Build Date: Mon Sep 9 15:50:06 2024 UTC
you can't spell "death" without "DEA".
-- Juggler Vain
The Glass Bead Game
1999-10-01 12:52:53
Crazy! Straight outta the pages of Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi come a whole shitload of Glass Bead Games! What's up with THAT?
I dunno how many folks have read this book (it also goes under the title The Glass Bead Game), but it's pretty OK in that high-flown sappy romantic early-20th-century German way. The crazy premise is that it's the FUTURE and there are these GUYS, see, and they live in a MONASTERY. CRAZY BEGINNING, eh? But it gets BETTER, trust me.
So anyways these guys live in this crazy monastery where they spend all their time learning this bizarre chess-like game, The Glass Bead Game. The deal with this game is that it is intricate and insanely complex, like chess, but instead of having a war metaphor, it's got a metaphor metaphor. Like, each player gets a chance to arrange these glass beads that represent IDEAS in weird crazy patterns. One bead per turn, and so forth. It's all complex and very symbolic and shit.
See, but the deal with this was is that this game is a METAPHOR ITSELF, for all kinds of formal systems and the process of learning to manipulate symbols -- KINDA LIKE WRITING or COMPUTER PROGRAMMING. Unfortunately, this interesting but kind of heavy-handed allegory has been totally weirdly taken too LITERALLY by a whole bunch of people.
Hesse never laid out the rules for the game explicitly, because, like, HOW are you supposed to represent ALL IDEAS in a finite number of beads and spatial relations and whatnot? You can't. Nobody could possibly do it. But, apparently, some people have tried.
There are a whole bunch of glass bead games on the Web. I got a link into the very cool Open Directory page about glass bead games right here. Go check it out, wonder at the amount of literalist fuckhead pills in circulation on our planet, and then go make some patterns of your own.
T O P S T O R I E S
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
'Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch'
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
SF Hippies Can't Get Their Act Together
The annual 420 Hippie Hill event in Golden Gate Park, where large crowds of hippies, wannabe hippies, and hippie poseurs drape themselves in tie dye t-shirts and gather on a hill on 4/20 to smoke weed, was cancelled this year because the organizers couldn't get their act together. (More...)
Mozart to be inducted into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame
Joining such hard-rocking inductees as Abba, Chet Atkins, Nat King Cole, and Neil Diamond, the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame is proud to induct Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
You need to make a fruity tropical drink and you have no recipe? Here's a mix recently tested by Pigdog's crack bevertology team that's made with ingredients available from most any grocery store. It tastes sweet, fruity, and is perfect for guzzling on the last hot days of summer. (More...)
From the mixed up files of citizen 566-77-0776 (More...)
Tastes like key lime pie, gets you hammered like nobody's business: Introducing the Key Lime Spocktail! (More...)
Ah, it's that special time of year again. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose, crowded, dangerous streets filled with maniac shoppers rushing to the mall to buy Pokemon action figures, and getting hammered at the Xmas party and insulting the boss's hair weave. That's right: it's time to drink heavily and wait out life's little nagging miseries, holiday variety. Pigdog is here to help. (More...)
We here at Spock Mountain Research Labs (SMRL - world leaders in beverage research and leisure technology) have been noting some complaints about a few of the last Spocktails recipes we’ve released to the general public. Some complaints received to barfback and pigdog-l have centered around the opinion that no one in their right minds would make the drink in question much less consume it. (More...)
Patient Joab's scientifick editorial discusses aspect of the space-time-beer continuum never before processed by sub-bush-robot minds!!! Too fabulantastic to contempulate! (More...)
