I've discovered you really aren't such a bad guy in recent months, Shroud. You run a fairly tolerant Tinychat and are certainly not entirely stupid or evil. But this tendency of yours to "Cracky empire-building" in THIS particular "anything that's Cracky is good" spirit is, I have to say, not your most appealing quality. It's largely what made Crackyhouse such a ridiculous and despicable travesty at the end and prompted even Jeff to see that it had to be shut down. Lahamu's public challenge to people to give him ANY three random words - or rather your attempt to "use this for Cracky purposes" and get him to make a Cracky drawing on that basis - is the very epitome of the random nonsensicality that Lia and her people were ruining the board with a year ago. "Cracky", like it or not, is the name - if not of a strictly and narrowly defined individual à la 71 - then at least of a loosely definable body of concerns and ideas. Those ideas do NOT, I'm afraid, include farming, sea-monsters, insecticide sprays or whatever random ideas happen to pop into your or your friends' heads on any given day or night. A board full of that stuff is a board about YOU, not a board about Cracky. Which is fine, of course, provided you don't start slapping the name and the clumsily-drawn image of Cracky all over it. What we have here is "just a board".....associated with "just a Tinychat", neither of which, let's be honest, have much to do with Cracky any more. It would show far more respect to Cracky if we admitted that, instead of slapping her name and image on whatever shit we happen to make up and post. Please: no second Crackyhouse!
>>374 You said it yourself, this is not Crackyhouse, nor I think is its purpose to emulate it. The former wish was more like an alternative to Bounceme for the community to have topics that weren't entirely Cracky-relevant or if so, weren't serious in their context. The drawing above my Lahamu, was, as you said, a challange, and I decided to post it here because I found the piece amusing and funny. This board is exactly where this type of context should be posted.
Besides that, I could slap the Cracky name to anything I want, from a pill of Aspirin to a broken fan of a ventilator. How does this affect you? Also, if this little world truly respeted Cracky in any way, these boards wouldn't exist. Her exposure created a fandom of sorts, which by definition, strips the privacy and seclusion of it's target of curiosity, admiration or infatuation.
>>374 I need Crackies, for my bunghole. I will have your Crackies.
Anonymous
>>376 Well, let's not get into a flame-war about it - but you really are just proving my point. For a board where "absolutely anything can be Cracky" just by having a red nose and cat-ears slapped on it, NOTHING is Cracky. I.e. it's not a Cracky board, and the people who use it are not Crackyfags. Once again, Ely's intendedly "ironical" self-deprecation - "we're not members of the super-sekrit, super-serious elite; we're just a bunch of pleb clowns and hangers-on that everyone who was serious about this thing despises and wants nothing to do with" turns out NOT to be irony, but just a simple accurate statement of fact. Get real.
Anonymous
I see where Alex is coming from here. Cracky makeup isn't enough to make a thing purely Cracky. There should certainly be a distinction between this place and old Crackyhouse, in that we shift away from a Cracky-focus to a 'community' focus. With the outbreak of those (probably fake, hopefully fake) chatlogs this week I do feel somewhat inclined to keep the real pure cracky stuff to .71 and the proper mystical stuff in its right board too.
Can we be a real people? Not just a crackyhouse-in-exile, can anything new be created or built up that honours where we came from without mindlessly appropriating the cracky image? I hope so, sometime soon. Maybe one day we'll start that cult we always wanted to, Anonymous, and then we'll live well again.
Anonymous
>>378 The previous poster's questions are valid and trenchant ones that touch on some very sensitive spots in the psychical and emotional persona of the community-to-(possibly)-be that he refers to. The hard and painful fact that "we" need to confront - if the loosely associated "we" that frequents the board and the Tinychat is going to become a "we" in any sense that is really worthy of the appelation - is that our community, if it is one, is one defined and indeed materially and really engendered by the experience of exclusion and defeat. As I have already remarked, Ely's ironical talk about "plebs excluded from the elite superstructure" is really not ironical at all but the actual reality, or something very close to it. The identity of the new Wish is surely defined by the contempt of the 71 "purists" on the one hand and by the indifference of the several genuinely beautiful and fascinating people - Kimi, RavRav, I suppose I am compelled to go even so far as to include Jeff himself here, even if only by his continuing association with the two just-mentioned "beautiful people" - who passed through Crackyhouse on the other.
>>379 Fortunately, however, it can be safely assumed (can it not?) that all users of the board and the Tinychat will be intimately familiar at least with the early chapters of Hegel's "Phaenomenologie des Geistes". Need I even point out, then, that we find ourselves gifted with a model for comportment and mental attitude in the present difficult juncture by the well-known "Master and Slave" dialectic featured prominently in this text. Personally - and here I am sure I can speak for all of us - I have always found this chapter to be unique, and uniquely admirable, in the history of philosophy and indeed of human moral endeavour as a whole. An identity and an ethic built on the arduous but patient acceptance of DEFEAT....a genuine turning of proven inferiority into a new, more subtle, more spiritual and more profound mode of positivity - what a vision of rare and courageous brilliance. For those of you who haven't quite got around yet to Hegel - hard as I find it to believe that this will apply to even a single one of you - I might point out here that Norman Mailer's commentary on the post-Zaire career of George Foreman brngs to expression what are essentially the same philosophical points: that it is possible, and indeed supremely admirable, to reconstruct a personality and identity after, and even explicitly and definitively on the basis of, defeat and proven "inferiority". Foreman, as Mailer points out in the excellent documentary "When We Were Kings", recovered from his crushing defeat and humiliation by Ali to become "one of the more positive and laudable figures in contemporary American cultural life".>>380>>380
Anonymous
>>380 It must, however, be added as a final word of warning that such an Hegelian-Foremanian "dialectical" identity for the board can only possibly ever be constructed on the basis of rigorous honesty and frankness with ourselves : that is to say, on the basis of an unflinching gazing into the face of the Medusa of our defeat and rejection by the beautiful and significant people of this world IN ALL THIS REJECTION'S ABSOLUTENESS AND UNCONDITIONAL UGLINESS: In other words, we must eschew "noble lies" of the type of Ely's entirely mythical and mythomanic "invitation to take tea with Kimi and RavRav". Pics, or this didn't happen. Actually, we must not and must never accept that it happened even if he DOES provide pics (I seem to remember there was some pretty skilled use of holograms going on on the very night of that alleged but entirely fictional visit in the old CH Tinychat, so we must be prepared for ANY trickery). Our new dignity and new identity can ONLY be constructed on the foundation of a COMPLETE UNCONDITIONAL ACCEPTANCE of our UTTER DEFEAT AND REJECTION BY THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE (and their ugly buddy Jeff, the wigger eejit) and NOTHING that detracts from or dilutes this can be accepted as true.
Anonymous
>>380 Did you watch The Master Alex? It touches on this master-slave dialectic you mention. As easy as it is to dismiss it as your usual attempt to fit your masochistic tendencies into any narrative you conduct for yourself.
Anonymous
>>382 No, not yet. But Paul Thomas Anderson is my favourite living director, so I'm sure I soon will. Oh and fuck you too.
Anonymous
The [plebs] are meat and the [elite superstructure | beautiful people and wigger] do eat.
>>381 lol, Alex. Why do you view everything as a battle or conflict? 1 year ago you used to portray the Lia thing as a war, now you're seeing this as a "revolution"?
Anonymous
>>385 I do wonder whether us young-uns have an unhealthy bias about war, since it's largely some sort of weird joke that happens elsewhere. Occasionally events like '9-11' and '7-7' happen that older people seem to take as real inhuman injustices, whereas we can clearly see that they're relatively minor shit. I don't think any of us are clear on exactly what a real battle could even be like, or a revolution, or even a pub brawl.
One day the balance will genuinely get properly disturbed and whatever any of us have done to try and secure a future for ourselves will be swept out as easy as anything. This will be a fun time I think, less introspection, more necessary action, perhaps we'll even fool around in between the action, wandering about lost in foreign lands constructing great works of art once our mortality no longer means anything much to us.
In the meantime we should STFU about revolutions and stuff we have no real belief in.
