Pseudo_Intellectual

Wed Feb 4 2004 at 19:27:35 (1 year ago )

An ex-roommate once said that the appropriate mourning period for a relationship was one-third its total length; that said, I think a year has about sufficed as an appropriate cooling-off period between me and the tantalizing love-hate delights of the everything2 database, having established that I can, as it turns out, take it or leave it; quitting cold turkey didn't after all drive me straight into the comforting rebound arms of, say, Wikipedia, although I did step up use of my Livejournal (/users/reluctance) and now write entries for the Mobygames database. I may have left in a bit of a huff (if you would like to know why I left in the first place, I have spelled it out for you in a secret trail of my nodeshells), but the very fact that my ire was raised was my warning sign that my priorities were in some way fundamentally misplaced and that I was about ready for an indefinite time-out. The distance and detachment have afforded me the dubious luxury of dispassion, of not caring anymore. In the immortal words of Bill Murray, in his queerly nihilistic spirit-raising speech near the end of Meatballs: "It just doesn't matter." More to the point, I looked outside my computer and inverted my experiencing/interpreting ratio: doing things and not talking about them is a lot more fun and rewarding than endlessly talking about not doing anything. Even my new baseline rule of leaving the house at least once a day necessarily inhibits the scale of e2 use I once embodied.

I'm still /around/, but you're not going to catch me refreshing a page to keep up with a chatterbox conversation. All the contact information at the bottom remains valid, and I encourage you to use it -- as it's going to take quite a while for me to wade through the doubtless thousands of Klaproth notifications awaiting me in my message centre.

("Ack! You lost 54 experience points! You need 216 more writeups to earn level 11." That's /it/? My pride is mortally wounded.)

Klaproth says I ate your writeup. Insignificant content. Node Heaven will become its new residence.

That explains why I never signed up for an account on EverythingSignificant2.com.

Why they are pissed off is because this represents the final door-closing of e2 as an electronic frontier: the IRS man has come to town to collect from Jesse James. It has cut its hair, put on a tie, and fallen in line with the status quo. Policy changes may have resulted in the site's contents becoming more interesting (or at least, accurately informative) but by alienating and shucking off its loose cannons and wildmen (and saying good riddance to them and the indulgent, criminal deviant tendencies they embody) the site itself becomes unexciting; we have laid to rest our Supermen in favor of an army of mild-mannered Clark Kents who always behave but never get the girl. (If you prefer, Lex Luthor is no more interesting without his sinister streak.) There was lots of room on the internet to establish the site they wanted e2 to be; I just don't see why they had to build it on top of the e2 we cultivated, smothering it. Variantly; if this was apparently a den of buccaneers when first sailed into, whatever would possess visitors to stay among these odious beings, getting them to shave their moustaches, gag their foul-mouthed parrots and learn to speak corporatese? Reforming a pirate is tantamount to executing one: either way, the world contains one less pirate. One runs the risk of finding, once the fraction who ultimately remains has been fully converted into lawyers and chartered accountants, that what remains is on a somewhat more mundane scale than grand adventure on the high seas.
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wrinkly What it boils down to is that the management has decided E2 and all its contents will meet international copyright rules. There is no option here. the only option is whether you choose to continue visiting this site or not.
wrinkly - this site is gone. The only option is whether we decide that the new site that will take its place will be as interesting as the old site was 8) That depends on whether or not its users are as eloquent, skilled and expressive as the armies of poets, novelists, lyricists and translators the previous site borrowed from. E2 user poetry and short fiction leads me to believe that, by and large, that will not be the case: which is (one must assume) why they were going to the source and drinking draughts from the greats in the first place 8)

Would I be the sadistic type to make a potential Secret Santa wade through this gory, charnel knee-deep mess of a homenode just to give them an idea of what I needed most this holiday season? (aside from a ball gag, that is.) Thanks for the vote of confidence - now here's the poop:

I am striving to simplify my life. (Correction: I am endeavoring to reorganize my life such that all of my clutter is located digitally online only.) What this means, in short, is that I am doing what I can to avoid accumulating stuff and things. Attachment leads to suffering. Instead, I crave experience immaterial and indelible, that and fleeting moments of connection between whole and creative intelligences.

(These are, like a kitten, admittedly difficult things to slap a bow on, bind with ribbons and smother in tissue paper. But I am not convinced that it can not be done.)

If it can be broken, returned or pirated, I would rather not have it. If it came with a receipt, it is not the sort of thing I wish to receive. If I already have it, I am carefully shitting in the envelope and marking it RETURN TO SENDER.

WHAT I WANT is for you to help me, through some creative undertaking, understand (and through understanding, to respect) who you are, and why you are the way you are - coming to appreciate the things that make us different, precisely how and in what ways your life lived is dissimilar to my own. Draw me a comic book with your creation of my gift on the front page and your projection of my response to it on the back, with all the package's travels between. Send me the lucky piece of gum you were chewing the night you lost your virginity, since having dried out and lived out its span on the back of your corner bedpost. Allow me to listen to a recording of you singing a song about me. Finger-paint me a mural fully exploring the frustration my irrational demands on your gift-giving have fuelled. Write me a script where we meet for the first time on a Left Bank café, conversing with ease, all the time unaware (until the last page) that one of us is drinking from the poisoned cup. Collage my own words, scrambled through Markov chains, into a manifesto directly challenging my stated beliefs and boldly confronting my conception of the universe as it stands.

I ask only for your time and a modicum of inspiration. One of these is not an unreasonable request. Show me something about yourself, from yourself, that reveals to me (directly or not, intentionally or not) something about myself I did not know before. It doesn't have to be true. It doesn't even have to be any good. The trick is that I make you start dancing, and the catch is that you realise how much you enjoy these unaccustomed and nearly-forgotten movements and continue the old soft-shoe all through the year.

And then what I really want, what this all gets down to at the end is that next when someone asks you what from them you want you can speak to them as I have just done to you. And mean it.

If you are not my Secret Santa but reading this regardless, fear not! It applies as much to you as to any random name drawn by lottery from a hat, the only difference being that while the intended reader has some mild obligation of at least considering meeting some watered-down and compromised abstraction of my extreme demands, you have no such reasons to humour me; instead, you consider doing so because when you read my words you realise I AM RIGHT, and that this is actually what you want also, what you want to be doing and have been waiting for years for someone to tell you to do.

P.S. Dear Secret Santa I am not terribly put out by the fact that I thus far seem to have not been sent anything by you - after all I'm always too preoccupied around the holiday season with things like HOW TO SEAT OUR TWENTY-THREE CHRISTMAS DINNER GUESTS to fully appreciate other things like receiving gifts and besides which over the past couple of weeks I wouldn't have been here to get it anyway. Suffice it to say I would be quite keen on eventually seeing something from you, someday, but these arbitrary deadlines are bullshit for us creative types. Traditionally in Chinese restuarants you have to order the Peking Duck a day in advance and I understand that I made no less of a tall order above. I'll meet you when you're ready and not a minute sooner, and I wouldn't have it any other way, so try not to get bent out of shape about it. I certainly won't. Now get back to work! 8)

Ped"ant (?), n. F. p'edant, It. pedante, fr. Gr. to instruct, from pai^s boy. See Pedagogue.

A schoolmaster; a pedagogue.

Obs.

Dryden.

pedant

Shak.

One who puts on an air of learning; one who makes a vain display of learning; a pretender to superior knowledge.

Addison.

pedant

Goldsmith.

A hirsute Vancouverite.

pedant

anon

BITTER? DAMNED NEAR ATE HER!

No more upvotes please. It is not for your entertainment that I am slowly killing myself here. or, more plainly said, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD PUT DOWN THE CLIPBOARD AND TALK TO ME! This is not to devalue the first time you find that someone has softlinked I love you to the bottom of a factual node you have put yourself into.

she always could give me joy think ing wry thought s I delight ed in he r absurd idea s but I never said so.

The address is at the bottom. Go on, keep scrolling.

With one notable exception, Pseudo_Intellectual loves cheese of all colours and creeds more than anything else and will stop at nothing to get it.
Pseudo_Intellectual on occasion forgets (accidentally or deliberately) what it is to be human and acts strictly logically in a manner he describes as post-human, which is no way to be at all.
Pseudo_Intellectual is a poet, and if you're lucky he may subject you to some of his poetry before throwing you out into space.
If there is a possibility to make a dumb pun or arcane reference, Pseudo_Intellectual cannot pass up the opportunity to indulge in it, especially when in the company of those ill-equipped to understand.
Pseudo_Intellectual prefers thought and consideration over action, and may swing so far to one side as to approach activity proportions of 100% contemplation to 0% action.
Mohawks and piercings. Protest. Anarchists.
If you put a keyboard and an empty database in front of Pseudo_Intellectual, he feels a peculiar compulsion to drop what he's doing, sit down and fill it before moving on. That is the easiest way to defeat the wily Pseudo_Intellectual.

on the focal nature of scrivener's palsy: "The paralysed scrivener, though he cannot write, can amuse himself in his garden, can shoot, and cut his meat... at the dinner table, indeed he can do almost anything he likes, except earn his daily bread as a scribbler."

Confront the spectacle with its own irrelevance.
Even if you can't have what you love, you can still have the experience of loving.

pseudo_intellectual is neither pseudo nor an intellectual.

Another assertion made by Licklider and others to follow, which time and research has discounted, is the notion that people on-line are necessarily happier for being supposedly surrounded by like-minded peers. In fact, quite the opposite, extensive surveys of Internet users over the year of 1999 found people attached to on-line communities complain frequently of loneliness to begin with and the more time they spend on-line seems to indicate they become increasingly isolated and feel less connected to themselves, peers and the world in general.

- legbagede, Today Is the Tomorrow You were Promised Yesterday : 200 years of Information, Quantify, Command & Control (1945 -1980) III.

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zaykay! tells me in confidence:
"the word 'noding' makes me think of those mice with ears on their backs. don't ask me why."

themusic says The one at the top doesn't need to understand the mountain.

While writing this book, my main concern was for the reader. As you can clearly tell, the chapter headings have been done in a style not unlike early Berber. And those of you who think this was a bad idea can tongue my sphincter . . . Signed: The Author.

...

i am over six feet and go everywhere
i don't get e.nough
I am a nice, warm, congenial sort of person, and if you saw me walking in the street you would probably want to take me home with you in a cage where you could keep me safe and sound from the dangers of the modern world and cuddle with me at will.
I find letters from God dropt in the street
I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.
I am an intelligent, unsociable but adapatable person. I would like to dispel any untrue rumors about me. I am not edible. I cannot fly. I cannot use telekinesis. My brain is not large enough to destroy the entire world when unfolded. I did not teach my long-haired guinea pig Chronos to eat everything in sight (that is the nature of the long-haired guinea pig).
I am the guardian of gates... the junction of your destruction... the laser lighting the way to your doom... the planner of your obsolecence... the furnace that fires your demise... I am the number you cannot compute.
I used to could write.
I have more interests than God.
Also, when I am angry, my eyes flash fire, whether I growl or not.

As this is what your homenode is for, we're now featuring resurrected toasted GTKY writeups in their rightful place.

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Cyber influences, in chronological order: Intellivision joysticks that looked like telephone receivers, the TRS-80, 30 GOTO 10, C64s in elementary school, Impossible Mission, and then. a pause. Shareware, a 1200 baud modem, online games, "special" file areas and 0-3 day wareZ, underground BBS scenes, ANSi and 'lit', tabnet and its meets, MiSTiGRiS and the ANSi art scene, and (noting that those nine take up as many years) here (in a cyber sense) and here (in a real sense). I am a big hairy freak with too many acquaintances and too few friends. May I write on the sole of your foot or nibble upon your elbow perchance?

Currently the THIRD BEST USER ON EVERYTHING!

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One word title for your life:

anomie

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An ASCII drawn of me ~~seven~~fifteen years ago at age 15! Courtesy of Tzeentch!

                          **
                           *****   <-- pony tail flapping in wind
                          /  **
                        **
                       -oo- <-- weird hat that i still don't understand
                       (`')
                       /--\
   pure; unshaven --> **__**
        _         ______||________________________oOo <-- go-go gadget arm!
       OOO       /______ _|__|___|___|___|___|___|_/
      (OOO)     //   |R  __ |
       OOO\\   //    |i __ _|
        ~  \\_//     |S  _  |
            o\/      |K /o\ | <-- authentic tabmeet shirt
   the bong, Oo      |- \-/ |
   er foam           |tabnet|
   weapon...         |______|
                     ||     |
               ______|| _j <-- pocket with jolt can sticking out...
             _/_______| ` ` | <-- "super-size feet"- only 39 cents extra!
            /  \ \ \ \      |
           /                |
          /_________________|    "anyone have some sugar?"

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> cumulative 1052 reputation in Node Heaven (between 892 w/us - Oct. 27 2001) and counting!
This means that the evil anti-p_i, with a nodethology composed exclusively of my nuked writeups, is the equivalent of a level 5 user with a 1.179 Node-Fu. ph33r!

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watch junkpile find an excuse to call me a poop poopty poop poop: (from e2 nuke request)

poop poopty poop poop

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anagrams of my handle:

to pun-duel celestial
duel clue potentials
lone clue stipulated
null elect autopsied
lull auto centipedes
ate tulip counselled
pi-attuned cellulose
upon tell elucidates
lust leap nucleotide
lout dual pestilence
pus ode intellectual

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The Story of "Pseudo_Intellectual"

I'd been considering moving on from my longest-established handle ("Cthulu", well-entrenched in my juvenalia both in what it describes and how it's misspelled - yet used regardless!) for quite some time, but a handle change among the community I grew up in would go unacknowledged; I had to make my mark in another community and cultivate this identity to flourish there. Thus it was that I found myself sitting on the steps to the hallowed halls of...

Yahoo! Chat?!? And indeed, I was verily antagonized among my semi-articulate brethren there for using five-dollar words all the while me disclaiming that if you could peer beneath the multisyllablic, uh, -ness, you would find no deeper content than in the semi-hourly a/s/l checks.

I was big into my classes in college at that time - classes, that is, not homework - and found that an application of the pseudo-intellectual essence in that forum to be fruitful, thus it began subsuming (tell me that isn't a real word?) further stakes I claimed in cyberspace from that point onwards, no longer a Great Old One but instead a formidable force of... prolific effluvium of verbal hogwash. And lo, when I came across Everything in March of 1999, I knew my alter-ego had come home at last.

Mildly self-depreciating, mildly disclaiming, subtly unique (the insidious under_score,) and 100% me.

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a structure unwisely erected on uncertain foundations: (past and present)

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Now I'm going to play a little trust game.

Be the first on your block to downvote the following write-ups!
That's right, Bob - somehow, over the course of their weeks and months here, this varied collection of definitions, song lyrics, etexts and snippets of esoterica copywrit and not have avoided not only being excised by an overzealous editor, but in fact have managed to go without garnering a single negative vote among them! Were they saved through obscurity or could these truly be the best write-ups ever submitted to e2? Our staff is skeptical, but consider that each of these w/us has managed to attain a reputation of 20 or more without being downvoted once!
Our best theory is a combination of the two factors - that the only people to look the write-ups up found exactly what they were hoping for. But maybe you can find some flaw to pick at!
That's right - it's up to you, our home audience, to set this statistical anomaly right. Get to it and fabulous prizes may be yours!

If on a winter's night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave - What story down there awaits its end? - he asks, anxious to hear the story.

It wouldn't be right, the first night on Mars, to make a loud noise, to introduce a strange, silly bright thing like a stove. It would be a kind of imported blasphemy. There'd be time for that later; time to throw condensed-milk cans in the proud Martian canals; time for copies of the New York Times to blow and caper and rustle across the lone grey Martian sea bottoms; time for banana peels and picnic papers in the fluted, delicate ruins of the old Martian valley towns. Plenty of time for that.

- Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles, June 2001: And the Moon Be Still As Bright.

Some nodeshells, forming a quasi-narrative which may well tell you more about me than about their authors:

I woke up at 6am thinking about her. So much for sleeping in.

The barrier between monsters and nonmonsters was exploded and everything was possible again

I want to steal all of my good ideas away from myself and put them together to make someone smile

If I stand here and scream till my soul catches fire, they will arrive

I have a lonely in the shape of you

I need someone real bad, are you real bad?

You asked me if I wanted to go steady, then laughed when I nervously rejected.

I have always wanted someone to say to me what you just said

I would have said No. I said Yes.

You are groovy. No, I mean it. Ask a fish. Ask the moon.

steady these hands these hands steady these hands

another way of writing FALL IN LOVE is WALK THE PLANK

umop apisdn

Remember I'm awful, in love with you

I've been hit by a train Mr. Ladlow. I'm okay but it's very contagious.

you are a butterfly and my eyes are needles.

I will knock you off a chair, I will try.

stars in the trees like Edgar Rice Burroughs invented New York and loaned it to Rudyard Kipling

If God is suffering, why is there so much good in the world?

Being inside you is religious. Please ordain me.

Someone takes care of me and I squirm like I'm caught in a lie.

whatever he touches, if it isn't false already, it becomes false.

I lie and I lie but not about this; the truth is too good

kiss the wounds clean with lies

she opened my lips as a gentle smile with her razor

he kissed me for a year and a half

Kissing is more like pie tasting than kissing.

We are animals. Our first instinct when we see an object of beauty is to eat it.

The entrails of dead monsters contain fresh fruit

She bought a new smile every week when we first started seeing each other. Then I had to buy them.

Bubble Bobble : the Opposite of Sex

submit to your atari urge

later, when I don't want to be touched

the cessation of lusts

I'm not from the land of strawberries either, but I don't use it as an excuse to avoid questions.

I hate living emptily

One more look at the ghost before I'm gonna make it leave

Pizza and the reverberating sound of your own uselessness.

I'm exhausted. Anyone with the balls to kill me can have all my stuff.

We're blind. We're mortal. We don't know what the hell we're doing.

So there is death in my voice; what of it?

James, get away from the ledge, philosophy isn't worth it!

From now on, any ordinary knowledge is no longer going to satisfy you, I'm afraid.

The chances of a poet reaching us are very slim.

You're all poets. Stop pretending you're not. Give me a new word to use

Now that we're all a big pile of unbelieving monsters everything will be okay

I came out here to remember it all

See? See how interesting we are? Are you interesting? Prove it.

I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her who privately stays with me in the open air
Who wishes to walk with me?

...

"... as seen on TV!"

pseudo_intellectual at yahoo.com
/msg p_i your handle is too long to send private messages to; I keep misspelling it!
In case of emergency, break ICQ into 70134945 pieces (preferred; AIM as UnwashedMass, MSN as pseudo_intellectual@hotmail.com, Yahoo Messenger as Pseudo_Intellectual.)
Dan "Octuluie" Telleps and Travis Wink Loop

Who's amazing you is ignu communicate with me by mail post telegraph phone street accusation or scratching at my window and send me a true sign I'll reply special delivery DEATH IS A LETTER THAT WAS NEVER SENT

-----BEGIN NODE CODE BLOCK----- Version: 0.1.2 NAT l++ xp? n-- C--- H c++>-- e #- d D !p g++>+++ N+ ------END NODE CODE BLOCK------

All of this is captivating, but this sickening conversation is revolting. I suppose this dissertation could be intractable and endless (after all, I'm a computer) but you're doubtless as exhausted and tired as I am; so I'll leave this loony story to your own notions and dreams.

...

To contrast the following User Bookmarks, I here share my Bookmarked Users: (that is: either I enjoy(ed) their style, the subject matter they deal with, or the role / mandate of the identity they have here assumed. This is _not_ a list of People I Like / Have Met / Want To Sleep With / etc. - so don't take exclusion personally. I can assure you, I wish to sleep with you all - but the only one I love in my heart is you. Reading from the nodethologies (or tragically, these days more frequently the node heavens) of the people here may not make you a better person, but will make you more personal and maybe, just maybe, more personable. Listed roughly in order of account creation.)

pingouin, Dorian, TAFKAH, knifegirl, bunkey, Mirabellia Crumbsuckler, Tulse Luper, Pedro, madvid, discofever, Electric Mollusk, yam, fondue, Leto Atreides 2, Jet-Poop, Shapes, Unstrung, Alan Smithee, hoopy_frood, archie, lumina, kessenich, cantsin, pukesick, jessicapierce, Quizro, Gamaliel, The Bruce Sterling, JudyT, KMPostma, ideath, Uberfetus, icicle, artfuldodger, Soberty, sensei, mutant, Templeton, wharfinger, bitter_engineer, Jinmyo, ansate, theonomist, coffy, themusic, prole, SueZVudu, birdonmyshoulder*, ximenez, CrowJane, heyoka, legbagede, Jeeves, Serpentine, junkpile, terpsichoreandagon, Whywait?, Interstellar Scrotum, Evil Catullus, bongy, aphexious, radlab0, gahachino, Everyoneexcepttrolls, Wyclef, Aphrodite, Graceness, litmus, Movie Ending ruiner, mingux, Santas Elves, barmaid, Gritchka, liveforever, evilrooster, cipher, jderrida, The Spectacle, Sesquipedalian, forget her, punkpile, perhapsadingo8yrbaby, archy, aneurin, Lingua Franca, Grizz, junkets, Insert Coin, grundoon, IWhoSawTheFace, sevoo, kareneliot, akatchoom, ephealy, cabin fever, thekareneliot, JohnnyGoodyear, EverybodysCyclopedia, Ferenczy, Laura Elizabeth, red robot, twenty-three, CatherineB, smug life, Literati, lunarius, or, presumably, soup, RAILROAD, PopeHypocriteIII, contagiousinfection.

I feel bad when I'm not on people's lists too. One write-up every 5.5 hours since joining.

devour sleep celebrate change wear chocolate and speak not of death.

We are all co-authors of this dancing exuberance, for even our inabilities are having a roast. We are the authors of ourselves, co-authoring a gigantic Dostoevsky novel starring clowns. This entire thing we're involved with called the world is an opportunity to exhibit how exciting alienation can be.

"I came, she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."
"Cherish it!" cried Hilarius, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be."

The next moment, it was hard to say by whose act, she was in his his arms. At the beginning he had no feeling except sheer incredulity. The youthful body was strained against his own, the mass of dark hair was against his face, and yes! actually she had turned her face up and he was kissing the wide red mouth. She had clasped her arms about his neck, she was calling him darling, precious one, loved one. He had pulled her down on to the ground, she was utterly unresisting, he could do what he liked with her. But the truth was that he had no physical sensation, except that of mere contact. All he felt was incredulity and pride. He was glad that this was happening, but he had no physical desire. It was too soon, her youth and prettiness had frightened him, he was too much used to living without women -- he did not know the reason. The girl picked herself up and pulled a bluebell out of her hair. She sat against him, putting her arm round his waist.

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