From bladex@bga.comSun Feb 12 12:18:15 1995 Date: Sun, 12 Feb 1995 01:43:39 -0600 (CST) From: David Smith To: scream@bga.com Subject: The Burn, Recycle, Blame Issue "I've got a bad feeling about this" -- Luke Skywalker babybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybaby babybaby yba aby byba abyb byba babybaby babybaby bybabyba babybaby byb yba babybaby byb yba ba ba babybaby babybaby yba babybaby yba aby yba ba ba babybaby babybabybabyb yba babybaby byb yba babybaby byb yba ba ba babybaby babybaby yba aby byb yba aby byb yba ba ba babybaby babybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybaby The "Burn, Recycle, Blame" Issue February 11, 1995 __________________________________________________________________________ | | | Editor : Blade X | Call Tejas at 512-467-0663 for BBS pickup | | bladex@bga.com | Send e-mail to majordomo@bga.com with the | | Neo-Wobblie Node # 269 | message "subscribe scream" in the body. | |__________________________________________________________________________| INDEX Ediborial #1 -- Tiger Hunting in Hugo Oklahoma........ Me Ediborial #2 -- Kurt C0bain........................... Me Ediborial #3 -- Archaelogical Discovery............... Me The Arcology of Violence : Christmas Day Massacre .... Me The Future of Scream N *me*me......................... Me Seven Simple Steps to Being Cyber-Organic............. Me Action Adventure Cliches ............................. Keith Goolsbey The Subscribers Strike Back .......................... Not me "I've got a bad feeling about this" -- Princess Leia Organa Ediborial Just got back from Hugo, Oklahoma. I had read in the newspaper about Shawna, a 250 pound Bengali tiger escaping from the circus holed up there, and how the experts expected to take up a week to catch her. So I did what any Quentin Tarentino cult wanna-be would do : rounded up a posse. Wrote my friend Matt, asking him to grab his shotgun, pickup truck, his dog Pig, and to have his wife Heather pack him a nice lunch because we were going tiger hunting! I was to bring the Shiner Bock and 80 pounds of raw beef as bait. Matt was saying that it smothered Oklahoma media, each station leading with the same news story. DON'T GET DRUNK, TAKE MEAT OUT TO THE WOODS, AND TRY TO CATCH THE TIGER YOURSELF! Like where did you think I got this idea? Then they would interview Farmer Bob, who would report seeing something orange and black slinking through the trees. Shawna is safe and sound back home, and so am I. * * * Ediborial #2 There is something horribly wrong with hearing Kurt Cobain on the radio. First time I heard his voice on the radio again I just stopped. Here was someone who was dead, someone who had taken a shotgun and blown his head off just eight months before, and in the process abandoning his wife and small child, here he was singing a new song for a new album. I leapt out of my chair, heart both pounding and frozen, unable to understand, unwilling to process this new information. Afterwards, I listened to the radio, read newspapers, magazines, Usenet articles, and all of those other information conduits which I am hard-wired into, but nobody said anything. I listened, but no one spoke it, so it's like no big deal. Whatever rip in reality has been sewn. No, it's not. I know it, and you know it, so I'm saying it here : there's something horribly wrong. So no, I am not buying the damn album. Or the next one. * * * Ediborial #3 Recently, my computer was in the shop for an upgrade and tune-up. So I fired up my old computer, the one that had been lying in the corner of my room, unplugged, disconnected, for several months, maybe even a year or more. Inside was several articles, notes, tidbits, and selections that I had saved for copies of Scream Baby that I had never used. Hey, it's no Tomb of Alexander the Great but one must choose your own adventures in the 90s. Much of this I don't remember what I was writing it for, or what I was talking about, but liked it enough to include anyway. I've also included subscriber statements, when I demanded an essay question before I would add anyone to the list. I started compiling an issue I was going to call the Subscribers Strike Back! and include only answers to these essays, but stripped out all of the names and forced it into this you/me continuum. Those days are gone; now one only needs to know a Majordomo subscribe command. I guess I've gotten fat and lazy like everyone else in the information age. * * * "I've got a bad feeling about this." -- Han Solo * * * Ediborial Date Unknown People are terrified of possibility. It's not that they are scared, but rather unsure of what to do with it. Before I created the mini-poll [see last issue] the horizon was unbounded. There wasn't nothing I couldn't do! But I don't dare tell you people that, for I would have gotten no response at all. Rather, I severely limit reality to seven or eight options, call it a "choice" and sit back while people gleefully herd through like cattle to the slaughterhouse. How disgusting. * * * The Arcology of Violence : The Christmas Eve Massacre / Charlie Manson Written December 1994 One of my friends (B______) and I have an ongoing conversation that we refer to simply as "The Christmas Eve Massacre". Imagine, if you will, the sheer number of people packed in the malls searching for that one last gift. Imagine, if you will, the notoriety given to a single gunman -- or small group of armed assailants -- if he "opened up". The single day mass murder record of 25 (Bakersfield, California, 1983) suddenly seems not worth mentioning. B______ and I have some disagreements, of course. I argue that one has a chance of scoring more points on the day after Thanksgiving, which is the biggest shopping day of the season. B______ counters that being known through history as "The Day After Thanksgiving Murderer" doesn't have quite the same ring. What one loses in body count is compensated by style/shock points. We both agree on avoiding the department anchor stores. Not enough people, too many places for them to hide, too many opportunites to be bogged down. Another point of disagreement revolves around escape plans. I'm like, why bother making them? There is no way someone will be able to walk into a mall on Christmas Eve, drop concussion grenades into the atrium in order to wipe out people on the ground level while simultaneous strafing the mall hallways with automatic fire, and expect to escape alive. It's not the mall police that you have to worry about, but armed shoppers. Either way, B_____ wastes a lot of our quality time together discussing vans, helicoptors, switching vehicles, and emergency routes. So given the conversation that I have about malls, and given that there is just *something* about the holiday season that brings one's innate hatred of humanity crawling to the surface, you can imagine my response when Paco asked me to write an article about "going to the mall". Sure! I'd love to! But when it was time to go.....well, someone swiped my enthusiasm. I did go at least once, however, for the purpose of doing research for this article. Let's just say it was an apocalyptical nightmare. I am not going to delve into the gory details, but will provide this example. I was drained I couldn't even manage marching into one of the stores selling nothing but calendars of half naked men, half naked women, fantasy figures, flowers, cute animals, celebrities, and Star Trek : The Next Generation idols and ask for the 1994 Johnny Marr Murder Can Be Fun calendar. I am sure that Johnny will cover the issue in a more detailed, less frentic attitude, but let me talk now about the new controversy brewing around Chuck Manson. First, a brief history lesson for those who may not know. Chuck Manson and his cult "Family" brutally murdered seven people in California some 20, 25 years ago. The only reason anyone cared then or now is that one of the victims was a movie star : the actress Sharon Tate, wife of film director Roman Polanski, and heavily pregnant with his child. Chuck's plan was simple : by committing heinous crimes on white people and making it appear that blacks were responsible, he hoped to instigate a race war. The Family would then flee to Arizona and wait. The blacks would win the war, Chuck surmised, due to superior survival tactics and pronounced physical prowess. They would take over the White House and start the business of running the country. But because of inferior intelligence traits, the blacks would be unable to do the job. They would then turn to Chuck, waiting patiently in the desert, and ask him to be President. Now that's a plan! People were killed, the Family got caught, and Chuck got thrown into the slammer, and will probably never, never never be released from jail, no matter how many times he appears at parole hearings with swastiskas carved into his forehead. I mean, what better way to show that one has reformed and is fit and able to be reintegrated into mainstream American culture? History lesson over. Fast-forward to the future. What people are upset about now is that Chuck is going to be *rich*. The new Guns N Roses album (called spaghetti something) has an uncredited track on it, penned by no other than...well you know how. According to a wire report. estimates are that Chuck will receive $60,000 royalties for each million copies of an album that is expected to easily sell several million copies. In addition, there are t-shirts with Chuck's face and imagery available. [NOTE 2/11/95 -- I have a note written here about recommodification of icons, but never finished this article. What I would note today is a similar phenomenon surrounding the controversy over witnesses to crimes being paid money by the tabloids for their stories. Only certain people are allowed to make money -- law enforcement, judges, politicians, and the media. Dan Rather can make hundreds of thousands of dollars talking about the latest "development" in the O.J. Simpson Trial but if someone is paid $2500 to tell Hard Copy, I saw four people walking down the alley at the time of the alleged murders, something has been compromised. The criminal justice system and those who feed off it garnered millions by playing off the shock and fear generated by crimes and it is just a little sanctimonious to start drawing lines of accept-a-ble-ness.] * * * "I've got a bad feeling about this." -- Lando Calrissian * * * [Est. date : Summer of 1992. Before I did Scream Baby, I did this huge multimedia hypertext monster called Scream N *me*me.] EDIBORIAL #4 THE FUTURE OF SCREAM N *ME*ME There are going to be 287 issues of Scream N *me*me. At the current rate of almost 4 issues/year, then I will be done in another 70.75 years. I'll be 95 and most-of-you will be dead by then. Most-of-you are already dead, but I digress. So what should you, the reader, expect for the next 70.75 years? 283 more lethargic editorials, for one. For those who have not yet noticed, I have a pretty bad attitude towards editorials. [Thus the title, stolen from the music&culture zine Ben is Dead.] If something is *really* important, then it will be found in other sections of the magazine; most ediborials are merely attempts to prop up the ego of the author by justifying opinions not able to be found anyplace else. Maybe it's because I consider every kilobyte to already-be an editorial. I'm open for suggestions on making this space fun, rather than the burden of being beaten with a lead pipe. Scream N *me*me is, and always will be, "Stuff I Think Is Cool". Everything else is secondary, especially format and subject matter. Scream N *me*me may not always be an electronic publication; we may not always be focused on cultural and social aspects of cyberspace. [] Scream N *me*me is an environment, not a thesis. There's no point to any of it. You're not supposed to learn something. You are supposed to wallow. So what monstrosity do I wish to unleash on you next?" you ask? Well....... [Deleted discussion of plans for what turned out to be Scream Baby. Though I made a mistake -- I was considering calling it Snuffleupagus Revenge.] Well, with 283 more episodes to create, I don't have anything else to say. There are plenty of other wonderful writings in this issue, though, but then again, there always is. Go read something. * * * "I've got a bad feeling about this" -- Young Indy Jones * * * Seven Simple Steps to Being Cyber-organic! 0. If you don't have a computer, go get one. 1. People jump into cyberspace for these things : software, sex, games, services. Then there is a small percentage (10% or so) who use the technology of communication to think, to create, and to explore. Join us. 2. Have an Internet e-mail address. Mine is bladex@bga.com. 3. Balance your information input : television, movies, newspapers, magazines, zines, books, comics, radio, shortwave, et. all. Balance one against another. 4. Believe who you want but not what you want. 5. Swim upstream. Create your own information output : television, movies, newspapers, magazines, zines, books, comics, radio, and shortwave broadcasts. Submit samples to Fringeware, Inc. and who knows, if we like it, maybe we might distribute your work for you! 6. You have a moral imperative to tune in and turn on as many of your friends, family members, and associates to the online world. Think of yourself as a multi-level marketer for cyberspace! If you recruit two people and they recruit two people.............. 7. Never forget that there is another human being on the other end of the screen. This step, alone, will eliminate the practice of flaming. 8. Send me your suggestions on Making Cyberspace A Better Place (sm). You may send me snail mail (that's what us cyber-organics call the US postal service :-) c/o of this magazine, or you may send e-mail to my address listed in step # 2 above. I am looking forward to hearing from you, because only by working together can we fulfill the promise and potential of cyberspace. Final note: This article is an excerpt from a work-in-progress, The Handbook for Humanity, a helpful guide to living wise in this unwise day and age. If you haven't seen anything similar in Whole Earth Review yet, don't worry....... You Will. * * * ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;; Action movie cliches ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; written by keith goolsbey ; goolsbey@mcc.com I. Bad Guys Bad guys are always men. Bad guys are always ugly. Bad guys come in three categories: (1) Fodder Fodder always come in groups (> 3). Fodder all look alike. Fodder never have speaking parts. Fodder are never on screen for more than 5 sec. Fodder never hurt the good guy in any way. The good guy kills all the fodder at once. (2) Thugs Every thug has their own distinctive, almost stylishly sinister look. Thugs usually have speaking parts. Thugs are always fought and killed by the good guy one at a time. Thugs will usually hurt the good guy once. A group of thugs must have a representative from every major ethnic group. Thugs never have real names; they instead have single word nicknames ala the American Gladiators. (3) Boss The main bad guy is the boss. There is only one boss. The boss is always psycho. The boss is always played extremely over-the-top. The boss only fights after all thugs have been eliminated. The boss hurts the good guy nearly to the brink of death. The boss is killed by the good guy via either: (a) impaling (b) annihilating explosion The boss will always injure one of his own thugs in an emotional outburst. II. Good Guys Good Guys are always ruggedly handsome. Good Guys are always athletic and muscular. If there are a group of good guys, only one will be left at the end. Good guys have monosyllabic first names, usually Nick or Max. Good guys have simple English surnames (even when portrayed by Austrian or Belgian actors). Good guys never run out of ammo. Exception: If they run out of ammo, they at least have another weapon. Good guys never run out of weapons. Good guys always get caught by the bad guys at least once, after which they escape. If a good guy is caught by a thug, the thug is always under orders to present the good guy to the boss alive. III. Sidekicks Every Good guy has at least one sidekick. The sidekick never gets the girl. The sidekick is wittier than the good guy. The sidekick is uglier and less athletic than the good guy. The sidekick always dispatches exactly one thug. The sidekick always does something stupid to get the good guy in trouble once. The sidekick always does something lucky to get the good guy out of trouble once. The sidekick always favors higher-tech/less personal methods of fighting. The sidekick never dies. Exception: if the sidekick is a partner, they die early in the movie. Sidekicks have ethnic surnames, usually Polish, Italian or Czech. IV. The Girl The girl is beautiful. The good guy always gets the girl. The girl is always physically assaulted by the bad guys. The girl doesn't do much else. IV. Fights The good guy and his opponent always fight with similar weapons. All thugs and good guys will favor a lower-technology/more personal approach to fighting whenever possible, i.e. guns over explosives, knives over guns, blunt instruments over knives, fists over blunt instruments. Bosses favor high/tech approaches to fighting, much like bad guys. Before dispatching a thug or higher, the good guy states a one-liner. At least one thug must be dispatched by the good guy using each of the following methods: (a) shooting (b) throwing off a ledge (c) breaking their neck (d) burning The effects of life-threatening injuries inflicted on a good guy by a thug only last until the next thug is encountered. Women are never killed. Exception: If a woman is a boss or thug, she may be killed offscreen. Bystanders are never injured in public fights. Horses and other animals are never even injured. Outdoor fights occur in the rain. Final fights take place in factories. * * * MUTTERINGS FROM MY MAILBOX ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Are CYBERPUNKS waiting for ANARCHY? If so, who will work at NUCLEAR POWER plants? Cyber Fetish [Editor's Note: Actually, my brother. He is an engineering student intern/co- op at the South Texas Nuclear Power Plant. Thanks for asking! -- Me] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- I, Your-name-here, have read the software licensing agreement and promise to abide by any restrictions on distribution that may apply as determined by the publisher. Amen, So Mote It Be, may the Good Lord zap me with a thunderbolt and reduce me to a pile of smoldering ashes should I so much as entertain the THOUGHT of violating this agreement. =) No, honest, I swear upon my honor as an Eagle Scout... ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- ESSAY QUESTION: While walking on the campus of the University of Texas one Sunday, I found a cassette tape whose film had been torn and the entire cassette thrown/wrapped around a tree and the surrounding bushes. Curious, I picked it up. Side A: Sexual Therapy Session I Side B: What is Man? Mineral or Drug In 100-200 words, describe what you think was on this tape, who made it, and why would they rip it up and wrap it around a tree? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Obviously, the individual who made the tape is (well, was) a professor at U of Texas. He has been having marital problems and his wife forced him into counseling. A cassette tape was made of a conversation between the therapist and the prof, and the counselor ordered the prof to listen to it and figureout what was wrong with his attitude. This very same professor teaches undergraduate biology. When the counselor insisted on an all-day three-way session to "help sort things out," the prof realized that he would miss his 11:00 lecture. He grabbed a random cassette tape out of the pile and recorded a bullshit lecture on it, the upshot of which involved whether it was better to see the human body as component elements or as a collection of enzymes. He stopped by campus just long enough to hand it to his T.A. and order him to play it. The T.A. turned the tape over, and LO AND BEHOLD, saw tape side #1. Since the real reason for the wife's dissatisfaction stemmed from the T.A.'s superior lovemaking skills, he listened to the tape out of curiosity and a nasty thought occurred to him. He switched the labels from one side to the other, then played the correct side in class (the side labeled What is Man: Mineral or Drug?) which of course was actually the sex therapy discussion. The Ugrads loved it. Several of the anal-retentive students had recorded the lecture, and passed copies around to , including the prof's wife and the department head. Upshot: she threatened to divorce him. In a fit of rage, he stormed the T.A.'s apartment, killed him with a rusty fork, recovered the tape, and spread it all over the forest. Then, he returned home and used the same fork to kill and eat the family cat (his wife wasn't home -- her cat.) Recovering part of his senses, he emptied his bank account and drove to the most desolate place he could imagine, the University of California at San Diego. He now lives as a homeless person on campus, dodging UC police and fighting others for scraps of student leftovers. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Anxiety. Remorse. Explode. Energy. Violence. Rip. Pull. Twist. Reach. Bend. Tie. Not. Enough. More. Turns. Wrap. Wrap. Leaves. Jogger. Blush. Glare. Turn. Hide. Duh. Damn. Bitch. Cause. Remorse. Stupid. Go Home. 69 more words to go. That's my intiutive feeling of what happened when the tape got wrapped around thebush. The tape was probably made by someone's conselor. They guy is having some kind of problems opening up, of letting go, during sex. He might have taken acid or some kind of other substance and made the second side. Sort of his reactions to it. He probably got pissed that the therapy wasn't working. So he took the tape out of his backpack and took out his agressions on the closest thing to his problems, and those are the thoughts recorded on the tape and the voice of the sexual therapist. Why, though, did he choose a time when he was walking by some plants? Fertility. Phallicism. Vernacular sexuality. All mapping roughly to plants, trees, and bush. It's all associative. Anyway, that's my best Hannibal Lecter -- style analysis. Can I get a subscription? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Not that I am going to try to do anything stupid, but is this really binding? After all, I all did was hit the 'paste' key. Just some thought for food. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- ANSWER TO ESSAY QUESTION: Side A is an elect/ronic simulatory attempt at remote masturbation through sonic overload of auditory passages. Side B is blank. The maker of the tape clearly apprehends his/her/its existence as a polarity between "mineral" (static nonreactive be/ingness) and "drug" (fluidicity in the sense of "space on the move"); s/he/it establishes Side A as a proximity-based temporary reality dichotimzation, i.e., an escape in the traditional sense. The aggressive destruction of the cassette demonstrates clearly the maker's final conclusion that postmodernist pro/fessors are full of shit and should be set in a colloidal suspension with complete sensory deprvvation for 24 hours per week, dammit, and I don't care if I flunk out!!! (Writer of above essay attends Williams College and is taking courses from the religion department, a well-known bastion of postmodernist mindfuck.) #include: "I have read the software licensing agreement and promise to abide by any restrictions on distribution that may apply, as determined by the publisher." ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- drug,mineral,sextherapy, tree] wrapped it because of some lower polar cystallization ruach] tit for tat intellectual BARKER , theory put on some tape, which pronnged a poor peons brain tomaximum absurdity. went to the tree spirit for advice, the tape was a sacrifice, wrapped it like joes penis in flesh, mineral? agonist? . roots of being? man=root=tree,, drugs are from trees/plants primarily.. many religions assert their beginings from doing drugs, any energy is sex energy , a neat albeit ineffective , jesture of juxtaposition fairly inflexible nature meets the mind of human all bent out of shape with kali yuga. I have no idea bout scream baby, Ive read a few boings liked it enought to order their back issues, MOndo strikes me astoo slick at times, FAD is interesting because it reminds me of the old WETznne. however, I am just rambling and though I would send this out of net-technoboredom, too bad I cant acesss the bbs from VAX here,, Ive heard its more interesting in some areas from other people as well.. +=+=+=+=+=+=+=++=+=+=+=+=+=+=++=+=+=+=+=+=+=++=+=+=+=+=+=+=++=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ I solve abstract puzzles. Fortunately, I live in an advanced civilization where abstract-puzzle-solving is a socially rewarded activity. If I lived a few hundred years ago, I would be a mathematician or kabalist and nobody would pay any attention to me. I'd have to get a day job. But around here and now, a puzzle expert is called a "computer scientist" and is generally supposed to be useful. "The Journal of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery". People are silly putty. How we look is not limited by nature. It is only limited by what we are willing to do. +=+=+=+=+=+=+=++=+=+=+=+=+=+=++=+=+=+=+=+=+=++=+=+=+=+=+=+=++=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ To: bladex@wixer Subject: plea Comments: Just like !YOU!. Date: Tue, 29 Sep 92 17:57:53 MDT Organization: Not damn much. Hi, this is my rant to get put on the list.. I am You, aka Handle-for-You. Sometimes "k_rAD Ei1+e!!" person but mostly just me, a 23 year old wondering about my life. Some times when I read all the "new edge" stuff like mondo & boing boing and future culture I find my self saying to my self Neat, but does it really matter? will it make a difference?" I try not to dwell on it too long. +=+=+=+=+=+=+=++=+=+=+=+=+=+=++=+=+=+=+=+=+=++=+=+=+=+=+=+=++=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ "I've got a bad feeling about this." -- my lawyer