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Comment by weeksie | Hacker News Reader

We had copies of this and the Book of The Subgenius laying around my high school. Obviously Principia Discordia was from much earlier but the new wave/punk scene around the 80s-90s cusp in (of all places, Anchorage, Alaska) was all about this particular brand of weirdness.

We had all read Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! Trilogy as well and contented ourselves making obscure jokes having to do with Eris, the number 23, and Slack, and intricate collage flyers with the assistance of the copy machines at Kinko's. Good times.

Fuck 'em, even if they can take a joke. <3

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At my university we discovered that if we passed lpr a multiple copy count, only the first copy would count against the print quota. That would have been really useful if the Campus Crusade for Chaos and Confusion existed and put up silly flyers—but of course sources differ on the cabal’s existence. Perhaps the truth will never be known.

I did manage to make it to the grave of Emperor Norton I back on 5/5/05, and met a pretender claiming to be Norton’s descendant. From what I know of the guy, he seems like an improvement over the current government fnord.

Can you fnord see the fnords?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126765/

"The movie's plot is based on the true story of a group of young computer hackers from Hannover, Germany. In the late 1980s the orphaned Karl Koch invests his inheritance in a flat and a home computer. At first he dials up to bulletin boards to discuss conspiracy theories inspired by his favorite novel, R.A. Wilson's "Illuminatus", but soon he and his friend David start breaking into government and military computers. Pepe, one of Karl's rather criminal acquaintances senses that there is money in computer cracking - he travels to east Berlin and tries to contact the KGB."

A bunch of dorks get online and talk about fandom stuff and it's all just playing around until Pepe contacts the KGB. So... uhh... that like... actually happened.

Reality generally requires surrealist fiction to capture. It's too weird for conventional narratives.

It is more realistic than Takedown vs Freedom Downtime.

See URLs hereunder.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Koch_(hacker)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Computer_Club

William Gibson put it nicely: every time one of these things happens, the job of sci-fi writers gets harder.

And now Psychedlic Warlord of the Cult of Dead Cow is running for President - but people are worried he's too mainstream and boring to elect. No wonder Gibson is writing recent-past stories these days.

>And now Psychedlic Warlord of the Cult of Dead Cow is running for President

Me, two minutes ago: "Oh, I bet he's some oddball fringe candidate who'll never get any press attention."

Me, after a quick google search: "Oh my god."

Right? Thirty years ago, Bill Clinton smoking pot was still a major moral question and Beto was a teenager writing weird short stories on forums. Now he's a bland mainstream candidate, his drugs-and-crime teen handle was about a three-day news story, and a former federal prosecutor candidate is making up stories about smoking pot to sound cool. "This makes my job harder" indeed...

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