by Daniel Robert Epstein

“I’’d have to stop halfway through when the people were being lowered to the floor. Everyone was all upset about these people passing out. Then I’’d finish the story.”
– Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk has been a major focal point of SuicideGirls and members since the beginning. Since his debut novel, Fight Club, was turned into a movie in 1999, Palahniuk has becomes a major literary force. His new book, Haunted, is a series of short stories connected by the idea of a writer’s retreat. My favorite story is “Guts” about a horny 13 year old, a swimming pool’s intake valve, and the taste of calamari.

Read our exclusive interview with Chuck Palahniuk on SuicideGirls.com.

Related Posts:
Chuck Palahniuk: Damned
Chuck Palahniuk: Tell-All
Choke: Sam Rockwell
Chuck Palahniuk: Snuff
Chuck Palahniuk 2
Chuck Palahniuk
SuicideGirls’ Fight Club Opens For Public Spar

Lumo Suicide in Room Service

• INTO: Martial arts, making my body a machine, movies, reading, bugs, driving alone, freckles (yummy), and sarcastic wit.
• NOT INTO: The sound of cutlery against crockery, big chunks of raw tomato, public speaking, planning (my arch nemesis), and bureaucracy.
• MAKES ME HAPPY: The smell of new mown grass, coffee, the sound of wind, stretching and dancing, very good food, pretty undies, my special cup, and lists to organize my head crazy.
• MAKES ME SAD: Early mornings and Jacob Zuma-well, politics in general.
• 5 THINGS I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT: I have to choose only 5??????????????????? MY STUFF, ALL of it!
• VICES: Bad temper, I hate mornings…a lot. Did I mention mornings? Bad electrical juju. Bad spelling, grammar and typing (you may have noticed).
• I SPEND MOST OF MY FREE TIME: Anime and avid series watching. Sadly I have the typical girly trait of loving shopping.

Get to know Lumo better over at SuicideGirls.com!

Aleon Suicide in Girl With Kaleidoscope Eyes

• INTO: Styling, modeling, watching movies, eating, smoking blunts, cleaning, and playing with my puppy.
• NOT INTO: Vanilla flavored people.
• MAKES ME HAPPY: Sandwiches, movie nights, sushi, roller coasters, cuddling, my kitties, doing hair, spending time with my friends, shopping, and dressing up.
• MAKES ME SAD: Stepping on snails.
• 5 THINGS I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT: Sleep, sex, weed, food, and fashion.
• VICES: Cookies. All kinds. I can’t say no.
• I SPEND MOST OF MY FREE TIME: Watching movies and playing on my PS3. Or Wii. Or X-box…oh and doin’ it.

Get to know Aleon better over at SuicideGirls.com!

by Blogbot

For the best part of a decade Rapture of The Nerds was essentially a two part trilogy, which, like a threesome without a third person, though fun, lacked its defining and completing part. A veritable Crosby and Stills, awaiting a Nash (and with no hope of being joined by a bonus Young), Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross’ jointly-penned post-singularity novellas Jury Service (2002) and Appeals Court (2004) languished, with fans resigning themselves to the fact that they may remain, for all eternity, a duo. But now, thanks in part to a rather random April Fools joke, a third installment of the adventures of an uploaded and rather curmudgeonly consciousness called Huw is about to be unleashed. For many a geek, the completion of the triptych is as miraculous as the father and son being joined by the holy ghost. But since sci-fi fans don’t put much weight in blind faith when it comes to trinities, the good Dr. Doctorow offered up this excerpt to SG by way of empirical proof of the September 4th third coming of Huw. – NP, SG Ed.

Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.

Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun.

The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander…and when that happens, it casually spams Earth’s networks with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems. A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there’s always someone who’ll take a bite from the forbidden apple.

So until the overminds bore of stirring Earth’s anthill, there’s Tech Jury Service: random humans, selected arbitrarily, charged with assessing dozens of new inventions and ruling on whether to let them loose. Young Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been selected for the latest jury, a task he does his best to perform despite an itchy technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and a couple of truly awful moments on bathroom floors…

“I hope you enjoy the facilities here,” says the gorilla with a wink. “Nothing but the best for our expert witnesses—we have hot and cold running everything.”

It’s a far cry from jury duty accommodation in a crappy backpacker’s hostel in dusty Tripoli. Huw dials her time right up (sinfully extravagant: it’s the same kind of costly acceleration that got her into trouble when 639,219 called her on it) and orders the whirlpool-equipped hot tub with champagne to appear in the bathroom. Then she climbs in to marinate for subjective hours (a handful of seconds in everyone else’s reference frame) and to unkink for the first time in ages. After all, it’s not as if she’s consuming real resources here. And she needs to relax, recenter her emotions the natural way, and do some serious plotting.

Of course, the sim is far too realistic. A virtual champagne bath should somehow manage to keep the champagne drinking-temp cold while still feeling warm to the touch. And it shouldn’t be sticky and hot and flat; it should feel like champagne does when it hits your tongue—icy and bubbly and fizzy. And when Huw’s nonbladder feels uncomfortably full and relaxed in the hot liquid and she lets a surreptitious stream loose, it should be magicked away, not instantly blended in with the vintage Veuve to make an instant tubworth of piss-mimosa.

This is what comes of having too much compute-time at one’s disposal, Huw seethes. In constraint, there is discipline, the need to choose how much reality you’re going to import and model. Sitting on an Io’s worth of computronium has freed the Galactic Authority—and isn’t that an unimaginative corker of a name? — from having to choose. And with her own self simulated as hot and wide as she can be bothered with, she can feel every unpleasant sensation, each individual sticky bubble, each droplet clinging to her body as she hops out of the tub and into the six-jet steam-shower for a top-to-bottom rinse, and then grabs a towel —every fiber slightly stiff and plasticky, as if fresh out of the wrapper and never properly laundered to relax the fibers—and dries off. She discovers that she is hyperaware, hyperalert, feeling every grain of not-dust in the not-air individually as it collides with her not-skin.

Oh, oh, oh, enough, she wants to shout. What is the point of all this rubbish?

This is the thing that Huw has never wanted to admit: Her primary beef against the singularity has never been existential — it’s aesthetic. The power to be a being of pure thought, the unlimited, unconstrained world of imagination, and we build a world of animated gifs, stupid sight gags, lame van-art avatars, brain-dead “playful” environments, and brain-dead flame wars augmented by animated emoticons that allowed participants to express their hackneyed ad hominems, concern-trollery, and Godwin’s law violations through the media of cartoon animals and oversized animated genitals.

Whether or not sim-Huw is really Huw, whether or not uploading is a kind of death, whether or not posthumanity is immortal or just kidding itself, the single, inviolable fact remains: Human simspace is no more tasteful than the architectural train wreck that the Galactic Authority has erected. The people who live in it have all the aesthetic sense of a senile jackdaw. Huw is prepared to accept — for the sake of argument, mind — that uploading leaves your soul intact, but she is never going give one nanometer on the question of whether uploading leaves your taste intact. If the Turing test measured an AI’s capacity to conduct itself with a sense of real style, all of simspace would be revealed for a machine-sham. Give humanity a truly unlimited field, and it would fill it with Happy Meal toys and holographic, sport-star, collectible trading card game art.

There’s a whole gang of dirtside refuseniks who make this their primary objection to transcendence. They’re severe Bauhaus cosplayers, so immaculately and plainly turned out that they look more like illustrations than humans. Huw’s never felt any affinity for them — too cringeworthy, too like a Southern belle who comes down with the vapors at the sight of a fish knife laid where the dessert fork is meant to go. It always felt unserious to object to a major debate over human evolution with an argument about style.

But Huw appreciates their point, and has spent his and then her entire life complaining instead about the ineffable and undefinable humanness that is lost when someone departs for the cloud. She’s turned her back on her parents, refused to take their calls from beyond the grave, she’s shut herself up in her pottery with only the barest vestige of a social life, remade herself as someone who is both a defender of humanity and a misanthrope. All the while, she’s insisted — mostly to herself, because, as she now sees with glittering clarity, no one else gave a shit — that the source of her concerns all along has been metaphysical.

The reality that stares her in the face now, as she reclines on the impeccably rendered 20-million-count non-Egyptian noncotton nonsheets, is that it’s always been a perfectly normal, absolutely subjective, totally meaningless dispute over color schemes.

Now she’s got existential angst.

<#>

The Burj Khalifa’s in-room TV gets an infinity of channels, evidently cross-wired from the cable feed for Hilbert’s hotel. It uses some evolutionary computing system to generate new programs on the fly, every time you press the channel-up button. This isn’t nearly as banal as Huw imagined it might be when she read about it on the triangular-folded cardboard standup that materialized in her hand as she reached for the remote. That’s because — as the card explained — the Burj has enough computation to model captive versions of Huw at extremely high speed, and to tailor the programming by sharpening its teeth against these instances-in-a-bottle so that every press of the button brings up eye-catching, attention-snaring material: soft-core pornography that involves pottery, mostly.

Huw would like nothing better than to relax with the goggle-box and let her mind be lovingly swaddled in intellectual flannel, but her mind isn’t having any of it. The more broadly parallel she runs, the more meta-cognition she finds herself indulging in, so that even as she lies abed, propped up by a hill of pillows the size of a Celtic burial mound, her thoughts are doing something like this:

• Oh, that’s interesting, never thought of doing that sort of thing with glaze.• Too interesting, if you ask me, it’s not natural, that kind of interesting, they’ve got to be simulating gigaHuws to come up with that sort of realtime optimization.• There’ll be hordes of Huw-instances being subjected to much-less-interesting versions of this program and winking out of existence as soon as they get bored.• Hell, I could be one of those instances, my life dangling on a frayed thread of attention.• Every time I press the channel-up button, I execute thousands — millions? billions? — of copies of myself.• Why don’t I care more about them? It’s insane and profligate cruelty but here’s me blithely pressing channel-up.• Whoa, that’s interesting — she looks awfully like Bonnie, but with a bum that’s a little bit more like that girl I fancied in college.• I could die at any instant, just by losing attention and pressing channel up.• That’s wild, never noticed how those muscles — quadrati lumborum? — spring out when someone’s at the wheel, that bloke’s got QLs for days.• If I were really ethically opposed to this sort of thing, I’d be vomming in my mouth with rage at the thought of all those virtual people springing into existence and being snuffed out.• But I’m not, am I? Hypocrite, liar, poseur, mincing aesthete, that’s me, yeah? • So long as it’s interesting and stylish, I’ll forgive anything.• I’ve got as much existential introspection as a Mario sprite.

Enough, already, she tells herself, and cools herself down to a single thread, then slows that down, hunting for the sweet spot at the junction of stupidity and calm. Then finding it, she settles down and watches TV for a hundred subjective years, slaughtering invisible hordes of herself without a moment’s thought.

Satori.

The Rapture of The Nerds excerpt reprinted with the kind permission of Tor Books.

Related Posts:
Cory Doctorow: On Little And Big Brother

by Michael D. Meloan (a.k.a. TheMountebank)

Mitt Romney wants to build a new fleet of battleships to ensure that the US remains world’s undisputed superpower. And he believes that trickle-down economics is the cure for our economic woes. Both represent a doubling-down on failed strategies from the past. The projection of military might into Afghanistan and Iraq has sacrificed our soldiers, depleted our national treasure, and done little to ensure security. US defense spending, at $700 billion, is bigger than the next 17 countries combined. And unregulated American capitalism brought the world economy nearly to its knees, and has destroyed the middle class. Yet conservatives maintain that more of the same is the answer.

Both parties have been compromised and infiltrated by corporate interests via relentless pressure from lobbyists. This has led to a sense of resignation in some camps. Many voters on the left feel betrayed because they believe Barack Obama has not been progressive enough.

I share some of those frustrations. But I also believe that Obama has a deep understanding of the political chess match. It’s a long game, he’s looking many moves ahead. He has a pragmatic sense of governing a country that is profoundly fractious.

The upcoming election marks a pivotal moment in American history. The divide between rich and poor has reached critical levels. This issue is not just about fairness. It cuts to the heart of one of America’s traditional strengths — social mobility. Now, more than in other developed nations, the economic circumstances of our parents will tend to dictate our future prospects.

The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project found that 42% of men in the US from the bottom fifth of incomes, stay there as adults. This American disadvantage is much higher than in Denmark and Sweden (25%), and traditionally class-conscious Britain at 30%.

Conversely, about 62% of Americans from the top fifth bracket, will remain within the top two-fifths.

The inadequate American safety net creates more vulnerability for children than in other wealthy countries. Also, the upward spiral of educational costs is a limiting factor for mobility. In addition, the decline of unions in the US has been driving wages down in comparison with Europe.

Even Republican Representative Paul Ryan has written that “mobility from the very bottom up is where the United States lags behind.”

But the conservative answer for all of these negative trends is to stay the course and let the free market work its magic, instead of looking at the attributes creating greater mobility in other countries — strong unions, a robust safety net, access to higher education, and a regulated business environment.

The conservative spin machine has adroitly injected patriotic, religious, and individualistic sound bites into the pop culture allowing conservative politicians to leverage these American values toward a brand of hyper-capitalism that is unparalleled in the world. It serves corporations and shareholders before our citizens. The destruction of the middle class has been the result. If Mitt Romney is elected, we will make another major leap in this direction, and it will have profound human costs.

We need a Democrat in the Whitehouse. We need Barack Obama. In the next few months, work phone banks, walk precincts, talk with friends.

Only 57% of voting age Americans participated in the last presidential election. Many new voters can be mobilized. It will take a grassroots effort. This is the time. Your involvement is key. The ballot box is powerful, and it belongs to us!

Michael D. Meloan’s fiction has appeared in WIRED, BUZZ, Larry Flynt’s Chic, LA Weekly, SuicideGirls, on Joe Frank’s NPR program, and in a number of anthologies. He is coauthor of the novel The Shroud, and also a Huffington Post blogger. In addition, he was an interview subject in the documentary Bukowski: Born into This. Follow him on Twitter @michaelmeloan.

[..]

by Brad Warner

Yesterday someone sent me a link to a story in the New York Times about a guy who had died when he and his wife were expelled from a Buddhist retreat.

There is so much I could comment on this story that it’s hard to know where to begin. So I’ll begin with the title. If you look at the URL for the story it’s clear that the New York Times originally titled it “Mysterious Yoga Retreat Ends in Grisly Death” and then later changed it to “Mysterious Buddhist Retreat Ends in Grisly Death.” Which goes to show you just how much the mainstream media, and by extension the mainstream public, knows about Eastern religions. You fine folks who read my posts and follow the Buddhist magazines and websites and what-not know the difference. But like nerds of all kinds, we Eastern religion nerds often forget that there’s a whole wide world of people out there for whom Yoga and Buddhism and Hare Krishna and Zorastrianism and Sufiism and all the rest appear to be just one big very weird thing. It’s really important to keep in mind that those of us who do know the differences are a tiny, itty-bitty, teeny-weenie minority. To the rest of the world our pointing out that yoga and Buddhism are two different things seems about as relevant as the Godzilla geeks I used to know arguing about whether Godzilla is actually green or not (he’s not, by the way, except that recently sometimes he is).

This is important because it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone who participated in this retreat actually knew anything about Buddhism at all beyond what they heard from its leader, one Michael Roach Geshe. I would think that even a very cursory glance at some of the beginner’s level books about Buddhism would have alerted them to the fact that something rather odd was going on here.

For starters, the retreat these folks got expelled from was supposed to last three years, three months, and three days. That’s just too gosh darned long! The early Buddhists did three month retreats during the Indian rainy season when there wasn’t much else anyone could do. This tradition is carried on in many places in the form of what Japanese Buddhists call an ango, a retreat lasting around 90 days that typically occurs in the Summer (though spring, winter and fall angos are common these days too). Three months is pretty intense and there’s a good reason Buddha never recommended doing retreats any longer than that.

While reading the story I found myself wondering just how Mr. Roach Geshe justified such an excessively long retreat. A clue can be found on their website which says, “The word ‘enlightenment’ sounds vague and mystical, but the Buddha taught that it is quite achievable by deliberately following a series of steps. The three-year retreatants have been studying and practicing the steps very seriously for the last six or more years, and by going into the laboratory of solitary retreat they hope (to) realize the final goal taught by Lord Buddha.”

So they figured that if they went at it really hard for three years they’d get enlightened. Just like Lord Buddha. Lord Buddha? I’ve run across that designation for Gautama Buddha before and it always seems like a signal that something strange is afoot. I suppose whoever made it up thought that the designation Buddha (the Awakened One) wasn’t quite grand enough and chose to borrow the word “Lord” from Christianity in order to make Gautama seem more supernatural. Whenever I come across someone who talks about “Lord Buddha” I assume they want to make the point that Gautama Buddha is, to them, a kind of god.

Again, this flies in the face of what any introductory text will tell you about Buddha. It’s another clue that the folks who participated in this retreat were the same kinds of people who don’t know any more than the New York Times does about the differences between Buddhism and yoga and whatever else falls under the umbrella heading of Eastern spirituality.

I spend a lot of time on the internets shaking sock monkeys around and poking fun at people who advance all sorts of incredibly obvious hookum as “Buddhism.” This story drives home the point that this stuff isn’t always funny. In fact it can be very serious and very, very sad.

Apparently Mr. Roach Geshe was one of a growing number of people trying to link Buddhism with so-called “prosperity theology.” This is something that first appeared in American Protestant Christianity in the 1950s and claims that the real teaching of Christ was that if you followed him you could get rich. Which flies in the face of pretty much everything Jesus is reported to have said in the Bible. But the folks who follow prosperity Christianity seem to know as little about what’s in the Bible as the people who follow prosperity Buddhism know about what Buddha taught.

I can see the appeal of prosperity theology. Look, I’m going to move to Los Angeles in a week. You best believe that if I thought I could pray my way to a higher income I’d be praying all the time! But I’m extremely skeptical of words like “prosperity” and “abundance” as they are used by middle class Westerners of the early 21st century. Compared to most of the rest of the world, we already start out with way more than we really need. Yet we still want more because our economically driven society continuously emphasizes the need to consume. If we can find some religious justification for greed we’ll grab it. It’s very attractive. I don’t think any of us are completely immune its charm. I certainly am not.

But, again, even a quick look through the most basic books about Buddhism — or, for that matter, a scan through any of the gospels — will tell you that Buddhism is definitely not compatible with prosperity theology — and neither is Christianity. Yet if these things are advanced by people who appear to be authorities, who wear the right robes and speak in the correct way, a lot of folks who really ought to know better will swallow them whole.

I’m not sure if it’s easier to dupe people into thinking any old spiritual sounding nonsense you make up is Buddhism than it is to dupe people about our more familiar religions. If people want to believe this kind of stuff they’re going to. But I feel like I’m going to have to keep pointing out that not everything that calls itself “Buddhism” has anything at all to do with Buddhism for quite a while.

Mr. Roach Geshe has posted a very long open letter on his website describing his take on what happened. Amidst a lot of ass-covering language there emerges a description of a retreat that was really far too intense for any of its members. Silent retreats with small groups of people often cause those among the group who may already have psychological difficulties to experience those difficulties even more intensely than they might experience them in a more “normal” setting. Of course people go off in the midst of straight society all the time. But there’s nothing like an intense spiritual retreat to really bring these things to the surface. The more intense the practice, the more likely it’s going to cause someone’s psyche to crash and burn.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, when you’re getting into meditation practice you’re dealing with some serious mojo, this is not to be taken lightly. And if you think you need a more intense or extreme practice to get you into the deeper stuff faster…you most assuredly do not. It’s absolutely crucial to take this stuff slowly. If you try to rush it, bad things will happen. We’re all full of lots of bad stuff. If you think you can push right through into the great enlightenment of Lord Buddha without first dealing with your own accumulated negative shit, you’re dead wrong.

Brad Warner is the author of Sex, Sin and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between as well as Hardcore Zen, Sit Down and Shut Up! and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff that you can click here to see. You can also buy T-shirts and hoodies based on his books, and the new CD by his band Zero Defex now!
[..]

by Daniel Robert Epstein

“I did keep the Oompa-Loompa psychiatrist chair which is very appropriate and very comfortable actually.”
– Tim Burton

Tim Burton’’s film, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is his best work since 1994’’s Ed Wood. I would say that casting Johnny Depp as the obsessive compulsive child hating Willy Wonka is an inspired choice, but since this is their fourth collaboration that point appears to be moot. Depp has totally and completely entered himself into Roald Dahl’s universe and given himself over to this wild and wooly character with chocolate running in his veins.

Read our exclusive interview with Tim Burton on SuicideGirls.com.