An Introduction to btanaka's webstuff

btanaka's webstuff is a collection of web pages whose contents reflect a few of my interests. If you're looking for a unifying theme, you won't find one easily.

These web pages were originally called "BWorld" when I first put them up in 1992. It was something of joke or a play-on-words. To get it you'd need to remember the old online service "eWorld". (Don't worry if you don't think it was a good joke. No one else did either. Ha!)

Somewhere along the way I grew tired of the name and changed it to btanaka's webstuff. And when I changed the name I changed the pages a bit too. I took some stuff out and added new graphics and content.

The most significant chunk of stuff I removed was all the punk rock stuff. (It was the section that came to be known as "Happy Farm -- the punk rock old folks' home".) It was fun to be one of the first half dozen web sites in the world with punk rock stuff on it. I had lyrics and pictures and other things. Being one of the first and leaving it up for a couple of years earned me links on quite a lot of sites all over the web. I still get around 30 hits a day on the punk pages that no longer exist! I finally took down all the punk stuff because I didn't feel they were good enough to speak strongly enough for something I care about alot in a time when the distortions of what it is are so very strong. (Those of you who care about it too and remember the way it was back, say, during the early 80's, know what I'm talking about.) Every so often I work on some pages that cover this subject. I'm still not happy with them. If I ever become happy with them, I'll put them up.

Actually there is one last punk rock related thing still here: the ksun interview with citizen fish. In it, Dick reveals the meaning of the name "Citizen Fish" and other interesting things transpire.

I also removed a Noam Chomsky lecture. When I html'ized that and put it up originally, it didn't exist anywhere else on the web, and it had a little blurb from Chomsky about the Internet that I thought was interesting. Since that time a number of excellent Chomsky sites have come up. I'm sure someone has put the same lecture up somewhere else. But if not I'll put it back up on btanaka's webstuff.

I've tried to make the index on the main page self-explanatory, but here's a quick run down of some of the sections:

  • Brain Oil is a collection of creative writing exercises written by myself and two friends. It was fun making them up. It was, and is, fun to use them. If you enjoy creative writing, please try them out. Recently Brain Oil was featured in a creative writing magazine published online by some folks on AOL. When their website is up I'll include a link here.

  • Zenspace is a reference page listing Zen resources. Mostly it's an annotated list of websites, but there are a few items on there that aren't Internet things. As I mention on the page, I very much like to give webspace on that page to groups that can't put up their own pages for whatever reason. I don't often find time to do much research, so the content on this page is "user-driven". That means you all suggest things to put up on the page. Feel free to send me mail if you have suggestions.

  • I worked for Silicon Graphics recently, and while there I thought, "Now what kind of fun stuff can I make with this neato graphics workstation?" Well, I ended up goofing around with all kinds of things, but one very simple project in particular turned out well (proving again, I suppose, that simple is better) and seemed worth putting up on a page. I had been inspecting animated gifs on various web pages. Invariably they were meant to be mere accents on a page, but ended up being obnoxious, flashy things that demanded attention yet transmitted nothing useful or pleasurable. I began to wonder what would happen if I made one with two questions in mind: 1) What if it were intentionally the center of attention? None of this, "Oh, I'm just a little accent, but I'm going to pound you on the head with a mallet and set fire to my corner of the page". And 2) What if it were subtle visually and told a story or something? Using Showcase, Snapshot, and Whirlgif I made an animated gif wherein William Carlos Williams' poem " the red wheelbarrow" unfolds. I hope you like it. (You'll need a browser that understands animated gifs to view it.)

  • There are a number of other things in the index too that I haven't talked about here. Go ahead and take a look at the index for a complete listing.

I very much like to hear from people that have visited my website. (There are many hundreds of you every day!) So, drop me a line!

Come back again. This document will change. The whole site will change. Slowly.

Thanks for visiting, and remember... commerce on the 'Net makes money, but community on the 'Net makes sense.

- Brian Tanaka, btanaka@well.com