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LiveJournal for Ernst von Staniel.
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Thursday, June 3rd, 2004 |
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and I get reams of spam too, so here are some of the better subjects: missy4252@aol.com : your document is not good smokeweed_111@ hotmail.com : I 've found your bill! Marina Calhoun : I've had enough of your bullshit Chrystal Burns : you are nominated Bachelors |
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Wednesday, May 12th, 2004 |
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I never really read this until yesterday, even though I've liked Pokey the Penguin for a long time. It raises a lot of interesting points about the nature of art and what constitutes a masterpiece. There are some jokes at the beginning that are pretty much what you'd expect of a Pokey fan, which is why I never looked closely at it at first. It gets good, though. I also checked out two dystopic novels from the library, both of which should be interesting (although apparently, chances of either being a masterpiece are slim): Yevgeny Zamyatin's We and Ernst Jünger's The Glass Bees. |
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Friday, April 2nd, 2004 |
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Eh, it's long, I didn't save the file, and it's pretty dry, because I don't want to piss him off. I summarize this article about how Scientology auditing is the same as authoritative hypnosis (that is, hypnosis involving command and/or suggestion). I mention that Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, made the same mistake as Hubbard, assuming that one-time trauma is the primary cause of mental problems (neurosis, hysteria, entheta, etc). Freud even used hypnosis, and it's ironic how much Hubbard and the later CoS leaders rail against psychology in general, while practicing something very similar to the worst kind of psychology. After that, I point out false memories of child abuse recovered under hypnosis, and how the temporary relief at being able to blame a specific source for one's problems doesn't outweigh the damage done in the long term. I argue that changing the trauma from childhood to a past life isn't any improvement, and that even if the mistaken beliefs the patient acquires are harmless, minor delusions, the dependence on the auditing/hypnosis procedure that usually develops is dangerous. After that, I just give him links to Operation Clambake and Secrets of Scientology, and tell him to read Bare-Faced Messiah. |
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Thursday, April 1st, 2004 |
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For some reason I thought yesterday that what I had forgotten was something important. Which this isn't. It is kind of funny, though. In the course of the shooting expedition, there was a trip to a gun store. On display in this store was a large pistol with a tag that said: 10 MM WITNESS HUNTER There's a reasonable explanation to do with the model name being Witness and the option package being Hunter, but it still seems like something from the Simpsons. In other news, I wrote a long letter to my Western Civilizations teacher (who wisely does not make his email address public, because he's nuts and people would mess with him) about how Scientology is not as cool as he thinks it is. I'm still not sure whether I want to give it to him. |
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Wednesday, March 31st, 2004 |
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An old friend of mine (and former co-worker and roommate) applied for a government job and used me for a reference, so I gave him a call Monday night and got invited along to go shoot off some guns yesterday. I have learned that when shooting guns, it is good to wear gloves and protective glasses. I had ear protection, but my hands got a little bit hurt and a lot dirty, and there was stuff all over my face. It was still fun, though. I shot a semi-automatic version of an FN-FAL and a Yugoslavian 8mm Mauser copy, plus some handguns. I was talking to aryan_menace last night and had thought of something of more substance in the course of that conversation, which I wanted to put here, but I have forgotten it. |
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Friday, March 5th, 2004 |
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Quirky, uneven speech has made its move from the internet to radio! I don't understand the appeal of presenting oneself as the old Saturday Night Live character whose catchphrase had to do with living in a van down by the river. | ||||
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Friday, December 5th, 2003 |
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It is past three o'cliggity in the A to the miggity, and I have been up all night writing piggities. In about 6 hours, I catch a bus to school where the computers have MS Word instead of WordPad, so I can add double spacing to said piggities and priggity them out. And hand them in. Christ Almiggity. (I have taken to referring to the 459 bus route that I will be riding as the fo' fi' niggity, but not out loud.) |
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Saturday, November 22nd, 2003 |
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The flash cartoon with the badgers is more popular than I thought. The sort of dense goth girl who sits next to me in Psychology was drawing badgers, snakes and mushrooms on her notebook yesterday. She even wrote out the abbreviated lyrics ("badgers x 12, mushroom x 2"). | ||
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Wednesday, November 19th, 2003 |
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Some years ago, a friend told me about the wonders of the nearest McDonald's to my house. I remembered from my childhood that it had more fiberglass reliefs of McDonaldland characters on its walls than any other restaurant in the area, but what I didn't know was that it also featured a longtime employee well versed in their lore. He gave my friend (and my friend's teenaged ska band) a tour of the wall of bygone characters and told them about his website. Some time closer to the present, I went to see what was new in the life of this Michael Biocco, and was surprised to find that his website was gone. A Google search for his name turned up his gay corpse. Tonight, months later, I'm playing with Google again instead of outlining for my English final, and there is nothing new. Frustrating! I personally think this should be the subject of a TV movie. Either that, or his name could be given to a new McDonald's character. He'd be called Milkshake Mike, and he wouldn't be dead. PS, he also compiled a list of gay TV episodes. |
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Thursday, November 13th, 2003 |
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A wayward tree has struck my house. Not a little one, either. It was the largest tree in my neighbor's yard until it cracked somewhere near the bottom and fell, smashing the deck and part of the eave around the rear of our house. Internal damage so far is limited to two rafters, one broken and one cracked. The force of the impact was enough to knock the wall clock down in the kitchen and jar the telephone and electrical wires on the side of the house somewhat, but they're hanging by substantially more than a thread, and service has not been interrupted. I'm pretty sure the wind that knocked the tree over was not caused by a hurricane, so the insurance should pay for the damage. It's more of an annoyance than a disaster, even for my parents, whose house it is. Still, holy shit. |
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Tuesday, November 11th, 2003 |
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So, I'm registered for five classes, and I'm an English major. I have a chemistry textbook from the library, which is hard to pay attention to. I will need a science elective, and the preparation for chemistry class won't transfer, so I want to be able to test out of it and just take chemistry next year. At least there's plenty of time to acquire alchemical competence. That reminds me, when I got this book out of the library, there actually was an alchemical manual on the same shelf. I think it was written by one of those Golden Dawn people. The crappy drawing teacher was actually trying to be helpful this week. About half the class didn't show up, so it might be the result of more individual attention instead of a surprise burst of competence at and interest in teaching. I am still not going to know anything about composition or any of the other formal rules of drawing when the class is concluded, which indicates that I've been ripped off. I ate two steaks and a pie today. |
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Monday, November 3rd, 2003 |
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I went away for the weekend, and now I'm back where my girlfriend isn't, where I get to be annoyed by classes full of idiots at my ghetto college, which I ride to on the ghetto bus. Bluh. Priority registration is this week, and I have to declare a more specific liberal arts major (or change majors). I think to transfer to a real college for linguistics or library science I would just have to be an English major. I was considering changing to Chemistry, which I always liked and understood in high school even though I did terribly because I never did homework. I wouldn't be able to re-learn the math fast enough, though. I still want to make up for all the math I didn't learn on my own. |
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Tuesday, October 14th, 2003 |
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When I saw this in the store today, the box was on its side, and all I saw was "PERSONAL SEWER". I was so disappointed. |
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Monday, October 13th, 2003 |
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My drawing teacher, who also happens to be a bad teacher, has admitted to the crime of installation art. As if that's not bad enough, and it is, there's an "artist's statement". If your art doesn't function without an explanation, then it doesn't function and you need to fix it. Even I know that, and I'm no artist. Regardless of what you think of them, the pioneers of incomprehensible art let their works speak for themselves, which at least made their art something to discuss instead of a formal, dull chunk of information. The description for this piece should be changed to "Mixed media with projection and stupid essay." |
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Thursday, October 2nd, 2003 |
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A couple of weeks ago, after I'd returned the defective turntable, I boxed up all the records I had and sent them to my girlfriend, who has a record player. The morning after I'd got them all packed and ready to mail, I saw a decent-looking record player in someone's garbage. As I looked at it, a car that had been parked on the street left, and I noticed that it had an old TV or something on the back seat. These people must have been throwing out their entire entertainment center. I kept walking to the bus station, went to class, and on my walk home, I saw that it was still there. I left it for someone else to get, though, not wanting to get my hopes up again and be disappointed. When my girlfriend got the records, she found out her record player needed a new needle. |
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Friday, September 12th, 2003 |
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I was reading through my interests, in this case military hardware, and I came across this. The situation with the colors reminds me of two things: one, what if you call red "red" and I call it "green," but when you say "red" I understand it as "green"? I used to think of things like this a lot in my early teenage years, and one progression of it was what if everything one of us does is perceived as something completely different the other, but it functions perfectly in the other's perceived reality? There could be a completely different story going on in each living person's mind; you could say "I'm going to water the lawn" and I would hear you say "I'm going to go kill the alien invaders," and when I looked out the window and saw you with the hose, there would be laser beams coming out of it, destroying said invaders; another person with us could understand your actions (and mine) a third way, and so on for everyone, ever. It's not a very useful train of thought, and I didn't stick with it for too long. For years after I abandoned it, though, I was sure that everyone must have had similar thoughts at one time or another, but after talking to a few people, I became convinced otherwise. I think it might have picked it up from a text file on a dialup BBS; there was one that was run by Wiccans (who were as annoying in 1992 as they are today) and another almost entirely populated by Objectivists, and either of those groups could have had a store of Richard Bach or Seth-inspired goofiness. So there's that tangent. The other thing it made me think of is when a long time ago, a friend of mine described a conversation he'd had with a crazy old black guy who told him that the reason black people think clashing colors match is because their eyes and optic nerves are different from white people's, rather than social conditioning or a traditional availability of dyes of certain colors in Africa. |
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Saturday, September 6th, 2003 |
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The only acceptable price for used electronics is "free," and that's only after it's proven that the damn thing works. I really should have figured that out a long time ago. Now I have to go back to the stupid Berlin Mart tomorrow and return a record player. I'm pretty certain the guy will be there. He had a couple tables (it's a flea market) and a bunch of flags, so he's probably a regular. |
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Thursday, September 4th, 2003 |
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Community college. You'd think that people would be willing to suspend their use of the word "ain't" for at least a few hours per week for an English class. I like to think that South Jersey has a greater quantity of stoners and wiggers than the rest of the world, and that I won't have to deal with this for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, since the places I think of as possible future homes are the Carolinas, Oregon, Colorado and Northern or Central Europe, the pizza will probably suck. |
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Sunday, August 31st, 2003 |
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Mission statement (ha): Well, let's start with what this isn't. It isn't an attack or anything else negative directed at anyone from POE or SSW. I've been sort of retreating from heavy internet use and various other forms of socialization lately; I don't want to hang out or meet up somewhere or spend a lot of time on IRC, but I am not disgusted with everyone I used to know. I have been told (albeit by a person very unfriendly to me) that people think I am. It is not a continuation of when I was a much more active Things I Hate editor. I no longer care about trying to be entertaining, which was the prime reason to write up anecdotes and (ugh) short fiction and present it for internet approval. Nor does it take the place of my former hatelife journals. It's not going to be personal, introspective, or whiny. My TIH crap (it's a good site, don't get me wrong, I just didn't do much good on it) wanted attention, my journal was created in the hope that I'd have an outlet that people could read that was anonymous. I still like the idea of writing things that people will read. It's a good idea to go into that not caring who reads it, though. I am pretty content these days. Let us all practice tolerance and non-creepiness. I would like to assume most people have been -- I think I have. And, hello anyone who has no connection to the above matters. |
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LiveJournal for Ernst von Staniel.
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