Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Hello, Geno.  What was it like being a subject of a book? You must not feel
too abused by the process.  Any bones to pick with Indra?
Stuff he left out or should have?
  

    
I must confess to not having been around in the glory pre-net days,
never having had the thrill of mixing with virus hatchers, and not much
liking the atmosphere created by this author and his old buddy. The
whole thing appears to me to be an exercise in middle-aged nostalgia
for times that should have gotten better and did. For most of us.
  

    
Indra darling, when you discovered the net in, what, mid 1980s? were
you aware at the time of the existing net culture that had already
been thriving for over a decade?

Are you aware of that culture now?
  

    
In a message to Geno, Gail sez:

   GW> How does it feel to be subject of a book? Any bones to pick
   GW> with Indra?

This was not the first time I was mentioned in print. You might check
out George Smith's: The Virus Creation Labs. Also you might have
noticed that I am mentioned frequently in the bible. So this time I was
a bit more prepared. 

IF YOU CAN'T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT...TIE HER UP.
-JESUS AXION

Now, I can't tell you how poorly my story was told in the bible. Time
and time again Peter and his boys got it wrong. You might notice
though that they made themselves look pretty damn good. I mean hell, no
one ever mentions Peter's perference for sodomizing chickens. Indra
told mainly his story in his book. Yes, there are a few things I'd
wish he'd have gone into more detail on. Cleton and what a real
asshole he was in reality. How my Bogus Message Writter program worked
and how it drove the fido gawds crazy but it wasn't my story, it was
Indra's. He did a fine job and I enjoyed the book.

DAD THIS IS A FUCKED UP PLAN!
-MY ACTUAL WORDS ON THE CROSS

Anyway Gail I'm hoping Indra will write a sequel. I've even offered to

help. I think he should call it: Cyber Trailer Park Trash.



-Jesus, Son of Gawd  
  

    <hidden>
  

    
In a message to Jesus, catch22 sez:

   C> I must confess to not having been around in the glory pre-net
   C> days never having the thrill of mixing with virus hackers and
   C> not much liking the atmosphere created by the author and his  
   C> old buddy. The whole thing appears to me to be an exercise in 
   C> middle-aged notalgia for times that should have gotten better
   C> and did.

Sharon, Sharon, Sharon. These were not pre-net days. Fidonet isn't
even as old as the internet and is still alive and well. It is
international and still a lot of fun. Chances are if you like the Well
you'd like Fidonet. Research it on the Web and maybe you'll find
something you like.




-Jesus 
  

    
I appreciate your solicitude. However, the key point I was making is
that I find your behavior boorish and the author's twaddle sophomoric.
  

    

I find the author an excellent writer. Quite good with words.
I like his taste in friends (Alaster McIntosh, who is one
of my heros in the whole world).

I think Jesus Slut Fucker is funny.
But that's just my sense of humor.
And then again it's not *my* religion he is making fun of.

But part of what makes him funny, to me, is how
irritated he makes some people become.

Sorry.
  

    

catch22, who is really just too fucking stupid to live sez:


   C> I appreciate your solicitude. However, the key point I was
   C> was making is I find your behavior boorish and the author's
   C> twaddle sophomoric.


Now Sharon, you can't lie to Jesus. The truth of the matter is I
exposed your ignorance and now your backtracking. I suggest my dear
Sharon the fault is not in the stars but in you. Take a laxative or
get laid maybe you'll feel better.

OH GOD THAT THING IS BIG!
-ALL OF SLUT FUCKERS LADY FRIENDS

Additionally as official conference moderator I demand you show us 
your tits.



-Jesus
  

    
I do think that some of the groups that were using various networks
and online technologies in the late 80s and early 90s were interesting,
vibrant, and unique.

For whatever reason, most of the gathering places of these groups were
hugely fragmented when the web came along.

Despite <catch22>'s dismissiveness, I think this is a real phenomenon, one
that characterizes the current state of The Well, among other things.
  

    
Yes, Fidonet is not what it once was, however there are over 20,000
or so BBS's in the US alone. Fido suffers from poor leadership or they
could easily take advantage of the web. Still the messaging software
is still a lot better than anything  you see here on the Well. Also
Netscape and Mickeysoft could learn a thing about file transfer from
fido technology.



-Jesus
  

    
It's just after 5:30am here and there's lightning over the woods to
the south and a hell of a wind blowing. Stayed up to watch the Tyson
fight - what a fiasco, particularly coming straight after Naz's dirty
maul in Detroit last night - saw the computer was still glowing in the
dark so came to check this. 

Anyone offended by Geno (Jesus SF), he's just doing what he does. He's
a softy really, behind all the blather. You might care to check out an
interview I did with him
(http://www.cybergypsies.com/geno-jesus.html). Geno, please don't
insult Lizabeth, she is making a valiant attempt to interview me.

Hello Jef (#28), I first got online (not the internet) in 1984 and at
the time was the first person I knew who had ever used a computer of
any kind. I'd been asked to write an ad about this thing called a modem
and decided to test it first. So I was very much at sea and rather
dumbfounded to discover that, as you say, there had been this unknown
world out there for years. Most of the things I was involved in,
Fidonet, Greennet, the various multi-user games, dated from that period
or not long before, so I was never much involved with what had gone
before. Some of my friends on Shades, for eg, had been around when
Essex MUD was developed, that being the director progenitor of Shades
and forerunner of all the thousands of Lambda and Diku and other MUDs
that now exist all over the net. In answer to your question, I knew
that I had stumbled into something beyond my experience, but I never
really did get to know all that much about what had gone before. I have
read about it since. Cybergypsies is the stories of people I knew and
wasn't intended to be a history or view of the net. The stories unravel
during the decade between the invention of the Apple Mac and the
coming of the Web

Sharon (#27), I don't want to say that the pre-Web era was a golden
age, just that I enjoyed being online more in those days. The virus
thing was only one very small part of it. Partly what made that time so
exciting for me was that I was very deeply involved in human rights
work online via Greennet, which I no longer am. During the Gulf War,
when we were working with the Kurds, there was a real sense that at
least in Britain we were close to achieving a breakthrough, that we
were mobilising irresistible pressure on our government into doing more
than pay lip service to human rights. The old 1991 postings on
Greennet are still there, in the mideast.kurds conference, and reading
them back now they seem so charged with naive hope. I stopped writing
for Amnesty in 1997, after Bosnia, Myanmar, Rwanda and countless other
disasters, I found myself having to whip up passion rather than just
feeling it. The last thing I did for Amnesty was an interview with Don
McCullin, the photographer, about his feelings after thirty years of
documenting human rights disasters. I asked him if he ever looked back
over his old pictures and he said, "When you go into your attic and you
fish out some of those old colour magazines as I often do, and look at
what I've done, it all looks rather like a veneer, that's faded
because it's been up in the attic. It's kind of faded like newspapers,
they go yellow and faded and that's what our memories become, our minds
become."

Given the power of his pictures, and his reputation, I thought that
was terribly sad (anyone who doesn't know Don's work, do check it out
via Amazon or the search engines - or mail me indra@jamrach.com if you
want to know more) but it was exactly what I felt when I looked back
over my work for Amnesty and the work we did on Greennet - old, faded
and turning yellow. :)
  

    
Hello Marguerite, (#18) yes I was and am very deeply influenced by
Hindu ideas - and those of other Indian religions. At the school I went
to, Mayo College, in Ajmer (near Pushkar lake, which you will surely
know, having belonged to Swami Muktananda's sampradaya) we had Hindus
of various sects, Muslims (Sunni and Shi'a), Jews, Christians of
various demoninations, Buddhists (Mahayana, Hinayana and Tibetan),
Jains and Parsis. We grew up together knowing a lot about each other's
religions, partly because we all celebrated each other's major
festivals - dozens of holidays and feast days, wonderful for schoolboys
- and learned each other's prayers and traditions and tales...

...but I have not heard your story before. Where does it come from and
what was the vizier's reply?
  

    
Marguerite, you said

>It seems the meme of different worlds as different states of 
>consciousness and not actually *substantial* in and of themselves 
>as we ordinarily think of "substantial", comes up over and over 
>in Hindu stories.(I can give other examples.)"

Please do, I would love to hear them.

>Did you first think about this as a result of your contact with Luna?

What I described above (#13) were more Luna's ideas than mine, but I
applied them when struggling to work out how to write my book, which
contained stories from dozens of different people inhabiting many
different worlds, all of which to me seemed equally real. 

Luna, in her power, in the Vortex, was a mesmerising, dazzling person.
I never did find out who she "really" was, no-one did, but the one
time she spoke to me "out of character", ie as her human self, she said
"if you met me in real life, you wouldn't look at me twice and
wouldn't want to know me. I am lonely, a bitter person. I murder myself
daily. I come here to die, so that Luna can live."

I'm no psychologist, but it seems obvious that we all do this, to some
greater or lesser degree, in our everyday lives. We all have roles
(mother, golfer, raconteur, mountain climber, project manager) which we
relish, of which we can say, when I'm doing or being such and such, I
feel absolutely alive, and other roles which are "just not me".
Whoever-played-Luna saw her/him/self as having two roles, one the human
being in the real world, the other Luna in the Vortex. Of the two,
s/he chose to regard Luna as having the "real" life and lived for the
moment when the modem went on and the portal of the Vortex scrolled up
onto her screen.



 
  

    

There was a slippage in the messages.
I meant for this one to follow <38>


I think the story is from the "Yoga Vaishista"
The author is himself sort of mythical. Like a Homer.
His name's "Vaishista," if i remember correctly.
I will find out

Aaggggggggggg.

But I will have to wait to go upstate (soon)
to where I keep my books so I can really goggle my memory.

I will find out.  I also sending an e-mail to my friend
Swami Shankarananda in Melbourne. It was his job
to remember. And he's an ex-Shakespeare scholar.
So he may have something interesting to add.

I think the upshot of the story is that the King could no
longer find any peace after this incident and so became motivated
to do unusual things, for a King, in order to try to get at the bottom
of what was going on.  He goes on to try to find out who he
really is, what is his true identity. So it turns into a quest for the Self.
Leads to other adventures. He becomes a King/savant.

It took a while before they could calm him down. He could've
run away a la Siddhartha Gautama. Or he may have fired
the Vizier and brought in other consultants.

Or perhaps the Vizier gave him The Teaching.

I believe this story is used by people giving instruction in
Advaita Vedanta. "Only Brahman is real...etc."

But these stories get spun differently depending
on from what linage is the person who is telling them.
And what they are trying to emphasize.
I may be wrong about the Yoga Vaishista.
It could be straight from an Upanishad. Used by Vendantins.
Which one? I will just have to look it up.

There was a comic book series a while back that did something
similar. It featured a postman who went to sleep in one world
only to be someone in another world while ostensibly asleep
in the first. And vis versa for the other world. It was a gimmick
for two comic book companies to merge their worlds and
join together their stable of characters into one series.
At the end (spoiler) the postman, Akira-like, becomes a giant
who straddles the two worlds. He merges identity somehow
with the writer of the comic.  And is able to have whatever
he wills. And becomes "God." It's uncomfortable for
the other characters, to say the least. Since he's not a
particularly nice or happy "God." The end, like the ending
in _Akira_, the Japenese anime, was a bit of a let down
to the build up, IMHO.
  

    
I'm always surprised when someone actually takes JSF seriously, sorry
to anyone that took offense. I don't think the Well is ready for JSF
so I guess I'd better keep him at home, under the bed, in the closet,
and on the fidonet echo Flame. Anyone searching for Jesus can find
him in Flame, where he is a sure bet to win the Asshole of the Year
Award for 1999.


-Geno
  

    
Maybe JSF should visit <flame.ind.>
  

    
JSF> Fidonet is not what it once was

Case in point: the company that produced TBBS is now growing by leaps and
bounds, driven by an internet-related product -- a hardware/software
combination that's basically a turn-key, all-in-one gateway, firewall,
email host, and web server.
  

    

(I hid <30> because I had already posted that message earlier in the topic.)
  

    
From my perspective as someone who has been on the net continuously
since 1976, the BBS/MUD culture of the late 80s & early 90s is a
puzzle.  It came out of nowhere, ignoring existing culture.  A decade
later it vanished, declining to adapt to changing conditions.  And
during the ten years it was popular, it was also the subject of
much ridicule for its shallowness.  And yet we have a book written
about these folks, which I guess we are supposed to take seriously.
It doesn't really add up for me.
  

    
Jef, I don't think you are looking at the whole picture. Fido
vanished? Certainly it declined. There are still over 70,000 nodes
internationally. I find it strange that I am being forced to defend
it, me one of it's biggest critics. However, the detractors here in
the Well seem uninformed.  

There was a book written about the decline of the Roman Empire. Should
we take that seriously? Most of the net software you currently run
was first developed for fido.  
  

    
Well, you don't have to take it seriously, but I guess it might help
if you read it :)
  

    
In a message loosely aimed at Jesus, David sez:

   DCL> Maybe Jesus should check out Flame.ind


Yes, it is interesting and the first thing I checked out when I came
over here. Funny some of the people posting in there we ran out of
Flame long ago. Could be interesting and fun, though without the Flux
and dirty tricks of fido Flame.
  

    
>Most of the net software you currently run
 was first developed for fido.

Uh, no.  Actually most of it is directly descended from the NCP tools
on the ARPAnet.  In particular telnet and ftp are both the same
programs used back in the early 70s, with modifications of course.
  

    
Geno, what you're saying isn't exactly true.  Certainly some Fidonet
software was adapted to work with usenet and other internet technologies,
but there's little direct heritage between the two.

Jef, The BBS culture became popular as Modems became affordable to
consumers. At that time, public ISPs were unusual.  The internet was
mostly accessible to academic users, along with a few corporations and
governmental organizations.  BBSs were a way for people to connect.  The
net was not on the radar.

And, um, wasn't the early Well part of this movement?

The current web is also the subject of much ridicule for shallowness.
Then as now, the ridiculers are the ones who haven't figured out how to
find the things they're looking for.  Maybe the things they're looking for
don't exist.  That doesn't mean there's nothing there.