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Things that are interesting

Really, Ed, I wasn't trying to game the test at all!


You are The Devil


Materiality. Material Force. Material temptation; sometimes obsession


The Devil is often a great card for business success; hard work and ambition.


Perhaps the most misunderstood of all the major arcana, the Devil is not really "Satan" at all, but Pan the half-goat nature god and/or Dionysius. These are gods of pleasure and abandon, of wild behavior and unbridled desires. This is a card about ambitions; it is also synonymous with temptation and addiction. On the flip side, however, the card can be a warning to someone who is too restrained, someone who never allows themselves to get passionate or messy or wild - or ambitious. This, too, is a form of enslavement. As a person, the Devil can stand for a man of money or erotic power, aggressive, controlling, or just persuasive. This is not to say a bad man, but certainly a powerful man who is hard to resist. The important thing is to remember that any chain is freely worn. In most cases, you are enslaved only because you allow it.


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I thought this was interesting...
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2006/11/27/fashionable_theft/index.html
because it made me think about other places where it might apply.

I'm pretty sure it applies to music, where back in the day, Mozart ripped off his predecessors and contemporaries, and it was good, and now people put samples in their music and get sued.

I'm pretty sure it applies to books, where people have always plagiarized each other, but now 'google search inside' or whatever it's called catches them.

I felt like the author was suggesting the literary equivalent to fashion knockoffs was reading books posted online, or downloading MP3s. Isn't that like shoplifting a Hermes scarf, rather than buying a nearly identical one with someone else's label?

Not that I think plagiarism or sampling without credit is necessarily good...

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