Pacing issues

So, it is time for things to pick up in The Mask Makes the Pony, and there is some trouble. I want the pace to pick up a bit, because we approach the end and there are a lot of things that need to happen.

That said, while I want some speed, I don't want things to go Volvo Wagon Turbo Brick velocity. I just scrapped a 3k word chapter in its entirety because the sudden narrative acceleration almost gave me whiplash. And by scrapped, I mean complete and total deletion and then trashing the document so I couldn't undo it. That chapter was supposed to be released tonight and after about six hours worth of work, I have zero words to show for it. Now, who is a clever monkey?

Since I do not have a chapter to give you this evening, I am forced to distract you with something surreal, so here you go.

Comments

[PhycoKrusk]

I would say, "I worry about you," but honestly I'm more worried about myself at this point.

[Autumn Colors Fall]

derpicdn.net/img/2015/6/13/916085/small.gif

[kudzuhaiku]

4455419

That finger... I bet it tastes like feet wrapped in vegan bacon strips.

[Slinky1313]

The fact that you can produce a 3k word chapter (even if you didn't like this one) in 6 hours is crazy to me.

[Boulder]

It happens....and that image...?
"I find your lack of suction disturbing!"

Bad Mango you!!
derpicdn.net/img/2013/9/20/430974/medium.gif

[HolyCross9]

That is disgusting and disrespectful! Especially since Carrie Fisher died a few months ago and this image only BUTCHERS her most disrespectfully. I mean seriously, have you no shame?!

[Blewfire]

I very distracted.

[PhycoKrusk]

4455423
Well, the good news is that I'm not worried about myself anymore.

Now I'm terrified.

[anunenka]

Talk about daddy issues!

4455465
We're fine! We're all fine down here... now... how are you?

4455462
I hate to say this, but get over yourself. Knowing what I do about Ms. Fisher, she'd've laughed her ass off at this. Is it disrespectful? Yes, but it is funny as hell and has been around longer than she has been dead.

tl;dr - The dead don't give a shit, and neither do many of us.

[mastermenthe]

Kudzu, you can always stretch things out by a few more chapters than intended, it is OK.

[HolyCross9]

4455470 I don't care! I won't tolerate disrespect for the dead.

[kudzuhaiku]

4455462

I am a Discordian. What is this shame you speak of?

Some sort of debilitating condition?

Not only do I have no shame, but I give good head. Here, come into my headspace, said the Discordian to the Greyfaced Cabbage.

Appendix Teth: Hagbard's Booklet
" I once overheard two botanists arguing over a Damned Thing that had blasphemously sprouted in a college yard. One claimed that the Damned Thing was a tree and the other claimed that it was a shrub. They each had good scholary arguments, and they were still debating when I left them. The world is forever spawning Damned Things- things that are neither tree nor shrub, fish nor fowl, black nor white- and the categorical thinker can only regard the spiky and buzzing world of sensory fact as a profound insult to his card-index system of classifications. Worst of all are the facts which violate "common sense", that dreary bog of sullen prejudice and muddy inertia. The whole history of science is the odyssey of a pixilated card- indexer perpetually sailing between such Damned Things and desperately juggling his classifications to fit them in, just as the history of politics is the futile epic of a long series of attempts to line up the Damned Things and cajole them to march in regiment.

Every ideology is a mental murder, a reduction of dynamic living processes to static classifications, and every classification is a Damnation, just as every inclusion is an exclusion. In a busy, buzzing universe where no two snow flakes are identical, and no two trees are identical, and no two people are identical- and, indeed, the smallest sub-atomic particle, we are assured, is not even identical with itself from one microsecond to the next- every card-index system is a delusion. "Or, to put it more charitably," as Nietzsche says, "we are all better artists than we realize." It is easy to see that label "Jew" was a Damnation in Nazi Germany, but actually the label "Jew" is a Damnation anywhere, even where anti-Semitism does not exist. "He is a Jew," "He is a doctor," and "He is a poet" mean, to the card indexing centre of the cortex, that my experience with him will be like my experience with other Jews, other doctors, and other poets. Thus, individuality is ignored when identity is asserted. At a party or any place where strangers meet, watch this mechanism in action. Behind the friendly overtures there is wariness as each person fishes for the label that will identify and Damn the other. Finally, it is revealed: "Oh, he's an advertising copywriter," "Oh, he's an engine-lathe operator." Both parties relax, for now they know how to behave, what roles to play in the game. Ninety-nine percent of each has been Damned; the other is reacting to the 1 percent that has been labeled by the card-index machine.

Certain Damnations are socially and intellectually necessary, of course. A custard pie thrown in a comedian's face is Damned by the physicist who analyzes it according to the Newtonian laws of motion. These equations tell us we want to know about the impact of the pie on the face, but nothing about the human meaning of pie-throwing. A cultural anthropologist, analyzing the social function of the comedian as shaman, court jester, and king's surrogate, explains the pie-throwing as a survival of the Feast of Fools and the killing of the king's double. This Damns the subject in another way. A psychoanalyst, finding an Oedipal castration ritual here, has performed a third Damnation, and the Marxist, seeing an outlet for the worker's repressed rage against the bosses, performs a fourth. Each Damnation has its values and uses, but is nonetheless a Damnation unless its partial and arbitrary nature is recognized. The poet, who compares the pie in the comedian's face with Decline of the West or his own lost love, commits a fifth Damnation, but in this case the game element and the whimsicality of the symbolism are safely obvious. At least, one would hope so; reading the New Critics occasionally raises doubts on this point.

Human society can be structured either according to the principle of authority or according to the principle of liberty. Authority is a static social configuration in which people act as superiors and inferiors: a sado- masochistic relationship. Liberty is a dynamic social configuration in which people act as equals: an erotic relationship. In every interaction between people, either Authority or Liberty is the dominant factor. Families, churches, lodges, clubs and corporations are either more authoritarian than libertarian or more libertarian than authoritarian. It becomes obvious as we proceed that the most pugnacious and intolerant form of authority is the State, which even today dares to assume absolutism which the church itself has long ago surrendered and to enforce obedience with the Church's old and shameful Inquisition. Every form of authoritarianism is, however, a small "State," even if it has a membership of only two. Freud's remark to the effect that the delusion of many men is religion can be generalized: The authoritarianism of one man is crime and the authoritarianism of many is State. Benjamin Tucker wrote quite accurately:

Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government are interchangeable terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it be made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.

Tucker's use of the word "invasion" is remarkably precise, considering that he wrote more than fifty years before the basic discovery of ethology. Every act of authority is, in fact, an invasion of the psychic and physical territory of another.

Every fact of science was once Damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and "progress," everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man's refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, "Disobedience was man's Original Virtue."

The human brain, which loves to read descriptions of itself as the universe's most marvelous organ of perception, is an even more marvelous organ of rejection. The naked facts of our economic game are easily discoverable and undeniable once stated, but conservatives- who are usually individuals who profit every day of their lives from these facts- manage to remain oblivious to them or to see them through a very rose-tinted lens. (Similarly, the revolutionary ignores the total testimony of history about the natural course of revolution, through violence, to chaos, back to the starting point.)

We must remember that thought is abstraction. In Einstein's metaphor, the relationship between a physical fact and our mental reception of that fact is not like the relationship between beef and beef-broth, a simpler extraction and condensation; rather, as Einstein goes on, it is like the relationship between our overcoat and the ticket given us when we check our overcoat. In other words, human perception involves coding even more than crude sensing. The mesh of language, or of mathematics, or of a school of art, or of any system of human abstracting, gives to our mental constructs the structure, not of the original fact, but of the symbol system into which it is coded, just as a map-maker colors a nation purple not because it is purple but because his code demands it. But every code excludes certain things, blurs other things, and overemphasizes still other things. Nijinski's celebrated leap through the window at the climax of 'Le Spectre d'une Rose' is best coded in the ballet notation system used by choreographers; verbal language falters badly in attempting to conveying; painting or sculpture could capture totally the magic of one instant, but one instant only, of it; the physicist's equation, Force = Mass X Acceleration, highlights one aspect of it missed by all these other codes, but loses everything else about it. Every perception is influenced, formed, and structured by habitual coding habits- mental game habits- of the perceiver.

All authority is a function of coding, of game rules. Men have arisen again and again armed with pitchforks to fight armies with cannon; men have also submitted docilely to the weakest and most tottery oppressors. It all depends on the extent to which coding distorts perception and conditions the physical (and mental) reflexes.

It seems at first glance that authority could not exist at all if all men were cowards or if no men were cowards, but flourishes as it does because most men are cowards and some men are thieves. Actually, the inner dynamics of cowardice and submission on the one hand and of heroism and rebellion on the other are seldom consciously realized either by the ruling class or the servile class. Submission is identified not with cowardice but with virtue, rebellion not with heroism but with evil. To the Roman slave-owners, Spartacus was not a hero and the obedient slaves were not cowards; Spartacus was a villain and the obedient slaves were virtuous. The obedient slaves believed this also. The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.

If authority implies submission, liberation implies equality; authority exist when one man obeys another, and liberty exists when men do not obey other men. Thus, to say that authority exists is to say that class and caste exis, that submission and inequality exist. To say the liberty exists is to that classlessness exists, to say that brotherhood and equality exist. Authority, by dividing men into classes, creates dichotomy, disruption, hostility, fear, disunion. Liberty, by placing men on an equal footing, creates association, amalgamation, union, security. When the relationships between men are based on authority and coercion, they are driven apart; when based on liberty and non-aggression, they are drawn together. The facts are self-evident and axiomatic. If authoritarianism did not possess the in-built, preprogrammed double-bind structure of a Game Without End, men would long ago have rejected it and embraced libertarianism. The usual pacifist complaint about war, that young men are led to death by old men who sit at home manning beaurocrats' desks and taking no risks themselves, misses the point entirely. Demands that the old should be drafted to fight their own wars, or that the leaders of the warring nations should be sent to the front lines on the first day of battle, etc., are aimed at an assumed "sense of justice" that simply does not exist. To the typical submissive citizen of authoritarian society, it is normal, obvious and "natural" that he should obey older and more dominant males, even at the risk of his life, even against his own kindred, and even in causes that are unjust or absurd.

"The Charge of the Light Brigade"- the story of a group of young males led to their death in a palpably idiotic situation and only because they obeyed a senseless order without stopping to think- has been, and remains, a popular poem, because unthinking obedience by young males to older males is the most highly prized of all conditioned reflexes within human, and hominid, societies.

The mechanism by which authority and submission are implanted in the human mind is coding of perception. That which fits into the code is accepted; all else is Damned to being ignored, brushed aside, unnoticed, and- if these fail- it is Damned to being forgotten. A worse form of Damnation is reserved for those things which cannot be ignored. These are daubed with the brain's projected prejudices until, encrusted beyond recognition, they are capable of being fitted into the system, classified, card-indexed, buried. This is what happens to every Damned Thing which is too prickly and sticky to be excommunicated entirely. As Josiah Warren remarked, "It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly." Almost always, we have not understood them. We have murdered them and mummified their corpses.

A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of "monopoly in the means of production." Since man extends his nervous system though channels of communication like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc., he who controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every individual's brain.

Thus in preliterate societies taboos on spoken word are more numerous and more Draconic than at any more complex level of social organisation. With the invention of written speech -- hieroglyphic, ideographic, or alphabetical -- the taboos are shifted to this medium; there is less concern with what people say and more concern with what people write. (Some of the fist societies to achieve literacy, such as Egypt and the Mayan culture of ancient Mexico, evidentially kept a knowledge of hieroglyphs a religious secret which only the higher orders of the priestly and royal families were allowed to share.) The same process repeats endlessly: Each step forward in the technology of communication is more heavily tabooed than the earlier steps. Thus, in America today (post-Lenny Bruce), one seldom hears of convictions for spoken blasphemy or obscenity; prosecution of books still continues, but higher courts increasingly interpret the laws in a liberal fashion, and most writer feel fairly confident that they can publish virtually anything; movies are growing almost as decentralised as books, although the fight is still heated in this area; television, the newest medium, remains encased in neolithic taboo. (When the TV pundits committed le`se majeste after an address by the then Dominant Male, a certain Richard Nixon, one of his lieutenants quickly informed them they had over stepped, and the whole tribe -- except for the dissident minority -- cheered for the reassertion of tradition.) When a more efficient medium arrives, the taboos on television will decrease.

[Scarheart]

Who knew Darth Vader was made completely out of licorice?

[anunenka]

4455481
You mean you won't tolerate what you see as disrespect. That's fine, and your perogative. It's other people's perogative to tell you to stuff it. You don't like a certain sense of humor... okay. I highly suggest you stop reading these odd posts Kudzu puts up, or you're going to stroke out from high blood pressure.

[anunenka]

4455498

Bucky's favorite!

[kudzuhaiku]

4455504

[anunenka]

4455514

Nice.

[Cricket3877]

4455514
4455518

Goofing on people, especially the triggered ones, is hilarious

goofs and gaffs

[Hodios]

4455484 In so far as the removal of authority means the elimination of taxonomy which is one of the bases by which authority is structured, enforced, and propagated and by removing these Damnations we are able to embrace differences because differences are no longer Damnations but are instead merely universal which creates a level foundation upon which all things share kinship and thus differences are categorically annihilated due to there being no more categories and this new abyss is an equal space that is called liberty, yes?

[kudzuhaiku]

4455545

More or less?

Each of us takes away what we want from this, but Discordians are prohibited from believing anything they read.

[Hodios]

4455549

Indeed. Wait, but isn't the edict to not believe what you read written down and thus must be read?

Kudzu, I already had a headache. =P

[kudzuhaiku]

4455551

It protects us from zealotry and cabbage-like thinking. I've read the Principia Discordia and our other texts. It cured me of religion and helped to make my mind well again after the extensive damaged caused by Christianity. Why, I almost became a priest! Imagine that.

[Hodios]

4455554 I am imaging it, it doesn't seem too far fetched, except that perhaps a priest of Discordianism would be a contradiction? Then again is that the point? Not that I should worry about it much, being a Minister of the Church of the Latter Day Dude.

I am glad you found liberty.

[kudzuhaiku]

4455557

I have a lot of respect for Christianity... I'd like to make that clear. I just find it such a pity that I have to pray to Yahweh to save me from his followers. There are good Christians, there are. But they are the exception, not the standard. I find that Quakers are far more to my liking than most, if I had to sink down to finding a label that I liked.

Seminary school was not kind to me, and the aftermath of what took place there was filled with shaming, hate, and even more hurt. There is nothing worse than a failed priest. It is a special type of damnation, not just spiritual, but social and cultural as well. Instead of a padre, you become a pariah.

I worship chaos now. I know it is real. It is an observable, tangible entity. I hold science holy and skepticism is my reverence. I've learned to break the pattern of shame that is placed upon human beings who ask 'how' and 'why.' Religion does not like people who ask how and why, because that is dangerous thinking. Curiousity has to be made into a sin. Obey your God, wholly and completely, without question. That is faith unwavering.

I could not function under such conditions, and I broke.

[Hodios]

4455559 Indeed, I was raised Lutheran and then not very seriously, these days I think of religion like polyamory. Be with the people you care about and the ones who care about you.

These days I also have two questions to ask any dogmatic Christian. One, is righteousness greater than love? And two, by knowing the universe do we not come to know god?

Failing the church meant failing god in eyes of others, I assume?

[iakovl]

4455449 compared to the good old days of "chase" when you could get more than few chapters a day

4455462 im a brony, i have no shame... and don't use the "she is dead" excuse, yes... she is, and other too... take a joke for what it is, no disrespect in it.

4455474 that what happens, a one shot becomes a fic then a verse

4455504 or as carlin say it [youtube=NXWBvB4U-cA]

[kudzuhaiku]

4455573

Failing the church meant failing god in eyes of others, I assume?

I guess. Everybody sees it a little different, but no one sees it as a good thing.

[Hodios]

4455580 I can't fully comprehend why the attempt to become more than a layperson, to enter the priesthood would be considered a noble pursuit that may not be for everyone and that the sincerity of saying "This isn't for me" is a far better act than doubling down on hypocrisy by sticking with it. I don't grok this.

For now, goodnight~!

[kudzuhaiku]

4455588

Through faith, all things are possible.

In school, doubt isn't seen as doubt, it is a lack of faith. If you fail in school, it is from a lack of faith. The twin fangs of guilt and shame are sunk into your flesh and a terrible poison is injected into your soul. You fail because you lack faith. And this fact is hammered into your head like crucifixion nails.

Because of this, a lot of people end up becoming ministers and priests that probably shouldn't be.

Mental illness becomes greatly exaggerated during this indoctrination process. It's not mental illness, it is the devil come to test you, or God himself testing your faith. You are expected to power through it and have faith. If you fail to power through it... well, you see the issue, right? If you have a nervous breakdown in school, (more common than you think) you aren't sent someplace where you can get professional help, no... you go on a retreat. You end up someplace in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, in some little cabin owned by the school or one of the churches associated with the school, and you fucking disappear.

Then they fucking browbeat you and bullbait you, and they do their exorcist bullshit as they try to cure you of the terrible, deplorable condition known as a lack of faith. It's the same goddamn tactics that cults use to brainwash people... break them down and then rebuild them. They beat you and slap you and they pinch you and they grab you by your hair, and they do it all in the name of Jesus Almighty. They claim to do it out of love, even as they are hitting you in the face so goddamn hard that loosens your teeth.

At some point, you break, because that is what an exorcism, a reaffirmation of your faith, a retreat is meant to do. Break you. You do anything to make the pain stop. You confess that you are a weak-willed, spineless, worthless wretch of a human being. But the it doesn't stop there... no... because you ain't no true believer just yet. They're just getting started. They keep slapping you, and hitting you, and hurting you... over and over again. They control when you sleep, when you eat, when you shit, and all of these things are dependent on how sincere you sound when you say how weak you are, how worthless you are, how much you grovel, and promise, and pray to God to give you strength.

There are even retreats where they fucking kidnap you and haul you out of country, to places where the law don't matter. They will absolutely wreck your shit if you end up there. Some next-level 1984 I love Big Brother shit goes down in those places.

And this... this is why I walked away from religion. I saw the worst of it, starting from an early age. When I was still a dirty little feral, taken from my family, and given over to nuns to make me civilised. Like so many other tribals, I was ground down and forced to assimilate.

To this day, I still wonder what might have been had I stayed with it and stuck it out.

[mastermenthe]

4455559

I hold science holy and skepticism is my reverence.

I was going to joke "ah ha so you must worship eliezer yudkowsky" but then i read you were Discordian and not Bayesian, so the joke kinda fell flat.

[mastermenthe]

4455624

Mental illness becomes greatly exaggerated during this indoctrination process. It's not mental illness, it is the devil come to test you, or God himself testing your faith. You are expected to power through it and have faith. If you fail to power through it... well, you see the issue, right? If you have a nervous breakdown in school, (more common than you think) you aren't sent someplace where you can get professional help, no... you go on a retreat. You end up someplace in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, in some little cabin owned by the school or one of the churches associated with the school, and you fucking disappear.

Then they fucking browbeat you and bullbait you, and they do their exorcist bullshit as they try to cure you of the terrible, deplorable condition known as a lack of faith. It's the same goddamn tactics that cults use to brainwash people... break them down and then rebuild them. They beat you and slap you and they pinch you and they grab you by your hair, and they do it all in the name of Jesus Almighty. They claim to do it out of love, even as they are hitting you in the face so goddamn hard that loosens your teeth.

At some point, you break, because that is what an exorcism, a reaffirmation of your faith, a retreat is meant to do. Break you. You do anything to make the pain stop. You confess that you are a weak-willed, spineless, worthless wretch of a human being. But the it doesn't stop there... no... because you ain't no true believer just yet. They're just getting started. They keep slapping you, and hitting you, and hurting you... over and over again. They control when you sleep, when you eat, when you shit, and all of these things are dependent on how sincere you sound when you say how weak you are, how worthless you are, how much you grovel, and promise, and pray to God to give you strength.

you know the real fucked up thing about that?

it actually works, because that is how the various human instincts are wired, and from an instinct-only perspective if it does not work on you, that proves you are an abnormality and therefore a threat to be killed , because that is how our instincts think, so the logic is internally consistent and therefore not wrong.

that is why religions are now so dangerous to society, it harkens back to more primordial days where ritual weeding out of genetic-or-mental abnormalities in the tribe was a necessity for the future of the tribe, and religion having preserved those practices into a more advanced age has distilled the old practices into a highly potent memetic bomb capable of devestating individuals and communities by exploiting root-level firmware weaknesses that still remain expressed in the average human's genome.

what im saying is, it works, it works destructively, but it works, and it is capable of self-replication because it is an exploitation of the most redundant heavily networked mechanisms in the human brain, able to survive even the most traumatic of events by operating on such a low level, and it can create a memetic pandemic that will actively consume and destroy humanity as we know it.

im fucking terrified

[Halira]

4455449

Why? It is about 500 words an hour which isn't exactly breakneck speed. Most of the time is likely spent editing and making revisions. I know I have thrown together close to 3000 words in about two and a half for stories before but I don't take the time and effort to revise and edit to the extent Kudzu does (which is why my work is of much lesser quality overall). Heck I threw together a fifty page report once in college in about eight hours; I had all my sources and notes and knew everything I wanted to say so just had to write it out and largest challenge was deciding what to cut to meet the maximum length limit. If you know pretty much what you want to do 3000 words is fairly simple.

[Slinky1313]

4455733 Yeah it's not so much the word count as the word count and topic combined. I could write that much on a nonfiction topic of my choosing but I would be way slower at actually writing a story. I guess Kudzu does have a lot of stuff planned out already though so it's not like he's starting from nothing for each chapter.

[Hodios]

4455624

Through faith, all things are possible.

Even horrible misdeeds.

None can say who you would have been, save that it would have been someone else. I am glad to know you as you are.

[Boulder]

4455470 (Snerk) "Who is this? What's your operating number?"
orig07.deviantart.net/1db4/f/2017/073/3/4/boring_conversation_anyway_by_lynx318-db2cvr9.jpg

[Boulder]

4455481 Could have been worse, could have used this one...
d3qvyul2tp4j8.cloudfront.net/i/VISmJTbYl8.gif
I would probably have used this one...
media.giphy.com/media/lxmWjwJ39pa4U/giphy.gif

[HolyCross9]

4456544 (screams with disgust)

[Boulder]

4456616 There is a lot worse you know, this is extremely mild. Emphasis should be on some more support and positive advice for Kudzy.. Something like this Dr.Seuss quote...
cdn.ebaumsworld.com/mediaFiles/picture/730195/84877189.jpg

[Boulder]

4455484 upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Sacred_Chao_2.jpg

[kudzuhaiku]

4456845

The Hodge Podge.

[Boulder]

4456848 The Taoists have their Yin and their Yang. The Christians have their Good and their Evil. The Libertarians have their Rich and their Poor. And the Discordians have their Hodge and their Podge. How else do you explain the Podge design of the Pentagon building? Positive U.S. chaos or trying to provide excessive order.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/The_Pentagon_DCA_08_2010_9854.jpg
And for Hodge, there's the Big Apple, New York, if that doesn't symbolise Eris's chaos on the world what does?