BEGIN LINE_NOIZ.9 I S S U E - ( J A N U A R Y 2 4 , 1 9 9 4 >LiNE NOiZ< >LiNE NOiZ< )(#*(&^)!@ L I N E ~)!*@}#"(& L I N E N O I Z )3%(@&(#$* CYbERPUNk I N f O R M A t i O N E - Z i N E __,,,,,...................... L i N E N O i Z .....................,,,,,__ I S S U E - ( J A N U A R Y 2 4 , 1 9 9 4 : File ! : Intro to Issue 9 : Billy Biggs : File @ : SF TV or that was the year that sucked : The Eyeball Kid : File # : Cyberspace : The Electric Phantom : File $ : Virtual Light review : The Eyeball Kid : File % : Subject: ThirdFloorGardenOfEden03 : Pythagoras ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- File - ! Guess what, I think I forgot to say something last issue. I'm really ashamed at the quality of the stuff I've been putting out. I havent exactly been great with spelling and proof-reading. With LN10, things will really change. I'm editing the format [seriously this time. I havent actually gone through with a lot of promises I've made]. Also, I will be adding a few other little things to the 'zine. This issue wasn't exactly supposed to come out so soon. I just wanted to get rid of a few things. The next issue will feature the promised Information Superhighway stuff. If you have any interesting info on that, please send it. -Billy Biggs, editor. --NOTICE: IF you subscribed and HAVEN't recieved any issues, mail me and I'll fix the problem. -*- Subscription Info -*- Subscriptions can be obtained by sending mail to: dodger@fubar.bk.psu.edu With the words: Subscription LineNoiz In the body of the letter. Back Issues can be recieved by sending mail to the same address with the words BACK ISSUES in the subject. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- File - @ >From: eyeballk@orion.login.qc.ca (The Eyeball Kid) SF TV OR THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT SUCKED OK YOU PRIMITIVE SCREW HEADS LISTEN UP: THIS IS MY "BOOM-STICK". A paraphrasing of ARMY OF DARKNESS? Perhaps, but it could well serve as the opening lines for any TV series that started in the two last years. Particularly if it was Science Fiction. TV is a game of numbers based on a horrendessly flawed system called "the Neilsen ratings". A group of "average American TV viewers" are given two way TV controls (we know what you're watching) and punch in the numbers when they watch a TV program. Everyone in the family has a number, from Mom and Dad, right down to the kids. When the TV is on, the number(s) are recorded in the Neilsen computer and tabulated in a form of viewer response known as THE RATINGS. Advertisers look at these rating and decide which shows they will sponsor. Obviously they want the show with the most viewers (a slot which also costs the most money per second). Obviously a show with lower ratings generates fewer viewers and therefore less advertising revenue. You all knew that, right? Quality isn't a factor, it's just a numbers game. OK, these numbers are broken down further into DEMOGRAPHICS. When mom watches the TV she punches in her number and "they know" that a particular show is reaching a demographic group labeled "MOM". She might be between the ages of 30-50, have a small car, and buy cereal and margarine. This gives advertisers a number to work with so they can advertise their competing brand of margarine in the top-rated show for margarine buying Moms. So, DEMOGRAPHICS represent the type of customer a TV show can expect (or MUST) draw to stay on the air. In other words: a TV shows existence is subject to the following: COST PER EPISODE, NEILSEN RATINGS, AND DEMOGRAPHICS. How it works in real life: Bob Smith Producer delivers a series that is dramatic, politically appropriate, and costs half of what a regular show costs. The only problem is, it's major demographic group are the homeless, who all cluster around TV store windows to watch it. It runs at 2 PM in a country with ten million homeless people. Well, with an audience of ten million it's one of the most highly watched shows in the world (for it's time slot). Now the problems starts: These homeless people don't appear on the Neilsen ratings. Even if they did their demographics would suck. But worse, they don't buy margarine, they buy turpentine and soup. And THEY HAVE NO PRODUCT LOYALTY! So ADVERTISERS CAN'T INFLUENCE THEM! THEY JUST BUY WHAT EVER IS CHEAPEST! Fortunately for the failing Network, they have a soap-opera in the wings which costs more, is badly written, but appeals to 2 million versions of MOM (see above). And it sells margarine. Granted, the HOMELESS wouldn't appear on the ratings anyway, because they aren't programmed into the Neilsen system, but substitute the Science Fiction fan for the homeless, and you get the picture. That's right SF fans: YOU DON'T COUNT. You don't even exist, according to the numbers, except on Saturday and Sunday night (because YOU HAVE NO LIVES). It gets worse: YOU'RE NOT VERY CLEVER, IN FACT YOU WILL BELIEVE ANYTHING IF IT HAS A SPACESHIP OR A PHASER OR SOME SPECIAL EFFECTS. YOU ARE SOCIALLY INEPT, but (fortunately) subject to merchandising -- toys, games, and collectibles. SOUND LIKE ANYONE YOU KNOW? For you the Network makes a special exception: STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION (hey, compared to Law And Order it's mindless crap) and better yet, on Sundays, SEAQUEST (mindless crap compared to STTNG)! And you eat it up! YUM-YUM! You're so loyal you get sequels and movies until you choke. Why? Because you just happen to be watching a show Mr. and Mrs. Neilsen and the 2.5 Neilsen children like to watch. That's right SF fans, that is their BOOM-STICK. It ain't right, but that's the way it works. NOW THE GOOD NEWS: YOU CAN KICK THE CRAP OUT OF NEILSEN AND THE TV EXECS FROM THE PRIVACY OF YOUR OWN HOME! YOU DON'T EVEN NEED A TV! If you're reading this tirade you're obviously on-line or connected to someone on-line. And you probably have a fax-modem, a word-processor, or a piece of paper and a pen. The fax-modem makes it easy, but the pen and paper will do the job just as well. YOU FAX THE BASTARDS WHERE IT HURTS: IN THEIR MAIN OFFICES! You don't go after the affiliates, or program creators, YOU GO AFTER THE NETWORK AND KICK THEM IN THEIR DEMOGRAPHIC BALLS! Write yourself a letter, something along the lines of the following: "Dear [Programing Exec.], I'm tired of watching [name a crappy program]. Stop inflicting your stupidity on me right now or I won't watch any more." or alternately, "Dear [Programming Exec.], I am a loyal fan of [name great show]. I hear you with the target coordinates. All you have to do is assign you weapons and start firing. Because if you don't, you're just as responsible as THEY are. The Eyeball Kid EyballK@Orion.login.qu.ca ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- File - # >From: phantom@cyberspace.com (The Electric Phantom) [[[ C y B E R S p A C E Well I found a pretty kewl article I think you all will like. It answers the very common questions What is Cyberspace? Is Cyberspace real? Omni Magazine department- First Word by David Porush typed to file by The Electric Phantom FIRST WORD Cyberspace: Portal to transcendence? By David Porush There's a new frontier beckoning us we're growing it in our own backyards. Today many writers are liiking toward cyberspace as eagerly as previous generations aticipated moving westward across the prairie or out into space. The prairies, however, held hardship and war. And the high frintier of space primises vast stretches of cold indifference punctuated by alien landscapes. But cyberspace lets us dram that we can build and an inner frontier, a virtual reality, to our specs. So our culture is telling itself sexy, glitzy, wishful stories about descovering alien territories right here on Earth. About releasing ourselves from the burden of body and liberating ouselves from sex and race and class. About acting out our fantisies in an electronic nether world and tripping through that trapdoor in the the mind that will let us like Alice, fall into a dream. This is a fascination utopian mythology based on a tehnology still in its infancy. So I have been trolling for new cyberpunk fiction (like Neal Stephenson's _Snow Crash_), going native on electronic bulletin boards, and listening closely to the technical researchers, sociologists, philosophers, hackers, and writers who speculate anout cyberspace. This is what I am hearing: In the short run, cyberspace will require an elaborate cyborg armor - data gloves, goggles, bodysuits, helmets. Many believe, however, that some time in the next century, genetic engineering, biochip design, and nanotechnology will collaborate to produce functional wetware - computer interfaces that will enable us to jack our brains directly into a vast, worldwide, interactive network with it's own geography and sensory realism. [Like the Matrix in Neuromancer, for anyone that didn't notice-Phantom] Evntually, we might achieve the Holy Grail of VR research: the delusion that our bodies are actually there, when, as William Gibson quipped in his 1984 novel Neuromancer, "There is no there there." The result will be a cross between the ultimate interactive computer game and telepathy. While there may be no there there, many would-be cybernauts imagine there's something else there, waiting for us on the other side of the interface. A recurring theme I hear is the confidence that cyberspace will be a technology not just of the brain and of the mind, but of the soul. There's something quite primitive at work in cyberspace's allure. This yearning for mystical encounters seems unusually superstitious coming from otherwise rational engineers, academics, and writers. But good anthropologists learn not to dismiss al native beliefs as mere superstitions. So let's take them seriously, if only for a moment. How might cyberspace be a portal to transcendence? Neurophysiologists suspect that lurking somewhere in the brain - most likely in a formation at the base of the brain stem called the dorsal raphe nucleus - lies a facility that makes us feel, under the right conditions, like we're in communication with gods or that we have voyaged out to meet some Higher Presence. Certain configurations of data delivered to the brain by electronic stimulation could flood this region of the brain with serotonin, a neurotransmitter involved in many functions, including hallucination. In this way, the right software might evoke that oceanic, world-embracing feeling known so well to mystics and psycho-tropical beachcombers. But let's not stop here with this portrait of cyberspace as some kind of electronic designer drug. It's hard not to wonder why the brain has this weird facility to make us feel like we're talking to God. Is something so irrelevant to survival and yet so distinctively human just a neurochemical accident, and evolutionary byproduct of the sheer complexity of the nervous system? Or is it, as Immanuel Kant suggested two centuries ago, that the laws of the "in here" are the same as the laws "out there": Our minds are tuned to universal harmonies. Perhaps the brain is prepped to receive divine telegrams because there is, after all, an Intelligence informing the cosmos toward which univeral evolution gropes - a Cosmic Anthropic Principle. Perhaps VR technology will be one of the ways to open the hailing frequency. Surely we are no less likey to find transcendence in cyberspace that we are in any other space, whether a Gothic cathdral or a Himalayn monastery or the pages of the Talmud. Cyberspace could be our brungin bush. ------**--------- David Porush is author of The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction, and professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institue where he codirects an AI research group. Well that's it! How'd you like it? I think I'll also give my personal deffintion of cyberspace too. I think cyberspace is any "world" that is explored through the use of technology. I think different technology puts different parts of your body in cyberspace. For example I think one of the earliest venture in cyberspace was when voices first traveled into cyberspace; the telephone was invented. I also include video games. Game characters like Mario and stuff exist in cyberspace. Unlike most I have a much broader definition ulike most who only think that VR and Neurojacking are the only things related to cyberspace. With the addition of modems and networks cyberspace began to seem more real. Exploring real worlds where you have a real life living amognst real people. MUDs for example are just like VR but non graphical. Being in a MUD is having your brain in cyberspace. Graphical games put your eyes in cyberspace. VR puts actual nerves and muscles in cyberspace by reacting to real movements. The Internet is as much of a world on cyberspace as an arena in a VR game. Well that's my totally different and unique definition of cyberspace. Does anyone agree? Is their anyone who thinks I'm a maniac and that isn't remotely what cyberspace is about? The Electric Phantom *** phantom@cyberspace.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- File - $ >From: eyeballk@orion.login.qc.ca (The Eyeball Kid) Subject: VIRTUAL LIGHT VIRTUAL LIGHT When I got my copy of VIRTUAL LIGHT -- autographed by Gibson at a signing I couldn't attend -- I decided to wait until I had a week of couch time to read it. Just as well: if Neuromancer started a trend in "reader osmosis", VIRTUAL LIGHT might well finish it. It's like one of those French classes where you speak the language without really knowing what the words mean -- after a while you get the hang of it, but you always wonder if you're not missing something. Which is how VIRTUAL LIGHT works -- at least for me. Like the Cyberspace Trilogy, the story revolves around a cast of outsiders: Berry Rydell, a stumbling renta-cop, and Chevette Washington, a bicycle courier, make a convoluted journey through the California of 2005 (NoCal and SoCal ), encountering Gibson's usual cast of eccentrics, misfits, and truly evil authoritarian figures. It's very much a Chandler novel for the nineties, just as The Trilogy was a Hammet series for the eighties, and in my opinion that is it's biggest problem. Gibson is probably the most over-rated SF writer in history. This is not because he lacks talent -- indeed his talent is formidable, all the more so because it is "intuitive", rather than "educated". And it's not because he WANTS to be the demi-god of contemporary SF -- he's done enough interviews complaining about the way his fans have misinterpreted his material, or just by-passed the subtext entirely. Rather he is over-rated because, in the eyes of his fans, he's become an icon who can do no wrong. The media has picked up on this, and now he gets cameos in Wild Palms, and a layout in GQ. Yet when he tries to push the envelope a little (The Difference Engine, for example), his fans desert him. Those same fans won't be disappointed by VIRTUAL LIGHT. Apart from it's Spartan narrative style (you better read the others before you take on this), it's just retracing old literary ground. While Gibson is "devolving" his expositionary technique and letting it take us places on it's own, he still hasn't learned to release the characters. He likes them too much. It wasn't until Neuromancer that we found out what happened to Johnny Mnemonic, and then only as an aside. It wasn't until Mona Lisa Overdrive that we found out what happened to Case. Gibson can't kill them in front of us, he has to wait until he's hooked us into someone else before he does the deed behind our backs. He writes sophisticated characters and ideas, but then he falls in love with the characters and can't let them go. It's as much a problem with the fans as it is Gibson: they too fall in love, and they get mean when you shoot the object of their affection. This is smart business sense -- they keep buying your books -- but one day Gibson will be placed in perspective, the fans will have moved on (or died) and his literary short-comings will drag him down the ladder. "All style and no substance," they'll say, or "Kinda like a Sci-Fi version of Stephen King." It won't be his FAULT, but it will happen. And VIRTUAL LIGHT will fuel the flames. Is it a good read? YES. Is it a page turner? DEFINITELY. Is it any different to Neuromancer, Count Zero, or Mona Lisa Overdrive? Well... it's set in a different era... yeah, I guess... Owen Coughlan ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- File - % >From: maysa@knuth.mtsu.edu (Pythagoras) Subject: ThirdFloorGardenOfEden03 ****start Third Floor Garden Of Eden: Chapter 03 "Blake" @2045 "I was hired as a SysOp with NetProtect in 1998, only two months before the Neural Assassination of President Medjiama. That was 47 freaking years ago. I was young, careless...some things got by me then that I would never allow now. Here I am today, a 61 year old spirit with a family in another world. "My wife, Paige, She tells me gets lonely without me there to hold her...to satisfy her. I've told her that I watch her from in here, and I do - But that is not enough to satisfy her needs. She's cheating on me now, as I watch her through the security feed. A man I know everything about and yet not at all lays above her and fills her with his presence. "Presence. My presence has been absent for so long; and yet I am here. I am watching. I am hurting as she lays there in her increasing age and enjoys those pleasures I can no longer give to her. "We have engaged in neurally stimulated sex here in the network; Paige and I. Yet it was only a fantasy for us, and so the experience only left us with want. For I have no manhood except for what makes me think and act like a man; and it is this manhood that Paige so desperately misses. "I am but a spirit who dedicates his time to acquiring knowledge for storage in the University Library. I am but a slave to this electricity of life, a am nothing but a kind thought and an old photographic to my family now. And at the same time my little one needs me the most I am helpless and can offer only computer simulated sentimentalities. "My daughter, Alexia, she has created something which I fear will cause more harm then good. As her father, I of course heard of her project, and yet I had no idea what the ramifications would be. "I remember when she woke that morning; screaming, crying, clutching for sheets she'd kicked off during the night. The dream was intense, worse then most she had had. She was writhing in torment there in her sweating, cotton clad body; then with a start she bolted upright and furiously began scribbling away at her notebook. A tear, perhaps of joy, dripped down her face and she quietly whispered, 'This will be the beginning of a new Eve in Bioengineering.' "She worked in privacy for months. She used to go to work incredibly early and she returned home entirely late. Sometimes she seemed out of place, as if her mind was off exploring other worlds. She'd sit, a blank look upon her face and stare at a wall; moaning and sighing in obvious ecstasy. "I didn't understand what she had done at that point; and still today I'm not sure exactly what her project is. I know for sure that she's done a deal with a local pharmaceutical company, they have been shipping in load after load of big unlabelled boxes. "Rumors I've heard say that the boxes contain NeuroTropics. Smart Drugs. Mind enhancing chemicals that give you energy, allow for faster and healthier cell growth. I don't know, I'm no scientist; I just know that my little Alexia is in a lot of trouble. "Yet how can I explain to Alexia that her passion for Bioengineering has burned her soul black; and that her creation of that spliced and bioengineered fruit tree may cause her to loose her job, her respect or her life?" ***************fin Coming next time: Chapter 4. "Medjiama" @2046 One Foot in the Future, Pythagoras maysa@knuth.mtsu.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- >> Still looking for Information Superhighway stuff << >> << >> as well as anything else << END LINE_NOIZ.9 -- Billy Biggs Ottawa, Canada "When all else fails, ae687@Freenet.carleton.ca read the instructions"