oh wow I'd totally forgotten about those! Man those were as much fun as Lego!!!

oh god those wrestling dudes that came in a belt!!!

ARMY ANTS!!!! omg I loved those!

Aswang

Just remember, don't feed the trolls or you're responsible for empowering them to do what they do.

There's an IGNORE list on the forum for a reason. The next round of week-long time-outs will NOT be one-sided.

You mean this thread: [ www.rave.ca ]

Funny thing about that. After the whole fiasco, I started following people on Facebook that he was blocking/banning from posting in his "give me pity" group that he started. He was under 18 at the time, so no public judgement was made, but on all counts I was right.

He was found guilty of negligence for driving without a permit, the other girl in the car testified that they'd been smoking weed and drinking and were pretty buzzed/drunk, and evidence showed that he was going over 160km/h in a 30 zone. He also had a whole heap of other charges relating to intimidation and threats/harassment because he was threatening the dead girl's friends AND FAMILY.

That's what she said?

HELLO DOWNTOWN MONTREAL I AM DOG!

Is it really a surprise coming from Bliss though? Remember when he was saying shit like how maybe Sammy didn't really drown but it was his friends that killed him? [ www.rave.ca ]

Zero fucking respect for people.

Well, Bliss "only" has two accounts, his Bliss account and his Hamish account, that he claims his friend Wendal used for a while, but now he's back in control of it.

He claims that he's not the two proxies, and really, we're never really going to know, they were routing through TOR, so hey, for all we know, maybe that's the one thing he's telling the truth on.

As for the damage, well, it's fairly obvious; the board's been nothing but a hate-fest for the past few months, but things really boiled over (IMO) in THIS thread, where Bliss first accuses an dead friend of ours as being the proxy, and then when he "finds out" that the guy is dead, insinuates that maybe he faked his death to troll us.

As for the ban, it's for a week. If he steps out of line and starts up with the threats and challenges and just generally polluting the board with his bullshit, he gets two weeks, then four, then eight, etc.. until we just forget about him for a year or two like we did with Corrupter when he was throwing the same kind of a temper tantrum.

As for the proxy accounts, until they start logging in and posting in the Silly Games from a non-TOR/proxy IP, they are banned indefinitely, as well as any new accounts that get made with proxies that are "new users" yet mysteriously know years of history and ravers and just magically happen to all side with Bliss on any issue that Bliss happens to have.

Yeah, at the very least something should be done to make the forum compatible with Tapatalk..

Yeah, the thing now is that we need to start posting about things other than "Hey remember when the board was shitty last week"

How To See The Future
Warren Ellis
September 7th, 2012

This is the raw text of the keynote I gave at Improving Reality on Thursday. Thanks again to Honor and her crew for being so wonderful, and for so kindly inviting me.

The concept of calling an event Improving Reality is one of those great science fiction ideas. Twenty five years ago, you’d have gone right along with the story that, in 2012, people will come to a tech-centric town to talk about how to improve reality. Being able to locally adjust the brightness of the sky. Why wouldn’t you? That’s the stuff of the consensus future, right there. The stories we agree upon. Like how in old science fiction stories Venus was always a “green hell” of alien jungle, and Mars was always an exotic red desert crisscrossed by canals.

In reality, of course, Venus is a high-pressure shithole that we’re technologically a thousand years away from being able to walk on, and there’s bugger all on Mars. Welcome to JG Ballard’s future, fast becoming a consensus of its own, wherein the future is intrinsically banal. It is, essentially, the sensible position to take right now.

A writer called Ventakesh Rao recently used the term “manufactured normalcy” to describe this. The idea is that things are designed to activate a psychological predisposition to believe that we’re in a static and dull continuous present. Atemporality, considered to be the condition of the early 21st century. Of course Venus isn’t a green hell – that would be too interesting, right? Of course things like Google Glass and Google Gloves look like props from ill-received science fiction film and tv from the 90s and 2000’s. Of course getting on a plane to jump halfway across the planet isn’t a wildly different experience from getting on a train from London to Scotland in the 1920s – aside from the radiation and groping.

We hold up iPhones and, if we’re relatively conscious of history, we point out that this is an amazing device that contains a live map of the world and the biggest libraries imaginable and that it’s an absolute paradigm shift in personal communication and empowerment. And then some knob says that it looks like something from Star Trek Next Generation, and then someone else says that it doesn’t even look as cool as Captain Kirk’s communicator in the original and then someone else says no but you can buy a case for it to make it look like one and you’re off to the manufactured normalcy races, where nobody wins because everyone goes to fucking sleep.

And reality does not get improved, does it?

But I’ll suggest to you something. The theories of atemporality and manufactured normalcy and zero history can be short-circuited by just one thing.

Looking around.

Ballardian banality comes from not getting the future that we were promised, or getting it too late to make the promised difference.

This is because we look at the present day through a rear-view mirror. This is something Marshall McLuhan said back in the Sixties, when the world was in the grip of authentic-seeming future narratives. He said, “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

He went on to say this, in 1969, the year of the crewed Moon landing: “Because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world. The present is always invisible because it’s environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone is alive in an earlier day.”

Three years earlier, Philip K Dick wrote a book called Now Wait For Last Year.

Let me try this on you:

The Olympus Mons mountain on Mars is so tall and yet so gently sloped that, were you suited and supplied correctly, ascending it would allow you to walk most of the way to space. Mars has a big, puffy atmosphere, taller than ours, but there’s barely anything to it at that level. 30 Pascals of pressure, which is what we get in an industrial vacuum furnace here on Earth. You may as well be in space. Imagine that. Imagine a world where you could quite literally walk to space.

That’s actually got a bit more going for it, as an idea, than exotic red deserts and canals. Imagine living in a Martian culture for a moment, where this thing is a presence in the existence of an entire sentient species. A mountain that you cannot see the top of, because it’s a small world and the summit wraps behind the horizon. Imagine settlements creeping up the side of Olympus Mons. Imagine battles fought over sections of slope. Generations upon generations of explorers dying further and further up its height, technologies iterated and expended upon being able to walk to within leaping distance of orbital space. Manufactured normalcy would suggest that, if we were the Martians, we would find this completely dull within ten years and bitch about not being able to simply fart our way into space.

Now imagine a world where space travel to other worlds is an antique curiosity. Imagine reading the words “vintage space.” Can you even consider being part of a culture that could go to space and then stopped?

If the future is dead, then today we must summon it and learn how to see it properly.

You can’t see the present properly through the rear view mirror. It’s in front of you. It’s right here.

There are six people living in space right now. There are people printing prototypes of human organs, and people printing nanowire tissue that will bond with human flesh and the human electrical system.

We’ve photographed the shadow of a single atom. We’ve got robot legs controlled by brainwaves. Explorers have just stood in the deepest unsubmerged place in the world, a cave more than two kilometres under Abkhazia. NASA are getting ready to launch three satellites the size of coffee mugs, that will be controllable by mobile phone apps.

Here’s another angle on vintage space: Voyager 1 is more than 11 billion miles away, and it’s run off 64K of computing power and an eight-track tape deck.

In the last ten years, we’ve discovered two previously unknown species of human. We can film eruptions on the surface of the sun, landings on Mars and even landings on Titan. Is all of this very boring to you? Because all this is happening right now, in this moment. Check the time on your phone, because this is the present time and these things are happening. The most basic mobile phone is in fact a communications devices that shames all of science fiction, all the wrist radios and handheld communicators. Captain Kirk had to tune his fucking communicator and it couldn’t text or take a photo that he could stick a nice Polaroid filter on. Science fiction didn’t see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make amazing things happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards.

That, by the way, is what Steve Jobs meant when he said that iPads were magical. The central metaphor is magic. And perhaps magic seems an odd thing to bring up here, but magic and fiction are deeply entangled, and you are all now present at a séance for the future. We are summoning it into the present. It’s here right now. It’s in the room with us. We live in the future. We live in the Science Fiction Condition, where we can see under atoms and across the world and across the methane lakes of Titan.

Use the rear view mirror for its true purpose. If I were sitting next to you twenty-five years ago, and you heard a phone ring, and I took out a bar of glass and said, sorry, my phone just told me it’s got new video of a solar flare, you’d have me sectioned in a flash. Use the rear view mirror to imagine telling someone just twenty five years ago about GPS. This is the last generation in the Western world that will ever be lost. LifeStraws. Synthetic biology. Genetic sequencing. SARS was genetically sequenced within 48 hours of its identification. I’m not even touching the web, wifi, mobile broadband, cloud computing, electronic cigarettes…

Understand that our present time is the furthest thing from banality. Reality as we know it is exploding with novelty every day. Not all of it’s good. It’s a strange and not entirely comfortable time to be alive. But I want you to feel the future as present in the room. I want you to understand, before you start the day here, that the invisible thing in the room is the felt presence of living in future time, not in the years behind us.

To be a futurist, in pursuit of improving reality, is not to have your face continually turned upstream, waiting for the future to come. To improve reality is to clearly see where you are, and then wonder how to make that better.

Act like you live in the Science Fiction Condition. Act like you can do magic and hold séances for the future and build a brightness control for the sky.

Act like you live in a place where you could walk into space if you wanted. Think big. And then make it better.

###

Awesome found footage horror anthology! 5 stories + a wrap-around. Only one of them wasn't really that good, but 3 and 5 were fucking great!

That was just one example. Most every forum I've posted on, all the IRC chatrooms I've been in since the mid 90s; telling people you're Canadian, they love you. Tell them you're from Quebec and immediately they distrust you or start talking shit about you.

It's not just the rest of Canada, it's the rest of the world. Posting on Dogs on Acid that you're from Quebec is regarded as you being even WORSE scum than if you were an American, because we're whiny crybabies who are never happy and always want special treatment.

Which, for the most part, isn't that far from the truth.

Yeah I'm getting flooded with messages from bliss that I have to "Defend him since he can't".. Because obviously the world revolves around him. Little does he seem to realize that, when he's not here, we don't talk about him, because he is irrelevant.

So let's take that to heart and stop talking about him and focus on something else! Unless, you know, the universe DOES revolve around him and we just can't live our petty insignificant lives without his obvious greatness.

I can only delete individual posts, but not the first post of a thread, and therefore not the thread. What's been said has been said, are YOU guys mature enough to leave that in the past is the question that remains now.

I got rid of the REASON they were getting pissed off: your constant taunting and shit starting. If someone's got a brain tumor, you don't just give them tylenol for the pain; you treat the tumor. Cut out the source and the symptoms will follow.

Thanks for reminding me about this account. Any more of start popping up and your banned time is going up by an additional week per account that shows up with your IP address. You get a free pass on this one since you've "always had it", but any more attempts at ban-evasion will only result in longer banning.

You've earned your banning on your own merits. The fake accounts are being handled separately. If they want to prove they're not fake accounts, they've just got to log in and start posting with their REAL IP and not TOR or another proxy, as I *will* be checking what the hosts resolve as and not just where they resolve to.

Enjoy your time out, and we'll see you next week and hope you've learned to behave yourself by then. Feel free to post all you want in the Silly Games section.

Yeah, that's no problem, it's specifically shit like the fake accounts that were using it obviously/specifically to hide so that no one can figure out who they really are. We know who you are, so there's no reason to check your IP. It's mostly for new users or "old" accounts that mysteriously start posting and slamming everyone that Bliss doesn't like but that are SO TOTALLY not him (lolyeahright)

Well, it's been taken care of, so we can get back to other things. Until he starts posting from his real IP in the Silly Games section, he's not getting unbanned. No more troll accounts on MY watch!

You can always +1 the first post :P

After having spoken to a few people, we're doing a little bit of cleaning.

Any account that posts from a proxy/TOR/whatever is getting banned/exiled to the Silly Games section until they start posting from a real, legitimate IP address. No more fake accounts and fucking around.

For all his hateful spamming, Bliss is getting a week's time-out, and has been told that his constant "You all suck and I hate you" trolling will no longer be tolerated.

THIS GOES FOR EVERYONE. Let's see if we can live together as a community for a change. Anyone, ANYONE, starts up another one of those "X vs Y" threads, or contributes to the general atmosphere of BULLSHIT that's been going on here, will get the same treatment: One week exile to Silly games, followed by two, followed by four, etc., growing exponentially until you either get the message or have earned yourself a lifetime ban.

No more threats, no more challenges, no more trolling, or you get put in the corner like a child.

... of every time bliss or one of his blatantly fake accounts posts.

Actually, he's a friend of Noah's. You know, the guy who runs this site? They grew up together.

No, just a heavy user

I know Noah usually posts these, but DAMN!

The "facts" are, Bliss is a troll, hardcore, and has been for a very long time. Bliss has been doing this shit since early/mid 2000. It started off on MtlDnB where he would make fake accounts pretending he was the Planet Breaks crew and posting racist shit and saying that they were gay, badmouthing promoters and other DJs, etc, trying to get the real planet breaks crew in shit with the people he was slandering.

[ www.rave.ca ] <-- links you to a post I made a couple of years ago, with links to multiple instances of Bliss doing on MtlDnB what he's doing now; starting shit, making fake accounts, trying to get people in trouble, being racist and homophobic, etc etc.

Does Alex go a bit off the rails sometimes when he's pissed off? Totally. But this is, as usual, clearly a case of Bliss going out of his way to provoke that reaction.

RE: Thread title

Not fucking soon enough.

Atlantis is/was near Spain.

HOMOPHOBE!

The PQ in a nutshell:

IA! IA!

Fag.

<3

Figures you'll be here all week, you fucking welfare-case, get a job fatty!

Because



That I made, is currently sitting in my kitchen

still needs some finishing; acrylic tube, some cosmetic bits, sound kit, light kit, amp, speaker.. it's gonna be fucking epic when it's done