Have you ever been reading or listening to someone who wrote or said something so powerful that you felt a physical reaction? I say physical reaction, because understandly people's reactions to powerful communication are different. For me, my entire body chills and the hairs on my skin raise.
If you have read something that powerful, and the source is still available, please link it up. I'm interested to find the very evocative texts. It might not be as powerful to the rest of us, but I'm still interested to see it.
For me, it's always been definitions. This is WHY something is, or this is HOW something is.
And the thing that made me POST this topic was actually a silly description of Hi-NRG. It's a type of techno music that I like, but I've never been able to find a good classification of the type I like (it's usually called trance, but I don't like MOST trance).
Quote:
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Hi-NRG is a fast variation of disco that evolved in the '80s. Driven by a fast drum machine and synthesizers, Hi-NRG was essentially a dance-oriented music with only slight hints of pop. There would be a few hooks -- generally sung by disembodied vocalists wailing in the background -- but the emphasis of the music, like most dance music, was in the beat.
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I don't know why, but I just went "YES!" and got chills when I read it.
One of the most powerful I've read is strangely The Hacker Manifesto by +++ The Mentor +++. At the time I read it, he wholly described my motivations in a concise and powerful way. He wrote it shortly after I was born, yet he described my life in detail. I still get chills reading it:
http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/manifesto.html
Quote:
The Hacker Manifesto
by
+++The Mentor+++
Written January 8, 1986
Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...
Damn kids. They're all alike.
But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world...
Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.
I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me.. Or thinks I'm a smart ass.. Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.
And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found. "This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...
You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
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