Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

In any case, I hope Jesus Christ comes back.
  

    

Welcome, Lilith!

Indra, I do hope your friend Sathyu shows up. He's one of the folks I
admired most. 

Another question -- how did your career in advertising inform your work
as a writer? And how did you get into advertising? 
  

    <scribbled>
  

    
It's never been possible to control you, dear.

Even as a character you refused to do as you were told. You'd spit out
the words my pen put in your mouth. Thank god. There was a point, when
I was trying to figure out how the hell to tell the story of Calypso
going on holiday with her husband and her three lovers - wanting to
tell it from the point of view of each - when you came to my rescue. In
my imagination I felt your arm go round my shoulder and your voice
say, "Relax. Let me tell it." And from that moment on, the book worked.
  

    
Warner, (#126), so do I! :)
  

    
RE #126 Some people have been hoping that for millenia now.
  

    
Tigerlily, thanks for your help with this. I think we have made some
new contacts. My poor friend isn't at all well, I saw him earlier
today, but we all still live in hope.
  

    
Read a bit of Cybergypsies today in the bookstore; didn't walk out with a
copy at $30, sorry Indra.  Good stuff, though, and I'm sure I'll manage to
read the whole thing before long.

I was interested that the pervading theme (at least in the sections I
read) seemed to be addiction.  Although I've felt a bit of that in the 12
years I've been doing online stuff-- I had The Well disable my
account so I could finish my senior year of college-- I don't see the
parallel to a hard drug like heroin.  Maybe I've just never found the
places that are truly that addictive, or maybe I don't have that kind of
personality.  Whatever.  Interesting, though.  Any further comments on
this phenomenon?

I really loved the story about losing the Modem at the rocks.
  

    



Lilith, lovely Lilith. What do you think of the uses that Monica
and Bill put to Cigars? If it isn't too much trouble, can you show
us your tits?

Now Dloebell, don't take it personal, my calling you a "fucking moron"
is just my way of saying hello! David and I are cool now, I have
promised not to make fun of his limited knowledge of the Beatles and
he has promised not to ask to see my dick. No harm no foul :)


-Jesus
  

    

Indra,

I really loved the part in the book where you fucked over Nasty Ned.
Whatever happened to that slime ball?





-Geno
  

    <scribbled>
  

    <scribbled>
  

    
Well, the last I heard he was in prison.

For the benefit of people who don't know what we're talking about, Ned
(not, obviously, his real name) was a BBS sysop. As for the "Nasty"
epithet: "Long before the word had become an adjective of choice for
purveyors of hardcore pornography, Ned had redefined it all by
himself."

Some of his fellow sysops suspected him of dealing in child porn. So
we set up a routine to find out if this was true - a simple trojan that
while installing some software on his computer simultaneously scanned
its contents, with results told in Cybergypsies. 

By the way, welcome back. :)
  

    
Hi Lizabeth, in reply to #127, I fell into advertising by mistake a
long time ago. I'd wanted to make documentaries, but the BBC didn't
give me a job, so I thought that as a temporary diversion I'd earn some
money writing ads - I knew about this because my mother had worked for
a while in advertising in India when I was a kid. Advertising in
London in the seventies and eighties was great fun, I wound up in an
exciting agency full of clever, amusing people.

In 1990 we began to work for Amnesty and it's probably not
overdramatic to say that it changed my life. Certainly, after I became
aware of what was happening out there, having read raw eyewitness
statements, actual letters, fragments of smuggled writing, seen
pictures, I could never again close my eyes to it.

The human rights theme in Cybergypsies - the Kurds, Palden Gyatso and
his terrible torture weapons, Don McCullin's anguish - is as important
in my view as the cyberlife theme. 
  

    <scribbled>
  

    
Owing to the miracle of the telnet device, I am with you at this very
instant in the Vortex, Lilith, and can verify that what you say about
your attire is perfectly true.
  

    
Ah, but you did join Amnesty.
  

    <scribbled>
  

    


In a message aimmed primarily at Lilith, Jesus sez:

Pimp Wars was a good game! A friend of mine wrote Mall Wars and it was
pretty good as well. Since Mall Wars came before Pimp Wars my friend
TR really hated that game. Perhaps if you looked at the parts of
Indra's book not about Shades or Vortex as foreplay you'd enjoy it
more.

FREE YOUR ASS AND YOUR MIND IS SURE TO FOLLOW
-BOY GEORGE

No Lilith, I find my own natural "cigar" is more than UP to the task
and thus have no need  for artifical devices. Also I have a wart on
the end of my tongue. Still, sometimes devices can cum in handy if used
right, not everyone can put them to the right uses however. Edwin
Cleton confined to me that he didn't like cybersex because he had
trouble getting the mouse out of his asshole following a session.



-Jesus

 
  

    
Heck may as well try to relate all this to the book.

"The Butterfly Effect is set up as a Fidonet node, to be a focus for
human rights and green issues. It carries all our Kurdish news. Every
night I take Amnesty's Urgent Action alerts off Greennet and relay them
to Fidonet. We start an online Amnesty group. Old friends Todd and
Lori, new to cyberspace, take over part of the board for a 'personal
development workshop' called Waterwheel. Graeme and I open a
members-only section which we call 'The Cybergypsy Club' and Graeme
uploads to it a technothriller he is writing about a cybergypsy chief
who gets mixed up in a flying saucer flap. Geno calls once in a while
but, chary of bills, never stays long, thus proving himself to have
more sense than me. Branwell drops in every night at eleven for a game
of chess. Luna, taking great care not to leave a traceable number,
calls to argue obscure points of hermetic philosophy. Lilith often pops
on to tell me about her latest conquests. The Butterfly Effect, a tiny
speck of light in the galaxy of systems that form the global net, is
soon home to a small group of ragged-arsed philanthropists: a strange
mix of human rights enthuasiasts, environmentalists, technopagans,
cyber-sutrans, virus folk and roleplayers. Among them is a mysterious
Irishman who calls himself Gliomach"...

but that's another story.

Yeah, Pimp Wars was fun. I used to go to Arkham to play it.
  

    
Magnus wrote (#98):

>Re:#94 Well, Indra, maybe the frontier lies elsewhere these days...
>Anyway, I would like to hear more about some fellow characters in the
>book: Do you know what happended to Calypso and were you in love with
>her?

Calypso was a complicated lady who specialised in seducing men online
and some of them subsequently off-, with a view primarily to funding
her modem habit, but she claimed to be in search of a soulmate. Her
online character was of course very delicious and she was scarcely less
gorgeous in real life. Cybergypsies records several of her conquests,
including a lunch at her house where the narrator finds himself in
great peril. I'd rather not reveal the story, in the faint hope that
someone will go out and buy the book. But Magnus, to answer your
question, no, I was not in love with her. I don't know what became of
her after the events described in Cybergypsies.


>Also, any news on the Detonator? I would really like to buy him some 
>more sushi... 

Hmm, well okay, the Detonator was a Swedish virus author whom Magnus
and I met in Stockholm. Over a sushi lunch in the unlikely setting of a
boardroom, again as recounted in CyG, he expressed the somewhat
antisocial desire to...

..er, Magnus, försökte få tag på dig. Häng med, <brucet>! Raczej nie 
rozmawiajmy o The Detonator. Chyba wiesz, ze sie wlamal do komputera 
IRS?
  

    
(indra)
This has been a wonderful few days, reading your posts.
Your language is seductive, magically descriptive.
Having been a member of Amnesty some years ago, twice, for my sins;
and having left because of the usual Irish fractionalisation, I am 
tempted even to try again.
THank you.
I have just ordered your book.
  

    
Katherine, thanks for the comments. I hope you enjoy the book!

But why leave Amnesty because of Irish fractionalisation? 

I had the experience of working with the Community Relations Council
in Northern Ireland a few years ago, meeting people from every corner
of the community, from Sinn Fein to the DUP, politicians, journalists,
social workers and your man and woman in the street.  (Cybergypsies
contains an account of a lunch I had with Ian Paisley Jr at that time.)
I must have made ten trips to Belfast and 'Derry. Nothing was as I had
expected or imagined and I didn't meet a soul I didn't like.

The task was to do a feasability study on whether mass communication
might be able to soften the edge of confrontation. Conventional
advertising clearly would cut no ice in a place where the graffitists
are the best copywriters, so we proposed an entire mass media programme
built squarely upon the principles of conflict-resolution - to be
conducted (mainly on TV) in distinct phases, using material generated
by members of the public. 

Conducting a structured conflict-resolution programme on a mass scale,
to my knowledge, had never been done before. It was really exciting.

One of part of the proposal was for an online roleplaying game for
schools based on what we knew from places like the Vortex, where deep
friendships were formed without any certain knowledge of the other
player's identity, roots, colour, religion or class. The idea was that
not only would cross-community friendships inevitably arise, but kids
would be tempted to "try out" the opposing identity - seeing through
the other side's eyes being an essential part of the
conflict-resolution process.

We never got the chance to test any of these ideas, except on a very
limited scale, because of lack of funds.
  

    
Hi David, Lilith is right, $30 is a snip, especially when you consider
that if you read the thing three times it will work out at just $10 a
go. Why, a meal for one at Girasole ("occasionally obnoxious service,
but good food", 985-4659, 1305 Locust ) would set you back $31.

Re addiction: I know that <lisabeth> for example prefers to think of
this as obsession, but having witnessed marriages disintegrate, a
friend's business go belly up, a suicide (yes, cherchez la belle
Calypso, dame sans merci), the disastrous effects on life, work and
family of eight hours a night online seemed comparable to those caused
by gambling, liquor or heroin.

My life at that time seemed like a drug experience. Fractured and
hallucinatory as it was, vivid, incredible, ravishing to the
imagination, I remembered de Quincey, deep-diving his imagination in a
bubble of opium, viz my favourite passage from "Confessions of an
English Opium Eater":

"Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights,
I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees
and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical
regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan. From kindred
feelings, I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. I
was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by
paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was fixed, for
centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms: I was the idol; I was the
priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of
Brama through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me; Siva laid wait
for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they
said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a
thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow
chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous
kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy
things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud."
  

    
Just been talking on the phone to Alastair (McIntosh) who recalled
everything about your meeting the instant I mentioned you, and sends
warm greeting. I read him your post on here (#76) and he laughed and
laughed. He says he vividly remembers your vision of the jaw bone. As
you mentioned in your post, he wrote an article after your meeting,
which he has promised to email to me. 

Have you read "Puck of Pook's Hill", Kipling's book about fairies in
Sussex? (Written about ten miles from where we live.) I sent Alastair a
copy a few weeks ago, and he just told me it has been very useful in
helping him understand the English post-colonial identity crisis! He
apparently lectures on peace studies to the British Army General Staff
once a year and this year he talked about fairies - yes he's truly a
marvel. 

Jeevema sharadah shatam.