Materials (IX)

“Spelunk 04! Base Camp” (Thread From Cafe Chesscourt, Page 1 of 1)

[This thread has been deleted from CC, but I emailed myself this copy of it on the second day of Spelunk 04! -GlassWave]

torgo	Posted: Jun 24, 2004 7:14 PM
Administrator Joined: Dec 11, 1999 Location: Satellite of Love Posts: 511	Spelunk 04!'s starting this Saturday. Congratulations to everyone who's going to be able to make it out there (so far metamarsh, jenni_fur, Errant KnightsMove, and GlassWave have RSVP'd and Sexologian says she'll "probably be there but can't guarantee yet"). This thread is meant as a place for our Spelunkers to communicate with the Cafe, if they so choose. _________________ You are the driver. What would you do if this happened to you?

Sexologian	Posted: Jun 25, 2004 9:43 AM
Tilemaker Joined: Apr 3, 2000 Location: Posts: 1711	I am definitely coming!! Sorry for the last minute confusion. My parents were "having second thoughts" :P but we had a talk and they're willing to let me go as long as I call them regularly and all that jazz~ _________________ ~*~*~ "He showed her a most beautiful crystal globe, made in the shape of a castle, and containing seven mansions, in the seventh and innermost of which was the King of Glory, in the greatest splendour, illumining and beautifying them all. The nearer one got to the centre, the stronger was the light; outside the palace limits everything was foul, dark and infested with toads, vipers and other venomous creatures." ~*~*~

Libation Point	Posted: Jun 25, 2004 3:22 PM
Pawn Joined: Nov 5, 2002 Location: L1 Posts: 212	Anyone know if the Spelunkers will be equipped with a scanner? The sooner we digitize these new Salby documents, the sooner everyone can reap the benefits. I have a fair amount of OCR experience, including techniques for wrangling recalcitrant documents, if that's relevant. _________________ Contributor to Wikipedia -- the free encyclopedia anyone can edit Are you a United States citizen? Do you know your rights? Libation Point's Homebrew FAQ

metamarsh	Posted: Jun 26, 2004 6:12 PM
Cherub Joined: Jun 2, 2000 Location: marshland Posts: 965	Hey. I'm posting this from SPELUNK 04. (Wooooo) It's really happening. Err and Jenny are here, I think GlassWave and Sexologian will be here soon. We're not gonna open any of the stuff until anyone gets here but meeting Cafe people is a trip. I gotta get back to the party but I just wanted to let you guys know that shit is coming together. _________________ think for yourself, schmuck

Avery Lodestone	Posted: Jun 26, 2004 6:55 PM
Cherub Joined: June 15, 2002 Location: Zanarkand Posts: 997	AWESOME!! Good luck to the spelunkers :D That is all. _________________ Maintainer of the Anti-Pokémon Haiku Archive (contributions welcome)

jenni_fur	Posted: Jun 27, 2004 2:02 AM
Moderator Joined: May 17, 2000 Location: the warrens Posts: 2641	hey cafe people. a lot of stuff has happened just since we've been here! i want to just give a quick update on things. first of all, the part you're all wondering about -- what was in those packages? well . . . LOTS OF STUFF. we haven't managed to even take an inventory yet. there are drawings, notes, part of LS' personal library, all sorts of stuff. as well as, of course, the original TNC manuscript. of the stuff we've been able to look over so far, the most INTERESTING part is a set of journals. it looks like salby kept pretty detailed journals, although a lot of entries are just about his daily writing progress and that sort of thing. but there are some entries that are very informative about TNC. marsh's house doesn't have a scanner, or we'd sent these to you guys right away, but the gist is that TNC is meant to convey sort of worldview LS had, involving an intense sense of moral duty he felt constantly throughout his life. he has a name for this, "mundum," and has written a fair bit about it. ALSO, it seems there was another man, william chen, who lived with and worked with LS while he was at work on TNC. i'm surprised we'd never heard about this! we haven't looked over all the relevant papers yet, but i'm sure there's a lot of insight to be gleaned there. now i'm going to veer off in another direction entirely. spelunk 04! has turned into something none of us originally intended. after talking back and forth about our own feelings on TNC and LS, we decided that we wanted to really . . . CONFRONT TNC, i guess would be the word. like, we'd all read portions of it, but we'd never quite felt like we'd really taken in the whole thing on its own terms, and now that we know LS had this whole big idea he meant to set out, about "mundum," we thought, why not give him a chance? so spelunk 04! has become a literal spelunk! we are sitting around reading TNC to one another, page by page. it's a very, very weird experience, and i don't know how far we'll get, but so far it's been enjoyable. can't talk anymore -- it's my turn to read! i'll check in with y'all next time i get a chance. _________________ Life Among The Lorrums, a mildly AU story about our favorite not-rabbits (200k and counting!) ff.net profile "I've never had any ambitions except to be kind -- but it seems life has contrived others for me." ~Tom (Nautical Dusk) "Life without mechanical assistance? Just the idea chills me to the marrow!" ~Cleft-Ear (The Mainspring)

GlassWave	Posted: Jun 27, 2004 3:46 AM
Cherub Joined: Mar 25, 2002 Location: Midwest Posts: 1237	It is correct for me now to instruct you on certain points concerning the proper arrangement of material. It is correct for me to generate sentences which, as abstracta, are embodied in ASCII encoded in capacitor charges and then conveyed via electric current to other capacitor charges which encode the selfsame ASCII embodying the selfsame abstracta. It is permitted, if not necessarily correct, for me to sequentially arrange my musculature so as to produce depressions in an approximately flat plastic surface, and without arranging my musculature in this fashion it would not be feasible to set in place the required capacitances and currents, so it is thus correct that I perform this series of muscular arrangements. In approximately 120 seconds it will be correct for me to return to the recitation of the text, but this constraint is not yet active. It is correct for me to spend the remainder of the approximately 110 seconds setting forth a brief notice concerning the disarrangements in your midst and the ways in which they might be conceivably rectified in part. The most pressing infelicity in the arrangement of material concerns the distribution of bone, muscle, keratin, etc. A cursory examination of the material environment will allow you to verify that these material are not distributed homogeneously and are almost entirely found at ground level, usually within a set of designated "dwellings" (houses, etc.) A moment of honest introspection should reveal the incorrectness of this arrangement. There are cases in which is is in fact correct for bone, muscle, keratin, etc. to be located at ground level and within "dwellings," but for it to be thus distributed in every case is much too far. It will be difficult to rectify this injustice on a wider scale, but immediate improvements may be improvised: I suggest for instance moving oneself and one's fellows as far above sea level as possible, and vacating "dwellings." It is now correct for me to actuate the musculature necessary to move my directly accessible material away from the plastic surface. I will later return to the plastic surface and influence the further arrangement of capacitances. _________________ Obnoxious pedant, incorrigible Sally/Charles advocate, the only person in existence who's favorite CC book is Sea of Glass exquisite stasis -- about Sally trapped in the plains forever, and what she did there (AU)

JimWind	Posted: Jun 27, 2004 5:30 AM
Lorrum Joined: Jan 24, 2003 Location: Glasgow Posts: 399	Uh, what exactly am I reading? Is this some kind of prank? Is GlassWave OK? I gotta head to work, but I'll check this thread on my break. Hoping everything's OK over there. :/ _________________ Fav book: Creatures of the Plains Fav char: Charles Fav fic: Aunt Wrath Remembers The Old Times

jenni_fur	Posted: Jun 27, 2004 7:49 AM
Moderator Joined: May 17, 2000 Location: the warrens Posts: 2641	glasswave is OK. things over here are . . . i'm not gonna lie. things over here are weird. both aaron (errant knightsmove) and paul (glassware) are having pretty rough nights. i don't really know what was going on in the post above, but i have talked to paul in person and he seems OK. when you get a bunch of chesscourt nerds together and several of them are not in great moods, things get weird. we are still reading TNC, we are having fun, and i am pretty sure paul and aaron would be worse off if they were not here. i'll try to keep you guys posted as often as i can. i apologize for any alarm we've caused you. _________________ Life Among The Lorrums, a mildly AU story about our favorite not-rabbits (200k and counting!) ff.net profile "I've never had any ambitions except to be kind -- but it seems life has contrived others for me." ~Tom (Nautical Dusk) "Life without mechanical assistance? Just the idea chills me to the marrow!" ~Cleft-Ear (The Mainspring)

Ombudsman	Posted: Jun 27, 2004 9:06 AM
Lorrum Joined: Apr 19, 2003 Location: Houyhnhnm Land Posts: 658	A most fascinating series of posts! Herein we see enthusiasm followed doggedly by the specter of disquietude; the heights of ambition reaching over into the heights of what I hope I am not too bold in calling madness. jenni_fur, you assure us that GlassWave is, as you would have it, "OK," and yet from the horse's mouth itself? -- the rank frothings of rabies, dressed up in the counterfeit finery of modern mechanistic science. I have seen this dire incline on prior occasions: half-madness cloaked in the language of objectivity yields to full-madness caught too late, and the putative man of science finds himself, in a flash, a man of the mad-house. Heed my warning, Cafe Chesscourt! -- herein we see a man near the end of his tether. Rather than reel out that tether, knowing full well that our quantity of rope be finite and the imp of madness nigh infinite in resourcefulness, we ought -- or I say we ought, and value the coin of my word as is your wont -- to recognize caution as superior to convenience, the former but not the latter belonging to the sphere of prudence, and take swift, immediate action to halt the degeneration of GlassWave, our fellow Salby-scholiast. Godspeed. _________________ A Humble Ombudsman's Musings