How can we finish DESTORYING THE WORLD if we must spend so much time merely REPAIRING our STUFF?!?
NEW TOLL FREE CHURCH MAIL ORDER LINE!
SUBGENIUS FOUNDATION MANUFACTURING and DISTRIBUTION DIVISION MOVES TO NEW FACTORY!
SubSITE IS PICK OF THE WEEK ON MICROSOFT NETWORK!
UPCOMING DEVIVAL IN COLUMBUS!
SUPERB ZONTAR WEBSITE UNVEILED!
CONSPIRACY FUCKS STANG RE: ALT.BINARIES.SLACK
NEW HOUR OF SLACK
WHERE TO GET MPEG-VIEWERS FOR SUBGENIUS ONLINE VIDEOS!
HELPFUL HINTS FOR MAC USERS
CHURCH IRC ONLINE SERVICES NOTES and ARTICLE about IRC
Let's get this business meeting over with as soon as possible, okay?
***
First on the agenda:
NEW TOLL FREE CHURCH MAIL ORDER LINE!
NYES! And it really is:
1-888-669-2323
That's where you can call or FAX in your SubGenius Goods order along with your credit card details, and THAT WHICH YOU MOST WANTED will be winging its way to you via lovely UPS or US Mail!
Now, don't go pestering Jesus at that number just to CHAT. You can pester Jesus on your own dime at 214-324-0993. But if you want to order something, or to ask about something orderlicious, or to bitch about an order, well by gobbs HAVE AT IT and WE'LL pay the bill! (With the profits off your order, natch!)
SOMETIMES -- when our Lord is online -- that number may be busy. And if he or his Fishers aren't there to pick it up, leave a message -- for he is a Good Lord, the Prince of Peace, and will call you back. You can also fax orders to my office #, 214-320-1561. I ALWAYS let the machine pick up the call first. ALWAYS. I am totally pester-proofed. But Jesus will deign to talk to you. DON'T call before noon!
***
SUBGENIUS FOUNDATION MANUFACTURING and DISTRIBUTION DIVISION MOVES TO NEW FACTORY!
YEA, LO! For Jesus betook Himself, and the goods and chattel of the Church, unto His new Manger, which was like a great Wharehouse full of Dynamos, and to there did He and His Fishers of Wallets remove themselves, that His Heavenly Father, which is Stang, might have Peace and Slack.
Yes, all the great machines and devices, the crates full of SubGenius T-shirts, the dubbing decks, the forklifts, the smelting equipment, the conveyor belts, the boxes and boxes of unprinted Stark Fist pages and unmixed audio tapes, and the attendant workers, all have moved to a new Industrial Home a mile or so down the lakeshore from the Corporate Office. It was felt that perhaps company morale would be better served were the, shall we say, executive level personnel no longer forced to INTERFERE with the good common salt-of-the-earth workers who so ably man the presses and CD-stampers. They have their own cafeteria now, a basketball court, even a smoking room. And we less mechanically inclined will be able to stay out of their hair, here in the Penthouse, surrounded by the tedious accoutrements of upper level management.
Division Supervisor is Rev. Jesus H. Christ Devilacqua; Division Chief of Security is Rev. Will O'Dobbs; Comptoller of All Internet Relationships is Rev. Nickie Deathchick. Janitorial Staff: D. Smith, S. Wilcox
***
SubSITE GETS PICK OF THE WEEK ON MICROSOFT NETWORK!
Heh... the AntiChrist comes through again. We got this letter:
>Congratulations! The Microsoft Network (MSN) web site, www.msn.com, has
>selected your site, The Church Of The Subgenius, as the pick of the week
>in the links area for Fun and Interest
>from Aug 21 to Aug 27, 1996.
>
>MSN on the Internet currently receives over 3 million hits per day, and
>now our customers have a direct link from our site (in the Links
>area) to yours. We have an MSN pick-of-the-week icon (in .gif format)
>at http://www.msn.com/awards/weekly.htm that you can use on your site.
>If you use it, please link it to www.msn.com.
>
>Because you'll undoubtedly get more hits from people using Microsoft
>Internet Explorer to link from our site to yours, we invite you to
>participate in the Internet Explorer logo program. See
>http://www.microsoft.com/ie/logo/ for details.
> blah, blah
This was very exciting news, because WE NEED MONEY. We need $2,000 in postage to mail the mini-Fist to the western side of the country and the rest of the world. But this also put a China Syndrome-type bonfire under our asses.
Lately, we've been able to monitor the use of SubSITE (which is located many hundreds of thousands of miles away from us in North Carolina) via a program called AccessWatch. We can see how many people looked at how many pages, and WHICH pages, etc. Two weeks ago we were pulling in roughly 1,000 people a day. (Half take one look and split, the other half goes in 10 pages or more at a whack.) (Incidentally, the term "hits per day" is generally misused. "Hits" basically means PAGES seen, not number of people looking. We get 8,000 "hits" a day. But only 1,000 individuals are doing the hitting.
The first day of being "Pick of the Week," we shot up to 2,000 people a day. BUT -- as Jesus and I realized to our UTTER HORROR -- THEY WEREN'T LOOKING AT THE ONLINE CATALOG!! Only 20 or so people were even GLANCING at it! Instead they were taking... well, the standard route, what I would have expected, what I in fact set up with fiendish cleverness as the main trail in. And I STUPIDLY had made all links to the CATALOG practically nothing more than little AFTERTHOUGHTS. MOREOVER -- THE CATALOG SUCKED!! I had overloaded the single page it was on with art, long ago, thinking Jesus was going to be rebuilding it soon in a FORMS form. It was sure to crash anything but a real modern system, and even then it was a pain in the ass. And the order form really didn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense.
So I busted that thing into 5 fast-moving parts, redid the order form, linked in the new product illos Jesus had made, splurped the toll free number everywhere, and then PUT SO DAMNED MANY EVIL LINKS TO THAT CATALOG ON ALL THE WEBSITE'S OPENING PAGES that NO FLY could POSSIBLY avoid THAT spider.
It worked, too. I checked the stats today and now the Scatalog is the third-most-hit page, after page one and the first FIST pre-contents page. Mentioning that there was "nudity" in the catalog helped a lot, I'm sure. There actually is a little bit. But the nipples are replaced by eyeballs...
The lengths to which we prostitute ourselves for that man "Bob." I hope he appreciates it. Fat chance.
I thought, well, I reckon all these gimps, Pinks and potential SubGenii out there who recently bought their first Windows crap and PCs and all, whose main view of the Net starts at www.msn.com, the extra thousand a day looking at this, why I'll bet they mostly ARE using Explorer and not Netscape. I WONDER HOW SUBSITE WORKS FOR THEM.
I had tried Explorer and thought it clunky and limited. This time I took a good close look at SubSITE through it.
AND ALL THE PAGES USING ATOM FUNWAY PLASTICO ART FOR BACKGROUND TILES ARE TOTALLY FUCKED WHEN VIEWED THROUGH EXPLORER!!! (And that's a lot of pages now). The background art goes so hog-wild schizoid that the text in front is unreadable. Why the HELL this could be, is a total mystery... any ideas?
GOGGS-AMIGHTY have I got a lot of repair to do on SubSITE. And the articles... and art... and the soundz... g'blbl'bl'bl'bl'bl'bl
***
TWO DEVIVAL EVENTS with REV. IVAN STANG-- COLUMBUS, OHIO
Saturday night, Oct. 26
STREET PREACHIN'
(part of THE WITCHES' BALL street festival, protesting the expulsions of various "alternative" stores by a fundamentalist Christian real estate developer)
Sponsored by SALEM WEST (occult book shop)
Location: SALEM WEST , 5th and High St.
For info: 614-421-7557
Sunday night, Oct. 27
Full Fledged Devival
at a bar called STASHES (2402 N. High St.)
with special gust stars THE MENDELSONICS!
Sponsored by: MONKEY'S RETREAT (614-262-9511)
There will be a book signing/minidevival at Monkey's Retreat before the devival at Stashes
This is all we really know so far, except that the people setting this up are real nice folks we know from the Starwood events, and that part of our job is to raise a big public stink about this born-again company that bought up a huge chunk of the "trendy strip" part of town and are ending the leases for the various occult, punk, skatepunk, gay&lesbian, and etc. weirdo shops.
Funny how God needs so much help from mortals, huh? Well, we'll be there to see if the Big Guy is MAN enough to DEFEND HIMSELF!!
***
SUPERB ZONTAR WEBSITE UNVEILED!
My very favorite magazine of all time was ZONTAR, THE MAGAZINE FROM VENUS, created by Rev.s Jan Johnson and Brian Curran in Boston, dedicated to serving the Master Zontar and exploring the Zontarian Aesthetic especially through careful analysis of the films of Larry Buchanan (a Dallas filmmaker best known for MARS NEEDS WOMEN, DOWN ON US (BEYOND THE DOORS), ZONTAR THING FROM VENUS, etc.).
ZONTAR is now THE THIRD GREATEST WEBSITE IN THE WORLD and we are HONORED to have it buried within SUbSITE!!! TO SERVE THE MASTER!!! TO SERVE THE MASTER!!
The art, layout, and above all, the TRUTH OF ZONTAR is of such a PURE POST-BUCHANANISTIC NATURE that my eyes water to even think of it. Like the truncated Nenslo art gallery that still hides cowering at SubSITE, ZONTAR is not a SubGenius Foundation production but rather more akin to a carbuncle or tumor growing upon the skin, normally hidden beneath a layer of clothing, but always ready to delight the eye of he or she who would pull back that waistband and peer down.
PEER IF YOU DARE:
http://www.subgenius.com/ZONTARZONE_/zhome.HTML
Notice that underline line right after ZONTARZONE.
STANG SEZ: "CHECK IT OUT!" We don't harbor just ANY old bizarre-ass website inside ours.
***
CONSPIRACY FUCKS STANG RE: ALT.BINARIES.SLACK
It has been so torturous for me... sob... for my umbilical to alt.binaries.slack is so twisted about my neck that I can get almost nothing to and very little from. And that's a PISSER because in recent weeks, thanks to the FASCIST JACKBOOT of THE SUBGENIUS POLICE, and the artists involved, a.b.s. has been a veritable FONT of DOBBSIAN VISUAL PSYCHEDELIA! The good Dr. cuthulu in particular, and those wacky zanos at Funway Plastico, not to mention Tripp and the regulars, have filled the vacuum left when the warez doods fled. YET I AM SEEING BUT A FRACTION OF IT!
I have posted and posted and posted, art, sounds, by me and others, on a weekly basis, for weeks and weeks, constantly badgering my access service, and last week -- A JPEG GOT THROUGH!!! Since then however I have sent many more tests with NO RESULTS.
What's really maddening is that I can see twice as many posts on a.b.s. through my AOL account as I can through Metronet. BUT AOL DOESN'T LET YOU DOWNLOAD THE BINARIES!!! Nor post. Not without an immense hassle.
So YOU ARTEESTS -- have mercy on poor old Rev. Stang. When you post something to abs, slip one to i.stang@metronet.com at the same time!
DESPITE THE TRAVAILS, I have amassed a NEW gigantic stack of BLISTERING JPEGS which will be in a new tunnel in the Art Mines at SubSITE just as soon as I can get this shovel fixed.
***
NEW HOUR OF SLACK
At least it wasn't a rerun this time. #542... I'll post the log elsewhere. It was a pretty good one. A REAL classy Dr. Howll bible story and a somber Joe Mama sermon stand out, mixed with some recent fave crackpots.
Jesus just got some new TrueSpeechified shows from Wandarer and those should be up at SubSITE soon.
Wandarer has completed copying almost ALL of Media Barrage Tape #10 to compressed WAVs. That'll go up on its own EARS OF "BOB" page at SubSITE, followed by TrueSpeech versions of each file.
I really LIKE TrueSpeech. It works pretty well most of the time, for speech anyway, and you don't have to wait objectionably long for the spew to start from SubSITE. I just wish they'd make a convertor for the Mac. What I want to do is sprinkle appropriate TrueSpeech phrases from the tapes all through the website. Once we figure Java out a little better we'll have the sounds sproinging out SPONTANEOUSLY whether you want 'em to or not.
***
MORE TECHNOSHIT:
WHERE TO GET MPEG-VIEWERS FOR SUBGENIUS ONLINE VIDEOS!
I was getting email from SubSITE visitors griping about how come our downloadable video clips were mostly in this weird MPEG format and why couldn't we be normal and make them Quicktime files that would play on anything, reh reh reh. Well, our already huge 1 meg MPEGs with their separate soundtracks would be 20 megs as AVI or Quicktime or whatnot. I dunno about YOU but I'd rather spend the $20 for the video than wait that long for 30 seconds of product! And the MPEG viewers work GREAT.
BUT!!! I caught on that the reason they were griping so, suddenly, was that the link I had on SubSITE through which PC users were supposed to be able to download the right MPEG player, VMPEG 1.7, had DIED THIS MONTH! What you got instead was a confusing mess.
The work of a Sacred Scribe is never done. I had to lower myself to WEB SURFING for a PC PROGRAM. And I found these three sources for VMPEG 1.7:
from Univ. of Delaware
http://www.udel.edu/ps/sw/vmpeg.htm
TO FTP IT: http://www.udel.edu/ps/sw/vmpeg.exe
OR from:
http://www.cs.ucla.edu/csd-grads-gs2/jperry/WWW/vmpeg17.zip
OR from
COMPUSERVE:
ftp://ftp.spry.com/web_server/downloads/win95/utility/viewer/vmpeg17.exe
SPARKLE (the MPEG viewer for the Mac) can be had from:
ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Mosaic/Mac/Helpers/sparkle-245.hqx
***
HELPFUL HINTS FOR MAC USERS
There is a teeny little Mac System Extension which you can download from the Funhouse at SubSITE called "NO APPLE, A PIPE" hacked by Rev. Numens Remissionis. Don't fear it; I have used it in various Macs for years and it has never been a problem. It replaces that little static apple in the very top left corner of your desktop with a smoking Pipe.
IT IS A CRASH DETECTOR. You know how sometimes a program will freeze up but you're not sure if it crashed or just timed out temporarily or what, and you waste time waiting for it to come back to life? Well, the PIPE is a SURE-FIRE INSTANT INDICATOR. If the smoke stops moving, you are clicking with a DEAD MOUSE. If the smoke is still a-wispin', DON'T RESTART -- the machine is just catching its breath.
(a tip of the Tip Hat to Princess Wei "R" Doe)
***
Church IRC notes
Is Undernet too netsplitty for #subgenius? Should we consider DALnet? Anybody who, unlike me, knows what they're talking about, have any ideas?
I've missed a couple of IRC Sunday Services due to electrical storms and visiting dignitaries. I'm not being a snob. One night I spent the first hour changing from Homer to a seemingly better Mac IRC program, Ircle, and then blabbed froppedly for 2 hours just because it was such a joy not to crash every 15 minutes.
Even though I don't really know a damned thing about it, I did have to write an ARTICLE about IRC in about a HALF a DAY (crisis deadline situation) for Internet Underground mag, where I have a column now to replace the departed Mirsky. You'll have to buy the magazine to read the polished version (which is half as long) but let's just say these are the "notes":
***
AVOIDING CHAT ROOM TRAUMA (long version)
Rev. Ivan Stang
Remember the first time you logged onto a "chat room" crammed with 25 people all typing much faster than you can even TALK, but in Martian? And being barraged from all directions at once with helpful suggestions couched in seemingly insane gibberish? And then just when you thought you had a clue, five new windows spontaneously stacked up on your screen, as five different people sent you private messages, while twenty different sound effects chirped and bubbled madly from your speakers? And you suffered pure sensory overload and a panicky feeling, like your home was being invaded by crazy people?
And you never tried it again?
In the unprepared, IRC can produce ever-accelerating, snowballing levels of confusion. But some folks get a "rush" from that confusion, just as some people enjoy jumping out of planes or having themselves lashed to the back of an enraged bull.
Once you get used to the medium, it can be highly addictive. Like a cross between conference calls, shortwave radio and email, it's ideal for hobbyists and those too annoying to have friends in their physical vicinity. And you aren't paying long-distance.
My introduction to Internet Relay Chat was like most people's these days: recently, and starting with AOL. To millions of people, AOL's baffling array of chat rooms IS the Internet. It's the first thing on the Net that they saw, and, like a newly hatched duckling who thinks the first object it sees is its mother, they haven't left it since.
Of course, everybody except the very rich eventually graduates from AOL into the real Internet and its deeper, faster, infinitely more esoteric IRC realms, where sentences are longer than three words and nobody endlessly repeats the sentiment, "kewl."
This is where you encounter the dreaded hard core IRCers (rhymes with lurkers and irkers). The minute you land in their midst they must show off their respective bags of tricks and, using their impenetrable jargon, urge you to do scary-sounding things to your computer's innards. (If they try to "give you ops" don't be offended. It's not a disease; they're only trying to share control over the room.) You think REGULAR computer geeks are incomprehensible? You'll be hard pressed to find ANY English words in use by IRC junkies.
They change their own onscreen names constantly. They use the "topics" line at the top as a billboard of absurdist one-liners. They do these tricks just because they can. They can run their spying eyes up the phone lines straight into your computer and then announce to everybody else your real name, your city, your server company, your computer model and your shoe size. That can be a little disconcerting.
IRCers staunchly defend their addiction as being as "real" as real-life face to face conversation, conveniently forgetting the obvious fact that their noses cannot be punched over a modem. You will at first scorn them, and then pity them. Eventually you will probably become one of them, because, like a drug, one hit leads to another and the next thing you know, you live for the hard stuff.
HELPFUL HINTS FOR RETAINING SANITY
1. DON'T TRY TO FOLLOW EVERYTHING BEING SAID
Be ready for way too many people "talking" at once, forcing the screen to scroll too fast for readability, with half a dozen separate conversations interwoven in a jumbled mess.
The easiest way to deal with this is to focus on just one or two people, ignoring the rest. If you are seized with something to say, just DIVE IN -- ignore ALL the rest, type and send happily away as if you were king of the world, then sit back and wait for any reactions.
2. KEEP A LOG SO THAT YOU'LL KNOW IT WASN'T THAT YOU WERE GOING CRAZY
Most programs let you save all that text that's flashing by. Don't even try to make any sense out of it while it's happening; come back to the log later to decipher just what the hell they were talking about. Chat logs can also be good for mining surrealism from chaos when, entirely by coincidence, two conversations which actually had nothing to do with one another, appear to relate in bizarre, synchronistic ways!
3. It might help to disable the sounds on your program before starting. The tweets, clanks, rings and beeps that some programs provide can drive a beginner tire-gnawing mad.
4. THE GLITCHES AREN'T YOUR FAULT
IRC is glitchier than the slower, more methodical and rational media like newsgroups and email. A pigeon gets electrocuted on a phoneline in Peoria, or somebody trips over a wire at a server in New Zealand, and suddenly all your newfound buddies