boingboing's topics - tribe.net

8th anniversary

2008-01-22T15:57:44Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/21/boing-boing-turns-ei.html

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

need a new moderator

2008-01-22T15:57:21Z

does anybody care? I'm the only one left, aren't I.

posted in boingboing - 4 replies

Post your Youtube "Favorites" video page link!! Create your own Channel

2007-11-23T06:08:02Z

Post your Youtube "Favorites" video page link!! Create your own Channel
http://rimo.tv/#/en/ch/6966

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

BBtv

2007-10-03T13:15:55Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/02/boing-boing-tv-same.html

ah, okay.

so, the brand.... er, sorry -- the team is expanding into television.

Mark never looks nervous when he's typing, but he looks petrified on camera.

:-(

conversely, Xeni looks much more human in motion.

Well, let's see where this goes.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

piece-meal pirates

2007-09-13T09:34:51Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/24/worlds_biggest_theat.html

"In light of the ridiculous action being taken against the 19-year old who took a 20 second clip of the transformers movie, it seems that maybe some boing boing readers should make a project out of filming the entire transformers movie at regal theaters using only cell phones or digital still cameras and afterwards, editing the film together as seamlessly as possible. This is sheer absurdity but a kick in the pants as well. I'd love to send a version of it to Regal so they see that no 'pirate' would steal a movie that way in order to distribute."

Sure, cellphone video-clips are teh suck *today*, but 10 years from now? a world-wide distributed flash-mob on opening day of the movie, where every participant shoots 10 seconds (or whatever the legally-dictated minimum is) will be uploaded, sequenced, jitter-corrected, noise-reduced, color-balanced and seamlessly edited together into the entire film before the ushers can clean the spilled popcorn from the floor.

It's not ridiculous, it's next year.

posted in boingboing - 1 reply

This is pretty ridiculous (bekawz it goes back to a post about THREE YEARS old!), but, considering the whole Hollow Earth thingamajig . . .

2007-06-26T22:19:11Z

. . . this one particular o.o.p. tome, authored by the world renowned puppeteer (!) Walter Kafton-Minkel, no less, whose beliefs DON'T themselves include the Hollow / Inner / Under Earth "religion", lept to mind. Entitled "Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 Years of Dragons, Dwarfs, the Dead, Lost Races, & UFOs From Inside the Earth", it has to be THEE quintessential opus on the matter. It was published in 1989 by the now defunct Loompanics Unlimited. That publishing house was located in Port Townsend, WA. Have a look. It's an enjoyable, informative read, if nothing else . . . (+:-)}

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

cory on Hook, Wicked

2007-05-21T13:12:38Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/20/capt_hook_kids_novel.html

"I found it a little overlong, but not nearly so much as, say, Wicked, another villain's point-of-view book, which was so incredibly long and dull in the middle that I barely finished it."

I find that particularly interesting from a guy who's novels are so short they're nearly novellas.

I read Wicked; I thoroughly enjoyed it; I never once thought that it was long, much less "over-long."

On the other hand, I also enjoy Stephen King, at times.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

how movies are differenct from reality

2007-04-20T15:09:33Z

http://theprogrammingblog.com/jokes/things-computers-can-do-in-movies/

I have to wonder -- do gearheads post lengthy critiques of automotive handling in the movies? Do engineers get incensed when explosions defy physics?

Why do programmers feel the need that hollywood's fantasy machines should accurately display their world?

"Dear Hollywood, I really must protest the inaccuracies in the film Alien. The computers are completely unrealistic!"

posted in boingboing - 1 reply

cell-phones vs the world

2007-04-16T12:45:07Z

a continuation of http://boingboing.tribe.net/thread/88e7f53d-c881-4955-a2df-779e23cde190

Post 1: an ideal phone (see also: kosher phone http://boingboing.tribe.net/thread/88e7f53d-c881-4955-a2df-779e23cde190#341a238f-68a9-4c54-9be1-62bc8960e33d )
http://www.futurismic.com/2006/04/selfdisassembling_phone.html
What if the product disassembled itself, in one second?

yeah. Phones that tear themselves apart. Next step -- getting them to do this IN THE FACTORY.

does anybody else see some sort of Phildickian dreamscape approaching, where our interconnected viral-ad-spouting smart-appliances wander around killing themselves?

See, Stross, the techno-scizophrenic auto-da-fe precludes your singularity. Marvin the Paranoid Android strikes a blow for counter-revolutionary freedom.

posted in boingboing - 19 replies

laptop dining outrage

2007-03-30T14:44:28Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/03/13/for_dining_only_anti.html

those hateful, hateful restaurateurs (imagine, using the selling of food as a business model!) in Austin don't like laptoppers.

wrotes Mr. Doctorow:

Just snapped this "FOR DINING ONLY" sign at an Austin restaurant -- it includes a laptop in a circle with a line through it. I get the point -- laptop users squat on tables, reducing the turnover. But I can sit and read a newspaper or a book at a table for hours, too -- why not have a "NO READING -- FOR DINING ONLY" sign? And how about those great, social meals where you chat with your friends for hours? "NO READING, LAPTOPS OR TALKING: FOR DINING ONLY!"

----

Do you know why? Maybe because nobody else is as much of an asshole.

Is this profiling?

Yes.

posted in boingboing - 5 replies

copyright outrage

2007-03-27T02:19:01Z

(maybe this should be a generic thread? or BB's subtitle?)

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/12/20/santas_copyright_wei.html

Man is upset that he doesn't own the copyright to photo's he paid to have taken.

Yeah, well, you don't own the copyright to books you pay to have shipped to you, either.

Okay, mixed metaphor. But photogs retain the copyright to their images, even if you buy prints. You're buying copies, not rights to those copies. There's a reason you don't get the negatives.

you don't like that business model? Then buy your own damn camera & go to photog school (or, in the case of the mass-marketers, read the 3-ring binder).

posted in boingboing - 4 replies

comments are back! in a highly-limited form

2007-02-07T03:56:13Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/02/06/video_can_a_vehicle_.html

note the aggressive policing of the forum, he said with approval.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

ancient histr'y: M2K, BB, Wired, et al

2007-01-15T15:00:29Z

http://www.suck.com/daily/95/11/07/mondo1995.html

Mondo 1995: Up and Down With the Next Millennium's First Magazine

By Jack Boulware

Copyright 1995 SF Weekly. All rights reserved. No reproduction without written authorization.

The night air swooshes through a 20-foot door into Bart Nagel's Emeryville warehouse/studio space, where almost a dozen people are busy shooting a promotional video for a new book - Cyberpunk Handbook: The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook - that takes the cyberhip cliché to task with an ironic smirk.

It's only fitting that the book's authors - St. Jude, R.U. Sirius, and Nagel - are sending up the concept, seeing as they were the ones who foisted cyberpunk mania upon the world with the slick quarterly Mondo 2000. Begun six years ago as a shared hallucination in the Berkeley hills, Mondo melded computers, psychedelic drugs, sex, and art into an organic whole.

Published and financed by minor heiress Queen Mu, Mondo found a nationwide audience in the hip computer culture and titillated the talk show bookers with stories about virtual sex, smart drugs, cryptology, and nanocyborgs. By 1993, Mondo was on the cover of Time magazine, promoting the editors' best-selling book from HarperCollins.

But in 1995, with cyberpunk now reduced to trite Hollywood formula, this trio from the Mondo brain trust are happy to record the movement's obituary with the snide video. As Nagel puts his "star," former Mondo writer Chris Hudak, through his paces, R.U. Sirius and St. Jude offer directorial suggestions. Hudak, decked out in black leather - his bullet belt bristling with a Taser, laser pointer, and Star Trek communicator - re-creates his tongue-in-cheek role from the Mondo spoof "R U a Cyberpunk?" in issue No. 10.

Nagel's Fisher-Price video camera pans across Hudak's gear as he recites, perhaps a tad earnestly, from a color PowerBook:

"The term 'cyberpunk' has been used to describe music, lifestyles, and artistic sensibilities, but it really describes one narrow school of science-fiction writers," Hudak says. "God, it was a good word ... poetic, efficient, and romantic. Distance and passion. Machine and man. Technology and attitude. Cyberpunk. Great fuckin' word. And what the hell; we stole it."

After several takes a break is called and the crew sips brew and chatters. Slouched against the refrigerator, R.U. compliments Hudak's performance and adds, "Boy, am I working hard!"

When did cyberpunk die? I ask.

"1993," smirks somebody. "The release of the Billy Idol record."

Although the crew continues to gab, they avoid discussing the magazine that brought them together in the first place. It's no secret they've all fallen out with Queen Mu, and haven't worked on the publication as a group for several issues. I understand their reticence, having survived a few San Francisco magazine wars myself. Since the newsstand hasn't seen a new issue of Mondo in seven months, many readers assume that it is as dead as the cyberpunk concept, so I volunteer what appears to be the obvious:

"Isn't it a shame about Mondo?" I say.

The silence that falls on the room informs me immediately that I've broached a horribly touchy topic. The seasoned smartasses avoid my gaze to stare at the floor. An uncomfortable dramatic pause says I might as well have mentioned the name of somebody's family member who died in a violent accident. After a couple of vague, sad remarks, the subject is changed and chatter picks up again. Without further comment, we return to the video shoot.

As it turns out, Mondo isn't dead: In late September, Queen Mu produced Issue 14 and placed it on newsstands. What did expire some time ago was Mondo's bragging rights, its role as the undisputed arbiter of technohip. Having nailed the new Zeitgeist with the very first issue in 1989, the Mondo crew isn't keen on acknowledging that a South of Market competitor fat with consumer ads, subscribers, a commercial Web division, and an infusion of cash from Condé Nast has displaced it as the magazine of the 90s digital mind-meld.

Examined at close range, Mondo's history reads as if fabricated on another planet, spewed forth by a sweaty cyberpunk novelist tripping on nasal-ingested DMT. Yet the story is true. In its absurd journey from Marin to San Francisco to Berkeley, Mondo changed its name three times to avoid detection. Its staff consumed vast quantities of designer psychedelics; was plagued by vehicular accidents, some of them fatal; experienced office break-ins; suffered publicity-starved celebrities; indulged in media pranks; watched the skies during suspicious helicopter flyovers; engaged in cross-dressing; enjoyed the temporary rush of depleting inheritances; and generated conspiracy theories about the Mormons taking over the world.

And it all began at a 1984 equinox birthday party for an archdruid named Stephan Abbott in Berkeley. Ken Goffman (by this time already adopting the Dadaist persona of "R.U. Sirius") arrived with newsprint copies of the premiere issue of High Frontiers under his arm. Subtitled "Psychedelics, Science, Human Potential, Irreverence & Modern Art" and published by a dubious organization called the Marin Mutants, High Frontiers consisted primarily of long, unedited interviews with acid veterans like Albert Hofmann, Timothy Leary, and Terence McKenna, the margins filled in with weird jokes and short items.

That night, Sirius met a woman named Alison Kennedy.

"She was talking about how she had been irradiated over in Germany, because she was living right next door to the Russian Embassy," says Sirius, who turned 43 this year. "She'd been irradiated and poisoned, she was sick and dying, and she was smiling from ear to ear. I immediately fell in love with her because she was so strange. She was also the prettiest woman at the party. I said, 'Let's go take some drugs,' and it went from there."

The long-haired, gap-toothed Sirius was a self-described "street rat" and ex-yippie musician from New York. Kennedy was the faculty wife of an Eastern religion professor at UC Berkeley, and the daughter of a wealthy Palo Alto family that claimed Noah Webster in its lineage. Her friends included the late Aldous Huxley and Ken Kesey.

Despite its small print run of 1,500, High Frontiers No. 1 was well-received. The back room of Mill Valley's Flashback Pizza became the unofficial hangout of Sirius and other characters who worked on the magazine: "Somerset Mau Mau," "Amalgam X," and new Art Director "Lord Nose." There, Sirius began plotting the second issue of this party-on-paper. Timeliness was not an issue. "The staff was always blasted!" laughs pseudonymous investment banker/psychedelic drug expert "Zarkov" of the pizza parlor era. Zarkov often contributed, together with his companion Gracie, to this Mondo family tree of publications. "Selling pizzas and drugs on the side - it took forever to get your pizza." High Frontiers No. 2 equally focused on drugs, but expanded to include interviews with yippies and physicists, reviews of art and literature, and an essay by Kennedy about datura, the common North American plant whose psychoactive qualities were rediscovered by British soldiers who accidentally ingested it in Virginia in the 1800s. (According to an 1883 citation, the limeys became extremely disoriented, blowing feathers in the air, grinning like monkeys, and "pawing and fondling their companions.")

In its pages, Sirius and Mau Mau advertised little pamphlets touting the "Neopsychedelic Pop Party" and "cunnilinguistic programming." Now published by Sacred Cow Mutilators, High Frontiers was right on schedule - producing a whopping one issue per year.

"My original idea was to make it a confluence between psychedelics and science and tech, but once we blasted out the first issue, which was all about psychedelics, we sort of got deep into it," laughs Sirius. "That's the most fun I've ever had in my life, actually. It was pretty fucking carefree."

But not very profitable. David Latimer came on board for High Frontiers No. 3 in 1987, which was subtitled "The Latest in Science and Fun." He had worked on Sunset and Scientific American, and was co-publishing both Soma and a magazine for Asian-Americans called Rice. With Latimer (also hiding behind a pseudonym), Sirius and company opened an office in San Francisco's Financial District, launched a companion newsletter called Reality Hackers, and began sponsoring seminars and discussion forums at the Julia Morgan Theater.

"We had Terence McKenna and [physicist] Nick Herbert together talking about time travel," remembers Sirius. "It was pretty fucking obscure stuff."

Equally obscure were the new designer drugs, many of which were not yet outlawed.

"We tried every drug there was," says Latimer, who today publishes the cafe magazine Cups. "Peyote, ketamine, DMT, MMDA ..."

"... 2CB, 2CE, dozens of little alphabet soups," smiles Sirius. "We were tripping pretty heavily. It was very magical, actually."

High Frontiers No. 3 plunged still further into new technologies with strange articles on psychoactive software, nutritional memory enhancers, quantum physics, fractal geometry, and interstellar carbon clusters. And, of course, heaping quantities of drugs, and an essay on tarantula venom from Alison Kennedy, who had been rechristened Queen Mu, Domineditrix.

High Frontiers/Reality Hackers attracted not only the psychedelicized, but computer types from Silicon Valley. As detailed in Douglas Rushkoff's book Cyberia, the acid/high-tech computer geek connection extends back to the days when Jobs and Wozniak were still constructing blue boxes from which free long-distance phone calls could be made.

Sirius says that a revelation occurred to the staff "that if, for instance, we were able to change ourselves biologically, that would be a more interesting change than a million people dropping acid. ... I started to become aware that the ability to manipulate information - and the huge carrying capacity of information, all that stuff that is related to silicon and digital stuff - was also going to be related to any other kind of technical change."

In other words, getting high wouldn't change the world. But computers could. The '80s had been years of great imagination with science-fiction novelists like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and John Shirley stretching the form so far that one East Coast newspaper wag coined the term "cyberpunk" to describe this new genre. Silicon Valley nerds were hunched over tool benches, furiously whipping more, more, more out of their fledgling appliances - the 512 begat the Mac Plus, which begat the SE, etc. Desktop publishing bureaus opened around the bay. Ex-hippies like Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly started the WELL computer network as an offshoot of the post-hippie Whole Earth Review. Anarchist programmers like Jude Milhon hovered around the Bay Area, inciting nerds to plot the overthrow. In Amsterdam, Louis Rosetto and Jane Metcalfe, later to found Wired, published a magazine called Language Technology. Theorists like Timothy Leary pondered the consequences of a digital future about which nobody knew anything - except that its reach seemed infinite.

And then tragedy struck High Frontiers. One night Sirius and Deborah Smith, the magazine's office manager and fiancee of David Latimer, drove down the peninsula to Cupertino for a radio interview. Smith got bored and decided to take a drive over to Santa Cruz; on winding Highway 17, she got in a horrible head-on collision.

Smith was paralyzed. Latimer says that he and Sirius and Queen Mu attempted a peyote healing ritual in Smith's hospital room to lift her out of her coma.

"We brought a Native American Indian in," Latimer remembers, "and brought Smitty in on a bed. We did a prayer ceremony, did channeling things - they brought witchcraft and crystals."

To this day Smith remains brain-damaged and bedridden, cared for by her family in Texas. When Queen Mu offered to buy Latimer's shares, he reluctantly accepted and left the magazine. (Some months later, he would begin working with me on the concept of a rude little magazine called The Nose.)

Not long after, new Art Director Adam Zakin celebrated the completion of High Frontiers No. 4 by traveling to Tibet with his wife, where both died in a freak accident when their bus went over a cliff. Meanwhile, back in the States, the High Frontiers office was broken into twice under mysterious circumstances. In 1988, Sirius and Queen Mu renamed the magazine Reality Hackers to reflect the drugs-and-computers fusion they had been writing about and moved the operation to the Berkeley hills, where Mu rented a big wooden Maybeck house and stocked it full of Victorian furniture.

Vowing to make the magazine a moneymaker, the pair wrote a business plan, but their meetings with potential investors ended in frustration.

"There was definitely no advertising," says Sirius. "Acid dealers don't advertise."

"It's just that if your lead story is 'How to Party on Ecstasy,' it's really hard to go to IBM or Macintosh and say, 'Hey, would you like to take out a full-page ad?' " echoes Latimer.

Although Reality Hackers appeared more frequently than High Frontiers, Sirius and Mu could only afford to publish biannually. Sirius says he made the sacrifice of cutting back on psychedelic use to get more work done. Unix champ Jude Milhon signed on after meeting Sirius at a party, mutating into the sharp-tongued St. Jude. The staff bumped into Michael Synergy, who was working for AutoDesk down in Silicon Valley, and he agreed to write up some subversive articles about cyberpunks overthrowing the government. After a serious bicycle accident left Synergy temporarily laid up, Mu and St. Jude rescued him from the hospital and moved him into the house in the hills.

Reality Hackers offered the most diverse and interesting mix yet, with articles on computer viruses, virtual reality, psychoactive designer foods, high-tech paganism, alleged AIDS biological warfare experiments, Brian Eno, chaos theory, Hakim Bey, and a lengthy exploration by banker acidheads Gracie and Zarkov on Blue àyster Cult. In addition to Leary, Herbert, and McKenna, new contributors included isolation tank expert Michael Hutchison, drug authors Peter Stafford and Bruce Eisner, drug architect Alexander Shulgin, smart-drug pioneers Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, and computer whiz Eric Gullichsen, one of the original VR developers. To corral the whole concept, a new subhead was composed: "Information Technologies & Entertainment for Those on the Brink."

But the name Reality Hackers remained a problem. Reports came in from national distributors: Retailers don't know whether to stock it next to Guns and Ammo or D-Cup Beauties.

"One distributor told them that everybody east of the Rockies thought it was about hacking people up, and that it was a Mansonite cult magazine," cackles Sirius.

Kevin Kelly, then editor of Whole Earth Review, wanted to hire Sirius as a writer to help him produce a new magazine called Signal, which would cover digital technology and the cultural impact of computers. Sirius said no, that he had an idea of his own.

With the next issue containing a big scoop on the heretofore ignored subject of cyberpunk, R.U. Sirius and Queen Mu wanted to change the magazine's image and make a big splash. Sirius flicked on the television.

"There were all these commercials for this-2000 and that-2000. Furnishings 2000. All this really banal stuff with the name 2000 after it. Finally this show came on, which was like Future 2000. It was like an Omni magazine kind of pop-science show. I stumbled into Alison's room and said, 'We've got to come up with a name with the name 2000 on it, because everybody's using it to sell shit.' "

"Mondo," replied Queen Mu, explaining that the lettering would look great on the masthead, and that it had a delightfully fashionable yet decadent sound. The name was changed.

Mondo 2000 reached newsstands in 1989 with a unique new logo designed by German graphic artist Brummb'r, each letter of "Mondo" containing its own separate personality. Todd Rundgren was the cover boy, the only male to grace its cover in masculine clothing (drag queen Jade made an appearance years later). Readers were treated to articles by Gibson, Shirley, and Sterling, as well as several pieces on hackers and crackers, Internet viruses, conspiracy theories, cyberspace, and cutting-edge technology nobody had heard of.

The inclusion of Gibson in particular struck a chord with readers. In many circles his seminal 1984 book Neuromancer was referred to in hushed tones, like a sacred scripture containing secrets of the future. "He was writing about us," says St. Jude. "Drug-taking, intellectual scum." At the bottom of the masthead was this somber warning: "Mondo 2000 has monthly bonfires at the full moon of all unsolicited manuscripts."

"It had arrived at a particular moment where there was at least a subculture of people in the computer community that were ready for it," remembers Sirius. And after some money from Kennedy's family became available, it was full steam ahead. "At the time there was no competition at all. There was absolutely nothing to compare it to. It talked about how technology was important in our lives at a time when people were in denial about it."

There was no denial about the importance of technology from the publishing industry. This same time saw the launch of several local magazines, taking advantage of the burgeoning desktop opportunities, including Frisko, SF, SF Moda, FAD, The Nose, Harpoon, and Just Go!. But Mondo 2000 took the technology to the outer limits, thanks to Bart Nagel's art direction.

A photographer and custom guitar maker in Phoenix, Nagel had followed his friend Fred Dodsworth to San Francisco. Dodsworth, who had started a new publication called The City, introduced Nagel to Queen Mu, who was in the market for a magazine redesign and in an interview asked Nagel his astrological sign.

"I'm a Pisces," said Nagel.

"Well, I think this will work out very well," answered Mu, and though Nagel had never designed a magazine before and had lived in California for just a month, he was appointed Mondo's art director.

"Being in Mondo is like being in a rock band," explains R.U. Sirius. "You have to bring your own equipment."

"I didn't think this was going to go anywhere," Nagel says, remembering that he would arrive each week at the Mondo House to pick up editorial copy - and learn that none was finished.

Besides a lack of copy, the photographer-turned-graphic designer faced an intimidating work environment - an editorial staff of the brightest, most eclectic bunch of misfits in the Bay Area. Queen Mu, the mad miscellaneous-trivia bank; Jas. Morgan, the subscriber from Georgia who came to visit and ended up as music editor; St. Jude the computer anarchist, a self-described polygamist and ex-physician's assistant with legitimate hacker connections; and R.U. Sirius, a walking Bonneville Salt Flats of pharmacology. Loitering around the perimeter were Michael Synergy, Queen Mu's former boyfriend Morgan Russell, and Gracie and Zarkov, the investment bankers who enjoyed drugs, heavy metal, and polyfidelity, and who took credit for starting the first sex club in Chicago.

As many news hacks would later trumpet, it was Revenge of the Nerds.

"We were all freaks in our high schools," says St. Jude. "They all hated us."

Nagel felt like he was trapped in another universe.

"In my circle of friends back in Phoenix, I always felt fairly bright. I had bright friends. And then I come into this world, and I'm starting to feel like an idiot. They just know too much about too many things. The editorial was beyond me. What the hell is an Extropian? Tell me what DMT was again?"

Nagel set about redesigning the book from top to bottom. He commissioned unknown artists like Eric White to do full-page illustrations for cheap, and discovered that collage artist John Borruso's sensibility would fit perfectly on the spine. And photographs were no problem - Nagel took most of them himself.

One such photo caught the eye of Andrew Hultkrans at a Berkeley newsstand - the cover of 1990's Mondo No. 3, portraying a sweaty Deborah Harry against a background shot of deep-space nebulae.

"What the fuck is this?" thought the 24-year-old Harvard graduate, fresh from a year as managing editor of the Zyzzyva literary journal. He thumbed through the issue, which boasted peculiar articles on producing your own growth hormones, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, cybernetic fashion, and psychotic illustrations by Butthole Surfer Gibby Haynes.

"They were intelligent, obviously," says Hultkrans. "Part of the thing that seemed intelligent about it was that I couldn't understand half of it. A little bit might have been that I was just baffled, and therefore assumed it was deep."

Sheer curiosity drove him to send in a résumé, which earned him an interview at the Mondo House - scheduled on a Saturday morning.

Hultkrans showed up looking professional - pulled-back ponytail, blazer and button-down vest - and knocked on the door for several minutes before a nonplussed Morgan let him in without introduction, ushered him into the kitchen of this antique-crammed home, and left him to wait. Queen Mu eventually entered, but instead of asking questions, she kept a steady stream of words going all by herself.

"Five minutes later [R.U.] appears in a bathrobe, looking totally awful and pale and fucked up," says Hultkrans. "R.U., in the morning after a big night, is pretty much of a sight. Alfred E. Neuman with long hair. He mumbled something and then left." To his astonishment, Hultkrans was hired, first in ad sales, but he quickly was moved to working with text, and Nagel christened him "The Tall Editor" on the masthead.

One month after he joined up, the Mondo House threw a party for staff and friends. Somebody put on a belly-dancing record, and Gracie the investment banker came out in costume and did an exotic dance routine in the living room. "This is so fucked up," thought the New York transplant. What had he gotten into? Mondo was nothing if not playful. Nagel peppered the book with eye-scorching graphics and puns and wordplay. St. Jude composed witty subheads and penned a column called "Irresponsible Journalism." Hultkrans steered the ship further into the rapids of pop culture, assigning articles on hip hop bands and writing a column about slacker culture. Morgan was essential for dense interviews with mathematicians and physicists. In addition to her interests in toxic plants and conspiracies, Queen Mu edited stories and brought a strong gender balance that attracted female readers, a subtext that said your sex wasn't as relevant as your brain. Sirius floated around as figurehead, writing and assigning articles. And new pseudonyms appeared: Mondo Connie, Lady Ada Lovelace, Nan C. Druid, Marshall McLaren, G. Gordon MIDI, and the wild conspiracy ranter, Xandor Korzybski.

Although Mondo gained enthusiastic readers, it received its share of negative notices from the press. Rather than sulk about it, Mondo wore them as badges of honor, reproducing them on the magazine's subscription solicitations. "Slightly unfathomable - The Washington Post," read one tear-out card. Another: "Unfortunately, the hacker lingo makes this relatively new magazine indecipherable for any but the most seasoned of computer aficionados. - The Utne Reader." Below this was the Mondo pitch: "Have this indecipherable rag delivered to your own doorstep. Stump your mailman. Confound your neighbors. Master the secret argot of the cyber underground."

The Village Voice declaration that Mondo was an art director's nightmare and completely unreadable prompted Nagel's joke of putting "Guaranteed Read-Proof!" on a cover-in-progress. The gag was such a hit with the staff that they let it stand, and it was printed in issue No. 5.

Some jokes weren't planned. Also in issue No. 5, in 1992, Nagel accidentally transposed the names of avant-garde musicians Glenn Branca and Elliott Sharp on the cover, rendering them Glenn Sharp and Elliott Branca. Since Sharp and Branca weren't household names, few readers noticed, but Mondo obviously owed them - and the author of the piece, Mark Dery - an explanation.

Rather than apologize, Mondo proclaimed the snafu intentional. Gracie and Zarkov composed an essay about post-postmodernism and deliberate art damage. Or rather, they scribbled notes on a napkin while out having drinks. The outline was passed around to the staff, and the concept ended up as a collaborative two-page manifesto on Art Damage called "What Do You Say After Po-PoMo?"

"Half the time we were trying to baffle people into thinking we were deep," says Hultkrans, "and having it be a pop fluff rag at the same time. It was paradise."

"You picked up Mondo and it became aflame in your hands," remembers high-tech publisher Randy Stickrod, who acted as business consultant for the early Mondo. "It was like computers as drugs. This very cool but somehow almost impenetrable intellectual content underneath it, and yet with this edge of New Wave paranoia. It was outrageous! It was like discovering sex for the first time!"

There was little division between Mondo House living, Mondo House parties, and Mondo the magazine. Mondo partied with the people it wanted to write about and have write for the magazine: the cyberpunk novelists (of course), Spalding Gray, Timothy Leary, and John Perry Barlow, to name a few.

"Ideas for articles appeared at parties, parties happened as a result of articles, parties happened as a result of interviews, interviews happened as a result of parties," recalls Zarkov. "It was a very integral part of how Mondo proceeded. Ken and Alison knew a lot of people that they wanted to have over, to build the scene. The scene built the magazine, and the magazine built the scene."

A Mondo party might find a time-travel expert being interviewed in one room, people playing word-association games in another, others experimenting with weird mental mind-stimulation glasses, groups quietly chatting in conspiratorial whispers, or Bart Nagel and virtual reality theorist Brenda Laurel leaping in the air to see if they could do a complete 360-degree turn without falling down. Rude pornography or Japanese animation videos flickered on monitors, figures performed frottage on antique sofas. A journalist from GQ might have been taking a piss on the front lawn. One creature would trap people for entire evenings in conversations about how Sir Francis Bacon was actually William Shakespeare.

"It's very strategically positioned," says Timothy Leary of Mondo House, speaking between bites of crackers. "You're almost in the country, and yet you're three minutes away from the country's top university. Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone - you can't go over to Jann's pad in the penthouse on Park Avenue and hang out."

Mondo also partied with people whose money it coveted, throwing one affair for Joichi Ito, its Tokyo correspondent whose parents had been targeted as potential investors because they came from a wealthy big-business family in Japan. During the course of conversation, the topic turned to the Japanese language.

"You know, there are 12 ways of saying 'thank you' in Japanese," said Ito.

"And every one of them insincere," replied novelist John Shirley.

I recall one evening drinking and arguing in the Mondo House kitchen with an accordion player named Miss Murgatroid, and thinking that not only our conversation was passé, but our substance of abuse. Beer was a quaint, retro, Bill-Haley-and-the-Comets vice compared to the choline cooler smart drinks people were sipping or the experimental mail-order neural inhibitors whose molecular structure was still a mystery to the FDA. Having defined the nascent cybersexcomputerdrug culture, Mondo assumed the role of oracle for the rest of the media struggling to comprehend the trend. Sirius appeared on Donahue and Ron Reagan's show. Reporters descended upon the Mondo House from all parts of the globe - Newsweek, Details, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and bureaus from Europe - as well as all the local dailies.

What is cyberpunk? they begged. Tell us why cyberpunks wear mirror shades and drink Jolt cola. What is virtual sex like?

Mondo obliged with catchy slogans for the journalistic pack. "We're a pirate mind station," Queen Mu told them. "The New Edge ... the alpha and omega of cyberzines." Rudy Rucker supplied the accusatory, "How fast are you? How dense?"

" 'The convergence of technology and culture' would be the straight rap," says Sirius. "But it got mistaken for total advocacy. These magazine people would come around, writing an article about VR. I'd be really cynical for a half-hour. I'd say maybe one positive statement, and that's what they'd put in the article, because that's what they were looking for."

The magazine found itself described as "Berkeley-based and cyber-spaced." R.U. Sirius became everything from "Gomez Addams" to a "balding entrepreneur" to a "long-haired leprechaun who sports some truly humongous brain banks." Queen Mu was described as "hyper-cerebral," "techno-yogic," and "not a witch but may be a pixie." Together they were "digital Druids," working against a "pre-Raphaelite backdrop" out of a "techno-Gothic citadel."

Mondo staffers were articulate and erudite in interviews - so articulate and erudite that reporters were too intimidated to ask for clarifications and instead ran the staff's soundbites in their goofy entirety.

"We talk a lot about the 'rupture before the rapture,' " Sirius once told an Examiner reporter. "It's going to be interesting to see how the really advanced super-high-tekkies are going to function and evolve amidst this coming economic chaos. It just might be the garage-tech cyberpunk brigade that can carry the ball through it."

Queen Mu added, "We're no longer knuckling under to a priest-physician class that demands belief in a model that has totally failed - a highly puritanical society where both pleasure and intelligence are suspect."

When the Washington Post asked Sirius what he looked forward to most in the future, he responded gleefully: "The cure of venereal diseases and the free passage of RU 486 and the orgiastic end of the 20th century!"

Eventually, being covered by the media became as intoxicating as making media. One day, Hultkrans entered the Wednesday editorial meeting to announce that Mondo was the subject of the lead editorial in the new issue of Artforum. The staff cheered, then somebody asked:

"Is it positive or negative?"

"It's hard to tell." Hultkrans scanned the text. "I think it's negative."

The room broke into applause.

During 1992, Mondo finally lived up to its promise that it was a quarterly by producing four issues, to the surprise of all. In three years, circulation rose from 15,000 to nearly 100,000. Quality writers and artists flocked to the magazine - certainly not for the grandiose late payment of 5 cents a word or 100 bucks per full-page image, but for the joy of partaking in the magic.

"There was something really wonderful about the dangerous mind behind Mondo," says Gareth Branwyn, author of the Beyond Cyberpunk hypercard stack, and a frequent contributor. "As a young writer, this to me was a real breakout platform. It had a similar feeling to the whole notion of punk music. There was that sense that we had thrown out all of the rules. So when I would go to interview a rock band or a multimedia producer, you could do just whatever you damn well please. The Red Hot Chili Peppers - they actually did a Rorschach on their dental records. Really bizarre shit."

Branwyn continues: "You could be belligerent and combative, or be just conversational. If you thought what they were saying was bullshit, you could just start arguing with them. It was really this kind of Interzone, where anything was allowed. That was a real liberating feeling for me as a writer. It celebrated that you were being irresponsible."

The success of 1992 also included a book - Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge - a 317-page compilation of previous articles and artwork, with new additions and resource listings. It was an immediate success, going into reprint and eventually selling over 40,000 copies.

In 1993, Bart Nagel rattled his peers with an editorial inspired by artist Jeffrey Koons' theory of image appropriation. Either steal it and manipulate it, wrote Nagel, or use it blatantly under the fair-use doctrine. Nagel practiced what his editorial preached with the cover of issue No. 10, in which he superimposed a photo against a background stolen from the cover of another magazine.

Nagel was immediately savaged in trade journals as the Antichrist of art directors. He retaliated with an editorial in issue No. 11 about a new technology that works on the DNA level to detect microscopic, recognizable patterns in images. He asserted that the technology encoded patterns that were invisible to the naked eye but detectable no matter how much the image was scanned or used. He further claimed that in one year hence, all scanners and copy machines would contain a built-in chip to detect these codes and notify a national computer image bank of every duplication by modem. The computer would then automatically debit your Visa account.

"I tried to make it more and more absurd, by saying these scanners would be hooked up to a neural net computer, which could actually detect if you were scanning someone's style, and that a lot of photographers were already excited about this, and that Richard Avedon and Annie Liebovitz were already offering to donate their proceeds from their style theft to a photo assistance group called We're Creative, Too."

It was a joke, of course, yet an assistant who worked for both Avedon and Liebovitz called Nagel, asking if his bosses were actually doing it. The magazine of the Library of Congress called expressing interest in an interview with Nagel. The corporate offices of Kinko's requested permission to reprint the article and distribute it to managers. When the Australian Broadcast Company also requested an interview, Nagel couldn't stop laughing, and admitted the hoax.

"Well, just consider it a feather in your cap that you put one over on the Australian Broadcast Company!" snapped the indignant Aussies. As Mondo was cresting, the founders of a failed magazine named Electric Word, Louis Rosetto and Jane Metcalfe, were returning to the States from Amsterdam. They were eager to start a magazine about computer culture and had already picked out a name: Wired. A mutual friend introduced them to Mondo adviser Randy Stickrod, and after a small meeting at Stickrod's home, he showed the group a portion of his office space at South Park, a corner eventually nicknamed "The Charmed Corner" for its list of successful publishing tenants - Wired, Might, Cups, Boing Boing, and Just Go!.

Rosetto and Metcalfe liked the space, moved in, and spent the next 15 months hosting a conference on the WELL, schmoozing contributors, and working on a business plan package for investors. Stickrod even introduced them to Queen Mu at the Mondo House.

"They were kind of chummy," Stickrod remembers. "They were swapping tips. That was the level of incestuousness we had going on there. Alison would come over to my office and bring a box of Mondos for me to hand out. She'd go sit and talk to Louis and Jane for half an hour. There was no overt tension at all."

Throughout 1992, Mondo 2000 could do no wrong and could afford to be gracious to the young upstarts, who obviously were dull, boring computer people while Mondo was ultrahip counterculture. (Electric Word telegraphed how boring it was with the slogan "The world's least boring computer magazine.")

Still, Wired's basic concept - the consequences of technology on lifestyle and popular culture - was very similar to Mondo. Didn't everyone know?

"Oh, of course I did," says Stickrod. "They knew that, too. What we all tried to do was politely underplay the similarities and really play up the differences. At the time, we all put a spin on it that they were not competitors. Including Alison."

"The only thing that was remotely connected [to Wired] was Mondo 2000," says Wired Executive Editor Kevin Kelly, who wrote for the early Mondo. "It was coming along in parallel with it. We were very careful not to refer to Mondo. We didn't want to be compared to them. But they also were aware of this same niche."

In January 1993, Wired magazine debuted as a bimonthly, its billboard campaign announcing, "At last. A magazine for the Digital Age," its promotional literature adopting the phrase "Rolling Stone of the 90s," a soundbite used previously by Mondo 2000.

The Mondo folks had no reason to flinch: A week later they were featured on the cover of Time magazine's "Cyberpunk" story in what could have passed for a paid advertisement. The cover was designed by Bart Nagel, and the layout, which mimicked the Mondo book's design, was illustrated by Mondo artists and photographers. Paragraph after paragraph was devoted to descriptions of Mondo articles and topics. Wired rated only a passing mention.

Accompanying the article was a photo of Nagel, R.U. Sirius, and Queen Mu standing in a field, the royal trio of cyberpunk prankster publishers. But unknown to Time readers was that Sirius and Mu were barely on speaking terms. He had already left the magazine. Most staffers say it was over the U2-Negativland story.

As the magazine's popularity rose, its staff was solicited by celebrities hoping to get into the pages. Neil Young, Italian astrophysicist Fiorelli Torenzi, Dan Aykroyd, Michael Penn, Billy Idol's "people," even Buffy Sainte-Marie approached the magazine asking for press. So when U2 guitarist The Edge asked to be interviewed, R.U. Sirius summoned his friends from Negativland, a Bay Area band that had been sued for copyright infringement by U2's management for sampling the Irish band's music on its release U2.

When The Edge phoned on schedule for the interview, members of Negativland were there to conduct it - unbeknownst to The Edge. Negativland skillfully drew the guitarist into a philosophical discussion in which he described the artistic liberties U2 had taken in appropriating video images and music onstage during its "Zooropa" tour.

The shocker came when R.U. Sirius told The Edge that he was, in fact, talking to the band his management company nearly sued out of existence. Brilliantly revealing U2 as hypocrites, the article caused a huge rift at Mondo when Queen Mu balked at running it. She was tired of Negativland, and since she was paying the bills, she could make the calls.

"This was the centerpiece of the issue," remembers Hultkrans. "It was a huge fight."

"I just blew up," says Sirius. "It was probably a confluence of a lot of other shit leading up to that." He quit, walked out of the meeting and out of the house, and later faxed in a formal resignation.

Hultkrans rewrote an introduction to the story and Queen Mu graciously ran it in 1993's issue No. 8 as scheduled, but Mondo 2000 had faced its future.

"If [R.U.] is not here," thought Nagel, "it's not going to be fun anymore."

Sirius left the magazine and started looking for work at mainstream magazines like Details and Spin. His approach was not the most tactful employment solicitation. "Let's face it, I had an attitude: 'Hey, I'm gone from Mondo 2000! I can fucking come in and remake your goddamn magazine until it means something!' That didn't go over too well," he says.

He eventually slinked back to the Mondo House, and traded his ownership shares for a steady salary and financial security. Nobody said anything.

"It was like Long Day's Journey Into Night," says Hultkrans, "where everybody sort of dances around the problem."

Queen Mu's idiosyncrasies also ran through other departments, recalls Stickrod, who, in addition to advising the magazine for a time, also shared responsibility for advertising sales.

"Alison personally alienated more advertisers than you can imagine. She developed this theory that the reason she couldn't get big-name advertisers is that the agencies didn't respect her because her rates weren't high enough. So one day she arbitrarily tripled the rates."

"She was always frustrated because she couldn't understand why we weren't selling more [advertisements]," says Miles Hurwitz, an independent media rep who hustled ads for several issues. "And one of the reasons is because the rates were ridiculously high."

"This is a place I'd done a lot of footwork, and had opened the door up to them," says Stickrod of Apple Computer's ad agency. "There are people I can't talk to now because Alison came in and raised so much hell."

Queen Mu may not have been the greatest leader of a sales force, but the magazine did attract ads from the likes of Xaos Tools, Geffen, New Line Cinema, Logitech, and other big-ticket concerns.

But the magazine's erratic publishing schedule also made it difficult to develop a solid advertising base. "Had they just come out quarterly as they had promised," says Hurwitz, "that would have been helpful."

Mondo's pro-drug association continued to haunt advertisers, a bargaining chip often used by Wired ad reps, so Queen Mu began orchestrating the tone to appear more mainstream.

"I think that was a big mistake," says Stickrod. "That was the place that made them interesting and hip. She was losing touch with her constituency - the thing that made them outrageous and interesting."

Nagel also winced at the changes. "The rest of us thought, 'We've already gotten mainstream coverage here - why don't we just continue doing what we're doing?' It's not like we were going to lose any ads." Wired scrupulously avoided mentioning Mondo, but its contents page revealed that it had looked long and hard at Mondo's back issues.

The cover story in its premiere issue was written by Bruce Sterling, a frequent Mondo contributor. Also on the masthead were R.U. Sirius as contributing writer and Randy Stickrod, who was thanked under "tea and sympathy." The second Wired detailed the Crypto Rebels, "cypherpunks" battling for the right to encrypt, a subject first covered by Mondo. Posing on the cover, among others, was St. Jude herself, who had coined the word "cypherpunks." Wired's third cover featured Brian Eno, previously written up in Mondo; the fourth cover story was written by Mondo alumnus (and Mondo House guest) William Gibson.

Paying writers 20 times as much as Mondo, and paying on time, the more commercial Wired quickly skimmed the best of the rest of the Mondo talent pool: St. Jude, Branwyn, Rucker, Barlow, Ito, and Jaron Lanier.

To this day, Wired still smells strongly of Mondo. The October issue contains articles by former Mondoids Andrew Hultkrans, Chris Hudak, Allan Lundell, Mark Fraunfelder, and Gareth Branwyn; Wired's on-line subsidiary, HotWired, includes on its staff former Mondo contributors Gary Wolf, Richard Kadrey, and John Alderman; the magazine's new Scenarios special edition contains essays by Barlow and Sterling.

"Mondo did the market research for a cyberculture magazine," says Branwyn, author of an upcoming book called Jamming the Media. "Wired manifested on a much larger playing field, with sane people running it, with intelligent management. Mondo could have been much, much more than it was, and could really have been a contender for Wired."

Initial reaction to Wired's debut at the Mondo House was skeptical. They now had a competitor - their first competitor - but nobody seemed impressed by the first issues. It was corporate and straightforward, even journalistic. Timothy Leary called it the CIA's answer to Mondo 2000. The staff compared it to the Monkees.

"I thought it was a rip-off," remembers Hultkrans. He then pauses. "It was really like seeing yourself cloned in a way. It seemed like they were on a campaign to eat up our entire back catalog - people we've interviewed, issues we've covered."

Even the distinctive spine design of Wired was blatantly copied from the clever John Borruso-designed spines of Mondo, according to an insider who attended the Wired design meeting.

"I don't think they make any bones about [the similarities]," allows R.U. Sirius. "Kevin Kelly pointed out in a discussion on the WELL, 'Well, you're always advocating appropriation, so fuck you.' I gotta hand it to him."

"Wired was uptown and Mondo was downtown," says Stickrod. "Mondo was really for the hairy and unwashed, and Wired was able to comfortably cross that threshold."

Queen Mu and her chief assistant, Wes Thomas, acted indifferent to the arrival of Wired, yet each issue was immediately scoured for ad leads. Once Sirius severed full-time ties to the magazine, Thomas assumed more editorial control. Originally the Mondo publicist based in New York, Thomas wrote technology articles for many issues, and had a brilliant intelligence for conspiracy theory.

"He went to work creating this little wedge in between there, and wound up with this really weird period that I like to refer to as Hogan's Heroes," says Sirius. "He was acting like Colonel Klink. On some cosmic level, his job was to come in and tear the place apart." "He was the potentiator of Alison's worst qualities," claims Hultkrans. "I personally hold him partially responsible for what happened at the magazine."

"Wes would come to the door around 11 a.m. in a Buddhist monk robe, and get upset that his morning Chronicle was sitting under a car in the driveway," says then-staffer John Alderman. "Make one of the staff go get it for him. 'I'm the editor of the most important magazine in the world, and I need my newspaper every day!' "

The fun and games had ended.

"They had this beautiful house up in the Berkeley hills, trying to be the center of culture, but really it's this siege mentality," Alderman says. "The mail all has to be pored through like it's messages from the CIA/Wired/Mormon/Illuminati axis. That was a fully described theory one day."

In the early days, paranoia and conspiracy theories were just jokes from which outrageous scenarios and rants could be spun, but by 1994 the mood was strangely sober. The guys working on the phone box down the street - what were they really up to? And who was that guy visible from the kitchen window, pretending to draw sketches of the building? And who were those kids who came to the door of the house, one of them claiming his dad worked for the CIA?

But maybe the paranoia was justified.

"Some of the shit they wrote about," says former illustrator Eric White, "I wouldn't be surprised if I'm on some list somewhere, just for being associated with it."

When a package arrived one day, the usually levelheaded Bart Nagel remembers gingerly opening it with an X-Acto knife taped to a broom handle. Gracie and Zarkov remember coming to visit once and finding everyone hiding under a bed, convinced the feds were circling with a helicopter.

And one of the staffers started to develop a serious cross-dressing persona - at the office.

"He was like, 'Oh, I'm sorry. We haven't met. My name is Amara,' " remembers Alderman. "He looked more like a British pop star. He had on all these flowing things, and a red wig. It was sort of par for the course. In fact, it was much more pleasant to work with Amara, because [he] was this cranky old man, and Amara's at least kind of perky."

Alderman and fellow staffer Kenneth Newby were in similar positions - young latecomers surrounded by incomprehensible tension, working on a magazine that was appearing less and less frequently on the newsstand. The two wondered if this was what publishing was really like.

"We'd go out to lunch every day and just laugh and laugh and laugh," says Alderman. "Everything seemed so important, dead serious while you were there, and then you'd get out for a minute, take a breath. You're like, 'I just spent my whole day arguing about Masons and the CIA stealing the data base, when it's right there under yesterday's Chronicle.' It was like a Fassbinder film." Many Mondo principals interviewed for this story doubted that Alison "Queen Mu" Kennedy would talk on the record about the magazine. After years of skilled media manipulation herself, they said, she was now distrustful of the press, and refused all requests.

But talk she does. To me for about five hours and to the editor of SF Weekly for maybe 30 minutes. She is puzzled about why this piece is being written, but once it becomes evident the story will be told anyway, she loosens up, relaxes, and expresses herself. Still, she insists on not being quoted.

No complete history of Mondo can be written until she talks because, as she has repeated to anyone who will listen, "I am Mondo 2000!"

Rudy Rucker agrees.

"It wouldn't be Mondo without Alison," says Rucker. Since its inception six years ago, Queen Mu has published 14 issues and co-authored a book, all without drawing any salary, instead pouring a personal small fortune into the coffers to produce the best magazine possible. The inheritance is now spent, by some accounts tallying close to a half-million dollars, but at the time of this writing, a fresh infusion of cash into Mondo is said to be on the horizon.

Given the sheer number of off-record anecdotes about her, the level of unresolved frustration among many former staffers and contributors, it is surprising to find her extremely charming, in a timeless, Old World sense. Verbal exchange for her is an art form - you imagine receiving an engraved invitation for lunch, delivered by a butler on a silver tray. It's a truly odd juxtaposition, the publisher of a high-tech computer lifestyle magazine preferring to discuss arcane academic disciplines instead of electronic gadgetry. For years she even refused to use a computer. But then, Mondo has always been about juxtaposition, as perpetually confounding as a conversation with its matriarch.

Topics bounce around with lightning speed in conversation with Queen Mu, a stream of thoughts often mutating, unresolved, from one to another, as we circle around a set of questions faxed at her request. Our discourse is luxurious, seductive, and frustrating simultaneously, as a sudden Latin or French expression is casually dropped, requiring me to ask for explanation. It is a position of authority she has been in many times before.

One can empathize with Queen Mu's reluctance to talk on the record. Everybody on a publication wants to reap the rewards, but nobody wants to pay the bills. The person who does handle the checkbook has the least fun and becomes the most vilified.

In that context, the animosity toward Queen Mu among former employees seems confusing and unjustified. In her mind she professes great love and admiration for the talents of those who have passed through Mondo House portals. She is also frighteningly quick to judge, however, and starts zeroing in on certain Mondoids' personality flaws, giving each a verbal slap with antique velvet-gloved condescension, until I point out that the situation isn't that black and white. Many of the people I interviewed also have nice things to say about her, and admit they owe her for the opportunity. This produces a tranquilizing effect, and we arrange to have tea later in the week.

The day after our conversation, a flurry of panicked phone calls bounces among Queen Mu, myself, and SF Weekly. The story - the cover art by Bart Nagel! - infuriates her.

Staff members - past and present - say that no Mondo article was ever sent to press without her pencil going over it. It is becoming obvious to Mu that this Mondo story is one of the few the Domineditrix will not be able to edit. Referring to powers that will not be pleased by this article, she cancels our date for tea.

More than seven months after the appearance of Mondo No. 13, Mondo No. 14 is now on the newsstands. Its look is still sleek, still printed on heavy coated stock, and even more saturated with photography, courtesy of new Art Directors Thomas Pitts and Heidi Foley (Foley paid her dues for years as an assistant in the Mondo art department). Getting this edition out was obviously a chore - one ad announces a new CD available in January 1995, another promotes a Macintosh music festival that ended in July, indicating the issue's tardiness.

Some of the names on the masthead of No. 14 have since left. There are some interesting articles on Bruce Sterling, cryogenics, Bob Guccione Jr., and the future of audio, and a fun essay on video games, but it is a different magazine now. And yet, thumbing through its glossy pages, Mondo is still, as O.J. might say, absolutely, completely, 100 percent Queen Mu.

"It's a really remarkable institution," says Timothy Leary. "There was a style, in the best aristocratic sense, and an attitude of [being] very bouncy, self-confident. A beautiful merger of the psychedelic, the cybernetic, the cultural, the literary, and artistic. It shouldn't last a long time."

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

It's worth pointing out that de Saint-Germain appears prominently in Neal Stephenson's lovely "Quicksilver".

2006-12-19T14:57:50Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/12/15/_la_tras_sainte_trin.html

No, it's not. It is not worth pointing out every place a real person is referenced in fiction any time the real person is referenced.

Unless you are on a website devoted to pointing out every place a real person is referenced in fiction.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

the aeroplane in a hamster wheel

2006-12-12T21:14:08Z

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/60106460/airplanetreadmill_pr.html

yeah, but what a bout turbulence created by the high-speed of the treadmill? high-enough speed (and since people were positing numbers up to infinity....) and there's going to be something interacting with the plane's lift.

not that it still isn't a stupid problem.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

bad movie code

2006-12-08T14:10:49Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/12/07/hollywoods_dumbest_d.html

"wah! my beloved profession looks boring on the movie screen, so they bring in trained hollywood hotties to look cool and do engaging onscreen antics that look NOTHING like what i do in my cubicle!"

Look, Accountancy is ALSO extremely boring. And Hollywood's solution to that is to just not show it at all. Consider yourself lucky that some movie mogul thinks its worth his time to convince others that you have a sexy job. It's free PR, babe.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

Uberbabes Unite

2006-11-09T02:26:30Z

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Matriarchal-socialist government for Sweden by 2030

Proposed bill outlines transition strategy

November 7, 2006 / UBERSPACE, CYBERSPACE & ALL CLIMES IN BETWEEN –- On the heels of the inaugural intergalactic Peace Love and Uberbabe Groove-Out (PLUG), the government of Sweden passed an historic bill in support of transitioning the country's current political regime to a matriarchal socialist structure.

"This decision is groundbreaking, yet a natural progression, given the rise of ultra-love across and beyond the Western world," said Government of Sweden Intercultural Counselor, Berit Marna, who was part of Sweden's PLUG delegation, and a member of the Coalition of Enlightened Swedes (CES), the group that struck the original debate on instigating the Nordic country’s political reforms.

The bill itemizes specific milestones and measures to achieve full matriarchal socialist status within a near quarter-century timeframe. Immediate actions for 2007 include: "Abolishment of Kingdom status and shift to Queendom rule; integration of matriarchal immersion programming for all school-age children; and a review of national spending and compensation, with a view on championing a comprehensive and wholly equitable financial system."

Sweden’s ultimate goal is to move the country beyond either patriarchal or matriarchal government, towards a power structure no longer based on gender. This interim matriarchal transition is simply intended to re-right the balance of power, in preparation for meeting this larger goal.

Sweden's interest in leading its people to a new socio-political reality is long running. Its strategies are likely to capture world attention and inspire other nations to follow suit. Marna and his fellow CES members will be under close scrutiny by detractors and proponents alike.

"This is our love letter to Sweden, to our people," says Marna, emphatically waving the print of Bill S-20302B within the CES vodcast/podcast captured at the close of PLUG.

[30]

For full details visit http://www.uberbabe.com or contact: uberbabe@sugar-lab.com

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

concise

2006-11-01T13:48:29Z

in a survey of a few art-related blogs, the Art News Blog relays

BoingBoing - Blog of interesting and often unnecessary things.

http://www.artnewsblog.com/2006/10/art-blogs-of-moment.htm

posted in boingboing - 1 reply

suicidal robots

2006-10-19T21:26:09Z

no, not a nother band sporting duct-tape wallets and wish-the-were-analog synthesizers.

an art project, of sorts.

with lots of coke.

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/009040.php

cf http://boingboing.tribe.net/thread/b15ded11-7365-43f6-837f-f91205b3c632#6d5db3a2-cd3a-4040-8aa1-b7241ba8fe34

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

dear lab workers

2006-08-14T06:25:58Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/07/12/lab_workers_to_photo.html

your workplace is boring. deal with it.

posted in boingboing - 1 reply

Mark Rants

2006-08-09T20:37:02Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/17/garbage_man_severs_m.html

>I don't understand why garbage men always seem angry? What's to be angry about? They are well paid, have no deadlines or stress, never have to get their butt out of their seat, get excellent health benefits, paid vacation, and so on.

Garbage men never have to worry about getting fired, no matter how badly they screw up. That's probably why the Los Angeles garbage man who snapped my phone, TV cable, and internet lines, damaging my roof in the process, drove away without so much as a note with a number we could call. A neighbor saw the whole thing happen this morning. The driver shrugged and kept on going. "Not my problem," he probably thought to himself, assuming he had enough empathy to realize he had inconvenienced another person.

Now there are cables stretched across the road. I called the city, and they told me they'll send me a paper form in the mail to fill out. That's the city's way of dealing with the problem quickly.

The cable guy is here now, but he said he couldn't fix it until the pole on the roof was fixed. I climbed up on the roof and unbent the pole enough for him to pull the cable through.

The phone company won't come until Saturday. Meanwhile, the garbage man is probably downloading internet porn, yelling at his ex-wife's child support lawyer on the phone, and watching Die Hard VIII on cable, because nobody snapped his wires. I don't like you, garbage man.<

oooh, baby! yeah yeah yeah!!!!!

This is what blogs were made for!

posted in boingboing - 11 replies

Duct Tape Bag

2006-07-14T20:52:06Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2004/05/18/ducttape_messenger_b.html

"This duct-tape messenger bag is totally rad."

Yes! It is totally rad! And we're all wearing duct-tape truckers caps and listening to the White Stripes! On our iPods!

posted in boingboing - 20 replies

rants on deep-linking

2006-06-22T21:50:27Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/22/cory_on_fanmade_radi.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/22/public_radio_and_diy.html

Cory's wrong. He's mis-quoting and mistaken in his assertions of Brendan's assertions. Brendan said a lot of "should" "could" "would" as in "wouldn't it be nice" ... and then Cory says that Brendan is trying to destroy the Net, creativity, and has attempted to run him down in the street.

or something like that.

If I was writing this on a highly read and well-respected forum, I think I'd go back over my original sources once or twice. But I'm not so I won't.

Look, this is not just another copyright-knee-jerk rant -- this is out-and-out slander. While Cory's rants have worn thin at times, I generally have belived him over whatever corporate monstrosity he's taking on.

But in this case, we've got the words side by side, and Cory's demoning of someone who just said "yeah, we can't stop you from doing anything, but , gosh -- we'd really appreciate it if you could help us out" is depressing. And it makes me mis-trust Cory. That's sad.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

communist sodas &c

2006-06-22T01:19:45Z

http://feeds.feedburner.com/boingboing/iBag?m=1902

"after rinsing out an empty can of mountain dew for recycling (featuring the new logo), i set it upside dow to drain. from across the room it caught the corner of my eye and it read "MAO"! the swirl also makes the "oM" from "Mountian" look like a lowercase "g" so you get the "Tung" clearly"

-----

In other news. if you play BoingBoing's posts BACKWARDS you get PRO-DRM rants. w00t!!!

posted in boingboing - 1 reply

copyrighting conceptual and installation art

2006-06-14T12:58:44Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/04/12/nm_lightning_field_c.html

hmmmm, cory. For somebody fascinated with the future, you sure have an archaic idea of what constitutes art.

although that may not be strictly true -- but you certainly seem to have an archaic idea of what constitutes copyrightable art.

>installing art in a field doesn't make the field copyrighted.

that is correct. installing art in a field neither makes the field a piece of art nor does is make the field copyrightable.

however, when the field _is_ the art (as in "the affects of the forces of nature over the next 12 months commencing midnight April 14, 2006 on [this particular square acrea]) it is copyrightable. it is no longer "just" a piece of dirt. it is a piece of art.

you may not like that, you may not like conceptual art, but that's the way it goes. to say "I don't believe that's art, therefore it's not copyrightable" is criticism-based copyright law.

posted in boingboing - 3 replies

go Mark! (on ukeleles)

2006-05-30T13:07:06Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/04/03/satellite_radio_comm.html

Best. Post. Evar. (well, within recent memory, anyway).

posted in boingboing - 1 reply

Borderline Digital : wired for psychoanalytic deconstructions, June 3rd

2006-05-19T19:10:39Z

Upcoming exhibition in the Mission looking for virtual discontents.
Got some issues with being the lab rat in the cybernetic operation?
Got some issues with life slipping into binary subtractions and the shoddy simulacrum ?

Submissions still being accepted:
Using arts + media + technology for self-analysis , deconstruction, perspective and realtime liberation.
Contact: Zulah(s) at Station 40
azulah@gmail.com

fwd>

BORDERLINE DIGITAL
clinical diagnosis of mental dependency on digital data
an audio/visual critique of civilization through digital technology
and an exploration of fragmentation, alienation, pixelation
JUNE 3rd,
STATION40
3030B 16st @ Mission
San Francisco

thinking of digital bits that make up music, images, or video, in the
same way atoms make our three dimensional reality, millions of pieces
that together create the appearance of a smooth surface, but are indeed
independent, anomalous, and disorganized.
as a metaphor to human society, the promise of technology suggests
connectivity, communication, unity. but it is alienation, the force
that creeps in through the cracks of our fragmented social networks,
pixelated and corrupted, yet unable to reboot.

using the medium, the science and the derived technology, Borderline
Digital will tiptoe the fine line between the hype of digital
technology and the hypocrisy of primitivist abolition, to turn
technology inside out on it's belly and point out it's vulnerabilities
without getting too fussy about it's impending takeover and ultimate
demise.

here we are in the year 2006, and we have seen the future, we are post
modern and post futuristic, we are post post apocalyptic, we are living
in the days beyond the space odyssey. the red eye of the soft spoken
demented computer running the ship on it's way to jupiter is but a
dream induced hallucination. the reality we are waking up to is much
different, that digital voice, is nothing but an automatic answering
software running on a server farm in texas, telling us to please hold
on the line until our future is available... and yet we cant seem to
hang up that phone.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

he didn't start the fire

2006-05-01T18:29:15Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/05/01/make_633675_a_month_.html

Mark fantasizes about a 1960 ad for selling miniature fire-extinguishers. He goes all over the place -- speculation on how they might have been sold, to the economics of selling, to who might have designed the thing.

If BoingBoing had but one post like this a day (nay -- week!) it would be 10 times as awesome.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

xeni

2006-04-12T17:16:58Z

heh

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/27/xenisuckscom.html

posted in boingboing - 4 replies

cell phones vs. cemeteries

2006-04-07T13:31:42Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2004/04/13/highgate_cemetery_ph.html

I'm not one to jump on the "Cory is Evil" bandwagon, becuase I like Cory's posts (other than W*F*) an awful lot. But he's weird on cellphones. Last year, he was insisting he had never had a movie interrupted by a cell-phone ring (and just WHAT theater was that, people wanted to know). Now, he's irritated that he had to prove his cellphone was switched off when entering a cemetery.

Well. Be glad they didn't smash it right off: http://www.phonebashing.com/

Hasn't anybody developed a localized cellphone-jammer?

posted in boingboing - 118 replies

haha! remember the "good" old days?

2006-03-31T16:46:34Z

http://www.xradiograph.com/interference/2003/09/15/

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

how 'bout disney and menstruation?

2006-03-29T19:10:46Z

During the 1940s, World War II shut off the lucrative European theatrical market, which cut off a significant source of Disney's revenues. At home, "Fantasia" was a major commercial failure. Disney swallowed his artistic pride and did the ignoble: he began to take for-hire assignments for government and corporate producers.

Disney opted to take a commission from the International Cello-Cotton Company for an educational film designed to be shown in health education classes. What resulted was "The Story of Menstruation," a 10-minute animated film covering an area where Disney's films never went before. Indeed, "The Story of Menstruation" is the first film (as far as I can determine) which uses the word "vagina". Way to go, Walt!

part 1
http://filmthreat.com/Features.asp?Id=1231

part 2
http://www.filmthreat.com/Features.asp?Id=1232

posted in boingboing - 7 replies

holy crap

2006-03-28T06:40:41Z

There's a BoingBoing *tribe*? Cool!

--XJ

posted in boingboing - 26 replies

not that there's anything wrong with that dept

2006-03-10T18:18:58Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/10/smartfilter_boingboi.html

of course WE would never stoop so low as to insinuate, as OTHERS HAVE CARELESSLY DONE, that this man is a SEXUAL FETISHIST. but since its our job to report the news, that's the facts. somebody spread some innuendo, and WE HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO REPEAT, against our will, of course.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

now, now, boys.....

2006-03-06T15:05:06Z

http://corysucks.com/ - "a directory of horrible blog posts"
via http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/49755

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

What would an MMORPG about healing be like?

2006-03-03T01:57:05Z

What would it be like?
Booooorrring!

Seriously, while interesting as the description is, I don't think I could stand playing a game like this for more than five minutes.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

quiet american

2006-02-27T22:32:51Z

http://www.quietamerican.org/field_sfbay.html

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

A MARTIAN ANGST RAMPS (MAMA GRASPS A NIT RANT)

2006-02-24T18:33:11Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/23/anagram_transit_maps.html

can somebody explain to me the appeal of these transit maps anagrams? the first was amusing, the second was boring, and the fifth, seventh, and 39th version have been downright annoying. do you have to be wearing a trucker cap and a tshirt with an ironic slogan to find these fall-on-the-floor multi-post-worthy funny?

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

Glassbreaks

2006-02-24T13:33:55Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/22/mashup_friday_hiphop.html

Hey, a couple months ago BB posted the link to the Phillip Glass mashups; soon thereafter they disappeared. In the interim, I was only able to get three tracks from the page, as the server was being farking boingboing'd from the first post until the cease-and-desist.

Any chance someone could put it up at a Putfile or Dropload style delivery site, and post a link here?

posted in boingboing - 5 replies

Where in the World in Bonhomie Snoutintroff?

2006-02-23T22:24:14Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/23/more_clues_to_identi.html

In other news, I think I'm _this_ close to figuring out who's been tracking mud in the entrance of our apartment building. Last week I thought it was Old Lady Krczycki, but she denied it when I called her late last night. I'll keep you posted....

posted in boingboing - 1 reply

geek discovers dymo labeller

2006-02-23T18:14:52Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/23/tv_with_hackedin_sci.html

hilarity ensues

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

Schizophrenic Cats

2006-02-23T14:05:57Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/22/schizophrenia_aging_.html

That Louis Wain, prolific and popular illustrator of cats became schizophrenic is not questioned; that his happy, whimsical paintings of cats were transfigured by his disease into spiky abstractions, "Characteristic changes in the art began to occur, changes common to schizophrenic artists."

Unfortunately, the facts in the case are not so simple.

The off-puttingly titled "Catland" http://www.lilitu.com/catland/ is devoted to the art of Mr. Wain, and apropos the spiky schizophrenic abstractions, which Wain called "wallpaper cats", it comments that:

Wain drew many wallpaper cats during his stay in Bethlem asylum. Some have claimed that these drawings were an indication of his deteriorating mental state, since filling in pictures with detailed patterns is often a sign of schizophrenia. Others have doubted such theories, since he continued to produce drawings in his older style both while doing the wallpaper cats and afterwards. Both Brian Reade and Rodney Dale independantly came to the conclusion that Wain interest in patterns stemmed from his mother's designs of tapestries and fabrics. Dale describes it so:

"It seems to me at least as reasonable to suppose that Louis Wain was experimenting wih the patterns which he remembered from his youth as that he was deteriorating."

-----

The noble savage is a romantic conceit. When no savages are present, we try to look for those "touched (by the hand of g*d)" and imbue them with preternatural gifts. SMany times our desires for the other are merely projections.

In this case, a progression of abstraction wallpaper and textile designs. Aided and abetted, no doubt, by his illness. But not solely the province of his "madness", either.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

Rim shot

2006-01-24T15:46:49Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/23/moment_of_headline_z.html

okay, you got me. I am now OFFICIALLY tired of Xeni posting about sex-related topics AND gloating about it.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

Qwest AUP

2006-01-11T14:55:42Z

I was under the impression that common carriers are not allowed to place restrictions on how their customers use their connections. Am I mistaken, or is Qwest not considered a common carrier?

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

holes

2006-01-04T19:01:55Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/04/misbehavior_in_secon.html

"The Holes Around Mars" is f*****g excellent, although their use of the word "ceramic" always confused me.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

snarky comments, anyone?

2006-01-04T15:49:36Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/01/cory_quit_his_dayjob.html

posted in boingboing - 4 replies

Tribe.net on BoingBoing

2005-12-15T21:35:28Z

I'm no good at interpreting legal and censorship hype, but this is on BoingBoing right now, regarding Tribe.net:

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/12/09/tribenet_selfcensori.html

Somebody explain this to me?

posted in boingboing - 2 replies

xeni filter?

2005-11-27T12:06:04Z

I just can't handle any more posts from her about her photo shoots. What was that filter that removed her posts when you were viewing boingboing?

posted in boingboing - 7 replies

Bruce Sterling Gossip Update please

2005-11-22T18:48:34Z

So i take it Bruce Sterling got a divorce and some point and is now married to the Sarajevo artist?

Just fanboy curiousity. confirmations/denials?

/saw him deliver a great sermon at Powell's in Portland once.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

Beck and the dancing robots

2005-11-19T09:39:03Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/11/18/beck_and_the_dancing.html

I wonder how hard it was to program those movements...

posted in boingboing - 1 reply

design/ads

2005-11-03T16:48:50Z

http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/hiding_boing_boings_rss_ads/

j-walk sez:

The only way I can stand to read Boing Boing is by using an RSS reader (I use Bloglines). Boing Boing is one of the most popular sites on the Web, but the design is terrible -- even with the ads blocked.

Boing Boing's RSS feed also has ads, but they're been easy to hide using AdBlocker. Today, the RSS ads were back. Same ad below each item. This ad block filter will hide them:

*boingboing/iBag*

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

Shelley Jackson's SKIN project

2005-10-30T01:27:04Z

Artists can be so pretentious.

posted in boingboing - 8 replies

Jesus in the sand dune.

2005-10-24T02:12:17Z

Christ must pop up in a lot of inkblots too.

Is it just me, or does it look less like Jesus and more like a buried airliner?

Hey, have any flights gone missing?

posted in boingboing - 2 replies

Suicide Girls!

2005-10-24T01:50:46Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/09/28/suicide_girls_rumord.html

:::yawn:::

posted in boingboing - 5 replies

Mutter museum

2005-10-20T21:35:17Z

Alright! It's nice to see boingboing give props by the coolest and least well known Philadelphia attraction, the Mutter Museum. I actually went there for the first time a few months ago with my wife and my 7 year old neices.

It's definitely one of the most interesting places I've ever been to and you should check it out if you're in town.

posted in boingboing - 2 replies

Fractal Swiss "Cabbage"

2005-10-17T22:50:18Z

I've seen them before. Yes, they are lovely, but, um, that's cauliflower not cabbage.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

Psychedelic Science-Fiction

2005-10-06T01:17:42Z

"Arrows to Mercury. This is only the beginning. Out there, somewhere right now, the jargon is forming, a common vocabulary that will express the intellectual and moral graduation currently underway in the human mind. the vocabulary will be the shift itself, the birth of a fresh cognitive/linguistic model of the universe, one to overthrow medieval Christian and Muslim cosmologies, one to expose and neutralize globo-capitalist oligarchy. They are all self-destructing already, failing to adapt. It is now impossible for a person to carry on in these obsolescences without devoting most of their thoughts to fantasy and denial. Evolution exploits such niches. And so now so are we, sitting over a hell-mouth of self-editing, self-selecting psychostructures, eavesdropping and taking credit. But that's all any art has ever been. The overmeme is writing itself through us, through you now. We are its million monkeys at our million keyboards, unconsciously bringing it to life. Byzantine and paranoid. Only a rough draft."

That's from the opening editorial statement of a new zine called Psychedelic Science-Fiction. I have ten copies, and if anyone would like one, please drop me a line at cosmiccommunist@hotmail.com. All it will cost you is a SASE if you live outside Canaduh. If you're a local, it's free.

They do have an online presence, but because the project is so new, the site is still very much under construction. Anyway, you can have a peek here http://www.psychedelicsciencefiction.com

for contact info and submissions guidelines, etc.

If you're a fan of visionary sci-fi, it looks to be something worth keeping an eye on.

http://arghfuckkill.blogspot.com

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

Working Knowledge

2005-10-05T18:53:22Z

hey guys, any technology experts out there willing to check out a new free and open source technology based non profit? We are currently looking for people who would be willing to share their technology knowledge in a free tech school available via our website www.workingknowledge.org. We're a small non profit, well acutally it's just me right now, but I'm a hard worker! Check us out. When we get funding this will definitely be a place I look for recruits, and we might actually be able to pay you!!!! heh. Spread the word, please. Thanks!!

posted in boingboing - 7 replies

Take back America

2005-10-05T05:20:58Z

Take back America

http://tinyurl.com/8ghl8

http://tinyurl.com/b97vk

Where Republicans tread, innocent people end up dead.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

$20,000 in March!

2005-09-30T17:33:50Z

From the translated japanese interview:

"3. No compromising to advertisers or to readers

While they haven't created a corporation in the traditional way, "bOING bOING" has become a true business. With 200,000 hits daily from inside and outside the U.S., the company made $20,000 in advertisements from skateboard brand and a T-Shirt company in March, however maintaining an independent spirit is the the most important thing."

Maybe that's 20,000 yen.

posted in boingboing - 12 replies

Hummer-branded laptop

2005-09-29T05:49:12Z

http://www.hummerlaptops.com/
"Just as tough, reliable, and go-anywhere as a HUMMER vehicle, this laptop is the perfect addition to your active lifestyle! Featuring the latest in mobile technology, it's ergonomically styled, and tough enough to survive the wear and tear of every day use whether at home, in the car, or on the go!"

Also note that it runs on a petroleum-based battery that runs for 15 minutes on a 5 gallon charge.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

Join the FSM tribe!

2005-08-25T21:03:35Z

http://tribes.tribe.net/fsm

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

Public domain vs. copyright protected work flowchart

2005-08-24T23:49:39Z

Working in music publishing, I can attest to this flowchart's accuracy:
http://www.bromsun.com/practice/copyrights/flowchart.html

Okay - well, I fell asleep before getting through the whole thing. Somebody find me a new job before I kill myself.

posted in boingboing - 1 reply

Freakish Laughing Boy Mannequin

2005-08-23T04:45:13Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/22/surreal_mannequin_bo.html

These things are all over the place in Japan, usually in the mid- to low-end department stores. They really freaked me out at first, but I have since gotten used to them. If this is all it takes to get on boingboing anymore... I should start taking more phonecam pix.

pic plopped in der gallery

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

digging through the dirt

2005-08-10T12:59:00Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/09/the_man_your_garbage.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/05/cops_can_dig_through.html

Well, If I can go dumpster diving, why can't the cops?

http://www.allthingsfrugal.com/dumpster.htm
http://www.paghat.com/dumpster.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumpster-diving

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

Self portrait with planets

2005-08-05T18:02:53Z

The photo is awesome
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/124415main_image_feature_380a_ys_full.jpg

It's not even the space setting or Earth in the background that freaks me out when looking at it. It's the reflection in the mirrored face shield that makes my head spin.

posted in boingboing - 1 reply

Huffer!

2005-07-26T16:18:03Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/23/mugshot_of_man_arres.html

Oh, my goodness. What is it with huffers?

posted in boingboing - 3 replies

Federal DB of Sex Offenders Online

2005-07-22T02:12:24Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/21/federal_database_of_.html

I'd like to start a betting pool on time from the DB going online to the first BB post of the "mashup" (shudder) between it and Google Maps. Incidently, I want to send the people who misuse "mashup" to Google Moon.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

Free Software for Busy People

2005-07-20T13:21:35Z

We've been using exclusively free (as in freedom&beer) software in my home for about 5 years now, and I'm always trying to encourage friends/family to use as much free software as I can.

Today's link to Mohammad Al-Ubaydli's book seems like something I can forward to the same friends/family. How about the generally-not-overly-technical among this tribe's members? Have you looked at this? Thoughts?

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

crappy park job

2005-07-20T06:05:46Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/19/flickr_photos_of_bad.html

Man, I love this.

I almost wish I had a cameraphone. I've been wanting to snap people's cars & license plates for years.

posted in boingboing - 1 reply

White Wolf LARP fees

2005-07-11T23:01:47Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/08/white_wolf_cuts_own_.html

I (confess that I) went to a LARP that charge $5 a head for several months running. The collected fees went to the $50 space rental, and anything above that was used for pizza and soda.

Man, what fools these mortals be.

posted in boingboing - 5 replies

renew or be assimilated

2005-07-11T16:54:18Z

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/07/08/BUGF1DKKFM1.DTL

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

cake

2005-07-09T04:26:23Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/02/06/novelty_cake_gnawed_.html

okay. what's up with the cake posts?

at least they are no longer calling them cake "mods" .....

posted in boingboing - 4 replies

Zombies vs. DnD nerds

2005-07-07T13:10:59Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/05/nerdwar_dders_with_d.html

Oh. My. God. I SO want to play this. Er, participate. Um... lurch.

posted in boingboing - 2 replies

Group proposes to build hotel on Justice Souter's house property

2005-07-05T18:06:18Z

If I were wealthy, I'd sooo invest in this.

posted in boingboing - 3 replies

earwax

2005-07-04T15:29:27Z

so... cute?!???

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/20/accidental_earwax_sc.html

well, that's teh boing.

erg.

posted in boingboing - 5 replies

Censorware

2005-06-30T13:05:00Z

That's pretty obnoxious that a surf-control company took a website that regularly features the terms hentai, tentacle porn, fetish, and teledildonics and mistakenly assumed it was an "Adult" site. What were they thinking?

posted in boingboing - 4 replies

7/2 - LA - Audiocrash - An experimental music event

2005-06-26T20:27:53Z

I figure LA boingboing readers might be interested in this event since it's weird, crazy experimental music that is hard to find anywhere else.

saturday july 2nd
suburban theory presents

AUDIOCRASH
technobreakelectrocore

Uniting the California Hard Experimental Scene
WARNING: Not for the lighthearted or closeminded.

SAN FRANCISCO
-------------
kid kameleon
dj ripley
red max
r-type
filthmilk
heartworm
dj semtex
bass bin laden
666 gangstaz VS megabitch

LOS ANGELES
-----------
sonic death rabbit (live PA)
baseck
violentfingers (live PA)
hatbox (live PA)
low tech (live PA)

$10 - 21 & over
9:30 pm - 5:30 am
Los Angeles Location
Call (323) 769-5844 for directions

Costumes are encouraged.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

Accelerando

2005-06-20T15:36:52Z

Okay, so I'm jumping the gun; BB will most likely post about Stross' CC-licensed novel when he posts the text. I'm so stoked to see other authors trying this route.

I read Stross' novella "Concrete Jungle" for free from his site, which prompted me to purchase the "Atrocity Archives" hardcover (in which it is included) from Golden Gryphon.

It would be neat if bands started releasing CC-licensed tracks to promote their albums.

posted in boingboing - 6 replies

telstar logistics

2005-06-03T19:30:36Z

I saw Todd Lappin's Telstar Logistics car today in a hardware store parking lot. Too bad I didn't have a camera with me. But I did leave a note under the wiper.

Todd: http://tonga.tribe.net/person/ef1457f4-5ff3-46a9-9559-88c776c7f7b3

His car:
http://boingboing.net/text/2003_11_02_guestbar.html#106807109797819608

posted in boingboing - 2 replies

greasemonkey: boingboing butler

2005-05-28T02:26:21Z

http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000235.html

firefox greasemonkey script that removes non-content from our favorite website.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

Kingdom of Loathing

2005-05-26T22:27:01Z

This is one of the best games I've ever seen.

http://kingdomofloathing.com

posted in boingboing - 15 replies

be careful checking in

2005-05-20T19:51:41Z

Near Mission St in San Francisco, on 16th St or so, is the EULA Hotel. Be careful what you sign there.

http://louvre.tribe.net/tribe/upload/photo/624/527/62452734-9ed9-4f13-8ed0-5ec723e4ea80

posted in boingboing - 2 replies

walking chair robot

2005-05-14T15:22:34Z

WTF?!???

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/robots/wl16rii-stairclimbing-robot-chair-102156.php

Those WACKY Japanese!

posted in boingboing - 3 replies

guest blogs

2005-05-14T15:21:52Z

Hey what happened to the guest blogs? I seem to recall there being frequent guest bloggers, but lately I've seen none.
Hating the guest?

posted in boingboing - 5 replies

those WACKY japanese

2005-05-11T04:40:13Z

product not submitted to BB because 1) I'm lazy 2) I saw it on Gizmodo

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-entertainment/audio/takara-cubee-singing-animal-blocks-102721.php
http://www.takara-usa.com/toys/cubee/index.php
http://www.takaratoys.co.jp/cubee/images/cubee-l.wmv

the video (15megs, multiple ads) must be seen to be believed.

posted in boingboing - 3 replies

Cup-a-cake

2005-05-08T13:11:13Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/05/04/plastic_container_pr.html

When I saw an entry with a tupperware-like cupcake holder, I automaticall knew it was a Mark entry. His stuff tends to focus on geeky, naïve charm as much as Cory's are about IP or Disneyland. Xeni's are all over the map, but I couldn't see her posting about cup-a-cake.

Now I want cupcakes, and I'm in the wrond damned country for frosting.

posted in boingboing - 11 replies

Atari & other Gaming Consoles thread

2005-05-06T19:57:52Z

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/retro/atari-flashback-20-101455.php

today is "OM rips everything from Gizmodo day"

posted in boingboing - 2 replies

RIAA awards

2005-05-06T02:48:11Z

(So I'm a few days behind.)

Boingboing entry:
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/05/03/paper_riaa_shouldnt_.html

Paper location:
http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract_id=660601

For people who are interested but don't want to wade through it all (12k people viewed the abstract, 1.7k downloaded the paper, who knows how many fewer actually made it through to page 14 or so when the good stuff starts), here's my very brief summary.

Some years ago there was a case called BMW of North America, Inc. v. Gore where BWM was fined $4000 dollars in damages and $4 million in punitive punishment for selling a car which had been secretly repainted. An appeals court wrote that the disparity between damages and punitive awards raised "suspicious judicial eyebrow".

This paper applies that eyebrow to RIAA awards. Here are the court decision "guideposts" for deciding if a punitive punishment is warranted at all:

1) "Of the three gross excessiveness guideposts, first and most important is the reprehensibility of the defendant's conduct."

2) "The second guidepost in the determination of gross excessiveness is the ratio of the punitive damage award to the actual or potential harm inflicted on the plaintiff."
Quoth the court: "in practice, few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between punitive and compensatory damages, to a significant degree, will satisfy due process."

3) "Finally, the third guidepost used to decide gross excessiveness is a comparison of the punitive damage award with the civil and criminal penalties for similar misconduct."

Then add in that the $750 in "statutory damages for copyright infringement and thereby receive a guaranteed $750 in damages, all but one dollar of which would be noncompensatory in nature." ($749 in punitive, $1 in compensory), stir with "This large punitive component is not troublesome when statutory damages are awarded for one or a few instances of illegal file-sharing. The punitive component serves as an incentive to sue, and punishment for breaking the law is quite normal. However, when a given punishment is massively aggregated across many similar instances of misconduct, the resulting penalty can become so large that it becomes grossly excessive in relation to any legitimate interest in punishment and deterrence."

The rest of the paper seems to be backing this up with lots of case citations, background on the discussion, some analysis of actual damages, etc.

posted in boingboing - 1 reply

cowicide, this is for you

2005-05-05T20:06:44Z

http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/41760

posted in boingboing - 1 reply

Xeni shoots a gun

2005-05-05T14:28:52Z

And it is on bb why?

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/05/01/xeni_get_your_gun.html

posted in boingboing - 12 replies

fuh-nee voicemails

2005-05-03T13:47:27Z

all we need is a voicemail about ironic trucker-hats or duct-tape wallets

beying worn by somebody in a "I fucked XXXXX" t-shirt at Disneyland moblogged via nano-WiFi

on Flickr.

posted in boingboing - 9 replies

Happy Slap TV

2005-04-29T03:18:42Z

It's odd, but I don't picture this trend catching on in the USA, where one can never be sure if the intended victim is armed.

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

Awwww.... shit

2005-04-29T02:53:33Z

i'm thinking about doing something crazy about this...

please pacify me... stop me... before I get rash....

...about the TANNING BIMBO.

www.boingboing.net/2005/04/...rkansas_salon_requi.html

Awwww..... shit's gonna hit the fan now.

posted in boingboing - 2 replies

Maggots

2005-04-20T10:13:27Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/04/19/maggots_are_a_person.html

Mark's post about maggots and leeches is fascinating, but I'm such a wimp that I won't view the page with any meal on the horizon. Is it safe to check that page? I was traumatized by pictures at Snopes of a guy with maggots in his brain, and another guy that had them in his gums. While I recognize that these are "clean" maggots, I can't get over the idea that seeing a picture of a bone-deep wound filled with maggots will somehow dull my appetite.

Oddly, the concept of medical leeches has absolutely no negative effect on me at all.

For the morbidly curious:
http://www.snopes.com/photos/maggots.asp

posted in boingboing - 0 replies

Cell phone with onboard video projector

2005-04-15T18:17:18Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/04/14/cell_phone_with_onbo.html
My latest article for TheFeature is about the development of a mobile phone with an integrated laser projector:
"Mobile phone designers are faced with a paradox," says Siemens user interface researcher Alexander Jarczyk. On one hand, users clamor for smaller, thinner devices. But in the same breath, they scream for bigger screens. With the proliferation of mobile Internet applications, the problem is only going to get worse. Screen real estate is at a premium and designers are hustling to develop new territory, from flexible displays that roll up to zoomable user interfaces. For Jarczyk and his colleagues, though, the world itself is a mobile display. All you need is a projector that fits in your pocket.

...No, in that case, you'd need the phone with a projector, and a place that is dark enough to see the projection, and a place on which to project... Am I the only person who thinks this is infathomably silly?

posted in boingboing - 2 replies

Bill Gates 0wns Einstein, Groucho , Freud, Asimov, Fuller, et al

2005-04-11T20:31:53Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/04/09/bill_gates_0wns_eins.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1455524,00.html
'"Our legendary personalities are evergreen 'brands' with the benefit of worldwide recognition," reads a message on the Richman agency's website.'

*vomits*

Where is the line drawn between "public figure" and "celebrity"? How can a dead person have an agent, particulary where there are no specific works concerned other than a sense of character? It's one thing to insist that /Duck Soup/ is a work that should be protected (which any more simply means controlled by whomever has the most buX0rs), but shouldn't personalities and such pass into the public domain as well?

posted in boingboing - 3 replies

PB&J Patent ixnay'd

2005-04-11T11:27:42Z

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/04/08/court_denies_smucker.html

Yeah, it's funny that the patent office finally found a spine over someone trying to patent a sandwich with smushed edges. Didn't I see a Jakob Nielsen patent that nearly literally read, "Tool Tips for hyperlinks"? -- good grief, if you can point to two existing UI techniques and smush /them/ together, it's OBVIOUS!

posted in boingboing - 2 replies

musiclab

2005-04-05T22:26:15Z

this is some kind of crappy interent scam...all those songs sound like the same band, not only that, but the band names are awfully fishy...

the first 10 songs i listened to were surely the same annoying psuedo socal 'singer'...

posted in boingboing - 1 reply

Ka-Ching Ka-Ching

2005-04-04T13:59:30Z

http://www.glassdog.com/archives/2005/03/24/boing_boing_kaching_kaching.html

rant on BB ads, that I found on Waxy, when tracing another BB post. Hrm.

posted in boingboing - 3 replies