*ronch* *ronch* *ronch*

I think Alan Moore is a pretty cool guy. Eh is serious about magick for the masses and doesn't afraid of anything:

There is the Bumper Book of Magic, which I am working on with my friend and inspiration Steve Moore—no relation. We are hoping that when we get it finished, in probably a couple of years, that it will be the most lucid, most beautiful, and probably most informative and funny grimoire that anybody has ever produced. It will be the first time a book of this nature, a huge compendium of magic which explains it in theory, in practice, which explains its history, and which includes all sorts of other wonderful features—it will be the first time this has ever been done for a mass market.

All of the previous magicians who've published grimoires have done it for an esoteric elite, and it's mainly been done in fairly opaque language that would only be comprehensible to people with already a fair amount of arcane knowledge. What we are trying to do is to make this, as I say, completely lucid, to demystify it, and at the same time to restore it to the position of reverence that we think that it should be in.

This is a venture entirely in congruence with the principles of Chaos Marxism. Of course, we want to construct an open-source wiki-style grimoire for the new millennium, but I can't blame Old Beardy for taking every opportunity presented, by the release of a movie he never wanted produced, to try something a bit different and daring.

(DISCLAIMER: I am going to see Watchmen and I fully expect to love it to death, because I'm one of those shallow zombies incapable of real thought who Alan and Mad Larry are always going on about.)

I'm the goddamned Batman.

Bullfinch's Mythology - or perhaps Crowley's 777 - for the new millennium, ladies and gentlemen and smizmars. Or, to put it another way, a guidebook to the mass media equivalent of the "sephiroth" and "pathways" between them. Or - to put it in plain language - a guide to the memetic structure of the early 21st Western cultural infosphere, or at least that part of it which appeals to internet nerds. Thank goodness it's in Wiki format so it can keep continually expanding, self-reforming and becoming more complex.

The next step after you have a Table of Correspondences, of course, is to use it. The link between this site and the Real World of Horrible Jobs can be seen on those pages which have a "Real Life" section - i.e. where some contributor gets the levels confused and uses a meme to explain a real world event, rather than the other way around. (That's pretty much the Chaos Marxist definition of "ideology".) As we've said before here, once memes are set loose in the infosphere they will keep going until forcibly stopped, which is generally a real bitch to do (Newton's First Law of Memetics?) But it's much easier to subvert them - to impact the rolling ball so it rolls in another direction, with even a small amount of momentum impacting at just the right angle.

This work is only a fraction of what we need, of course. We need a "Ideological Tropes" wiki, where all these memes from fiction are linked into the memetic complexes of advertising, politics, news reporting, etc etc etc. If we can build something like that, it would be like mapping the genome of industrial deathculture. And then our "memetic engineering" will become less like praying for victory before a battle, and more like precisely focussing our own memetic artillery to pwn the enemy where he stands.

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Your reports on using TV Tropes or similar grimoires as a resource to create a work of art or propaganda with real socio-political consequences are awaited eagerly.

Vows

"Rise with your class, not out of it" - saying of English proletarian socialists
"To not achieve Buddahood until every sentient being can reach it together" - vow of Mahayana Buddhism

Yeah, that sounds kind of like the path I've chosen.

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Doing some heavy magic/political work at the moment. Will keep you posted.

Ten wins on the gay circuit

Are these guys the homo equivalent of Chaos Marxism? I'm perhaps a little sceptical of their breathless "OMG THE FUTURE IS HERE AND IT'S QUEER AND WE DON'T WANT ANY MORE BEARS" sloganising, but content-wise it's exciting and very fuckin' funny and we are proud to adopt it.

I'm also considering adopting a Patron Godform for Chaos Marxism, but it would probably be much better if people who consider the project worthwhile made some suggestions, and then we could come to some kind of more powerful consensus. Well...?