SLACK CRUSADES layout finally finished,
TUNS-A-NEW-SOUNDZ,
SCATALOG drastically improved at SubSITE
RANT
*****
SUNDAY NIGHT IRC DEVIVALS
There has GOT to be a better way! Currently, we "meat" every Sunday at 10 pm EST on #subgenius on Undernet. But in between the filthy sex talk and the secret underground revealed knowledge, everybody's constantly getting bumped and netsplitted, or else are unable to "lag on" in the first place. Tonight, it took me half an hour to find a server that'd work, and after 45 minutes I got bumped, and I went through so much hassle trying to reconnect that I decided to FUCK IT and write this instead.
It has been suggested that we move our #subgenius orgies from Undernet to DALnet. I brought that up in tonight's IRC devival, and was promptly trounced by several folks who said a better choice would be the less-known, less-used AnotherNet. Hey look, I barely understand this stuff myself!
Modemac says that connecting to "irc.another.net" will send you to one of the four AnotherNet servers at random. If I understand this correctly.
So let's try that -- this Sunday, 10 pm EST at #subgenius on AnotherNet.
SOUNDS good, anyway.
IF ANYBODY CAN OFFER A BETTER EXPLANATION OF WHAT WE'RE TRYING TO DO, or can supply any other instructions and details, JARGON-FREE, PLEASE, then DO SO!! I am NOT the IRC expert around these parts.
ALSO: There is a SECOND Online Devival session happening SATURDAYS at 7pm EST, Undernet #subgenius . That time slot is much more convenient to our brethren and sistern overseas in both directions. Dr. Dynasor speaks highly of it.
Personally I really enjoy the IRC stuff, but EVERY TIME I MESS WITH IT I spend as much time fighting technoglitches as I do having interspout.
On that fabled day when our BIG DEAL comes through, and we move SubSITE to an entirely different machine, our hope is to have our own mini-IRC and mini-newsgroups within it. I dunno about the IRC part actually, but I know that IN THEORY at least, we can now set up mini-newsgroups within SubSITE thanks to some new gizmos at SUNSite. "Hyperforum" I believe it's called. I haven't monkeyed with that yet because, well, I mean we already have alt.slack, and if that's too busy for you there's always the SubGenius Digest mailing list (which is much less cluttered but also about half as alive)... but why not, the more the merrier. It would be set up with "topics" I suppose, like New High Weirdness and Mutants Looking for Love. (JESUS! I've been talking to AOL execs too much!) Eh... I dunno, I'm partial to good old alt.slack myself, even though my routine, combined with the recent UTTER FUCKEDNESS of my access service, only allows me the occasional skim, DAMN IT ALL TO HELL!!
I would love to hear from people in Dallas/Ft.Worth whose access service is GOOD. Mine has been VERY VERY VERY BAD lately and, though it might finally have improved, and changing IP addresses would cost thousands of trees in printing, it's time to explore the options. During the past 3 weeks, 2 out of a dozen things I posted to alt.binaries.slack got through. This drives me NUTS because our stockpile of INCREDIBLE ART, SOUND and TEXT is TOO CEREBRUM-SPLINTERING to just SIT ON.
*******
Meanwhile, by Gobbs, I CAN post to SubSITE and thus share the wealth, at least with people who can operate web browsers. I have been doing so, fiendishly. It may make more SENSE to concentrate on the Sacred Website. Almost a thousand people a day look at that thing, as compared to about 120 a day for alt.slack. (Correct me if I'm wrong! This is based on some Net Stat Jesus told me about.)
We got this ACCESSWATCH thing running now at SubSITE. We know who's looking at it, when, how, and for how long. It's incredibly detailed. The most important single piece of information it provides us right now is, HOW MANY PEOPLE GET AS FAR AS THE ORDER FORM IN THE CATALOG: about 9 a day. That's fucked. The Scatalog gets hit properly now, and half of them go on through the third page of it, BUT THEY DON'T GO FOR THE ORDER FORM.
And we have a RELIGIOUS BUSINESS to keep alive here!
Consequently, much effort has lately been expended by Jesus and myself on the Online SCatalog. I broke it into 5 pieces for quick-EZ downloads, we have new photos of all the products, a bunch of NEW products listed, and the order form makes it VERY SIMPLE to call, fax, mail or email your desires. (It'll be even simpler once Jesus finishes his complex cgi fancy-schmancy "FORM"). Why, just yesterday, I realized that since my son had finished shooting his latest art-video, Rev. Nickie could have her VIDEO CAMERA back -- so it was time to QUICKLY SHOOT THOSE NEW T-SHIRT PRODUCT MODEL SHOTS while we still had an input device. Within the space of about one hour, we stuck Jesus and someone else into the new all-black Classic Dobbshead shirt and the ladies' BabyDoll T, respectively, put the Joe Riley DOBBSHEAD MASK and the SHE-NHGH mask on them, respectively, and grabbed some quick Video8 product shots in the office loft and the Herbal Preserve out back, respectively; I plugged that camera into Muleskinner, copped the freeze-frame PICTS, cropped 'em into jpegs, linked 'em in, uploaded 'em, and VIOLA! INSTANT SALES! For YOU WILL ORDER these shirts when you see them in NEARREAL LIFE at scatalog3.html!!!
But the new SCatalog is BUT NOTHING compared to...
THE MEDIA BARRAGE 10 AUDIO BINARY DOWNLOADS!
You can now download a RIGHTEOUS PORTION of the BEST CLIPS from our BEST OLD TAPE in WAV form, thanks to the dilligent efforts of Rev. Eyre Rend, AUDIO COMPRESSION GOD. This guy is able to take what would normally be a crappy sounding WAV at 600k and transform it into a smooth, sleek, noiselessnessful 150k compressed WAV, and he did that with most of Media Barrage 10 as well as everything else that was already in the EARS OF "BOB" section of SubSITE.
Personally, I don't spend much time downloading audio binaries. But there is a subculture devoted to it, and if SubGenius audio isn't PERFECT for that, I dunno what is. BUT the next step is to render those clips as TrueSpeech files, and that DOES interest me MAJORLY. They don't sound as slick, but you can get 'em RIGHT THEN. Like Radio-On-Demand. Meanwhile, the WAV files should come in handy for electronic logo bands as samples to weave through their pop hits-to-be so that we can sue them later.
The newly redone EARS section on SubSITE also offers a small shitload of other new sounds, from a very short "PUKE" to THE PRESCRIPTURES read by JHVH-1 ITSELF through a COMPUTER!
And there should be TWO new Hours of Slack up in TrueSpeech by the end of the week. They don't make a TrueSpeech WAV-converter for the Mac, so the way it works is, I finish a show, Jesus sends it on cassette to Rev. Rend (along with the 17 stations), he converts it to TrueSpeech WAV, emails it back to Jesus, Jesus links and uploads it for SubSITE, and then I add the log text later. We're finally getting the system "down" although the Lord has found out just HOW MUCH there is to DO for any given one of two full-time Foundation workers.
And the funny thing is, those shows don't sound too godawful bad coming over the wires! They sound a lot better on a PC with the NEW TrueSpeech than they do on my Mac, because... well, you know how THEY are about playback devices.
Lucky for me, RECORDING devices sometimes get made FIRST for the Mac. I got me this new recording device called BRYCE. You can record images of things you see inside your head... up to a point. It's limited. But YOW is it FUN. It's so damned habit-forming that I have actually had to SWEAR OFF it for days at a time following binges. Those binges are up at SubSITE as REV. STANG'S TRIP TO DOBBSTOWN in the EYES Art Mines section.
The Art Mines are about to swell prodigiously. The renaissance of alt.binaries.slack has produced a bountiful harvest. And wait'll you see the marvelousness that I get sent by email from the non-a.b.s. artists!! What I haven't been able to cop from a.b.s. due to my CRAPPY SERVICE, Lou DuChez has preserved for us all. NONETHELESS -- if you the artist is posting something to a.b.s., SEND ONE TO ME TOO! Unless you DON'T want it preserved in amber on SubSITE.
*****
Well I be damned. You never know what excitement will happen around here. It's 1 in the morning and simultaneously, my son hit a bump that wrecked his radiator and stranded him, and Demonica from Cleveland, "girl" "friend" of Jesus Devilacqua, arrived here at the offices from Roswell, New Mexico, her last stop on her trek to Dallas. (She says the Roswell Alien Museum now features the dead alien prop from some TV movie, displayed on an operating table with a mannequin doctor.) We fed Demonica and towwed the lad's car. Ironically enough, he had JUST FINISHED SHOOTING A COMPLICATED VIDEO using that car, just before decapacitating it. (The video: INCIDENT THAT NIGHT, a Tarantinoesque quasi-sequel to a film I made in high school called INCIDENT IN THE MORNING. What goes around comes around. Jesus plays the Mustache Man in this one. They had a hell of a time getting the firecracker-driven blood squibs to work...)
These are the sorts of things that draw us away from the Divine Work. If only we could but live in the virtual world, where all is orderly, and there are no potholes nor gate hairs nor lung cancer to interfere with the sublime contemplation of the CODE SOURCE... where all is CLEAN and PURE like my Bryce landscapes, like Dr. Howll's apartment. In that rarified realm there would be no netsplit, no disconnection, no crucifying of already-dead guys. No grease, no bubblegum on the sidewalk. NO PEOPLE... just pure... intention... ahh yes...
AHEM! EH! As I was saying.
THE SLACK CRUSADES REPORT finished
The Slack Crusade Devival Caravan of One Van took place in February; in March I managed to put together ELABORATE web reports on the first two dates, Chicago and Madison. I left the bare gray notes on the rest of the devivals there at SubSITE, unfinished, a skeletal list of jpeg file titles mixed with Jesus's barely literate diary. For some reason, this weekend I decided there was time to finish the layouts and perhaps even add a few words here and there.
Needless to say, it's always more time consuming than you think. But it's DONE. Page after page of system-crashing photos interspersed with Jesus's cryptic notes and my occasional clarification. WHY we do this, I don't know. Those who were at the shows will probably get a kick out of it, finally. But I must admit the reports become a bit repetitive. Each of the nine pages (for each of the 9 cities) has a picture of a guy with a screwdriver in his head, the same guy pulling a nail out of his nose, me holding up a cheesy firey HeMan sword in front of a rear projection of Dobbs, Legume bellowing... and other stuff as well, but... it's as if we are in search of the PERFECT IMAGE of a man pulling a screwdriver out of his head. And I'm sure we've GOT that image. It's just that there are so many that I can't tell which one it is. When I pin it down I'll make a Bryce landscape out of it. At least I don't have to pound the screwdriver into my own head. That is a job for Superman or Circus Apocolypse.
****
Here's a SERIOUS QUESTION:
Why does Microsoft Explorer browser display all SubSITE pages using Atom Funway background GIFs, FUCKED?
SubSITE is a demanding website. It's designed for NEW GEAR. My attitude is, if it works on my 16-meg-RAM Mac and my 28.8 modem, and NETSCAPE, it works. We would LIKE to make it ALSO compatible with, say, AOL's browser and other inferior technology. I actually spend time checking it out through those other systems. I have decided to write off AOL's browser. It's hopeless, at least for Macs. It's a joke. PC users on AOL can use Netscape now anyway.
Then there's Explorer. It's worth worrying about. A lot of people use it and more will. EUUGH; it doesn't handle GIFmovies. But nonetheless. It ain't bad.
BUT!!! Some of the coolest looking new pages on SubSITE use somewhat large background tile GIFs created by the Atom Funway Plastico folks. AND THOSE BACKGROUNDS GO SO TOTALLY SCREWY ON EXPLORER THAT YOU CANNOT EVEN READ THE TEXT. On Netscape, sure they take awhile to load, but they work great otherwise. What's the problem with Explorer? Is it the file size, or the display size, or both? Or is it that Funway saved those GIFs in some odd manner that, when filtered through my Mac and up to SubSITE, DON'T FULLY TRANSLATE? Only strenuous testing will tell. Or is it that Bill Gates simply has it out for the Church? I doubt that. Certainly we are his RIVALS for takeover of The Conspiracy, but I seriously doubt that he would take us seriously as such. He's a geek, he probably knows of "Bob" and mayhaps has even entertained thoughts of MAKING OUR WILDEST DREAMS COME TRUE WITH A FLICK OF HIS WRIST, and then blew it off. So the question remains, WHY DOES ATOM FUNWAY PLASTICO BACKGROUNDIZATION CRASH EXPLORER? I put it to you. I sorta don't want to ditch those amazing backgrounds just because somebody's half-assed forced-down-the-craws-of-the-Pinks program doesn't work.
******
Sorry to be so technical, but to me, the business and technical end IS the rant these days. What Dobbs has to SAY has been SAID. The question now is, HOW DO WE FORCE IT INTO THE BRAINPANS OF OUR POTENTIAL SLAVE RACE IN ORDER TO MAKE PROPHECY COME TRUE??
MONEY. Money first, then sex and violence. Make money, then make love, then make war. This is the true path, the centered way. CHARLIE spoke of it. JIM spoke of it. DAVID spoke of it. IT SHALL COME TO PASS. It is merely a question of WILL. WILL the SubGenii GET OFF THEIR BUTTS and demonstrate, put into REALITY, their TRUE WILLS? Or WILL they lean back and leave it up to "Bob," heaving and mewling in their Slack?? Probably the latter, and I can't say as I blame 'em. It's what "Bob" himself said to do. But ARE YOU GONNA TRUST THAT FUCKER?? Did he not also say to KILL HIM? So let's get down to business, here. Either you people ship up, or you'll just have to SHAPE OUT into the blended amorphous Conspiracy. Just GIVE UP. Go ahead. The loudspeaker spoke up and said. GIVE UP!
But I know you won't do that. I know you'll come through. I know you'll PULL OUT that credit card and MAKE that toll-free call to 1-888-669-2323, the number of the beast mixed with the stupid sexy frat-boy number mixed with the cosmic stupid Discordian number, and YOU KNOW it must be magic, and YOU WILL talk to Jesus and say, "JESUS? I'd like to ORDER A CD and T-SHIRT, please..." Yes I know you will. For the forthright and the upstanding shall be erect on that final day. We love you, dear friends.
Rev. Ivan Stang
P.S. Tomorrow I will start on the new "MIND BLOWING FILTHY X-RATED PSYCHEDELIC NEW ART" section of SubSITE. I swear to it.
Oh yeah, and the ARTICLES. Nickie finished a dumptruck full of preppings. There will be text. Oh yes. There will be text.
One last question: WHEN COMETH THE HUNDREDTH BONOBO??
Original file name: SubFound News 9-1-96
This file was converted with TextToHTML - (c) Logic n.v.