Date: Tuesday, 11-Mar-97 08:25 PM
From: lez69@gci-net.com
Subject: The Dogs! The Dogs! Arrrooooo!!

Pook stood at the top of the stairs, mulching wildly. It was almost not time. Jib-Jab attempted to dalmation Jubu, but failed and sat heavily on the pooches.

I loved your site. Keep up the good work.

TTYL

"Julia's only trustworthy friend was the banister." --The Lord of Grapes

Obviously, someone's spiking lez69's juice blend with high-grade crystal meth.

The Quake fiends keep writing:

Date: Tuesday, 18-Feb-97 09:28 PM
From: John Baumbach
Subject: RE: A small matter of addiction

What a whiner. We've all been through the "Quake dreams"... when we actally took a few hours off from playing and tried to sleep. That's common. Thinking about Quake all day? I once brought my Pentium motherboard into work (disguised in a leftover pizza box) to play Internet Quake on their ISDN because the 486s were too slow. I've gone to work bleary eyed after 4-am fragging sessions too many times to count. I drilled holes in the walls and ceiling of my condo to install ethernet cable to my roomates computer, and scrounged parts for another computer in the dining room. I upgraded to 64 megs of RAM (when it was still expensive) because I thought I'd get another frame or two extra per second. I jumped on the 3D card bandwagon, I've had 3 motherboards and two sound cards, all trying to squeeze that last frame per second out of my system. I've even missed "Melrose Place" because I was playing Quake!

I learned Quake C. I've spent countless hours making Quake levels. I've written Windows programs to help make Quake levels.

You think you've got a problem?

-- John Baumbach - mantis@vcnet.com
Creater of these fine Delphi components:
* TMovingButton * ScrollingBackground
http://www.vcnet.com/mantis


Hey John -- there's a reason I called it "A small matter of addiction." Get help. Now.

The following two-part email came from the editor of Entropy Gradient Reversals:

Date: Saturday, 01-Mar-97 09:20 AM
From: Christopher Locke
Subject: William Gibson: 90's cyberpunk or 30's hardboiled?

Jim,

enjoyed your piece on Gibson.

one thing you didn't emphasize i think, is that the guy is a considerable poet -- the first line of Neuromancer announces this: "the sky over the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel." unlike much else in SF, his prose pushed the language envelope way beyond the conceptual material he likes to traffic in. using the past tense there, as I'm less sure about Idoru, Virtual Light was a cool story and not much beyond, and The Difference Engine was a huge failure.

to Chandler-as-noir-model, I would add Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer series (excellent stuff), Robert Stone (Dog Soldiers, etc.), J.G. Ballard and William Burroughs (the latter two as noted in the Mirror Shades "cyberpunk" collection by Bruce Sterling -- for whom btw I have lost no love). these strike me as far stronger influences than say Phillip K. Dick.

back to the poetry: some of the sequences with Wintemute are pure lyric. also, his exploration of Voudon and Rastafarianism take him well beyond the usually noted focus on technology. all in all, a complicated boy.

best

chris

And:

Date: Saturday, 01-Mar-97 09:59 AM
From: Christopher Locke
Subject: Talking 'bout my generation

Jim,

If we are in an "attention ecconomy" as many have suggested, I think Cliff Stoll has found his media niche as the guy who disses the medium. you get your 15 minutes where you can. there's something extremely elitist and therefore entirely suspect in this stance. but if people are are as gullible as he suggests, then they won't notice the glaring cognitive dissonance that comes from seeing him deliver his homespun handwringing homilies on CNN or MSNBC. right?

best

chris

PS: I guess we're "competing" for this Webby thing in the "Weird" category. the *really* weird thing is that somebody classified us both as weird! -- though I must say, EGR does "try harder" in this respect ;-)

Entropy Gradient Reversals
All Noise - All the Time
http://www.panix.com/~clocke/EGR


Indeed, EGR and Ad Nauseam were competing for that honor of honors, Weirdest Site on the Web, which is kind of like winning Most Sex-Starved Adult at a Star Trek convention -- with so many to choose from, how can only one win?

Hell, the author of the top-most letter is the clear "Weird" winner.