The Church of the SubGenius Finally Plays It Straight | Hacker News Reader

The Church of the SubGenius Finally Plays It Straight

texasmonthly.com

132 pointswallflower58 comments

"And besides, it really is an interesting story. There are interesting characters, and we're not going to be around forever. I'm 64, and I'm doing great, but we've lost a lot of us. They aren't going to get to be in the movie. They boarded the saucers prematurely. It's good to document this stuff and get it down in the real words."

This part really resonated with me. There were so many things I was in to when I was younger that I liked but really didn't fully appreciate for the uniqueness of that particular time and place. It's never going to happen again, and if it's not documented, it'll just all fade away and no one who wasn't there then will know about it.

So much of it seems so special in retrospect, especially to people who weren't there, but there's no way of going back now and recording it all, or interview all those people I had an opportunity to interview then but didn't.

Something to think about for those of you who might be involved in some "underground" scenes today that the general public hasn't picked up on yet. I know you're out there and you know something we don't. Record it. Share it. Teach us. Interview the people who are involved in it. You might not get another chance.

> there's no way of going back now and recording it all, or interview all those people I had an opportunity to interview then but didn't.

If you still have copies of your old email inboxes, there are good tools to find your most interesting conversations with any given person or on any given topic. E.g. Stanford has a tool called ePADD: https://library.stanford.edu/projects/epadd

And then those emails can be donated to a university or museum with relevant collections, and/or published on the web. (Our startup, FWD:Everyone, does the latter.)

I find it rather vain of folks to think humanity should care forever about their personal experiences

That it won’t happen again or be known is part of the intrigue to me.

Why do we need to keep propagating our own contemporary fascinations forward in time?

We’re each going to die and very few of us will leave behind truly novel ideas that humanity can rely on

Most of our experiences are emotionally novel for us, and that specific time and place creates that novelty.

What makes them so will be completely lost on future people. So much information is inaccessible to them when reading about it or watching a poorly shot video

And to me that’s the cool part about having been there.

I’d rather folks go on creating such experiences for themselves than watch my highlight reel and never really get since they weren’t there

"I’d rather folks go on creating such experiences for themselves than watch my highlight reel and never really get since they weren’t there"

Don't worry, 99.9% of people are consumers and do exactly what you desire: nothing. We'll never know much about their lives.

Every person I ever met had some interesting story to tell or some interesting point of view worth noticing. Life is not just about doing the big & important things. Don't underestimate the ordinary people, each of them knows many things that you don't and has seen and experienced many things that you never will.

Couldn’t agree more! I think so much about this. What on earth gives anyone the impression anyone will care about us or our minutia in the future?

The fact is of the billions of humans on earth, almost all of them are either too low on resources or interest to even care about how things like the solar system or genetics operate, mysterie that humans have wondered for millennia and are only being unlocked now. It’s made me think that for most humans it’s enough to kind of wonder and enjoy the mysteries.

As a child I grew up upper middle class with kids who had time and resources to find out all kinds of things but most people including me just wasted most of our time, taking more interest in basic human interactions and intrigues than knowledge. It’s how humans are I think.

What makes anyone think some distant ancestor or researcher will care about us? I find it unlikely and kind of transparently desperate to think so. It’s liberating to know no one will care and I can die and have the freedom to just fade into oblivion and that no one but some AI will taken interest in my Gmails.

I saw a conversation where a diarist asked what a historian wished to find in someone's diary—like, do they wish for nuanced analyses about current events? But the historian said the most interesting stuff is that which you don't see in official chronicles or books: daily little things, relationships, habits, food, all the minutiae that still paints a picture of the world from a specific point of view.

For certain types of creator, diving into old archives is just the perfect way to get some inspiration or source material. It's true, archiving transcripts of your family's dinner conversations for 10 years isn't really going to do any future movie-maker any good, but the SubGenius folks went far beyond the mundane.

Plus, even if it were purely mundane, it would still be of eventual interest to historians, who could data mine over it for cultural references and such.

I'm not entirely sure what the line is between keep or save, but it could almost assuredly be drawn way to the left of where it is now and save a lot more for future generations.

> Couldn’t agree more! I think so much about this. What on earth gives anyone the impression anyone will care about us or our minutia in the future?

> What makes anyone think some distant ancestor or researcher will care about us? I find it unlikely and kind of transparently desperate to think so.

You say this but modern historians are desperate for these kind of sources even back a few hundred years since they provide an understanding of how the vast majority of humanity lived unlike the few royals (for example) whose lives were well documented.

It's unlikely historians of the future will lack sources in the way we do today but you never know what people will wonder about our times because we didn't think anyone would care.

> I’d rather folks go on creating such experiences for themselves than watch my highlight reel and never really get since they weren’t there

We learn as much from the paths others have walked as we do from walking it ourselves.

> I know you're out there and you know something we don't. Record it. Share it. Teach us. Interview the people who are involved in it. You might not get another chance.

I don't do this on purpose.

Some things should only exist in a time and a place for those who were actually there. It should fade with them and disappear into the writhing mass that is history.

Stop being cultural vampires: create your own experiences instead of trying to live off ours.

Ed:

The above is probably more snarky than necessary, but in a real sense, the constant reinvention of culture due to its ephemeral nature is what keeps us memetically vibrant. The calcification of culture through constantly reinterpreting high fidelity images isn't good for us developmentally.

Good thing there's still Discordianism for those of us who are more serious.

Hail Eris.

I think this is the first time I’ve heard Discordianism described as “more serious” than something.

Discordianism has always been serious, even when it's not. The end of the Principia Discordia even tells you to go back and reread it if you thought it was just a joke.

Subgenii annoy me, because they do tend to make everything a joke, and for some reason it reflects on those of us in Eris' Apple Corps. Like no, we have a serious philosophical point to make here (don't take everything seriously) that really needs to be taken seriously.

> Subgenii annoy me, because they do tend to make everything a joke

They've even got a slogan about that.[1]

[1]http://subgenius.wikia.com/wiki/Slogans

The one true religion disguised as a complicated joke.

Some of us take our humor quite seriously. Serious business is humorous, and humor is serious business.

You've obviously never met someone serious about their Discordianism. I suggest not commenting on the hot dog eating habits.

seriously unable to be serious

One of the little pleasures I had building a Linux From Scratch install was discovering that the GNU ddate [1] program was installed on most Linux distributions as a standard utility. Not sure if this is still the case, but it was funny to observe an inside joke make its way into so many internet servers.

[1] converts Gregorian dates to Discordian dates https://linux.die.net/man/1/ddate

We use machines of many different architectures at work. At one point, I compiled ddate for every machine we had, and wrote a script that would select the correct version of the binary for the current platform, so that I could use it in my bashrc.

Just checked on the Debian and Mint systems I've got here: not installed by default.

Looks like the con purged it from util-linux in 2002.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=149321

I think that about the time I first head about Discordianism, I was running Slackware (and I probably found it through the connect with Church of the SubGenius). That was in 2003 or 2004, so I'm guessing that Slackware probably continued including it past the time that Debian did.

I've known about Slack before, but this is my first run-in with Discordia. The Three Core Principles sound saner than any other religion or movement core teachings. They are aligned with scientific perspective ("Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful") and with Buddhism teachings of 'seeing things for what they are'.

Too bad about all the mythology nonsense and childish absurdism.

You might want to read the books by or listen to the talks of Robert Anton Wilson, here he talks about about the Subgenius in relationship to the Principia Discordia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qn1kilKVIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7N6TOFyrLg

All hail Discordia!

I really put a lot of effort into becoming a Discordian pope, so I'm all for it. fnord

all hail discordia!

though, I have to say that going to many devivals in my time, I am still a fan of bob. x-day never came, but what can we do?

slack... discord... ?

what next, microsoftskypianity?

Aha! I see you are one of today's lucky 10,000! [1]

Well, you would be, if I wasn’t too lazy to give a brief introduction to the American tradition of comedy Zen that both Discordianism[2] and The Church of the SubGenius[3] are manifestations of.

Unless including Wikipedia links counts. It probably doesn’t. Hail Eris.

1:https://xkcd.com/1053/

2:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordianism

3:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius

It's a conspi^W^W unlucky that neither Slack[1] nor Discord[2] the messengers got their names from those.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/where-did-slack-get-its-name-...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/4itsnj/why_did_...

Wow! I honestly thought they were references to the Church of SubGenius and Discordianism respectively. Odd how the names still make sense when viewed with the hacker sense of humour as if they were references...

Honestly I’m skeptical of both of this explanations for the names.

All hail Eris :)

discordians always seemed a bit too larp

Not at all. For larp, you want SCA :)

I've fought in the Pennsic Wars. In chain mail jockstrap, with an 18" Bowie knife (rubber). The Wild Boys brigade :)

Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJCzVscRgkw

Also inspiration for Slackware. One of the oldest Linux distributions in existence.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Volkerding#Personal_li...

And still a very good distribution. rock solid and very predictable with no weird magic stuff that may or may not work.

Yep! It runs on all of my personal gear for that exact reason. Praise Bob!

It was my first distro in 2007. I always loved it, just cannot use it now due to hardware, I just cannot find it upon myself to spend time trying to force my hardware drivers on there, that and the whole upgrading concept. Otherwise I'd happily install it anywhere. Another distro I fell in love with recently openSUSE has it's roots back to Slackware it seems.

One of? It's the oldest that's still in active development :)

Although people talking out of their ass about McLuhan have always annoyed me, that conspiracy nut who claims to be a 120 year old Bob (Neveritt) Dobbs is hilarious — his stuff is past performance art.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1JbomcBkck

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY4HG9YCUJk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9kMq131GyE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRJr1kKYFYY

Brilliant! I've had the (dis?)pleasure of spending hours with people like this in real life. They certainly are entertaining.

Watching this stuff tends to give me that dissociated-from-reality feeling that is only possible with certain media content (Richard Linklater's "Slacker", for one)

I remember the first thing I ever saw on the internet was an ASCII face of Bob Dobbs on a gopher site somewhere. This was back in the early 90s when MTV.com was owned by one of the VJs and web browsers were called Mosaic.

I'm hoping to hear more about the notorious "Cult performer arrested in rail tunnel" / "Poop & Pee Dog Copyright Violation" incident...

I'm sure it was just a big misunderstanding, and there are two sides to the story.

http://accelerateddecrepitude.blogspot.nl/2012/02/his-name-i...

The Baltimore Sun's Ann Lolordo reported, "As they entered the tunnel which leads into Camden Station, police heard a loud banging sound, like cymbals crashing. Then, police said, they saw a dead animal hanging from the ceiling and a man standing in the dark tunnel, his naked body covered with 'a glowing paint.'"

https://minxuslynxus2.wordpress.com/2013/06/24/poop-pee-dog-...

... I was naked except for my shoes & socks & I had white squiggly lines painted on me. I danced & gyrated wildly & beat the dogs & the thunder sheet with a club. The dogs were on fire & exuded what one might call a “foul” smell. I had been entrusted with the sacred head of Arnold Palmer by a representative of the Bloody Head Launcher’s Society which I had set on fire & which I was also beating about the tunnel ...

> SKB: When the SubGenius was originally created, it was the trickle-down theory and Reaganomics. Those policies destroyed our middle class then, and it’s still affecting us today.

I don't buy the argument that Reagan's policies destroyed the American middle class.

Based on every available statistic, the middle class has been in decline since the early 1970s, a decade before Reagan was president.

Cancer patient dies from blunt trauma. News at 11.

The blunt trauma might be NAFTA, which came into force in 1994.

There's actually a relatively non-controversial theory in economics that such trade agreements will decrease low-skilled wages in the richer country, at least in the short term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_price_equalization. Economists generally consider this acceptable however as the models used suggest the benefit to the poor country and overall increase in global utility is greater than the loss faced by low-skilled workers in the richer country.

NAFTA: A continuation of the Union Busting going back to PATCO. Which was during the Reagan administration. Please be especially aware, my point is NOT to engage partisan politics. My point is to illustrate that Partisanship itself is a false dichotomy; both parties in the US take turns redistributing wealth toward the rich, at any cost, and then deploy Partisanship against citizens, turning us against each other to distract us from their bad acts.

I call it "Mining Town 2.0".

Anybody else a Rev. Dr. here?

Rev. Dr. Scatological Warfare checking in.

Rev. Lost his certificate about 15 years ago and can’t remember here :(

Rev. Ocodo of Eschatologosis checking in.

Oh guuuuumby?

One of my long time friends and a fellow member came to visit a few years back. Before he left, he put "Kill Bob" easter eggs (via post it notes) in various locations in my house. These little fountains of Slack remain in place and I will leave them when I move out. Except for the one on the back of my monitor.

A great place to start might be reviving alt.binaries.slack. Or a countdown ticker for is-it-x-day-yet.com :)

Alt.slack still exists, and is fairly active, too.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.slack

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