A Challenge: Your own Knock!

So, I think anybody who may stumble across this blog will know, at least in passing, of the absolutely incredible hobby magazine of Knock! by the Merry Mushmen. 

I have all of the issues and am consistently delighted by it. It is simply an aesthetic pleasure to page through after a long day or simply when looking for inspiration. Some people find it too art-punky. 

And yet there are posts formative to my experience of blog-surfing that I miss. These may be posts from ancient dead blogs or a genius theory post from the start of a now entirely depraved blog. Things which you remember stumbling upon and have bookmarked, ideas which you still use, concepts which you still hold central to your thinking.

I have plenty of these I do not want to disappear into the realm of idle deletion or frank forgetfulness. I want to possess these posts as a personal act of preservation. The internet is fantastic as a library or as an indexing system, but it is absolutely terrible as a preservation medium - to that I would prefer to turn to clay or stone but we do not have printers for those mediums (at least none that are immediately accessible to me.)   

What I do have is paper and a printer. 

We easily acknowledge and then move on from the fact that the printing press was and still is an absolutely in-fucking-credible piece of technology. We should use it more, and learn to be more distinguishing with its use. 

So I think I have listed the basic elements of my challenge. Go forth, find those blog posts and think pieces and print them in the act of preservation of your Old-School Renaissance. I don't care how you bind them, or in what format you print them. I am using a lever-arch file and printing them whole from the blogs with headers and footers. Make a table of contents or organize it by number of letters in the first word. Draw, write, note on these printed posts. 

Just do it in the act of preservation. Make it so that a child in the future can find these pages, know why they have been printed, and then dive into what you loved about this niche-of-a-niche of a hobby. Make it so it can be donated to a historian or museum, and make it for yourself.  

This is obviously, a quite personal endeavor for those who do want to take up this challenge. I do not expect there to be tables of contents posted which list notable posts as a form of in-group signalling (in fact if you have all of Knock! why would you). This should be yours.  

Edit: I wrote this idly and with a great vision in mind - I now realise that I have made a mistake, and my eyes are too big for my stomach, and the blogs keep having links which have links which have links which have links and I need to see it all and tabs are increasing exponentially fuck. 

Don't Be a Sucker: A Post-WWII American Anti-Fascist Educational Film

Scarlet Heroes Quickstart Character Sheet

I quite enjoy Scarlet Heroes. Perfect for small groups. I'm playing a game tonight using Trilemma Adventures The Full-Dark Stone, details for how I did it in another post.

Here is a character sheet for Scarlet Heroes Quickstart. Available on Google Drive, simply copy the document, duplicate the slide several times for each member of your group, and share it with them.

Behold Aang! An Eckzampel to all of us.

Enjoy!

On Distraction

It's almost a cliche to state that the state of technology is using the human condition aggressively against itself. Entire industries have popped up around the anxiety that technology seems to create in us; mindfulness, exercise, drugs, self help, community etcetera. All available from the convenient little black mirror in your hand.

I realised, oh, about a year ago, that I had been choking myself on the sweet syrup of the internet. I stopped, at first, with facebook. Then deleted twitter. I still clung onto one "social network"; reddit. I thought it couldn't be too bad, I was learning so much from it. And I was. 

Every day. 

All Day. 

Most hours of my day. 

And still I persisted. 

I tried starving myself. And yet I still grabbed whatever content I could from other websites. I had an entire list of relevant, slightly clickbait-y news websites I followed - io9, the verge, vice, kotaku, to name a few. I would spend hours in class combing through their newest "stories". I would go back to reddit because it had even more.

I realised that the only thing that was actually making me be addicted to all of these things is the very medium they're attached to: The Internet. Our greatest invention of our entire history - putting thousands of bits of information at our fingertips, and thousands of specialised interests and communities seconds away. A glorious invention that allowed us to simultaneously talk to everybody and change minds around the world. To find whatever we wanted, and see it in any light we wanted to, because on the internet, you are sure to have somebody agree with you. It allowed us to bring such information so quickly to people. We could spread a lie to millions and trick people to believing that they have full control of their own thoughts, of their desires, that they are impossible to fool. It allowed the greatest predators on the planet, our very organizations, to finally become people. Entities with millions of dollars and enough computerpower to bend the instincts of billions to their own goals.

We're living in the arse-end of history where corporations who supply us with so many goods figured out that they can use technology to leverage the sub-conscious of man to their own ends. We're slaves to our own desires, and those desires can be carefully curated on the dopamine highway of the web.

The internet has allowed us to believe that the words on a screen are actual people and that communities are active when they are, instead, manufactured.

Facebook gives you friendship without that which makes it worthwhile - actual people. Twitter gives you the arena of soundbites and arguments without acknowledging that a name can be both a person and not - making you effectively vie against the idea of a person, instead of the tone, growl and blat of a real one. Reddit makes you think that it's constant stream of facts are somehow improving you, by simulating an agora. Meanwhile you're fed the intellectual equivalent of corn syrup - through a mouthtube. Your brain cannot process the vast information it's confronted with.

For us to appreciate anything anymore, we need to learn that the internet is ours. 

We are the workers in a factory we're convinced is actually a spa, our instincts hardly our own.