This is an informational topic.

124 responses total.

        Well, it's wet.

        It is not the same river you steped in (assuming you bothered
to step in it).

What's that I smell?

I smell home cooking!
It's only the river
it's only the river

        Wet home cooking..

The River is up to 200 members and it's still in pre-alpha
test phase.  But there is a downside to carrying in (unavoidably)
Well baggage.  The River may yet thrash itself to death.

Ah -- The River is a cyberspacean entity, you are saying?  Tell me
more, in this informational item.

        Fine. A wet cyberspacean entity.

I telneted to river.org, and they didn't let me in.  They said I 
had to be a "member" but didn't tell me what I would get or how 
I could become a member.  

I don't think they want me there.

                "..but the river is wide, and to far to cross.."

<nephi>, we want you on the River, really we do.  I think our
two communities should have ambassadors to each other, study
each other's cultural peculiarities, explore the possibilities
for trade, negotiate peace treaties, and develop reciprocal
immigration laws.  Just pledge $100 for the first year's
membership and I'll take care of it.  (There's a $20/month
user's fee too, but it's waived during the alpha test period.)

It's because we're in the alpha period and not really and truly open.
But Shannon is one of the River Gods, so he'll fix you up.

Hey!  River God!  I kinda like that.

Neptune

Oooh . . . a hundred dollars?  Can I make installments on that?

Not Neptune; Tiberinus, maybe.  But that's not ancient enough.  Who
knows the Egyptian God of the Nile?  What about the Babylonian
God of the Tigris? Or the Euphrates.  We need root authenticity here.

You can make installments.  Also it's only a pledge for now.  No place
to send the money to yet, I don't think...?  If there is, I'm delinquent.

But we knew that.

This is in case you aren't familiar with the egyptian gods.

Tmu, or Atmu, is the closer of the day or night.  Nefer-Atmu, the son of
Ptah and Sekhmit or Bast, represents the power of the heat of the rising
son.

Her-Pa-Khart, "horus the child", represents the morning sun.

Horus, the moring sun, son of Isis and Osiris, is "the avenger of his
father".

Ra, the sun-god, was also the creator of gods and men.

Menthu-Ra is the old war-god of Hermonthis.

Menu, or Min, formerly read Khem and Amsu, represnts the "generation" or
productive power in nature.

Khnemu, is the "moulder"; usually represented making man out of clay on
a potter's wheel.

Ptah, the "opener", the father of the gods (who came forth from his
eye), and of men (who came forth from his mouth).

Iemhetep (the imouthis of the greeks), was the first-born son of Ptah
and Nut.

Thoth, or Tchehuti, the "measurer", was the scribe of the gods, the
measurer of time, and inventor of writing and numbers.  Since writing
was one of the main foundation stones of egyptian society, this god was
obviously an important one to the egyptians.

Set, or Sut, or Setesh, was one of the sons of Geb and Nut, and the
brother of Osiris, and husband of Nephthys.  Originally popular between
the V & XIXth dynasty's, by about the XXVth dynasty "something
happened", and he became the personification of all evil.

Osiris, the great god and king of the underworld, the judge of the dead,
was the son of geb and nut, and husband of Isis.

Isis was a daughter of Geb and Nut, and married her brother Osiris.

Nephythys was another daughter of Geb and Nut, and married her brother
Set.

Anubis was, according to some legends, the son of Nephthys and Osiris,
but elsewhere is said to be the son of Ra.  He presided over the
embalming of the mummy, led the mummy into the presence of Osiris, and
watched over the ceremony of the weighing of the heart.

Shu and his sister Tefnut were emanations of Temu or Khepera.  Shu
typified light, heat and air, and Tefnut moisture.

Hapi, or originally Hepr, is the god of the Nile.

Khensu was, under the New Kingdom, associated with Amen-Ra and Mut in
the Theban triad, and was god of the moon.

Amen-Ra was originally the local God of Thebes, but subsequently became
the natioanl god of Egypt.

Apis, or Hapi, "the second life of Ptah", and the incarnation of Osiris,
was the name given to the sacred bull of Memphis.

The Mnevis bull was worshipped at Heliopolis, and is thought by some to
represent the same symbolism.

Mesta, Hapi, Tuamutef and Qebhsenuf, are the four children of Horus.

Sati, Anquit, and Khnemu formed the triad of Elephantine.  Sati seems to
resemble Nephthys in some of her attributes.

Sebek represented the destroying power of the sun.

Anher, "the leader of the celestial regions" which Shu supports.

Bes seems to have had a sort of double character.  He's represented as a
grotesque person with bandy legs, and he wears a crown of feathers and a
leapard skin.  As a warrior, or the god of war, he is armed with a sword
and shield, and sometimes a bow; he was also the god of music and the
dance, and as such was often represented as half-man, half-animal,
playing a harp, or striking cymbals together and dancing.  It is thought
he repesented the destructive powers of nature.

Sekhmit was the wife of Ptah, and the mother of Nefer Atmu and
I-em-hetep; she was the second person of the triad of Memphis.  She
represented the violent heat of the sun and its destroying power, and in
this capacity destroyed the souls of the wicked in the underworld.

Bast represented the heat of the sun in its softened form as the
producer of vegetation.  Properly speaking, the head of a cat is her
distinguishing characteristic.  She was chiefly worshipped at Bubastis.

Menhit represented the pwower of light or heat, or both.

Mut, the world-mother, was the wife of Amen, and the second member of
the Theban triad; she is also called the "lad of Asher".

Net, or Neith, the "Weaver" or "Shooter", also a mother-goddess, was a
counterpart of the goddess Mut, and was also identified with Hathor.

Maat, the "duaghter of Ra and mistress of the gods", symbolized Law.

Hathor, or "het-hert", is identified with Nut, the sky, or place in
which she brought forth and suckled Horus; she was the wife of Atmu, a
form of Ra.

Nu was the god of the sky, and the husband of Nut.

Nut was the sky, the wife of Geb, and mother of Osiris, Isis, Set,
Nephthys, Anubis, Shu, and Tefnut.

Geb was the husband of Nut, the sky, and father of Osiris, Isis, and the
other gods of that cycle.

Serqit, daughter of Ra, wife of Horus, and identified with Sesheta and
Isis, symbolized the scorching heat of the sun.

Maahes is sometimes represented as a man, lion-headed, wearing a disk
and uraeus.

Seker, or Socharis, a form of the night-sun, oftne represented as a man,
hawk-headed.

Ta-urt, or Thoueris, was the wife of Set.  She's usually represented
with the head and body of a hippopotamus, the hind quarters of a lion,
and the tail of a crocodile.

Sefekh-Aabu, or Sesheta, is a form of the goddess Hathor that was
worshipped in Hermopolis, and also adored in Memphis.

Neheb-ka, is a god mentioned in the book of the dead.  He's represnted
with the head of a serpent.

The egyptians aren't much noted for change; indeed, as one of the first
great bureaucracies based on writing, they were very conservative
indeed.  Nevertheless, as they started off as the conglomeration of many
different local river settlements, different gods were worshipped in
different places, with different tales being told of them.  And, as time
went on, different gods would come in & out of fashion, or similar gods
from different places would be confused with each other.

Good God <says juls ironically>; Professor Clyne has been upstaged by
Fact. How could a dreamed-up mythology (one conference on The River)
possibly compete with that Who's Who of the Original Riverpudlians?

What an inspiring cast of characters!

Aaaaaagh! <brighn whacks #17 a hundred and fifty times with a wet noodle>

Stick to the Kmetian Neteru names or stick to the GraecoRoman Egyptian 
names, but for dieties sake don't mix them!  You wouldn't want to piss off
Aset!

Wow.  Marcus is so cool. 

How do you know so much about Egyptian Gods? (say it w/ a British
accent) ( and don't say "a king 'as to know these things")

<juls bows in deep reverence to Marcus Watts -- the God of the Garbage
Mind.>

Is that what you call it?  we call it mental fat.  But we mean it in
a good way.

Well, I like the metaphor of the old-fashioned kitchen garbage can;
I imagine my mind (and Marcus' to a much richer and deeper degree)
to have a whole lot of this-and-that dumped in it: the coffee grounds
of astrophysics  are sprinkled over the eggshells of the Mozart
Requiem, which lie next to the banana peel of the index to River
gods, etc. 

The question is really one of retrieval, and Marcus has (naturally)
mastered that. I'm still working on it; the perfection of the 
retrieval system is in a race with the constant collection of yet
more data.  (No wonder I get migraines.)

I have to go lie down now.

My secret is to keep lots and lots of books.  Then it's a simple matter
of finding the right book, rather than of actually wasting the time to
(a) memorize the stuff, and (b) recall it on demand.

The only problem is, I've long since run out of bookshelf space.

Spoken like a Scholar!

What we need is more, manymany more, books on CD with search engines.
Faster looking things up, easier to transmit the findings, and the
savings in bookshelf space is enormous.

But you can't take those kinds of books to the beach (yet).

What? Laptops don't have built-in CD-ROM drives?  Is technology
letting us down?  Has the exponential curve of progress gone
flat?  I am utterly dissillusioned.

After watching the horrifying "Tycoon" on TV last night, I'm convinced
that not only will technology drag us down the road to perdition,
but that Bill Gates' pimply puss will be on every start-up screen
at Pismo Beach.

I'm worse than disillusioned, I'm scared to death.

I have been on an important mission and have not been here for a complete
cycle of the moon. I return to find much changed. 

The River, an alternate 'Well, appears to be running linux in the SF area.
It is a grand idea for accordion players, as the Well's approach to things
has taken its turns not to their liking. No more slow system.
Too bad for juls's (or was it thanne's) nails.

Most from here will not want to pay so much for a dip in the river. 
I hope that if this means you all leave us, you will at least remember the 
home of the (slow, but) free lunch, and return from time to time.

(We're building sawhorses. Next comes scaffolding. Watch our (slow) dust.)

Of *course* we'll check in here, you silly -- and on a regular basis,
like now.

(My nails are suffering from the indecently, some might say overreactive,
response time of River linux. Some things, gentlemen, are MUCH better
if done slowly. And deliberately. Never forget that.)

Checking in.  Drying off.  Eagerly awaiting <humdog>'s return.
And where the hell's <brenner>?
Nice to see you <juls>.

The River is more expensive than here, but it is, nonetheless,
a cooperative.  I hang here partly to see "cooperation" in action,
and partly to escape some perniciously annoying River rats.  (Not
*the* <rats>, of course.)

The River?

As in the Austin upstart group?

They must be pulling their own.

How do I get info?

Multiple rivers?  Shades of Philip Jose Farmer!

The Austin upstart group is the Spring (whole nother gang, whole nother
uh, philosophy.

River is still pre-Alpha, so membership is limited at the moment while
some of the bugs are sprayed. (Though some of the pernicious ones, as
Shannon says, will prevail in spite of gallons of virtual Round-Up, and
will continue on their merry, self-righteous, topic-killing way.) For
further, less cranky information, <raemo>, you have only to slime
<vsclyne> himself -- he's a honcho over there. (I have empirical data
to the effect that only sliming works with the redoubtable Mr. Clyne --
whining only annoys him and makes him extremely surly.)

(Yes, he broke my heart, the cad.)

Wait.  Juls.  It was all a misunderstanding.  I thought
*you* left *me*.

Hey, take just one close look at these mouldering Oysters Rockefeller,
you bounder, and then tell me who was unceremoniously dumped. (Ah, woe --
ah, wurra, wurra. Boy nobody can suffer the way we Arsh can.)

Well, I'm glad my worries were silly.

The river does sound like an interesting experiment.
Slightly before my time on Grex began, Grex was coerced into existence
by a group of people who were disaffected users of another system.

Despite the price tag differential, Grex and the River are kindred spirits.

One curiosity-- What conferencing software do you have for it?

I tried finger info@river.org but found no info available.
I would suggest (when you're ready) creating a id 'info' and giving it
an informational .plan file. Reduces the drain on staff.

Even linux on your (what is it, a Pentium?) will slow down if you let
enough people on. While it's closed it will resemble greased lightning, 
you will become addicted to the speed and never be happy later on, 
and your nails will suffer. Grex has solved all these problems, of course.

The River's conferencing software is Yapp, with some modifications.
It works pretty well.  And right now it's blindingly fast.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss