Corridor of Madness

The site was defaced... hopefully posting this entry will restore the normal index page. Let's see...

...yep, it worked. Wasn't too painful. Still, the mantra is in order:

May all script kiddiots everywhere find the enlightenment of True Knowledge.

Posted by mindwarp at 10:45 PM | Permalink

What to make, ladies and gentlemen, of this?

'From: "Isidoro Curtis"
To: "Wislaw Bowden"
Subject: MTW Drrugs
Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 21:11:06 -0500

Hello,

though he had not the latter's magnetism. He's been tellin' me
the properties behind them. If you will give me fifteen days or
exchange, many curious figures had been pointed out to him--State
and she sang only when he was there. There was something about
and aboveboard. It's true I am very fond of her and she is very
in her manner decided him to speak before she left; and after
Cowperwood's cell for a week if the visiting-hours of the peniten
political loyalty stuff cloud your judgment. You're in a very
in regard to the sixty-thousand-dollar check and his personal
anyhow you can't afford to be now. We're in this thing together.

Have a nice day.'

Frankly, it's hard to see this as anything other than an Imp of the Network babbling away in some weird dialect of Burroughs-cutup-ese. But if you think you have a rational explaination, by all means post it below... comments are open for this one, uh, until the other spammers find it.

Posted by mindwarp at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The comment spam had become way too much stress, so I disabled comments and trackback pings sitewide. I hate doing this, but the truth is that spammers have been almost the only ones to post comments in many, many weeks. And, my MT-Blacklist plugin seems to be broken (weird error about the MySQL server having "gone away" -- which is fairly ridiculous as it clearly still works for the rest of the MT installation).
Just more signs that this blog is in dire need of some maintenance and cleanup. Then again, so is the rest of my life, not to mention the rest of Creation. More on that some other time.

Anyway, long story short, I am temporarily withdrawing from confrontation with the spambots. At least now I can say that this site doesn't serve to prop up the Google rankings of cheap viagra pushers and similar scum. Of course the goal is to restore comments and pings to their full functionality, but I don't have time to fully get into it right now, and with MT-Blacklist not functioning, the fuckers were really taking advantage of me full blast.

I am considering several options to fix this issue and at the same time revamp the Corridor a bit. For instance, upgrading to the latest version of Movable Type would allow me (almost certainly) to keep the custom design with little or no effort, but frankly I'd rather switch to some truly Free software. I've tried and liked Drupal recently, so that might be another possibility.
If you know how to get in touch with me, feel free to send suggestions and ideas. Till soon,

mindwarp

Posted by mindwarp at 11:24 PM | Permalink

In the spirit of Mark Pauline and Monte Cazazza, but with a markedly geeky twist:

'Have you ever loaded a faulty CD into a high speed (30X or higher) CD-ROM player, heard it spin up to incredible speeds, rattling and whining, and thought to yourself: "this thing is going to explode"? When CDs came out they were heralded as the solution for the need for high storage-high speed information devices, transferring data at a whopping 150kb/s, but like all technologies, 1x CD players quickly became obsolete as the need for higher and higher transfer rates pushed for faster players, and, with them, higher rotational speeds. As we advance into the 21st century CD players are reaching the ultimate speed limit: we are getting to the point where the CD player simply can not spin the CD any faster or else the CD will literally fly apart.
On the interests of the advancement of high speed computing PowerLabs brings to you: "THE ULTIMATE CD SPEED LIMIT!" (Sam Barros' PowerLabs article)

Posted by mindwarp at 02:14 PM | Permalink

A chance encounter on IRC brought to my knowledge this cool project -- in so many words: Linux, culture, medialabs and community in the slums of New Delhi (and with local "troubled youths"). The website is a good read, with a lot of well-written info and samples of some of the media projects coming out of the experiment, It's an inspiring example of a social project enabled by and based on Free Software.

'The Ankur/Sarai Cybermohalla Project is an experimental collaborative initiative for the creation of nodes of popular digital culture in Delhi between Ankur, a Delhi based NGO and Sarai, the New Media & Urban Culture Programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

The word Cybermohalla, suggests a hybrid location, which has the open-endedness of cyberspace, qualified by the local specifities and intimacy of a mohalla or a dense urban neighbourhood.' (Link)

Posted by mindwarp at 12:55 PM | Permalink

Look, frankly, screw 2005. I'm going back to 1996:

'So you think you are a geek, eh? The first step is to admit to yourself your geekiness. No matter what anyone says, geeks are people too; geeks have rights. So take a deep breath and announce to the world that you are a geek. Your courage will give you strength that will last you forever.

How to tell the world you are a geek, you ask? Use the universal Geek code! Using this special code will allow you to let other un-closeted geeks know who you are in a simple, codified statement.

The single best way to announce your geekhood is to add your geek code to your signature file or plan and announce it far and wide. But be careful, you may give other geeks the courage to come out of the closet. You might want to hang on to your copy of the code in order to help them along.' (Link)

Posted by mindwarp at 09:11 PM | Permalink

It started off about a year ago with the site's redesign from a regular website edited by a staff, to a "content management system" type site, open to public submissions and moderated by the staff. Then, more recently, a RSS feed finally became available.

Now the process is finally complete. The Disinformation Company, Ltd. has fully jumped on the blog bandwagon, with staff blogs (so far Richard Metzger's, Alex Burns' and Jason Louv's) and the opportunity for all Disinfonauts to start a blog, for free, under the same umbrella.

This is very cool, as well as being the obvious right thing to do. The three Disinformants' blogs have been added to my "Other Personal Blogs and Sites" blogroll, to your right. Enjoy, but also consider becoming the media yourself.

Posted by mindwarp at 03:32 PM | Permalink

In what marks (finally!) my first real contribution to Key23, my piece about the recent PTV gig in San Fran is up. Check it out.

Posted by mindwarp at 10:37 AM | Permalink

DW over at Invisible College has posted a nice little roundup of Chaos Classics in handy PDF format — the Principia Discordia, one essay by Peter Carroll and four by Phil Hine.
Check it out.

Posted by mindwarp at 06:10 PM | Permalink

Tinkering around with some really minor things in the Corridor's new template. Not sure *exactly* what I'm doing, so if you start noticing any glitches or strange, different-from-before things, by all means let me know.

Thanks! Now resuming our regularly scheduled Programming.

Posted by mindwarp at 04:03 PM | Permalink

I got more electrically themed, plain fucking eerie spam. A companion to this one, apparently (same strange formatting, even the same identical date).
You know, I really have no idea why anybody would send such a thing as spam. Can anybody enlighten me on this? What is the point of sending the following message (it's the complete thing as I received it; it had no links or pictures embedded in it -- like the other one) to millions of people? Or am I the only one? At any rate, it's pretty weird. Goes like this:

-----original message-----
From: mistie@xxx.xxx [mailto:kai@xxx.xxx]
Sent: Friday, March 8, 2004 7:44PM
To: dorian; corrine@xxxx.xxx; melissa; deloris; hedwig
Subject: not now, then the post office address is listed in link

Joslyn looked upon him gravely and sighed Mrs

Joslyn bent over her son with tears in her eyes and said: This electrical nonsense has affected your mind, dearYou must promise me to keep away from that horrid workshop for a time I won't enter it for a week, he answered

Posted by mindwarp at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Just a quick post to state the obvious: the new design is here! The story of this design has been fraught with so many tribulations you wouldn't even believe it, but that's for another time... For right now, what's important is that it's finally up and running. This is just a bare-bones version of what I have in mind, but it'll do for now. Soon, I'll get another designer to make a few modifications, and eventually expand the site into a few more static pages, etc.

So stay tuned... for all of the above and of course for the blogging, which should return to more regular levels soon. I have been neglecting blogging/writing in general because of a bunch of pressing "real life" stuff, to the point where I'm the only one over at Key23 that hasn't posted an article yet. Despicable. Ah, but I'm working on it, I'm working on it...

Posted by mindwarp at 04:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I'm just back from Vegas, where I attended Defcon 12. What's Defcon? You can call it a "hacking" conference, although the word must always be used with caution, especially if you're the type who thinks that hackers = cybercriminals, or stuff like that. I like to imagine that no reader of Corridor of Madness would, but you never know. The reality is that hacking is a great example of practical magick done in everyday life, and within a world saturated with technology and glued together by multiple networks, of networks, of networks... but I don't really want to get into the subject, as I am supposed to work on a Key23 article about it. So stay tuned with The Key, and go there right now to read all the cool stuff that the rest of the gang has posted while I was away...

Posted by mindwarp at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Check out this link. Put your mouse pointer in the Flash box and wave it around. Stare. Enjoy. Repeat.

Man, is it ever sweet to be a geek in the 21st century.

Posted by mindwarp at 02:57 PM | Permalink

The rise of the Net and the Web represents a victory for the counterculture and the subculture.
The next generation, raised on the Net as their primary medium, won't even know what consensus reality is.
--R.U. Sirius

Ladies and Gentlemen, it is a honor for me to introduce you to Key23, a new group effort of the occultural blog/zine variety.
An apparent accident, borne out of a beautiful series of effortless synchronicities, Key23 finally brings me to team up with several o t h e r shady figures, whose own work I have long admired and blogrolled. At this stage in the game, what we have in practical terms is a group blog, but the six of us are in constant communication and working to expand in multiple directions at once. Please be our guests for an informal inauguration by pointing your browsers and bookmarks to http://www.key23.net/, where Michael Szul serves as the ideal MC to introduce this project:

'What is Key 23? Key 23 comes from author Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles graphic novel. Originally termed Key 17, and then remonikered with the 23 later in the series, Key 23 is a chemical substance that forces the person under it’s influence to confuse words with the concepts that they represent, ultimately leading to a blurry line between reality and the written word.

That is our attempt here: to blur consensus reality with the concepts and ideas that you’ll be reading about… and we’ve assembled a team like no other to accomplish this task.'

So enjoy the occultural waves coming your way, and dance with us on the edge of the End of Consensus...

Posted by mindwarp at 09:35 AM | Permalink

Today is July 23rd.

Exactly one year ago, I was in Santa Cruz to attend the world premiere of Maybe Logic, a documentary about Robert Anton Wilson. Santa Cruz Mayor Emily Reilly was there too, and she officially proclaimed that day "Robert Anton Wilson Day", managing to flatter even further an already warmly celebrated Wilson.

On July 23rd, 1973, Wilson had an experience that appeared to be a communication with an alien intelligence from Sirius, and that served as foundation for his trilogy The Cosmic Trigger (one, two and three). This wouldn't have sounded particularly weird at all to the ancient Egyptians, as they believed that the connection with Sirius is at its strongest on July 23rd, day on which the star first rises from behind the sun. Sirius is also known as the "Dog Star", and its rising on today's date marks the beginning of the "Dog Days" of Summer. The Dogon people of Africa also have had, historically, quite a relationship with Sirius. If you'd like some more information about that, LVX23 has some related quotes up today.

Incidentally, Sirius has an astronomical luminosity of 23.5 as well. But I'm going to stop here, and right away — before this becomes yet another endless list of 23's. If you would like one of those, may I direct you here... it's more fun that way.

Anyway. Coming back to the present... today, July 23rd, 2004, the doors of Robert Anton Wilson's Maybe Logic Academy have opened, and 44 people (including myself) are beginning RAW's course on '8 Dimensions of "Mind"'. Course text is Wilson's masterpiece Prometheus Rising. A forum has been set up for people that are enrolled in the course to share insights and discuss this or that point, and RAW is already encouraging such interactions. As the course progresses, I might sporadically blog about it whenever a particularly interesting discussion or statement enters my radar. So stay tuned and, if you feel so inclined, you might consider joining of the other, upcoming courses. If you end up in the Illuminatus! course, I'll see you there — be sure to say hi!

Posted by mindwarp at 08:22 PM | Permalink

...was found hiding in today's spam (about some sort of antiaging product). The Demon appeared to me in the following form:

From: xxxxx@x.xxx [mailto:xxxx@xxxx.xxx]
Sent: Friday, March 8, 2004 4:68PM
To: maira; alisa@x.xxx; willia; dee; efrain
Subject: appreciate but no thank you PO 12 00 B , Oran ge sta d, A ruba


You don't seem to understand Well, I'll explain

You're the Demon of Electricity, aren't you? I am, said the other, drawing himself up proudlyYour mission is to obey the commands of whoever is able to strike the Master Key of Electricity

And that was it.

Creepy.

Posted by mindwarp at 06:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My friend Paul, also known as Your Imaginary Friend, recently sent me some cryptic emails, each containing what appears to be a fragment of a longer story. Or a longer something, anyway. I'd like to share with you one of those fragments. It's a great prelude, I think, and I hope he continues fleshing out the whole thing. Read on for the story so far.

Continue reading "Your Imaginary Friend: The Sweeper // prelude" »

Posted by mindwarp at 10:56 PM | Permalink

Yesterday, as I was cruising around on Google for my daily fix of alchemical symbolism (don't we all), my choice of keywords made me stumble upon this blog: Circling the Square: Dark conspiracies, fiendish plots, and end-times paranoia.The site is basically dead — last updated on May 26th — but I've decided to make it a policy to blog any such serendipities. So check it out anyway for a few funny and snarky tidbits about, among other things: brain fingerprinting, far-out futuristic weaponry, Martha Stewart, small-penised men fighting back against spammers, and the virtues of crack cocaine over the Atkins diet.

Posted by mindwarp at 09:38 PM | Permalink

MadGhoul's editor Michael Szul interviews Douglas Rushkoff, brilliant media philosopher. Read the interview here, and check out Rushkoff's Disinformation dossier if you need some background. Enjoy.

Posted by mindwarp at 08:59 PM | Permalink

Novelist (Move Under Ground) and erstwhile Disinfo scribe Nick Mamatas has received TRUE and AUTHENTIC wisdom from no less a source than Ted Jesus Christ GOD, and decided to share it with us. Thanks, Nick!

'This is Ted Jesus Christ GOD saying that I AM THE CREATOR and this is what Doctors and Dentist should be Prescribing...NO PROCESSED SUGAR in anything and ZERO TOLERANCE for any of that and NO PROCESSED FOODS and NO PROCESSED WHITE BREAD and NO STARCHY FOODS and NOTHING ARTIFICIAL and NO ANIMAL FATS in anything and ZERO TOLERANCE for any of that and this includes NO butter milk and NO dairy milk and NO sour cream and NO yogurt and NO cheese and NO meats and then NO Biotech and EVERYTHING from the Fresh Produce Section has to be Creator Original and definitely NEVER any Street Drugs or Over the Counter Drugs or Prescription Drugs or Pharmaceuticals or Hospital or Medical Center Drugs and NO Smoking of anything and NO drinking of anything alcoholic and NO Plastic or Cosmetic Surgery and NO Surgery to counter Growing Old Curse and DEFINITELY AND THIS NEVER EVER EVER taking anything or allowing to be put in your veins anything that Alters your Genetics and that can then be passed onto children or Altering of Human Genetics for any reason including to cure or fix or improve or enhance or alter. Ted keeps hearing and this LOUD SPIRITUALLY that Antibiotics have caused certain types of FATAL Cancer and are partially RESPONSIBLE for the Cancer EPIDEMIC!'

Posted by mindwarp at 11:10 PM | Permalink

Open yet another doorway into the Patently Absurd, by checking out this list of the "Worst analogies ever written in a high school essay" (via Discordian Research Technology News).

Featuring:

He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
— Joseph Romm, Washington

She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.
— Rich Murphy, Fairfax Station

Posted by mindwarp at 01:43 AM | Permalink

Today, Corridor of Madness received its first big spam attack, with about 200 comments posted by spambots. Most were links to either sex sites (of the brutal kind), or various online scams. All I can say is, Gee... thanks! The attack has provided the push I needed to finally install MT-Blacklist, a plugin for Movable Type that automatically deletes spam comments and prevents them from being posted in the future. It was a snap to install and use, and it fixed in a few minutes a problem that it would have taken me hours to tackle otherwise. I highly recommend this plugin, if you have a Movable Type blog and wish to secure it from the attacks that some extremely low forms of life (spammers) might level on it.

Special thanks go to MT-Blacklist's author, Jay Allen: I'll get you a donation as soon as I can! :)

Posted by mindwarp at 02:56 PM | Permalink

Many have already linked to this BBC article, relating the Sun's latest display of bizarre behavior:

'A new analysis shows that the Sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the previous 1,000 years.
Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star's activity in the past.
They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth's climate became steadily warmer.'

Continue reading "Solioonensius Rising" »

Posted by mindwarp at 11:15 PM | Permalink

American Samizdat links to this Robert Anton Wilson interview:

'The reason for optimism lies in the biological fact that it keeps you happy and busy, whereas pessimism just leads to lying around and bitching. I'd rather keep happy and busy than lie around bitching, but I know this will not convince those who really like lying around and bitching. As Nietzsche said that optimism and good health always go together, and so do pessimism and morbidity, in the medical sense of the word.' (Church of the Subgenius interview)

Posted by mindwarp at 09:18 PM | Permalink

While you question your identification with this or that political/social/cultural group, it might also help to disengage from one-dimensional polarities (Fascist-Communist, Liberal-Conservative, etc.). As a tool to do just that, a British journalist-and-academic duo created The Political Compass:

'There's abundant evidence for the need of it. The old one-dimensional categories of 'right' and 'left' , established for the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly of 1789, are overly simplistic for today's complex political landscape. For example, who are the 'conservatives' in today's Russia? Are they the unreconstructed Stalinists, or the reformers who have adopted the right-wing views of conservatives like Margaret Thatcher?'

They also checked the voting record of all the 2004 Presidential candidates from the two major parties, and generated their position on the Compass accordingly. Which results in an interesting at-a-glance overview of American politics. Moreover, this quick quiz tests your knowledge of the more surprising positions of many political leaders, from Gandhi to Adam Smith to Mussolini to the Dalai Lama. Which makes for many a revealing "Everything You Know is Wrong" moment.

Enjoy, take the test, and once done don't forget to question the Political Compass itself, along with the way it evaluates information (which, incidentally, is not disclosed).

Posted by mindwarp at 06:34 PM | Permalink

Well, it's that time of the year again. For the occasion, let me first echo the sentiments expressed in these July 4th wishes, contained in the latest Disinfo newsletter edited by Alex Burns:

'First, the Disinfo team wishes our United States readers a safe and joyous July 4 celebration. During this holiday weekend take time to reflect on the fate of American governance and the republic, given the major events during the past 12 months. Is the US truly a universalist civilization, worthy of being the 'city on the hill', the 'guiding light' of the world?
Freedom of the revolutionary sort must begin with you, not an elected government or nation-state. It's the individual freedom that Aleister Crowley conveys, or that Douglas Valentine hints at (in an almost throwaway line that Christopher Hitchens is being disengenuous to critique Michael Moore when the neoconservatives have likely siphoned off $US20 billion from Iraq's oil reserves).
The Freedom of an arrow effortlessly hitting the bullseye.'

Continue reading "Freedom?" »

Posted by mindwarp at 03:23 PM | Permalink

'The Gematriculator is a service that uses the infallible methods of Gematria developed by Mr. Ivan Panin to determine how good or evil a web site or a text passage is.

Basically, Gematria is searching for different patterns through the text, such as the amount of words beginning with a vowel. If the amount of these matches is divisible by a certain number, such as 7 (which is said to be God's number), there is an incontestable argument that the Spirit of God is ever present in the text. Another important aspect in gematria are the numerical values of letters: A=1, B=2 ... I=9, J=10, K=20 and so on. The Gematriculator uses Finnish alphabet, in which Y is a vowel.

Experts consider the mathematical patterns in the text of the Holy Bible as God's watermark of authenticity. Thus, the Gematriculator provides only results that are absolutely correct.'

[The Gematriculator was found via Invisible College.]

Posted by mindwarp at 04:45 PM | Permalink

This video gallery for the Discrete Differential Geometry Project — hosted at Technische Universität Berlin — contains a few nice geometrical computer visualizations, such as the one about constant mean curvature tori from which these stills were taken:

Posted by mindwarp at 03:53 PM | Permalink

Overheard at the local video store, 3 minutes before closing time. Three girls, probably none of them older than 17, trying to agree on the movie to watch.

Girl 1: "Hey, [insert name here], do you wanna see Bowling for Columbine?"
Girl 2: "Well, I like weapons, but yeah, sure.
Girl 3: "Say what?"
Girl 2: "I said I LIKE WEAPONS!"

Meanwhile, Nick Mamatas is commenting on Moore's latest: Fahrenheit 9/11 (as well as pointing out something about Bowling that, judging by the quote above, is still worth repeating).

Posted by mindwarp at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This site is a collection of found photos. If you have ever lost a picture of yourself, somebody might have found it and submitted it to the site. The idea being that, if you recognize yourself, you can get the photograph back. If you don't, you can browse through hundreds of pictures of strangers all huddled together in small thumbnails, crowding a single webpage. A mildly eerie buzz might well ensue.

Check it out: http://www.isthisyou.co.uk/

Posted by mindwarp at 12:57 AM | Permalink

'These 9 drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD -- part of a test conducted by the US government during it's dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950's. The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils. His subject is the medico that jabbed him.'

See all the drawings and experiment notes here.

Posted by mindwarp at 12:24 AM | Permalink

A few days ago, my friend Kyron sent me this link. I clicked on it, listened to it and then — as one might — I asked what it was. He explained it to me as follows.

Continue reading "rand()%" »

Posted by mindwarp at 01:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It finally happened. Robert Anton Wilson has finally started teaching at the university! It's just an online, uh, offbeat 'academy', but an "institution of higher learning" nonetheless, at least in my book. Ladies and gentlemen, enter the Maybe Logic Academy...

'Maybe Logic Academy is an innovative educational learning center and online community. The Academy features online courses by many of the most important and ground-breaking writers, theorists and leaders today.

Each course is grounded in the philosophy and perspective of maybe logic, an approach which emphasizes the fallibility and relativity of perception and tends to approach information and theory with questions, probabilities and multiple perspectives rather than absolute truths. If students leave the courses with more questions and more options, we've done our job.'

By the way, Wilson has been using the "Maybe Logic" meme for a while now, beginning with the homonymous movie, which I can highly recommend. For further background, check out my Disinfo review of the movie's premiere in Santa Cruz, California — where Wilson currently resides.

Posted by mindwarp at 07:36 PM | Permalink

Such is the title of a Forevergeek.com article which describes a way to alter your brainwaves using sound generator software. Different ready-made presets are available, and the software can generate new ones. May be worth a try; check it out.

NOTE: the article references 0wnz0red, a cool sci-fi short story by Cory Doctorow, but the link is broken. Use this one instead.

Posted by mindwarp at 03:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

'The Symphony for dot matrix printers is a work which transforms obsolete office technology into an instrument for musical performance. The Symphony focuses the listener's attention on a nearly forgotten technology: the dot-matrix printer. Specifically, it employs the noises the printers make as the sole sound source for a musical composition. Leaving the constituent elements untouched, the process imposes a new order upon them, reorganizing the sounds along a musical structure.'

There you go. Why? Because it hadn't been done yet. You can download or stream the Symphony itself as several tracks, which have titles like "New Existential Clause". Of course. Go ahead, check it out. See if I care.

Posted by mindwarp at 02:57 PM | Permalink

After George Washington's large plantations of cannabis, and Russ Kick's revelation (in 50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know) that Carl Sagan was a major pothead, here's more evidence of the pervasive and sinister presence of Marijuana! in our midst, concealed behind the friendly face of our favorite media outlets.

The other day I typed 'http://www.disinfo.com' in my browser's address bar and, instead of the familiar red-and-black homepage, I got this error:

mysql://disinfoSiteAdmin:@ganja.terabolic.com/disinfosite failed to connectCan't connect to MySQL server on 'ganja.terabolic.com' (111)

Posted by mindwarp at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

While shopping for other stuff in the well-stocked magazine section of a well-known bookstore, I happened upon this cool little zine called Switcheroo, issue #2.
The presentation is unassuming — black and white, no frills whatsoever, good old lo-fi cut&paste publishing — but the headlines immediately hooked my attention.

Continue reading "Official Organs of Global Madness, part 1" »

Posted by mindwarp at 02:19 PM | Permalink

Well, it finally happened. So much time has passed since the last entry that finally the blogroll bar to the right (that thing that lists a bunch of potentially interesting sites under the Recent Entries, Archives etc.) has "broken". Not to worry, I'm on it — finally free from all those pesky Real Life commitments stealing time away from me, I have a long summer ahead, to delve into a world made exclusively of fast, abundant, pure information.

Actually, I'm not going to. But it mildly disturbs me to type it, which is fun, and I do intend to put some of that "regularly scheduled" stuff into my blogging.

Here goes...

Posted by mindwarp at 04:02 PM | Permalink

I sure haven't been blogging much lately... The reason is the simplest one: I don't have the time/mental focus to spare right now. I'm also sort of waiting for the new site design to be completed, which is taking a little longer than I thought (as the most attentive among you might have noticed), but should be here soon.

Be that as it may, I am confident the blogging will become much more regular and plentiful in the near future, as soon as the commitments currently monopolizing my attention are dealt with. So bear with me and stay tuned!

In other news, today is May 23rd, a date of the utmost Discordian significance (if you don't know why, I won't spoil your finding out for yourselves). For the occasion, Technoccult has a nice entry on Discordian music, complete with assorted Discordian links for the unitiated. Check it out, and Hail Eris!

Posted by mindwarp at 05:57 PM | Permalink

Many thanks to my good friend Kyron for sending me this:

'The mind-altering mechanism is based on a subliminal carrier technology: the Silent Sound Spread Spectrum (SSSS), sometimes called "S-quad" or "Squad". It was developed by Dr Oliver Lowery of Norcross, Georgia, and is described in US Patent #5,159,703, "Silent Subliminal Presentation System", dated October 27, 1992. The abstract for the patent reads:

A silent communications system in which nonaural carriers, in the very low or very high audio-frequency range or in the adjacent ultrasonic frequency spectrum are amplitude- or frequency-modulated with the desired intelligence and propagated acoustically or vibrationally, for inducement into the brain, typically through the use of loudspeakers, earphones, or piezoelectric transducers. The modulated carriers may be transmitted directly in real time or may be conveniently recorded and stored on mechanical, magnetic, or optical media for delayed or repeated transmission to the listener.

According to literature by Silent Sounds, Inc., it is now possible, using supercomputers, to analyse human emotional EEG patterns and replicate them, then store these "emotion signature clusters" on another computer and, at will, "silently induce and change the emotional state in a human being".

Continue reading "Mind Control With Silent Sounds" »

Posted by mindwarp at 05:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yahoo! News article:

AP: WTC Developers to Break Ground July 4

NEW YORK - Developers of the Freedom Tower will break ground on the 1,776-foot skyscraper at the World Trade Center site on July 4, Gov. George Pataki said Wednesday.

1776! What does that number remind me of?

Continue reading "a tinfoil hat moment" »

Posted by mindwarp at 02:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Warren Ellis has just blogged about this amazing invention, which I remember noticing two or three years ago in the project list over at the MIT Media Lab website (can't remember whether it was the US or European one).

Back then the idea was in an early developmental stage, but — of the numerous, all quite far out projects that the Media Lab folks were tinkering on — I was particularly mindblown by this piece of technomagic, capable of inaudibly shooting a beam of sound through the air. When the beam hits its target, "the sound waves disperse and the audio portion of the message magically becomes audible at that particular point."

Continue reading "Introducing: the Hypersonic Soundbeam" »

Posted by mindwarp at 07:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I know I've already said this, but this time it's really imminent. The new design is slated to go up sometime within the next 2 days. It's going to be slick, so stay tuned....

Posted by mindwarp at 06:47 PM | Permalink

Through Erik Davis' mailing list, I recently found out about Ken Wilber's cool new site, Integral Naked.

Continue reading "Integral Naked" »

Posted by mindwarp at 11:54 AM | Permalink

...is out. Featuring: Christopher S. Hyatt Ph.D, William S. Burroughs, Aldous Huxley, Howard Bloom, Antonin Artaud, and many others. Issue after issue, the guys at Antiqillum.com don't cease to amaze me. Check out their magazine right here.

Posted by mindwarp at 11:19 AM | Permalink

OK, it's my turn now to talk about the Disinformation evening last Friday in NYC.
The event, held at the CUNY Graduate Center, was well attended — though not packed — by an audience quite varied in terms of gender, age, and appearance. It featured a few select clips from the Disinformation DVD, along with speeches by Disinformation co-founder Richard Metzger, Douglas Rushkoff, Joe Coleman and Howard Bloom.

Continue reading "04.16.2004 — An Evening With Disinformation" »

Posted by mindwarp at 01:51 AM | Permalink

This just to note that I won't be blogging very much for the next few days, either. The Corridor of Madness is about to undergo a major redesign. Stay tuned, it's going to look cool... I'm still in NYC, leaving Tuesday morning (about 2 days from now), and once I'm back on the Other Side I'll be posting more. Until then, I'll try to post a few important items (such as the Disinfo conference that took place on Friday night), but that's about it. The internet connection just started working again, too — in this old Manhattan apartment, the wires get soaked when it rains and the connection becomes completely unreliable... I could not live here.

More later... stay tuned.

Posted by mindwarp at 08:46 AM | Permalink

Just to make good on my recent promise: about Hellboy, I just want to mention one thing. If you want an actual review, do a search or read MadGhoul's for the more descriptive comments of a fellow blogger close to my own focus. What I will say (WARNING: spoilers approaching) is that, while as we all know the movie is a cartooney, inflated Hollywood blockbuster etc. etc. blah blah, I actually quite enjoyed it (for reasons I won't really go into) — except for one thing: The Big Letdown Moment(tm).

Continue reading "Hellboy, and the thoughts it spawned" »

Posted by mindwarp at 03:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Continuing my chronicles from the past weekend, a few thoughts on Monster Road, the documentary about claymation master Bruce Bickford.

Continue reading "Monster Road" »

Posted by mindwarp at 07:16 AM | Permalink

Well, I've arrived safely in NYC and taken temporary residency in the East Village. Yesterday was my first day in New York, though in some way (of course!) I feel I've been here plenty of times already. But I'll get to the present moment later, if such a thing is possible — I still have a bunch of recent experiences to digest; so right now, to kick off my April notes, let's go back a week to Alex Grey's lecture/presentation/slide show.

Continue reading "Alex Grey — Visionary Art: Eye of the Soul" »

Posted by mindwarp at 01:08 PM | Permalink

The pause in my blogging (not that I've ever been a truly regular blogger — working on that, too) will continue for a little while longer. I'm leaving for New York tonight, and will catch up about this last, wonderful weekend and other things from there.

The weekend in question consisted of attending a pre-workshop lecture by Alex Grey last Thursday, and a Saturday 3rd screening of Monster Road (one of the best movies I've seen in a long time) at the Red Vic. For good measure, I caught Hellboy on Sunday nite (MadGhoul saw it recently too, and already has a review). More about all that later.

Oh, and while in the Apple, I couldn't possibly miss this event, so I'll soon be telling you about that, too.
Over and out for now. Communications will resume when I get there...

Posted by mindwarp at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Nice. Last Saturday's event ended up at the top of "The Mix", the SF Bay Guardian's weekly list of the top 5 events in the Bay Area.

Sounds about right. I wonder how they grade the events, though. Does anybody know?

Posted by mindwarp at 07:37 PM | Permalink

Well, Saturday evening turned out to be pretty cool. The (drum roll) Live Thelemic Ritual with Kyron and Koyote turned out to be definitely worth the price of admission (what was the price of admission, by the way?). Koyote, enveloped by a long cloak/robe, administered an ecstatic ritual very vaguely suggestive of a Gnostic Mass to a mostly bewildered, but eventually surprisingly responsive crowd.

The whole thing was complete with candles, incense and holy wafers (soy crackers); red ceremonial wine and... well, and "manna from the gods", in the form of little colored candies, each of which resembled a tiny phallus — yeah, a phallus, OK? Don't ask.

Continue reading "temporarily autonomous pleasure domes" »

Posted by mindwarp at 05:38 PM | Permalink

How very appropriately synchronistic. Shortly after the last few meetings of Erik Davis' class, one of which was supposed to end with a screening of Kenneth Anger's Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome but didn't, here it is -- showing tonight at Craig Baldwin's Other Cinema:

Our most popular theme night is reprised with a jewel-box of brilliant pebbles and two magic mountains of musical majesty. For the 50th anniversary of Kenneth Anger’s oneiric Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome, Kyron (J.C. Mendizabal) re-scores this lysergic Bacchus rite with a dark-wave of sonic shamanism, whilst Koyote performs a live Thelemic ritual!

Obviously Baldwin, being who he is, had to acquire an original film print of the movie, one more reason why this is going to rock way beyond anything we could have achieved on a TV at CIIS. Hopefully some folks from class will show up for the occasion... Plus, I have the good fortune to count Kyron and Koyote as my friends. It will be cool to see what they can, uh, conjure up tonight.

As Erik said, I'll be there unless snatched away by aliens.

Posted by mindwarp at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've recently had a chance to view CRUX, a video document by Antero Alli.

82 minutes of raw, intense, personal images (along with Alli's running commentary) chronicle a five week long ritual, culminating on August 11 1999, day on which a rare interplanetary configuration — known by astrologers as a Grand Fixed Cross — took place.

Continue reading "CRUX: a paratheatrical video document by Antero Alli" »

Posted by mindwarp at 01:03 AM | Permalink

Via Jeremy Hulette's blog, Nothing Is True, comes a link to this '78 and '79 interview with Uncle Bill on CREEM, the legendary "rock 'n' roll magazine for the people". Enjoy!

Excerpt:

The first time I met literary iconoclast William S. Burroughs (1914 – 1997) was on a Saturday afternoon in February 1974 at A Space gallery in Toronto where he was doing a reading. Afterwards, I asked if he would autograph a photo that I had brought of himself standing next to David Bowie. "You oughtta get Booey to sign the other half," Burroughs drawled as he signed the space over his head. As it turns out, Bowie did sign his half of the photo later that July while he was recording the David Live album at the Tower Theatre in Philadelphia. But that’s another story for another time.

Posted by mindwarp at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

MadGhoul's editor, Michael, has let us know that he's completed a more detailed research essay about the interesting theory of Quantum Immortality, which he had mentioned before.

Excerpt:

Somehow, despite my better judgement, I found myself entangled in a web of scientific inquiry that I never thought plausible. I've learned that the more you study and the more you research, you come under the realization that all science - in fact, all reality - is nothing more than a philosophical system of objective truths. These truths, of course, mean nothing unless put into experiential context, thus making them subjective.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by mindwarp at 08:46 PM | Permalink

Via Sophists.Org comes this article — culled from the LA Weekly — detailing a quite interesting contribution to death and dying studies.

Excerpt:

Almost as soon as Dr. Charles Grob secured approval to study the effects of psilocybin on Stage IV cancer patients, he faced another challenge, one nearly as formidable: recruiting 12 participants. Unlike so many other experiments in radical cancer treatment, Grob's does not offer a cure; he merely hopes to find that psilocybin, the most potent of the many compounds in psychedelic mushrooms, ameliorates a dying person's fear of death. The study targets patients relegated to "palliative" treatment, people with metastatic cancer for whom there is no reasonable hope for remission. It is a segment of the population, says the National Cancer Policy Board of the Institute of Medicine – which put out a call in 2001 for "novel" approaches to palliative treatment – largely ignored by medical science.

Posted by mindwarp at 08:40 PM | Permalink

Again via Invisible College, a link to an interesting article referencing Gematria and combinatorial mathematical systems in general. It is part of The Ineffable Ten Dimensions — the whole site looks like it's well worth reading.

Excerpt:

There are three specific types of combinatorial systems. In mathematics, these three types are called permutation, combination, and variation. Each begins with a limited number of items, a set of things. In permutations, the positions of these things are shuffled within the whole set, as in an anagram. For combinations, one can take out any number of elements from the set and put them together in a smaller group. Variations are permutations with repetitions allowed; in variations, one can permute to infinity. certain questions, themes, and comparisons arose. Why are permutations of abstract symbols so often linked to creation, whether divine or artistic? What is it about permuting letters or numbers that leads to mystical experience? Is this experience born out of the creative transformation that occurs or out of the meditative activity? What role can the computer play as a stand-in for this process? What is the qualitative difference between permutational systems that are intentionally driven, and those systems that are manipulated with chance operations?

Posted by mindwarp at 08:27 PM | Permalink

Via the excellent Invisible College blog comes a link to these musings by Paul Hughes:

IS HUMANITY BEING HACKED?

Sometimes when I am in deep meditation I get the strong feeling of a higher intelligence speaking through me, through human culture, as if we are being hacked, used, programmed by something else. As Mark Pesce has said,

We don't use memes, they use us.

Continue reading "Humanity Hacking" »

Posted by mindwarp at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

— C.S. Lewis

Posted by mindwarp at 05:22 PM | Permalink

Killing Time by Mark Dery: a collection of brief strings of thoughts about — among other things — life in the Net age.
Excerpt:

Life lived at Net speed means sitting at a computer, our thoughts racing, our bodies unmoving. I call it "terminal inertia": the sensation, experienced daily by millions in our wired society, of overflying infinite landscapes of information while sitting still. In a sense, we’ve arrived in the future foretold by J.G. Ballard in his short story, "Memories of the Space Age."

Via Heckler & Coch.

Posted by mindwarp at 07:47 PM | Permalink

This is interesting:

In the experiment, a physicist sits in front of a gun which is triggered or not triggered by radioactive decay. With each run of the experiment there is a 50/50 chance that the gun will be triggered and the physicist will die. So according to the Copenhagen Interpretation the physicist is either dead or not dead, but death lies somewhere in the picture.

Via MadGhoul.

Continue reading "quantum immortality?" »

Posted by mindwarp at 03:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This article, posted on Disinformation by occult author Taylor Ellwood, offers an original and interesting approach to sigil magick (Disinformation article).

Continue reading "How To Charge & Fire A Sigil By Playing A Video Game" »

Posted by mindwarp at 04:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

...speaking of occulture, this 1993 Antero Alli essay, OCCULTURE: The Secret Marriage of Art and Magick (Paratheatrical ReSearch link) offers another interesting perspective.

Continue reading "speaking of occulture" »

Posted by mindwarp at 01:46 AM | Permalink

What a treat:

Issue #10 of the Grey Lodge Occult Review is online.

Continue reading "Grey Lodge Occult Review #10 :: online!" »

Posted by mindwarp at 11:19 PM | Permalink

Well, the upcoming seminar with Erik Davis inspired me to start re-reading his Techgnosis.

The book is a brilliant study of the currents of magic, mysticism and religious mythology that easily slither through the cracks of technoculture to envelop and imbue its means of communication, all the while remaining largely unseen.

Continue reading "aimless wanderings of the mind [on and around Erik Davis' TechGnosis]" »

Posted by mindwarp at 09:49 PM | Permalink

This is exciting:

I've recently found out about and registered for an Erik Davis workshop at the California Institute of Integral Sciences in San Francisco. Theme, The Altered State: California's Spiritual Frontiers.

Continue reading "The Altered State" »

Posted by mindwarp at 03:41 AM | Permalink