Legion

Sorry I didn't even read your blurb about the beta 2 test posting, so here is my effort.
Oh, and an image test! Beta Tester Magisteris!

Just testing.
All very impressive. Big ups to the scripting chops.
However, the design is just awful. It hurts to look at. Can I help in any way?
We love you big fella!

PS. Didn't publish this for hours cos I didn't see the 'untick to publish' tinytext (TM).

That is going to wind me up if it stays...
A button to preview and a button to publish is what any sane person looks for.

This is such an obvious method of finding "stuff" that we are surprised that more people don't use it, but after exhaustive market research (read - harassing people when drunk) it would appear that they don't. This method didn't work quite as well a couple of years ago, but now that every man and his iguana has a domain name for their pathetic collection of holiday snaps and feeble life stories, it works SO much better. Lucky us.

It's insultingly simple, and if you haven't done this before then you are an embarrassment to the human race and you really should consider shooting yourself to protect future generations from your low quality genes. So, pick a word that
sums up what you're looking for, or is related to the area. Type it into the address bar with the appropriate prefixes and suffixes. Of course if you're that dumb then I'll have to remind you that by this I mean you need to put www. BEFORE the word, and .com, .org, .net, or any other domain suffix you feel like AFTER the word. Got it? Good.

With any luck this will take you directly to a site that is exactly what you're looking for, or has links to what you're looking for. If it fails, as it does sometimes, try using a different suffix until you get some results. This is a good method if your area of interest is quite broad and not focused upon specific information. Out of curiosity, a year or so ago, we typed in
www.hell.com and the result was quite pleasing and somewhat unnerving.

One thing you may notice from using this method is the huge number of fuckwits that are buying up really cool domain names and wasting them on their half-assed, waste-of-space sites. Our advice here is to email the webmaster and insult them roundly for using up such great domain names which they clearly have no right owning. Better still, do a bit of investigation, go round to their houses and beat the shit out of them, preferably killing them.
Then, someone else can have their domain name, maybe even you. It may seem that we are suggesting that you resort to violence and possibly even murder anyone who possesses something that you covet. This is correct.
[ul]

Random Link Chaos Method - Like, totally kaos dude.

Listening to Other People (Crazy & foolhardy but it sometimes works)

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This method of searching utilises and harnesses the mystical powers of chaos (or, Kaos, as overly retentive bores would have it). You can alter the superficial technique to your own desires, but we go with the standard intuitive natural style, which is just our snappy name for going with the flow.

Here's what you do: Pick a starting site, anywhere will do, and follow a link at random. Don't worry about where it says its taking you, don't even think about it, just follow your mouse finger.
Trust chaos, and it will serve you my friend. Once at this new site, follow another link immediately, the first one that you see. Don't stop to think about it, don't let your conscious mind interfere with the process and ruin everything.

Keep following random links, and soon, you will reach a site that makes you stop. This site is the destination site. It may be a site that is related to what you were wanting, or it may be an entirely unrelated site which is nevertheless, strangely fascinating to you.
Whatever the results, you'll be happy, and will have saved all that time you would have spent pissing around on search engines simply by allowing chaos to do your work for you.

With practice, the number of random links you need to follow to reach the destination site will decrease, as you become more proficient in giving yourself up to the subconscious currents of your mind and allow your fingers to do the walking...

Here at Sensibilium we have developed our chaos fingers to the extent that we find great sites even before we realise that we are looking for anything. You of course, can only dream of aspiring to the dizzy heights of our chaotic greatness, but there you go.
[ul]

Quantum Direct Method - Three Quarks for Muster Mark

Listening to Other People (Crazy & foolhardy but it sometimes works)

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Surfing the net aimlessly in the hope of finding anything that even remotely resembles what you're looking for is akin to shopping in a lard factory for low-fat food. That is, it's foolish and ultimately futile.

To get to the meat of the stringy and jaundiced beast that is the net, you have to approach surfing in a different way. There are differing methods for finding interesting and informative sites on the net but our ways are the best - trust us.

The ones we favour, and which usually turn up things we would never have found otherwise using conventional search methods, are as follows - (in a handy list format to infer to you that they will lead to fresh pages, which by gods, they will...)
[ul]

Random Link Chaos Method - Like, totally kaos dude.

Quantum Direct Method - Three Quarks for Muster Mark

Listening to Other People (Crazy & foolhardy but it sometimes works)

[/ul]

The internet becomes increasingly schizophrenic. Art sites that want to show off their textual skills, literary sites that are coated with so much graphical slickness that the mere touch of them is enough to make you slide right off to somewhere less pretentious. And then we have the sites that don't really know what they are, but my, don't they have pretty interfaces.

To find information on the net it has become almost de rigueur to have to bludgeon your way through ever more unnecessary "intuitive" graphical interfaces. Why? Why the fuck is this necessary? If I pick up a newspaper to check out the score in the latest minor war, I don't expect to have to negotiate my way through several beautifully printed but ultimately useless plastic coatings. Likewise, if I walk into an art gallery, I feel no great desire to have copies of the artists diaries lying around so that I can read about the torturous minutiae of their lives. Half of the attraction of a painting, or a photograph is the act of mutual creation between artist and viewer, that mingling of perception, the grey area between conceptual vision and derived understanding.

So, I ask you, why is it suddenly so common for a website to have a finger in every single pie going? Why is it that on the net, an collection of images cannot speak for itself, or a piece of writing cannot be appreciated without graphical interjection?

It would seem obvious that there is a whole load of "me too" psychology behind web design. Not only does everyone want a website, but they want their website to include every single "cool" feature that the designer has ever coveted on other sites. Websites have to be seen to be providing something for everybody, or at least to prove that they can do everything that everybody else can. The net still doesn't seem to have understood that the maxim "more is better" is completely false, and ultimately leads to lowest-common-denominator content on any platform.

One thing stands out. Although the internet is undoubtedly a far more aesthetically pleasing place to be these days, on a purely eye-candy level, it becomes ever more difficult to find anything that stands out, that is new or different. The focus on content is being lost behind the sharp, design-led revolution of a thousand geeks who know how to code, but haven't got a clue when it comes to filling their sugary confections with content of any value. The American dream of slick, mass-market homogeneity is slowly enveloping the net. All-singing, all-dancing, all-suffocating.

To be perfectly honest, I can't see the point of the internet at all if we are merely going to transform it into another cable network. Why not just sell the whole fucking thing to CBS and start a new revolution. Maybe this time we can get it right.

He stopped reading some time ago. I didn't notice, and don't know how much time has passed since. Time is beginning to flow differently for me, another sign of the change in me, the evolution of my being.

"Baal? Are you listening?" His voice begins to reach me as I allow myself to resurface.
"Baal... I asked you about the children. Why it is you feel children are pure. Do you think you were pure as a child? Is that what you want to return to? That purity?"

He is so riddled with the cancerous growth of Freudianism yet doesn't even feel those malignant pustules oozing their juices; that whisper of sex and penetration and oedipal dreams. He believes himself to be a thoroughly modern psychologist, and yet, does not even observe himself enough to notice how often he returns to poke at what he hopes is the open wound of my childhood.

"Baal. Please talk to us. I think it would help you if we explored your notions of purity and childhood."

He hasn't actually asked the question yet - dare not now anyway, in the presence of the woman - for fear of seeming too archaic, too old school, too unhip. Of course I can see the question in his mind, fidgeting and raising it's hand, trying to force itself to the fore.
He resists, but he wants to ask, wants to ask so very badly. Instead he circles the issue, dancing on the fringes. Asking instead what I enjoyed as a child, what my earliest memory is, what my friends were like. I lie of course. I lie and he knows I lie, and he believes himself to be so very perceptive because he sees through my lies so easily. What he doesn't understand is why I lie. He views my lies as fear, a resistance to analysis common to all who wish to pretend to themselves that they are sane, and yet deep down they know how truly mad they are, how vulnerable the truth would be to the good doctors mind scalpel.

"Baal. This isn't helping you and I think you know that. We need to get at the truth, confront the truth. You see that don't you?"

The truth. It is at the very core of us. It is our beating heart. An incision made with a probing question, layers of skin and fat peeled back. The answer shows the path that the scalpel should take, reveals a trail of scar tissue that the blade can follow easily. Another cut, deeper, through muscle, sinew. Another question, another revelation, the fleshy parts pushed away and muscle clamped with childhood memories, we reach the heart. The truth, and the root cause. An abusive mother, a neglectful mother. The doctor withdraws, satisfied that the cancer has been removed, and leaves his underlings to mop up.

There are two parts to a psychological analysis; getting the patient to reveal the truth, and, once that has been achieved, ripping that truth out so that it infects the body no more.
The first part is the harder. Many psychologists consider the second part beneath them, a job that any amateur can achieve. No, it is the direction that matters, the ritual cutting of the patient with that scalpel. The good doctor though fails to see that I am different. That I lie only to observe his reaction to my lies. To see how he will combat it. To see if I can provoke him to ask the question, the oh so clumsy slash with the blade. The one that would lay bare
his own truth. The Freudian cancer that lies beneath the healthy modern skin.

"Baal. Are you in there?" He is getting angry. It is masked, but I can smell it.

"Baal, I think we should go back to your own childhood and look at your ideals of purity."
Surely not? Have I finally broken him? in front of the woman as well...

"Baal, why don't you tell me about your mother?"

I smile...

I look into my eyes and I see death.
The face that the eyes are set into, that they pour out of like twin orbs of darkness, that is the face that I call my own, but in fact it is alien and inscrutable to me. This face resembles a mask to me.

I know that if I could tear this mask, this fade away from my head - rip the skin from the flesh like thin plastic - then I would see the face of death. The face is a lie, a piece of artless trickery that deceives those who look upon it. It presents a veneer of normality that fools people into believing that which they want to believe. That I am normal. That I am not a killer.

There is no explanation for the eyes though. Anyone who looks upon their obvious malice, as I do every day, must notice that they at least cannot disguise what I am. Grey-blue like a cloudy windless day, flecks of rust brown within, like dried blood. The same shade as the spatters that stain the tiles beneath my feet.

The truth is, whomever observes my eyes cannot fail to see the monstrous entity that looks out through them, observing these people in return but seeing them only as objects, measurements, visions of violence. Thoughts of how they would appear lying on the tiles, chest cavity laid bare, organs arranged around their corpse like post-modern confrontational art. These thoughts must be apparent, must be reflected upon their surface.

I see a childs face upon the street and see only an image of future pain that I could inflict upon them.
Children see more, or rather, they ignore less than what is readily apparent. We grown ups do not want to accept that in the eyes of a man on the street we can see untold horrors, can smell the sickly sweet odours of blood drying upon pine floors in some charnel house of a cellar, can taste the slick warmth and coppery tang of the flesh as it yields to teeth.

Children are less easily constrained and they give me a wide berth usually, knowing that what they see in my eyes is not fancy, not an overly imaginative mind at work, not societal paranoia. Children see my eyes and see a bad man looking back at them. A killer. A monster.

I like children most of all, for when a child is in the grip of absolute fear, when it reaches that point of utter certainty that they are going to die, then, oh god, that moment that sweet moment! All the fighting, the lying, the survival instincts give way to an instant of complete peace. All fear passes from them. There is total acceptance of their mortality, and at that moment I can see their souls and it is beautiful. More beautiful than anything else you can imagine or experience. You have broken down all their animal like instincts and vulgarities, and in return they surrender their very soul to you. As they die they die having known ultimate peace, they have transcended the mortal boundaries that we wallow within for our entire lives.
They are pure.

The girl on the floor is beginning to smell now. It's time to clean up I suppose. I look once more at the pinprick circles of blackness in the centre of my eyes. I shake my head slowly. They know. They know and yet they do nothing. They share my guilt, they are as culpable as I. At least I am honest with regard to my nature. All they can do is deny it, and deny me.

He is Here Again.

I open my eyes and he begins to speak immediately, as if he fears that he has a set amount of time before I drift, rather than the mere fact that I find him incredibly tedious.

"I hope you're well Baal. I really want to discuss the writings you left in your cell the other day. We feel that if you can talk about your feelings rather than writing them down it will prove to be beneficial to you. We are here to help you. I hope you realise that. Please don't judge us too harshly or consider us your jailors. We want to bring you back to yourself."

A remarkable waste of words. Clumsy phrasing as well. The concept of bringing me back to myself amuses me though. He believes it as well. The conviction in his voice has a certain religious zeal that I have heard from the fanatic previously. This man is paid to help heal those with allegedly sick minds?

Healer heal thyself. "I have no wish to discuss what I wrote. The text is self-explanatory, and should be perfectly clear, particularly to one with psychological training."

He sighs. It is a fake sigh. He was expecting that response. He is leading onto something else.

"I'm not sure how you expect us to help you Baal. Talking about your problems and your feelings is the only way we're going to be able to make you better. But, if you are certain, then I'll respect your wishes. Would you mind if I read you something then?"

Ah. Of course. He is going to read back to me from some journal or other of mine. A relic from before the change. He is hoping it will bring me back to myself, as he quaintly terms it. It is of no consequence now. That was another place, another person.

"Go ahead Doctor. Make your play."

He clears his throat, and squints slightly at the clipboard he has brought with him. He holds the board closer to his face. Obviously the man is short sighted but is too vain to wear spectacles. How bizarre for one who is not attractive to begin with.

"The entry is entitled 'Windows of the Soul', and I believe you wrote it about three months before you joined us here. Do you remember writing it?"

I don't bother responding. It would do no good to speak to him of memory at this point in the game.

"Well, anyway. I'll begin."

I close my eyes, placing myself back into that time, recalling who I was then and the mask I wore. His exercise is futile, but it serves to remind me how far I have come since then. He begins to read.