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13 APR 1994
See people as precious
Essential to my mission and personal life. I have to appeal to their best, their inner glory, if they are to help in either area. Each person a source to recreate the world.
5296
06 JUN 1994
Humor elements and values
TFF stories are false-funny jokes which are also secretly true. They have humorous value as false and additional humor value as secretly true, a second level of the joke.Acting as if true also adds to the humor on both levels. The best jokes are told with a straight face. This can be extended into a hoax, where the audience thinks the story is true until they act on it. This is a good game to play with the Inquisition. It spins out the false-funny level, and further conceals the secret truth.
The truth may evoke some subconscious recognition that it is true, even while thought to be false and funny. This adds energy and arouses conflicts in the brain mirroring those in the game. More drama. And a growing ambiguity as the game world grows and seems to have validity.
5389
14 JUN 1994
Funny act
Being one-down and secretly ahead is a humorous position. Energy emanates from such a person as humor rather than love. Actual jokes will then release the energy and seem very funny.Fun and funny have the same root. Rule one has always been fun rather than love, with the fun test as supreme arbiter of yang plans. Fun seems more down to earth than love, more accessible, more established in the culture. Now we link fun to humor. Humor is the most immediate and universal kind of fun available.
I'll be asking for help from one-down by making the other divine. I will make an extravagant appeal for the great powers of this illustrious divinity to do something apparently trivial: play a game.
This will make the players curious about what's behind this game, what I'm not telling them. I'll have created a demand for information. A treasure-hunt.
540604 JUL 1994
Content and tone of TFF story for random actsSET IN PRESENT? The scenario is of a revolution under way. You are asked to join a mass movement that clearly does not exist. False and funny. YES.
SET IN FUTURE? A fictional game scenario. Not as funny. We can explore futures in secret game levels, called planning.
NAIVE OPENNESS? Present as a sincere religious mission. Pious language will be funny.
OUTLAW UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT? A more dynamic joke that involves recruits in secrecy, and gives rise to the Inquisition later on. This goes with the story of a secret revolution under way. Language just the opposite of pious, could include free love. YES.
So we're back to outlaw tone and outrageous content, going for entertainment value. This will secure the widest distribution.
292329 JUL 1994
Religion a TFF joke?
The local project is primarily religious, flanked by entertainment and business. Is the religion a TFF joke? That's hard to call. Could the joke be sold to true believers as a missionary ploy? We want those true believers at the start. We want some weight in the proposal, some major commitment. It's easy to signal to any particular audience how to take the joke, to help them fall down on either side of the tightrope of ambiguity.The joke also has appeal for me because the straight transformation route hasn't gone anywhere. I can't claim to offer that product. And that may be just as well. The joke has no stress, no promises, no struggle, no failure. It's much more fun than a grim and fruitless search for spirituality. And it's a way to relate.
295530 JUL 1994
Joke structure
The central spiritual purpose of the project is both undercut and enhanced by the joke.Undercut: The weight is gone. Who can be committed to a joke? Entertainment and business prevail. And nobody has to confront the spiritual message.
Enhanced: Those who know the joke is true can take further delight in the humor of the situation. The joke can even be played as a hoax, where it starts out true but eventually becomes incredible. Or it splits into many independent stories, some false, as you'd expect from grassroots input, and we may have to determine the truth of everything for ourselves, a challenging treasure-hunt and learning process.
Games have scenarios that are often fantastic and funny. Introducing the story as a game gives it more acceptance. And players pay more attention to the story to learn the game. They will even suspend disbelief and act as if the story is true, entering into the game world like multi-user dungeons.
Keen players will extend the game, carrying its logic to the limit and finding there isn't any limit.
I thought I'd start out serious, and perhaps I can if I say the game is for spiritual education. That's true, and it's the main truth. And those who believe in the truth will know the game is only a game. And that's a good place to stop. If the game turns into an economy we could be tempted to think that was the main truth, so it's a good thing to stay centered in the idea of game as spiritual education, only a pointer to reality.
We can counter the initial seriousness by making the game as funny as possible. This will be the initial goal of the distribution game, to grade rules and material on how funny they are, and contribute our own.
2956
13 AUG 1994
The supreme value of the spiritual economy is humor
As consumers our first need is to be entertained. If we prefer funny to serious material we are only following spiritual law. By choosing funny rather than serious heresies we exercise quality control on the ideas circulated in the spiritual economy, and ensure that our religion is stodge-free.Those able to produce humor will grow rich in the spiritual economy, meeting an insatiable demand, and rapidly advance to sainthood as their currency value takes off.
The rest of us can retail the jokes to people who haven't heard them. This is called missionary work, bringing the divine word to brighten up people's day.
2985
01 MAR 1995
It's all stories
[Rosie] It's all stories, all one big story. That's what holds us together, keeps things going. A good story goes round the world. And the best stories are the funniest. So if you said the spiritual economy was a big joke you'd be about right.I mean, you get rich by inventing your own money, right? And if you come out on top you're saved. These are in the articles of faith, and I'm not making this up now. So the whole thing is a joke, which makes it the most fun thing to come along in ages.
Also, if humor is the driving value of the spiritual economy, then it's an economy run by jokers, and anything can happen. Whenever you see a story, you have to decide for yourself whether it is fact or fiction. Also its status may change. There is no official version of the rules.
But if you write or distribute funny stories you can't go wrong. You're dealing top dollar in the spiritual economy. You'll go far.
Humor is the supreme value of the spiritual economy. That's in the articles of faith also. So what about love and kindness and trust and all that? OK, but they don't travel well. Most people won't stand still for that stuff, but they'll let you make 'em laugh.
3258
17 NOV 1995
Funny money
The key to abundance is to create our own currency. What shall be the basis of our currency? How about fun and laughter? We can call it funny money, and create it to represent how much fun we have. We can also award it for jokes. We can also print up jokes as our currency. What's our money worth? Whatever's printed on it. One joke.Some say that the highest values behind their currency are spiritual values. Absolutely right. Humor is a prime spiritual value. If you're serious you miss the point. Our game economy will thrive on laughter, jokes, fun and silliness. If our money isn't funny, what good is it? If our games aren't ridiculous, let's scrap them and do better next time.
5999
24 NOV 1995
Jokes are memes
Humor is a way to spread an idea or attitude. A good joke rewards the retelling, at least until everybody's heard it. Then a joke becomes old, and people close their minds to it. The joke ceases to be a meme.To avoid this fate, and make a joke into a permanent meme, it has to be an ongoing or running joke, with endless new variations built upon the underlying meme. The TFF structure is rich in this regard.
6006
02 JAN 1996
All-powerful, rearrange the world, make it funny
Not everyone will want to enter Divinity School as God, so we try to make this entry-level position as attractive as possible. We don't ask you to actually run the world. Your job is not to run our lives but to entertain us. With your infinite powers, we ask you to rearrange the world to make it more of a joke than the previous God played on us. Your job performance will be measured by our portable laugh-meter. We will also reward you with funny money.
2629
02 JAN 1996
Start infinitely rich in funny money
One of the perks of entering Divinity School as God is that you are infinitely rich in funny money. This is sometimes called Grail Dollars or other names, but it doesn't matter because whatever it is, you have unlimited supplies of. Whatever world you create, you own the bank.This is another good reason to accept the God job. And even when you move on to lower positions, you can take the money with you. You may not be infinitely rich at that point, but you will have made a good start. Your best strategy while God is to spend as much as possible, so your currency gets known.
02630
02 JAN 1998
Why make money?
Creating your own currency is a rather quixotic gesture on its own. It raises the question, what good is it? No, we don't want to get into serious justification and support. The place for our money is in a game.In a game we make money because that's the game, and it has game value in play and outcome. That's a given. We play for fun. The game has to be good.
Then we can add more reasons, more values, more games. Eventually we'll have justification and support, without being serious.
6422
WE ARE ALREADY RICHWith the power to create our own currency we are already rich. We don't have to go out and grub for other people's money.
But most people don't know that. Until they wise up, we are doubly rich. We create our own money and other people are eager to acquire it.
Even when they do wise up and learn to make their own money, then we are all equally rich.
There is a spiritual truth behind our money: We are all connected to an infinite source. Maybe if we switch from scarce money to abundant money we will realize that fact.
File no. 3395 -- 18 SEP 1998 -- Derek Brownlee
04 JUL 2001
We like the win-lose guys
[Dylan] We call it funny money because it measures how much fun we're having. And that keeps people from taking it seriously. Some guys get real competitive about it, like they have to win, right? If it's a game, there have to be winners and losers, and they have to destroy everybody else. So after these guys have pulled each other down, who's left? All the folks who were just having fun and getting richer every day.Actually we like these win-lose guys. They work so hard keeping score. They set up all the accounting systems and Internet programs and world championship games and 24-hour currency exchange systems and instant credit reports and encrypting everything. So they're building infrastructure. They're duplicating the financial system. Maybe funny money will take over the world after all.
3880
18 AUG 2001
Funny money goals and growth
Jokes only take us so far. Look at all the funnies that are thrown out with yesterday's paper.For funny money to survive we need to invent a thousand things to do with it -- games to play, things to bet on, treasure hunts, trading, advertising, phone messages, random acts of kindness, rumors and hoaxes and lies.
Then funny money can spread throughout the world and make everybody rich or make everybody laugh.
All the best ideas on the future of funny money go into our inventory, with a price tag, what we think they're worth. Then the total in any particular group is what the group thinks, and the ideas with the highest investment can be pursued.
So we're not just collecting jokes. We're building an ongoing game economy, and deciding where it's going.
3918
30 DEC 2001
The purpose of funny money
The purpose of funny money is to make everybody rich and make everybody laugh, an economy of fun.People will believe the fun part before the money, and that's the right priority.
4006
31 DEC 2001
The joke that goes around the world
The logic of the joke is all people need to know. No game required.Game should be easily generated as an extension of the joke, totally decentralized. Something played around the kitchen table or by email. It starts out as creating more jokes, or building funny worlds of fantastic variety.
Stick with the higher goal of making everybody laugh. The purpose of funny money is to create a funny world. The table game should assemble a funny world as its end product, the crazier the better, pure entertainment. The ongoing games or game economy will have the same aim, entertainment.
4734