#secret knowledge

[sonnyboyoedipusacre]

[sensationpop]

From The Matrix to Marvel: How Gnosticism Became the New Pop Culture Default

Grab your coffee (or your red pill) because we’re going down a rabbit hole I can’t stop thinking about. Have you ever watched a movie and felt like there’s a secret to the universe just waiting to be unlocked? That the world you’re seeing isn’t the real world? If you’ve nodded along to The Matrix, questioned the reality in WandaVision, or felt a strange vibe from the cosmic “gods” in Marvel’s…

From The Matrix to Marvel: How Gnosticism Became the New Pop Culture Default

[cadmar]

Pattern of Existence

Everything is a pattern. A pattern creates what we observe and all our interactions. Your identity, your personal history from being born until you die, is a series of patterns, some nested in others, others interact with others, and others all by themselves. Basically, you are a result and creation of and from patterns. You are a pattern! If you want to look back the past 30 years or longer, or just one day, yesterday, or even one minute ago, you will notice that there is one particular overriding pattern that dominates all the other patterns!

Patterns are created by boundaries. The force and the movement of the universe within is limited to go only so far in distance: this much to the left, this much to the right, this much straight, this much behind, this much upwards, and this much downwards. This is the pattern for that particular amount of energy. This is how the universe expresses itself to us!

These limitations are similar to a horse with blinders on and is forced to see and to go only in one direction: the direction that the rider wants to take! The rider's direction and not the horse's direction!

Who is your rider? As you are in a physical body with physical limitations, your emotion is your rider! Your blinders are made by your emotions! The emotions create your boundary of behavior, thoughts, ideas, actions, and interactions! They create your range of your ideas, goals, and ideals! Breaking these blinders widens your range of reality!

Once your blinders are broken, a new rider will become obvious!

[yourlocalxiaosimp]

Wanna know some secret knowledge?

I have a sneaking suspicion that it has something to do with rickrolls but sure

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Open Circuits

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet that picks up where the old, good internet left off. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

Every trip to Defcon – the massive annual hacker-con in Las Vegas – is a delight. Partly it's the familiar – seeing old friends, getting updates on hacks of years gone by. But mostly, it's the surprises, the things you never anticipated. Defcon never fails to surprise.

I got back from Vegas yesterday and I've just unpacking my suitcase, and with it, the tangible evidence of Defcon's cave of wonders. My gear bag has a new essential: Hak5's malicious cable detector, a little USB gizmo that lights up if it detects surreptitious malicious activity, even as it interdicts those nasty payloads:

https://shop.hak5.org/collections/omg-row2/products/malicious-cable-detector-by-o-mg

(In case you're wondering if it's really possible to craft a malicious USB cable that injects badware into your computer and is visually indistinguishable from a regular cable, the answer is a resounding yes, and of course, Hak5 sells those cables, with a variety of USB tips:)

https://shop.hak5.org/collections/omg-row2/products/omg-cable

But merch is only a sideshow. The real action is in the conference rooms, where hackers update you on the pursuit of their obsessions. These are such beautiful weirdos who pursue knowledge to ridiculous extremes, untangling gnarly hairballs just to follow a thread to its origin point.

For the second year in a row, I caught a presentation from Joseph Gabay about his work on warshopping: slicing up shopping cart wheels and haunting shopping mall parking lots during resurfacing to figure out how the anti-theft mechanism that stops your cart from leaving the parking lot works:

https://www.begaydocrime.com/

And of course, I got to give one of those presentations, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," to a packed house. What a thrill! It was livestreamed, and if you missed it, you'll be able to catch it on Defcon's Youtube page as soon as they upload it (they've got a lot of uploading to do!):

https://www.youtube.com/@DEFCONConference/videos

After my talk, I went back to the No Starch Press booth for a book signing – which was amazing, so many beautiful hackers, plus I got to share a signing table with Micah Lee. As I was leaving, Bill Pollock slipped me a giant hardcover art-book, and said, "You're gonna love this."

I did. The book is Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components, by Windell Oskay and Eric Schlaepfer, and it is a drop-dead gorgeous collection of photos of electronic components, painstakingly cross-sectioned and polished:

A photographic exploration of the tiny design wonders hidden inside everyday electronics.

The photos illustrate layperson-friendly explanations of what each component does, how it is constructed, and why. Perhaps you've pondered a circuit board and wondered about the colorful, candy-shaped components soldered to it. It's natural to assume that these are indivisible, abstract functional units, a thing that is best understood as a reliable and deterministic brick that can be used to construct a specific kind of wall.

But peering inside these sealed packages reveals another world, a miniature land where things get simpler – and more complex. Inside these blobs of resin are snips of wire, plugs of wax, simple screws, fine sheets of metal in stacks, wafers of plain ceramic, springs and screws.

Truly, quantity has a quality all its own. Miniaturize these assemblies and produce them at unimaginable scale and the simple, legible components turn into mystical black boxes that only the most dedicated study can reveal. Like every magician's trick, the unfathomable effect is built up through the precise repetition of something very simple.

A prolonged study of Open Circuits reveals something important about the hacker aesthetic, a collection of graphic design, fashion and industrial design conventions that begins with this realization: that the crisp lines of digital logic can be decomposed into blobby, probabilistic lumps of metal, plastic, and even wax.

It reminds me of George Dyson's brilliant memoir/history of computing, Turing's Cathedral, where he describes how he and the other children of the scientists building the first digital computers at the Princeton Institute spent their summers in the basement, hand-winding cores for the early colossi their parents were building on the floors above them:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/03/12/george-dysons-history-of-the-computer-turings-cathedral/

You can see my hacker aesthetic photos in my Defcon 31 photo set:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_search=1&tags=defcon31&user_id=37996580417%40N01&view_all=1

In this video, Eric Schlaepfer illustrates the painstaking work that went into decomposing these tiny, precise components into their messy, analog subcomponents. It's pure hacker aesthetic, and it's mesmerizing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byKyJ0b04Lo

But Open Circuits isn't just an aesthetic journey, it's a technical one. After all, Oskay is co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Labs, one of the defining places where hardware hackers gather to tear down, pick apart, mod, improve and destroy electronics. The accompanying text is a masterclass in the simple machines that combine together to make complex assemblies:

https://www.evilmadscientist.com/

Defcon is a reminder that the world only seems hermetically sealed and legible to authorized parties with clearance to crack open the box. From shopping cart wheels to thermal fuses, that illegibility is only a few millimeters thick. Sand away the glossy outer layer and you will find yourself in a weird land of wax-blobs, rough approximations, expedient choices and endless opportunities for delight and terror, mischief and care.

Back my anti-enshittification Kickstarter here!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/14/hidden-worlds/#making-the-invisible-visible-and-beautiful

[archivist-dragonfly]

Book 516

Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters - New and Expanded Edition

David Hockney

Viking Studio 2006

With the exception of his photo collages (which I think are incredible), I have never been much of a David Hockney (b. 1937) fan. His paintings just never really did much for me. That all changed with this book. Taking two years off from painting, Hockney devoted himself to trying to answer some artistic technical questions—to wit: how were the Renaissance masters able to reproduce what they saw with such detailed accuracy? His investigation would eventually lead to what is now known as the Hockney-Falco Thesis. Briefly, the Thesis states that in addition to advancements in materials and techniques, the Old Masters also utilized new scientific innovations such as cameras obscura, cameras lucida, and curved mirrors to achieve the incredible level of detail. This, of course, led to a rather heated debate among not just art historians but also scientists that is still ongoing. The upshot is that after reading this book, I have an entirely new respect for Hockney and his work. It isn’t that I necessarily like his paintings any more than I did, but I do see them in an entirely new light.

[freyatarotreadings8]

No Tower Moment for Chris Evans?👀

So many folks are looking for this dramatic moment. I was asked so many times about Chris’ tower moment. I didn’t post any readings about it, however, I pulled cards some time ago. I didn’t notice any crucial evilish collapse. The only things that may be changed in his life are celebrity status, way of thinking, philosophy or spiritual path. Nothing bad for real!

Recently I was enlightened by my colleague - a hypnotherapist. She is so into occult. Her line made me realize so many things.

I guess we all know that Bible says “Don’t judge, so you won’t be judged”. But, there is an additional truth & law of the Universe that relates to this topic that almost no one is familiar about. When we judge someone, we take all negativity away from that person and attract it to our lives, we even can become as him personality wise.

How many bad guys did get a fair punishment for its actions? Hmm 🤔 Not that much 😬

Moreover, remember that all personality traits of others that piss you off are part of your shadow, secret self (according to Carl Jung).

You may believe it or not (it’s your choice), but there is a huge possibility that CE’s tower moment is taken away thanks to all people, who judged him all over the internet and wished him unwell. The Tower Moment may happen only for ex fans, haters of Chris or anyone else who prays for his fall, criticize him as well as his actions. When you criticize someone, you can’t change a person at all, because he becomes defensive and you become an enemy. The whole situation is so unfair, I know. But, only people with victim mindset complain about unfairness (another thing to think about and get rid of it). Personally, I don't believe in karma. I know that if you believe in it and are afraid of consequences of your negative actions, sooner or later you will get a confirmation of your perceptions and fears. Additionally, I absolutely believe that our enemies deserves a punishment. Revenge is cruel, but it's natural. That's how we can truly forgive. You can take a revenge during deep meditations or during hypno sessions (I can claim it as a hypnotherapist. It happens all the time. It feels as a real event. Clients get a relief and let it go.)

To sum up, the best advice for you is to forget & leave him for good, start prioritizing your own life, change personal perceptions and stop creating any other idol.