Sta.sh
Theme
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Total prizes reach 1000 
But of course there are always the rules......
Please please please fave the journal!
Make another journal about this giveaway and provide a link of that journal in the comments (this will help spread the word about this giveaway)
this journal 
Rules
Should be about School Times!
oints:
, comment and watch!
....but, OK, I'll play. Thanks to
Rules are at the bottom, but I forewarn you I'm gonna break them. I'll explain why later.
Tell 8 real things about yourself
1) I really am a nihilist. When I was in high school, I thought that being the dark gloomy nietzchean nihilist was cool - and I pretended to think that nothing mattered and that life is nothing more than the brief pathetic writhings of doomed meat robots. 30 years later I know, in a way I could not possibly have understood at the time, that I was right all along. Of course, being trapped in causality's web as I am, knowing this has had relatively little effect on me other than to put the notion of 'fear' into perspective. Since nothing means anything, I think I'll have a second pint of beer, please.
2) Favorite flavor of Ben and Jerry's is coffee heath bar crunch - but it's gotta be washed down with (duh, what else?) coffee.
3) I am a big fan of Henry Rollins' spoken word shows, and I've been to a couple of them. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I suggest you go buy a copy of "talk is cheap" volume 4. As part of my job, I do a lot of speaking at conferences and a lot of teaching and Henry's approach to the microphone is one I envy and I'm sure it's influenced me more than I can understand.
4) My "real job" is as an executive (the Chief Security Officer) for a computer security products company. I also consult and teach, which means I travel constantly. In the late 1980s and early 1990s I was an early innovator in computer security products and coded (and documented and sold and supported) the first commercial internet firewall product. I also was the guy who set up and operated whitehouse.gov for the first 2 years that it was online. I made a lot of millionaires during the "dot-com" boom. I'm not one of them.
5) I'd rather be doing art.
6) I wound up on DA because someone pirated a few of my images and posted them here. I only created this account so I could complain and get them banned. I'm still here and they're not.
7) My favorite erogenous zone is the brain. Even on girls. So there.
8) I always felt that the single best thing you can do for the environment is not to breed. That way I don't have to worry about humanity's inevitable dive off a cliff; there won't be any descendants of mine around to see it.
Other tag-chain rules
Now, the rules of the tag is that I'm supposed to tag 8 more people. If everyone actually followed that rule, the entire population of earth would be tagged by mid-next week. So obviously, a few of us are going to break the viral growth of the tag-chain and in honor of "fact #8" I'm one of the people who's not passing on the tag.
Love ya,
mjr.
Thanks 
Moi aussi, except, I don't do it because it's cool. I can't imagine thinking otherwise. Nihilism is silly and pointless and will get me nowhere in life--but the same to everything else! I could use another pint as well. Mmmm, Yuengling.
2) Favorite flavor of Ben and Jerry's is coffee heath bar crunch - but it's gotta be washed down with (duh, what else?) coffee.
Cherry Garcia. I can't stand too much chocolate. But Heath bar with a frappuccino... Mmmm...
3) I am a big fan of Henry Rollins' spoken word shows, and I've been to a couple of them. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I suggest you go buy a copy of "talk is cheap" volume 4. As part of my job, I do a lot of speaking at conferences and a lot of teaching and Henry's approach to the microphone is one I envy and I'm sure it's influenced me more than I can understand.
You've been to them? Wow. I'm a fan. I never get to go to any shows for anyone though.
4) My "real job" is as an executive (the Chief Security Officer) for a computer security products company. I also consult and teach, which means I travel constantly. In the late 1980s and early 1990s I was an early innovator in computer security products and coded (and documented and sold and supported) the first commercial internet firewall product. I also was the guy who set up and operated whitehouse.gov for the first 2 years that it was online. I made a lot of millionaires during the "dot-com" boom. I'm not one of them
I've always found this humorously surprising.
5) I'd rather be doing art.
I'm paranoid I'm going to spend every moment of my computer science classes thinking about sewing and fabrics and eventually drop out. I think I'm hoping to marry rich so my spouse can support this habit; I'll be sure to spoil him to death with kindness so he can't legitimately complain about the money drain.
6) I wound up on DA because someone pirated a few of my images and posted them here. I only created this account so I could complain and get them banned. I'm still here and they're not.
This wasn't the psycho you wrote about on your site, was it? That was fucking absurdly hilarious.
7) My favorite erogenous zone is the brain. Even on girls. So there.
But but but there's tits and legs and ass and ribs and wrists and necks and hip bones and...
8) I always felt that the single best thing you can do for the environment is not to breed. That way I don't have to worry about humanity's inevitable dive off a cliff; there won't be any descendants of mine around to see it.
While an environmentalist at heart, I cannot help but inwardly scream "go, Global Warmiing, go!"
Keep on fighting for fewer people! ^^
I feel.
And that's about all that's needed.
Ditto.
" I always felt that the single best thing you can do for the environment is not to breed. That way I don't have to worry about humanity's inevitable dive off a cliff; there won't be any descendants of mine around to see it."
Also well said, also ditto.
That said, I also sit somewhere along the nihilist spectrum (strong belief in fate as arbiter of action; viewing consciousness as more of a reactive force than an active one; generally stoic attitude).
If there is such a thing as a "nihilist spectrum", that is - maybe it's in greyscale.
I agree - I think the reason Nietzche gets tagged with it is because he had a couple of good one-liners ('as you gaze into the abyss...'
If there is such a thing as a "nihilist spectrum", that is
I don't really see how there can be... If you reject a few of the underpinnings of meaning and value and theism then they all fall apart if you see far enough. Personally, I think that's the bind atheists (and even agnostics) ought to find themselves in if they're honest. There's no way to say, "the universe has no meaning BUT MY LIFE does."
Holding the beliefs that you do, it must stagger your imagination to think how humans could ever have come to attribute the cold, dark, meaningless universe to the creative power of a benevolent, omnipotent being.
To me, this seems so unlikely as to suggest the existence of some superbeing. After all, if the universe is entirely meaningless, where are we humans getting this crazy idea of 'meaning?'
Actually, it makes a tremendous amount of sense that we would (I'll explain in a second) but it's amazingly sad to me that we can't let go of it.
if the universe is entirely meaningless, where are we humans getting this crazy idea of 'meaning?'
Well, we're organisms that evolved in a small world (we didn't travel much or far) before we had technology, and in the small world where we grew up, we understood a couple ideas:
1) people can do things
2) there is cause and effect
so, when a tree falls on Oog the caveman, the rest of the tribe were savvy enough to realize that the tree fell because the roots were weak - that's immediately observable. but when lightning hits the tree, they have no idea what lightning is but they understand cause and effect and, well, what could have caused the lightning? now, we know it's static discharge - but once upon a time lightning was attributed to gods. now, we know the sun is a big ball of fusion - but once it was thought to be the manifestation of a god. because we're primed to think in terms of cause and effect and if you actually don't understand what's going on it's nice to have something to pin everything on: god.
That process of trying to impute cause and effect is crucial to survival: it gets us looking for causes, so we can understand them!! If I am riding my horse and he suddenly jumps sideways, I may fall and die. And, if I survive, I might think "something caused that" and look him over and notice he was bitten by a horse-fly. So I adopt a new survival trait of keeping an eye out for horseflies because if I see one I can try to shoo it off or expect my horse to jump. Maybe that's not the best example, but I think you can see where it's going.
In other words, I am saying religion is a left-over survival trait of the primitive mind. In that context it makes sense. And that, by the way, is exactly why I despise it - religious attempts to 'answer' the big questions actually get in the way of our attempts to deal with reality as it is. And dealing with reality as it is is a matter of species survival.