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All the Suck columns from August and Sept. 1995.

S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 28 August 1995.

Live Through This

There's something exciting about the breaking of news on the Web that
can make an otherwise bullshit-quality story smell sweeter than Glade
Potpourri-in-a-Spray. Whether it's two zillion critiques of a
handicapped Time cover feature or early scene reports following an
aging hippie's demise, I tend to find myself lapping it right up,
like a thirsty dog at an open toilet.

Still, even I have my limits: the OJ debacle is lost on me (beyond
Capricorn One, I was not a big fan) and my only reaction towards
highly-publicized prostitution scandals is envy towards those able to
afford them (both the prostitution and the scandals). Be that as it
may, one emerging story has managed to push all my buttons: Tom
Grant's Courtney Love Murder Conspiracy Theory.

We all know Love is a bit unhinged - her ponderous Usenet rants and
predilection towards Wu-Tang style physical assaults on her critics
are prize chapters in this character's study. But what makes Grant's
story both fascinating and less-than-credible is the extent to which
he paints a portrait of Love as a Reagan (or Madonna?)-level media
manipulator.

If Grant (who was originally hired by Love to investigate Cobain's
disappearance before the grim discovery) is to be believed, Love
foresaw the massive financial opportunities which lay in wait for the
widow of a mass-culturally crowned King of Angst, and understanding
the historical appeal of prematurely deceased losers, iced the
miserable fuck.

When you think about it, the premise does seem tenuously convincing -
Love is doing phenomenally well right now, commanding both press and
bucks with her Lollapalooza misadventures. And then there's the set-up
for her next album: who'd dare call her unauthentic, irrelevant or
contrived? Autocanonization, up yours!

And I've always thought it a bit odd that her current buzz-bin singles
seem written from the perspective of someone who's already lost a
loved one. Funny, considering Live Through This was released days
before Cobain's death. "Go on, take everything..."

But when you get right down to it, while the whole theory may be
Pretty on the Inside, external reality is cramping its style in a big
way. Part of Love's genuine charm is her unaffected representation of
the average incompetent boob, kicking and screaming like a kid whose
Riot Grrl Barbie has just been confiscated, hoping the visceral effect
of her tantrums will gain her a little attention and perhaps motivate
some exasperated sucker to fix her problems for her. I'd be surprised
if Courtney could orchestrate a song with more than four chords, much
less a murder plot.

Still, a good read's a good read - and I called shotgun at the shitter
before you...

courtesy of the Duke of URL





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 29 August 1995.

Close-Up Penetration Shots & Your Children

Anybody remember prophet manqu_ Michael Stipe's 1984 prediction that
music video would go the way of the mohair jacket? Just like anything
ever uttered by Timothy Leary, Stipe's dumbass prediction proved
woefully misguided.

Fact: Laughable fads and fashions often last far longer than their
detractors.

"Wanna see my clit pierce?" - a dubious invitation, but far preferable
to the far more common exhibition: your buddy's recent trendy penis
mutilation on display like a prize-winning sow at the county fair
(well, maybe the Folsom St. Fair...)

You can bet your best friend's apadravya that the wandering steel is
here to stay. One sure sign is the offhand embracing of this trend by
today's youngsters. To the average 15-year-old, a nose ring or
belly-button pierce is as ho-hum as couple of tabs of microdot at
Lollapalooza. Just be grateful that scarification has remained
confined to the extreme freak/power-fratboy ghetto!

Word is that concerned parents and barstool cultural critics are
hoping that impressionable tykes will use Piercing Mildred to excise
their piercing curiosity, and thereby sublimate their desire to get
perma-jabbed through this vicariously cute WWW thrill.

I'm no Nostradamus, but I'm guessing that the mutilation movement is
still in its infancy and will join tattoos and sneakers in the
pantheon of dubious decade-spanning megatrends.

Case in point: the codpiece. Tipper Gore's display of the cover of
W.A.S.P.'s "Fuck Like A Beast" notwithstanding, this fashion
accoutrement's long-past peak belies its once mighty cultural status.

As far as display rituals go, the codpiece must be one of the most
straightforwardly honest of all time - instead of casually drawing
attention in the way a sideways-turned hat or obnoxious tie might, the
codpiece cuts through the bullshit by ostentatiously emphasizing its
wearer's genitals. An elegant marriage of form and function, to be
sure.

But try this out for size - according to the data presented by the
Codpiece Resurrection Society (codpieces arise!) this fashion trend
(chiefly popular amongst the sons of wealthy aristocrats - people just
like you) was the rage for no less than 200 years !!

Even calculating for the acceleration of culture in today's
media-driven society, it's possible to see through this example that
even the most improbable crazes, like burning weirdos or
over-accessorizing flannel, can last 20-30 times longer than the most
irresponsible cultural commentator would venture to predict.
Accordingly, we might make the liberal estimate that the art of skin
puncture will prosper well into '98 - if not the fin-de-millenium.

courtesy of the Duke of URL





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 30 August 1995.

SIGGRAPH Damage Report (pt. 1)

What do you call a $100K paintbrush?

About $99,995.00 too expensive?

Not much of a punchline, I know, but it's difficult to grin when
you're getting sodomized by the 300-pound gorilla that we
affectionately call the Media Industrial Complex.

That was the impression left on myself, and not a few other SIGGRAPH
attendees, by the combined barrage of cheezy CG, humorless feature
presentations, uninspired "art pieces", and the frenzy of
exhibitioners and their overpriced wares at this year's annual
celebration of all things computer graphics.

Fittingly, the debacle was held in LA, described in the conference
literature as "the city that converts ancient and modern myths to
everyday reality."

Please.

The practical effect of this locale was felt most significantly in the
party scene (the only part of the show most people seem to give two
shits about, anyway.) With a few notable exceptions (the Amazon 3d
Paint party in the Hollywood Hills was a blast - a great view and a
feisty cadre of hackers) these scenes were, contrary to mass opinion,
the last places at which you'd want to wind down, shake it up, or meet
a sympathetic soul.

Unless, of course, you happen to be one of the many who dream of the
great CG jackpot - a glamorous position at a production house erasing
wires, adjusting color palettes and/or airbrushing zits off of
Sylvester Stallone's overpaid ass. In which case a much coveted pass
to the ILM or Digital Domain show may just have made your career, not
to mention your day.

What's most disturbing about the whole scene isn't the lack of
humility amongst the giants or the dearth in moving artistic
experimentation, but the degree to which the Big Media Hegemony has
established its stranglehold on the new technologies associated with
computer graphics.

How can you expect great art or even whimsy when not only the hardware
alone - nevermind the software and maintenance expenses - on an
average power SGI runs well into six figures? When the students who're
training to use this crap will be paying their student loans for the
next twenty years - all so that they might get a precious 15 minutes?
1 hour? a week? on their school's machine. The bottom line is that
it's all about the bottom line.

And, trust me, it showed.

Sure, Disney/Pixar's Toy Story at least showcased some decent
character animation, but if it seemed like the majority of the other
pieces were beer ads and silly rollercoaster ride excerpts, it's
probably because they were. On the other hand, if you're a
clean-freak, you'd have loved the polished marble...

Hard to imagine, but one of the most sorely missed exhibitions this
year was the VRoom, which offered a few jawdroppors in its past
incarnations in early years. The writing's on the wall, though: VR is
old news and Interactive Communities is the new shit.

The HotWired Lounge was one of the the most popular areas around, less
due to people's burning interest in the Web than in their interest in
taking long naps on the couches. A few show highlights did transpire
there, though, including an acrimonious impromptu debate between geek
representatives from Word, Razorfish, SonicNet, HW and Suck over the
future of HTML, effective Web design, the relative merits of "cute
Netscape tricks", and site/content (mis)management.

[Not to worry- it all ended fairly well. If there weren't some degree
of mutual respect going on, we wouldn't have bothered baring our fangs
in the first place. And, rest assured, we've all got bigger swine to
gut than each other...]

Everybody seemed to agree that this year's requisite mind-blower was
the T_Vision exhibit, which allowed one to zoom in from a satellite's
perspective of the globe to as close to three feet from the operator's
office window. Thankfully, the close-up views were VR and not true
high-resolution photographic shots, but that did little to keep most
people from being resoundingly creeped-out by the whole idea.

As for the Electronic Theatre - don't ask me, I was literally put to
sleep.

And after five days and nights of meals at The Pantry, a popular
nearby restaurant whose major claim to fame was not only being open
24-7 but having been so for the past seventy years, excuse me if I'm
not suitably intimidated by the prospect of never doing lunch in that
town again...

(TO FOLLOW: Monkeywrenching SIGGRAPH)

courtesy of the Duke of URL





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 31 August 1995.

Marc's million-dollar trick

If it's all too seldom that people know when their fifteen minutes are
up, it's rarer still when these same expired starlings have a clue as
to what meager gimmickry (quote unquote talent) thrust them into the
limelight. And if ever there were a one-trick pony on the Web, it's
Marc Andreessen, who owes his fifty million dollar piece of Netscape
Communications, Inc. to that wunderkind of inventions, the IMG tag.

Lest you think Marc would dismiss this rant as so much more hopelessly
pedestrian "text" in a Web that looks more and more like a cross
between a Club Med brochure, an early 80's copy of Dragon magazine,
and a copy of Hustler you've become acquainted with one too many
times, never fear: Marc does stay awake at night, and we have the
proof.

In what was obviously a brilliant flash of self-aware paranoid
neurosis, Marc put together his entire Web page with one big HTML
standards committee fuck you: <img src="marca.gif">. (You'll need to
go through the motions of choosing View Source yourself for the full
effect.) And take one look at that image, and it all comes together:
the man secretly wishes he had gone to work for that small pisswater
company he announced he was leaving for after Mosaic and that none of
us can remember the name of, anyway.

Marc Andreessen's home page

courtesy of Webster





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 1 September 1995.

SIGGRAPH Damage Report (pt. 2)

Institutions can be wonderful things. They represent the accumulated
conventional wisdom of any given social, political or commercial
enterprise and, as such, provide a useful launching point for
discussion. And when the guiding set of assumptions start to cramp our
collective style, it's great fun lobbing potshots at their bloated
presence.

So, while we whittle our time away trying to figure out what,
precisely, is so great about the "promise of digital media" (and how
we might scam a few megabucks off of it), we amuse ourselves with
half-ass plots to prank, monkeywrench, and generally ball-bust the
media oligopoly.

Smug self-importance is an annoyance on a personal level (we like to
think of ourselves as an object lesson): when this attitude is
encountered en masse one can hardly resist the temptation to hack.

SIGGRAPH, which is basically a digital playpen for incorrigible
spoiled brats, presents the ultimate nurturing environment for
miscreants of all flavors. As the opprobrium of the exhibit floor
attacked our senses with the zeal of a pack of convicts making new
inmate introductions, we remained vigilant, searching for the good
works of fellow troublemakers.

We would've thought of something ingenious ourselves, but we were far
too busy at our day jobs evicting failed Web-culture mags from their
swank South Park digs. Luckily, others were less steadfastly inept...

One of the funnier, and more coveted, items making the rounds this
year was the official SIGGRAPH bootleg t-shirt. Instigated by an Alias
mole and implemented by an analog design guru, the shirt says a lot
with a little: technodweeb-wannabe Republican Newt, carrying an Alias
potato and sporting a hamburger hula skirt, holds up a mirror showing
the visage of the the most effective media manipulator of the 20th
century.

More serious, though, was the whiff of scandal we caught wind of
regarding the "uninviting" of Heidi Dangelmaier from the Video Game
Industry Overview Panel. We checked out the Heidi-less panel, and
found an eccentric SGI guru handing out this flyer, which left us
hungry for more dirt.

What we found out was, sadly, not very surprising, but still deserving
of more investigation than the whole ordeal is likely to receive.
Dangelmaier, a researcher in feminist media issues, was notified only
weeks before the show by Time-Warner Interactive Head of Media Jane
Veeder, the panel's moderator, that her views had been judged to be
incompatible with and inappropriate for the panel. Her registration
for the conference was summarily revoked.

Not taking such actions kindly, Heidi informed Veeder that she was
planning to formally protest this move and, in turn, is said to have
been notified that she might wish to reconsider this decision, "if she
valued her participation and reputation in the industry." Luckily,
Dangelmaier is not easily cowed, and the piece she drafted was passed
out by friends, handed to most of the panel attendees until security
officials intervened, citing rules against "the dissemination of
non-conference materials in the convention center."

It should be noted that in spite of the largely successful flyering
effort, few of the attendees appeared to be affected and there was a
palpable lack of pointed questions during the mammoth 5-minute Q&A
that followed.

Which just goes to prove our original point: if the horse you lead to
water won't drink - drown the fucker.

courtesy of the Duke of URL





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 2 September 1995.

Just Another Media Hack

"This is going to be a lame, cheesy, promotional site for a movie.
Nothing more..."

"Hackers, the new action adventure movie from those idiots in
Hollywood, takes you inside a world where there's no plot or creative
thought, there's only boring rehashed ideas."

So reads the hacked Web page for MGM/United Artist's Hackers site, our
newest study in (failed) media manipulation.

Not being regular readers of alt.2600, our first run-in with the
Hackers story was an article by Elizabeth Weise for the Associated
Press, in what looks to be a warmed-over press release, including a
helpful plot synopsis of the film and opening dates...yet another
publicity stunt by a media marketing firm gone amuck?

Cruising to the Hackers Web site, you'll find, in addition to the
dictated-by-Netscape layout, a conveniently prominent link to the
hacked Hackers site, and links to mail from the alleged hacker
himself...the first supposedly informing the site maintainers of his
use of "ub3rt00lz" to (in words wonderfully reminiscent of Freud's in
Civilization and its Discontents) "urinate upon [their] firewall",
demonstrating his "k-rad ubertechnique(tm)". You're allowed to get
just a little suspicious, since even marketing types can run some text
through a B1FF filter.

Following quickly on the heels of the first message, the second letter
available for public consumption conveys the hacker's "deepest
apologies" and talks about "damage I have done (even though it was
unintentional)", though we're not quite sure what might have been
munged besides the Web pages themselves...this second note concludes
with:

"I'd rather not go to prison for what was at heart a prank. I hope you
agree that would serve no good purpose. I'm not an ad man, but it's
just possible you can use what I did to promote your movie. It would
certainly be better publicity than being behind the prosecution of a
hacker, or the persecution of his community."

So what happened? There's a media prank here somewhere, but is it
being pulled off by "the hacker", who is quoted on details outside of
the letter in the AP article, or by MGM/UA, who's reaping all the
benefits? Or Digital Planet, the company which put together the
Hackers Web site?

One gets the feeling that Digital Planet was smarting from having its
Web space "hacked", since the Hackers page is also kind enough to
provide the viewing public with the definitions of crackers and
hackers...crackers being "young teenage punks who are...malicious"
and whose "level of education/intelligence on the system...is very
low"...this, versus a hacker, the subject of the fine MGM/UA film,
who, if we're to understand the definition offered, would never dream
of altering data - including, say, modifying pages on a Web site. Of
course, Digital Planet, which, in words on its corporate Web, is "able
to handle all of our client's needs in-house", including the "set-up,
maintenance and periodic updating of Internet sites", must have a very
high level of education/intelligence on the system...so that we can
only conclude, if the site really was hacked, that MGM/UA said "no"
when Digital Planet asked "You want security with that?"

Theories which might place MGM/UA and Digital Media not so obviously
as perpetrators of the hack but conspirators in it, in that the
companies might have left obvious security holes in the system in
order to encourage and publicize an attack, are, to an extent,
eviscerated by those too-prideful definitions. Corroborating evidence
is the copy for the hacked site which we could never imagine making it
past a MGM/UA executive; a different version of the hacked page
lending some credibility to the timeline presented in the AP story of
the page being hacked, replaced, then hacked again, then replaced
again and made available via a link; and claims on alt.2600 that
Digital Media is dumping their Internet service provider (so much for
everything being done in-house). Not to mention Digital Planet's open
job posting for a System Administrator.

But what does it take to hack a little corroborating evidence? A few
co-conspirators and a friendly administrator at another Web site?

So, in the end, what do we have? A hacked Web site, a hacked hack, and
the press doing what it does best - more press releases. Or not. After
all, who gives a fuck? The end result is Another Fine Hack by your
friendly corporate entity, Co-opters 'R' Us - who woulda thunk
anything different?

courtesy of Webster





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 4 September 1995.

Consuming Media Babe.-->

This is a test:

Imagine that you're head of production for a major Hollywood flick.
The concept is Charlotte's Web-meets-Look Who's Talking Now with a
little "existentialism" thrown in to meet the demands of today's
times. It could be a goldmine - the star is a pig, and who can't
relate to that?

Here's the problem: you've got a minuscule window of time in which to
film your star, limited to weeks 16 to 18 of his short but
star-studded existence. Three weeks being preposterously inadequate to
finish shooting, you sagely solve this dilemma by training 48 piglets
on a staggered schedule.

Which leaves you, in the unavoidably grim post-production stage, at
the following crossroads -

Do you:



___ Pay tribute to the adorable critters who sacrificed their short
lives for silver-screen immortality with a sturdy tribute to their
porcine valor...

___ Go one step further in the preservation of their collective memory
and commission an even starker reminder of their professional
dedication...

or

___ Decide that it is not to the swine but to your paying audience
whom you owe the deepest gratitude, and settle on an elegant method of
giving back a little to your fans?

courtesy of the Duke of URL





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 5 September 1995.

WWWF Grudge Match

"O.K., today's big question: who
wins in an old fashioned street
brawl between Gary Coleman and
Webster? By street brawl I mean
a one-on-one street fight using
only bare knuckles and whatever
weapons can be made from items
found in a typical street alley.
No hidden guns or knives. One
pair of brass knuckles per
participant is allowed."



Celebrity fights are second in glory only to celebrity deaths, but
neither occur as frequently as they should in an ideal world. Luckily,
some people have figured out that the great thing about made-up
characters is the author's prerogative to kill 'em off. It's a
personal dream of mine that one day, TV networks will capitalize on
this and more season-finales will feature mass slayings of their
show's main characters (Mr. Spelling, are you listening?)

Still, sometimes settling for what seems like second-best actually
means choosing the best of all worlds. You may never actually get to
see Grimace eviscerating Barbapapa during a station break, but you
just might get a blow-by-blow from Brian and Steve, the masterminds
behind WWWF Grudge Match. It's not your average mind that can devise
contests like the Hannibal Lector/Jeffrey Dahmer Bake-off, much less
offer pro sideline coverage with uncommon stylistic flair.

Ample proof that the preponderance of college kids with too much time
on their hands on the net may be cause to keep other net.denizens
awake at night...

courtesy of the Duke of URL





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 6 September 1995.

Unabomber: Blah, blah, blah...

[Stupidity is Always CounterRevolutionary!]

It's getting so that you can't go to a party or hang at a bar without
some tedious "neo-Luddite" regaling you with his shot glass philosophy
on the evils of technology. Depending upon on how much alcohol you've
consumed, these types can be good for a laugh or two, but after a
while it's tough to withstand their all-too-common combined assault of
historical ignorance and circular logic.

The anarchists and their retarded hillbilly cousins, the neo-Luddites,
both fail to understand a basic human truth: People prefer MTV to
leprosy.

The Unabomber, who identifies with both movements, seems to think that
the Industrial Revolution is the root of all present-day ills. He
yearns for a better society, one where everybody is responsible for
slopping their own pigs, burying their own stillborn offspring, and
meticulously hand-carving their own custom explosives.

[An Unholy Matrimony of Fashion & Fascism?]

Fuck that.

The Unabomber is the tragicomic apotheosis of the anarchist
stereotype: armed with long-winded harangues, a battered copy of The
Poor Man's James Bond, and a conspicuous lack of sympathizers he goes
about trying to alert the world to the evils of cyber-capitalism: as
if we didn't already know, buddy.

Problem is, just as with the annoying anarcho-lush at the kegger,
frustration ensues when he discovers nobody's listening. That's when
he starts hosing down ad execs and college professors with his
home-brew pipe bombs, forcing his laughable manuscript upon innocent
media consumers, and generally blasting his way into the center of
attention.

The Unabomber's tragic flaw isn't being born into the wrong era - it's
his inability to formulate any intelligent criticism of the system he
so hates. It's not as if technoskeptics don't get their fair share of
attention - bozos like Kirkpatrick Sales get feature stories in
magazines like Wired and Harper's on an almost monthly basis.

And look at Clifford Stoll, who followed up his mostly interesting
Stalking the Wily Hacker with Silicon Snake Oil, a collection of
gregariously repeated rants so barren of content as to be readable
during one extended session on the growler (where it was most likely
conceived) - yet the hardcover did gangbusters at the newsstand.

It's ironic that so much discussion over the foibles of our dim-witted
adversary takes place on the Internet, which is arguably the epitome
of the industrial system he so despises. While he deplores the
"progressively narrowing sphere of human freedom," his writing and
discussion thereof flows freely here. The net has even given him his
own Freedom Club, though I'd say it's far more likely that the net
will help bring him down rather than muster up a small militia.

As one optimistic Usenet poster offered, "I hope they give him a TV in
his cell that's stuck on The Discovery Channel and can't be turned
off."

[Future Suck Intern?]

Ultimately, most of us will just keep surfing. Pseudo-revolutionary
manifestos are a dime a dozen around these parts, many of them
considerably shorter than the Unabomber's own 35,000 word long
Industrial Society and Its Future - and if we're really that desperate
for reading material, Mr. Unabomber, we'll take the Reader's Digest
condensed version, thank you.

courtesy of the Duke of URL





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 7 September 1995.

They Must Be Doing Something Right...

Let this be a lesson to fledgling Web hackers everywhere - the <BLINK>
tag is evil.

Why would anyone voluntarily plop that kind of eyesore on top of their
ventures into Web publishing? Doesn't everyone know that <BLINK> looks
like shit on anything outside of an X term? [A debatable point. -
Dunderhead] It's like stringing Christmas lights around a Picasso ...
very poor taste.

Look what happened to these unfortunate souls as a result of a
seemingly minor lapse in HTML discretion:

>Hi,
>
>The URL you submitted
>http://www.jodi.org/betalab was
>not added to Yahoo because we
>feel that there is currently not
>enough interesting content
>within your site for our users.
>
>When your site is more fully
>developed, please resubmit your
>listing. We believe that this
>policy is the best for all parties
>involved. Users are quickly
>turned off by underdeveloped
>sites. It reflects poorly not only
>on the site itself, but Yahoo as
>well.
>
>We look forward to adding your
>site once the underlying content
>is more fully developed.
>
>Thanks..
>
>The Yahoo Gang



Sure, if you visited the URL given above you'd see a page of annoying
garbage. But if you look a little deeper you hit something that
approximates pay dirt.

Betalab offers some funky web experiments - occasionally flaky - but
not totally devoid of merit. The "Automatic Raindrop" section falls a
little short of revelatory, but, gaudy intro image notwithstanding,
there's some clever work in their "HyperBody Positions" piece.

And I'd be willing to bet that the good folks at Yahoo never made it
to the "The Heemskerk Collection of Data-Instruments and Re:
Machines", an insane collection of dubious devices, nicely laid out
with accompanying schematics and QuickTime demos, that veers
precariously close to art qua art.

Whether you think this site is just so many bytes of dogshit [Amen! -
Dunderhead] or worthy of an NEA grant, you've gotta give a little
respect to people who'd voluntarily put that much work into such a
conspicuously pointless endeavor.

But just as you'd be hesitant to enter a gallery whose doorknobs are
soaked in urine, gigantic blinking text doesn't offer much of an
invitation, much less indication of the manifest potential contained
within your Internet pi_ce de r_sistance. So, let's all give each
other a break and kill the <BLINK>s. Yahoo will dig it, Suck'll love
it, and the rest of the net will say a silent thank you at the end of
every day of pollution-free surfing.

courtesy of the Duke of URL





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 8 September 1995.

Passive Consumerism

"Real-time transmission of audio data over the internet? No way!!"

RealAudio is a proprietary sound file format which allows for
real-time transmission of audio data over the Web.

This you already know.

Not only do you most likely have the RA Player installed - you're
probably listening to some punk-ass "sketch comedy" or wasting an hour
of your life listening to an interview with Slash at this very moment.
Wow.

Progressive Network's RA, like so many net.wonders, may not exactly
blow away your neophyte friends ("What am I supposed to be
hearing...music?") but for the dedicated net surfer with a set of a
headphones, it doesn't sound like shit - it is the shit.

Call me an idealist or simply na_ve, but from my vantage point, I'm
seeing a whole lot of minuses to this equation. Execrable sound
quality aside, what RealAudio boils down to is an astronomically
expensive bandwidth-throttling audio server priced way out of the
range of the average webhead.

The RA player is, of course, free, and the encoding software, which
allows you to convert your .au and other audio files to .ra format, is
also given away by PN. The trick is in obtaining the essential RA
server, which, though offered as a free sixty-day demo, will
ultimately run you about $10K per 100 simultaneous streams - $100 for
each listener. That's without upgrades, ma'am, and never mind the cost
of your saturated T1 link.

And what do you get for that $100 a head? PN's been rather
tight-lipped about their compression code, but, according to one
anonymous ex-Apple guru, nothing that couldn't be duplicated and
improved upon by a smart, motivated college geek or two: take, in way
of (bad) example, Roman Mitnitski's UnReal Audio server. Whatever
magic RealAudio may possess, though, does lie within its compression
algorithm - which both the RA encoder and player take advantage of,
but which has precious little to do with what the company is charging
the big bucks for, the RealAudio server: here, Progressive Networks
seems to be following Netscape's lead in overvaluing a server product
to give the bean counters some sort of profit model, while attempting
to grab market share by giving away the client.

PN's not the only company playing this let's-give-away-the-TV-sets-
and-we'll-make-a-killing-on-the- TV-station shill game: its
competitors, DSP Group and Xing, are following this same course.
There's a real difference between real-time audio on the net and the
Web scenario that Netscape played out, though: in the case of
real-time audio, there're no standards, and no cheap alternatives.

It's anyone's guess whether PN, and its competitors, will be forced to
drastically reduce their server prices in a market-driven attempt to
penetrate the broader base of noncommercial Web sites and to establish
some proprietary de facto standard - or, to follow recent trends, to
appear viable for an initial public stock offering. For the time
being, though, the method to PN's and its ilk's madness is
disheartening when thought of in the context of net.economics and
rampant commercialism.

How long will it take PN or other start-ups to market RealVideo,
RealNewsfeed, RealMultimedia, ad nauseam, each at its own respectively
outrageous price? When the Web is ruled by well-financed Media
Heavyweights broadcasting from hi-tech studios, what will be the
qualitative difference between the Web and TV?

Sure, larger Web sites like HotWired and C|Net already approximate
this, but the differences between their sites and yours are largely
due to issues of scale, not inflated barriers to entry. Given enough
incentive and amphetamines you and your buddies could rule the digital
world.

Major media outlets having access to expensive broadcast tools is
nothing new or radical - nor is your consumption thereof. If there is
something revolutionary about the Web, it's the capacity for cranks,
crazies and cretins to operate with the same tools as and compete with
the big guys. That's what makes this whole mess worthwhile.

And that is the real shit.

courtesy of the Duke of URL





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 11 September 1995.

A Modern-Day ReVival

Drugs.

It don't matter who's in office, how many cops are on the streets, or
how well-patrolled the shores of Florida and borders of Mexico are.
Kids love 'em and they're gonna get 'em.

As is well known, those who make it past the Mickey Mouse blotter acid
and graduate to the college druggie stage are divided into two camps:

First and foremost, you've got your psychonauts: these suckers, known
for their extravagant home-made bongs, appreciation of long-winded
psychedelic sounds, and eagerness to enter into pointless discussions
about "the cosmic singularity of the universe," are fairly boring.
Whether they're listening to Terrence McKenna or Captain Kangaroo,
their reaction is one and the same: whoa!

Less conspicuous, but equal if not greater in number, are the toxic
overachievers. Beguiled by dreams of golden GPAs and long grad-school
careers, they pull their first all-nighter. And they like it! Amazing
how much you can get done once you've dealt with that bothersome sleep
habit...

Far more disturbing than the image of young minds spiraling towards
out-of-control crank addiction is the fruit of their wide-eyed
efforts: useless term papers and week-long SimCity marathons. What
these drug-addled youths need is an appropriate outlet through which
they may channel their amphetamine passion.

Enter Vivarin.

Keenly targeting the "too-much-time-on-their-hands" demographic,
they've announced a promotional contest for ephedrine enthusiasts,
"There's No Place Like Home Pages." With $10,000 as the jackpot,
Vivarin hopes to "alert" students not only to the pleasure of HTML
mastery, but also to the conscience-soothing joy of street-legal speed
substitutes.

"College students are often the first to embrace new technologies,"
the promo copy reads, and the message is crystal-clear - that
double-barrel hookah is old news, baby. Pop some pills and get
hacking!

courtesy of the Duke of URL





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 12 September 1995.

For They Know Not What They Do

Picture this: you're cruising down the highway in that red convertible
Mazda Miata you just drove away from the dealership. Wind in your
hair, the scent of the road in your nostrils, Born To Be Wild playing
in the middle of an hour-long commercial-free block on the radio.
Forgetting the payments, you begin to think that you may not only have
succumbed to the gen-x-focused advertising for a status-bearing
consumer product, you may be the advertisement. Life is as good as it
gets.

U N D E R - C O N S T R U C T I O N

Then, on the horizon, you see the inevitable end to any consumerist
fantasy: an "Under Construction" sign, there to the left, sealing your
fate for the next 20 miles. As the sounds of Steppenwolf are drowned
out by the monotonous pounding of jackhammers, you ask yourself: Was
this trip really necessary?

U N D E R - C O N S T R U C T I O N

Welcome to the World Wide Web. We hope your stay is a pleasant one.

U N D E R - C O N S T R U C T I O N

If you will allow us to extend the metaphor a little further, however,
this only represents the tip of the iceberg of a hell frozen over.
Burly, tar-booted workers flash toothy smiles and coyly exhibit their
sweat- glistened butt-cracks. The countryside is done in gaudy neons
and swirly psychedelics, making the trees and livestock difficult to
discern. Off-ramps abound, but they all lead back to the same stretch
of four-lane.

U N D E R - C O N S T R U C T I O N

So what is the queer logic which makes an "Under Construction" icon on
the Web a sign of quality and a badge of honor? As if those "Please Be
Patient. God's Not Finished With Me Yet." T-shirts weren't already
enough. (We could only hope that the deity would finish these people
off.)

U N D E R - C O N S T R U C T I O N

Although we have to give a reluctant hand to the purveyors of sites
who seem to have devoted more time to the "Under Construction" icon
than the site itself, we simply fail to understand the libidinal
economy which would cause these signs to multiply unto the furthest
reaches of the Web, without bounds or limit. It's almost enough for
Suck to sponsor a contest: Best Under Construction Icon For A Web
Site Which Never Really Makes It Past The Conceptual Stage.

U N D E R - C O N S T R U C T I O N

Unfortunately, we've already unearthed the winning entry: our own
inimitable Suck "Under Construction" Icon, engineered for maximum
elegance and impact, with your sorry-ass site in mind.



U N D E R - C O N S T R U C T I O N

courtesy of Dunderhead





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 13 September 1995.

"Dear Netscape"


Dear Netscape,

Hello!

Would you be so kind as to allow
us a few moments to introduce
ourselves?

Suck is a small media outlet on
the WWW. Our mission is quite
simple: Suck believes that the
Internet has "come of age" as a
pervasive force in mass culture,
and we've elected to take it
upon ourselves to be the
rigorous and uncompromising
critics - and occasionally court
jesters - of this new,
commercialized, consumer-driven
online culture.





Suck may, at times, come across
as a bit harsh in our
assessments and opinions, but
we'd venture to guess that
Netscape, as the leading
industrial advocate of the
medium, hardly requires us to
explain the value of unfettered
dialogue.

We've had the pleasure to watch
the epochal ascent of your
enterprise from risky start-up
to lofty megacorp and, boy, are
we impressed! It seems as if it
were only yesterday that we
would sit around smirking at
Clark's Folly, wondering how
you'd ever squeeze a dime out of
your efforts. Well, you sure
showed us!





In particular, we've been putting
some thought towards your
"What's Cool" page. The way we
see it, the Netscape home page
probably receives more visits
than any other home page on the
Web - after all, upwards of 80%
of Web surfers use the Netscape
browser in some incarnation, and
it's our reasoning that a
relatively few of these
infonauts actually have the
time, inclination, or
resourcefulness to modify the
home page location pref to, say,
http://www.suck.com/.
Undoubtedly fewer still choose
to disable those attractive,
hard-coded directory buttons you
so helpfully provide at the top
of every Netscape browser. And
we haven't chosen to mention
those hit counts you give to
potential advertisers. All in
all, we think it's a fairly safe
bet to assume that your "What's
Cool" page is one of the most
popular destinations on the Web.

Make no mistake - Suck is cool.

We spare no effort in the dynamic
presentation of honest, relevant
and often passably amusing
content. And we publish daily,
to boot! We're like "Cool Site
of The Day" without the
embarrassing puns on the names of
weekdays and a bit more "laff
value."

Now, we took a gander at the
current entries on the Netscape
What's Cool page, and were a bit
disturbed to discover (through a
bit of cyber-sleuthery) that the
sites included
disproportionately represent
the Netscape Communications and
Commerce Servers - not
surprising, perhaps, considering
the monumentally commercialistic
goals of the larger part of the
sites, but a bit revealing
considering that the Netscape
servers own less than 10% of the
market, according to the
WebCrawler survey and the
better-documented but
smaller-sampled survey by Paul
Hoffman.





We'll be the first to concede
that people giving you money is
a pretty darn cool thing,
indeed, but "cool", as an
abstract concept, surely must
signify something more profound
than the exchange of filthy
lucre, no?

Don't get us wrong - we wouldn't
mind if people started tossing
cash in our direction, but
that's not really our goal. We
far prefer support in the form
of a little publicity, maybe a
link to us here or there. It's
not as if Suck hasn't already
provided links going the other
way, and we like to think our
site is a solid addition to any
hotlist, corporate or not.





Show us that you care.

Give us a shot...give us a spot.

Sincerely,

The Society of Sucksters






S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 14 September 1995.

MAKE.MONEY.FAST

You wanna make a cool $5.5 million off this whole Internet frenzy? How
about $5.5 mil guaranteed annually, with another $24 mil as a safe
yearly income estimate?

Well, if you happen to own a part of Network Solutions Inc., you may
have just gotten a piece of the action:

DRAFT NEWS RELEASE

FOR RELEASE 6 A.M. EDT, MONDAY,
SEPTEMBER 18, 1995

Contact: Dave Graves, Business Manager
Network Solutions
703-742-4884

INTERNET BEGINSI FEE-BASED
REGISTRATION

(HERNDON, VA) September 18, 1995
-- Internet domain name registrants
will begin paying registration fees
immediately in order to improve
registration processing and fund
Internet infrastructure improvements.
Beginning at 4 p.m. today, a $50
annual fee will be imposed on all
five top-level domains: commercial,
educational, government, network and
non-profit organization (.com, .edu,
.gov, .net, .org) domain name
registrations. Until now, the
National Science Foundation (NSIF) has
subsidized these registrations, which
currently total more than 100,000
domain names. A five-week backlog has
developed in processing domain name
registrations.
[...]



As if it weren't already bad enough that all the good domains were
taken, now you'll have to shell out bank for the staid sobriquets that
remain. (And don't go thinking they're gonna start giving away winners
like criminal.edu and colostomy.org just because they've started
charging for 'em...)

We all knew some sort of user fee was coming, but, frankly, we never
anticipated $100 per new domain and a $50 annual renewal. Call us
stupid, but we expected the fees to have some relation to the actual
cost of registering domains and running a dozen or so root servers.

We've got to admit, though, the detailed Q&A of the press release
shows a fair amount of net.savvy not displayed by the likes of, say,
the CompuServe-Unisys announcement of recent memory. Now, we don't
want to perform a detailed point-by-point analysis of the press
release along the lines of a Hoffman/Novak piece - we understand our
audience a little better than that - but allow us to sniggle on a few
points:

"...The third group are small
businesses and individuals who have
their own domain name. The fee amounts
to less than $5 per month which is
less than the cost of a single movie
ticket...."


$5 a month may be fair enough, until we remember the $100 fee for new
registrations. That's still less than $9 a month, which is about the
cost of a single movie ticket in this town, but NSI's unique sleight
involves substituting the concession stand (where the easy profits are
to be had) for the gate...

"...While Network Solutions will need
additional staff to complete
registrations, we are also investing
in automating the process...."


Um, this is nice, but, according to our estimates, it doesn't take
anywhere near $5.5 million to throw up a Web server with a fill-in
form and a Perl script behind it to parse for the likes of
mcdonalds.com or fuck.com and dump the registration into the whois
database. (And, as we learned yesterday, if they used a Netscape
Commerce Server, they'd probably even get a spot on the Netscape
"What's Cool" page - gratis!) Popcorn and Swizzlers, anyone?

Now, on top of the annual $50 renewal fees NSI will be collecting on
the 100,000+ domains already in existence, add another $24 mil per
year based on the current rate of 20,000 new domains registered each
month - it's hard not to be left with the impression that these jokers
are the real mozillionaires.

Even if NSI doesn't automate and instead goes hog-wild and doubles its
whopping ten-person domain registration staff, adds a bunch of new
machines, and pays for some snazzy new stationery, we're still talking
about a serious chunk of "walking-around-money" (and nobody needs that
much exercise).

And these are the folks that came out on top of a competitive bidding
process? Man, this subversive propaganda gig blows! We'd wait until
the contract expires in 1998 to get in on this govt. contract action,
but it appears as if it doesn't expire. Shit.

JUST IN: It seems NSI caught wind of this rather pesky emerging
controversy, and decided to preemptively rush its statement, moving
the release date from 8 A.M. September 18 to 6 A.M. September 13 -
posted complete with unanswered FAQ questions, non-ISO Latin 1
characters in its HTML, and impossible "last updated" dates. So much
for that "Oklahoma land rush of registrations" we were hoping to
spearhead. [And our handy fill-in form for automatic domain
registration was half complete - Dunderhead]

- Suckster Solutions Incognito





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 15 September 1995.

Why, yes, in fact, I am a model...

Curiously, as we steamroll full bore into the future, the highest
premium is commanded not by authenticity but by that which is most
magnificently phony. The concept of "The Big Lie" has migrated from
the realm of politics into the media, where, instead of indicating
pernicious subterfuge, it stands as the crowning glory of modern
digicinematic achievement.

The fruits of this trend are omnipresent: some of the biggest stars of
the summer movie blockbusters were, at least in part, more virtual
than actual; digitally manipulated images in and on magazines are not
just acceptable, but de rigueur; courtroom decisions are more and more
predicated on which side is better able to produce a compelling
simulation of disputed "events."

Meanwhile, one of the creeping directions in Web publishing is the
possible acceptance of VRML as a suitable data structuring
environment. If this trend gains a foothold, the emergence of VR and
3D modelling as the "killer app" for the net grows frighteningly close
to becoming a bloated, oppressive reality. You think home pages are
bad now? Wait until they're all designed with crude 3D primitives: 3D
resumes, proliferation of desk and standing light models, and an
inexhaustible font of crude digital wallpaper: yeesh!

Ultimately, trying to abate the sinister influx of ill-conceived
noveltyism is like to trying to stem a river with a condom, and we
frankly lack the energy. Instead, we'll offer a few pointers towards
creating your own special digital future.

Most of us will undoubtedly lack the intelligence or wherewithal to
set up shop in the emerging cyberwaste, but that's OK. You could
splooge together a few walls, a ceiling, and a sofa as your own
personal piece of net-based real estate, but it would probably be best
not to tax your already-waning attention span. Keep it simple: build
yourself and travel light, kind of like a cyberpunk Boxcar Willie.

We recommend shopping at Viewpoint Datalabs, surely the Ikea of 3D
accessorization. Not satisfied with the hand dealt to you by fate in
the sweepstakes of physical reality?

Enhanced by Viewpoint, baby!

Still, not all of the net is about such prurient matters, and we're
hoping that people will exercise a bit of restraint when building
their avatars. A safe bet would be to ground your appearance in
reality, creating something that reflects the truth of your existence
in the material plane. Everybody's different in this world, but we're
predicting that a few universal characteristics will define tomorrow's
netsurfers...

First, of all, you'll need wheels, man! Why not pick something
utilitarian. Something comfortable enough to provide transportation,
storage capability, a place to rest, and offering easy customization?

That spacey interior will provide ample room for what are sure to be
some your fondest lifestyle accouterments...

And last, but not least, a face for yourself that'll communicate your
identity and evoke your rich experience and history.

Congratulations! You're ready for the (un)real world. Now get
cracking! There's an industry eager for enterprising young turks who
have the desire to help colonize this exciting new medium and who're
capable of visualizing and constructing complex objects. If you build
it, they will come...

courtesy of the Duke of URL





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 18 September 1995.

A Spot-On Caricature

That a site like the Spot could be one of the most religiously visited
sites on the Web (Cool Site of the Year, even) is not surprising when
compared to the breadth of TV predecessor Melrose Place's fan base.
Hell, you've probably spent some quality time with both of 'em. I know
I've only approached either from a safe distance, with my bullshit
detector cranked to 10. [You're making mine hit 11. - Dunderhead]

At Suck, we obviously think there's something to be said for giving
you, our gentle readers, something new daily - and who are we to knock
a site just because its daily content of choice is cheesecake
smothered in crappy prose?

That's just following smart, market-driven business strategy. And if
the folks behind the Spot know anything, they know their audience -
remember, this is the site in which the characters make their
fictional status a "philosophical" question. And with the marketing
savvy you'd expect from an advertising firm-cum-Internet content
provider, they even give Spotnik his own page, acknowledging the clout
of the ubiquitous zoophile crowd we're always hearing about (and
allowing the dog a chance to reminisce on his old cross-dressing
owner).

The Spot will finally get a chance to put its moron muscle to the
test, though, now that Aaron Spelling has teamed up with former MTV
veejay Adam Curry's On Ramp, Inc. to produce 4616 Melrose Place.
Curry, whose skills set includes provoking domain name legal fiascoes
and delivering heinously designed sites to surprisingly well-heeled
clients, has clearly taken notice of the successful Fattal &
Collins/Silicon Reef teaming: 4616 ups the derivation sweepstakes by
aping The Spot with a Hollywood understudy's zeal, on a Spelling
gold-card budget.

Faithful to the show's current plot, they've dumped a powerful bomb of
sorts in the basement: a Real Audio file showcasing Adam Curry's
comatose reading of the Melrose Minutes, a rock-bottom low for the
man and the technology. [Let this be a lesson to you, Duke! See how
low that Curry creep has had to stoop to since being deserted by his
team of fine engineers? Think about that before you decide to slap me
around in front of your friends again! - Dunderhead] Good luck getting
a connection though - those 100 RA feeds fill up pretty quickly. We
told you so...

4616's success, as we've mentioned, will be determined by how
committed Spelling is to producing a "spot-on" facsimile of the The
House That Michelle's Ass Built. That would translate into
relentlessly shoveling new Melrose diary and scrapbook entries onto
the site, with some of Jo's more racy photos thrown in from time to
time to satisfy the midnight chokers in the crowd. That, and the
systematic removal of all traces of Curry, should be enough to make
4616 Melrose a Web blockbuster, at least until MTV takes a look at the
failed potential of their dismal site, remember that they happen to
own The Real World, and find that on the Web, two plus two sometimes
does equal five.

courtesy of the Duke of URL





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 19 September 1995.

The Sickness Unto Death

If ever there was a medium which served as a ready reminder of our own
mortality, it's the Web. As the incarnation of someone else's
overreaching fantasy made horribly real (but only to be a constant
reminder of what will never be), the Web is the first of the new
"interactive media" to give us so little for so much: it demands our
attention and forces us to interact, but only as so many mindless
automatons basking in the phosphorescent glow of our "terminals",
developing RSI and serving as cancer hosts.

Is it any wonder, then, that one of the more popular Web sites,
URouLette, is based on the most desperate of gambler's games? You
say most of the links are stale or broken? Welcome to modernity.

The modern, of course, gives us more than just the technological
wonders made possible by criss-crossing the earth with metal and spun
glass: witness the homage to childhood fantasy, ordered, regimented,
and made stale which is Disneyland. Even in this sanitized dreamscape,
however, the underlying industrial mechanisms extract their true
price: if the grounds and rides are spotless, it's only because the
blood's been wiped clean.

If you prefer your death to be packaged more straightforwardly, your
consuming passions may lead you to the calm reassurance of Faces of
Death, by which the act of dying can be bought like any other
commodity. For those who prefer to be faced with the "real" thing, the
Web has to offer Dan's Gallery of the Grotesque, where all those pics
that have been floating around Usenet for years are conveniently
collected in one place for your armchair viewing. Finally, with half
the laughs but twice the perversion, there's the child-torturing Diary
of Death.

Ready to put yourself out of your misery? Although you could belabor
the point by worshipping at the altar of Ian Curtis or joining a cult
such as the Church of Euthanasia, or consider what might be the most
interesting way to die today (not to mention who you might be doing a
favor, besides yourself), it's always been most effective to grab a
handful of sleeping pills and a plastic bag. Before you go, don't
forget to immortalize yourself with a home page for all eternity.

courtesy of Webster





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 20 September 1995.

Pathological Self-Improvement and the Organizational Man

Patrick Combs is an accident that was waiting to happen. Like a fetid
Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, he represents the marriage of two malignant
(but often amusing) 90's trends: prankster ideology and the
self-affirmation industry. His goal, to establish himself as the GenX
answer to Anthony Robbins, is less than cataclysmic. It's his method
that bears investigation...

Combs, amidst shady promotional tours and conference speaking
engagements, stumbled onto something worthy of RE:Search Pranks.
Having been sent a bogus "non-negotiable" $95,000 check as a part of a
promotional mailer, he decided to deposit it, on a "whim". Through a
series of bank blunders, the deposit went through (not surprising
considering the institutional ineptitude we've come to expect from our
friends in banking).

Combs's subsequent legal and institutional hi-jinx were assiduously
chronicled on TV and in print, and his Web site - the Web being the
perfect home for self-promoters - has an extensive journal dedicated
exclusively to the fiasco. One gets the feeling that Combs quickly
realized how thoroughly he might be able to milk the debacle from the
moment of its inception - the passages in which he describes his
efforts to get the story written up in the NY Times impart an air of
unequivocal tension.

Check it out for yourself - it's worth a look. But by the time you
(fail to) finish the tale, you may have become as distracted as we
were by Combs's relentless pitching of his promo material. It's hard
not to laugh as you track Comb leaping through intellectual hurdles,
trying to spin his story into yet another example of the indomitable
power of "the man without fear." His attempts to frame his efforts as
a crusade against junk mail are especially ironic, considering his own
rather dodgy career choice.

As a service to the more gullible of our readership (and don't be too
sure we're not referring to you; you bought into this whole Internet
thing, after all) Suck advises steering clear of Combs's literary
hustle, Major In Success - unless you're thinking of setting up shop
as a huckster yourself, in which case we recommend not only Combs's
tome, but any other affirmation encyclopedia you can get your hands on
- in particular, Dale Carnegie's "How To Win Friends and Influence
People," which is a favorite of Combs, Suck, and wannabe
power-swindlers everywhere.

But remember, pathological self- improvement is pass_, anyway - in an
age in which email has replaced the handshake and mouse-clicks are
tantamount to heavy petting, the value of a bright smile and an eager
disposition rapidly approaches jack shit. If you're at all like us -
content to fester at a terminal in the dimly-lit sty you call home,
only venturing outside to score cola and terrify children - we'll
still like you. As a matter of fact, we suggest you consider Roberto's
page a special celebration of your sorry excuse for a lifestyle.
Cheers!

For those as yet unconvinced of the general uselessness of Combs's
shtick, we still advise caution: a Patrick Combs infomercial is sure
to be looming on the horizon, and as we all know, nothing beats a
vicarious multimedia thrill.

courtesy of the Duke of URL





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 21 September 1995.

Hit and Run

In our dreams, every Web site we slum is either so exquisitely skewed
or such a colossal bummer that we're instantly motivated to toss off a
Suck-length screed in its honor. Luckily, we're far less idealistic
during our waking hours (which is pretty much all the time) - though
we somehow manage to find a few howlers each week, our bookmarks
always end up bloated with a mess of also-rans.

It seems a shame to let our ambivalence and/or lack of ingenuity get
in the way of connecting you, our readers, with the Great Morass of
the Web's minor miracles. So, in the name of quantity over quality, we
celebrate these one-hit wonders with our new semi-regular feature, Hit
and Run...

Once upon a post-war America, the Book of the Subgenius was, like, a
really cool subversive item for dweebs like us to show off on their
bookshelves. But by this point, the joke has achieved a level of media
saturation akin to that of Michael Jackson, where every potential
disciple has already placed his or her sacrifices at the altar. Bob,
it seems, is just another asshole hipster with a groovy pipe, like
Flavor Flav. Still, we can't help being pleased that someone's taken
the time to do justice to the holy one by building a first-rate Web
site in his honor. But who knows? Maybe in a few years, when the Sega
generation comes of age, they'll be allowed to re-discover what we
knew all along: sloganeering and slack just keep on coming back.


Tired of OJ Coverage?
Tired of OJ T-shirts?
Tired of OJ Documentaries?
Tired of OJ Magazine Covers?
Tired of OJ Websites?
Tired of Naked Gun Reruns?
Tired of Kato Kaelin?
Tired of Judge Ito Breakdowns?
OJ Personalized Checks.

Eureka! The folks at Club PepsiMax must be sore from all the
back-patting that must have followed this brainstorm: a Web contest
featuring a *private* CU-SeeMe session with Cindy Crawford as the
grand prize. Little do they suspect that the real jackpot will come
when Cindy discovers that the killer app of videoconferencing is
disturbingly tied in with the concept of "hands-free" computing. Is
that a QuickCam in your pocket or are you just glad to CU-SeeMe?

Morse McFadden Communications is threatening to periodically update
its Walls '95 site with illicit photos of the construction of Bill
Gates's $50 mil sea-side mansion. While we couldn't think of a better
candidate for a little invasion of privacy, we would hope a schlocky
gimmick like this would at least warrant a live feed. After all, the
only compelling payoff for our daily patronage would come in the form
of a well-timed natural disaster. Since neither we nor MMC have the
kind of clout necessary to pull that off, we'll have to settle for the
slow-motion tragicomedy of Bill and his minions drowning in a sea of
greed, power-mongering and tasteless hype.

If it's a truism, it's only because it's so true: the chainsaw is the
most viscerally satisfying murder implement ever conceived. Sleek,
messy, and unquestionably sexy, the chainsaw is rivaled only by mental
retardation as a sure-fire winning plot device. These days, with
Tarantino-style gunplay in deep vogue, it's easy to lose sight of
the glory days of splatter, but if a game like Doom 2 can lay claim to
the title of biggest selling computer game ever (with it's only real
distinguishing feature being some righteous 'saw action), who's to say
a website like Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn't have a
shot at a Webby?

courtesy of the Duke of URL





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 22 September 1995.

We Give It 3 Out of 5 Stars

It had to happen. Like so many bulls in the Web's china shop, the
Information Highway Parental Empowerment Group (IHPEG) has officially
bum-rushed the net. And when the tumult will have ceased, two things
can be guaranteed: a detritus of broken merchandise and the herd's
fecal calling card as a grim souvenir.

IHPEG, an odious beast-of-many-backs, including Netscape, Microsoft,
Time-Warner and Viacom, has joined with MIT's W3C to spawn the
Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS), a so-called
"self-imposed" ratings system for the net.

Of course, it's all for the sake of the children. In theory, parents
will be able to configure browsers to filter out certain types of
offensive content. In practice, anyone who's ever been a pubescent
adolescent should recognize the folly of this type of maneuver. It's
the kids who're teaching their parents the ins-and-outs of the
Internet to begin with, and I'm less than confident that any system
could ever be devised that might keep a pubescent pre-teen from the
joys of salacious scholastic achievement.

There may be a glimmer of hope concealed within this fiasco, however.
The aggregate girth of the participating corporations may just
facilitate the creation of usable filtering software - as useful to
the pederast as to the pediatrician - and help us all get to the
killer content as quickly as possible, much as Parental Advisory
labels on CDs provide the same consumer service.

It all depends on how cunningly the conglomerate formulates their
categories. For the sake of group participation, Suck has constructed
its own system of Web site rating, which we humbly present to the
Internet community for examination and possible adoption...

G - Warning: This site is Garbage, and may contain representations of
a half-hearted weekend stab at a home page, inept culture mag
publishing, or the tasteless use of HTML.

PG - Warning: This site features words and pictures related to Pierced
Genitals, Tattoos, Biker and Hot Rod culture, ritual scarification,
hipster hyperbole, and leather fetishism.

PG-13 - Warning: This site is either a repository of Political
propaganda or a Governmental morass of incomplete information, and as
one of the 13 daily visitors, you may be exposing yourself to
investigation for suspicious seditionist activity.

R - Warning: This site is an electronic Retail establishment, and as
such, may contain words and images evincing crass commercialism,
cynical marketing ploys and/or corporate whoremongering.

NC-17 - Warning: This site may contain No Content 17 minutes or so
after a deluge of porn-hungry surfers bring the server to its knees.
Don't even bother.

and, back by popular demand...

X - Warning: This site is eXtraordinarily fucked-up, revealing the
maladjusted, idiosyncratic and possibly sociopathic tendencies of its
author(s). Extreme caution should be employed, as this site may not be
sponsored.

courtesy of the Duke of URL





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 25 September 1995.

Good Luck, Jammer!

It's a sure sign that any industry has "come of age" when the
dissenters from within its ranks pull together to assemble kamikaze
tattletale rags. Considering the depths to which advertising has
successfully colonized our mental real estate, it comes as no surprise
that the mere existence of a magazine like Adbusters is enough to make
us Sucksters sire walloping woodies.

Unfortunately, we've always been a tad more impressed by Adbusters'
concept than its execution. While making an impressively hip coffee
table item, at $6 per (irregular) pop it's often difficult to sustain
our enthusiasm for what amounts to a sporadically clever (though
highly relevant) zine. What kind of words, then, could adequately
convey our pleasure to be able to announce that Adbusters has hit the
Web, with a home page that can truly be called home?

Ad spoofs, media deconstruction, corporate analysis, and subversive
"events" - just as in the print mag, they're all to be found on the
site. Amazingly enough, though, the Cassandras behind the operation
have managed to use the Web to breathe life into the very conceits
that were most wanting in its paper incarnation. The design is
impeccable and highly appropriate - at least as slick as the Madison
Ave. fodder Adbusters regularly skewers.

And the much-touted capacity for websites to house comprehensive
archives is not just a promise for the future at the Culture Jammer's
Headquarters. Not only has Adbusters managed to pack in quite the
back catalog of media hacks, but they've also been able to deftly
position their works in just the right places (and we thought only
anarcho-capitalists still read Understanding Media.)

Adbusters deserves an award for the most insidious use of hyperlinks
yet: the Bolt into Action! segments follow many Adbuster features,
linking readers directly into feedback pages of corporate sites such
as CBC and Coca-Cola. Their call to activism, "Good Luck, Jammers!,"
is rapidly becoming the farewell of choice for phone conversations and
email missives at Suck Central.

"We will uncool their billion dollar images with uncommercials on
TV..." proclaims their Media Manifesto, heralding the kind of intent
cheered more by featherweights like Suck than knotty-necked
muscleheads such as ABC (oops...Disney/ABC), NBC, CBS and the Canadian
Broadcasting Company, all of which the magazine is taking to court to
dispute their unflinching refusal to sell airtime for Adbusters'
"uncommercials."

If we weren't such brainwashed idiots we might quit this Suck crap and
go work for them. As it is, their favorite targets (McDonald's, and
the cigarette and alcohol industries) sadly coincide with some of our
most deeply-held passions. While we can't help but thrill to their
struggles to place distorted "Got Milk?" and Absolut Vodka ad parodies
in the Dirty Dozen of mainstream magazines, we're ashamed to admit
that huge gobs of barely-chewed Big Mac usually project forth from our
mouths right along with the sympathetic laughter and outrage. But our
status as Media Tools is hardly "breaking news."

It's axiomatic that a sucker is born while another dies every minute,
but the real action lies in the media goons' baptizing of "born-again
suckers," a title awarded on a mass scale many times every moment. The
question is, when it comes time for your next sacramental dunk -
who're you gonna call?

courtesy of the Duke of URL





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 26 September 1995.

Youth Marketing

Could ReBoot be the greatest Saturday morning cartoon ever made? How
the hell would I know? From what I've heard, it's on sometime between
9 and 10 in the morning (and like a bargain- basement Naomi Campbell,
I don't get out of bed before noon for less than twenty bucks.) [Duke
being a technophobe, his porn box - er, VCR - unceasingly blinks 12:00
- Dunderhead]

Maybe if I had a bit more in common with all those Tick-heads, I could
pull it off. It's not a motivational problem - my curiosity was peaked
from day one, and recent net surfing has only heightened my interest.
With entirely computer-generated animation, a character designer best
known for his drug-addled comics imagery, and a vaguely intriguing
Internet-related premise, what more could a 20th century media
consumer possibly ask for?

How about some impressively manipulative solicitation tactics for the
kiddies?

[From the official Reboot website]:

Hi. It's me, Dot.

I'm glad you could duck away from
Enzo for a Nanosecond. This is
supposed to be a surprise and
it's so hard to keep anything
from him. He's such an energetic
sprite!

As you must know from our
adventures in "Talent Night",
it's Enzo's birthday and I've
planned some very special
events. Even though you can't be
at the party in person (view it
on your own vidwindow!) you can
still make your presence felt.

This is Enzo's birthday card and
I'm hoping to get all of his new
friends to sign it. Don't forget
to tell Enzo all about yourself,
that boy has a Syquest-sized
thirst for data!

I love it.

Expect similar demographic research techniques from Suck in the near
future.

courtesy of the Duke of URL





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 27 September 1995.

Disgorgeous George

Clearly, the greatest obstacle to the Internet's mass acceptance is
its nonportability. Put bluntly: it can't be browsed while relaxing on
the toilet. A shame really, considering how well suited much of its
content is for precisely that arena.

Consider JFK Jr.'s slick political throwaway, George, which hit both
the newsstands and the net yesterday. Junior managed to whip up some
righteous hype during the past week, piquing our curiosity enough to
compel us to make a few calls in search of an advance copy. After all,
it's not everyday that a banal marriage of politics and fashion (in
print, no less!) gets the full media spectacle treatment.

Our efforts earned us a few base snickers (we might as well have been
begging for a screening copy of Mortal Kombat) and little else, so we
hacked together a nifty little script and waited for notice that the
site had gone live. Our auto-mailer sent the news at 3:20 am, and we
quickly learned that late-night site management was the extent of our
shared values...

It's not an issue of political stance - George doesn't have one.
Instead, the editors of George settled on the novel concept of
covering statecraft through the tried-and-true method of creation and
celebration of celebrity qua celebrity. We're neither smart nor slimy
enough to set this kind of object as a goal, and, even if we did, we
couldn't expect to get Urkel, much less Cindy Crawford, to strike a
ludicrous pose for our media projects.

Between said cover and Madonna's backpage PoliSci (cribbed from bumper
stickers peeped during her '85 Virgin Tour, it seems) lies the
manifestation of a shrewd concept: the Details-ization of political
commentary. Articles penned by Mark Leyner and Jim Carroll entice in
their crass GenX pandering, but profiling ex-Nirvana's Kris Novaselic
as a "political insider" is a bit over the edge by anyone's yardstick
(well... besides Tabitha Soren's, anyways.)

While it may seem obvious that no amount of finessing can turn a piece
on "the institutionalization of rock" into valuable civic insight,
there's more to George than "The P.A.C. The Punk Built." There's gotta
be some meat to these features, no?

Unfortunately, the decidedly nonpartisan mission statement makes for
some unequivocally noncompelling journalism. Take George's John Perry
Barlow interview with Gingrich. Wasn't Esther Dyson's failure to
disgorge anything but platitudes from the Speaker in a recent issue of
Wired lesson enough to squelch exactly this kind of farce? Barlow
eschews gritty discourse for more palatable vagaries, and by the time
he admits to using his "hippie mystic intuition" to assess Gingrich as
an "extremely compassionate guy," you know this pow-wow is getting
nowhere pronto.

At least George's Virtual Politics page includes links to sites with a
bit more incisive analysis.

If only the users of George's web site were able to guffaw at its
opportunism with both the ontological perspective and clarity of mind
afforded from a sojourn to the shitter, it would be sure to hit big.
But maybe all those cute server pushes will herd readers in - and with
@radical.media's Phiber Optik (voting "green" like a true consultant,
eh?) taking care of "the hard stuff like cgi-bin programming," who
knows what flashy tricks they've got in store?

courtesy of the Duke of URL





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 28 September 1995.

Hit and Run II

A formulaic method to success is the grail that we're all after - from
sleazy get-rich-quick schemes to 12-step programs to kick a habit
that's become just a little too familiar, we can't get enough of easy,
no-brainer ways to give us maximum returns for minimal effort - that's
what it's all about, isn't it?

At Suck, we may know better, but we're not going to quibble with that
which will seemingly bring us one notch closer to the Big Media
Sellout. You liked last week's Hit and Run? You told all your friends
that you like to Suck? You wrote our URL (http://www.suck.com/, for
those with short memories) on the restroom wall of the faceless
corporation you're shamelessly reclaiming time from now to surf Suck?
(And that's gonna lay you off anyway as soon as management can figure
out how to get a machine to do your mindless job?) At Suck, we aim to
please - you, the (non-paying) customer. So please, enjoy this, our
second installment of glorious one-hit wonders...

Sure, the boundaries of the Web only expand when iconoclastic types
venture into uncharted territory, but four-figure fashion? On the net?
Color us Luddite, but most of the webheads we know would be more
inclined to drop $7K on a T1 - not a stylin' Armani silk velvet dress.
And net.geeks may not be known for color coordination, but animal
prints as a white-hot Fall trend? Somebody pinch me - I think I'm
screaming!

Still, what do we know - the complex mathematical theory presented on
the ELLE Numerology page left us quite befuddled. Perhaps with a bit
more dedicated study, we too could unravel the economic mysteries
ELLE's fantasy demographic have already conquered. Until then, we'll
remain low-rent slobs gawking like fuckin' tourists at the nobility -
just like the rest of you.

Who calls a 900 Number - And Why? is a question we Sucksters have
asked ourselves many times. Maybe to hear some "hot" two on one
"licking action", but, more likely, to help relieve the tension after
reflecting upon the use of modern technology and contemplating its
attendant decay of our collective moral fiber upon viewing the NYC
Series.

Heaven or Las Vegas? We're told on the fanboy Cocteau Twins site, a
complement to the band's entry in the 4AD eyesore database, that
'virtually all the lyrics in "Iceblink Luck" are audible!' So is it
"I'm seeming to be glad a lot; I'm happy again; Caught, caught in
time" or "You're savin' too big lend a line/How do you again come,
come in time"? If we count the "a" and "in", that's, let's see, four
words in common? So how to decide? May we recommend the respectable
unambiguity of AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long" - here, here, or
here, the song remains the same.

The best kind of home page is one that carelessly reveals too much
about its author. Take the Calvin Klein Porn Source page as an object
lesson. Entire forests have been felled for the sake of aggravating
the ludicrous controversy over recent Calvin Klein magazine and TV
ads, but only on the web can you find this kind of frank,
well-informed contribution to the debate. Did we mention that the
bottom gif is actually a not-so-cleverly concealed bonus game? (Think
Missile Command.)

- Sucksters





S U C K
"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
Originally for 29 September 1995.

NetSoft vs. MicroScape

Douglas Coupland once advised us to write and seal a description of
our worst enemy's most distinctive attributes, not-so-subtly
cautioning that the villain we'd describe might ultimately turn out to
be ourselves. We decided to follow his suggestion, skewed to become a
sort of blueprint - thus, Suck.

Apparently, Jim Clark was similarly counseled. Assuming his
instantaneous reaction was to jot down a thumbnail history of
Microsoft's robber baron exploits, we're forced to conclude that he
kept his scribblings and, in fact, immediately set out to evolve them
into the Netscape Business Plan.

Amidst the excitement of the impending release of Netscape 2.0, it's
easy to be distracted from the real interactive entertainment:
watching Netscape attempt to relive the worst moments of the last ten
years of the software industry in the space of eight months.

The key to understanding Netscape, it seems, is to read through their
PR sophistry about "application platforms" and label their product as
what it really wants to be: an Operating System. Y'know, like Windows
95, except cross-platform. It's only fitting that Netscape would
strive to emulate the most conspicuously shady tactics of the
Microsoft juggernaut (and we don't mean the uncanny similarity between
2.0's frames and Windows 1.0's tiles).

When Netscape touts its "plug-in architecture" don't be fooled into
thinking of Photoshop - they're not talking about Kai's Power Tools.
Netscape's development partners include some of the most auspicious in
the software industry - Adobe, Macromedia, Apple, Kaleida, and more.
Expect to be running apps from these outfits very soon, if you aren't
already. Netscape Navigator? No, Netscape OS.

While the strategic alliances with the SW big boys are real enough, it
should be pointed out that Netscape's recent announcement of more than
2,000 developers joining its Development Partners Program can be
dismissed as amusingly meaningless. Every joker with a browser applied
for this program, hoping, perhaps, to snag an alpha of 2.0. And keep
in mind that nobody even knows whether or not they're part of this
elusive Partner's Program - as Netscape hasn't actually officially
approved anyone yet.

The astute software developer may feel compelled to interject protests
here along the lines of, "Wait a minute, piss-poor treatment of
developers was a late 80's Apple trademark... what's this got to do
with Microsoft?" While we wouldn't hesitate to agree that Netscape
should seriously consider tossing some of their stock at ex-Apple
evangelist Guy Kawasaki (even if Guy has come back to Apple as an
"Apple Fellow", Guy is no stranger to potential conflicts of
interest), Netscape's powerploys go well beyond shoddy developer
relationships.

Netscape's adoption of the preemptive announcement credo (developing
its NewsServer and Publishing System products in a backroom labeled
"vaporware") is quite the indicator, but their unflinching embrace of
Microsoft's date-rape approach to strategic alliances really puts the
show in perspective. As surely as Gates supervised the systematic
sodomization of Apple (remember "look and feel?") and IBM (never
mind the OS/2, here's the NT), Netscape's partnership with the Java
team is growing more sour with every <BLINK>.

Netscape announced that 2.0 would include a scripting language called
JavaScript, based on Java, which will be used to control other
plug-ins, such as Macromedia's Director Shockwave player. What is
JavaScript? Enquiring minds want to know, including, perhaps, some
people at Sun, the four-year incubator of Java technology:

From the java-interest-list:

>>"Netscape Navigator 2.0 supports
>>the Netscape scripting language,
>>a cross-platform language based
>>on Java"
>
>Oh well, we were not involved in
>the design of this language. It
>has no relation to Java applets,
>it doesn't interface to Java, nor
>is it implemented in Java.
>
>Have fun,
>
>Arthur van Hoff

Arthur van Hoff, of course, being one of the principal engineers on
the Java project.

Oof.

In other words, look for the relationship between Java and JavaScript
to be closely analogous to that of HTML to Netscape HTML, where
Netscape is successfully converting an open standards process (or, in
the case of Java, another company's trademark and an open language
specification) to a proprietary one owned by itself. And those
annoying and restrictive features of the Java language, such as
security and distributed objects? Bye-bye.

It's a shame that Adobe has had since '82 to refine its licensing
agreements for use of the PostScript language - it would be great to
see Netscape try to apply a similar set of screws to Adobe. Then
again, Adobe had the foresight to buy out the most promising HTML
editor to date, Ceneca's PageMill, to try to shoe-horn PDF into it.

But even if you subtract Netscape partners too big or too
insignificant to clown with, you're still left with a bevy of would-be
victims. Does Netscape have the wherewithall to bang 'em all? Maybe,
when you cast your gaze upon their newest management recruits: a
virtual shadow government consisting of seasoned veterans of failed
start-ups and has-beens (NeXT, GO, and Borland - all sharing the
distinction of having been royally hosed by Microsoft. But then again,
who hasn't been?) led by heavy-duty hardass Jim Barksdale, former
FedEx VP and AT&T Wireless CEO.

Could Netscape's stock price be undervalued?

courtesy of the Duke of URL and Strep Throat






 
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