Note from the Editor:
Alone with a Djinn at Petra; …after entering and exploring Israel, we crossed the border into Jordan, and got a very lovely bus tour with a guide sponsored by that latter country’s government. He was so professional, intelligent, and well-spoken; I was thrilled to have him as our leader until we crossed back. That gentleman made me want to see more of his country, and others across the region, no longer fearing them like my relatives and the military taught and did.
Arriving at the storied cliff-dwellings we’d been told Alexander the Great had his forces carve into the local rock formations and canyon, I started to realize it was WAY bigger than what Hollywood and the “news” had shown; Petra stretched on for MILES… all the way out over the horizon… and deep down into the Earth. It was something NO army could have done, at least not in the time Alexander had passed through. I would later start to understand, thanks to many experts becoming friends, that it had been fashioned by far more ancient and powerful peoples.
The Djinn are what the people over there call Elementals; they are like the genie in Aladdin, but not necessarily living in golden lamps –though I’m sure they could. Djinn are more energy than flesh, and are sometimes called ‘smokeless fire’, or spirit-like. They don’t fully exist in our plane of existence, and are masters of the elements, their bodies and minds being so much more closely related to the primal things, such as forces of nature.
Atop one of the difficult-to-reach places overlooking the main ‘strip’ of the canyon known to the outside world as Petra, I was approached by a woman whose eyes very clearly told me she was one of the Djinn, she wanted me to know this, and she was welcoming me, as well as testing me, with a small and simple gift… She placed a smooth pebble in my hand, and I somehow knew what was really going on in that gesture. I bowed to her, and was very grateful and serene in how I did it, and I could tell this registered well with her; I had honored her in turn, and the test was over; the Djinn had welcomed me to their famous desert home.
Somehow… I know she knew I knew a little about her kind, and I loved them, and had been hoping to meet some of them. Somehow… I know I will return, next time without a lame church group full of jerks. This first-pass was out of the way, I’d made it all the way out and up right to where I needed to, pushing through the fatigue of having lost a lot of sleep the night before (again, thanks to the assholes in that typical religious group). Round two will be by invitation… from more Djinn, showing me the rest of that city. Round three? Working with them to make my own.
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Actual Advertisements:
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Vocab of the Day:
- mind-surfing: (also: ‘mind-hopping’) coined from ‘surfing the Internet’, this indicates browsing through minds instead of computer files; looking at the files of brains, such as thoughts, daydreams, and memories, even if they are repressed or otherwise forgotten by the given person (ex.: Inisfreeans sometimes mind-surf to experience life through the sensory perception of other beings, though also to process all of the data recorded by any number of brains, thus rendering interrogations and lie-detector tests obsolete.)
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Advertisement Parodies:
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Articles:
2011-2012 articles are here.
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Artwork:
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Comic Strips:
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News Stories:
Nahanni National Park Decapitations: numerous reports from local authorities in this remote Canadian wilderness area suggest a possible holdout site or entire nation of antediluvians
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Poking Fun at Fake News:
Sometimes we realize the ‘news’ is fake long after the fact, and a prime example from this year is here. This site talks about how it was fake-news to report that Iraq had weapons of mass-destruction.
How long did it take for this to start getting talked about and reported? YEARS.
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Meme Faves:
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Great Shit from Army Ranger Mat Best:
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Photos:
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Screenshots:
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