If my TSCC Security Clearance hasn’t already long-expired, as I expect it has, since 1968 — the last time I used it — as a former member of the Intelligence Community, PFC Clerk-Typist Trainee 006″ with the AIS/ASA, following which I served with the “Arlington Witches Remote Viewers Group” under the title “Div44”, I hereby Self-Revoke any shred or vestige of my own Security Clearance, whatever it may be, and like I said, it’s probably already long gone, especially after my “sheep-dipping” in 1964 to allow me to operate as “Control” for Billy Byars and Billy Byars Jr., both close friends of President Johnson.
Please note that my MOS — Military Occupational Specialty — was only one digit away from James Bond’s “007” designation. My sanction was slightly more limited than was the notorious but completely invented novel-character, the British Secret Agent “James Bond” who was licensed to kill, I was also licensed, but only to seriously offend.
Hence, my standup career after the Army.
Hey, anyone with good taste and values will want to leave the Untied Snakes of Arnica real soon, especially if it turns into a military dictatorship, which is now very possible, so much so that even those in denial can see clearly what lies up ahead, if Congress fails to do its job, to limit the power of the President, so the President can never become a King — that was the whole point of the Constitution & Bill of Rights.
Trump is Power-Mad, and he’s in fact angling himself to be in position to fire people by taking away their security clearances, which means they can’t work at their jobs.
He’s also just on the verge of declaring a military emergency, so he can direct his troops to shoot down innocent civilians, because that’s what Strong Rulers do!
With a Power-Hungry would-be dictator in control of your life at the moment, It’s totally understandable that you’d want to escape, but what if your financial status says “no”? What can you do with little money and little hope?
If you’ve got medical issues, it’s even less likely that you’ll grab up a Bugout Pack and escape into the high country, and if you’re just barely stable and unable to withstand a change in environment, you’re just plain out of luck.
So maybe you CAN’T load up the car and drive off into the sunset, but never fear — you CAN escape into sanity by learning how to dive headfirst into a fabulous BETA-BRAIN WAVE BLOCKER called “Diablo 2”, and STAY THERE forever, or for at least a couple of hours.
Wow, can you imagine getting two SOLID hours of PAIN RELIEF from Trumpian howling, raging and torment, without ONCE thinking about TRUMP???
How you you spell “Relief”??? Not T-R-U-M-P, that’s for sure, and about R-E-S-P-E-C-T he knows nothing. Get outta town! Take yourself off the planet! Get away for the whole week, never mind the weekend!
Played in the ordinary way, DIABLO 2 is just a game, just a very ordinary videogame of the vintage variety, a definite legacy game that belongs properly in the 80s and 90s, but when activated with Objective Gameplay, it comes alive and becomes a transformational experience as well as an escape from the insanity that is Amerika today.
So are you delusional when you play D2? Is it a sickness, a cop-out, a failure?
Not at all.
DIABLO 2 is at best a simple escape mechanism, similar to a movie, play, dance, music or a good book. It’s an escape, pure & simple, and all escapes are about equal in guilt-factor — those who are keeping you in your cage don’t want you to escape, not even into your own inner self. You can turn the experience into a full-on meditation experience, if you know how to do it.
That’s why MEDITATION, simple meditation, was outlawed in the West for hundreds of years — it’s strange, a strange space, and escape is not allowed by tyrants — see my friend Patrick McGoohan’s “The Prisoner” television series for details.
ANY ESCAPE MECHANISM is forbidden by law under a dictator — Trump wants your complete undivided unremitting attention, and, as they do in North Korea, he will have his Minions play his favorite brilliant genius style speeches over loudspeakers on every corner of every city and town in Amerika if he can.
Try to sleep through THAT every night and work while that’s going on during the day — that’s what it’s like to live under a dictatorship, it’s all about the leader, never about the people.
Leaders like Trump, who like to enslave others, tend to dislike anything that offers FREEDOM in any form, however slight and however temporary the relief from the world-pain might be.
Trump will never let you get away with FREEDOM, especially the PERSONAL variety.
Meditation was illegal for hundreds of years in the West, as was massage and other therapeutics — they were not meant for the Great Unwashed, only for the elite class, the LEISURE class. No sense accumulating all that money for nothing — might as well have the luxury and the white bread, butter and jam.
The Hell with the Poor. They’re nothing, leading worthless lives, of no interest, no consequence and no help.
Forget the Poor. Let them eat cake if they can’t find a baker open who has some dark bread — I know how that is, when every bakery in town is sold out of dark bread, you have to settle for white, wheat or a bagel. Sometimes cake is not a good choice, if you happen to be making a sandwich.
Of course, high-ranking Catholics could meditate, but that was different — they were meditating on God, Heaven or the Holy Bible, and the word MEDITATION meant something different in the West than in the East.
Yeah, the Holy Bible — subverted and distorted as it is, the Holy Bible is still one of the most influential books on the planet, apart from my humble offerings, and yet it stands as the singlemost inaccurate history ever written.
It has been thoroughly distorted, ripped to shreds and reassembled to support hypocrisy and greed, and no longer resembles the simple history of a culture that it once was, in support originally of the religious practices that had developed within the Jewish civilization, but that’s not important right now, not with Trump bellowing and lashing out at everyone around him, including you.
So how the Hell DO you get off Planet Earth?
Simple escape plan — LOCK & LOAD a copy of Diablo II on your computer, log into the game and start deciding how you’re going to see your GUI display screen.
There are a LOT of things to know about the OPTIONS panels, but not now, not yet — we’ll deal with those issues in the Labor Day Con Workshop, where we’ll cover everything you need to know in order to change the settings and hot keys on your game board screen.
You don’t have to do any of that in order to get started — let’s break into the game right away, shall we?
First thing you’ll be asked to do is name your ACCOUNT — you can have dozens or hundreds of these, but you’ll have to keep renewing them, so be aware that every single account is going to need UPKEEPING and HOUSEKEEPING and time, energy and attention.
Normally, you wouldn’t be able to get items out to your “Mules”, those characters that you create just to hold your goodies, but you can get a friend to go into a game with you and pass those items from one of your player characters to another, a “Mule” that exists just to hold items for future use or trading.
If you’re intending to sell it, why keep it?
DIABLO ILLNESS #2
First and foremost “Creator of Miserableness” in the game would be the tendency — some would say “elevendency” — to collect far, far more than you really need.
This can and often does include LIFE POTS and MANA.
I dunno — it seems like you’re always running out of MANA, and LIFE, there can never be enough LIFE pots around while you’re actually in heated battle.
That heated battle, where creatures are running circles around you and attacking from every direction, will sort of smooth out and slow down as you become a more experienced player.
Claude is of the opinion that the D2 Gaming Engine somehow detects your consummate mouse-handling skills and adjusts things to go slower, much slower than you’re seeing them now, although why it would SLOW DOWN when you play better, I’m sure I don’t know.
Maybe you’ve experienced the same thing — the better you get at something, the more the action slows down.
So how can you get from the miserable Trump-infested world in which you now find yourself doing what is laughingly called “Living”, all the way to another world.
Well, first of all, the World of D2 is actually one of the next-nearest dimensions — it’s the place where Spenser’s “Faerie Queen” is set, and is the home of “Lord of the Rings” and many other stories from early cultures and civilizations.
It’s easy to get to, and almost every human identifies easily with the land, sky and creatures both hidden and obvious, making Voluntary Character Identification possible, and that’s what you want — voluntary bonding with the on-screen char.
Piece of Pie, Easy as Cake, as a Russian friend likes to say and, yes, I have Russian friends — there are people here from everywhere in the world and some worlds you’ve never even heard of, and my grandparents, all four of them, came from the Jewish ghetto of Ludz, which was once in Russian Poland, but is now officially Polish territory, which made my Great Grand-Uncle, Harry Semels, remark when Poland recovered the land from Russia, “Thank God, no more of those horrible Russian winters!”.
When my family visited recently from Poland, I made a horrible mistake — I had driven them to the Sunrise Mall in Citrus Heights, because they’ve never seen a mall before, but accidentally, I managed to leave my keys in the ignition, and the motor running.
As I locked the door and closed it, I only then realized my mistake. It was six hours with the pry-bar before we could get them out.
It was my Great-Uncle Harry who was so upset with all those Polish jokes that he finally snapped, grabbed up a protest placard mounted on a two-by-four. He’s with the Polish protestors now — even now, as we speak, they’re only twenty minutes out of Seattle!
I have dozens more Polish jokes, and only a small handful of Russian ones, but boy, have I got a bushel-basket full of Trump jokes, now that I’ve finally visited this time zone — it took the threat of a “D Minus” grade to get me to actually dive through the headpiece and go this deep into the SIM.
I never like that first hit of organic stuff. It seems, well, gooey, messy, sloppy, but that IS the nature of the organic world, nicht wahr? What I mean is, “ain’t it?”, so if that was what I meant, why didn’t I say it?
I did. Twice.
Now a third time — oops, that was the fourth and this is the fifth — three Polish people go into a bar. “What is this supposed to be?” asked the bartender. “Some sort of joke?”.
Living in Another World is a simple tube-extension from one world to another, using what is quaintly called by local physicists an “Einstein-Rosen Bridge”, which is today referred to as a “Wormhole”, although that’s not a very accurate description of the phenomenon.
You don’t need to physically travel there — through the magic of the Computer Interface, you merely travel there with your attention rooted on the OTHER WORLD.
That means letting go of this one, at least to the extent that you can fully TRAVEL into the TARGET DIMENSION, the world of D2.
So what is DIABLO ILLNESS #1???
It’s the process of VOLUNTARY IDENTIFICATION, as I briefly mentioned above — “above” in the paragraphical sense, not the Elevated Reality sense, although that could be a factor, with some experience in the Theater of Virtual Activity.
In order to fully identify, you’ll have to MAKE YOURSELF CARE.
It’s always better if you automatically care about a videogame, but that’s very unlikely, except at first, when it’s all new, but like marriage and a new job, the novelty soon wears off, and you’re left with what remains, whatever that is.
If you’re attracted easily by appearance, you’ll be easily led away from the screen. Full Voluntary Identification is NOT automatic, NOT easy and takes a few MONTHS to get hold of and YEARS to MASTER, just like any OTHER form of meditation.
VI — pronounced “vee eye” — is a deep and profound level of inner meditation. You focus on the screen and try to find every possible reason to CARE about what’s happening within that game.
- The DROPS, the items, become important.
- The MONSTERS become important — names, characteristics, immunities, weapons and possible drops, such as the Countess and Baal.
- The EXPERIENCE POINTS become important, loss of EP even more so.
- The RUNES become important — everything about them is vital to your efforts.
- The GEMSTONES become important, especially as your character ages.
- The SYNERGIES become important — how they work together to make you strong enough to carry out your missions.
- The QUEST becomes important — you find yourself finishing a quest before you’ll get up to go to the bathroom or to get a snack.
- The WAY POINTS become important — how you get there is a matter of effort and risk.
- The MINIONS become important — they change, and sometimes they don’t.
- The LEVELUPS become important, so your character can do more and handle rougher areas and monsters and challenges.
- The MAGIC FIND becomes important so you can find great DROPS.
- The ARMOR becomes important, especially for your MERC.
- The WEAPONS become important as you move into the HELL LEVELS.
- The BOOTS become important right from the get-go.
- The GLOVES become important as soon as your character begins its adventure.
- The AMULET becomes important and even more so as your char develops.
- The SHIELD becomes important at first, less so for some, more so for others as they progress up the charts, level by level, Act by Act.
- The DEFENSE becomes important and is a big factor in how the char is handled.
- The ATTRIBUTES become important as the char becomes more able to deal with advanced spaces and monsters that have odd characteristics.
- The SKILL POINTS become immensely important and make the char what it is.
There are more things in-game that are or become important as you play your char, and you’ll tend to notice more as you play more often and for longer periods of time.
A really good gaming session should be about two hours. More than that? Sure, if you’re a glutton for punishment.
I generally sit down for a six-hour session, with breaks every half hour to walk around and drink some water. Stay hydrated, just as you would when working out in any other form of exercise.
Sure, D2 is exercise. Try running around like that these days with your aging body and see how far you get before osteoporosis raises its ugly head, but I can run around the entire encampment several times without stopping, if I’ve had a potion or two, without feeling winded.
Of course, after a Diablo Kill or a Baal Run, I’m likely to take a break, as well. Taking breaks away from the computer is manageable, but don’t forget that those Bad Trumpian Thoughts will come crashing back in for as long as you’re on break.
Get back to the game, and everything will be all right.
Stay in the game as long as you can — the whole day and part of the night, if possible. Try to game even at work, or better yet, quit work and just game until they come to take you away, one way or another.
That’s my solution, and I think it’s a good one. It might work for you, too. Shut out the Trumpian Misery and TUNE IN to the WORLD OF DIABLO 2.
Turn on, tune in, drop out — that’s what Dr. Tim, Timothy Leary to you, said quite often, and what he meant by that varies with the reporter, but we were longtime friends, and I can tell you EXACTLY what he meant by it.
Just what it says, and what it says to YOU at THIS VERY MOMENT. So, what DOES it say to you at this very moment?
Exactly — and that will change from day to day and even from moment to moment, and mostly you won’t be aware of the Processional of Changes, because you haven’t trained yourself to be aware of such things, and why should you?
Why should you become aware of things that are now subtle and beyond your sight? Because you can’t play D2 without doing at least a little of that sort of thing, is why.
D2 forces you to make decisions, to consider, to plan, to make alternate plans and to come up with a strategy for winning a specific area, and that means “Damage Control”, which is one of the things you’ll have to learn, along with “Repair of Self”, “Repair or Resurrection of Merc” and of course the RE-CASTING of SUMMONED CREATURES, such as your Valkyrie or your Wolf, Bear or Oak Sage.
There’s a LOT to know, and a LOT to find out and a LOT to master, and it all has to be done RIGHT NOW, and that’s what makes the game work as an ESCAPE MECHANISM — it demands your attention and your deepest considerations, and it requires that you make decisions FASTER THAN HELL, and that’s pretty fast.
Of course, at first, you can blunder about all you like, and you don’t have to react quickly at all, if you don’t mind dying repeatedly.
VOLUNTARY IDENTIFICATION can be defined as “To deliberately and intentionally identify deeply with an online screen character in a videogame”, although the process itself has many forms and applications.
Sports fans will understand this quite easily — football, baseball, soccer, golf, horse racing, cricket, tennis, NASCAR and wrestling matches and who knows what-all else. Anything on which you can make a bet is certainly covered in that description.
VOLUNTARY IDENTIFICATION doesn’t come easy unless it’s natural and automatic, like the sports fans and hey, the knitters and quilt-makers and patisserie chefs and armchair quarterbacks are numberless and legion.
Everyone has something really deep and important to keep them rooted to the spot. Everyone, including me and you, and you can VOLUNTARILY CHANGE what it is that keeps you rooted, if you learn how and DO it.
Okay, so how does VOLUNTARY IDENTIFICATION work, anyway?
In the ABD, we talk about “HABITS”. They are powerful, they hold sway over mere thought, and yet, we have little or no idea in general about how HABITS both good and bad are formed.
First of all, habits are natural to the machine — they are always there, but the habits implanted in each “HABIT RUNE SOCKET” that makes up the HABIT MATRIX in your Human Biological Machine, will definitely vary as the machine ages and/or matures.
A SIX-OPEN-SOCKET HABIT will cost you plenty, either in searching or in purchasing, and you won’t be able to keep track of what does what, so you need a scorecard, something to guide you when placing HABITS into their DESIGNATED SOCKETS and, just like D2 socket technology, it MAKES A DIFFERENCE in which ORDER you place the HABIT RUNES.
The MOMENT at which the HABIT was created or decided upon is the ONLY place where you have any POWER, so you need to go back to the Moment of Creation of the Habit, and the best way to understand that is to tell you what used to happen at typing schools back in the 20th century.
If you made a TYPO kind of mistake, such as typing “k” for “d”, you would DELIBERATELY strike the wrong key a few dozen times, then RESET THE HABIT by typing the CORRECT letter.
This was long before you could ERASE things on a typewriter. At first, you had to strike it out, then you might be able to use a special eraser to take out the error, leaving a horrible messy blob where the offending letter had been, and sometimes leaving a definite hole in the paper when the erasing got too stubborn.
IDENTIFICATION is a major crime in Fourth Way Schools, I’m told. Well, I’m here to tell you that as long as you’re AFRAID of IDENTIFICATION, you’ll never get free of its hold.
You need to confront it directly, and that means VOLUNTARY IDENTIFICATION, and there’s no better way, nor more pleasanter way, to commit VOLUNTARY IDENTIFICATION than to thoroughly and completely give your life over to the glorification and understanding of the life of your D2 Character and its life, loves and aspirations.
In short, you BECOME the CHARACTER, leaving behind your ordinary life for as many hours in a row as you can manage without starving to death or being put out on the street.
Everything is about that char, it’s all about the next quest, or the previous quest, or one that you did a while ago or might do fairly soon if you level enough to handle the mobs of monsters in the next level.
It’s all about the drops — the next great drop, or the most recent incredible drop, or the complete lack of decent drops or the drop you saw but couldn’t get to because you timed out.
Your daily chatter should be all about your char, your game, your char’s hopes, fears and aspirations for its world and its people.
Charms, Amulets and Rings — they can’t be bought, but they CAN be found, although not all that easily, and the ones you find at first are in general lousy, but then, there’s that exception to the rule – there always is one, you know.
So how do you keep yourself interested in the game?
Jesus, we’re back to a previous set of blogs about VOLUNTARY INTEREST — it’s up to YOU to make yourself interested, and the simplest and easiest way to do that is to flip the “NO INTEREST” or “DISLIKE” button to the “LIKE” setting.
If you still don’t know how to RESET the Like and Dislike Buttons in yourself, you need to pay strict attention to the RESET BUTTON Workshop at the upcoming Labor Day Con.
It’s there at the LD Con that I’ll go over these details and take LIVE questions from you on this or any other subject including a possible Pardon even though there was no collusion.
Sorry, sometimes the Trumpian Logic creeps and crawls into the conversation, and that’s the problem during those short intervals when you’re NOT in the D2 World.
Escape today. Make no personal long-term plans, don’t expect miracles, DO expect the worst, and take IMMEDIATE ACTION by joining us in one of today’s D2 SAFARIS.
You need to be at least a LEVEL 12 to join one of my SAFARIS, and I reserve the right to send you out for training if you can’t keep up with me, although I do my best to slow myself down, stopping downright still every few seconds to allow the wandering souls to find their way to the POG.
POG is “Pack Of Green”, which is how the SAFARI crowd looks on an overlay map, of which you have at least one, invoked by hitting the “TAB” key or pressing the MIDDLE MOUSE button or wheel or what-have-you, but remember that you have to SET the MIDDLE MOUSE button on OPTIONS in order to make this work, otherwise use the “TAB” until you figure it out.
The “TAB” button turns the map ON, but it also turns the map OFF. This is called a “Toggle Switch” and dates back to the turn of the previous century, to early electrical devices such as reed switches and SPST toggle switches.
Everything that’s done by photoimagine a chip these days used to be done by wrench and screwdriver and soldering iron back in the day.
So how does this D2 HABIT form?
Follow the directions and you can’t go wrong. I’ll be giving said directions at the Labor Day Con, as I said before, and you have a chance to learn it LIVE and in person, and to ask questions or bring up problems at that time.
In the meantime, get into D2 and just play, just see what you can do without help, without guidance, then compare that after the workshop with what you’ve learned about VOLUNTARY IDENTIFICATION and HABITS and SUBSTITUTION of HABITS, and you’ll be amazed, delighted, astounded and able to do things you never thought possible.
Most of all, you’ll learn to ESCAPE, IDENTIFY & OBSESS on your D2 Experience, and you can drive all your friends crazy with it until they also try it and get into the game with you and become D2 FANATICS, and that’s the whole idea!
Create Diablo ii Fanatics everywhere! Fill the planet with D2 Fanatics!
Kill Escargot!
Sorry, I thought it was a costume ball.
See You At the Top!!!
gorby