New Feature: CannedJihad!

I am trying to tone down my extremist ways re: literature, but I admit, it's damned difficult. Really, what am I supposed to say to this? http://poemblaze.wordpress.com

It's not like I can unsee it. It's not like I can reach into my brain and remove the words. I know, you're asking "why don't you just leave the poor fucker alone?" Oh, I guess we could, but if you're on CombatWords! it's partially because you too believe that conflict builds strength.

Here. Okay. I'm going to make this fair. If I'm going to feature a twaddle-peddler, then I should also feature someone with some lit ability, right? Okay. So to make it fair, here's someone who's not such an easy target: http://godlessmonkey.wordpress.com/

I don't think he's a bad writer, but he has yet to impress me. Anyhow, for now, CannedJihad! will feature writers of varying strength. Top 'em. That's the trick. Outwrite 'em. I was lazy earlier today and should have just out-written the poemblaze guy, but what can I say? Sometimes I'm antagonistic. It's why I curate CombatWords! after all.

Subscribe in a reader

Canned Combat March 23, 2010: Health Care

What is health and how do we care for it? Why the fuck is it that two thousand years after Hippocrates and the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine, we still don't have a sound notion of health? Or maybe you think we do. But I don't want cheap notions and opinions: this is CombatWords! and demands rigor and aggression.

If you post first and nobody else comes to play w/ you, I'll make sure I post something. If you're feeling nervous, why not consider attacking the subject of the upcoming 'CannedJihad!' (sounds so much better, don't you think?) Still, there are so many angles with which one can approach health: why not try?

Subscribe in a reader

Fine, I see this isn't working as well as the old format

I'll go back to frequently updating canned combat. I'll also add a new feature: 'Combat Targets.' The idea behind Combat Targets is simple: why wait for the fight to go to you, when there are billions of pages out there just begging for readers.

True, they want 'positive readers,' but fuck what they want. They wanted an interactive experience, let's give it to them.

Subscribe in a reader

Arr! Time for TIMED Canned Combat March 20-etc

Okay, I've let you all throw down here in a very loose, lazy way. But now CombatWords! is ready for some additional rules--to make it interesting. Engagements should have time limits. I'll start you all off easy: time expires 24 hours after the last post in a thread. Winner is declared by critique and audience vote.

Right now, I'll keep the topic open. The main rule is to riff off the prior post. Oneupsmanship should form the bulk of the combat here, though the audience is encouraged to be as harsh as the compositions warrant. I mean, you can totally jeer at bad writing if you want to, but don't scare off your sparring partners, okay?

Subscribe in a reader

Example of the sad sorry crap people are posting online

This dolt strolls onto craigslist litfo shilling his hackery:

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/forums/?ID=153942260

I can't stand this sort of brazen, no-talent cyber-clutterer. He's the word equivalent of prescription-meds spam.

He wants attention? Let's give him attention. I already started there, to bait the cretin. Let's see if he has the balls to be brazen when the internet talks back to him:

http://www.deathofrhett.blogspot.com (copy and paste, he'll get no link from me)

I couldn't even make it through more than a few paragraphs at a time. A man ought to be able to read and keep his lunch you know.

Subscribe in a reader

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.

Subscribe in a reader

Long Live the New Flesh

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

Subscribe in a reader

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.

Subscribe in a reader

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.

Subscribe in a reader

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!

Subscribe in a reader

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...

Subscribe in a reader

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.

Subscribe in a reader

Canned Combat: March 1, 2010: Interspecies Communication

Mix and match with the unrealized themes below.

Subscribe in a reader

I noticed a shortage of combatants for stumbleupon

So what are the proposed alternatives?

Subscribe in a reader

Ongoing Combat About to Close in Favor of Projecting the Combat

Let's do it.

Subscribe in a reader

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.

Subscribe in a reader

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?

Subscribe in a reader

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.

Subscribe in a reader

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!

Subscribe in a reader

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.

Subscribe in a reader