SUBSITE NOW HAS VIDEOS!!!

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, well, that takes 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.

In fact, don't try to download the videos until after 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. Just look 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 DOES WORK!! It SHOULD work on PCs just as well as Macs, too.

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