((NOTE: I wrote up the following this morning, after having not peered in
on alt.slack for 2 weeks (A LIBERATING EXPERIENCE!!). In the process of
sending this, I discovered that LANGUISHING ON MY SERVER ARE 1,668
POSTS!!! I guess what I'll do is tell my machine to display ALL of them
and then I'll read the LONGER THREADS, the ones that seemed to have
generated HATEFUL ARGUMENTS (most of which seem from this distance to
involve my old pal GGGordon). What else can I do? If somebody wants to
take on the task of saving the INTERESTING stuff for this month for me, or
rather for the Web archives, have at it. (Email me about it.) At this
point I'm gonna have to throw up my hands, and my lunch too, and just
proceed with what I was doing, which is to ignore the bulk of the
newsgroup for now so that I can get some damned PRODUCT PRODUCED!!
HEUNH!!))
((P.S. this starts off kinda technical but becomes "homey" and
"philosphical" and probably "maudlin" as well.))
*******
I hope the 20 people a day who have been emailing me to ask if I got their
tape, disc or book, and if I had heard/seen/read it yet, and what I think
of it, will pardon me for not having answered, and possibly never
answering. I've been hard at work on "real" jobs -- those rare paying
ones. The NON-SUBGENIUS ones. One video and three articles. All the rest
of the time (except for that day or two catching up on the RADIO SHOWS),
I've been striving like mad to finish that intercontinental railroad, The
Stark Fist -- both online and offline.
I have to make all the rails meet before we can run any trains back and
forth. When I got internet acces several months ago, I started saving the
good stuff on alt.slack, but only about 2 months ago did I discover that I
could save posts into categories right there and then, while reading them,
rather than later breaking them down into categories like I had been
doing, and which takes FOR FUCKING EVER.
Anyway, I have almost finished categorizing the old stuff up to the point
where the newer, pre-categorized stuff had begun. In other words, we built
the railway starting from the East and West coasts and working toward the
middle, and now the two sets of rails are about to meet somewhere in the
middle of Kansas. It's at that point that I can move literally thousands
of pages by virtual train to the SubGenius Web site. I also have the last
two print-FISTs' worth of articles, and all the REV-X out-takes, and tons
of miscellaneous, to place there as well. But one night I woke up in
horror thinking, "MY GAWD!!! YOU CAN'T JUST DUMP THAT SHIT WEBWARDS! HTML
doesn't recognize PARAGRAPH BREAKS!! Much less ITALICS! Will I have to go
through 25 megs of text, copying in a >br< or >pg< code or whatever EVERY
FEW SENTENCES?? AIIIEEEE! But wait. Calm down. Don't be a fool. Surely
there are automatic ways to do it. Yes. That must be what those "HTML
CONVERTER" programs are for!"
I already knew about the HTML editing programs, at least in theory; I've
actually been Web-building in my spare time, just feeling my way. It was
scary to start tweaking what McConville had done at SUNSite. I was afraid
I would BREAK it. But it was EASY AS HELL, and FUN, and now ALL I WANT TO
DO IN THE WORLD is start converting and editing and dumping all this art
and text into place. I can't do the really MIND-BLOWING PROGRAMMING that
the SUNSite guys will contribute to the SUBsite, but I'm the ONLY one who
can supply the "SUBGENIUS ENCYCLOPEDIA" that makes up the bulk of the
actual MATTER of that universe.
The HTML editing programs for the Mac are pretty developed. There are 5 or
6 good ones to choose from. But the CONVERSION programs... rtftohtml
sounds like it'll do the trick, but I gotta sit down and make it do so. It
was giving me a hard time last night. (The older Stark Fist and book stuff
is all highly formatted for printing, with everything from italics to
footnotes, and I'd hate to lose all that formatting when it goes to html.
But I also ain't gonna do it by hand.)
And last night I finished re-editing the Indian Rope Burn music video of
their song, "RED LIGHT." I can now sing that song BACKWARDS, although
Rev. Clay Mation has advised me NOT to do so. When I'm on a "job," it's
much easier for me to IGNORE ALT.SLACK. And it was good for me to do so, I
can tell. I haven't peered in on the newsgroup for 2 weeks. So I'll miss a
little bit. I know now that it won't kill me. That was an important lesson
to learn. I had to break free. Elsewise I wouldn't have even STARTED on
that Web-Fist stuff yet. Besides -- if one of you is combing the
"ARTICLES" section of the Website, or whatever section, and is HORRIFIED
to find that your MASTERPIECE #25 isn't THERE, well, that just means ol'
Rev. Stang happened to have been AWAY FROM HIS DESK during that week of
alt.slack, and you can always email it to me with tears in your eyes, and
I'll stick it on the Website so you can feel that life is worth living
again! (Unless I decide the piece SUCKS, in which case you'll just have to
commit suicide or something.)
There are overpowering reasons, such as PAYING THE BILLS, for WORKING
outside in the real world instead of JACKING OFF here on alt.slack. I can
FEEL the clock a-tickin' away, friends. I'm 41 now. If I'm as lucky as
Frank Zappa, why, I might live another 13 years!! A long time ago, I
managed to get me some for-real cosmic-style Slack -- Slack SO cosmic that
after that, I didn't need to spend all my time running around looking for
it anymore. In fact, just lying back and "experiencing" must take a back
seat to DOING. I let the collecting and the consuming slide, and
concentrate on the producing. This philosophy is behind my every move,
even if AVOIDING it is all I'm doing. It's why I buy a new RECORDER rather
than new SPEAKERS. (We burn up a couple of recording decks a year, but I'm
still using my wife's old $35 speakers from high school to mix HOUR OF
SLACK and listen to my Hendrix bootlegs.)
PRODUCE! PRODUCE! STOP CONSUMING AND PRODUCE! I would NOT recommend that
to most bipeds, but that's the way I try to do things, these days, EXCEPT
when I'm feeling all cranky and sorry for myself. One must have Slack, and
it's really hard to have mental Slack without some PHYSICAL Slack as well;
there's only one basic SLACK-field, after all; the increments are only an
illusion.
And, despite having ignored the newsgroup totally for 2 weeks, I'm about
to argue that alt.slack provides PHYSICAL SLACK.
Dropping in on alt.slack is like leaving the farm and moseying into the
village to jaw with the other geezers whittling on benches out front of
the courthouse. People who haven't monkeyed with the internet think that
it's gonna be all "cyber"-something and hectic, but it's just the
opposite. Alt.slack is a breath of naturalness. Oh, sometimes it's
exciting, like when FISTFIGHTS break out and guys come crashing out the
saloon doors into the street. (Another thing that makes alt.slack resemble
a frontier town is that it's mostly MEN... men who really appreciate
"Madam Tarla's!") The fact that we aren't in the same geographical
location makes it hardly any less of a community, although we can't catch
diseases from each other, and we can much more easily ignore folks we
don't like than is possible in a real town. There's way less adultery. And
there're lots of village idiots. BUT THERE ARE NO PINKS. There's also a
lack of racism, or bias against fat people or cripples or whatnot, because
nobody knows what anybody else looks like, and really doesn't CARE.
If we could just afford to ship more GALS out here from back East, it'd
just about be UTOPIA. And, of course, even Utopia can get boring, if you
let it.
But you say, "Rev. Stang, how can it be UTOPIA? There's NO SEX!" Well,
GOOD. That way we don't make the ladies nervous by constantly glancing at
their tits. There are also no RESTAURANTS in alt.slack.town. You can't EAT
here. I'm afraid you'll just have to STAY HOME for meals and fornication.
FINE. That leaves less mess to clean up here.
All in all, alt.slack.burg is a PRETTY COOL HANGOUT, and while it does
often seem like The High School from Hell (Mavrides' description of the
Church at large), WHO WANTS TO GROW UP? It's like the convenience store
parking lot on Friday night. It's where we go to LOITER and GOSSIP and
SHOW OFF and vainly try to pick up GIRLS. It's where we go to get away
from our "parents."
The upshot is, it's SLACK, and SLACK IS HEALTHY! SO WHAT if we're sitting
on our butts in front of a screen. We used to do that just as much ANYWAY.
Only with those old-fashioned TVs, you couldn't BRAINWASH BACK at 'em.
The more Slack-time you spend, even if it's on your butt, the less the
stress and tension is going to eat away at your ticker. I don't know about
you, but that's a concern in some quarters. My blood pressure goes haywire
these days if I don't get my Slack, and that's even with the calcium
blockers. If I get upset, I start hearing a LOUD PIDGEON in my RIGHT EAR.
To prevent heart attacks, I must not only walk the guard dogs, I need as
many HONEST CATHARTIC LAFFS as I can FUCKING GET!! Like any other
SubGenius, I also need the CONSTANT REASSURANCE that I haven't LOST MY
MIND. Or perhaps it's really that I my DELUSIONS get reinforced here. But
whichever of those I get from alt.slack, I get a LOT.
Alt.slack.ton reminds me also if Ayn Rand's hidden Utopia in the Rockies
in her classic crackpot masterpiece, ATLAS SHRUGGED. Only here, instead of
a bunch of Slackless geniuses, it's a bunch of... well...
There are so few SubGenii in the world that we never really HAD this
"village" until E-Z Net access happened. I'm not too worried about it
turning into a CITY; if it does suddenly grow, it'll just keep fragmenting
into more little villages.
And when that happens, you'll know you can always find me in one of the
GATED HIGH-SECURITY LUXURY COMMUNITIES -- IF you have the PASSWORD.
This has been another pep talk from your good personal friend and prayer
partner, Coach Stang.
P.S. The only thing I wonder about are the "LURKERS." Are they really
there? Or are they a legend, a myth? Are they the GHOSTS that HAUNT our
little town? Doesn't it EMBARRASS them to be, well, eavesdropping? What
are they afraid of... looking DUMB? That certainly hasn't stopped me or
ANY of the regular posters. We've had our heads laid out on the chopping
block for a long time now and nobody's launched 'em YET.
A NEW "QUOTE" for ya:
"In this day and age, if you're the kind who still thinks you MUST have an
explanation for the universe, then it'd BETTER be "BOB"!" -- Rev. Sag Van
Tin
PSS:
WEB-BUILDING TECHNO-STUFF
SUCCESS!! EUREKA! I got the rtftohtml program to work on my ancient Stark
Fist back issue WORD documents! Just goes to show, if you calm down, poke
around, and use your head, THE DAMNED MACHINES WILL WORK. Rtftohtml wasn't
opening those old WORD 2.0 docs even after I converted 'em to WORD 4.0. (I
don't have RAM for Word 6 and I hear it's glitchy anyway.) But until just
now I had NEVER NOTICED that among the "save as" options was one for "RTF
format." Well, I saved Peppe's AD and GGG's THE HEAD BECKONETH in RTF --
it turned them into gibberish -- but then I was able to open them in
rtftohtml and by Gobbs if they didn't scrunch in one end as gibberish and
come out the other end as simple html documents, which I can COMPREHEND
now, and they looked FINE albeit PLAIN on Netscape. Sadly, the changing
font sizes and certain formatting things like Shadow font don't come
through, but at least the pg breaks are AUTOMATED now. I can easily change
the font sizes and so on in one of the html editors. Heck, I know how to
do stuff like that with TEACH TEXT and my MEMORY of the HTML codes! But
I do have a question for the 3 or 4 others out there who use Macs to
produce html documents, and have used the editing programs already:
WHICH IS BEST?
Save me some time experimenting.
I have Web Weaver (used to be "HTML SuperText"), HTML.edit 1.5b1, HTML
Editor 1.0 (which I have to use on my wife's machine, as it needs more RAM
than I have), and Simple Editor. I understand there also exists HTML
Grinder, and Alpha-Text. I can download something called "BOB'S HTML
EDITOR", but pardon me if I avoid that one in SUPERSTITIOUS FEAR.
All of these are freeware. I have seen a number of odd web-building
programs which one uses THROUGH SOMEBODY'S WEB SITE, usually with a fee
attached -- DAMNED clever, they are -- with names like HouseBuilder and
HomeMaker, but I get the impression that they're designed for IDIOTS and
are real slow.
I understand this stuff pretty well and am doing it, I just wanna save
myself time monkeying with the various doohickies to see which one's
"best" (I know, that's real subjective)... so any suggestions would be
appreciated.
DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ADVISE IF YOU ARE NOT A MACINTOSH USER.
****
Man... I have it ALL TOGETHER!! I can convert the old docs to html! I can
convert the Photoshop stuff to GIFs! I can edit the alt.slack files EN
MASSE! I can link it all up and ftp it to the vast storage vaults in North
Carolina! And now I want to do JUST THAT! But, god damn ya, I have to
answer TEN BILLION EMAILS first and even check in on my AOL account
(haven't checked the mail there in many moons). I would kinda LIKE to read
a LITTLE of what are probably way over 1,000 alt.slack posts on my server.
I have to finish the RUN&GUN article too. And another Hour of Slack. And
possibly even answer some of the mail-mail. And pry open the boxes of art
that Vreedeez returned, sort 'em, and send best unseen stuff to THE
VOLUNTEERS for scanning. And finish categorizing that last few miles of
old alt.slack. And simultaneously be editing the same mess of stuff for
printing. And catch up on the phone calls. And remember to pick up fax
paper and dogfood at the Feed and Office Supplies store. And eat, and like
that. BUT STILL!! I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's
getting closer! It's so bright! Wait, that's not the tunnel mouth, that's
--
Copyright 1995 by Rev. Ivan Stang / 1st Orthodox Stangian
MegaFisTemple Lodge of People's Covenant Church of the
Wrath of Dobbs Yeti, Resurrected / The SubGenius Foundation,Inc.
PO Box 140306 Dallas TX 75214 / Fax 214-320-1561 / PRABOB
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: mtownsend@interramp.com (Michael Townsend)
Praise Stang, I say! Praise him! Do it! 'Cause HE'S DOING IT, all for you!
--
>>>Dad's Soulsucking Tapexchange<<<
**Send a tape. Get a tape. It's that!**
Mail to:
Dad's New Slacks - P.O. Box 4272 - Portland, Maine 04101-4272
::::or email:::::
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Old Papa Frood <dode@dolmen.demon.co.uk>
STANG Sayeth
> Church at large), WHO WANTS TO GROW UP? It's like the convenience store
> parking lot on Friday night. It's where we go to LOITER and GOSSIP and
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Which Exactly Explains
> P.S. The only thing I wonder about are the "LURKERS." Are they really
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> there? Or are they a legend, a myth? Are they the GHOSTS that HAUNT our
> little town? Doesn't it EMBARRASS them to be, well, eavesdropping? What
> are they afraid of... looking DUMB? That certainly hasn't stopped me or
> ANY of the regular posters. We've had our heads laid out on the chopping
> block for a long time now and nobody's launched 'em YET.
>
Oh yes were here!
More of us every week Hiding in the shadows stealing
YOUR slack. Eventually Alt.Slack will be sucked dry.
The false face of "Bob" will be replaced by the evil
image of "Count Slackula".
HaAHah Eck Slurrpp.
--
This weeks ShorDurPerSav := Ivor Cutler;
__ __
|| dode@dolmen.demon.co.uk ||
The world's first Slack Vampire Compostian. Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: mation@aol.com (Mation)
Stangy-Baby sez:
>And last night I finished re-editing the Indian Rope Burn music video of
>their song, "RED LIGHT." I can now sing that song BACKWARDS, although
>Rev. Clay Mation has advised me NOT to do so.
That's Right! I once tried to sing that old infamous IRB tune backwards
once and I got ruptured tendons in my FEET!! O.K., you alt.slackpans, YOU
CAN HAVE STANG BACK NOW! We're DONE with 'em. For TWO SOLID WEEKS we
kept him tied from the waist down to a video toaster located in an
industrial storage building just on the outskirts of Dallas. There, we
plugged wires into Stang's HIND and FORE Brain and connected the other
ends to a Tri-Cranal TeleMoniter Deck. The result of these sessions was
over 2 HOURS of Ivan' personal dreams and Racial Memories, only a few of
which are suitable for your average Pink Household Families. The
following session was a little more, uh...how should I say...PAINFUL for
Stang and the band. The setup for Stang was as before, only this time,
the song "RED LIGHT" was pumped through a Trans-Cloglifier Roto Modocate
Tram-MIDI-Flash Cropper-Sleeve (but this one go's to ELEVEN!!)
Mapro-Phaser with Frodo-Mainframe "Bob" Mogro-Ducer through wires right
into Stang's EARDRUMS, DOWN THROUGH THE SPINAL COLUMN INTO RECTAL CAVITY
(the straight way). From the 2 Hours of Raw Footage, sound and visual
image were joined with the aid of FROP and GROUPIES (of the IRB variety--a
new taste for Stang!!) into what is NOW, THE NEW INDIAN ROPE BURN VIDEO!!!
And WAIT TILL YOU SEE IT!! A Video From HELL It IS!!!
>All in all, alt.slack.burg is a PRETTY COOL HANGOUT, and while it does
>often seem like The High School from Hell (Mavrides' description of the
>Church at large), WHO WANTS TO GROW UP? It's like the convenience store
>parking lot on Friday night. It's where we go to LOITER and GOSSIP and
>SHOW OFF and vainly try to pick up GIRLS. It's where we go to get away
>from our "parents."
Yea, Man, I go there sometimes, dude, y'know, when there's nuthin' much
else t'do. It's a groovin' scene, mate. I know the brothers and sisters
on alt.slack view Subs who use AOL about the same as rapists and child
molesters. DON'T LET THE AOL IN THE ADDRESS SCARE YA. Sometimes it is
the ONLY option. I checked out a local server in my area and it cost MORE
than the ConNet that I must use. No big deal, though, I can use AOL just
like I use ALL Conspiracy Branches for my own twisted needs. That's what
separates the SubGenius from the Pink--NOT an e-mail address. Oh Well,
Fuck It, Stang told me that even He got SHIT for starting out on AOL. I
DON'T EVEN LOOK AT a post's address when I read it. What counts is the
MESSEGE, the THOUGHT, y'know, THE IZNESS OF THE BIZNESS!!!!!!!!
Anyway, sorry about HOGGIN' STANG all this time. It seems a lot of
alt.slackers can't get up in the morning and take their pills without HIM
holding their glands, er...hands. When the Shephard is not around, it is
YOUR DUTY to MARCH TO THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE WITHOUT HIM!!!! So....GET
GOING!!
Wielding The Cleaver,
MATION
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