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 You'r deep inside searchlores 
 This is a windrose
Fravia found jewels and keys on our fathomless web
  
Sour 'n Sweet
Swan Song
~S~ | ~S~ | ~S~ | ~S~ or, if you prefer: "Soswswso!"
pronounced with a sharp hissing sound, as if to show disapproval, displeasure or contempt... or maybe relief?
...image -say- a tired old "snake locomotive" suddenly escaping steam...

...and anyway: "Olorum morte narratur flebilis cantus, falso, ut arbitror, aliquot experimentis" so take these silly ramblings (Note 1) cum grano salis


Late April 2009             (0027)
~ Sour ~

Ok, so all the cures I had to undergo for almost two years: two complete and quite debilitating chemotherapy cycles, 4 operations, many biopsies, uncounted PET scans and MRIs, months spent inside a clinic... did not work out.
The metastases escaped from the throat: my dutch professor managed to stop everything but not the liver tumour, and my liver is now imploding. So it is a matter of weeks, not even months.
My remaining choices are to die in a clinic, to die home or to ask for euthanasia (the last I will of course do if needs arise... fortunately this is a civilised EU-country and religious nuts don't have here -at least for now- enough power to nuke my rights just to appease and placate the alleged wishes of their dubious godzilla).

I'll go for home: it seems (again: this ubiquitous "seem") that I will die while asleep. I will "just" get weaker (and yellower, gosh: nothing like a terminal tumour to become really ugly) until one day I won't wake up any more. If so, fair enough: you go with a gentle puff on your final trip, an experience that btw is usually reported as unique and unrepeatable :-)

Anyway if universe and time are really infinite (which I somehow doubt), then an almost "metempsicotically identical" combination of neurons will re-appear again somewhere, e.g. on another galaxy and planet... hopefully one with less imbeciles.

More realistically, I regret not having the time to accompany my kids when they will soon enter university. A part of me should live on through them, though, and I think I did manage to give them some powerful weapons & parachutes (see below) to prepare for the ugly times that anyone with a brain above eggplant level can now easily see against the horizon: The powers that be of our "oh so nice" society have managed to provoke the biggest pyramid scheme in economic history (IMF, 21/04/2009: US bank losses at almost 3 trillions; total world bank losses 4 trillions... no small peanuts he!) all money that -ça va sans dire- poors and slaves will have now to mend and repay!
As an added bonus in the mean time they also managed to destroy -probably irremediably- the whole planet's ecosystem :-|

Now, with the deafening chorale of their corrupted politicians and ecstatic media corybants, the only solution they all happily propose (further wasting for their own sake hundreds of billions that in fact belong to you) is to kick-start again the same moronic cycle of forced credit | forced consum... instead of questioning a model of development that utterly failed and is already now (and rightly) biting everyone on his ass.
But that's nothing alas: I fear that the massacres, wars and concentration camps of the next decades will have us remembering the horrors of the first half of the XX century with mild nostalgia.
Our "oh so nice and oh so democratic" societies (where nowadays only soubrettes, body builders, media owners and "the richest bozo in the pond" tend to be elected by a population of zombified slaves happy to run inside their guinea pig wheels) are headed at full speed on a steep slippery slope towards the chasm, where they will perform -smirking as usual- their final reverse three-and-a-half somersault, among the hurrahs! and viva! of their paid media-lackeys... before splashing aloud on the concrete reality pavement below.

~ Sweet ~

Enough messages of doom: to be angry just because you die would be childish. And in fact I am not even angry, just analyzing and rambling aloud.
Anyway some (albeit weak) weapons to defend yourself are there for the take, scattered on the deep web, our fathomless cornucopia of knowledge.
The most powerful ones are imho a sound knowledge of rhetoric (Note 2)
Especially euphemisms, which nowadays can betray a comic sarcasm... and exegesis, and maybe also some sound (if rough and home-made) reality cracking.
Poetry -and more generally a sound general culture- are also quite helpful armors.
Learn how to find good books (see below for some suggestions), you'll need them -like the medieval monks did once upon a time- while the barbarians burn everything and everyone in sight outside the walls.
More generally, never underestimate all sciences "in decadence", they are often quite powerful resources, lowballed (or even forbidden) on purpose by those that want you to just work, drool before a TV screen and consume consume consume... wasting your whole life in order to be able to buy slightly sooner a car of a different color.

Two other possible parachutes are knowing how to reverse engineer software (whose role in our societies and their petty censorships and sniffing attempts is bound to increase dramatically), and a sound learning of more than "just that one" foreign language. These "parachutes" could allow many readers to (maybe) fall on their feet.
Good luck anyway. I do wish all the best to anyone with a brain.

Yet my most cherished advice to all friends is the following: learn to enjoy your contingent present, don't be obsessed by the future. Carpe diem, and enjoy the current emotions: a starry sky, a fresh wind, the shells on the seashore, your love at your side in the night, a long talk in the evening twilight with a friend, the smile of your kids. Substituting *that* with a TV -or a computer screen- is a very poor bargain... that is one of the few things I am now pretty sure of.

Bye bye to all my readers, a big hug to the many friends I made all over the world. A great experience for me! I'll carry on as far as I manage, I'll even try to held a last talk in Köln end May, but I doubt I'll manage it, and anyway soon my sites won't be updated anymore, unless my friends will take care and devise some sort of wiki/blog (and monitoring & corrections facilities) to allow this. We will see.
But do not worry in the least: If you did learn how to search you'll find other good resources anyway. There are aplenty around after all.
Yes! There's sound knowledge on the web, albeit hidden and buried behind or beneath slimy morasses of useless frills, moving dunes of commercial crap and an incredible amount of content-empty and utterly useless "bait" advertisement sites.
Yet the web very structure was made for sharing, not for hoarding and surely not for "selling", never forget it! Therefore searchers may take advantage of this... A good knowledge of the main web-protocols, a good browser and our trusted wireshark and no one is gonna stop a mighty seeker from finding whatever he fancies :-)

Granted there's indeed a lot of obsolete stuff on searchlores, and -as already stated- the byzantine-labyrinthine structure of the site should have been streamlined long ago.
However, even if partly obsolete (but real knowledge is seldom obsolete, isn't it?) I have decided to leave on line everything I gathered and offered along many years as it is and as long as it will remain on the web, because I believe there's still a great wealth of free searching knowledge here, awaiting those among my visitors that are interested in learning and mastering the difficult twin arts of searching the web and reversing everything they find.

If -as some say- people all over our planet did and will learn using what I offered, my life was not wasted :=)

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Rhetorica_ad_Herennium/home.html        
 !

Sursum corda!
Here a small collection of (slightly OT) books, towns and specific places (and games!) that I really enjoyed and by all means recommend to any reverser... ...however please note that this is just another semi-private blabbering, rambling, meandering snippet of searchlores, and you probably don't really need to read it :-)


fravia+     ...25 April 2009, St Marc :-) Woah! Another month!
 ! Notes




Note 1
I wonder if it makes any sense to publish some "ramblings" of mine like this, "spicing" them with some small web-searching examples, tips and links that could even be useful for the educated seeker.

Note 2
Most original sources can be easily found on the web and -frankly- when you can read the real sources yourself, why should you read at all what somebody else wrote about them? :-)
Here, just two examples...
  • Juan Luis Vives De Ratione Dicendi, Bruges, 1532 in Opera Omnia, ed. Gregorio Mayans ý Siscar (Valencia, 1782), 2.93-297, found in an "unpatentable" edition
    As a sidenote: the bastards of the US-EU patent's mafias managed now to bring retroactively patents effects to 70 years, but here we are more than two centuries ago, out of their dirty hands, yokes and deeds :-}
    I also observe and constate -with balmy feelings of regret- that despite the patent's mafias best malevolent efforts, of course all sources and literature can still be easily found in some "gray" areas of the web, for instance using techniques and approaches described everywhere on the web and also in my conferences and in the books searching lore section.

  • Here, fully legit, The Rhetorica ad Herennium: original latin     ••     english translation.
    "Rhetorica ad Herennium" is a derivative of Greek rhetorical theory, this "treatise was broadly influential in Roman antiquity, throughout the middle ages, and particularly in Renaissance rhetorical theory. Its fourth book, in particular, contained a detailed dictionary of rhetorical figures to which countless future authorities turned".
    However if in doubt about the legitimity of such approaches in the country you and your proxies are compelled to live in, just (re-)find and read the texts on line whenever you feel like it, instead of useless hoarding them on your harddisks... it's always quicker :-)





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