ostentatious
long
time
waste…
Sound familiar? These are the prescient first four words in what has become the longest thread by far on ILP.
I know what Freud says about all this, but I want to know what word association is or has become in the ILP context. Why some of us are addicted to it, what the rest of us are missing.
The longest thread on ILP deserves some commentary. And no one word answers, please. Yes, that means you.
I would imagine the thread is commonly used for search engine placement. It works better than stuffing meta-tags with keywords and gives the 'bots a workout. One could write a script to sit and play “Word Association” all day (on a forum or web-site), if one wanted to.
Word Association is moving towards the stream of consciousness. Is in the place where minds can meet, almost naked, almost unguarded. It is thought whittled down to a near atomic level. It is the elements of mind freely mixing in a freestyle Brownian hodown. It is the smallest sacrifice. It is the cheapest date. It is the lesser of all present evils. It asks so little and gives so little, but it gives quickly and consistently. It is the sure bet. It is the place where even the least desirable will be asked to dance.
xanderman,
That’s so beautiful and so pathetic…
I try.
We get to satisfy our impulsive, non-committal, spur-of-the-moment, instant-gratification, no-strings-attached, non-judgmental, mono-syllabic self.
Hello F(r)iends,
Gamer, at the moment it seems to serve the purpose of entertaining Dunamis thereby extending his stay at ILP—I am completely in favor of that.
Also, if we have nothing to actually post, but want to “hang around” the forums, where better to make our presence known?
-Thirst
Your answers are great, but there’s some mystery still…there must be more to it. I love expressing myself, but yet I haven’t been interested in the thread at all.
What troubles me about it is its similarity to actual philosophical discourse. Perhaps some alien race might observe our actual discourse and view at as mere word association, nothing more. And furthermore, they would see it as semiotic fish thrashing about on dry land trying to connect with water they will never find, each telling the other in some private language where the water might be.
A secondary concern is the issue of mastery or excellence. If I were to participate I’d be trying to transcend cliché. But that’s not the point. You say soccer, I say ball, someone else says Lucille, to which someone else says seminal, and I just don’t get the same self-satisfaction as I might from a post like this, for instance. [/list]
Yeah, I don’t know what to make of it either. I post in there sometimes when I’m bored.
I had always imagined it as a big pack of posts its, that when flipped through really fast would produce a cool effect. I mean just think about it for a sec… like a cartoon thing but with words. A meta-toon.
it also seems to have spawned the… entity known as Atalanta whose purpose here seems to be limited to the movie quote and word association threads. But as she gathers the exhaling power of Dunamis, we could see her branching out into other more challanging avenues as well.
Or… she could -be- Dunamis.
An interesting thread to say the least.
Hello F(r)iends,
I hate to pidgeon-hole you, Old Gobbo, but you liberals really do sit around thinking up conspiracy theories…
-Thirst
I love how everyone calls me a liberal when I constantly preach that liberal, conservative, republican, democrat,
nowadays… it doesn’t matter.
I talk of conspiracy theories because that’s politics nowadays, voting is a symbolic function, it’s all behind the scenes. I realize the world pretty much needs to act this way to keep going, I’m just trying to get as good of a feel for what’s REALLY going on as I can.
Besides, I just like thinking. it’s an excersize in creativity. I don’t really care if I’m wrong about most of the stuff I write, it’s for entertainment not… anything else, at least in this forum. Guessing about Dunamis or whoever, who cares? Heh, in fact if Dunamis cared at all about what I’ve written I’d openly laugh at him.
Liberal… lol
Hello F(r)iends,
I guess you aren’t paranoid if they are really following you…
Take your pick:
Druggie
Delusionalist
Hippy
-Thirst
It’s easy if you think like Gobbo, you simply replace the spurious political spectrum with a spurious ontological spectrum then blame tha weed whenever you talk gibberish. Talk about a philosophy laden with get-out clauses…
Hello F(r)iends,
SIATD… you’re brilliant. I need my own exit-clause!
From now on, in the very unlikely event that I am wrong, it is because I have chronic insomnia.
-Thirst
Take your pick:
Depressed
Angry
Confused
LoL, keet it coming though guys… .I like this.
Demon-possessed? No, I’ve met people who I’ve been convinced were possessed, and Gobbo doesn’t fit the profile.
My get-out clause is the inadequacies of language. That was I’ve got all the bases covered…
Personally I like ‘angry hippie’ the most.
Now you take your pick:
Chocolate
Vanilla
Strawberry
Fuck I’m clever. 
James
These Aussies are crazy (taps head like in Asterix books)