dynasor@infi.net (Dennis McClain-Furmanski) wrote:
> LeeTrevino wrote:
TREVINO??? Is that fuckin' TREVINO?? Thou Unlaunched Head, thou UNWORTHY
of Launchness One! Back thine cart from mine GREEN, demon!!
> : Ok, now is revealed the Lesser Mystery of Reverend Ivan Stang's .sig file!
>
> : Yes, that's right! It's all ONE line long. Regard the Unix "od" dumps
> : below:
>
> That's the standard Apple way. CR's only at the end of a paragraph.
> Yeah, it'd be helpful to hand place a few.
>
HUH?
Is this better?
--
Copyright! 1995 by Rev. Ivan Stang,
1st Orthodox Stangian MegaFisTemple Lodge of
People's Covenant Church of the Wrath of Dobbs Yeti,
Ressurrected, aka The SubGenius Foundation, Inc.,
PO Box 140306 Dallas TX 75214, fax 214-320-1561PRABOB
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Re: I'm WARLORDING Stang's .sig file
From: anarch@cse.ucsc.edu (Anarch)
[If this is the second time you've seen this, IGNORE THE FIRST! It is
hereby SUPERSEDED...my first recommendation, I am ashamed to admit,
contained TAB DAMAGE, inserted without my approval by this fiend of an
editor...believe me, Stang, you DON'T want a tabdamaged sig. Anyway...]
Rev. Ivan Stang <i.stang@metronet.com> wrote:
>Is this better?
>
>--
>Copyright! 1995 by Rev. Ivan Stang,
>1st Orthodox Stangian MegaFisTemple Lodge of
>People's Covenant Church of the Wrath of Dobbs Yeti,
>Ressurrected, aka The SubGenius Foundation, Inc.,
>PO Box 140306 Dallas TX 75214, fax 214-320-1561PRABOB
I think this would be nice:
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
anarch@cse.ucsc.edu +-+-+ Just because it's a JOKE doesn't mean it's not TRUE
D I S C L A I M E R : E V E R Y T H I N G I W R I T E I S F A L S E
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Re: I'm WARLORDING Stang's .sig file
From: dynasor@infi.net (Dennis McClain-Furmanski)
Rev. Ivan Stang (i.stang@metronet.com) wrote:
: > Yeah, it'd be helpful to hand place a few.
: HUH?
: Is this better?
: Copyright! 1995 by Rev. Ivan Stang,
: 1st Orthodox Stangian MegaFisTemple Lodge of
: People's Covenant Church of the Wrath of Dobbs Yeti,
: Ressurrected, aka The SubGenius Foundation, Inc.,
: PO Box 140306 Dallas TX 75214, fax 214-320-1561PRABOB
Well, yeah, or a bit flatter like anarch showed you.
Just keep it to 75 characters or less per line, non-proportional,
and center it if that pleases you. An old scissors and paste veteran like
you should have no problem with it. It's a minor art form, but an art form
none the less.
--
dynasor@infi.net The Doctor is on.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Re: I'm WARLORDING Stang's .sig file
From: anarch@cse.ucsc.edu (Anarch)
[alt.fan.warlord removed since now we're talking good sigs]
Rev. Ivan Stang <i.stang@metronet.com> wrote:
> anarch@cse.ucsc.edu (Anarch) wrote:
>> I think this would be nice:
>>
>> 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
>>
>
>Well, thanks, but when I tried to copy that, it screwed everything up BUT
>ROYALLY.
>
>Excuse me, but I honestly don't understand what you people are trying to
>tell me.
We're just trying to keep ACCELERATING you up that ol' ON-RAMP to the I-WAY.
We want you to have a good-lookin sig, so it HEIGHTENS your powers to
impress and astound, rather than providing SNIGGER-FODDER for geeky
net-pinks. There are long traditions, you see, dividing Usenet signatures
between the good, classy and stylish, and the bad (technically,
"barfulous"). Now I'd advise no one, let alone YOU, to change their sig
just to conform to tradition, BUT these are not *just* traditions--there
are actual RATIONAL FOUNDATIONS for these rules, mostly involving the
technical history of Usenet messaging...there's this de facto standard,
for example, of composing messages for 80-character lines with no
word-wrap (ie hard returns for every line) using the 7-bit "ASCII classic"
character set (source of "curly quote" problems, as you know). It's
unfortunate, but it's something we have to live with, because you just
can't count on anything fancier working properly in every one of the
bazillion different machines out there in the net.
So anyway, signatures as well as articles need to keep these things in
mind...it can be trickier for sigs, though, because there's a natural
inclination to throw fancier formatting into a sig, and that's where the
trouble starts. Other aspects of this default standard that will
invariably trip up the uninitiated attempting to, say, center a line, are
NO TABS and *monospace* typefaces. I'll bet that it's one of these
features that screwed up your copy of my suggestion...tabs will get you
because it has been SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN that no two newsreaders on the
planet share the same tab settings, so your nice half-inch indent gets
turned into three-quarters on someone else's screen and 17 spaces on mine,
and so on. Usually not too ugly looking if you're just indenting
paragraphs, but try to create some kind of snazzy centered ASCII graphic
in your sig and WATCH OUT! You may remember I mentioned "tab damage"...
that's what I'm talking about. The practice of quoting Usenet posts by
inserting additional characters at the start of the lines also screws up
tabs. So if you ever get the urge to start tabbing around, STOP! and use
spaces instead.
Which brings me to my next point...spacing works as a replacement for tabs
only because of this monospace font habit. Monospace fonts are
traditional because for a long time there WERE no proportional fonts, and
they're still in use because of what I mentioned before, that you just
can't count on anything else, unfortunately. Nowadays the amount of
newsreading done on Macs and Windows boxes and X machines is growing a
lot, so a lot of people DO read and write news using Gaudy Old Style, but
like tabs it inevitably results in trouble on other machines when you
start to do formatting based on it. So keep your target audience in mind!
You can probably tweak your newsreader's display to fit the Usenet
standard: try Monaco 9 (or Courier if you like, but I think it's gross)
and make your window 80 columns wide. Remember your carriage returns
(turn off word wrapping if you can) and WATCH THOSE TABS!
There are other less technical signature rules, but the aesthetic theory
is all rooted in these kinds of geeky details. The biggest rule is simply
KEEP EM SHORT! Four lines or less is the accepted rule (the "McQuary
limit"), though there's a lot of leeway. Eyebrows may be raised, but it's
unlikely you'd get warlorded (technical term for "having your signature
exposed for ridicule and mockery in alt.fan.warlord") just for having five
lines, as long as you're tabdamage-free and refrain from including
incomprehensible ASCII graphics.
So this:
>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
will probably keep you off a.f.w. for now. But, with all respect, it
doesn't LOOK real nice (is this what happened when you copied my
suggestion? You were RIGHT to be concerned!). It looks a lot like a
proportional font-type mixup, especially the last line...looks like it`s
TRYING to line up with something but it CAN'T QUITE MAKE IT. Check it out
in Monaco if you're using something else.
If I may humbly resubmit my example:
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
and a few extra details: nothing but simple text in those first two
lines, but note the extra space after "Copyright!" and "Stang,"...gives it
that nice full-justified feel. And that third line is centered by virtue
of the six spaces at the beginning--NO TAB (the first time I posted this,
the editor I'm using "helped" me out by automatically changing the first
four spaces to a tab...THIS is the sort of new-fangled stuff we have to
struggle with while trying to keep things DOWN at the Usenet standard
level). And the last is balanced by FIFTY-ONE, count 'em, spaces
in-between the 1 and the P. And EVERY line has its very own carriage
return out on the end. So try copying that and if your newsreader or your
editor messes up the PRECISION LAYOUT with some kind of "helpful"
adjustment, just give it a cuss and a whap upside the head and type it out
yourself. I think that's a damn fine sig (though I do say it myself) and
I'd be proud as hell to see the Rev. Stang tacking it onto his posts.
anarch@cse.ucsc.edu +-+-+ Just because it's a JOKE doesn't mean it's not TRUE
D I S C L A I M E R : E V E R Y T H I N G I W R I T E I S F A L S E
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Re: I'm WARLORDING Stang's .sig file
From: henke@netcom20.netcom.com (Douglas G. Henke)
i.stang@metronet.com (Rev. Ivan Stang) writes:
> Excuse me, but I honestly don't understand what you people are trying to
> tell me.
Excuse me while I chuckle mirthfully, remembering how little sympathy I
received when I last directed a similar sentiment SubGenius-Foundation-wards.
(IHNW, IJLS "mirthfully.")
Original file name: WARLORDING
This file was converted with TextToHTML - (c) Logic n.v.