Thursday, January 25, 2007

Cyberstampers Convention and LARW Gallery


--Newsflash--don't forget--
The online "With Love From Me To You" Cyberstampers Valentine Extravaganza! Convention will open Thursday January 25 at 9 PM EDT and will run 24/7 until midnight (EDT) Sunday January 28. Vendor "booths", stamper chats, FREE online classes and more! Vendor booths will remain open until Wednesday January 31, and the regular Cyberstampers booths are open 356/24/7. We will have a special sale for Cyberstampers shoppers on ALL our items from the beginning of the convention until the end (1-31-07)! Visit our convention booth (after it opens) at: http://convention.cyberstampers.com/larubberworks/ for more details.

Join BlackCats of Cyberstampers and Kendra of Lost Angeles Rubber Works/ASLstamp.com for a Cyberstampers "social" Saturday evening, Jan 27 at 7 PM EST (4 PM Pacific Time). Learn about our new stamps and ask any questions you might have! The classroom can be reached by going to: http://www.cyberstampers.com/schedule.html and clicking on the link for the Lost Angeles Rubber Works social.

Also - finally - more stamping projects and artwork are up in the LARW Gallery! You can view it directly here, but to make it easier to navigate through the site, we recommend you go to www.larubberworks.com/frame.html and then click on the links for "Gallery and Projects". You'll find some new cards and projects by BlackCats, previously taught at the Cyberstampers Conventions!

Sunday, January 14, 2007

RAW - R.I.P


Robert Anton Wilson, one of my favorite crazed but thoughtful writers, left us at age 74 on 1-11-07. It's a little hard to describe his books.. I guess his main thesis would be: "Think outside the box of consensual reality". Or maybe just "Maybe". Heck, read some of his works and come to your own conclusions. For those of you too busy to search Amazon.com, here's a convenient booklist: The Illuminatus Trilogy, Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, Cosmic Trigger I, II, and III, Prometheus Rising, The Illuminati Papers, The Historical Illuminatus Trilogy (The Earth Will Shake, The Widow's Son, Nature's God), Quantum Software, Email to the Universe, Robert Anton Wilson - Maybe Logic (this last is a DVD - probably not captioned tho).

As a little tribute and to give you an idea of the trippy stuff that came out of RAW's mind, and help you get a handle on what the heck he's talking about, here is an excerpt from the preface to Cosmic Trigger I :
"Reality" is a word in the English language which happens to be (a) a noun and (b) singular. Thinking in the English language (and in cognate Indo-European languages) therefore subliminally programs us to conceptualize "reality" as one block-like entity, sort of like a huge New York skyscraper, in which every part is just another "room" within the same building. This linguistic program is so pervasive that most people cannot "think" outside it at all, and when one tries to offer a different perspective they imagine one is talking gibberish.
The notion that "reality" is a
noun, a solid thing like a brick or a baseball bat, derives from the evolutionary fact that our nervous systems normally organize the dance of energy into such block-like "things", probably as instant bio-survival cues. Such "things", however, dissolve back into energy dances - processes, or verbs - when the nervous system is synergized with certain drugs or transmuted by yogic or shamanic exercises or aided by scientific instruments. In both mysticism and physics, there is a general agreement that "things" are constructed by our nervous systems and that "realities" (plural) are better described as systems or bundles of energy-functions.
So much for "reality" as a
noun. The notion that "reality" is singular, like a hermetically sealed jar, does not jibe with scientific findings which, in this century, suggest that "reality" may better be considered as flowing and meandering, like a river, or interacting, like a dance, or evolving, like life itself.
Most philosophers have known, at least since around 500 B.C., that the world perceived by our senses is not "the real world" but a construct we create - our own private work of art. Modern science began with Galileo's demonstration that color is not "in" objects but "in" the inter-action of our senses with objects. Despite this philosophic and scientific knowledge of neurological relativity, which has been more clearly demonstrated with each major advance in instrumentation, we still, due to language, think that
behind the flowing, meandering, inter-acting, evolving universe created by perception is one solid monolithic "reality" hard and crisply outlined as an iron bar.
Quantum physics has undermined that Platonic iron-bar "reality" by showing that it makes more sense scientifically to talk only of the inter-actions we actually experience (our operations in the laboratory); and perception psychology has undermined the Platonic "reality" by showing that assuming it exists leads to hopeless contradictions in explaining how we actually perceive that a hippopotamus is not a symphony orchestra.
The only "realities" (plural) that we actually experience and can talk meaningfully about are perceived realities, experienced realities, existential realities - realities involving ourselves as editors - and they are all relative to the observer, fluctuating, evolving, capable of being magnified and enriched, moving from low resolution to hi-fi, and do not fit together like the pieces of a jig-saw into one single Reality with a capital R. Rather, they cast illumination upon one another by contrast, like the paintings in a large museum, or the different symphonic styles of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Mahler.
Alan Watts may have said it best of all: "The universe is a giant Rorshach ink-blot." Science finds one meaning in it in the 18th century, another in the 19th, a third in the 20th; each artist finds unique meanings on other levels of abstraction; and each man and woman finds different meanings at different hours of the day, depending on the internal and external environments. - (Robert Anton Wilson, Dublin 1986 - Cosmic Trigger Volume I, New Falcon Publications)


So long and thanks for all the mind candy. Fnord!

Saturday, January 13, 2007

January Sales and News


I hope everyone had an excellent holiday season and a happy New Year's as well! Here's what's happening in January:

January 25-28 is the "With Love From Me To You" Cyberstampers Valentine Extravaganza!
The online Cyberstampers Convention will open Thursday January 25 at 9 PM EDT and will run 24/7 until midnight (EDT) Sunday January 28. Vendor "booths", stamper chats, FREE online classes and more! Vendor booths will remain open until Wednesday January 31, and the regular Cyberstampers booths are open 356/24/7. We will have a special sale for Cyberstampers shoppers on ALL our items from the beginning of the convention until the end! Visit our convention booth (after it opens) at: http://convention.cyberstampers.com/larubberworks/ for more details.
For more information and to check out our expo status, go to:
http://www.larubberworks.com/frame.html and click on "Show/Expo Info" in the menu bar to the left.

And now for the current sales. They repeat every month with new items on sale, and here's what we have for January:
Celebrate the new year with an eclectic assortment of stamps at 25% off! They are on sale starting January 1 through 31 at: http://www.larubberworks.com/promo.html
You can also see more sales (from other vendors) at: A Monthly Rubber Stamps Club .

During January, more of our "Style Stones" from Clearsnap are on sale! "These cultured stone embellishments lend a timeless dimension to Cards, Jewelry, Keepsakes, Scrapbook pages, Altered Books, Magnets, Wood, and all Dimensional Craft Embellishments!" A selection of our basic shapes are going for only $3.25 each.
Find them on sale at: http://www.larubberworks.com/promo2.html .

Come check out our Cafepress-printed clothing, buttons, magnets, and other items! They are online at:
http://www.cafepress.com/aslstuff?pid=3964302 and http://www.cafepress.com/lostangeles?pid=3964302
Starting January 14 through February 14, Cafepress will have a great Valentine's Day promotion! Here are the details:
Free Super Saver Shipping on orders over $50 (before tax and shipping)
Coupon: VDAYSHIP (type this into your shopping cart)
Check out both ASLstuff and LostAngeles for great love-themed items for your sweetheart; we also have some Anti-Valentine's designs for the cynical... look for the "Biohazard Heart" on LostAngeles and Toxic Love .

Our new stamp designs for this year are now online! A potpourri of designs including backgrounds, cute animals, teachers' stamps, anatomy, greetings and more!
To see the new designs go to: http://www.larubberworks.com/frame.html and click on the link for new stamps.
To see the new sign language designs go to: http://www.aslstamp.com/frame.html and click on the link for new stamps.

A reminder.. if you order over $100 worth of items on our secure shopping cart, we will take 5% off your subtotal! You can combine items from all of our sites (except Cafepress) on one cart.

These links may be out of frames. To ensure easy navigation, just go to:
http://www.larubberworks.com/frame.html .
You will see our links in the left-hand table of contents. To see the sale stamps, click on "Rubberstampsclub Sale". To see the sale Style Stones, click on "More Sale Stuff". We also have more Style Stones available; to see them, click on the link for "Supplies" then select the link you want from the main supplies page. To see new additions, click on "What's New".

Thanks for visiting!
Kendra
Lost Angeles Rubber Works
ASLstamp.com
Arts'n'CraftSupplies
ASLstuff at Cafepress
Lost Angeles Image Works