RKNet Blog... Thing

Fake Stephen Colbert, a twitter user posting under @stephentcolbert, has been unmasked. Luckily, the psuedostephen opted to share the reasoning behind this Twitter-Digg deception.

It’s really fun to see someone take a silly experiment and launch it to the next level, a silly experiment with wide recognition. Of course, with Stephen Colbert’s huge popularity these days, is it really any wonder that a Twitter account that was updated with some regularity would get noticed?

As noted in the Fake Stephen’s article, there was already an @stephencolbert when Fake Stephen went to register. However, that person had updated very infrequently, and had stopped updating a very long time ago overall. Even though @stephencolbert had 10,000, without updates it was just another idle account. When I checked earlier tonight, Fake Stephen’s account, @stephentcolbert only had 5,000 followers. Yet it was this account that hit the front page of Digg and got called out by Comedy Central themselves. Proof that one of the keys to recognition within a social environment is to be social! (Duh.)

I kind of hope that Fake Stephen carries on in some way, shape or form. It might be a nice addition to the pantheon of other Fakes out there. Like Fake Steve Jobs.

Despite my vehement aversion to being up before noon on any weekend day, I am very very fired up for the NH Media Makers event this Sunday. It will be held at Crackskulls book store, coffee haus and cozy nook. I look forward to meeting a lot of folks I’ve been tweeting back and forth with for the last couple months.

The goal of this get together is not just to serve as a general #NHTWEETUP but to also gather up people from the area interested in, well, making media! Specifically internet-related ventures like vlogging, podcasting, blogging, and making the most of social media outlets. It’s going to be a meet-and-greet and round table discussion, and thankfully for non-morning people like me there will be plenty of coffee on hand.

For those that have already pledged to be there, I look forward to meeting you. For those NH folks who might come across this, make sure you pop by the NH Media Makers blog and RSVP so everybody knows you’re coming.

Gets a (handmade digital replica of an Emperor Norton) dollar. GO!

What can I say, I’m feeling generous!

It might not be as cool as this.

It almost certainly won’t be as cool as this:

But it will be handmade in some fashion, JUST for you, and signed! Collector’s Item like whoa! Any takers?

The Damanhurians are a lot of things. A small group of semi-private spiritualists, architects, philosophers, ecologists, and revolutionaries, for starters. In 1978 they began building a complex series of temples into a mountain in Italy. They finished this construction in the 90’s. They were constructed with the use of whatever labor they could find, and construction was done in secret so they didn’t have to deal with legal constraints. According to wikipedia, Damanhur was an ancient Egyptian city whose name translates literally to “City of Horus”.

For your edification, here’s a short video on the history of the Damanhurians. Check out the Damanhur websites and scope around for more videos. The temples are absolutely gorgeous. There’s so much more to the Damanhurians than just the temple though, they’re a fairly good sized group at this point, with ecologically conscious installations all over the world.

In what can best be described as a very long pitch to get people to join a group called Question Authority on MondoGlobo, Phil Leggiere provides this timeline of the Bill of Rights during the Bush Administration.

It does cite sources all along the way, such as the NY Times, Slate, and US Today, so it can’t really be written off as so much unverifiable conspiracy theory. Still, this is a very long timeline, stretching in a rather poorly designed column from 2001 to this year.

There are gems like this:

June

In “Bong Hits for Jesus” case Supreme court rules that student free speech rights do not extend to promotion of drug use.

And more urgent-sounding items brought up such as:

May

National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD-51) establishes a new post-disaster plan (with disaster defined as any incident, natural or man-made, resulting in extraordinary mass casualties, damage or disruption) which places the president in charge of all three branches of government. The directive overrides the National Emergencies Act which gives Congress power to determine the duration of a national emergency.

Note: For what it’s worth, both of those items are from this year.

It would be really nice if someone could arrange this in a more smooth, visual fashion, rather than a giant article. It is far easier to swallow large timelines of events when arranged as, well, a timeline.

Incidentally, after a little poking around, I discovered that RU Sirius is a member of Question Authority, and the group itself was created by user “MondoGlobo“, who in turn links to 10 Zen Monkeys. All that lead me to look back through Valleywag, where I discovered a brief blurb about MondoGlobo, 10 Zen Monkeys, and RU Sirius.

Given all that, it is difficult to say at this time if the agenda of Question Authority and this timeline is to generate more members for the group, or to generate attention to MondoGlobo itself.