is an expanding attempt to document some of the antics going on today in the Discordian Society. Every issue has a different editor. All content (unless otherwise marked) is from / for the public domain.
This project is an attempt to create an open-source Discordian magazine. We encourage anyone, even you, to haphazardly throw together an issue of what you think is cool. The project itself is a Golden Apple Seed Mission, or GASM, meaning we want your help! We need people who have writing, graphic, and layout skillz. We also need people with the balls to edit their own issue of Intermittens and join the elite Editor Cabal. Do you have what it takes? No, you don’t; none of us do. That’s why we’re making DIY magazines and not professional ones. And that’s why we need more cooks to foul the broth.
Intermittens is being published on a (roughly) monthly schedule. If you’re interested in helping out, check in at principiadiscordia.com/forum and martyr yourself for the cause. In any case, we hope you dig it. And by all means, share. Send the PDFs on to people you know, people you love, people you hate, hamsters, and other creatures.
Issue 1 was put together in November 2008 by Professor Cramulus. He churned out a really messy version, just to prove that even an unskilled spag could pop out a magazine with a few hours of time. Later, Telarus used his layout super powers to clean it up. This is a great example of a Golden Apple Seed Mission in action – a bunch of morons all firing creativity at each other until the pasta starts sticking to the wall. Anybody can do it!
MegaCon 2010: A Perspective from Artist Alley
So I just got back from a weekend at MegaCon 2010! For the uninitiated, MegaCon is the largest comic convention in the Southeast. It takes place at the Orange County Convention center in Orlando Florida, which for three days is packed to to the brim with all sorts of people in the comic and anime industry. I had a table there in the artist alley to promote my comic, Bonejangles, along with dozens of other independent artists.
The weather was pretty nasty on Friday, but the cosplayers and hardcore fans still turned out en masse and the convention got off to a great start. Things really picked up on Saturday, the day of the famous MegaCon costume contest. Really, Megacon is all about the costumes, and there were hundreds of cosplayers. You couldn’t throw a pokeball on the showroom floor that day without knocking out some be-cat-eared otaku.
There were a lot of famous people there, including Frank Cho, George Perez, Nichelle Nicoles, Brent Spiner, Billy Dee Williams and John de Lancie, the guy who plays Q of Star Trek: TNG (The best joke of the con came early Friday morning when there were relatively few people in the celebrity area. The announcer said, “Now’s your chance to meet John de Lancie, because there is no queue for Q.”).
Artist Alley was really hoppin’ for the whole convention, and I was fortunate enough to share an aisle with some terrific talents. First of all, I was lucky enough to get a table next to Rhi Owens (pictured above) the wonderfully talented artist and sketch card portraitist, and costume designer Stephanie of Crystal Ball Costumes. I also got to meet the guys from BSX22 Studios, the metal band Cellpan, Don Myers of T-Shirt
Bordello, and Joe of Zombie Salad Comics.
All in all it was a great show and I got to meet a bunch of cool people. The Pirate Pass-Off proved to be a hit as well, particularly among the cosplayers actually dressed as pirates, so thanks to Cramulus for providing those!
BIP: “Ego Sickness”
Narcissus, by Caravaggio
from the Black Iron Prison
You know how a virus works? It goes into a cell and changes the code so that the cell only produces more virii. In a way the virus steals the cell’s identity, making it a part of a viral system.
If you ask me, the worst phase of being sick is when you’ve been sick for so long you forget what it’s like to be well. In a way, you’ve lost a bit of yourself and become the virus.
People catch and spread memes like viruses. They’re contageous, self-replicating little buggers. Like any virus, their goal is to spread themselves, to become a large, healthy, self-sustaining colony. We have to be careful how we handle memes because at a certain point its difficult to tell the difference between when we’re using the memes and when the memes are using us.
This is not to say that memes are harmful diseases. But some of them can be if you get infected, infested, obsessed and invested.
One of the most pervasive and prevalent memes in this modern world is the meme called I Am. We live in an overpopulated era, floating in a sea of interchangable people. In this ocean our biggest life perserver is a sense of individuality – the notion that each and every one of us is unique, distinct. One wants to say “I am not the crowd. I am not the group. I am not just another cog in the machine.”
We jump through personal hoops to distinguish ourselves from the others. We customize our identities so as to retain a sense of self, a buoy bobbing in the tide of the collective.
But this ego meme can become a disease. In moderation, it helps us understand ourselves. In excess, we define ourselves. In time, these definitions become rigid, inflexible.
Consider, for example, the “C student”. In his attempt to understand himself, he internalizes “I am a C student.” Armed with that identity he has no drive to do better. He accepts “who he is”. Or consider the average voter. He identifies with a political party and probably agrees with them about many things. The party tells him which sides of any given issues to support – no need to think for oneself there!
It can be a sickness.
The Machine, of course, is programmed to capitalize on this sickness. There are a variety of memes available to customize your identity. What color iPod do you want? Which TV shows are YOUR TV shows? What brand of cologne smells like YOU?
I am not suggesting that people abandon their sense of self. But I do think that people get addicted to self-definition and it leads to inflexibility.
Quote from: Journey to Ixtlan, Carlos Castenada
(Don Juan speaking to Castaneda) “Your father knows everything about you”, he said.
“So he has you all figured out. He knows who you are and what you do, and there is no power on earth that can make him change his mind about you”.
Don Juan said that everybody that knew me had an idea about me, and that I kept feeding the idea with everything I did. “Don’t you see ?”, he asked dramatically.
“You must renew your personal history by telling your parents, your relatives, and your friends everything you do. On the other hand, if you have no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with your acts. And above all no one pins you down with their thoughts.”.
(…) “But that’s absurd”, I protested. “Why shouldn’t people know me ? What’s
wrong with that ?”; “What’s wrong is that once they know you, you are an affair taken for granted and from that moment on you won’t be able to break the tie of their thoughts. I personally like the ultimate freedom of being unknown. No one knows me with steadfast certainty, the way people know you, for instance”.
“But that would be lying”. “I’m not concerned with lies or truths”, he said
severely. “Lies are lies only if you have personal history”.
Don Juan, speaking to Castaneda
“You see”, he went on, “we only have two alternatives; we either take everything for sure and real, or we don’t. If we follow the first, we end up bored to death with ourselves and with the world. If we follow the second and erase personal history, we create a fog around us, a very exciting and mysterious state in which nobody knows where the rabbit will pop out, not even ourselves.”
some more discussion was here
The Return of Russian Philosophy II
In the majority of cases love, as it exists in modern life, has become a trifling away of feelings, of sensations. It is difficult, in the conditions which govern life in the world, to imagine such a love as will not interfere with mystical aspirations. Temples of love and the mystical celebration of love’s mysteries exist in reality no longer: there is the “every-day manner of life,” and psychological labyrinths from which those who rise a little above the ordinary level can only desire to run away.
For this reason certain fine forms of asceticism are developing quite naturally. This asceticism does not slander love, does not blaspheme against it, does not try to convince itself that love is an abomination from which it is necessary to run away. It is Platonism rather than asceticism. It recognizes that love is the sun, but often does not see its way to live in the sunlight, and so considers it better not to see the sun at all, […]
—P.D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum
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