UnderWord Update 1.3 -

faust, collaboration, purity, told 'em so

Inspiring collaboration in the last two days.

Tuesday morning I read some dreams, poems onto a dat tape for my friend Steve Bahcall here at Cyborganic. He has a bitchin' midi setup, he's gonna try putting some digital music behind my words.

You can read just a bit about Steve, and find your way to his music at:

http://www.links.net/vita/cyb/steveb.html

He's building a mega music archive - materials on jazzmen, classicists, International Music. Besides his creations, he doing a download from his fantasically packed musical mind.

I've been working with Howard Rheingold the last two days as well, we've been doing a major overhaul of his pages. The old front end to his site was so eighties - extremely high text to graphics ratio. We ditched that in favour of eye catching colours, buttons, snapshots; easier for my MTV addled brain to handle - now it looks more like AOL.

For his birthday I gave him 10 free hours of web work. Expending some of that in the last few days has been helpful to me as well. Howard inspires me to access my right brain, my visual imagination. I write a heckuva lot, but I don't play in visual space enough. Howard's paintings adorn walls in his house, he wears hand painted shoes, fimo crafted belt buckles. Designing pages to suit his gratuitously psychedelic spec was excellent practice; good to get out of my head for a bit.

You can see the manifestation of this inspiration, I've changed my title graphic. Finally some colour! Actually, a picture of me, and coloured text. I want to do something more wacked but I gotta keep file sizes down.

All along I've believed that the fewer graphic banners, the better, simply for speed of surf. I'm developing a less driven view of things - time to plant and smell some roses.

That story I sent you folks about my friend Patrick Combs has really gotten around. I got a call from NBC asking me about my involvement, and if I knew how many hits his web site is getting. I have had his story re-told to me by a senior editor at Wired magazine and "Crime Wave" a homeless guy on Haight street. Each was equally impressed by his feat.

When he told me the Wall Street Journal was going to interview him, my advice was to put his own account of the story up on the web. I think it's been a good thing, it forced him to write his own (excellent) version of the tale, and now he can tell the folks from Montel Williams to get the scoop from his page!

If you haven't checked in recently, I recommend the updates, available on...

The latest addition to my increasingly unmanageable collection of links is a page collection of funky fresh stories. When it comes down to it, there may not be much else. Sure beats advertisements!

http://www.links.net/www/story.html

Six to start with.

I was quite taken by Sage Lunsford, a young woman who is weaving a wide web. She in part prompted me to start a page coordinating online autobiographers:

http://www.links.net/www/vita.html

Reading through her Coffee Shakes pages gave me a better sense of what it would be like to delve into my autobio - high level of personal exposure. She's put enough of herself online to really give you a sense that this is a witty warm woman with a wonderful heart.

Hers is the most engaging entry, by far, the others are at least topically interesting.

Also, I have here reviewed thes pot thespot the spot, cuz it's ostensibly autobio. Not the case, I met one of the spots who was pretty flippant discussing reality versus web opera. I got her real name, and it didn't take long for her to confess that they don't really spend that much time in the house together. Hey, but it makes for good lack of anything better to do!

And she was pretty, in an LA sort of way.

Speaking of LA, makes me think of my perforated puss spewing resewn appendix gone. I've been surgically altered! and I haven't posted it to the web yet. Rest assured, full colour action photos are on their way. Being creative is more time consuming.

I feel a bit like Faust. I recieved some tripped out mail from MicroSoft Ad Folk:

Date: Tue, 22 Aug 95 15:23:10 UT
From: "MSN ADSALES" <omitted>
To: "'justin@cyborgasmic.com'" <justin@cyborgasmic.com>
Subject: Your site in the MSN SiteSeeing Guide

OFFER LETTER

Date: 8/21/95
Re: Web Link Placement - MSN Launch Promotion

For: http://www.links.net/

Dear Web Site Operator:

To provide the
members of The Microsoft Network ("MSN") with a taste of the rich resources on the World Wide Web, we would like to place a link to your web site in MSN's new "SiteSeeing" guide during our launch promotion period. Our SiteSeeing guide is a tabulated compendium of sites on the Web and MSN that contains a series of "pages". Each of these "pages" will display twelve linking graphics to sites on the Web or MSN. An important aspect of our SiteSeeing guide is that it will allow MSN members to view a "thumbnail" image of your site's entire home page before they link. A prototype of our guide may be found at http\\marvel.net\siteseeing.

We would like to place
a web link to your site in the SiteSeeing guide in time for MSN's launch week (August 24-31). There will be no cost for this initial placement and you have no obligation to remain in the guide after our free launch-promotion period ends, (no later than October 1, 1995). Also, you may withdraw your authorization to allow our use of your Web site's image and logos in the guide at any time during the promotion.

If you would like us to include
your Web site in this promotion, please use the attached letter to confirm that we can reproduce an image of your site's home page as part of the guide and may use your logo as the graphic object manifesting your site's web link (if you would like to specify the logo you want us to use, please let us know). We acknowledge that our reproduction of these images and logos will not result in MSN's acquisition of any rights or interests in any image and logo that we use.

Please note: this letter is intended only to request
authorization of use of an image of your site's home page and your logo. It is not a guarantee that a web link to your site will appear in the MSN SiteSeeing guide or that it will appear for the full launch promotion period. Also, it is possible that MSN will create a web link without using your site's images and logos, consistent with prevailing Internet industry practices.

Thanks,

The MSN SiteSeeing Guide
The Microsoft Network

<contract omitted>

Heavy shit, over some links.

Extended legalese, made me suspicious. Why do they need to reproduce front pages at their site? Why do I feel like they snuck my firstborn in somewhere?

People would be linking to me, right? Do I care to be officially lumped in Microsoft's pages? I guess it's nice they appreciate my work. Does that smell bad?

Heavy duty, signing contracts over links and web sites and shit. I gave them an icon to use and agreed to their terms.

I may have wider exposure, but parhaps I feel less pure.

I do relish the chance to go head to head with the other "Entertainment" sites they will be posting.

Probably the same stuff that was selected for Cool Site of the Year. Five choices, vote 'em up y'all. thespot, Rock and Roll, Entertainment, self styled web design master, and LA hipsters.

I'm glad there aren't too many sites using ads.

Mebbe I'm just bitter. While there's enough web for all of us, I get frustrated when I see the net delving into unconditional shallowness.

My mom gave me hella shit last night. I an not calling her enough, calling my grandparents enough. In particular I have not been spending enough time with my sister Chris and her kids, especially since I am staying at their house. Actually, I have been staying up all night playing on the web and sleeping on the floor of my office for five hour stints. This is the home stretch!

Sun is rising on a fogged in Mission district. I've got two appointments in the next six hours, and I haven't slept since yesterday this time. Ravel's piano works are beautiful, so is San Francisco

especially the third day before I am to leave.
Another good summer, I felt more in control of this one, but those nights I wasn't, man, they were doozies.

You can read about 'em on my site.

Thanks for the responses to my computer empowerment query. I've got a few leads, I'm putting together some materials, I'll keep you folks posted.

I'm looking for web conferencing software; I'd like to have a place for folks to write messages and post in html. I would like to see a public domain solution out there, so forums can exist beyond the pale of PathBinder and HoWtired.

Speaking of which, now that they've dropped authentication, I'm gonna have to revise my beef with them. I'll have to resist I told you so. or maybe not.

Thanks for your BandWidth,
Justin

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  Justin Hall                              Links from the Underground
   justin@cyborgasmic.com                      http://www.links.net/

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