*PRANKSTERS & DISCORDIANS & OTHER NEAT PEOPLE
*STUFF WE LIKE
*INFORMATIONAL RESOURCES & OTHER STUFF TO READ
*AMUSING EYE CANDY
PRANKSTERS, DISCORDIANS & OTHER NEAT PEOPLE
The Cacophony Society is a loosley gathered international disorganization. They are not specifically Discordian, but they might as well be. They have events each month as diverse as Bad Porn Video Nights, SantaCon, and Faceless Birthday Boy goes to Chuck E Cheeze. There are now 23 Cacophony chapters in the US alone, with several in Canada and many like-minded orginizations all over the world. Cacophony.org updates faster than I could ever possibly hope to.
RTMark is an amazing troup. I'm shocked and surprised I hadn't heard of them earlier. RTMark has a lot of ideas (often politically-minded, but not always) for pranks they'd like to see accomplished. These range from easy things you can do on your own, to extremely complicated acts of subversion. By giving money to RTMark, you can finance some of these complicated pranks by actually helping to give financial assistance and/or motivation to potential pranksters. They have recently confounded the likes of eToys and Rudy Guiliani (Nazi mayor of NYC), among others.
Decadent Action is a group of anarchist culture jammers based in London. Their theory seems to be that by running yourself hevily into debt (through purchasing all sorts of luxury items - and having a good time doing it!), you can create enough inflation to make the populace revolt. Founders of World Call In Sick Day, their website is definately worth visiting. Good links, too.
The Billboard Liberation Front is a group of fearless outlaws who climb up on billboards and change their messages into something much more desirable than the usual advertising.
POPaganda is another name for the various projects of Ron English. For many years now, Ron has been liberating billboards around New York City, among other things. Especially worth checking out are the photographs of his billboard creations.
Joey Skaggs is an internationally infamous prankster. For the past thirty years, he has been hoaxing large-scale news media with false news stories and fake "expert credentials". This man is a legacy.
The Museum of Bad Art is a little place in the basement of a movie theatre in MA. Saint Mae has made the pilgrimage, and whole-heartedly reccomends the place to any visitors to the Boston area. They have some photos online, too.
Seemen is a group that creates giant robots, then has shows where they spit fire at eachother, a lot like the celebtrated Survival Research Laboratories.
Robert Anton Wilson's homepage - where he's speaking, some of his writings, etc.
Hakim Bey is a cultural theorist, social anarchist, moon-howling maniac, and all around occult genius. He coined the term "poetic terrorism". He created the Temporary Autonomous Zone, and the Short Duration Personal Savior. His work is extremely important to the Great Work of Blowing Thine Own Mind.
Kristin Buxton was one of the first Discordian net.personalities. She is legendary. This is her site on Discordianism.
Seti23 is the Discordian SETI@Home team. SETI@Home is where you sign up to let your spare CPU cycles be used to try to find extra-terrestrial intelligence. Seti23 seems to be full of Germans, but the page is also in English. There are currently 251 members (as of Feb. 1 02), so it's fairly big. Nice site, too.
This is a list of cool stuff you can buy or look at and dream of buying. Sites listed here sell all sorts of neat things.
Unamerican Activities is a couple of awesome guys in SF who put out shirts and stickers and zines and other assorted things all hell-bent on getting you to FUCK WORK.
Adbusters is a Canadian group dedicated to showing advertising as the propaganda it really is. Creators of Buy Nothing Day, they do produce things you can buy. They have a very well-made magazine, and videos of "uncommercials". They're a useful resource for the would-be culture jammer.
Loompanics is an awesome resource for all kinds of interests. They sell books on all topics, from the Principia Discordia to tax evasion and lockpicking.
Essential Media iswas your
discount catalogue of underground literature and music. As of 2003, they have closed doors and are selling
the business. Got cash? PLEASE consider this, EM was a valuable resource that should not be lost. They
sold everything from Annie Sprinkle to the Santa Con '96 video.
Archie McPhee - neat toys and random strange things.
Skullsunlimited.com - what more do you need to know?
American Scientific Surplus - random stuff like Archie McPhee, along with scientific surplus of jars and tubes and other suchlikes.
Pharmex sells those little labels that go on pharmacy drug bottles, the ones that say things like "take with water" and "may cause discoloration of urine and/or feces" and the ever-popular "for vaginal use only". I'll leave you to devise fun uses for these things....
INFORMATIONAL RESOURCES & OTHER STUFF TO READ
This list contains sites with good information for the interested, and other stuff worth reading. We can't, of course, list every cool site on the web. But we can list some good ones, with particular emphasis on Discordian interests.
The Principia Discordia, the original writing about Eris and her crazed followers.
Free Will Astrology isn't your usual astrology publication. Rob Brezsny is the author of _The Televisionary Oracle_, an amazing book that's just about as important as _Illuminatus!_. Read it, and you'll see what I mean.
About 23 is a rather long and somewhat long-winded essay on the phenomenon of the number 23, and synchronicity in general. It's really interesting, but keep in mind that this writing is somewhat in the vein of "everything proves everything".
Infiltration is a site and a zine dedicated to exploring forbidden places (abandoned buildings, "employees only" machine rooms, tunnels, drains, etc.). "College tunnels are dirty, dangerous and uncomfortably hot. Unfortunately, they're also strictly off-limits." The website has a lot of useful information on it, not just big ads for the zine.
Disinformation bills itself as the "counter-culture search engine". It is a Yahoo-style page of rated links on subjects ranging from UFOs to Mumia Abu Jamal to CNN News. From Prozac to pirate radio, Disinformation has a great list of sites. "Propaganda, revoloutionaries, censorship, counterculture, counterintelligence, newspeak." St. Mae is a little annoyed with Disinformation because they stopped listing Discordian.com, but there's still enough cool stuff on the site that it's not worth removing.
Neophilic Irreligions is a masters thesis on Discordianism, Church of SubGenius, and net Cthulhu semi-worship. It's extremely well written, but very long and not for the faint of heart or the easily distracted.
Poison Spur is an e-zine that covers topics such as art-terrorism and Adbusters-style pranks. Check it out.
Cyber_Lit: Cybertheory is an excellent index of texts on postmodernism, "cyber-space discourse studies", Hakim Bey (full online texts of several of his books), and Thomas Pynchon. There is a lot of stuff here, so take a look at this page when you're out of books on a Sunday afternoon. This site is extremely good. **Note: it saddens me to see that this site has not been kept up. Many of the links are broken and/or out of date. Still, the working links are worth checking it out, so I'm leaving it here.
ErisWerks is an awesome site that I just recently came across. They have created a print newsletter, and are hoping to assist in the creation of a new edition of the Principia. Extremely worth checking out.
Cabaret Discordia is a great Discordian site. The background is a little hard to look at, but some of the writing is good enough to be worth braving the graphics.
Irreality calls itself "your potal to the occult underworld", and that's just about right. This is an excellent site.
ChaosMatrix is one of the best sites for chaos magic(k).
ErisWarez has created Erisian java and perl scripts for all your Discordian needs.
The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension, aside from being unpronounceable, is a well-written site that doesn't seem to get as much attention as it deserves. I can't really explaine what it's about, but it's good.
ErisX has a lot more to it than meets the eye. Look around for a while and you'll be rewarded.
This is an excellent article written about one of the better-publicized RTMark pranks. Well worth reading.
AMUSING EYE CANDY The sites listed below are just neat websites to look at, not resources or people or groups we know or advocate. That being said, enjoy!
Absurd.org is, well, absurd. Finding your way through the site is a little difficult. This site is simply amazing! It has created multi-media art through java in ways that I didn't think were possible. Most art sites are just "Oh, a scanned painting" or something else where the web is the transportation to the art. In the case of absurd.org, the web *is* the art form.
The Multi-Cultural Recycler is really neat. Basicly, they have a list of about twenty or thirty webcams. They take two or three camera images, combine them, and put them through an "art" filter that re-colorizes, cuts, twists, and places the images into a new image, the final product. You get to pick which cameras to use to "create" your own recycled images.
Eddie Breen creates what he calls "piggyback art": he picks up bad art at garage sales and thrift stores, then adds his own touch. The paintings are really cool when they're done, and if you decide you want one, they're for sale on eBay.
PostcardX - want to introduce more chaos into your mailbox? Go to this site. Send this person a postcard. Add your own address. Eventually, you will get lots of postcards. As of 02/01/02, this is St. Mae's current hobby/obsession.
Anemic is similar to Absurd.org above, but, um, more colorful and less Geiger-esque. Sadly, it's also a bit smaller. Good, though.
Hell.com. Is there anything more to say? Not really.