What if schizophrenia were contagious?
A friend on SL passed me something that led me to this rather bizarre video of what's left of Tom Cruise (see also the Washington Post). The original thing my friend passed to me was about some recent anti-Scientology protests, as featured on Slashdot and WikiNews.
(Wikinews? For some reason I always forget we got Wikinews.)
This led me to various things about Scientology, including the Wikipedia item on Scientology's "Space Opera" (which is Hubbard's own term, not a derisive label applied by anti-Scientology forces) and related pages, and a copy of Keeping Scientology Working, which is what Cruise means by "KSW" in the video.
I used to think that Scientology was just something that Hubbard thought up sort of as a joke or a dare, that then got co-opted by greedy exploitative people to make money. But from this new-to-me stuff it looks like Hubbard was really something like paranoid schizophrenic, believing at least much of this stuff about Incidents and Implants and how a trillion years ago our spirits were tortured by aliens by having their faces pushed into supercooled sheets of glass and being forced to watch films of dogs or whatever.
And now lots of people give the resulting organization lots of money.
That's really odd.
And speaking of really odd:
"I don't think Americans are concerned if we're there for one hundred years or a thousand years or ten thousand years."
-- John McCain, on Iraq
Politicians really do live in their own strange little worlds, don't they?
Photo frames hack game accounts:
If you insist on replacing the most mundane, everyday objects in your life with digital gadgets, we might suggest that having a picture frame steal your virtual sword is exactly the fate you deserve. But then, we're a bit old-fashioned like that.
From ftrain: 2080 State of the Union Address: Key Terms and Phrases (inspired by the very interesting US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud).
And from another ftrain entry, a big list of words!
"I think so, Brain, but how will we get the Spice Girls into the paella?"
As everyone else has already weblogged, Polaroid is closing its instant film factories. Guess the world just isn't ready for nanotech smart-matter photography yet.
The PIRC Horror (a fun chess-based Lovecraft pastiche that I can find only in the Wayback Machine).
And I released that Haldeman book back into the wild.
