TEN-YEAR DOWNLOADS NOW POSSIBLE!!!
YOU MUST SEE... now lemme get this right, off the top of my head...
http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/eyes/eyes.html
and
http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/ears/ears.html
I'm pretty sure those are right. I can't check for sure because I'm
working on my wife's Mac; mine is tied up, uploading the MTV/SubGenius
video MPEG to Sunsite and that's gonna take about 2 hours since it's 5
million some-odd bytes. 5.5mb actually, and that's just the picture. The
.wav that goes with it is half that size.
DON'T try to download the videos until late Sunday night, Oct. 8. Several
of them are still in transit at this writing. (For all I know, were you to
try to download from Sunsite a file that's still being ftped from Dallas,
it would cause a nuclear explosion!) For that matter, don't try to
download them at all unless you have plenty of free time and equipment
capable of playing MPEGS. Instead, just marvel at the amazing frame
blow-up GIFs on the "storyboard" page.
Most of the video clips are about 1mb. But they DO WORK. I've checked the
shortest one, which is already up ("Fuck'Em," a closeup of me at the last
Cleveland devival, looking ever so studly and handsome, as usual), and IT
DOWNLOADS AND PLAYS BACK WITH SOUND JUST FINE!! It SHOULD work on PCs just
as well as Macs, too. (You MUST download both the picture and the
soundtrack and they must keep their labels, (filename).mpeg and
(filename).wav)
A matter of terrible shame for me has been that the main art and sound
displays of the SubGenius Monster Website -- the "halls" in the Online
FIST labeled THE EYES OF "BOB" and THE EARS OF "BOB" -- were pretty much
EMPTY. Last week I succeeded in doctoring up the entire front end of the
website into the mind-blower it was meant to be (proof of that later), but
I was DYING to get AT LEAST more color art and some sound into the rest of
it. I'm a damned FILM MAKER by trade, after all, and we have MOUNTAINS of
good video and audio sitting around here, but I was just IGNERNT about the
multimedia aspects of computery net-dom.
Well, this week I probably SHOULD have taken it easy and started preparing
for this GWAR/SubGenius Ragnarok tour, which ACTUALLY IS HAPPENING (!!),
but Tuesday night, after I had finished tweaking the major errors in the
new SubSITE and ascertaining that everything worked, I made the FATAL
ERROR of NOT going to bed. No... I wanted just a wee bit more ACTIVE
SLACK. And there was this CD ROM that had come with my new Power Mac,
containing the AVID video editing program and various demos. And there was
this OTHER CD-ROM that came with my "Multimedia on the Mac" book. And I
thought, "Well, I'll just SEE WHAT'S ON these things, I'll just check the
demos, GOD KNOWS I don't have time to sit and actually LEARN how to USE
these things, I KNOW AHEAD OF TIME that it's ALL TOO COMPLICATED." I had
been successful the week before in downloading quite clear, smooth-moving
silent videos in MPEG form of blowjobs, from
alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica. (Didn't our own MODEMAC start that
newsgroup?) I was shocked at how easy it was and how well they played. I
couldn't attempt stuff like that on my old machine.
I looked at the AVID program and skimmed very quickly through the
instructions and suddenly realized that it was SO simple that I NOW KNEW
COMPUTER-DRIVEN VIDEO EDITING. The VERY most shameful thing in my life is
that I didn't know a damn thing about that until Tuesday night. I edited
films for a living for 20 years, and when video came along I successfully
bluffed my way into that, but I was terrified of this AVID and PREMIERE
crap I'd been hearing about for the last several years while sidetracked
into REVELATION X. I ran into a more active editor type guy the other day
and I had to PRETEND I knew what he was talking about. That's how ashamed
I was. BUT NOW I DO KNOW WHAT HE WAS TALKING ABOUT!!! HELL, any CHILD
could cut videos (and mix sound and add special effects) on a fucking
Macintosh! Well, a NEW one anyway.
This was still in the first hour or two of Tuesday night.
The immediate thought was, "Maybe I better just briefly look into the
vague possibility of piping some video and audio clips to Sunsite or
alt.binaries.slack. Just so I'll know how massive and confusing a task
that's gonna be. Gosh, maybe I'll even go so far as to HAUL MY VIDEO DECK
OVER TO MY COMPUTER AND CONNECT THE TWO!" Radical thinkings for me.
There are PLUGS in the back of a Power Mac (7500 in my case, anyway) for
video and audio input, just like on a video deck or a tape recorder. I
hooked everything up, KNOWING that this was gonna wreck my computer. Then
I discovered that AVID wasn't exactly the recording program, but mainly an
editing program. How to record? How to get the video on my screen? I
discovered that THOSE doohickies were all pre-installed in this damned
machine. In fact, it had MANY A-V programs provided free, waiting for me
to learn them. QuickTime this and QuickTime that, Apple Video Player, etc.
etc. I read the readmes and next thing I knew, the videotape that I'd
stuck into the deck at random, "MAKING OF SUBGENIUS MTV," WAS PLAYING JUST
LIKE A GOD DAMN REGULAR ORDINARY TV PICTURE ON MY MAC, IN STEREO SOUND!!!
And I could shrink the screen down to postage stamp size or make it fill
the whole 15 inches. And it looked GREAT.
So I shrank it down a bit, rewound back to the beginning -- the actual
SubGenius-MTV commercial itself -- held my breath and pushed RECORD. I
fully expected it to record maybe 3 seconds and then crash or erase my
entire 1 gig hard drive.
IT RECORDED THE WHOLE FUCKING THING! In 44 megahertz CD quality sound! And
it only ate up about 500 megs, or half of my hard drive.
I was stunned. It played back WONDERFULLY, with the little slider bar
allowing me to skip around in it, and moreover I could grab any frame as a
color PICT image.
Man, I was jumping up and down. I was muskin'. I grabbed the master of
PRE-DOBBS STANGFILMS and ran off about thirty seconds of my old claymation
porno film, REPRODUCTION CYCLE. It worked slicker than snot on a door
handle. I plopped in the "SubGenius Devival Demo" tape I had compiled to
help convince GWAR's managers that we SubGenii weren't little wimps who
would be torn apart alive by GWAR's fiendish audience... copied off some
good devival moments (with the video rear projection visible and
cool-looking) of Pope Sternodox, Susie the Floozie and me.
I have wanted to make the SubGenius-MTV one-minute commercial more
available to my fellow Ministers since it was produced. It's the one and
only time I got to do a SubGenius project with ANY kind of a budget. (The
feature length video ARISE and all the radio shows don't count, because
there was never at any time any kind of budget at all for those. ARISE
took Cordt Holland and me 5 years to edit because we had to wait for
borrowed equipment to be available.) I'm personally very PROUD of the
SubG-MTV thing. It's REALLY SLICK and potentially our best recruitment
tool. MTV ran it in moderate rotation when it was first produced in 1990,
and it's tacked onto ARISE and some of our other videos now, but STILL.
So I had it sitting inside my computer. Great. But it was taking up 500
megs! Obviously it wasn't gonna do anybody any good that way. I mean, I
could morph it and play psychedelic filtering games with it, but nobody
else could see it. I scratched my head and puzzled over it. "Now by dangy,
I KNOW those blowjob videos looked fine and were a minute long and YET
were only about a meg or so and didn't take more than 10 minutes to
download. HOW'D THEY DO THAT?" And at that point I realized the slight
difference between a Macintosh QuickTime movie and an MPEG. Those pornos
were running on that ancient freeware program I'd copped and never used,
SPARKLE -- they weren't running on Movieplayer at ALL! But... they had no
SOUND. COULD I convert the videos to MPEG and KEEP THE SOUNDTRACKS TOO?
And it turned out, as usual, the genius who invented the freeware to begin
with had already upgraded it to suit my needs; the NEW Sparkle could
handle sound, as either AIFF or WAVE files. I dunno what PC users need to
play an MPEG in conjunction with a .wav file in sync, but I would assume
that if it's doable on a Mac, it's been doable on a PC for 6 months
longer.
At that point (probably the next day) I had three reference books open and
had FETCH fetching me by ftp whatever conversion and compression freeware
doohickies I needed. Which is easy in theory, but god damn if each Mac
info mirror site doesn't have a different anonymous password protocol. I
already had so damn many freeware conversion programs on my hard drive,
for jacking with text and art for cross-platform Internet purposes and so
on, that I was starting to think of myself as a REAL computer geek. Hell,
that was NOTHING!!
((I have to run upstairs every now and then to make sure FETCH is still
uploading. (I tried to let it do the uploads automatically while I slept
last night, but it conked out in the middle... too much too soon. I know
how it feels.) The MTV PICTURE part, the MPEG, is now at SubSITE. The .wav
soundtrack is about halfway there.))
This stuff gets so technical that you have to remember a million little
details while saving-as and converting and compressing. I must have lost
focus for awhile there because some of the clips aren't rightly synced
with the sound. The two START at the same time and END at the same time
(the sound track dictates the picture play rate) but in between, they
drift. I think it's because the video player can't QUITE keep up and has
to do some creative frame-skipping. It's very interesting how MPEG works.
It is able to compress video frames so drastically because it NOTATES ONLY
THE PORTIONS OF EACH FRAME that have CHANGED since the PREVIOUS frame. In
other words, if the background is static and it's just a foreground head
talking, there's not much image change and the file isn't as big. If the
camera is zooming, Sterno is dashing back and forth on the stage, and
there's another video being projected BEHIND him, EVERY FRAME is
ALL-DIFFERENT and it eats up memory. The busy-ness of the image affects
the file size. And THAT (I finally grokked) is why the clip of porno
claymation from REPRODUCTION CYCLE is SMALLER than the SOUND TRACK... the
background is flat, blue, static, the camera doesn't move, the clay
figures are small on the screen and there's relatively little change from
frame to frame.
On the other hand, the SubGenius-MTV video is in CONSTANT MOTION. That's
what makes it fun to watch a hundred times, but it also makes even the
smallest possible screen-sized MPEG 5.5 MEGS BIG... 7 megs with the .wav
soundtrack (which I did at 22 megahertz because it's WORTH it). (Although
there is a 1-meg cheesy 11 mh version also available for download at
SubSITE.)
I am most cognizant that half of you won't be able to deal with these
large video downloads at all. But then, half of you can. The ways things
are changing so fast, half of us will probably have ISDN lines by next
year. I sure plan to. The "policy" regarding the SUBSite is to make it
absolutely as high-tech and state of the art as possible. It's not like
the graphical-only browsers are ignored. That website contains thousands
of pages of TEXT-ONLY files.
And, for those who can't see the video, I went through the painstaking
process of saving the best frame from each shot of the SubG-MTV piece and
matching it in html as a .GIF with the accompanying narration text. So you
can ALSO scroll down a lovely full color frame-blow-up "storyboard" of the
whole thing.
(You can EVEN buy the videotape from us! But of course that's a last
resort... I understand...)
There may be things I can do to make these files smaller, and if you know
what they are, let me know. I know I could compress the sound further by
saving it at 11 megahertz instead of 22, and I might do that.
OH YEAH -- I almost forgot. The EAR of "BOB" section. That's all .wav
files. Some are huge, some are dinky. Many were already on
alt.binaries.slack. The night I copied off the video, I afterwards hooked
a cassette deck to the Mac and digitized a few random sound bites, mostly
from a recent Hour of Slack. The Father Joe Mama rant is big (1.9mb) but
really well delivered. There's a "MINUTE OF SLACK" Stang-rant that got
compliments back in the olden days. And I linked in the video soundtracks
and so on.
Sound-by-.wav download is not a pressing interest because of fast changes
in sound compression, making LIVE sound downloads possible. A guy with an
I-Wave audio server is gonna make HOUR OF SLACK available to anybody
anywhere any time starting next week or so (details to follow). This
radio-by-Internet thing is going through the roof, technically speaking.
We aren't there YET but it's right around the corner.
Did you know that in theory, using MPEG-3, one could crunch 600 hours of
Slack onto one CD ROM? Or something like that? The CD audio technology
we're used to is prehistoric. There's a new high definition CD compression
format now being used by a few sound studios that makes CDs sound like...
like 11 mh .wav files. Digital sound FINALLY can be as good as the best
analog sound. (It wasn't before, at least not on CDs... don't let 'em fool
you.)
How we're gonna make a buck off all this is anybody's guess. Maybe SubSITE
will get so famous we'll sell ADVERTISING on it (!sheeeeee-it). Maybe
we'll turn the whole thing into a CD-ROM.
The new SubSITE mindfucks ARE WORKING ADMIRABLY, though, I must say. The
poor system administrator at Sunsite has been getting angry email from all
over the world from FUCKING IDIOTS who ACTUALLY FALL for the "virus" and
"shut-down" gags and booby-traps I've place throughout the front section.
I have some AMAZING email copies to reproduce here... I need to remove the
real names and addresses because these suckers are just TOO DUMB to
BELIEVE! I must say, I have CACKLED ALOUD in satisfaction upon hearing
this news. SubSITE IS the most irritating website in the universe, and the
rubes out there WILL believe ANYTHING they read on their screen as long as
it has a plain white background.
I haven't looked at alt.slack in two weeks. I really miss it but... the
PERMANENT installations MUST TAKE PRECEDENCE!! I've been reading my email
but haven't answered any but the most pressing in a week. And the problem
is I'm SICK OF SITTING AT THE COMPUTER!! Mastering (or at least getting a
handle on) a new technological leap is tremendous fun for me, but APPLYING
it after that tends to become pure tedium pretty quick. My wife and kids
all went to see PHANTOM OF THE OPERA on this beautiful day in North Texas,
and I have to sit here nursing the uploads and killing time by writing to
you fine alt.slack.fukz. The nasty thing about the SUBSite is that it
NEVER NEVER ENDS. There are always a zillion things to change or add. I
haven't even STARTED SORTING the physical art pieces for scanning. There
are literal ACRES of wonderful text that could "just as easily" be dumped
in. I have people breathing down my neck by email, "Put my essay here!
Change my prices there!" and there's only so much I can do. In fact I
shouldn't be fucking with this any more this month at ALL. I have a
SERIOUS ranting ordeal with GWAR coming up and I should be shopping at the
magician supply stores around here, not jacking with the Internet. AND
YET... AND YET...
Anyway, THE OFFER STANDS: if you have a change to make, or a design
option or entire illustrated rant with a soundtrack, EMAIL THE HTML PIECES
to me. You can cop the code of anything on the web just as easily as I
can, tweak it, bounce it right to me and I'll PROBABLY add it to SubSITE.
Nobody has taken me up on that yet.
WHOA!!! I almost FORGOT! I need to add this to the credits list at the end
of the SubG-MTV "storyboard" photo gallery:
The hapless SubGenius in the office is played by Farley Scott, aka Dallas'
"Rev. Bob." This was inspired casting on my part I must say, designed to
confuse the foolish Dallasians even more. Farley Scott is an accomplished
Dallas comedian who, in 1978, EXACTLY AT THE SAME TIME THAT PHILO REVEALED
THE TRUTH OF DOBBS TO ME, started doing a stand-up "routine" that was a
take-off on televangelists. He called himself "Reverend Bob." Rev. Bob is
a fixture in Dallas night clubs and comedy venues and also has a certain
presence in the "underground." He's really funny, and audiences love him,
but it has nothing whatsoever to do with "Bob" Dobbs. Many dipshits,
however, have jumped to conclusions of both kinds. When FORMER SUBGENIUS
Pastor Buck Naked first heard of Rev. Bob, he threatened him physically
for ripping off The SubGenius Foundation. And no doubt some people think
we ripped off him. But, like Mr. Appleton, the ChiChiRodriquez on the
first DEVO album, and so many other examples, it was merely the
OVERPOWERING SYNCHRONICITY of the TRUE DOBBS that caused so many utterly
unrelated "Bob"-related "characters" to appear in the early 80s.
At any rate, casting "Rev. Bob" in our first big national TV broadcast
exposure seemed more than fitting. (Coindidentally (?), Farley looked the
part and also, in real life, was suffering almost exactly the same sort of
job as the video was protraying (legal secretary for pinks).
I just wanted to make sure Farley got credit for all that. He only got
paid $50. I only got paid $1,000. But then he only worked an afternoon,
while I sunk 4 months of my life into that job. And that's one reason I
have posted it on the Internet for all to copy, no matter HOW impossibly
huge the file is!!
*******
I'm not sure life is worth living with less than 8 megs of RAM. I have 16
now and I'm already running into the occasional shut-down. I used my
wife's Performa (5 megs RAM) to view the SubSITE and it crashed trying to
display all the 30 or so GIFs in the SubG-MTV storyboard page. (Everything
else worked fine and it was able to cop the audio files and play them --
after quitting Netscape.) My old LC with 4 mb RAM would die after about 6
pages of good art on the Web. Even with 16, when I used AMERICA ONLINE
(sorry) to view SubSITE through their new browser, I could only get about
4 pages in before it started pretending there was no art on subsequent
pages at all. (Sneaky of them to design it that way... puts the blame on
the web page designer rather than AOL, which is apparently incapable of
hiring enough well-groomed Pink programmers to make a web browser
requiring less than 8 megs!) The first page actually looked okay on AOL's
browser. It's missing the frames around the text, and all the text is the
same size, but... you know, for $3 an hour, that's not bad. Thank Glod
that in the computer world, you get BETTER results from LESS money. The
free shit that I use for $20 a month is about 10 times faster and
infinitely prettier looking than what AOL sells my family for an hourly
rate.
I still have that AOL account, because my 14 year old can't get Net access
any other way. But that's the only reason. If I had ONE MORE 14.4 modem I
could drop that account. Actually AOL is quite reasonable if you only use
it 5 hours a month... only $10. It takes longer than that just to download
my email some days.
My 16 year old doesn't have any interest in the Internet and says I'm a
REAL geek. But then he thinks R.E.M. is the greatest band in the world and
shuns Hendrix, Zoogz Rift, and the Swingin' Love Corpses, so... what can I
say, the only way he could rebel properly against his parents was to act
kind of normal-like. (He fakes it okay, but you can tell he's faking.)
*** DAMN! The ftpee'in has only gotten as far as STANG2.MPEG. 3 more vids
AND soundtracks to go. Jeez.
I don't HAVE to be sitting here typing to you people, you know. I could
stroll down to the lake and watch pudgy white women jog by, which I would
enjoy a great deal, in all honesty. (I have BROAD tastes, you might say.)
I could watch PULP FICTION, which I haven't seen but my daughter rented
(along with THE EXORCIST and BILLY MADISON) for her slumber party last
night. (-- It's Homecoming Dance night at the high school... my daughter
spurned the "socials" and threw her own bash, while my son spent his
hard-earned print-shop $ and did up the whole Homecoming thing, with a
suit and a mum and a date -- Christian girl, hmmpph -- dating outside the
faith; he's the high school's resident atheist/humanist/scientist.). Yeah,
I COULD watch PULP FICTION. Watch well directed violence scenes. That
would be fun. Or I could watch the 4 GWAR videos I have, again... I NEED
to do that. Must soak up GWAR jargon, intertwine with Church, make new
rant NOT designed for the Saved. With lots of special effects and flaming
swords and suchlike. I'm looking forward to this GWAR tour. I was dreading
it at first because I was afraid I'd be sleeping on a bus floor. Looks
like it might even be less stressful than normal ordinary everyday
parental life, now. The GWAR monsters seem like real regular joes, real
normal joe lunchpail hate-filled redneck intellectual Southern bastard
compulsively-creative mutants, just plain folks. Kind of fellers I can
hang out with and not feel like I have to up the bullshit level. I hate
that, upping the bullshit level. It really drains you. It's
Slack-depleting.
*****
Okay, I really am gonna quit typing now. Just because my uploads are still
happening doesn't mean I STILL have to LIVE and BREATHE computers. I could
just go walk Beast and Puddin', chat with the Baptist neighbors. I could
'frop up majorly and hook headphones up to my son's stereo vcr and watch
PULP FICTION or whatnot. Hell, for that matter I have my OWN stereo vcr!
With stereo reception capability! Found it in the TRASH CAN by the LAKE
where the RECYCLING BINS are! No shit. A perfectly good LOOKING stereo
vcr, 4 head... perched on a trash can. I thought, "Maybe this is STOLEN!
Or some old lady decided to buy a NEW one rather than CLEAN her old one!"
So I took it home and by gobbs, it WILL PLAY and RECORD if you CAREFULLY
FORCE the video cassette past the bent doohickies. It won't EJECT but
there are ways to get around that. And you have to put it in fast-forward
for a couple of seconds before it will play or record. But it DOES "WORK."
This is the WAY of all the equipment here at the SubGenius Dallas skyscraper hq.
*****
Nah, I'm just gonna EAT and GO TO BED. That's it. Will O'Dobbs got here,
he's up there in the factory office in case the uploads cause an
explosion. I don't HAVE to do anything, not even be polite to my family. I
COULD just FUCK OFF. Hmmm.
But then I might be like THE OTHERS for half an instant. NO.
Well, maybe.
Nah. I know. I'll go to bed for just a LITTLE while. THEN I'll watch the
movie. No I'll walk the dogs first. No...
Shit, I hate Slack.
******
DAMN! I went upstairs one last time to check the upload and either Fetch,
Sunsite, Metronet or the PeeMac HUNG UP again. SEEMS to have gotten
through the third to last MPEG.
This could go on FOREVER.
** IT DIDN'T. In the time it took me to blab and edit this update, the
whole mess got transfered. HAVE AT IT if you dare. Me, I'm gonna crash.
Stang
--
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
http://www.subgenius.com -- SubSITE of Slack
Original file name: SubSITE now has Church VIDEÉ
This file was converted with TextToHTML - (c) Logic n.v.