Instructor: Wayfarer
Date: November 3, 2017 (Friday)
Wayfarer
And we’re close enough to 630 so @here get out yr slammers and pogs and those obnoxious slap bracelets because it’s time to get in a time machine to the 90s. @ShadowRain I’m also pinging you so you can start archiving or whatever you do, I’ll clean this thing into a nice format for Sunora later if you give me text logs.
Midnight
are we doing this over voice, or text?
ShadowRain
đ will do
ShadowRain
just don’t delete stuff đ
Simica
@Midnight text
Midnight
right on
Wayfarer
Text, because a lot of people seem to prefer that. I’m a voice lecture kinda guy but text is good too sometimes and why not? Also I’ve got food delivery coming here so now I can get that from the door without any of you knowing that I have to eat food.
Midnight
it’s a lot easier to review that way
Wayfarer
So, lecture bits gonna start now, light commentary allowed, please move side discussions to the social hall or annex, if you have questions please feel free to post them.
Lutasi
oh there’s an annex!
ShadowRain
(annex is for practice)
Wayfarer
First, the ’90s? Why are we talking about the ’90s? Why have I turned everything into a delightful trapper-keeper inspired color system? What is wrong with me? I have answers to some of these questions.
Wayfarer
The 1990s were a very different Internet from the Internet we know today, in several key ways, but importantly, the Internet was a thing. The 90s were a traditional era where the Internet was no longer purely the domain of turbonerds using BBS, but where it hadn’t yet crammed itself into every facet of everyone’s life 24/7.
Turbo
I take offence to that name đ
Wayfarer
These differences had influences on the online energy scene, naturally. OECs were a new-ish thing then. Early OECs were small, usually personally run, and often the result of networking that happened more offline than online. The OECs were an online face for otherwise existing groups of friends.
Wayfarer
Internet indexing back then was largely garbage, with search engines being slow and cumbersome, often focusing on specific types of sites, sometimes only indexing a few top level domains, sometimes contracted with hosting companies and licensing who was searchable on what engines. I want to say HotBot was the first that acted as a meta-search engine in a public, commercial way, and obviously Google killed all the other ones eventually.
Wayfarer
I mean Yahoo! and Bing! still exist but ⌠nah. Not really.
Wayfarer
What this meant was that one of the key differences in the 90s was availability of information and access to information.
Wayfarer
I first found my way into OECs as a young kid in 1997 or 1998 while actually researching some other things, by way of Dimensional-Doorways, a now defunct website aboutâŚI’m not actually sure, exactly, it was all full of the most newage stuff around, but it had some paranormal forums that I started posting on way back then.
Wayfarer
At the time, there were quite a few magic and psionics type websites around already. Of them I think only Psion Guild still technically exists. I remember there were a few others that were like prototypical modern ones – with ranking systems and certificates and stuff – but I think they are long defunct now. I can’t remember names, we’re talkin’ 20 years ago.
metalforever
the psi palatium still exists i think
Wayfarer
But that’s what the 90s. Why the ’90s is a discussion that started here a day or two ago that brought to a point some ideas that had been festering in my head for some months, as well as the brains of some other old timers.
metalforever
i have an archive of upc online as well if anyone wants it
Wayfarer
Holy shit Psi Palatium is totally the one I was trying to think of there btw.
Wayfarer
WaitâŚmaybe. Something like that. Did they do certificates? One of these places was doing like certifications for scanners and healers and such.
Lutasi
zues’ thing right?
Simica
Yes
Wayfarer
Memory lane up in here.
Wayfarer
So, as I said, a bunch of us dinosaurs were sitting around talking about how things used to be back in the day, and what was different. Now, as a warning, this might get real old timery. As in, I might take to ranting about kids these days and suchlike.
Rainsong
shakes her cane from her rocking chair on the porchâŚ. and tosses one to Wayfarer
Wayfarer
And I’m willing to accept that, I’m willing to own up to my rapidly approaching geriatric status and I realize that things are different – but a lot of this talk is going to be an attempt at an objective assessment of those differences so please don’t hate on me too much and take things as they are meant to be taken.
Wayfarer
As I mentioned before, communities back then were much smaller. They were largely comprised of people stumbling onto resources. Today, we know pretty much where we’re gonna go if we want to find out about something. Want to know about ghosts? There’s probably a subreddit. Want to know about psionics? You can Google that. Because almost all search engines are using the same methods now, and because like 99% of people in the West use Google, almost all searches bring everyone to the same places with the same priorities.
Wayfarer
As a result, almost everyone is finding the same resources today. Back then, it was actually not at all uncommon to have to dig deep with weird terms to find weird psionics stuff that like one other person had ever seen.
Wayfarer
PsiPog was one of the first big, successful psionics websites because it focused on building a community, and because it deliberately engaged in search engine optimization when SEO was barely a thing.
Wayfarer
All those websites that were out there, incidentally, and small, and generally passing around the same information, actually improved the signal to noise ratio. It was difficult for any random weirdo to propagate his or her own weird stuff because the audience was smaller and people searching for information would compare the few sources they had.
Wayfarer
So all that’s to paint a picture of âthe dayâ that everyone is trying to back into.
metalforever
yeah, to be honest, at least the OEC as I remember it, had much better content.
metalforever
well, do oecs even have content any more?
Simica
Not really
Wayfarer
Well, I’m gonna get to that, as we move onto the second part here, which is to contrast and compare some things.
Wayfarer
All of those differences in how the Internet worked meant that websites needed actual content to get popular. Link-sharing thingsâŚwhat called, âwebrings,â were very popular. You would join a bunch of other websites that would all link to one another based on being similar in content and topics. This was webmasters talking to one another, making a webring, and so on.
Wayfarer
The Internet wasn’t considered hugely anonymous yet, most people dealt with each other via email but under their actual identities, and business was still conducted like you were real human beings doing real business, before the Internet ruled us all. You actually wrote emails in the format of a normal letter (some of us still do this, us geriatrics).
Wayfarer
Today, I think most OEC stuff is running off of communities on chat services like this, or off of sites like Reddit.
Wayfarer
This really changes things up, because as we can pretty easily observe these days, popularcontent is not necessarily good content.
Wayfarer
A lot of research has gone into ruining everything and this means that it’s very possible for someone to get their signal amplified way past where they deserve it. In any case, when someone’s using Reddit, the most popular posters will have their voices heard even if their opinions aren’t that great or correct.
Wayfarer
When you have a topic like magic or psionics, this is a problem. If someone’s posting shit in the programming community, people with credentials and experience can shut them down. If someone’s posting shit on a legal trouble subreddit, actual lawyers can shut them down. If someone’s posting shit on a psionics subredditâŚwho polices that?
ShadowRain
even if anyone tries, the new agers who think kundalini will solve all of their problems shout them down
Wayfarer
This especially becomes a problem because certain movements, such as for example and not to single anyone out, the tulpamancy thing or (lmao I saw that) some aspects of what the otherkin community has turned into, repeat the mantra of âit’s real if you want it to be realâ pretty solidly. âIt’s all true because if you imagine it’s true then the egregore becomes real which is why I worship Oscar the Grouch.â
Wayfarer
So there is a real problem in getting good information today. What a lot of us points to the purple and neon blue names take for granted as basic information simply isn’t available to most people, because they don’t investigate that far. They get a very convenient and fast answer from a Reddit or a Discord community, and that’s that.
metalforever
it occurred to me that the youngins might not get the oscar the grouch reference
ShadowRain
sesame street is still aroundâŚ
Rainsong
And the Oscar muppet has changed a few times, but he’s still there.
metalforever
eh honestly , im not even sure if the basic information is really published anywhere anymore.
metalforever
(im gonna put my site back up when i get a moment between class.)
Rainsong
We have some on our site.
metalforever
theres just so much stuff it takes weeks : P
Wayfarer
There are a lot of major differences in the culture of the OECs between then and now, but I identified three to discuss, which are: 1) Emphasis on self-verification, 2) Different standards of success, and 3) A higher general level of skepticism.
Wayfarer
So, what does this mean? Well, today, if I am a still wet behind the ears newbie wanting to learn psionics, before I ever get to the point where I’m making a psiball, I’ve already been told that tulpas are a super common thing, I’ve run into sigils all over and that’s kind of the standard, and 80 people have told me that while I’m making a psiball they have created a pocket universe in their astral containment assembly with the loop regression metaxes discombobulator nodes.
Wayfarer
When I go about making the psiball, I’m already being exposed to a lot of weird shit, is what I’m saying. And in order to verify my success, I am told, I should not trust my own feelings. After all, I can trick myself into believing something is real that isn’t. It is ironic that this advice, which was almost a mantra back in the 90s, too, usually coming from skeptics, is now something that we apply to for example energy work but not to, for example, tulpa mancing, but here we are.
Wayfarer
See, there is a legitimate concern that you can make yourself feel things that aren’t there. And we all want independent verification that what we’re doing is âreal.â So at some point, the message went from âyou should have someone check on your stuff if you’re not sureâ to ânever trust yourself to have done anything, get someone to scan everything.â This, in fact, makes things worse.
Wayfarer
Back in The Day people would work for some weeks, sometimes months, to make that first psiball. The answer to âhow do you know you’ve made a psiballâ was âbecause you can feel it.â We would often not tell people what exactly they were feeling âfor,â and generally people would eventually report a sensation, and people who had been around would go âyes that is a thing sometimesâ or âno that’s weird are you sure? Keep trying.â
Wayfarer
If you weren’t sure you had made a psiball, you were told to keep trying until you made one you could be sure about. Nobody said âokay, I will scan. Okay yes it’s there great job, let’s make an astral theme park now.â
Wayfarer
So an emphasis on doing your work such that you yourself knew, and were confident, that it was âworkingâ was important back then. Now, that is much reduced, with more of an obsession with having people âscanâ for it, and in the absence of anyone scanning, there’s no way to know if you’re doing anything, which means you only practice when there’s a scanner around.
Wayfarer
I used to sit in class at school building little constructs that I could put my hand on. I could tell when my shields failed because I felt a noticeable change in my cognition (all them thoughts flooding in). Back Then ⢠we mainly had to verify for ourselves that something worked, and as a result our training, our practice, was âuntil we can do that.â It led to people practicing basics much harder, and thus building better foundations for more advanced stuff.
Wayfarer
The second issue is the âpower scale.â With so many people working in the astral to make their tulpas a mansion or whatever people are doing these days, there is social pressure to come in and say âoh my tulpa also has a mansion, I too manse tulpas.â Nobody wants to admit to âI really am not sure if I’m even making a psiballâ because all the other people in the community are talking about how they doxxed a dragon and leaked its true name to all the villagers in the astral universe they are building or whatever.
Wayfarer
The bar for success has been set to these kind of insanely high narrative points. As a result, even though communities don’t explicitly say it, nobody wants to talk about megggaaaa basic stuff. âI am having a very hard time moving energy to my handsâ is not going to get much attention when someone is going âI am being attacked by the Great Old Ones because I accidentally harvested a sentient potato and it put a curse on me, but I’m a secret angel otherkin so I can probably call my uncle Michael, butâŚâ
Wayfarer
What this means is that there is a lot of social pressure to talk about things in the âastralâ (usually the mental plane, really, but I usually let people have their narratives, because it doesn’t affect me at all), and to focus on these astral things, and to say that the astral is real and the physical is not. That was actually pretty uncommon in the 90s. We focused a lot on making psiballs here, and the people who got off on PK obviously focused on here, and most telepaths and empaths were dealing with emotions and thoughts of people nearby, and people doing remote viewing or projection did so locally, first. Astral projection was kind of a gimmick, really.
Wayfarer
And if you were going to do astral projection, you went all in, full projections, and not âI’m running a simulated astral space in my mind.â Because that’s called imagining things. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but it does deter people from wanting to admit that maybe they aren’t sure if they can actually shield or not.
ShadowRain
There was a lot more focus on affecting the real world here instead of trying to escape it in favor of the astral or whatever
metalforever
eh honestly in some communities the astral plane stuff we stayed away from lest we be labeled fluffy
Wayfarer
I’m saying, that’s how it was, yeah. Because of the third part, which is the higher level of skepticism.
Wayfarer
I honestly don’t know what the bigger cultural shift is, but in the 90s and early 2000s, and I actually was reminded of this earlier today, one of the big problems we had was people coming into the chatrooms to be science crusaders
Wayfarer
And they would say âoh, you’re a telepath? That’s really cool but can you prove it to me right now with hard evidence?â
Wayfarer
âRight this minute please prove psychic stuff is real or I will call you a liar.â
Wayfarer
There was a generally higher level of skepticism even of just basic claims. âProve that psychics existâ was the pressure, and with that being the thing, ain’t nobody gonna claim ânot only do psychics exist but my soul is actually a unicorn and I have an energetic horn.â
Wayfarer
Okay that’s an hour and we’re about halfway, I’m gonna call this a good place to stop and we’ll pick up tomorrow at maybe 530 EST.
metalforever
ok
Dr. Strange Stuff
Good stuff so far
Simica
Thank you Wayfarer
Turbo
Thanks, pal
Dr. Strange Stuff
Thanks for the lecture
Rainsong
Thanks, Wayfarer
ShadowRain
in case people are wondering, there will be actual practice/techniques as well
ShadowRain
not just history
Wayfarer
Yeah I do have a thing about practice but I wanted to paint a picture.
Turbo
Feels like I’m reliving history. Can we go back to that time, instead of the cringe it is out there today?
Wayfarer
We’re gonna actually do some 90s stuff.
Wayfarer
I just wanted to talk about the 90s first a bunch.
Wayfarer
Haha
Simica
I wasn’t around that far back. Anything I was doing at that time, was learning through personal experiences. Since I didn’t have any terminology only experiences. And back then. Life was hectic for myself to say the least. But even when I did find the oec. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it is now.
lurker1f
That was a cool lecture, thanks
Wayfarer
Sorry that I didn’t get to the practical bits, more on that tomorrow.
Rainsong
Always takes longer than expected to do these broader topics.