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Conspiracy theories, government cover-ups, and the Secret Masters!
Or "How to conquer the world over 39 cent tacos and Coke...."

All of us here at The Commune to some degree enjoy either believing, debunking, inventing, mocking or fearing conspiracies of various kinds. It's an interesting hobby, because you can simultaneously laugh at the outrageously goofy ideas of other paranoid weirdos out there, while harboring many of your own, openly or privately. I inherently mistrust all authority, and the higher and more powerful that authority is, the more it is abused, and the more I mistrust and fear it. Years ago we clipped a newspaper article called Suspicious Minds from the LA Times, and it gives a good overview of the general state of mind in the paranoid underground, and how it's becoming more above-ground every day.

With the following, we intend to add to the storehouse of the net, as the majority of these have come from other sources unavailable online. Some of these are quite frightening, others are just goofy. We plant our tongue firmly in cheek while looking nervously over our shoulder, and give you our:

Conspiracy Of The Month

1999

1998

1997

The internet is probably the greatest thing to happen to conspiracy theory. It provides a host of information that is easily obtained, and allows equal time to every possible source, sane or psyhotic, validated or prefabricated. All walks of life of the common man can interact and discuss any topic freely and openly. Of course, the truly paranoid would disagree, and there are all sorts of real or imagined government sanctions and censorship attempting to subdue the web as I type.

Online, as we've come across things that sparked our interest, either seriously or hilariously, we've added them to our list of Illuminated links. Many forums of discussion are out there as well. Here are just a few newsgroups: alt.conspiracy, alt.politics, alt.censorship.

On the lighter side, Steve Jackson Games created a tongue-in-cheek game based on conspiracy theories called Illuminati, originally published in 1983, when it won a Hugo award for best new game. With the popularity of Magic: The Gathering, they modified the game for the collectible card game format, vastly expanding and improving the original idea. This new game, Illuminati: New World Order (or INWO), has become the drug of choice for The Ebright Commune. Combined, we own literally thousands of cards and have played an average of at least three games a week since we started in 1994.

The Assassins expansion fueled us onward for quite some time, having both balanced a lot of things out, making degenerate decks harder to survive, while also adding some great new twists and tricks. We slacked off a lot in the last six months, but the fire is flaming anew with the release of SubGenius. We've just started tapping it's absurd potential, so it will keep us going for a while, with no end in sight for the possibilities for that creation of the newest cool combination of cards that surprises the others with some sneaky twist.

INWO [c] Steve Jackson Games

Here are some decks we've built:

Like most players, we've created several of our own "home brew" cards, and we thought we'd share our ideas with you. We didn't want to create anything that upset game balance, so we only have a few and most are New World Orders. That way, if it unbalances things, it does it to everyone at once.

Previous to INWO, we regularly played original Illuminati, another Steve Jackson creation called Hacker (a game about cracking into computer systems illegally), enough Stratego that we're considering adding pages on strategy for it, and lots of late-night Euchre. Although we go back to these sometimes, as well as the occasional game of Trivial Pursuit, Clue or Risk, nothing compares to our mutual obsession with INWO. We highly recommend it, but not to those with the tight budget or busy schedule. It won't bury you as deep as Dungeons & Dragons and the like (those were our high-school days, when nothing mattered and responsibility was a vague concept) but it will take it's toll.