Joy to the World

Lyrics brought to you by Segnbora-t

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Christmas carol with words by Isaac Watts vaguely based on Psalm 98, and music by Lowell Mason (Mason claimed to have based his music on George Frideric Handel, but various sites say scholars can't really find anything in this tune that comes from Handel. kerawall suggested, "I'm no music scholar, but the tune for that song sounds remarkably similar to two pieces in Handel's Messiah. Maybe that's what Mason meant? Just a guess.")

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven, and heaven, and nature sing.

Joy to the world, the Savior reigns!
Let men their songs employ;
While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat, repeat, the sounding joy.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as, the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders, wonders, of His love.

Or, the song goes in schools all over the world during the Christmas season:

Joy to the world, the teachers dead.
I barbecued her head!
What happened to the bo-ody?
I flushed it down the potty
And round and round she goes,
And round and round she goes,
And round and round and round she goes.

what are the oldest surviving things?

- books
- tools, religion, stories
- fossils, species, genetic sequences
- planets, stars, rocks, water
- elements
- spacetime

from this graph we can infer
that words are just a weaker form of sex
(it is not a coincidence that intercourse has two meanings)
which itself is a complex imitation of the sensuous cloth of existence
allow me to explain:

language is a great power
it is the domain of wizards
long before we learned to speak ideas into each other's minds
we fucked ourselves toward immortality
writing and rewriting the incantation of life
spoken in proteins and recited by nanopriests
every cell a tabernacle

names have a terrible power
because they point a finger at the truth
but they mean nothing without an interpreter
you can't write out AGTCGCGTATGTGAC and create life
which incidentally is why spellcasting works on a social but not a physical level
because the world isn't watching our handmotions and words
it looks at chemicals and temperature, light and gravity

everything is a leaky abstraction
down to subatomic particles, down to the planck length
we don't know how far down it goes
i assume there is a floor, but who knows?
we are only touching the hem of that garment
if in the future you discover what's down there
please insert a stanza about it:

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.
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back up here, near the local maxima
computer files are a way of viewing bit sequences stored on a disk
even a disk being a sequence of bits is an abstraction of its physical nature
everything has a context, which determines its fragility
a catalyzation point, which tips it over into the next layer down
which is not to say that computer files are not real
but only that, from a certain perspective, only one thing is real

many people conflate god and the universe
God is with us; the universe is a shimmering fabric of knotted vortices
like the mandelbrot fractal but the 'c' of each point is determined by adjacent ones
what song does a graph automaton sing?

god is a fundamentally human concept; God sees through our eyes
God walks with us, always twice our height
god is humanity manifest in thought
as real a person as any relative we never met
parent to all, hiding behind every curtain, dancing with the wind
and god, like nearly everything else, is a leaky abstraction