Time for farewells..

[marmot]

Man Alive! This has gotten frightening!

It's like a bad dream that just won't end.

[monster]

Dang, I sure miss RI's golden years:

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewt ... b4ddea89a9

Hey thanks for the link, I always knew Professor Hex lurked at RI but I'd never seen any actual posts. But s/he did post in that old thread.

[Uncle $cam]

It's like a bad dream that just won't end.

Ahh, Dreams End...

[Project Willow]

Bye Et.

[Wonderflonium]

So take your slick, diseased, and altogether worthless fucking selves and celebrate your own cleverness....

You're right. I'm going over to 4chan, where they're more polite.

[Uncle $cam]

Like seeing the 'tea stain angel', or providence in a spoon, (God, how long I looked for tutelary powers in the spoon) this has indeed, been like masturbating into a scrying mirror...

To watch self-destruction from a distance is awful, but it is much more awful to realize that it is yourself you are watching...I am not convinced that the ego death drive is necessary; I am not convinced that this conjecture leads us anywhere but back to the idea that men do not understand satisfying the Id death, nor that we are its true emissaries in the service of Art.

Perhaps, I was wrong to doubt, My doc told me today, I don't do well with 'trust', so to the one in the mirror, RIP (rot in purgatory).

[alwyn]

Hey et, enjoy your respite.

Communities, online or otherwise are constantly evolving.
Creative communities can do the same, with possibly more burn-out.

It is unfair to those remaining to say what's here is dead. It is not. And there is certainly wisdom amongst the chaff.
Who are we to judge what a traveler needs, when they are looking for help? And who can say what help has been given here? While there is life, there is hope, and to kill hope may be the biggest sin there is.

Rumi has some wisdom which may be pertinent here.

"The whole world is a form for truth.
When someone does not feel grateful to that,
The forms appear to be as he feels.
They mirror his anger, his greed, and his fear.

Make peace with the universe.
Take joy in it.
It will turn to gold.

Resurrection will be now.

Every moment
a new Beauty."



Edited for spelling,

[RocketMan]

I'm gratified to be the lamb here and bring pleasure and joy to those that crave it at someone else's expense, but you have to know that as a whole, this community whether it was ever great or not has been hollowed out and gutted into something it was never intended to be and you are Lost and Blind, a beautiful people that celebrate themselves masturbating into a broken mirror never sure of what you really are.

I daresay this is the most flagrant display of narcissism here. The amount of presumption is also quite awe-inspiring. It's quite a feat to decry the futility of posting on a messageboard and at the same time wallow in that futility and an empty, blindly insulting and self-regarding Weltschmertz.

I'm a fairly new visitor here, but I've taken to visiting here many times a day these days. I don't consider it masturbating to a broken mirror but then I'm quite unappetizing even in a brand spanking new one. Plenty of interesting points of view here, and I've thought that Jeff still keeps himself nicely engaged, even though the Golden Years may be provisionally over. Jeff's work here expanded my horizons to such a degree that I considered buying the new book a duty.

[Trifecta]

Maybe it's time we took this mob social

[Joe Hillshoist]

Look this place has changed, and I dunno if that change is good. I'm not talking about:

Communities, online or otherwise are constantly evolving.
Creative communities can do the same, with possibly more burn-out.

Well I hope not.

I hope the change I am talking about isn't an evolutionary one, tho .. if society is anything to go on it might be.

The overall signal to noise ratio has changed.

Not so much in the content itself, but in how people interpret that content. Which of course feeds back on the content. I think in the "old days" there was more of a conscious effort to be aware of our tendencies as humans to have that happen. We are focusing on the noise not the signals, its even happening in this thread, and most people are focusing on the noise in Arcadia's OP, not the signals.

BTW alwyn, thanks for the Rumi quote.

Its always a pleasure to read Rumi.

[Elvis]

Someone said,

What I have learned here at RI has changed my life. It changed how I raised my daughter. It changed how I look at the sky and see the "chemtrails" that I never paid attention to before.

...That sort of thing makes it all worth it, it seems to me.
I know there must be others.

Myself, I read a lot of good ideas and information here (almost every day) in people's original material and from the links and articles etc. I pass a lot of it on to friends who appreciate it. The occasional bickering and "flagrant displays of narcissism" are naturally tiresome, but overall there is a wealth of good and fascinating material here. Thanks!

I guess I'm saying, I hope you don't all wander off... I'll try to make time to particpate more for what that's worth.

[psynapz]

No matter which drops of water are flowing past our vantage point along the shores of the RIver, and no matter how the character of the flow refines the river's path over time, it always remains a river, vast and mighty.

Fed from the melting snow atop a huge pyramid of seemingly-immovable rock, the river water would be pure but for the effluents of industry which can't seem to help but dump into it periodically, and save for the mindless animals that fuck, shit, and die in it before it flows down past your particular camp site.

Of course you can swim in it and splash your friends, or dump buckets of it on cranky people so they either loosen up and laugh or storm off never to return, but despite the purity of origin, if you value your life you will not ingest this water straight from the river. You must first construct a still and, to your liking, distill the water before you drink.

You must also keep refining your still's design and regularly cleanse all that calcifies, so that you may keep drinking the mighty water without falling ill to it.

You may sit at the river's edge in meditative trance, possibly buzzed from some fine bud, possibly tripping your f*ing balls off, possibly just in full lotus with a throbbing erection and some baby batter backing up into your bladder, hypnotized by a brightly sparkling spot of river water as it peaks and troughs with the continuous and dynamic flow of the thunderous, controlled chaos and ponder the impermanence of existence and simultaneously the infinity of this moment and, in perfect cognitive dissonance, grow.

When you're finally ready, or when you must, you break camp and go home. Until, that is, you again feel the calling of the river, be it in days, months, years.

Though dammed by concrete structures of control, the water leaks through controlled and, increasingly, uncontrolled, and the flow rate grows daily, hourly, by the minute now.

If you're here when the dam breaks, you'll be the first to know.

If then you built a network of repeaters to retransmit your last broadcast as you run for the hills to make final preparations for the rising shore line, perhaps others can outrun the surge and join you. Perhaps that's why some of us keep camping out here. Perhaps we're kidding ourselves. Perhaps...

[Fat Lady Singing]

If you're here when the dam breaks, you'll be the first to know.

hi psynapz -- thanks for the lovely extended metaphor, and a great potential motto.

[Telexx]

Hey, dragon feathers Jack, would you like to meet Jesus? He would like to meet you. I just know he would!

Warm Thought & Huggies from Heaven,
Brother Floyd

Heh heh I diddly-dang digged the Floydernator.

See ya D - good to have met you on here.

Cheers,

Telexx

[sunny]

If nothing else we can depend on this:

I guess we watch hoping to catch a revelation or two here if we just keep tuning in.

there is certainly wisdom amongst the chaff

.

This board has gone through many changes. I still feel the absence of folk from the old ez-board days, who felt for one reason or another they could no longer tag along for the ride.

The Theremy implosion DID break something but I'm at a loss to pinpoint exactly what was broken, though if I had to guess I would say mainly we lost the sense of "us against the world" comraderie we had before. Suspicion, accusations, anger amongst friends has a tendency to do that. I lean toward it being deliberate but of course I can't prove it. Were we so important as to elicit such attention? I would say yes. Mainly, in my opinion, due to our near daily and intense focus on RAT/MC issues, something into which TD was also dipping her toe. Now she is destroyed.

Have we learned a lesson? Should we?