This post details a unique steampunk museum piece stolen from DragonCon. The owner is offering a considerable reward, including commissioning a custom costume piece, for anyone who has information that leads to its safe return and/or the arrest of the thief.
Last night, zaiah and I went shopping at Target for curtains for our new house.
There are, as it turns out, a bewildering array of different kinds of curtains, in different patterns and textures, almost all of which are stunningly ugly.
One brand of curtain carried by Target is Eclipse brand curtains, which are entirely opaque and block out…well, let me show you. Apologies for the poor quality of the image; it came from my iPhone. The bit I’ve circled in red is the interesting bit.
Have you ever thought about all the world’s religions, looked at how downright goofy they are, and thought “Hey! I can do better than that!” Have you ever wanted to start your own religion, and go down in history with men like Joseph Smith (minus the part about getting shot in a prison cell), Paul of Tarsus (minus the bit with the beheading), or L. Ron Hubbard?
Well, look no further! Here’s an easy, step-by-step guide to building a religion of your own.
Step 1: Start General
“There is a divinity and this divinity created the universe.” People are natural storytellers, and people are naturally curious about where they came from, where the stars came from, and where the ground they’re standing on came from. But, people are also lazy, and don’t want to spend years learning about the physical properties of the universe, or the mathematical models that describe the formation of the heavens and the earth. “God did it” is an easy explanation that appeals to folks, and you’ll find that people will accept it wholeheartedly without one single shred of evidence.
Step 2: Work from the general formation of the universe to human beings
People want to believe they are special. People adopt worldviews that are inherently self-centered; if you tell a bunch of folks that god made the universe, people are going to want to know if god made them. “God made the universe with a set of immutable natural laws and then those laws took over to form, over many millennia, us” just isn’t satisfying for most people. It’s not a good story.
You want to tell folks that your god made them specifically. This, too, you will find accepted without question or proof; people are already halfway to believing it before you even begin, because it’s a damn good yarn that appeals to their inherently self-centered worldviews.
Plus, you’ll find it useful for the next step.
Step 3: Since god created human beings, he must have had a reason for doing so, right?
Human beings are inherently prone to promiscuous teleology–the tendency to believe that things happen for a purpose. It’s not enough for us to look for the explanation about how things came to be; we also want to know why. This appears to be a side effect of a hyperactive sense of agency, which has a positive survival value; we see agency because it helps keep us alive. It’s easy to mistake a shadow for a burglar, but people rarely mistake a burglar for a shadow!
Anyway, appealing to this sense of purpose will help reinforce your religion in the minds of the people you talk to. It’s a great shot of self-esteem; “God has a plan for me!” It helps personalize your religion by appealing to people’s inherent self-centeredness. And it’s massively helpful in establishing the creeds you’ll be using a bit later.
The notion that your god has a purpose for humanity makes the next step logical and easy to swallow:
Step 4: Since god has a purpose in creating us, there must be a right and wrong way to live. The right way to live is in accordance with this purpose; the wrong way is in defiance of it.
This is a step that’s surprisingly subtle in its ramifications. Anyone who believes that your god had some reason for creating human beings is going to find this easy to believe also; you won’t have to sell this point. And it opens the door to all sorts of distractions you can easily use to deflect conversation away from anyone who wants to challenge the assertions you made in the first three steps. Just bring up the philosophical idea of “free will,” assert that your god wants us to live according to his plan of our own choice, and any inconvenient conversations that start to head too close to “Well, how do you KNOW god created the universe?” will quickly become bogged down in the semantic morass of free will and determinism. You can trap the conversation in this mire for decades.
But, now you have a problem. Now you have to figure out some kind of way to codify what the right way to live is, because people are going to want to know. So far, you’ve been able to skate along without offering even the tiniest scrap of evidence that ANYTHING you say is true; people will believe you because they want to believe you. But once you start telling folks what the right way to live is, people are going to want to know how you know.
This is a problem that’s never been completely solved; look at all the other religions and you’ll see that folks really like to bicker about this stuff. But there is a solution that works well enough to get you by, and that is:
Step 5: Tell people that your god writes books.
Books are awesome. You can claim that your god gave the book to you by divine revelation without also leaving the door open to other folks saying they’ve had revelations that contradict yours, because where’s the book? You don’t have to remember all the various tenets of your religion, because hey, they’re in the book. You can fend off challenges to your authority by referring back to the very book that you wrote to begin with. It’s brilliant!
It doesn’t even have to be a very good book. It can be filled with contradictions (your god created the world, then created man, then did some stuff, then man got lonely, then your god created woman; no, wait, your god created man and woman at the same time). It can make assertions that are provably false (the Native Americans are a lost tribe of Israel). Doesn’t matter. All you really need is a story that sells the book–some kind of tale that’ll help people accept that the book is actually written by your god.
A story involving magical plates made out of gold hand-delivered to you by an angel is good. If your imagination fails you, though, you can always just say that you sat down and thought about it really hard and it came to you.
Step 6: Sell the books by preying on natural human drives
We’ll use two emotions here that are often called ‘negative,’ but as we’ll see, thinking of these as negative emotions is nonsense! They’re positively wonderful for helping you to get people to believe what you want them to believe.
The first is fear. In your book somewhere, you have to say that people who don’t believe this book will have bad things happen to them. This is a must. It doesn’t matter what the bad thing is, provided it’s bad enough.
If you’re a traditionalist, burning forever in a lake of fire is good. So is being ground beneath a wheel or being torn apart by demonic dogs. If you’re more modern, you can talk about how mysterious spiritual entities will be drawn to unbelievers and clog their thetan energy or something.
People tend to fear death, so playing on that fear is brilliantly successful; you can do it directly, by telling folks that anyone who doesn’t believe your book will die; or indirectly, by telling them that they don’t really die, but if they don’t believe your book they’ll come back to life in an undesirable form.
I recommend the latter, because it gives you a natural hook into the other emotion you’ll want to use, which is greed. Tell people that they can have things they want and they will be happier if they believe your book. Again, you can do this directly, by saying that people who believe your book will never die but will instead go on to a wondrous place where the streets are made of gold, they will have stables full of hot women who want to fuck them, and they’ll be able to create worlds of their own if they like; or do it indirectly, by describing how people who believe your book will become successful and wealthy. (They might not, but that doesn’t matter–if you’re doing this properly, you will! Should someone tell you “I believed your book and I haven’t become rich,” you need only say “God is testing you.”)
By this time, people will believe your book because they’ll be too damn scared not to.
You might think that people would say “Wait a minute–you mean your god prepares pits full of fire and razor-clawed wolves to tear us apart because he has a plan for us and wants us to be happy? How on earth does that make sense?” But you’d be surprised.
Step 7: Lay down the rules
This is trickier than it sounds.
A natural beginner’s mistake to make is to set down a bunch of rules for people’s lives that will cause them to act the way you want them to. Remember, though, you’re dealing with human beings, and human beings are notoriously resistant to changing the way they behave, even when they think that behaving the wrong way will cast them straight into a burning pit full of lava and body thetans.
And also, people are excellent rationalizers, who are very crafty at making up reasons why rules they don’t like don’t apply to them.
So you have to be careful. You can’t just write a bunch of rules without thinking about what the folks yu’re talking to are already doing.
Successful religions succeed because they do not try to set morality; they instead cater to the various prejudices, bigotries, and moral beliefs that people already have.
If you live in a slave society, you will not gain any traction if your book says that god thinks slavery is wrong. More likely, you’ll get arrested as a public nuisance.
Similarly, if you live in a racist society, you won’t gain any followers by telling people that god says blacks and whites are equal. if you live in a society where women are second-class citizens, you’re not going to get too far by saying that god wants men to treat women well. You can’t just go making new rules willy-nilly; even if you’ve sold people on all these ideas so far, they’re going to balk at actually changing their moral code.
So, the professional instead makes a list of all the various prejudices that the people around him already have, then writes the book to justify those existing prejudices. That way, your book becomes an easier sell.
Don’t worry that the prevailing cultural prejudices will change over time. Nobody’s actually going to read your entire book anyway; only the parts of it they like. If you write in your book that your god thinks that slavery is a pretty neat idea, and then centuries from now slavery is abolished and people start believing that it’s morally wrong or something, they won’t say “But wait, this book says that god is OK with slavery! That must mean that god is immoral!” Instead, they’ll simply stop reading those parts of your book. It’ll be like a little secret, you know?
If you find yourself in a place where you’ve run out of ideas about what sorts of rules to write about, write about sex. There’s always someone doing some sex stuff that his neighbors don’t like. You can milk that for thousands of pages, if you want to.
Step 8: Sell the book
If you’ve written the book correctly, this step is already halfway done. Make sure you feature prominently in the book or (better yet) in the story about the book in some way. Making up stories about your lineage helps.
You don’t really have carte blanche to write whatever rues you like into the book, but there’s nothing stopping you from putting a few things in there to benefit you. If you sell yourself and sell the rules that benefit you at the same time, you’re golden.
It’s important to sell yourself in the book because remember, folks will believe that the book was written by your god. If the book makes you out to be special, that will give you legitimacy, and your legitimacy will help you get folks to accept that the book was written by your god. It’s win-win!
At this point, you’re basically done. It’s important not to get too ambitious, though. A good messenger of god knows his limits; if you make a practice of boinking all the townspeople’s wives like Joseph Smith did, there’s bound to be talk. Similarly, if you try bringing your book and its rules into places that have different prevailing prejudices like Paul did, you may come to a sticky end, which is what usually happens to moral leaders who try to lead rather than follow the morality of their flock.
Instead, I advise stepping away from the day-to-day management of your religion once it becomes established. Let the faithful manage the enterprise; they’ll really believe it, so they might even work for free. You can distance yourself from any messes they manage to get into while still collecting generous stipends from your religion. Play your cards right, and by the time you die, you, too, may have a $600,000,000 ranch in California!
Naica, Mexico is home to a number of lead and silver mines. It is also home to a geological formation that appears to be unique in all the world: the Crystal Cave of Giants, discovered accidentally by mine workers in 2000.
The Crystal Cave is a gigantic underground formation containing the largest natural crystal formations ever recorded. The cave is superheated by a pocket of subsurface magma, and until recently was entirely flooded with water that was supersaturated with gypsum and other minerals. The combination of high temperature, superheated and supersaturated water, and time (lots of it–about 500,000 years, to be exact) produced one of the most mind-bogglingly beautiful things on earth:
The cave has been pumped dry by mine workers, who accidentally broke into it while mining for lead. It’s still superheated by magma; the temperature within the cave is a steady 122 degrees F with a humidity of over 90%. Explorers in the cave use special chilled suits and breathing masks, and even with this equipment can only remain within it for 15-45 minutes at a time.
The cave is doomed; when the mines are played out over the next few years, the mining companies will stop pumping the water out, and the influx of new, non-supersaturated water will destroy the crystal formations. There’s more about the cave, and more pictures, here.
I love the physical world. There is not a single day of my life that goes by when I am not boggled and awestruck by how magnificent this universe is. Should I live to be ten thousand years old, I will never, ever stop being awestruck by how awesome all of this is. Take a handful of basic particles, make them obey certain fairly simple rules, and the things you end up with are beautiful and magnificent beyond comprehension.
We, as self-aware entities, are the part of the universe that understands itself, and that one simple fact gives us incalculable value. I will never understand the tendency of some people to turn away from the wonders of the physical world into a tiny, feeble make-believe universe that’s a paltry six thousand years old and soon to be rendered obsolete by some invisible man with magic powers who lives up in the sky and spends a great deal of time worrying about what kind of clothes we wear and how we have sex.
The universe is incomprehensibly large and incomprehensibly fine-grained, ancient and mysterious and filled with so much beauty that it’s hard to imagine any person seeing it without being filled with reverence and awe. The more we learn about the physical universe, the more beautiful and magnificent it is. The desire to turn away from understanding the world around us and retreat into an imaginary bestiary of little gods and demons is the desire to turn away from the greatest beauty we can ever hope to bear witness to.
A good friend of mine from way back, who is (among other things) an awesome musician, has released an album! You can find out more, and listen to it, on his Web site. He also wrote the music that was on the (short-lived) CD-ROM version of my game Onyx.
ZOMG. I’m trying to think of a balanced and reasonable way to describe the past several days. I’d say things like “best con ever” and “the most amazing five days a human being can ever hope to imagine in this life or the next,” but I don’t know if they really convey quite how I feel.
Unfortunately, I’m still totally exhausted (despite about twelve hours’ worth of sleep), and I’m nowhere near cogent enough to be able to write about Dragon*Con. So instead I’ll do something I generally don’t do, and just re-post messages from my Twitter account. The following text is probably not safe for work
Several weekends ago, zaiah and I went up to Seattle for the weekend. One fo the hilights of the trip while I was there was visiting Gasworks Park, a large public part down on the waterfront, built on the site of an old and long-abandoned coal gasification plant.
We met up with peristaltor while we were out there (and as a side note, if you don’t read his journal, you should–it’s one of the smartest reads on LiveJournal).
The old gasification equipment is still there, slowly crumbling into rust. Some of it is now fenced off, which is a damn shame–I’d love to spend an afternoon with a couple of models and about forty feet of rope out here. I’m told the fences are new; and to some extent, I can kind of understand it–if some damn fool falls off one of these things and busts his head open, I guarantee the first thing he’s going to do is retain a lawyer to sue the city, before he even gets stitched up, even though it’s not “the city” what put his ass up there in the first place.
Anyway, I spent a good bit of time taking pictures, because that’s what I do, and now I’m going to bust your bandwidth, because that’s also what I do.
A while ago, I got to wondering, as I sometimes do, exactly what makes an orgy. For example, if fifteen people are all in a room having sex, but only within existing partnerships, and there’s no “extra-partner” sex happening, is it an orgy? If four people are all fucking each other, is that an orgy, or is it just a foursome?
As it turns out, the dictionary is of precious little assistance with answering questions like this. I consulted a number of different dictionaries, and got a number of different answers–one said an orgy is five or more people having sex, one said more than two, one said an event dominated by “excessive” sexual activity (whatever the hell that means), and so on.
Now, to me, three people having sex is a threesome; four people having sex is a foursome; it doesn’t get to be an orgy until you’ve got five or more people.
But is a play party an orgy? Clearly not all orgies are play parties, but is a play party an orgy? What about a play party where people aren’t having penetrative sex? How about a mutual masturbation event…is that an orgy? My impulse is to say “no;” it isn’t an orgy unless there are five or more people and there’s fucking going on, so mutual masturbation doesn’t count. (Edit: There are many kinds of sexual activities that aren’t penetrative sex that I would consider to be an orgy, so I’m still not quite sure exactly where the borderline for the definition of “orgy” is.)
From there it was a short intellectual hop to wondering how many different kinds of group sex there are1, and what the relationship between them is.
So I started working on a Venn diagram of group sex. Then I started enlisting the help of all the people around me.
Then I started realizing that some of the potential overlaps are complicated beyond what you might at first think. For example, not all swing parties include group sex, yet most folks would probably think of a swing party as a group sex event.
And it soon became clear that certain rules of geometry2 precluded doing this as a traditional Venn diagram, because it’s not possible to show all the overlaps and exclusions with circles.
So the project got a little more complex.
Anyway, here’s what I came up with: Where group sex intersects with information theory!
Some assumptions I’ve made for this chart:
1. An orgy must involve penetrative sex of some kind (including manual sex) but can not involve all the participants being sexual with one and only one person; a gang bang and an orgy are exclusive, non-overlapping sex.
2. An orgy can never bee a threesome or a foursome.
3. If penetrative sex happens, it is no longer a puppy pile; ergo, orgies and gang bangs exclude puppy piles.
I have the feeling I missed some categories of group sex, though, and I don’t know how universal these assumptions are.
1 As opposed to how many different kinds of sexual activity you can have in a group sex situation, which is a completely different question altogether.
2 Specifically, group theory, about which I know less than what would fit in the white space of a postage stamp.
I know there are quite a few Macintosh folks on my flist. The rest of you can move along; nothing to see here.
A lot of folks in the Mac community are familiar with MacFixIt.com, a long-time Mac troubleshooting and forum site that’s been with us for about thirteen years. I have been a MacFixIt forum user for nearly that entire length of time, and managed to rack up just over 12,000 posts during my stay there.
Alas, all good things1 must come to an end; recently, Cnet News bought MacFixIt and closed it down.
Which is a damn shame, because the forums there represented what was arguably, minus a few hiccups, one of the best Macintosh communities on the Web.
So I opened my mouth, which is often foolish, and said hey, wouldn’t it be cool if some enterprising person set up a forum to replace it and we could all move over there? And other folks said hey, great idea, Tacit, when will you have the new place ready for us?
So I am pleased to announce the formation of a brand-new Mac community, Fine Tuned Mac.
Anyone out there who’s interested in a Mac community, I invite you to join us! We don’t bite2, and if you need any troubleshooting help, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more knowledgeable bunch3.
1 Except me, and many of my friends and partners, I hope.
2 Much.
3 Well, us and TechSurvivors, another Mac troubleshooting forum I like and recommend.
Back when i was still living in Atlanta, zaiah came out to visit a couple of times. During her last visit, I ended up with what I thought was a nasty cold but which actually turned out to be antibiotic-resistant pneumonia.
Now, I don’t know if you have had any experience with pneumonia, Gentle Reader, but in the likely and fortunate event you have not, I can inform you that it will cause certain biological urges of a licentious nature to wither in much the same way that a snowman wilts under a flamethrower. Which is a damn shame.
Anyway, while I was miserable in bed and sleeping most of the day, zaiah started drawing on me with Magic Markers, and took a picture of the result with my iPhone.
Since then, it’s become something of a standard part of our sex lives. She loves drawing on me, and I love being drawn on…and yes, it is sex. Many things other than the insertion of Tab A into Slot B are sex, legions of horny teenagers who’ve taken Purity Pledges but still want to get their funk on notwithstanding (“you mean if you do me in the ass I’ll still be a virgin? Oh, okay then!”).
I have quite a collection of iPhone photos now, which are all kinda fun and cheerful and which you can see if you don’t mind looking at possibly not-safe-for-work images that might include some portion of my butt