Talk:The Illuminatus! Trilogy/Archive 1

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Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Contents

Fnord lore

Note that this page now has a range of different kinds of invisible fnords inserted.

Although I agree personally with some of the editorializing comments, it strikes me as rather POVish, and needs rewriting. Also, am I right that this trilogy was a partial inspiration for Eco's (far superior) Foucault's Pendulum? Slrubenstein

Foucault's Pendulum and the Illuminatus Trilogy are entirely different kettles of fish. If one judges superiority by cultural impact, then the Illuminatus Trilogy wins. The Illuminatus Trilogy is a much more experimental book in terms of language, structure, and universe. Foucault's Pendulum is certainly more erudite and traditionally structured.
--William M. Connolley 17:16, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)) I prefer Illuminatus too. Did you notice the gross logical flaw in FP, BTW?
I didn't, but maybe it would be a good addition to Foucault's Pendulum (book)? --DenisMoskowitz


Fnord

I removed the fnords, as they make editing the page harder. Plus, that joke is old and not funny. Martin

Or maybe it's a problem with your sense of humor.

The interesting thing about this conceit (fnords) is that it is not falsifiable.

Of course it is. Just count the number of words in a newspaper article, then run an OCR program on it, and see if the count matches. --Evercat 01:43, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)

That assumes you can trust the computer, the optical scanner, the monitor, the software, etc. not to have been infiltrated by the conspirators behind the fnords. Only someone who crafts their own computer chips could have a reasonable confidence that the fnords aren't being systematically hidden, and even so it's doubtful that person could avoid unconsciously designing it to hide fnords.
But yes, as conspiracy theories go it's pretty silly. --The Cunctator 23:25, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)
If they were able to program people in such an advanced way, they wouldn't need fnords at all. :-) --Evercat 02:01, 19 Dec 2003 (UTC)
'Not Falsifiable?' Take a newspaper. Cut it into bite-sized pieces. Along with all the usual mangled words and fragments, if you can find a 'fn' or 'nord' or'nor' or etc. you probably have found it. Indirect evidence is still evidence. This would work since you've been programmed to react to the gestalt, not pieces. As a further check, if you reconstruct the article, and you cannot account for some phrases that is further evidence. --Maru
Not so.
It is implied in the books that fnord is not the actual word used for this task; it is a substitute since the actual word would not be able to be detected by most readers.
Finding fragments of words containing "fn" or "nor" or "ord" wouldn't prove anything. --Unregistered
Did you read my comment? Even if the first test, seeking fragments of 'fnord', failed, the second test is a general test- it catches *any* fnord-like word. And if the word is in another alphabet which people are trained to ignore like the fnord, then you cut the paper apart to consitutuent lines. And so on and so on through descending levels of granularity. (And you cannot have fnord-like lines or perception of the coventional alphabet would be impossible.) --maru 19:18, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

i think you guys are entirely missing the meaning of a fnord. it is far more liekly that what wilson and shea are getting at isn't the presence of physical words within the type of newspapers current affairs literature etc, rather the presence of implicit information, that can be freely derived from the facts available. such a piece of information is the fnord, and we are 'trained' not to recognise them by the logogram of the societal structure in which we live. if you re-train yourselves, fnords are in fact everywhere. i guess the concept can be adequately summed up by the phrase 'read between the lines'. 134.115.68.21 08:10, 27 October 2005 (UTC) Christophersen el Webstramos

Argentinum Astrum symbol

This talk's corresponding article contains

the ∴.∴.,

and the target of that link contains

(or A.A. or ∴.∴.)

but neither of these special-character markups is sufficiently widely rendered by browsers to be used.

Presumably the rendering desired is the symbol sometimes used in logic for "it follows that", namely three dots that would lie at the vertices of an (invisible) equilateral triangle that has a horizontal edge and the third vertex above it. Even if that can be rendered with TeX, that is probably an intolerable annoyance in this talk page's article -- unless the work described goes on for an annoying number of chapters just describing the dots without mentioning an equivalent name or initials.

(IMO, the stub for Argentinum Astrum deserves at the very least a paraphrase of my description above, and probably a TeX rendering if feasible and a graphic box if not.) --Jerzy(t) 16:35, 2004 Mar 30 (UTC)


The Case of Karl Koch

someone more familiar could include info summarised at http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Hagbard

That information is already provided at the hagbard entry, and you can get there from here using the "What links here" link in the toolbox. I don't think we need anything else - the Illuminatus! Trilogy is an important part of hagbard's story, but the reverse is not the case. DenisMoskowitz 02:00, 2004 Aug 6 (UTC)

Cleanup

moved from Wikipedia:Cleanup for posterity — Gwalla | Talk 16:52, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The Illuminatus! Trilogy reads like a book report for school, uses first and second person, seems to need NPOVification. I've never read the book(s) so I don't know where to start. {{cleanup}} was added on July 30, but evidently whoever did so neglected to list it here. — Gwalla | Talk 02:46, 4 Aug 2004 (UTC)

(William M. Connolley 12:02, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)) I've done a minor clean - removed the "I" - and added some. It might be OK off cleanup now, but I'll leave that for someone else.
That's a big improvement, thanks. I did a little bit more, mostly copyediting to make the prose flow a little better and to remove exclamations. Still not fantastic but good enough to warrant removing the cleanup notice. — Gwalla | Talk 22:36, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Spoofing Ayn Rand

Shouldn't the fun made, or rather the spoofing, of Ayn Rand and her books be mentioned in the entry? It seems like an interesting point and one that perhaps a few readers didn't get when they read the Illuminatus. --Karl Gunnarsson 18:48, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Um, theatrical release?

Um, when? are there any ELF agents that can get me some of their punch and the tickets? I was never here.

CABAL! CABAL! CABAL! RFC! RFC! RFC! It's all Jimbo's fault!

Elvis is alive in The North Pole

When?

This article doesn't say when the books were originally published. -GTBacchus(talk) 21:21, 11 December 2005 (UTC)