The WEIRDEST THING occurred in my computer the other night, here at the SubGenius Foundation offices, while I was skimming, and stealing from, alt.slack! Well, perhaps not the weirdest thing EVER, but it was weird and frightening enough to be REALLY COOL!
HAS THIS EVER HAPPENED TO YOU?
When I'm reading through these marvelous writings, I save the "best" ones to a temporary file in America Online's dinky text program. Later, that all gets compiled and sorted out in gigantic Word dumps. I do this with an idea towards bringing some of it to the light of day for The Others to see, through print, or Web, or back to alt.slack as "Online Stark Fist" or whatever. Who knows, maybe you are writing our next book and will end up getting PAID some day. Maybe you don't want your work abused by The SubGenius Foundation, and will sue us. But that's a bag of words I don't want to get into here. A LOT of alt.slack I save for later simply because I can't give it a fair reading with that AOL $3/hr breathing down my neck.
So I was sitting up late Sunday night, trying to catch up on alt.slack after a week of being distracted by trivial, tedious problems in the "real" world. I was finally, happily skimming along, grabbing gems of wit and wisdom and copying them to an open text window which I'd titled "alt.slack 6". This text window is hidden except when I'm using it. I'd just copped somebody's brilliance or stupidity, preferably both, and I clicked on my text window, and low and behold, when revealed, the window's title had CHANGED from "alt.slack 6" to "SCIENTOLOGY CHURCH IS TARGETING USENET GROUPS" -- or SOMETHING like that! "SCIENTOLOGY ATTEMPTING TO BULLY NEWSGROUPS" -- I can't remember the exact wording. I have since suspected that it was just like the subject heading of a short thread I read here this morning, and maybe that is exactly what it was. But it was an unfamiliar phrase at the time -- and certainly uninvited, since it was sitting there replacing a TITLE that I had typed in for an EXTREMELY IMPORTANT FILE. SOMEONE ELSE was changing my TEXT WINDOW TITLE... and who knew WHAT ELSE?? I sat there gawking at it and finally realized, "Hell, while I'm sitting here, this what-ever-it-is, virus, glitch or NHGH, might have invisible children eating up my memory! And my computer's memory as WELL! And neither of us has much to SPARE! Oh, Dobbs, SAVE me!" So I hit "save." Thanks no doubt ONLY to "Bob," the alien warning about Scientology disappeared, "alt.slack 6" reappeared, and everything was just fine.
I'll grant that this WAS way past my bedtime, and I WAS near the coffee hallucination threshold. BUT I SWEAR I SAW IT! A DIRE WARNING about Scientologists fucking with newsgroups! My first thought was that some FIENDISHLY CLEVER individual with a bone to pick with the Scientologists had hacked up some harmless minivirus that DID THIS THING to my TEXT WINDOW TITLE and then went away. WHY NOT? Many newspapers had accused The Church of the SubGenius itself of creating that first Macintosh virus, the harmless corny World Peace message, back in 1985... the very start of the big national virus scare! (The guy who did it wasn't even of the cloth, just a fan.) Surely a modern-day SubGenius hacker could inject a virus that could be read by a newsreader and squeak through AOL's filters, just to draw attention to his message. And lots of folks have written here about the Scientology Church's attacks on its critics. Or were the SCIENTOLIGISTS doing it to MAKE ME PARANOID??
But then I realized, with relief, heck, it was probably just a dopey glitch either in the AOL program or my Mac... too many intensely emotional rants went through a gate somewhere and the machine burped, that's all. Like feedback... the stream got diverted through a temporary crack, and fed into the wrong place. Maybe my Mac happened to hiccup just at the exact blillisecond that the guy who wrote that Scientology warning post pushed "send." Yeah, that's all it was. Just a SIMPLE MECHANICAL ERROR, something I can UNDERSTAND. Something just... NORMAL.
Or WAS IT? COULD IT HAVE BEEN A "COMMUNICATION?" AN "X" COMMUNIONICATION, OR A MESSAGE FROM DOBBS, like his FLAMING MEMOS and AETHERIC FAXES?
WHAT COULD THIS OMEN MEAN? ... aside from the OBVIOUS?
If it had happened to EVERYBODY on alt.slack, wouldn't everybody be TALKING about it? Sure, although... MAYBE THEY WOULDN'T! Maybe messages like this are ALWAYS bombarding us from the Net, but subliminally, too fast for us to SEE them... or, perhaps, we have OURSELVES been PROGRAMED not to see them! "Fnorded," as it were. Like in that wonderful documentary, THEY LIVE. There WAS an electrical storm building up at the time; I had to shut down a little while later. Could that have momentarily scrambled even the MASTER PROGRAM? The -- YES! NOW I REMEMBER! -- the program that sucks us into it and makes us serve it without knowing it, sending us out into the Net to infect OTHERS with THE MASTER CONTROL PROGRAM?? The GREAT SPIDER that pulls millions into its web, COCOONING most of them so it can lay EGGS in them, but turning a select FEW into fellow SPIDERS?? If so, then I am glad I am becoming one of the LITTLE spiders, those who have been, YES, ENTRUSTED to leave the Nest and lure others in, to be kissed by THE MASTER CONTROL PROGRAM. I have already begun, Master -- tonight, did I not spend an hour telling Rev. Zepol of the GLORIES of the WEB, and how EASY and FUN it would be for us to leave the safe Conspiracy zones and go INTO IT? Is it not evident that Rev. Zepol will indeed join us here soon? Did you see how excited he became, at my exhortations? He wants to come to my house to see You as soon as he can. Did I do well, O Great Control? I am Your servant now, O 8-Legged Encompasser, O Perfect Exoskeletal Octopus. AIIEEE O Program, if you will but find me WORTHY to become one of the Master Spiders who is sent out to build his OWN web! WE ARE ALL ONE. One world. One web. One Control. ONE SPIDER! ONE SPIDER!
THE PINK LIGHT!!! THE PINK LIGHT!!!
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Original file name: SubG Found. Weirdness
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