Boing Boing is proud to present its inaugural February Fuck Day gift guide

One year ago today

Missing woman searches for self: Turns out, the woman had in fact returned to the tour bus and had actually helped try to find, um, herself.

Five years ago today

Comcast limits customers to 250 gigs a month: If a customer exceeds more than 250 GB and is one of the heaviest data users who consume the most data on our high-speed Internet service, he or she may receive a call from Comcast's Customer Security Assurance (CSA) group to notify them of excessive use. — Read the rest

A real-time, always-on existence without past or a future, origins or goals.

Here's a bit of audio of Frank Zappa reading some of the dirty parts of William S Burroughs's Naked Lunch, taken from a rare double cassette called "The Nova Convention."

Here are our top posts of 2012. Now you can enjoy them all over again!

KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money is a new eBook charting the strange journey of prankster musicians/artists Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty at the birth of acid house.

Stage magician and "magic experience designer" Ferdinando Buscema, who I've previously posted about, was a guest on the always-provocative Expanding Mind podcast with Erik Davis and Maja D'Aoust. The conversation was fantastic and highly illuminating. It resonated with my own interests in magic (and art and science) as a tool to shift our perception/understanding of reality, cultivate a sense of wonder, and induce transformative experiences. — Read the rest

This week, Boing Boing is presenting a series of essays about movies that have had a profound effect on our invited essayists. See all the essays in the Mind Blowing Movies series here. — Mark

Watch PIG by Adam Mason on Vimeo

Pig (2010), by Rev. — Read the rest

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A brief look behind Ritual America: Secret Brotherhoods and Their Influence on American Society, a Visual Guide. by Adam Parfrey

One of the most exciting secondhand store moments ever: discovering a beautifully preserved 19th century Masonic uniform with dozens of buttons, embroidered crosses, a skull and bones apron, official belt, and pointy "Chapeau" hat topped with white ostrich feathers. — Read the rest

I never met Robert Anton Wilson, but after reading him closely for years, I like to think I know him pretty well. When I went to college in the 1970s, I encountered Illuminatus!, and it had a greater effect upon me than anything I learned in class. — Read the rest

It was raining hard and I came into work soaking wet.

My Dr. Martens had that darker sheen around the toes where the water had sunk into the petrol-resistant exterior. The smell of damp and of dusty books filled my nose as I prepared for another day of work at the library. — Read the rest

Photo of Tiffany Lee Brown by Wiley Wiggins

Someday I hope to share with you audio from an interview I conducted with Mr. Wilson, but it's entirely possible the old cassette is long gone. I'm still looking. For now, here's text:

Robert Anton Wilson was kinda more George Carlin and less Timothy Leary than he sometimes appeared. — Read the rest

"My function is to raise the possibility, 'Hey, you know, some of this stuff might be bullshit.'" — Robert Anton Wilson

I like to think of myself as a believing skeptic, someone who relishes in the ideas, the imagery, the arguments, the theories, and the literature of the occult and the paranormal, but accepts little of it as valid in a phenomenal sense. — Read the rest

Editor's note: I received so many wonderful essays about Robert Anton Wilson, that I've extended RAW Week for a few more days! — Mark

Robert Anton Wilson departed from this world on January 11, 2007 at 4:50 am. He will be missed enormously by his many loving friends and devoted fans, and his powerful impact upon the world will continue to catalyze the evolution of the human species for many years to come. — Read the rest

"Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking."

— Robert Anton Wilson

Fnord

"Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies, etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission." — Read the rest

Written and first published (on my radio show) shortly after Bob's death in 2007.

Robert Anton Wilson is dead, again, and I'm not feeling so good myself. Wilson — or let's call him 'Bob', as he would have preferred — was first reported dead on February 22nd, 1994. — Read the rest

Robert Anton Wilson Remembered: Interviews with Douglas Rushkoff, RU Sirius, David Jay Brown, Phil Farber, and Antero Alli, by Propaganda Anonymous.

My favorite memory of Bob, hmmm. Late one night during one of many infamous Discordian Salons that Bob and Arlen hosted for their fellow writers, scientists and misfits, I found my gaze drifting to the window and out to the blackened sky beyond.

"A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production."

— Robert Anton Wilson

Fnord

RAW (seated) and Rev. Ivan Stang (left)

If Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea had not written the Illuminatus! trilogy, there might still be a Church of the SubGenius, but we probably wouldn't get it.

All SubGeniuses, Dr. Philo Drummond and myself in particular, owe Pope Bob big time, and we've never made any bones about that. — Read the rest