Aliens and Angels Canned Combat, March 15-etc

UFOs are the new flaming, golden chariots, while the grays are replacements for God's little helpers (bearing a bizarre symbolic resemblance to Santa-Elves). Is space flight the new Tower of Babel? I sometimes think that industrial civilization uses space travel as a justification for its existence. "Nukes and global warming are okay. You'll retire on the moon." I see space colonization as symbolically related to heaven and apocalypse. Heaven turns out to be hell. And hell turns out to be Earth. And Earth was a cannibal-Eden, before we turned it into a giant farm.

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Long Live the New Flesh

I've always loved that phrase. Free-associate.

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Canned Combat March 9, 2010 - March 14: Hive

Regular readers of Toylit know that I am obsessed with the human-hive. Most self-other interactions involve tool-relationships. When manipulating inanimate plastic or wood, it's easy to see the tool-relationship. When befriending someone, or pledging allegiance to an organization (or even symbol), the tool relationships become more confusing. And yet, from these relationships, organizations arise. Invisible hands: entities that are comprised of humans and yet inhuman in nature. Organizations of any type can easily pass a Turing Test because they are COMPRISED of humans--bonded together by tools, systems and loyalties. Organizations, I argue, ARE AIs. The computerized AI, independent of humans, will never be as effective as a hive-AI. If anything, computerized AIs simply promise to be new components we insert into our composite-machine of a hive. So these AIs are molecules, with people--and increasingly computers--as discrete components.

A human is defined by tool-relationships, enhanced by them; and yet also constrained by them. Today's sociopathic killer was once Rome's finest General. What was once an essential white blood cell has withered away to an appendix. Times change, the hive changes. Hives compete, not only in war, but also in resource production and distribution. Banking can kill people as well as nukes can, as the Russians learned in the 90s. Ideas, like specific visions of law, can be so compelling that they become the highest allegiance an individual has, thus bypassing religion, state and sometimes even family.

I offer this thesis, that you might become unbounded by conventional visions of human and write something that scares you. If you are repelled by the thesis, then strike back with words in any form. Stab it in the heart if you can.

CombatWords! Engage.

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Canned Combat Format Change

Too often there's no combat, and then a flurry of combat. I had envisioned a daily combat involving swarms of warriors. Until that day arrives, the format must change: instead of daily canned combat, it will now be weekly.

Prepare for this week's canned combat topic.

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March 7, 2010 Canned Combat: Mysterious Processes

The info age lends itself to positioning the self as a knower, yet we live in an age of ignorance. It's why we thirst for info, to clarify the confusing. We ignore the mysterious processes--of how a cocktail party conspires against you. Which faux pas was the Rubicon? Ah or the rhythms of nature; the tempo of flies and their relationship to zooplanktons. I am especially guilty of proclaiming my knowledge, but my ignorance will always be vaster. Therefore we must write loving missives to ignorance and mystery for today's canned combat.

Use your knowledge of language to revel in your ignorance. Be Byron's grandiose foil.

Arr! CombatWords!

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March 5, 2010: Hooray for Dystopia!

Ah, LA. A gigantic machine. A really fun hell. Mechanical mice and backrooms with dice. Wargamer's delight in the virgin night. Everything's for sale and all products fail in the land of El Lay, where warm days are gray. When they're not busy being the end of civilization, they enjoy the fruits of their labor. LA is America's Potemkin shopping mall. In San Francisco, we just make imaginary things for sale, but in LA they sell the sale. And yet this citadel of fraud inspires our rightful awe.

Dystopia's hilarious. CombatWords! Engage...

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Canned Combat, March 2, 2010: Greed

Greed takes any form. It is an unbalanced sense of self--that in possession, we might become the things we own. Is this a true proposition? I think it might be--after all, what am I without my pen? Without my keyboard? Without paper? Without my health? Is greed a basic state, or is there something fundamentally unbalanced in the trait? And if so, where is the dividing line? Have at it.

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Canned Combat: March 1, 2010: Interspecies Communication

Mix and match with the unrealized themes below.

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I noticed a shortage of combatants for stumbleupon

So what are the proposed alternatives?

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Ongoing Combat About to Close in Favor of Projecting the Combat

Let's do it.

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Canned Combat: Feb 27, 2010: Hit Stumbleupon's Poetry Section

This accomplishes several things: 1) We drive traffic to our various pages (and combatwords if you so wish) by linking to it with every post. 2) Our user account pages should let us link to our own profiles so that we perhaps get followers on stumbleupon. 3) We improve literary standards. We should target all the top poems. If they are weak, let's attack. When the combatants get bored, find the fiction section. Any place where the writing is touted, but weak--attack it! In this way, we raise literary standards and remind writers that not everyone on the internet is an idiot.

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Jihad! CombatWords Topic Feb 27, 2010

Now that CombatWords! has warmed up a bit, it is time to explore the internet a bit and identify new targets. I would like volunteers and suggestions for topics for tonight's ire. I will select an initial target by 5:30pm PST or so and will add targets later this evening around or after 11pm PST.

Rules:
-Be honorable. If a foe scores a point, accept it. We must lead by example.
-Be aggressive. Show no mercy for bad writing.
-Be funny. Funny is memorable. Don't go for cheap quips, unless they add up to something funnier.
-Be grandiose. The whole point is to outwrite a wannabe on his/her turf, with a trail leading back to here, blogs or whatever.

So let's hear it. Who is willing to engage in Jihad?

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Feb 26, 2010: Ongoing Thread Below: Grade the Fighters or Leap Into the Fray

Essay Vs Prose-Poetry: Who's winning? Will you surprise the punch-drunk fighters and defeat them both?

There is no need for canned combat when we have a live thread here.

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Feb 25, 2010 CombatWords! Canned Combat: Human vs Inhuman

The ongoing thread below had me think about the nature of worldview on as big a scale as possible. Some subscribe to a human-centric model (considering postulates irrelevant to humans as irrelevant postulation), while others subscribe to a transcendental model--by which I do not mean angels and devils and so forth. Instead, I mean a harsh, deistic transcendental model as this combines theists with atheists and agnostics into a single category.

I would like to see advocates on both sides prosecute their case and fight! Any style, any position so long as it's relevant to the dualism I presented.

Be honorable and show the hacks of the world what a properly trained writer can do with a keyboard!

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Late Canned Combat: Feb 24, 2010: Beyond Words

Some concepts do not map well into single words. We use compound words ("love-struck" "fucked-up" etc), expressions ("threw him under the bus"), slogans (Patriotism: "Love it or leave it.") and even verse ("Hell hath no fury...") to contain certain thoughts. Some concepts import from a worldview ('hell' for example), while others draw upon analytic concepts (patriotism) with the concepts embedded in the language; while still others draw from ambiguous words that require context to fix them and as a result, connote broadly, while also being semantically rigid ("fuck"). I want you to hunt down the biggest such concept you can find and express it however you so choose. Do not disguise your concept ("my poem/story/essay _is_ the concept"), because if it can be summarized more simply, then you've phailed and risk pwnage.

And therefore it is CombatWords!

ps: Don't forget there's a live thread below.

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Canned Combat: Started Feb 23, 2010 and ONGOING: Conflict

Everybody loves to fight, but some are too scared of the word, so they call it 'conflict.' Fighting comes from many sources; from misunderstandings, to the snap applications of the ego one refuses to back away from, to the desire to test the mettle of another. Conflict is the opposite of equilibrium, of stasis, of death. The sea conflicts with shore; rivals conflict over doctrine; friends, because they're bored.

CombatWords! Attack!

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Feb 22, 2010: Canned Combat: The Media

That's a simple one, isn't it? The internet, newspapers, anything. Any riff you can think of. Cuff Link's post yesterday wins and now I expect to see some real competition as that came out of left field. Beat his post, or maybe you shouldn't bother playing.

CombatWords! I incite and summon thee!

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Feb 21, 2010 Canned Combat: Love

That's right, I've selected the most cliche topic around. That way it's more dangerous because it will be easy to spot who sux at love-writing. This one should get people to 'bring it' because it's easy and inclines one to one-up the other writers.

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Souvenir of Nothing: Canned Combat Feb 20, 2010

In the words of a wise man, "I am a fucked apart dead thing if I'm not having fun." I fucked apart the city. I cleaved through the crowds of giggle-tinklers and smoke rings of false eloquence. I saw the city as if I were a migrating soul, inhabiting the bodies of the howling louts and stumbling sluts as I walked past them. I wore their beer goggles as I deposited Today's News Poems in high profile locations. They did not understand why I was out. I was not out to get laid, or to laugh--but to sway. They understand the sashay, the persuasion of lust; but not the quixotic quest to provide them with a catalyst for drunken inspiration--verse in transit and on street corners. The redhead expected me to wait for her to finish the poem and get her digits--oh, but I had another 90 copies to go. If she is so fond of me she can send me an email. My mission tonight was sexless, though it was animated by eros. I left her a souvenir of verse. And the city gave me a song of lust without the filth of venereal disease.

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The Power and the Glory

Ahh, power. So delicious. So terrifying. When you seek power do you seek it to protect yourself or to abuse others? But that's too easy. Write a poem or prose about power. Anything. Like Iron Chef, I want you to prominently display the soul of 'Power' however you see it.

Sorry for not updating Feb 18. I'll see what I can do to make it up to you.

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