OC:: scientology

after this past weekend, i knew that scientology was a subject that i needed to bring up in one of my blog posts.

on saturday, there was a protest outside of the church of scientology on high street that i attended with my boyfriend and two friends. here's a dispatch article about it that was in the sunday paper. i've never been to a protest before, but i always thought of scientology to be a cult. justin and i bought dust masks at kroger and headed to high street.

the CoS [church of scientology] itself has a nice sign and an extremely expensive-looking big screen TV in the front window. we were across the street. about 80 of us showed up, many people carrying signs or handing out fliers, all of us covering our faces. the reason why?

scientologist lawyers have enough money to track you down. they are notorious for photographing or videotaping protests in an attempt to find a face or name to sue. it seems ridiculous, but once my mother got back from her weekend vacation and found out i had gone, even she was genuinely concerned that i had covered my face and head. the CoS will attempt to harm or bring lawsuits against anyone they can pinpoint criticism to. a prime example of this is "operation freakout", which tells of paulette cooper and her harassment from the CoS after she wrote a book criticizing the cult. they will do anything to keep their name clean. there was a rumoured camera in the bottom of the window of the CoS we were picketing across the street from. this has been reporting at many of the other worldwide protests as well.

the first protest was on february 10th earlier this year, which is my birthday, and coincidentally, also the birthday of another big scientology secret: lisa mcpherson.

i have not been much of an activist before now, but i've spent the entire day researching it. i already knew about many of their illegitimate activities before i went to the protest, but now i've really read up, and what i've found shocks me. its worse than i intially thought. here's a good link that sums up the majority of the crimes the CoS has committed.

now, in closing, i'd like to make it very clear that both myself and anonymous as a whole has NOTHING against freedom of religion or speech. people can and should believe what they want. the attacks are not on the beliefs of scientology, but are in fact against the practices, human rights violations, and immorality of the church itself.


here are some great links for you to check out::
xenu.net
whyaretheydead.net
xenutv.com
lermanet.com
lisamcpherson.org
perkinstragedy.org

those links honestly cover everything i don't feel like i could in one post, and those are really just a few.

OC:: internet bullying

i guess this is the first topic that came to my mind to write about this week, due to my recent encounters with negative/hateful/offensive comments being left on my personal blog. the comments were anonymous and not linked to any username, so i assumed it was a random "troll" and disregarded what was said. in the beginning, i just deleted and ignored the comments, but when more personal attacks came, i found it amusing to counter and respond.
my first instinct was that the person was spamming me because someone who didn't like me posted links to my page on a site and told people to send me hate mail/comments. this made sense because the person seemed not to know me very well, although they were armed with some personal info/rumours about me. their IP address also linked them to illinois. i don't think i know anyone there.
after a full day of genuinely having fun chatting with my pseudo-stalker and egging them on [note: i know it would have been best to delete/ignore it, but it was actually interesting to try and sleuth the identity of the person and to test how much they really knew of me], they revealed their identity to be someone i personally knew in real life. someone who had never before given me any indication of their distaste for me, and someone i had never personally wronged, nor had i hurt anyone close to them. he continually insisted that he knew that he was getting to me when in reality, like i said, i found the situation to be amusing. here's a quote to help me pose some questions for you to ponder:

"Keep crying about me, telling yourself your feelings aren't hurt...you know that it just fuels my fire."

"I know that I'm under your skin and I know that I'm in your head, and I know that I'm hurting you."

pretty ridiculous.
i guess i just want to ask everyone's opinion on internet bullying. why do you think people do it to begin with? out of personal insecurity?
why do people think it's an acceptable way of communicating a negative opinion of someone?

OC #1 for this week

honestly, interim is driving me fucking nuts already.

i got into linworth a little over a year ago, halfway through my sophomore year, so i kind of had to hop to it. i knew that because my main passion in life is art, and because art is a very independent trade, i'd want to do an independent study, and so i did. i chose to plan and begin to make a comic. that went okay.

this year, i need to have a mentor. and i have no idea what to do. i'd like for chris to be my interim advisor once again, seeing as how he is the teacher i'm most comfortable around at linworth, and the one i feel that knows me the best. the fatal flaw in this plan is that he will not take on any student in his interim group until they know exactly what they're doing.
well, shit.

at this point, i have two possible routes.
i have an acquaintance of mine by the name of nick meyers, who is 25 years old, and has a deep passion for electronic music or "techno". his work is not what you would consider generic "techno", "club", or "trance" music, it's definitely a little more on the eclectic, minimalist side, although still quite danceable. electronic music has always been an interest of mine, i listen to anything from rave to grime to new wave to trance, etc. and i've always had an underlying interest in creating it. i attempted to do so a summer or two ago, when i had the free time to devote to learning various programs and such, but i failed miserably. because nick has lots of experience doing this, as well as an array of professional equipment and programs, he'd be the guy to teach me if i wanted to dedicate a week to trying my hand at this.

my other option is that i've always kind of wanted to create a short film documentary about the dance game culture. i have no experience with video editing programs at all, but i've been itching to make a documentary about this underground scene, which is why my whole story about the community basically got word-barfed out into a blog post a few weeks back. i like to talk about it, and i like to tell people about it, it's not something that a lot of people know that i'm involved with, and it's not something most people know anything about whatsoever. i want to tell our story, if that's not too cheesy to say, haha. the community goes waaay past just hanging out at the arcade on weekends. i think this is a project i could genuinely be passionate about -- i just need to find someone who could mentor me with using video editing software.

yeah, i haven't really complained about my interim issues yet, so i figured i'd go ahead and get on that, since we can write about whatever, haha.