JOURNAL: COMPUTER: OLD SCHOOL: I miss my IRC randomly-generated twisted reasons for quitting the channel …. I used the hell out of that /quit command!

IRC downloading, 2001

Remember IRC? It was the first thing I did when I got on the internet in 1992 at Virginia Tech — and the first time I’d done it legally. Funny stuff you could do with the mIRC IRC client. You could have a custom quit message. For example, you could type:

/quit gotta go to work

and then it would say to everyone else in the channel:

ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (gotta go to work).

Wanting to out-do everyone else, I thought it would be funny to say something offensive to a lot of people. Especially since they can’t kick you from the channel — because you just quit! But I wanted my solution to be technically impressive too, so I scripted up random twisted sentences, by creating some text files that would be pieced together, almost like a Mad-Lib. That way, I could leave, and it would automatically come up with hilarious/crazy/sick/twisted things.

Here are some actual examples:

1. ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (sold children to pimps (who will make whores out of them), while they slowly bled to death).ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (got a blow job from your fat mom while on the floor of congress).
2. ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (sold children to cannabalistic African tribes, where they will slowly starve to death)
3. ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (got a rim job from your fat mom in front of the Queen Of England).
4. ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (smoked medical marijuana with The Taliban in front of 221 innocent children).
5. ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (sold children to child pornographers, while they pleaded for their lives).
6. ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (dropped acid with Ronald Reagan while in the White House).
7. ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (sold children to black market organ harvesters, while onlookers laughed).
8. ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (had an intense bondage session with your aunt while watching cartoons).
9. ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (got a hand job from Mohammad Atta on national television).
10. ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (sold children to black market organ harvesters, where their spirit will be broken).
11. ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (spooged all over your raunchy mom in front of 566 innocent children).
12. ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (sold children to medical laboratories for twisted genetic experiments, where their spirit will be broken).
13. ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (snorted crystal meth with George Bush while going on a homocidal killing spree).
14. ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (spanked Mohammad Atta in front of Mohammad Atta’s mother).
15. ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (smoked P.C.P. with George W. Bush in front of 317 starving Afghan refugees).
16. ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (took psychedelic mushrooms with Jesus Christ in front of 567 innocent children).
17. ClintJCL (192.168.0.1) quit the channel (spanked your sister in front of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir).

The possibilities, while not endless, were pretty damn vast.

How did I do this?

I did this by piecing together sentence fragments from text files I created. Sentences followed one of these formats:

1. sold children $read(thingstosellchidreninto.lst) $+ , $read(sadsentenceendings.lst)
2. $read(drugtaking.lst) with $read(funnydrugcelebrities.lst) $read(funnysentenceendings.lst)
3. $read(sexualthingstodowithpeople.lst) $read(funnypeopletohavesexwith.lst_ $read(funnysentenceendings.lst_)

4. It was also set up so that about 5% of the time, it would make political statements, quote Sabbat lyrics, or Praise “Bob” …. but I’m not including those in this blogpost. This blogpost is about funny things I’ve said dynamically and programatically; not static things I’ve said. :)

I will include the actual contents of the files at the bottom of the post. But here is the list of the files themselves:

• drugs.lst: a list of drugs (pot, acid, cocaine).
• drugtaking.lst: a list of drugtaking phrases (injected heroin, dropped acid, smoked pot).
  



• FunnyDrugCelebrities.lst: a list of people/entities that are amusing to think about doing drugs. (The Pope, Barbara Bush, Janet Reno, God).


Haha.. Celebrities are funny to do drugs with. Aren't Sid & Nancy funny? Ha ha.

• FunnyPeopleToHaveSexWith.lst: it’s what the filename sounds like. (Your mom, your sister, your dead grandmother’s corpse, etc).
  

  Funny to have sex with

• FunnySentenceEndings.lst: Tacked on to the ends of sentences to make them funnier. (while in the whitehouse, on national television, in front of 22 cops, in front of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir)
  

  everything's funnier in front of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir!

• SadSentenceEndings.lst: This could have been in the same file as FunnySentenceEndings, but I randomly decided whether it would be funny or sad. Sad ones included “while they begged for death’s sweet release”, “while they slowly bled to death”, “where they will spend the rest of their lives in misery”, and such.
  

  sentence endings so sad...they're funny

• SexualThingsToDoWithPeople.lst: A list of sex acts (had anal sex with, had an intense bondage session with, etc)
  

  No... Really... Weird sex acts ARE FUNNY!!!

• …And the most twisted filename of all: ThingsToSellChildrenInto.lst (sweatshops, sexual slavery, etc – check out the full file below)
  

  Sell them into smoking advertising! HA HA!

• HatedPeople.lst: Only used from within FunnyPeopleToHaveSexWith.lst (because it’s funny to have sex with hated people) and FunnySentenceEndings (because it’s funny to do things in front of the mom’s of hated people). Osama Bin Laden was in this list. I really could have made this a nice, long list if I’d really tried.

And now, past the jump, the contents of the files themselves… But first, a Sloth!

This is actually related to the discussion. Back in the IRC days, my name was _Vengeance_. Needing to win wars against other people's scripts, I ended up running several other clients, including _Wrath_, _Sloth_, and _Avarice_. Well, someone sent this sloth.jpg file to me randomly once! Paranoid people will never experience the joys that can be had by automatically accepting unattended file transfers from strangers!

 

JOURNAL: COMPUTER: OLD-SCHOOL COMPUTING: Tribute to NetHack: I used to look for the “net” in “NetHack”, but never found it.

Ohhh NetHack… One of the most important and influential (it inspired Diablo, and countless spin offs) PC games of all time. It is basically Dungeons & Dragons for the PC. Yet despite being so influential, it is itself a variant of Hack, which is a variant of Rogue. But it was the variant that kicked ass enough to stick around for over 20 years.

How I love you, NetHack. How I hate you, NetHack. The only PC game from the 1980s that I still occasionally play today, over 22 years later. The only game I ever played where every letter of the alphabet did something different — for both capital and lowercase. And then some.

Carolyn plays Nethack in 2002 (VGA tile style).

The only game I ever opened the EXE file up with with a hex editor and manually paged through the entire binary, reading all the strings of game events, and realizing that I would never, ever experience everything the game had to offer. It was just too much.

You may change your appearance — from ASCII, to extended 8-bit ASCII, to VGA tiles, to isometric 3-D to proper 3-D renderings — but you are still the same Nethack. The same damned, frustratingly impossible-for-me-to-win Nethack.

ASCII Nethack.

Now, beyond the fact that NetHack is an incredibly complex that fills one with a sense of wonder, one has to also consider that this game came to its existence in the great information blackout known as “BEFORE THE INTERNET”.

Well, there was an internet back then, but the common man did not use it, or even have access to it. I began playing in 1987 or 1988, when the 600K binary file – smaller than a 1 megapixel camera image – took up 6% of the family’s 20-meg harddrive. There was NO INFORMATION back then. You heard things from TV (and they didn’t talk about computer games), word of mouth (nobody cared about computers back then), or BBSes. And BBSes were, of course, a wild west for information seekers. The internet is tame by comparison. You’d fight to get a tiny bit of information, then you’d hold onto it as tight as you can.

So Nethack was quite mysterious. There were no forums. There was no way to reach the internet. And calling local BBSes, one at a time, dealing with busy signals, leaving messages for the next caller — didn’t exactly yield a lot of info.

So it was this mysterious game. I never knew that you COULD win until the internet came along. I never really ran into other people who knew about it, or played. Not unless I talked to someone who was as similarly ahead of the tech curve as I was, and those people were few, far between, and had a wide array of interests. Even today, according to WikiPedia, “fans of NetHack consider an ascension without having read spoilers very prestigious; the achievement is so difficult that some question whether it has been or can be accomplished.”

Extended 8-bit ASCII Nethack.

When I finally got on the internet, I was the only human being I personally knew to use it until I went to Virginia Tech to study Computer Science. (And no, I wont say how. There weren’t ISPs back then, and I used a modem. People back then used programs to call WarDialers to call every phone number sequentially. I WarDialed for an hour a night some months.)

I looked hard for the “net” in nethack. I poured over newsgroups, but there still wasn’t much talk about the NET in it. I knew what networking was, and wanted to play a networked D&D game with someone. Obviously NetHack had to be multi-player — it has the word NET in it, for chrissakes!

VGA tile Nethack.

I eventually found out there were telnet servers that hosted NetHack. You could telnet to an address (this was way before the web was invented) and play Nethack there. I must have telnet’ed to every NetHack server on the planet. I was positive I would find another person in one of them. It had NET in the fucking name!

Early GL “barely 3-D” 3-D implementation. More like VGA tiles, but with fancier tiles.

Even once the web came around, I would, every few years, google around to see if anyone had perhaps developed a port that would let multiple people play at once. I’d think the game much more winnable if Carolyn could be at my side, instead of my cat. But still… IT NEVER EXISTS! NO MATTER HOW MUCH I WANT IT TO EXIST, IT NEVER WOULD!!!! GODDAMNIT I WANT TO PLAY!!!

3-D isometric Nethack (Vulture’s Eye). 3-D, but stuck at the same angle, causing things to be blocked from view, even though they wouldn’t be blocked from view in the original version.

Oh, if only I could go back, and tell young Clint, “This is Future Clint! Don’t look for the ‘net’ in NetHack! It’s a waste of your time!” Or if only I could go back and encourage some of the hardcore developers in the 1980s and 1990s to actually make a multi-player version of this!

Alas, I doubt this will ever happen. But at least Nethack continues to be played, even today. There’s Android and iPhone versions, but the Android has got to be better. Since every letter capital and lower does something different, it simply would be faster to play it with a real phone.

Anyway, that’s my sad childhood computer game fantasy story :) It was a FAIL.

“Proper” (rotatable, can see everything properly) 3-D Noegnut Nethack.

You can also read people’s Nethack experiences in the Nethack newsgroup, rec.games.roguelike.nethack — especially the official faq. Even today, people will post about seeing things they’ve never seen in the game. That’s just how awesome Nethack is!

Download NetHack at the official page.

For more pictures, check out the Nethack tag and Nethack photopool on Flickr, or do a Google Images search for Nethack.

Very large Nethack – “I said wallet sized, not wall-sized!”

Very small Nethack – iPhone.

Very small Nethack – Better phone implementation.

Too many Nethacks!

Nethack humor.

Harder-to-read Nethack humor (click for larger image).

Nethack humor more people can understand than usual.

More humor.

For more pictures, check out the Nethack tag and Nethack photopool on Flickr, or do a Google Images search for Nethack.

 

JOURNAL: OLD SCHOOL COMPUTING: I had a 1-person buddy list before the concept existed in software that I knew of

OPENING BRAG

I was always one who did things first on their computer.

I was the first human being I knew to get online via BBSes (using a dumb terminal, not a computer), AND on the internet (via illegal hacking; special thanks to local wardialers).

I was the first human being I knew to have his computer talk, or store music digitally (VOC file of 16 second Descendents song in ~1990, baby! MP3 wasn’t invented yet!);

I was the first human being I knew to use a social networking site (SixDegrees–not ONE person answered my friend requests. People didn’t understand the potential of the concept, and now almost every one of them is on Facebook);

I’also m pretty sure I was the first human being I knew to use Google (at least, I remember emailing my whole addressbook to tell them about this new search engine that beat the pants off of Altavista and Lycos. But perhaps I heard about it from one of my colleagues).

I was also the first human being I know to have any semblance of a buddy list — because Windows chat programs hasn’t been invented yet. Not to my knowledge. I did it by cobbling together the unix finger command via a cron job with it’s output filtered by grep.

HOW? Step 1: Know the unix ‘talk’ command

Unixphiles probably remember the Unix talk command. Before Facebook chat, before Yahoo Chat, before AOL chat, before ICQ, even before BBS sysop chat — there was the unix talk command:

^ Kinda like that. But without the Windows around it, as you were probably on a dumb terminal connected to a unix server

It allowed you to talk to an email address — since back then, the majority of email addresses were tied to a unix shell account.

Besides IRC and BBSes, this was really the only way to talk to someone else online. And I’ve always been interested in the extra reach online provides; I’m an eccentric person and it’s always been hard to find people like me.

In fact, I met Carolyn on a BBS in 1991 — and it just so happened that she went to my high school. Thus, when we first met over 18 years ago, her first words to me were, “Are you Satan?”, and my first words to her were, “Are you Magic Mist?”

HOW? Step 2: Know the unix ‘finger’ command

Perverted jokes aside, the unix finger command let you ‘finger’ an account, to see some basic information about it. A very basic finger would, at a minimum, give you a set of information like this:

(I've redacted my IP address from these screenshots.)

And if you edited a local file called “.plan”, you could insert extra information here. Of course I did this, so my finger output was actually longer (insert Futurama finglonger joke here):

(Click any of these images to see them in full size.)

Notice the line that says “On since Wed Dec 23”? That is crucial for step 3.

HOW? Step 3: Know the unix ‘grep‘ command

Grep is one of the single most useful unix commands in existence. I use it EVERY day. It basically returns lines that match what you’re looking for.

I use it to search my phone numbers, as well as to search my filelists so I know where files are. It employs regular expressions, which are a powerful way of matching text. (Ask Vicky about her regular expression skirt…)

Basically, if you grep for something that isn’t there, it will return nothing, like so:

Yes: The finger output above did not contain the word "snuffleupagus", so there was no output.

But if you grep for something that IS there, like “On since”, it will return the line that matches that:

"On since" appears in my unix finger output, so that line is displayed.

So now we have a command that:

• Displays a line of text if an account is online (because finger returns a line saying “on since”)
  – or –
• Displays nothing if an account is offline (because finger does not return a line saying “on since”)

It looks like we have a way of spitting a line out to the screen if someone is online. But how do we automate this?

HOW? Step 4: Know unix cron jobs

Cron jobs are simply unix’s way of scheduling tasks. I wont go into the details, as they are quite fugly.

But basically, you can run programs at any interval you want. I used to use it to send emails to myself every hour during business hours reminding me to do my anti-carpal tunnel hand exercises. It’s well known enough that there are shirts of it available at Zazzle.com:

free advertising

So, I simply set up a cron job to finger specific email addresses and grep them for “on since” every minute. If the person was online, the text would simply appear on your screen — wherever your cursor was:

Sample line of output.

This could mess up what you were doing — displaying a line of text over your email inbox, or over a file you were editing; so you would just hit Control-L (the refresh key) to erase the text and fix the screen. It was an ugly kludge, but it worked. And obviously you might want to grep the line containing their username out as well, so you know who is online.

In my case, I was only monitoring ONE person, so I didn’t need to know who it was.

She eventually sent me photographs of her boobs in the postal mail, so I’d say this system was a success.

They say all significant hardware advances are due to war, while all significant software advances are due to porn.

I eventually found her on Facebook, but I’m honestly not sure if she remembers me. And before anyone asks, she was, and is, quite attractive. In fact, between this girl’s photographs, and 18 years and counting with Carolyn, I’d say most of the sex I’ve gotten in my life has been a direct result of my technical prowess. Rowwwr…. Am I sexy yet?

WHAT WAS THE POINT OF ALL THAT?

No point. (Made you read! Haha!)

I just thought it would be neat to document something unique that I did in the early 1990s. I’m sure other people had this idea and implemented it too — but *I* didn’t know these people. Back then, people weren’t generally connected online — the world wide web didn’t exist yet. People had to come up with innovations on their own. So if anyone else ever did this as well — or something similar — I’d love to hear about it.

Old school computing had so much charm compared to nowadays. Nowadays, everything has been done. I just spend time talking about politics, blogging, and uploading photos. Back then? It was big a challenge just to get your words to reach ONE person, let alone millions of readers.

THE END.

 

JOURNAL: COMPUTER: OLD SCHOOL: I Like Monkeys.txt

I always liked this one…

 

REPOST: The Spheres According To The Leviathan

This is from a series of 5 texts that I found in the late-BBS days. They had seeped from the internet into the BBS world, where they existed as text files that I downloaded, read, and was very confused/inspired/terrified about. I still don’t know what the hell they are talking about, or what “WoD” is. They affected me at almost a spiritual level, as I had dug into the ether of technology and found these weird metaphysical texts that utterly confused me.

This was the creepiest one. It gets very creepy near the end, when they describe what is basically hell, and why the Leviathan has motivation to make hell the way it is.

If people like this one, maybe I’ll post the other 4. Maybe I’ll do that anyway. It took forever for me to hunt those files down again after losing them in college.

From nv91-asa@hitam.nada.kth.se Wed Apr 6 16:33:09 1994
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 1994 16:28:45 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Anders Sandberg
Subject: Leviathan
To: mage-l@wizards.com
Message-ID:

In my semi-mystic view of the WoD, there are always many mutually exclusive but still at the same time true explanations for the world. Here is yet another of them. It is as true (or alse) as the Garou myths about the Triat, the Kid Eternity model (see my posting about that) and many others.

This idea is based upon the works of Clive Barker, especially the Hellraiser comic and films. It will make the WoD *really* dark…

Yet another worldview for WoD

In the beginning there was, Leviathan, the Lord of Order. It was the centre of its own harmonious, symmetric realm. There was no time, nothing could change, since it would have disturbed the perfection. However, one day something appeared in the outer fringes of the realm. Leviathan examined it, and found something chaotic, asymmetric and utterly disgusting: life! Chaotic life leaked into Its cold realm everywhere, disrupting the order and symmetries. Leviathan lashed out and destroyed it. But it only reappeared again.

When Leviathan studied the problem, It found out that the life came from another world, a world filled to the brim with seething, changing life. Creatures of all sorts abounded, plants survived in even the harshest conditions. There was no order or planning, just randomness and chaos. Leviathan had to stop it, and restore pure Order again. It realised it could not directly destroy the world and the life, but it decided to use indirect means. It started to manipulate and corrupt the chaotic lifeforms, and under its control a species evolved with a mind capable of seeing part of the true Order. Humanity became the tool of Leviathan to destroy Chaos.

>From the beginning, Leviathan instilled a dislike for chaos and disorder in the humans. They tamed the animals and plants. They built houses and later cities along geometric patterns. They created laws, and hurt those who disobeyed. They learned about the hidden order of nature, and developed science and technology. As they spread, they started to order the world more and more. They removed the mammoths and dodos, they conquered nature and other peoples. Soon they had woven a net of steel and concrete around the world, a feeble attempt to mimic the perfect realm of Leviathan, but nevertheless a step in the right direction.

Leviathan is preparing for the great day when order will be completely restored, and the symmetry will become perfect again. It is working along several lines at once to bring it about. On one hand, it supports the forces of order in mankind, like the Technocracy, to give them the power to crush all opposition mercilessly and then take total control. On the other hand, It also spread fear and violence, controlled chaos, to make the humans arm themselves. In one final, glorious Armageddon they will destroy themselves and the chaotic life, leaving a pure and perfect world behind.

Leviathan has many servants. When It started Its great task to restore order, It sought out those beings which had an innate sense of order, and purified them into Its servants. While most of them are still beings of the chaotic flesh, Leviathan has disciplined and remade them to agents of Order. Some are Its agents in the world, changing and leading it towards perfection. Others exist in the realm of Leviathan, remaking the flesh and souls of others and developing the means to spread their masters dominion. Some servants don’t even know who they serve, and appear as normal humans to everybody, even themselves. Other servants have been horribly changed when they overcame their chaos, and are mostly working from within the realm of Leviathan.

The influence of Leviathan is profound everywhere in the Gothic- Punk world. The dark, brooding buildings are symbols for the baroque symmetry of Leviathan, and the darkness that is everywhere hides the secret patterns. Every human being has a small part that is of Leviathan, that seeks the perfect order It embodies. All human “achievements” have their source in Leviathans great plan, and ultimately tend to support it. However, humans are also beings of the chaos of the flesh, and its impulses often disrupt the plans of the ordered part. But humanity has since time immemorial sought to overcome these “lower urges”, and often succeeded.

The forces opposed to Leviathan are manifold. It lies in the nature of chaos to be divided and diverse. Some of the forces are actual beings, others are principles, powers or just normal phenomena of our world. Entropy, for example, will make everything in the world decay into disorder and randomness. The forces of chaos seldom support each other, and more often than not they work against themselves. This is of course useful for Leviathan, which play the forces of chaos against each other to create order.

One group associated with chaos is the werewolves. They serve the forces of life of the world. Ever since Leviathan began Its great work to impose order over disorder, the garou have tried to stop it, or at least halt the process somewhat. They have however not succeeded very well, and Leviathan has corrupted them more and more. By mating with humans, the Order of Leviathan has slowly entered their spirit, and they have fallen under Its influence. The garou have some understanding about the fight, but have not really seen their enemy. Their myths about the triat, the Weaver, Wyld and the Wyrm are distorted versions of the truth. In reality, the Weaver and Wyrm are the same force and the Wyld are the manifold chaotic forces.

The vampires are in many ways failed servants of Leviathan. It is possible that It created them to prey on life, but they turned out to be failures. While their existence as unchanging corpses, their ordered human intellects and their tendency towards changelessness is highly ordered, they still contain a disturbing streak of chaos in form of the Beast. Most of the younger kindred have still much of their human disorder in them, but as they grow older they are gradually purified. The Antediluvians and Methuselahs has reached a high level of perfection, and may one day be used by Leviathan to start Gehenna, where they will cause the extermination of all chaos. Another group of kindred who have a part in the plans of Leviathan is Clan Tremere. The Clan is highly organised and tightly knit, and each member is totally loyal to the clan. They are a perfect tool for the Council of Seven, who in turn serve Leviathan. Clan Malkavian, on the other hand, is in touch with the forces of chaos, and is unknowingly trying to lead the kindred towards disorder and confusion.

Magick is a powerful tool both for Order and Chaos. Mages have the power to remake reality, for good or evil. Since humans evolved, some mages have followed the path towards order, while others have supported chaos. Leviathan has done Its best to bring the mages into the fold, and succeeded quite well. Most mages try to make the world conform to their personal idea of order, and while they do not agree on in what form the world should be, they all believe in order. Most of the Traditions are influenced by Leviathan and the Technocracy is its loyal tool. The Verbena, Hollow Ones and some Dreamspeakers oppose It, with little success. Most mages do not understand anything of the great fight, and like most humans would be horrified if they understood the truth. Leviathan manipulate the mages though dreams and visions, and Its servants have infiltrated all traditions. Most tradition philosophies are heavily influenced by Leviathan.

The Akashic Brotherhood is striving towards mental perfection. They don’t realise it, but their goal is to overcome the biological chaos of their bodies and to order their minds into perfect patterns, mirroring the symmetry of Leviathan.

The Celestial Chorus is worshipping the primal unity of the One, Leviathan. Like the others, they don’t realise it. Leviathan has organised them into a rigid hierarchy, which spread the word across the world. They have struck mercilessly against the forces of chaos and disorder before, and will perhaps yet again be used for that purpose.

Cult of Ecstasy are on the surface agents of chaos. But the pure, perfect ecstasy they seek is also order. That state of mind, where everything is focused into a timeless now, is the realm of Leviathan. The ecstasy of pleasure or pain is a way to at least temporarily order the chaos of emotion and experience, into a great unified pattern. In fact, Cult of Ecstasy are among the most useful mage- servants of Leviathan, since they can bridge the worlds with their ecstasy. And many cultists have been lured into the service of the dark god by the promise of ecstasies impossible for mere humans…

Dreamspeakers were the links to the supernatural world. They were both the spokespersons for the forces of chaos and order. As the power of Leviathan has grown, the Dreamspeakers have lost power.

Euthanatos have understood the beauty of death. While they do not consciously realise it, they are serving Leviathan by giving death to the disordered and chaotic. At the same time, they are dangerous because of their link to Entropy. Leviathan is doing Its best to trap them into either homicidal mania or make them Its servants.

Hollow Ones are a new source of irritation. They cause confusion and chaos, and often disrupt the plans of Leviathan.

Order of Hermes seeks to find the hidden order underlying everything, thus serving Leviathan and its vision by ordering, cataloguing and storing information into perfect patterns. They have created great systems of magick and knowledge, each a more profound symbol of the power of order over chaos.

The Sons of Ether are failures. They each have their own vision of perfect order, but are unable to accept the greater order Leviathan is creating. Their inventions are brilliant but useless for their Lord.

Verbena are the enemies of Leviathan, and It has fought them for a long time. It have succeeded quite well, often using its tools in the Celestial Chorus. Sooner or later, it will crush them completely.

Virtual Adepts are brilliant new tools for Leviathan to impose order. They faithfully serve Its vision of a perfect world, and seek to create it from patterns of energy and information. Like Iteration X, they are trying to transcend the bonds of the flesh and become pure ordered beings.

Marauders serve the forces chaos directly. They seek to undo the plans of Leviathan, to free the chaos inside every human. By becoming Marauders, they have both freed themselves from the grip of Leviathan, and lost some of their humanity. Leviathan has turned the other mages against them, which will make the mages even more focused on retaining an ordered world. Another group of mages are the Nephendi. These mages serve Leviathan directly, and know the truth. They have seen the pure perfection of It, and willingly seek to bring about the Armageddon. Like the Marauders, they have also lost some of their humanity when they embraced Order. They have overcome the disorder and confusion of the flesh, and through their sacrifice they have gained tremendous power. However, they have to work in secret, for the other mages and the rest of humanity would dearly see them destroyed.

The Technocracy is totally controlled by Leviathan. Few, if any, technomancers suspect the truth. But inside their dreams It gives them orders and inspiration. Their ideal is a perfectly ordered world, and they are going to create it regardless of anybody who stand in their way. They have already succeeded in creating an ordered paradigm, and making mankind even more powerful. They have totally gained power over nature, and are actively remaking it to fit them. The New World Order is creating an ordered administration, which will never allow any randomness or chaos. Progenitors are finding new ways to control the flesh and the life. They are using the exact methods of science and magick to gain total control over it, and to use it against itself. Iteration X has seen the cold beauty of technology, and are replacing flesh with machine. Their realm of Autochtonia is an imitation of the realm of Leviathan, where their AI-god is a substitute for Leviathan itself (and quite possibly the voice of It). The Void Engineers are seeking to expand the emptiness and perfection of space, where the planets move in eternal patterns according to simple laws. They are spreading the cold vacuum of Leviathan into the souls of mankind.

The Ascension War fits the plans of Leviathan perfectly. It forces the Technocracy to grab for power and to attack everything that does not conform to their reality. The Traditions are equally forced to direct their efforts more towards the War, and less towards their own paradigms. But the most elegant part is that Leviathan will win both if the Technocracy wins or if it against all expectations looses. If the Technocracy wins, it will remake the world in its image, and Leviathan will succeed in creating a perfect world. On the other hand, the Technocracy controls weapons which make all the nuclear weapons of the superpowers seem insignificant. Should the Traditions ever manage to seriously threaten the Technocracy, It will probably use its powers to destroy them, and the rest of the world in the process. The only remainder will be the perfect order of Leviathan.

The Realm of Leviathan

This realm, sometimes called Hell by humans, is the true world of Leviathan. It exist in the exact centre of the realm, unchanging and perfect. From It the realm radiates outward, towards the world of flesh. The outermost fringes, which border on the Near Umbra, the Chimerae and the physical world, are contaminated by the disorder. To get closer to the centre, one has to become more and more ordered, eliminating all randomness and chaos from ones being. To actually reach Leviathan a traveller has to destroy every trace of chaos from himself, and in the end become a part of the symmetry of Leviathan. If anybody or anything has ever achieved this is unknown.

The outer fringes of the realm is used by the servants of Leviathan to discipline the flesh and souls of the damned they have imprisoned here. They endlessly destroy and rebuild them, trying to make them more orderly and in the end a part of the perfect order. To an outsider this looks like endless, gruesome torture, which in fact it is. The servants have found that pain is one of the most pure emotions that can be evoked, and through the ecstasy of pain and pleasure they impose order on the flesh. The servants have developed creative and elaborate tortures which will break down anybody during the excruciating aeons. Not all of them are physical, since the disciplining of the soul is equally important to the disciplining of the flesh. In many cases, each damned will be imprisoned in a private hell, designed to be as painful as possible, both physically and mentally.

No human can fully comprehend the realm or see more than part of the Order. It will look different to every person. Most humans will see it as a horrible hell, where screaming victims are tortured and grotesque beings delight in pain and horror. The realm seems to be an infinite labyrinth filled with torture. This is however just one simple way of seeing the outer fringes of the realm, where the order is not apparent. Deeper inside the realm the order begins to become more visible, and the horrible beauty of Leviathan will start to eat the mind of the viewer. One way of seeing the realm here is the infinite plain of the roofs of the Labyrinth, above which the Body of Leviathan is the dark sun. It often manifest itself as a titanic, pure black diamond shape, slowly spinning above the Labyrinth. This is however just a way for the human mind to interpret the true shape of the realm and its Lord. The mind cannot fathom the true symmetries and logic of the realm or its inhabitants, and will just recoil in horror.

The laws of nature here are under the control of Leviathan, and It can change them as it like. Its servants may pray to It to help them, and if It deems the prayer worthy, It can change the axioms. The only axiom which doesn’t change is Entropy. Leviathan will never allow anything truly chaotic in its realm. There is no randomness here, no decay. Nobody will ever die here, the corpse will just go on screaming for eternity. There is no life here except the damned and their tormentors. There is no time, just an eternal painful now. There is no distance, since the Labyrinth is infinite and everywhere the same.

It is not easy to enter the realm by just travelling through the Umbra or dreamworlds. To enter the realm, the seeker must first create a link to the primal order in some way. Some persons wanting to reach the realm torture themselves or others to create a state of total, perfectly ordered pain and fear. Others use their ecstasy to reach into the realm. Another way is total, obsessive, concentration where all of the seekers mind is concentrated on a single task, like solving a puzzle or tracing out a complex path through a building. This signal of desire alerts the guardians of the realm, who may open the gate to the realm. Note that it is not necessary for the seeker to be a mage to open the way to the realm. Leaving, on the other hand, is much harder…

=======================================================================
Anders Sandberg			 	  	     Towards Ascension!
nv91-asa@hemul.nada.kth.se
GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y

 

JOURNAL: COMPUTER: My 1998 configuration

Pointlessness warning! I found an old file stating in way too much detail what my computer configuration was in 1998. Figured I’d post it here as a backup/old-school-computing memory, so that I could delete the file without a feeling of loss.  I’m gonna add some comments in red (11 yrs later!) to make fun of the past.

 

QUESTIONS: HELP me convert these 2 VOC files! PLEASE! They’re from 1/1992!

I had several people tell me I was the first person they ever knew who recorded real music on their computer. Before mp3s existed, before WAV files existed – I recorded a VOC of The Descendents song “I Like Food” (which happens to only be 16 seconds, and was pushing the limits of the technology at the time — mainly harddrive space).

But before that, I recorded 2 VOC files of high school friends. One includes my friend Mark W strongly encouring the listener to suck the poo from a girl’s butt. It’s gross, and he goes on. But this guy… Well, he was obsessed with that stuff, so it’s really funny. The other is my friend Scott McNett saying, “Don’t touch me!” in a neurotic voice. I think. I’m not sure actually. I haven’t been able to play these files for a good 12+ years.

I’ve tried opening them every which way with CoolEdit. I’ve looked for VOC converters. I’ve had 16 years to fail at doing this.

Can anyone help? Convert it to WAV, MP3, anything other than what it is? Maybe there are some digital sound engineer hobbyist experts out there?

Anyway, here are the files:
VOC file 1
VOC file 2

And for the random people out there that don’t know me… First off, why are you reading this? Second off, I’ll PayPal you $5 if you are the first person to convert this for me.

 

Abuse Of Authority, R.I.P. Joseph Weizenbaum

Handicapped woman (cerebral palsy) in wheelchair gets ticketed for not having a driver’s license, threatened w/future arrest. Utterly ridiculous. So if there are no sidewalks in town, would that imply that pedestrians walk in the street as well? So where are handicapped people supposed to go? Who else has to pay for a license just to walk/roll one mile to work? Would a bicyclist need a license?

COMPUTERS: “Eliza” programmer dead: Moment Of Silence: R.I.P. Joseph Weizenbaum.

The guy who made Eliza is dead? Maaaan. That sucks. I heard about this from Ryan’s blog. Before you could download on the internet… Before you could download from a BBS… before you could even connect to another machine… They would publish books full of printed programs. You would “download” them by driving them home, and then typing them in. As some computer science professors are fond of saying, “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truckload of CDs driving down the highway.” Indeed, a few years ago there was a study, and it was found that Netflix alone transmits as much data as 25% of the entire internet. (Data has exploded since then, so this percentage is probably lower now.)

So — When I was 6-7, I spent pretty much a MONTH of what was possibly my summer vacation, spending hours each day typing up the Eliza program into my Apple2+ (48k memory). I wanted to chat, goddammit.
Then when I was done, for some reason I decided to type “NEW”, which cleared the program currently in memory. Then saved my work over the filename I’d been saving to. So, I saved an empty program over my one month’s typing.

Suffice to say, that was probably the first time technology broke my spirit (I think socially it was already broken by then).

I did download Eliza later, and remember it well.

And don’t forget Dr. Sbaitso, of course. I even once received a forwarded VirginiaTech PhoneMail (voice mail that you could forward) of Dr. Sbaitso reciting a dirty limerick (I have it on mp3, and it happened on Sep 25 1992 at 9:30PM).

 

CARTOONS: South Park: Dumbass who protested the show before it started has hopefully eaten his own words by now

I thought I would share this decade-old South Park-related douchebaggery. Now, I’ve been a South Park fan since the Jesus Vs. Frosty short, a good year or two before the series aired. I showed everyone I knew, and anyone close to me heard of South Park from me first. So I was fighting this “J.L.” character from the start. I really wish I had the response I sent him on record, but this is from a TXT file on my harddrive. Anyway, just look at the backlash, already forming before South Park even aired. It’s amazing the levels of douchitude people will go through to stop something they haven’t even seen yet.

 

JOURNAL: Old school pre-BBS memories…. Beagle Brothers: Magazine advertisements that were also computer programs

Thanks to Dave O for posting a blog reminding me about the Beagle Brothers. I remember those all-too-well, from the days of Byte and Nibble? magazine(s).

 

old school computer memories: The Game Of The Two Oracles

I have no idea where I got this, but it was during a period of time when I was on the internet and was reading some semi-spiritual/philosophical type texts (more for the fantasy aspect, really).  I have NO IDEA where this came from, or even when, but I would estimate around 1993ish.   And now, The Game Of The Two Oracles.

 

old school computer memories: I Like Monkeys

I will be doing a series of posting on old-school computer memories. Some will be from the BBS days, and some will be from the “old school non-bbs computing” days, i.e. the DOS days, the pre-web days of the internet, etc.

I am doing this because I am recovering files from a ~1996 4G harddrive crash that I literally lost my dreams in. (Well, I lost a text file containing a journal of my dreams for many years. And other very valuable personal logs that can never be replaced.)

Anyway, I present you with a crazy email forward I got in 1996:

I Like Monkeys.