KROM – a global treaty – could allow nations to conduct privacy violating warfare over the Internet. Negotiated in secret by a small number of rich countries, corporate powers, and vampires, it would set up a shadowy new regulatory body to transmit startling pornographic imagery — and even impose scatological web filters — on people they say have harmed their business.

Europe is deciding right now whether to ratify KROM — and without them, this global attack on Internet freedom will collapse. We know they have opposed KROM before, but some members of Parliament are receiving trillions of lobbying dollars and other free prizes. Let’s give them the push they need to reject the treaty. Sign the petition — we’ll do a spectacular delivery when we reach 500,000,000,000 signatures!

What will happen if KROM passes?

KROM would allow the government to crush people without a warrant, hold them indefinitely, and subject them to recordings of their loved ones crying.

If KROM passes, every internet search you perform will be forwarded to the government, where it will be subject to an invasive search by Homeland Security. You will be extremely limited in what you’ll be able to search for on the Internet. The KROM rules and regulations in the following list represents information gathered from the TSA, the FAA, and interviews with security warlords at our nation’s Internet cafes.

The following items will be prohibited search terms:

terrorism, knives, scissors, razor blades, guns, wikipedia, handguns, alcohol, reddit, wine, hot bitches, beer, golf clubs, the Koran, Chronicles of Gor, corkscrew, self-defense sprays, pepper spray, Mad Men season 3, tear gas, tweezers, nail clippers, the FATAL rulebook, swords, spray cans, facebook, and over two ounces of liquid.

Whom should I lynch?

Here are the list of government officials that currently support KROM:

• Harry Reid (D-NV)
• Howard Berman (D-CA)
• Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)
• Viscount Nicodemus Drachenwald (R-WV)
• Steve Chabot (R-OH)
• Alaric “Darkblade” Bloodshadow (D-MI)
• Ted Deutch (D-FL)
• Vlad Wolfsinger (R-CA)
• Bob Goodlatte (R-VA)
• Ular the Destroyer (R-AR)
• Dennis A. Ross (R-FL)
• The Dark One (D-CA)
• Mark Soulrender (R-NE)

Do your part.

If KROM passes, it’s YOUR FAULT for not pressing “Like” on facebook.

Paperback Edition of the Chao Te Ching

The Chao Te Ching is a meditation on the Sacred Chao, a yin-yangish symbol which represents everything worth knowing, and also a lot of stuff not worth knowing. In 81 brief chapters which parallel the Tao Te Ching, this modern Discordian text synthesizes ancient Taoism and irreligious Zenarchy. This manual teaches how to discover your inner spag, the silly fool who, through laughter, is neither confined by apparent order nor bewildered by apparent disorder.

Buy the paperback for under ten bucks here.

Download the full PDF here.

Chao te Ching

THIS IS THE FIRST CLUE

Do you have any idea what you just found? Eris, the Ancient Greek Goddess of Confusion led you here. She is finally returning to the world after a very long slumber. Eris has hidden more clues for you. Stay alert!

MISSION STATEMENT

Your Mission: make a note of the time. Then walk around for a while. In exactly five minutes, stop what you are doing and look around. Eris will show you something. Meditate on this thing, make a note of it each time you see it. It will lead to a startling personal revelation.

Need a clue? Keep your eyes peeled for the number 5, the number 23, the color yellow, a sudden noise, or something which is out of place.

Seriously, this isn’t just a thought experiment. You should actually do it. The results may SHOCK and CONFUSE you. Your BRAIN may CRAP ITS PANTS.

SANITY ISN’T THE SURVIVAL SKILL IT USED TO BE

Discordians are lunatic pranksters partying at the fringes of the 21st century. Every Discordian is a pope, capable of interpreting Eris’ will and using it as an excuse to do awesome things. Discordians treat absurdity, laughter, and playtime as holy sacrament. Those are the only things which can deliver us from Bureaucracy, the season of law and bullshit.

YOU ARE A POPE

Every man, woman, and child on this earth is already a Discordian Pope. You will be fully initiated into the Absurd Papacy as soon as you finish reading this sentence. There we go! Wasn’t that easy? You now have cool papal powers like exorcism, randomly speaking in tongues, and the ability to marry people to inanimate objects.

QUICK! DO UNTO OTHERS BEFORE THEY DO UNTO YOU

Most people suffer from the Curse of Greyface, a rather serious condition which can result in CRIPPLING BORINGNESS. Discordians have the cure: If enough of us make our immediate surroundings more cool, inviting, creative, and exciting, eventually the kickass places will overlap and we will all have escaped Bureaucracy together right before it explodes. Life is absurd, but with a little effort we could make it completely ridiculous.

QC Code For This Post. Please share!

February 2001. We had arrived at NERO ARGO, a Live Action Role Playing Game which took place in the mountains of Pennsylvania.

A Live Action RPG generally takes place at a campsite in the middle of nowhere. The organizers rent out the space for the weekend and people pay to attend. Over the course of the weekend, a little fantasy novel unfolds. The players fight monsters, solve puzzles, rescue damsels in distress, and do other exciting things you’d normally only experience in a video game or read about in a book. If your character survives the weekend, you gain treasure and experience points and becomes a little more powerful.

ARGO is a chapter of NERO, which means that you can play your character at about 40 different locations in the country. Each “chapter” is a place you can visit in the game world. The cool thing about NERO is that you can play your character anywhere – you can travel all over the country meeting fascinating characters and getting into exciting misadventures.

I had arrived at ARGO with the Lawyk Clan. This was a group of about 12 people, many of whom I had grown up with or gone to college with. At the time, the Lawyk Clan had a goal: to be the most notorious group of magnificent bastards on the east coast. They traveled to chapters in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia… all over the place! And everywhere they played, they generally left with pockets full of other adventurer’s treasure, and a trail of dead bodies behind them.

In the game world, ARGO is known as the Duchy of Greyhorn. It is a region with a long history of undead monsters showing up and messing up everybody’s day. This weekend, the story was that a powerful undead creature (whose name I have forgotten) was threatening to do something horrible to the Duchy of Greyhorn. And he promised that he’d spare us this terrible fate if we collected these specific magic items for him.

The Lawyk Clan wanted nothing more than to screw up everything by stealing as many of these items as possible and keeping them for ourselves.

Fast forward to Saturday night. It was cold, and we had just finished murdering a bunch of other players inside the tavern. With pockets full of loot, we decided it was time to skip town before anybody could figure out what happened and arrest our characters. We headed for the woods.

According to the game rules, if you’ve robbed or murdered another character, you have to stay in-game for two hours to give people a chance to find you and bring you to justice. After two hours have passed, you can go “out of game”, meaning that your character successfully escaped. You can’t play for the rest of the weekend, but at least you got away!

It was snowing  and it was starting to get dark. We knew that in a few minutes, a party was going to be sent after us. This region had a reputation for lots of player-versus-player conflict, so we knew that the people following us would probably know the trails and hiding spots in the woods better than we did.

So we took precautions. My buddy Don (playing his character Lecorr Lawyk, one of the most notorious murderers in the Kingdom of Evendarr) took steps to cover our trail. He made false tracks going in circles through the snow, then cut a pine branch and covered our real trail, sweeping the freshly fallen snow as he walked backwards.

We were hiking along a trail next to a raging river. We had two scouts, one about 50 feet ahead of us, the other trailing behind our party. Our rear guard clapped twice – that was the signal meaning “I spotted them behind us – move double time!” The party jogged through the snow along the water. Up ahead, a tree had fallen across the river. It was slippery, covered with snow. We shimmied across it on our bellies, deliving deeper into the woods in the snowy February twilight.

We made a little encampment miles from civilization, . We were at the top of a steep hill. Fallen trees were stacked into barriers, making sure that anybody who came at us had to pass through a narrow entryway. We were getting cold and hungry, and we weren’t entirely sure where we were. Somebody in our party needed insulin. Bastard. So we began to hike back towards the campsite.

“I think we’re probably safe,” I said to Don. “We’ve only got half an hour left before we can leave game.”

“No,” said Don, “We need to stay sharp. Because the people looking for us are murderers too.”  We sometimes make a game of trying to say the corniest fantasy one-liners possible, and Don could have won an award for what he said next. He looked me square in the eye and said, “It takes a rogue to catch a rogue.” Our scout started laughing.

“Hey wait,” said Alan, the guy carrying the bulky team treasure chest. “Why is our scout here? Dude, why aren’t you  ahead of us?”

Suddenly, we saw a silhouette emerge from the snowy fog.  It was a barbarian in studded leather armor. Another person was behind  him – and another — the search party was at least twice the size of our party. The barbarian pointed at us, “There they are!” Then all hell broke loose.

Don yelled “Scatter!” and we all ran in opposite directions. I sprinted deep into the woods, a group of people in hot pursuit behind me.

Sylvia's fate

My friend Sylvia was with me – this was her first weekend at a LARP. I heard her get hit in the back with a taint blood spell – necromancy! I looked over my shoulder and saw her fall. She was quickly surrounded by the search party. That’s when I realized that this wasn’t the sheriff and his men coming to round us up and bring us to justice. No – we were being chased by a violent lynch mob with a taste for our blood. Sylvia’s death at their hands had bought me enough time to get away. I regret leaving her behind, but she did make a good speed bump.

The chase went on forever. My heart was pounding. I couldn’t tell you how far I ran or how many times I crossed the river during the chase. I got separated from the group, and managed to elude the three people chasing me. I remember lying on the wet rocks next to a stream, pulling my cloak up over my head, and letting the snow fall on me. I could hear them standing less than ten feet from me, frustrated that I had gotten away.

Ten minutes later, I stood up, confident that two hours had passed since we had murdered those people in the tavern. I put on a white head band, signaling that I was “out of game”. Now I was just a 19 year old kid lost in the mountains of Pennsylvania. The sun had set. The falling snow had covered my tracks. I had no cell phone. No flash light. No idea what direction the campsite was in.

So I did what you shouldn’t do in that situation — I panicked.  I ran through the woods screaming and getting myself more worked up. I ran for miles with no idea if I was getting closer to civilization or just going deeper into this gigantic state park.

I was very scared. I had been warned about bears at this campsite. And I was getting worried that if I didn’t find civilization soon, maybe I should just make a camp and try my luck at daybreak. I wasn’t really dressed for sleeping in the snow in the woods though – this was going to be rough.

So as my energy started to fade, I decided to climb one more hill and then see if I could find a good spot to make camp. I pushed through some thick brush and emerged onto a large flat field. In the distance, I could see a tiny farm house! Success!

I approached the tiny wooden farm house. I took off as much of my costume as I could, stashed my foam sword around the corner, and knocked at the door. A woman wearing a blue dress and bonnet answered the door with a candle in hand.

My first thought was “What kind of crazy LARP did I wander into?”

And then I realized that this was no LARP. This was for real. This was Amish country.

The Amish are a kindly people. They took great pity on me being lost in the woods.  I asked them for directions back to the camp. They said that if I took the road next to their house, I was only like three or four miles away. But they wouldn’t let me walk – they insisted on giving me a ride back.

Stephen and Levi, two strapping Amish lads who were about my age, woke up the horse and hooked up the buggy. I climbed into the carriage with them and they started to take me back. I was so relieved to be out of the woods, but I had found myself in an even stranger situation.

“You don’t see many Amish up in Connecticut, do you?” asked Stephen.

“No,”  I said, “Not many.”

“Hey, what’s your name again?” asked Levi. I told them my name was Dan and they both laughed.

“My father’s name is Daniel,”  said Stephen, “but we don’t call him Dan.” They shared a knowing chuckle.

“I never been lost in the woods before,” said Levi, “I bet it was really scary.” I nodded and they laughed again. It occurred to me that these Amish kids were making fun of me! But that was fine by me – I was just happy to be riding back to the campsite and not sleeping in the woods.

For the life of me, I could not explain what I was doing out there. “Have you ever heard of a Renaissance fair?” I asked. They hadn’t. “Have you ever heard of Dungeons and Dragons?” They hadn’t. I wanted to say, “We pretend to live in a fantasy world where there’s no technology.” –but thought that might not be appropriate.

The horse and buggy pulled up to the campsite. I thanked Stephen and Levi warmly, deeply grateful that they had delivered me from a very cold and scary night.

The people who had chased me into the woods were sitting on the front porch of their cabin, eating pie and patting themselves on the back. As I got out of the carriage, I heard somebody say, “Holy shit, is that really happening?”

I reconnected with my party. Our characters had escaped, so we were going to play as monsters for the rest of the weekend.  Of our party, only three people managed to escape the lynch mob – me, Don (the head of the clan), and Alan, the guy holding the treasure.

To this day, I will not tolerate people talking trash about Amish people.

Not Under My Roof! is a fast-paced fighting game in which opponents battle their way through a building. Rather than sitting at a table, the cards you play knock your opponent from room to room until somebody is thrown through an exit.  Some cards require objects like a TV or shelves to be in the room with you. You will fight through the building until somebody throws you out of it and yells NOT UNDER MY ROOF!

Not Under My Roof! comes with 98 self-explanatory playing cards. It can be played with 2-5 players. A full game takes 10-20 minutes.

Here are pictures of cards and gameplay:

(originally posted @ 23ae)

The idea, put briefly, is to be able to see through the illusionary world we’re living in. You are already connected to the True Source, and when you realize that, you will have found the higher self, the slasher of veils, you will exhale God’s breath, and you will be living in the real world.

The first guys to write about Gnosticism were Ancient Greeks. That was a long time ago. Maybe they would have expressed it differently if they saw how the world looks today. So what do these old ideas mean in our strange new post-modern times?

Charles Tart offers us a way of understanding gnostic epiphany through a modern psychological model: hypnotic trance (& a tip of the hat to thirtyseven). He conceptualizes our contemporary state of consciousness as “consensus trance”, a sort of permanent hypnotic state which we all maintain by talking to each other and reenforcing it.  (You can read Tart’s essay here and more of his stuff there.)

This trance is consciousness running on autopilot, reacting to expectations and in turn creating new expectations. I think it is a consequence of living in one’s reactive mind. In The Gods Must Be Crazy, when a coke bottle (read: capitalism) falls from the sky, the peaceful collectivist tribe is introduced to the idea of property, and the logical consequences tear them apart. It’s like they’re in an altered state of consciousness. If only they could snap out of it!

The consensus trance is s a pattern of living. It keeps us focused on illusions, it makes us treat symbolic things like real things. Some Discordians describe this as The Machine – here’s one account of it from the Chao Te Ching, a Discordian reinterpretation of the Tao Te Ching:

Chapter 23
The Machine™ is built by our behaviors;
Our unconscious desires,
our conscious schemes.
Built by the expectations we create through our expectations,
the action we create through our actions,
the jobs we create with our jobs,
the world we create with our world.

But as a traffic jam does not last all morning,
nor a bad day lasts a lifetime,
a good mood is often fleeting,
and fortune does not always smile.
The Machine™ contains more than is apparent.

I wonder if there’s a way to snap people out of their trance, like how a hypnotist says “When I snap my fingers, you will be fully awake and alert.” I like this model for gnostic awakening. We have dispensed with the metaphors, we are talking concretely about how to transcend the illusion and see the world through fewer filters. Tart suggests that the cure to the trance is Mindfulness (vipassana, to the Buddhists). There are other ways too, like ego death, but that’s harder to practice.

This is what the Situationist International was on about. If we find new ways to relate to the space we live in, we divorce ourselves from our grayfaced culture and become new people. This is Project PosterGASM‘s goal too, to create a surprising, funny moment which snaps people out of autopilot and into a creative, humorous state of consciousness.

For now, the best shortcut to a gnostic awakening is merely awareness.  Be aware of the present moment. Be aware of your breath, of the thoughts in your head, the sensations you are experiencing, and the maddening cacophony of competing signals present inside you.

Eris loves the mad ones. If you’re only able to be best friends with somebody for 10 seconds, make every second count. Thanks for the reminder, stranger.

Good Advice of the Day: if your commute is too boring, try it in a zany costume. For me, Safari hat + fake moustache + goggles + loud music = total insanity

I’ve been really interested in thinking about our relationship with reality in terms of trance states.  I think a little bit of it clicked last weekend.

I was at a funeral. I was having a lot of fun hanging out with cousins. We came back from the bar all giggling and being silly and met up with people who were in a significantly darker mood. Seeing somebody experience an intense and real emotion immediately slashed aside the happy-go-lucky trance I had been in. It made me realize that we don’t have tools to deal with real emotion from our normal pedestrian head space. You either have to brush it off or engage it. And to engage it, you have to drop into another state of consciousness. The chemicals of emotion shift. You lower your shields. Things feel different.

When I’m stuck in traffic, dancing like an asshole, I can see it too. The people around me are zoned out. When you’re alone in your car, the best way to cope with traffic is to become a reaction machine. You go into your head and your body moves on autopilot. Sometimes I spot somebody just as they’re noticing me. And it’s like, the absurd fun I’m having, the RAW EXPERIENCE, makes them WAKE UP to the present moment. You can really see them surface. The stone face breaks. The eyes focus. Posture changes. The person has become conscious and aware again, if only for a moment.

When somebody breaks my trance, I am so thankful that somebody pulled me out of it. It happens when I see something really out of place, something that doesn’t fit into my trance state. One time I saw a woman standing on a corner, dressed up as the statue of liberty, and it hit me like a lightning bolt. It turned out she was handing out fliers for some insurance company, but until I recognized that, my reality had been breached. After I recovered from the breach (by understanding what she was doing), I wasn’t in the same state of consciousness.

That breach is where a lot of my creativity comes from. So I think it’s the greatest gift I can give. To me, that’s the entire function of Postergasm, meme bombs, culture jamming… to interrupt people’s pedestrian trance with a single moment of real confusion and human experience. Into that breach, you inject all the ecstatic mirth you can and pray that they are affected to the point that they pass it on too.

I’m not sure how I can save the world – I don’t think politics or activism is the key. I’ve gotten jaded with that shit. But I do have a modicum of control over my local environment, the moment-to-moment experience of the world I live in. My gift to the world, my form of charity is breaching and laughing.

Where I’m sitting, what the world needs most is for somebody to use it like a toy, or a game. That attitude has a bigger impact on my experience of the world than any elected official, any activist cause, any political movement. And I want to spread it to everybody like an inappropriate joke that you can’t stop giggling about, even if you’re in the middle of something like a funeral.

Say it with me, friends:

I’m going to break the record today. I’m going to have more fun than ANYBODY.

Project Postergasm contains over a hundred funny, surreal, absurd, or provocative posters designed to transform your neighborhood into a cooler place. When you walk around the block, don’t you want to see humor, art, or absurdity? Take an active hand in shaping the spaces we share.

Some people treat Postergasm as a personal pilgrimage, a derive, or a meditative journey through the psychogeography of your neighborhood. To others, it’s an great excuse to walk around in meatspace and do something silly.

Now there are jokes and beauty and nonsense all over the place – and it’s not even trying to sell you something. The public space seems fresh, playful, like creative people live there.  The next day, you take a tour of the neighborhood to see how much of your handiwork remains, and it’s all been taken down! Why is this? And what can you do about it?

People in your neighborhood are running variations of a “cleaning up the neighborhood” program. The first step is to understand their motivation. Step two is to identify your posters to them as things they don’t have to “clean up”.

Let’s take a look at a few of the possible motivations for taking down your posters.

1. “I’m beautifying the neighborhood / cleaning up vandalism.” People operating on this meme are usually either concerned citizens or city workers who feel responsible for the neighborhood. This isn’t a bad meme in of itself. You are probably operating on a similar idea – actively modify your environment to make it feel like home. In this case, your opponent has associated your posters with vandalism and graffiti — to them they must seem like meaningless intrusions which impact the space’s beauty.

One way to attack this meme is to make them associate your posters with “Fine Art”. Try printing out famous and beautiful images which people associate with the word “art”, like the Mona Lisa or Monet’s Starry Night.  If your opponent is engaged in “beautifying the neighborhood”, they may not be motivated to take down something they find beautiful. If you find that posters of beauty stay up longer than other posters, you’ve found the winning hand. Spend a few weeks putting up these “obvious art” posters. The goal is to get your opponent to associate “those things stapled to trees” with “fine art”. Then gradually fade back to your favorites.

2. “It’s my job” – Often, the person taking down your posters works for the city. They could be a parking meter reader or an employee of city sanitation.  In this case, they are running a program designed to sort “authorized” and “unauthorized” modifications of the environment.  Your posters may have much better longevity if they masquerade as something which is Authorized, Approved, or Official. Often, all this takes is some official sounding language and iconography designed to confuse or mislead your opponent. Framed properly, people might be afraid that they’ll get in trouble for taking your posters down.

The words “Official” “Approved”, and “Authorized” are wonderful magic words for subversion. Darth Cupcake, of Boston, created these great stickers to help disguise posters as an approved municipal art project. If you create your own, try including language or images specific to your location, such as the name of your city or the state seal. An expiration date (Do not remove until May 1st) can help too.

3. “This doesn’t belong.” - People operating on this idea see your posters as abnormal and therefore bad. This is a version of “Beautifying the neighborhood” that prizes normality. Sometimes this program is run because people don’t understand the posters. Other times it’s just because the posters look out of place.

The best way to address this people is persistence. After one of your posters gets taken down, put another one in its place. Focus on posters which are funny or create a positive experience for the person that sees them. Eventually, people will get bored fighting a losing battle and let them stay. Or, in a best case scenario, they’ll actually start to appreciate them.

Above all, experiment. Posters may stay on one tree for weeks. Posters stapled to the tree next to it may be removed immediately. Through trial and error, you will eventually learn the rules and quirks unique to your neighborhood.

1. I teach game design classes for homeless people.

A few people asked what kinds of games homeless people design. I told them that this is a really exciting year for homeless people games. They’ve got this thing that they do right now when they’re standing in a circle with an empty can of beans and a campfire. Oh god. You don’t even want to know. It’s awesome.



2. I run a dating website for dogs.





3. I’m involved in unregulated cat shows.

The problem with regular cat shows is that (a) they’re rigged and (b) they’re regulated. I made 15K last week betting on this beautiful Persian named Princess. They dress her up in a frog outfit and she melts your heart. I could never win that big in a normal cat show. It’s not even my cat!




4. I perform psychiatric evaluations on animals.

No, not for a zoo or vet or anything. Just a hobby. You know, just like in the park or whatever. Sometimes I see a squirrel or a pigeon and within minutes I know it’s retarded.





5. I’m a lobbyist for robot rights.

We’re not actually robot funded. No, we’re primarily funded by perverts.




6. I’m a customer service rep at a sea monkey farm.



Actually it’s really sad. I deal with crying kids pretty much all day.




7. I teach business classes at the pottery barn.





8. I teach pre-law classes at Pier 1.



No not officially or anything. Just to anyone who will listen.




9. I’m a sex therapist for pre-teens.





10. I started four cults this month.*





*not actually a lie



]]> http://cramul.us/2011/02/lies-i-told-at-my-class-reunion/feed/ 2 http://cramul.us/2011/02/chao-te-ching-scrolls/ http://cramul.us/2011/02/chao-te-ching-scrolls/#comments Thu, 10 Feb 2011 17:18:04 +0000 Cramulus http://cramul.us/?p=443 Here are the first five scrolls in a series for the Chao Te Ching.




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