What's REALLY New?

ahem...

What's Really New?

Confusion 55, 3181

It has truly been a long time since there was anything new here. Sixteen years, in fact. Verily a coon's age. And yet here we are. HyperDiscordia is now one of the oldest old men on the World Wide Web, having existed since at least 1994, possibly since late 1993; I mean, my memory gets hazy. Look at me using normal dates instead of Discordian ones. Ahem: Online since 3160, maybe 3159. Most of that time was spent at the server name hyperdiscordia.westnet.com because the site is so old it's from the days before people bought domain names. When Westnet, at long last, changed ownership recently, I thought it prudent to bring it to my own domain, so it became hyperdiscordia.crywalt.com; and then recently I decided, what the heck, let's finally make it official, and now we get to the WHAT'S REALLY NEW part, which is that HyperDiscordia is now at hyperdiscordia.org (there being no .disorg top-level domain). Welcome to 1997!
In addition to that, thanks to the generosity of a friend, you can also reach us at hyperdiscordia.church. Because, sure, why not?
Concomitant with all these shufflings we finally made the leap to 1999 and gave the site its very own favicon. Better late then never [sic] [hic] [flick a Bic]!
Can you believe we elected George W. Bush? CRAZY

Chaos 62, 3165

Oops -- a much-belated happy new year.
Pretty much right after it went live, I've felt that the HyperDiscordia Reading Room has been in need of a face-lift. And a tummy tuck. And, while I was at it, butt implants. So, I overhauled the code (which was very poor, and is now only mildly nasty), re-did the graphics, wrote up some new schtick and modified the existing schtick surrounding the Library. A few days ago, I replaced the old version with the new, improved, expanded Library of Babble v2.3. Use the above link to get there, if you're interested.

Aftermath 64, 3164

Without going into boring detail, Goddess has conspired over the past few days to show me that not everyone in the world is an asshole, though assholes do predominate. (Or, She might have been playing jokes on me for the Hell of it and I'm reading too much into it -- Hail Her.) So, for those who this applies to: Thank you for not being an asshole.

Aftermath 42, 3164

I made a small modification of the Lord Omar page; unfortunately, it was in order to inform the world (or such of it as reads these pages) that he died on Aftermath 40, 3164 after an extended illness. It is my personal regret that, while I exchanged mail with him for some time, I never got around to telling him how much his work means to me. It is reported that, towards the end of his last visit to Little Five Points in Atlanta, he said that he felt ``like a tired child home from a very wild circus," alluding to a passage in The Principia Discordia:
``And so it is that we, as men, do not exist until we do; and then it is that we play with our world of existent things, and order and disorder them, and so it shall be that Non-existence shall take us back from Existence, and that nameless Spirituality shall return to Void, like a tired child home from a very wild circus.''
Rest in peace; Hail Eris.

Bureaucracy 35, 3164

I made a small addition to the HyperDiscordia Reading Room main page after discovering yet more evidence of Discordians quietly slipping the Word of Goddess into the cultural mindscape. I decided to take a look at the etymology of the word ``babble'' on Merriam-Webster Online. While it only traced the word back to the Middle-English ``babelen,'' it suggested that this was of imitative origin. So, while I was there, I looked up said probable imitated origin, ``Babel.'' And behold, an epiphany -- an English word which means (basically) ``confusion'' has its roots in a Hebrew word which means ``the gate of God.''

Confusion 51, 3164

After wandering around the HyperDiscordia Reading Room a little, I got somewhat tired of seeing the same decor room after room. So I hotfooted it down to Homepage Depot, picked up some carpet remnants and, well, a helluva lot of paint. I admit that the paint looked a bit better in the can than it does on the walls, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. Now, at least, you don't have to walk so far before you see a new room.

Confusion 16, 3164

I added a new page which describes a not-so-new threat to humanity, and modified the Illuminati, King Midol and Fnording Dollar Bills pages so as to link it in.
I discovered recently that newer browsers seem to be slightly less forgiving than old browsers in terms of spotting and handling special characters (things like Ö and Æ, say). The terminal semicolon, which used to be optional, is now mandatory unless you want your pages to be speckled with things like ``nicht für gefingerpöken.'' (If that last bit looks like perfectly acceptable faux German in your browser, well, it might not in the future.) Anyway, I went through and added semicolons where required.

Discord 55, 3164

I made a relatively small change to the Stoned Sermon #4 page to link the phrase ``Jesus had a sense of humor'' to my recent treatise on theology. Some will probably argue that, by doing this, I have implicitly affirmed the Christian assertion that Jesus was God and proceed to give me a hard time about it. Let us take it as a given, then, that I have done this and see where an investigation leads from there.
Now, from a (or at least my) Discordian perspective, God doesn't run the universe because He lost it (in either a divorce settlement, or perhaps a card game, with Eris). However, since it is analytic in the concept of God that He does run the universe, a God who doesn't cannot exist. Thus, since it is a given that I have equated Jesus with God and stated that God doesn't exist, then Jesus doesn't exist either. Now, since it is an analytic truth that ``a God who doesn't run the universe'' doesn't exist (like a round square or a married bachelor), ``Jesus'' must fail to exist in the same way. Further, this means that no sense whatever can be ascribed to any statement which contains either ``Jesus'' or ``a God who doesn't run the universe,'' because these phrases are non-referential -- the entities in question fail to exist so fervently that they cannot even be talked about, so they clearly cannot be said to be equivalent. To take a simpler example, the sentence ``The conical sphere is purple'' isn't true or false, but is rather a kind of null statement -- an utterance devoid of meaning and truth value. Not only does a conical sphere not exist, but I can't even say ``conical sphere'' and mean anything at all by so doing. Therefore, it is demonstrably impossible for me to have made any comprehensible statements about Jesus or God from within a Discordian ontoillogical framework.
Basically, the pages in question do not exist (insofar as it has been shown to be impossible that they have any content), so I don't know where you get off reading them, much less pestering me about them.

Discord 54, 3164

It appears that Netscape Communicator 4 recognizes background images in tables, so I modified the Reading Room to take advantage of them -- there is now a nifty paper-texture background on the pages of the books. I'm a little bit ashamed of using something so relatively non-standard, but I'm pretty sure I'll get over it.

Discord 53, 3164

GASP! We forgot to link the Five Ball of Magick in anywhere in the main pages! Never fear, we've found a home for it: Just off the Akashic Records.

Discord 52, 3164

One day we took a look at the What's REALLY New? Page and realized that some of the stuff on there was REALLY old. Also, the file size was getting stupidly large. However, since the What's REALLY New? Page is the closest thing HyperDiscordia has to a table of contents, we figured it should stick around, or else even we'll never be able to find everything.
Thus it came to pass that the What's REALLY New? Page was split into the What's REALLY New? Page and the What's REALLY Old? Page. We hope this helps.
Do you have questions but no answers? Do you have answers but no questions? Do you have a pocketful of after dinner mints you've collected from the finest Greek diners in America? Well, we can help with the first bit. Get your very own answers to all your questions -- as long as they can be answered with a Yes or a No -- from the Five Ball of Magick.

Discord 51, 3164

The recently-added Sacrifice page seems to have garnered an award. A proper award, mind, with no hot-dog buns (look, when you get things like this, you have to take what joy you can in them).

Discord 45, 3164

``I hereby award HyperDiscordia the Expanding Foam Dinosaur Award. An honor of the utmost prestige, [it is] awarded to those few sites which, like the water-doused expanding foam dinosaurs of our collective youth, get bigger and bigger over time but retain their basic shape and remain just as useless as they were before. Congratulations.'' -- Leonard ``Funkadelic'' Richardson
Well, we did ask for it (see the Discord 25 entry below).
In the interest of keeping all those busy Discordian Magii informed, I submit the Paper Clip Sacrifice Ritual, with an attached piece on sacrifices generally.
The foregoing required a few changes to link the new pages in; the victims were limited to the Turkey Curse page and the Neopagan Discordia page (which was itself also updated with a bunch [well, a couple] of new links and some re-rites from the author).

Discord 39, 3164

Yet another earth-shattering (Would you believe ``ground-breaking?'' Okay, how about ``floor-dirtying?'') treatise on theology has been added to keep the others company and linked in on the Stolen Holiday page.

Discord 26, 3164

As if to prove that HyperDiscordia is still a growing, breathing, flatulent creature, an insult was heard that was a perfect addition to the All-Purpose Slams Page -- a page which has not been updated in many, many a moon, sun, Mars or Jupiter.

Discord 25, 3164

Pope Icky has had, floating around in his head and bumping into things for quite some time, a thought. Just one. Just a little one. And he's decided to share it with us. And also clean up a long-standing tpyo in ISB while he modified the page to link in his thought.
Having cleared that thought out, Fundament had another thought: He has realized that HyperDiscordia is almost certainly one of the longest-running, currently active, basically unchanged sites still up since 1993. It's true: HyperDiscordia has indeed been going strong since 1993, and has only changed insofar as it has hopped two servers and had a cosmetic facelift. Sure, we've been adding pages for five (5) years, but aside from that, the site is the same as it was when it started -- same pages, same structure, same links. It has simply grown, like coral. How many other sites from 1993 can you think of that are still running, still active, still growing, and still have basically the same structure with which they began? Not many.
Certainly, HyperDiscordia deserves some kind of award for that.

Discord 10, 3164

Pope Icky is once again reading about art movements (which are like bowel movements, only less productive) and therefrom drew this inspired tidbit, which has been linked to from everyone's favorite splinter group. No, it's not much, but at least we ate'nt dead.

Chaos 50, 3164

I made minor modifications to the pages on the Library of Babel, Universal Libraries and the Akashic Records to reflect the recent opening of the HyperDiscordia Reading Room.

Chaos 48, 3164

Those of you who thought that the Library of Babel might be a neat place to visit may now test that theory at the HyperDiscordia Reading Room.

Click here for antiquated What's Really New? entries, most of which already smell of mothballs and, for reasons we can't discern, vanilla.