Friday, April 15, 2005

WEEKENDEST LINKS

APOCALYPSE NOW...OOOPS...CHRISTIANITY TODAY
This is all getting a tad absurd. I mean, I don’t mind my stuff being reprinted for free on lefty, goth, or generally surreal or subversive blogs and websites, but when I find myself linked on Christianity Today, well, neighbors, I start to fucking wonder what the fuck I’m doing. I’d complain except the Code of Literary Pillage prevents me.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/115/11.0.html

ELVIS SAVES
I really had thought that Elvis worship had faded with the 20th century despite all the remixed hits, but this piece of special weirdness from Capt. Chaos seems not only to indicate that it’s alive and well, and also turned shamanistic, but some denominations are big on retribution and Hound Dogs from Hell. To be honest, I could happily take on the gig of High Shaman. What I need is fund raisers and a sharp advisory council. There’s some confusion in the piece, though, as to whether all this is for real, or a role-playing game, but I’m ignoring that part, since I have rather dedicated my life to refusing to distinguish between role and reality. Such niceties never bothered Charlie Manson or Thomas De Quincy. Any offers?
http://bull.dumpshock.com/sr/fcoe.html

ANDREA DWORKIN
While hardly mourning the women, I recently linked hipspinster’s thoughts on her passing and now here’s another view from Susie Bright.
http://susiebright.blogs.com/

LIZARD KINGS
Underland*, the final book of the Renquist Quartet, ends with Victor Renquist confronting the Dhrakuh, or lizard men, in the Hollow Earth. That, of course, is fiction. Some folks, however, take the stuff very seriously (and not just the loathsome David Icke). Cathy O'Brien , a supposed victim of CIA MKULTRA mind-control, claims to have seen George Bush shapeshift into a Reptilian being. (Okay!) And Credo Mutwa, a Zulu shaman, claims that the Zulu people have known of a reptilian species called the Chitauli for centuries. Here is the real obsessive chapter and verse, folks, in super-handy form. My only complaint is that, since I’ve been getting so much attention lately, I’m kinda miffed and pouting I wasn’t cited as a reference along with Tim Leary and Philip K. Dick. Ah well. Fame is slow, they are dead, and I’m not.
http://dinosauroid.biography.ms/

FUZZY BACTERIA
Finally, some girl has sent a link to a vendor of fuzzy, soft-toy germs and viruses from HIV to the Black Death. And also a Martian Lifeform (like they found on that meteorite, dig?)
http://www.giantmicrobes.com

The secret word is Cobalt

CRYPTIQUE -- The Red Death is no mask.

* BUY A BOOK THIS WEEKEND

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

CYBER-EGO
An ego can be a terrible burden. It demands to be supported by unreasonable and near-obsessional courage, an impossible workload, and often a lifetime and wide variety of both mundane and exotic booze and drugs, just to keep the damned thing from pitching the rest of you into the drainage ditch of despair because it irrationally feels slighted. In all fairness, however, the ego can be very easily pumped by the most trivial occurrence, as it was this morning when I discover how, in a Smirking Chimp cyberforum, my fiction is being referenced, just like it meant something, in a discussion of Abramic religion, the Book of Enoch, the Nephilim, alien selective breeding, how science fiction writers may be unconsciously passing on psychically imparted knowledge. If nothing else, it has to demonsrate how the progressive left can become a tad confused at times. Check out the fun...
http://smirkingchimp.com/viewtopic.php?topic=54576&forum=3

The secret word is Inflated

CRYPTIQUE -- A squid-based belief system?

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

TWO QUOTES AND A LINK

"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic." – John F. Kennedy

"A couple nights ago I was out in the kitchen doing the dishes – not even thinking about any particular thing, just feeling overwhelmed by it all – and this suddenly coalesced in Brane (not as a smart-off, but as a serious question!): "Did somebody actually already drop The Big One, I'm dead, and this is Hell?" – Thel (clearly a devotee of string theory) who posts on Smirking Chimp (see yesterday) and the quote also kinda relates to what Billy Oblivion has to say over on the mass comments board.

Also our pal hipspinster blogs on the death of Andrea Dworkin (who I’d be a hypocrite to say I ever had any time for) and also The Story of O.

http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/

Monday, April 11, 2005

AT A GUESS, I FIGURE THUS PRETTY MUCH MEANS IT’S ALL OVER...
First the story, (in the chaos of concluding Conflagration The Novel, I have forgotten if someone sent this or if I found it at random.)

LONDON — Sony has patented an idea for transmitting data directly into the brain, with the goal of enabling a person to see movies and play video games in which they smell, taste and perhaps even feel things, New Scientist reports. The patent — based only on a theory, not on any invention — marks the first step towards a "real-life Matrix," the British science weekly says.
In the sci-fi film of that name, cyber-reality is projected into the brains of people via an electrode feed at the back of their necks. In Sony's patent, the technique would be entirely non-invasive. It would not use brain implants or other surgery to manipulate the brain. The patent has few details, describing only a device that would fire pulses of ultrasound at the head to modify the firing patterns of neurons in targeted parts of the brain. The aim, it says, is to create "sensory experiences" ranging from moving images to tastes and sounds. New Scientist said the inventor is based at a Sony office in San Diego, California. Sony Electronics spokeswoman Elizabeth Boukis said the work was a "prophetic invention" and no experiments at all had been done on it.
"It was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us," she told New Scientist. Independent experts said they did not dismiss the idea out of hand, although they also cautioned about the proposed method's long-term safety. So far, the only non-invasive way for manipulating the brain is crude. A technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation uses magnetic fields to induce currents in brain tissue, thus stimulating brain cells.
But magnetic fields cannot be finely focused on small groups of brain cells, whereas ultrasound pulses could be.

Could we be looking at an artificially induced Rapture, maybe?

The idea of total sensory entertainment has, of course, abounded in science fiction, and how
Sony gets to patent a theory without an invention seems dubious, but what can you do? I even threw up a short novel called The Feelies, first publish in 1977, and then revised in the late eighties. The basic idea was that you climb into this coffin/CAT scan bit of hardware and be the Marquis de Sade, Erwin Rommel, Caligula, James Bond, or Elvis. The idiot rich signed up for "duration of lifespan" contracts. The dirty secret, know only to the fascist corporate brass and an alcoholic janitor, was that they were fed on cheap nutrients and allowed to deteriorate and die after a few months. Darwinism reasserted. This being a product of punk neo-nihilism, the janitor did absolutely nothing about what he knew.

(I really do have to organize the republication of some of my back fiction catalogue. Any input to
byron4d@msn.com)

The secret word is Enfeebled

The column Get The Faith Out Of Here had been republished on smirking chimp. Which means it comes with comments from strangers.
http://smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=20612&mode=nested&order=0