Sex, Index Cards, and the Proto Internet Occult Conspiracy

A late fix for a fantastic Tuesday.
This by way of Kenneth Hite and Rob Mcdougal:
"The wise and devious robotnik gave me a pointer to this entry in Paul Collins'³ blog, which contained the following snippet of almost unimaginably pregnant occult metaphor:

In the US, for instance, the War Department struggled with mountains of haphazard medical files until the newly touted method of card filing was adopted in 1887. Hundreds of clerk transcribed personnel records dating back to the Revolutionary War. Housed in Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC -- the scene of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination a generation earlier -- the initiative succeeded a little too well. Six years into the project, the combined weight of 30 million index cards led to information overload: three floors of the theatre collapsed, crushing 22 clerks to death.

Can anyone say Ascension of the Bureaucrat in 1894? [EDIT: Per Wikipedia, on June 9, 1893.] Blood sacrifice to begin the Information Age? Creation of the "mass man" from data (which is to say, DNA) and crumpled flesh (of 22 people -- where was the 23rd, necessary to complete the full chromosomal pairing?), intermingled on the blasphemous regicidal altar of America? The possibilities are limitless."

Also I definitely want to link to this.

Debauchette apparently had an interview with Diane Sawyer, and has written two very great blogs on sex work. So yeah. Worth seeing that if you haven't. Good stuff.

An excerpt:

"In some ways, I feel the way I felt when I was sitting across from Sawyer. I feel like I can only sigh, because I doubt I can begin to penetrate the many layers of misunderstandings and preconceptions, let alone that relentless working assumption that a woman’s value as a human being decreases as she gains sexual experience. (Sawyer asked me about preserving the ’sanctity’ of my body, as though sex without the imprimatur of love were inherently degrading.). I’m glad my mother didn’t lash out in anger or patent disgust — what’s come across in her note is some mix of restraint, confusion, and extreme discomfort. That deserves some kudos, even if I still feel miles away from having a real conversation with her about this, which, unsurprisingly, is exactly how I felt when I sat down with Diane Sawyer. We just don’t see eye to eye."

Sex Magic on the Internet and What it's To Do with Gandhi

From Slashdong

Yeah so, what this is, is a flashlight they've converted into a sex mouse, that a male sex game player would put their member in and be able to interact more "naturally" with the game environment.

Now they just need to combine an exoskeleton with second life, and you'll be in like flynn on the internetz. If you can move around it, touch it, feel it, have sex with it--is it really there? At the very least it's a blow-up doll world.

But really what we are talking about is that sensation of immersion via a kind of projection. It's very interesting the intersection between hi-technology concepts and old world shamanism. Though to be sure, a lot of the technology is perverting many of those techniques, but it's using them all the same. Immersion is just astral projection. The internet is a kind of astral plane. Corporate logos are sigils. Magic is all around us. But more often than not we're interacting with it in an unconscious and passive way.

To that end, here's a lovely story from cnn's second life division about a guy re-enacting Gandhi's "Salt March to Dandi".

"Joseph DeLappe’s 22 days and 240 miles of walking on a treadmill to control his Gandhi avatar walking across Second Life to re-enact the Mahatma’s “Salt March to Dandi”, the seminal 1930’s protest against the British Salt Act of 1882. On this, the final day of walking both on the treadmill at Eyebeam, New York City, and in Second Life, the public is invited to either visit Eyebeam to witness the final steps of the march or join MGandhi Chakrabarti in Second Life to virtually walk the final miles."

I need to get on this second life thing, YESTERDAY!

Doggy Style

I found this very interesting sex blog the other day via Warren Ellis's blog. It's this little sex blog called debauchette:

"As I learned this, my respect for him expanded. There’s something fantastic about a stealthy slut, someone who secretly lays an entire university of women without bragging or broadcasting this fact. A sex ninja."

Worth sharing to be sure. I'm in love with reading it.

The other item for today is Otherkin. Otherkin as defined by wiki are:

"A term for a group of people who consider themselves non-human or having a connection to a mythical archetype in some way, usually believing to be mythological or legendary creatures. Common creatures to which Otherkin claim some connection include angels, demons, dragons, elves, fairies, lycanthropes, and extra-terrestrials.^[1] The otherkin community grew out of the elven online community of the early-to-mid-1990s, with the earliest recorded use of the term otherkin appearing in early 1996.^[2] Outside of their own subculture, otherkin beliefs are often met with disbelief.^[3]"

What I like about Otherkin is that they are the perfect litmus test for just how malleable people really are in terms of identity. While for some people the whole notion of a man having a baby completely splits in two their reality. For other's they can say they accept or tolerate gender blurring or crossing. Some even can understand it. But when you get to the topic of Otherkin, you pretty much lose everybody. The notion that people could identify as being of non-human ancestry, or being of some sort of cross mythological beast ancestry is usually just a step to far.
But it shouldn't be. There is a healthy cultural history of human-animal shape changing. We have the Native American Skin-Walkers which were Shamans who were believed to be able to change into animals. We also have the vârcolac in Romanian folklore which were also shape-shifting shamans. We have Norse Berzerker warriors who used bear and wolf skins to help in their trances to become nearly invincible crazed warriors.

So what I'm saying is that we have a culture of this throughout our world history. We have an extremely large history of people identifying with or as Otherkin. And yet here in 2008, we have the gall, while printing our dollar bills dripping in "In God We Trust", to just invalidate the vast bulk of human history, just so we can be bigoted arseholes.

What a lot of the skeptical idiorati don't fully grasp is that if you're confronted with an otherkin, it doesn't really matter whether you think they are actually part animal, or if you think they are full crap, because they are still going to be in tap with some level of psychology that puts them outside of your experience, and if you're not prepared for that you LOSE....THE...GAME.

Plus it's a mind hack that's worth learning. You never know when you're going to need to be werewolf strong. Perhaps when Homeland Security beats down the door to you love-in commune and you don't have any hi-tech iPod guns to make them go away with. Maybe then you'll appreciate a good berserker rage from a few of your house mates. I know I would.

Or at the very least you could just touch a few places in your brain that haven't been touched in a few hundred years probably. Might be fun. Why not?

Otherkin dot Com
Otherkin dot Net