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I just opened up a check in the mail, went to the ATM & found 20$ 😭 I’m not passing these shits up NO more on my mama!
Even if I do not receive money or good news, I did smile at seeing this smiling Buddha.
(via pipedreamdragon)
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(Source: spudnuto, via wilwheaton)
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people I still want to stab over a decade later:
Creative Writing Professor at a former college: Welcome to creative writing! By the way, you will not write fantasy, ghost stories, pranormal, or science fiction in this class, as this is a creative writing course.”
What the ever loving fuck is with “creative” writing professors who think that speculative fiction of any stripe ISN’T CREATIVE?
I still remember my own creative writing teacher telling me this because he saw the Terry Pratchett book on my desk and got this smug smirk on his face like “aha, gotcha”. He had the nerve to pick it up and call it “popularist fiction”, like somehow being popular and easily accessible made it less inherent in intellectual value.
I had it in my back pack because I did my final thesis on the evolution of mythology and folk tails into fantasy and sci-fi and the societal importance of telling stories (before anyone asks, no I don’t have it, I lost it when I moved continents), and I used Terry Pratchett because there wasn’t a single humanitarian issue the man did not touch on.
Which I told him. And then he kind of floundered and went “ah, well but, it’s…well I mean it’s not exactly high brow”, like neither the fuck was Shakespeare or Dickens you self-important turnip. Dickens was literally selling his stories by the chapter. He was the popular author of his time. Shakespeare was too, he fucking made up words and phrases all the time because the language he needed to express himself didn’t exist in the way he needed it too.
Intellectual elitism is nothing more than a hold over from class warfare and the belief that only certain people should get to be truly educated. And it needs to be smashed.
(via sekkuar-swagkeeper)
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The IRONY of PATRIOTISM | Bill Hicks
That moment when you realize that Bill Hicks was a disciple of Terence Mckenna:
(5:13) “Which is why I recommended ‘5 Dried Grams’ of psyilocybin mushrooms”
(He also mentions the ‘diminutive elves of the fifth dimension’)
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“If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly […] this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacrum […] It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.”
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I’ve been fascinated by old books for some time and I was happy to find this one in a thrift store - an 1883 edition of The Lady of the Lake, a narrative/romantic poem by Sir Walter Scott (originally published in 1810).
I did a little light research on the book’s background and found that it inspired a number of things, below are a few of significance:
- The official anthem of The U.S Presidency was inspired by the lines:
“Hail to the Chief who in triumph advances!
Honored and blessed be the ever-green Pine!”- The custom of cross burning was adapted by the KKK from what was described by Sir Walter Scott in The Lady of the Lake, as well as in his other poems and novels - in Scotland the fiery cross, known as the Crann Tara, was used as a declaration of war.
- As to avoid slave hunters, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey changed his name to Frederick Douglass under the advice of Nathan Johnson - an abolitionist that Douglass met in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
“I gave Mr. Johnson the privilege of choosing me a name, but told him he must not take from me the name of ‘Frederick.’ I must hold on to that, to preserve a sense of my identity.”
Johnson chose “Douglass”, which was based on a character (a banished nobleman) of the same name in The Lady of the Lake.
#books #oldbooks #literature #writing #novels #authors #sirwalterscott #Frederickdouglass #abolitionist #art #ladyofthelake #theladyofthelake #thriftstore
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Another old book I found in a box of old books my parents found at an estate sale, whixh they let me holdnon to:
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, 1937 Edition of Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the works attributed to the Persian poet/astronomer.“I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return’d to me,
And answer’d “I Myself am Heav'n and Hell:”“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit. Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
“The Grape that can with Logic absolute
The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute:
The sovereign Alchemist that in a trice
Life’s leaden metal into Gold transmute”#books #oldbooks #literature #art #novels and #writing #poet #poetry #quatrains #omarkhyyam #rubaiyatofomarkhayyam #sufi #sufis #persian #astronomer #scientist #alchemist #edwardfitzgerald
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To believe yourself to be in the wrong world is more or less the plight of, and the essence of, anyone with a Gnostic worldview. It immediately struck a chord with me that this idea is one similar to a key element ement in The Matrix among other narratives and films. Below is Philip K Dick’s take on what it means to be of the Gnostic persuasion and what it entails.
The Ten Major Principles of the Gnostic Revelation
From Exegesis, by Philip K. Dick
The Gnostic Christians of the second century believed that only a special revelation of knowledge rather than faith could save a person. The contents of this revelation could not be received empirically or derived a priori. They considered this special gnosis so valuable that it must be kept secret. Here are the ten major principles of the gnostic revelation:
1. The creator of this world is demented.
2. The world is not as it appears, in order to hide the evil in it, a delusive veil obscuring it and the deranged deity.
3. There is another, better realm of God, and all our efforts are to be directed toward
a. returning there
b. bringing it here.
4. Our actual lives stretch thousands of years back, and we can be made to remember our origin in the stars.
5. Each of us has a divine counterpart unfallen who can reach a hand down to us to awaken us. This other personality is the authentic waking self, the one we have now is asleep and minor. We are in fact asleep, and in the hands of a dangerous magician disguised as a good god, the deranged creator deity. The bleakness, the evil and pain in this world, the fact that it is a deterministic prison controlled by a demented creator causes us willingly to split with the reality principle early in life, and so to speak willingly fall asleep in delusion.
6. You can pass from the delusional prison world into the Peaceful kingdom if the True Good God places you under His grace and allows you to see reality through His eyes.
7. Christ gave, rather than received, revelation; he taught his followers how to enter the kingdom while still alive, where other mystery religions only bring about anamnesis: knowledge of it as the “other time” in “the other realm,” not here. He causes it to come here, and is the living agency of the Sole Good God (i.e. the Logos).
8. Probably the real, secret Christian church still exists, long underground, with the living Corpus Christi as its head or ruler, the members absorbed into it. Through participation in it they probably have vast, seemingly magical powers.
9. The division into “two times” (good and evil) and “two realms” (good and evil) will abruptly end with victory for the good time here, as the presently invisible kingdom separates and becomes visible. We cannot know the date.
10. During this time period we are on the sifting bridge being judged according to which power we give allegiance to, the deranged creator demiurge of this world or the One Good God and his kingdom, whom we know through Christ.
To know thesereturning therebringing it here returning therebringing it here principles of Gnostic Christianity is to court disaster.
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(Source: the-algebra-of-need, via trudiscordianism)
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(Source: supersexygamergirl, via arcadequartermaster)