The hope, of course, is that I won't be able to satisfy my hunger for the nutty tales from her bandwidth-bloating, Prozacified, polyamourized life.

Y


ou all have laughed along with me as I've had my little skirmishes with the Elly of Dreamdweller.com. You've sent me email telling me how entertaining it's been and even expressing support should she really carry through on her promise to sue me. Well, recently I've noticed she's tried a different technique to "get me." She's filtering out the Comet.net domain from access to her web site. It's an easy thing to do with most web servers. The hope, of course, is that I won't be able to satisfy my hunger for the nutty tales from her bandwidth-bloating, Prozacified, polyamourized life. But not so fast! Elly is successfully filtering out Comet.net, that is surely true. This means that perhaps 1000 households in Charlottesville cannot reach her award-winning website. But I get through to Dreamdweller.com without difficulty. Why? I'm coming through on another Comet.net-owned domain right here in the server room at Comet! Yes, the machine I now use the most, a 120 MHz Mac 8500, is not in the Comet domain! Furthermore, she hasn't filtered out the Virginia.edu domain and a number of other domains available to me. Anyway, besides being completely ineffective, the whole idea of filtering out domains runs counter to the idea of the World Wide Web. Again Elly proves to be a highly-strung technoklutz.

The musings finally made it into the Yahoo online journal index. I can't tell you how many times I filled out that damn submission form. And guess what? Tomorrow the musings celebrates its first birthday. In celebration, I've compiled a fine collection of images of the goings on in Kappa Mutha Fucka this month.



She could have interpreted my actions as supporting her cause, after all, I was placing pictures of the bad guys on a high traffic page!

S


teven Miller is Comet's in-house legal guy. It's a good thing we have such a creature, since my web pages cause enough commotion to warrant one. The latest stink I've kicked up is with Susan Duncan, the overwound woman who runs the Faces of Fear webring. As you know, I've taunted her by decorating one of my musings pages with some of her ugly bloated graphics (getting the graphics to load through a modem connection is like trying to make an unenthusiastic toilet swallow a twelve inch turd). One of the graphics featured the faces of child molestors that she would like arrested. She could have interpreted my actions as supporting her cause, after all, I was placing pictures of the bad guys on a high traffic page! And I was even kind enough to include links. But no, this evidently unstable woman has instead launched into hysterics. She's replaced the images (which I linked to on her servers) with poorly-sized (and originally typo-ridden) graphics of the following texts:

Please excuse this sick individual for he has only time to try to spread hate, mistrust, fear, envy & any kind of evil he can imagine. It is a shame that he links & steals from others. Feel sorry for this fool her makes his own life miserable & he is not a member of the ring.

This image was linked to another server and has been replaced THIS PRACTICE WILL NOT BE TOLERATED!

The matter wasn't finished there either. After she suspected that a new admission to her Faces of Fear webring might in fact be an imposter (another manifestation of me) she complained to a whole host of people, including MCI, who owns one of Comet's T1 cables. So some system administrator at MCI called Comet and had a conference call between the Ms. Duncan and Steve. The MCI guy was amazed to subsequently discover that none of the pages Ms. Duncan was complaining about had any offensive content whatever. He'd been expecting pornography at the very minimum.

This experience, along with the Dreamdweller and Ladies of the Heart nonsense (not surprisingly, Susan Duncan is yet another Lady of the Heart) has lead me to start generalizing about the psychological profile of people who create web pages with the following characteristics:

There is no tolerance, let alone interest in, serious issues or the "dark side." Frank discussions of sex, violence, drugs, racial problems, politics, etc. upset them visibly.

• contain huge unsized JPEGs (40K or more in size) or enormous unsized GIFs (often 80K in size)
• have repulsive background music in the form of MIDIs
• formatting consist of a centered stack of "content" occupying the right two thirds of the page while a column of high-contrast images (from the background texture) occupies the left third. Any and all tables are copied verbatim from obvious sources.
• images are of rainbows, flowers, unicorns, pre-Raphælite "Art," angels, Christian crap, or smarmy nature scenes
• belong to Ladies of the Heart and/or Webguard
• belong to more than six webrings (I would have said two, but I belong to three!)

The profile of the designers of such pages consists of the following traits:

• There is almost no sense of humour, and what little there is cannot comprehend satire, irony or sarcasm.
• There is no capacity to gracefully accept criticism.
• There is a repulsive overconcern about the sanctity, innocence and security of children.
• There is no tolerance of, let alone interest in, serious issues or the "dark side." Frank discussions of sex, violence, drugs, racial problems, politics, etc. upset them visibly.
• They tend to be on the brink of hysteria at all times.
• At the slightest offense, they run crying to authority figures for redress.

Well, today I discovered that Elly has finally put a MIDI file on her homepage. Her descent into the world of smarm is complete.

I used to resent the widespread feeling in America that there is something basically wrong with people who spend much of their life online. After my experience with the "online community of hysteria," however, I'm gradually coming to feel that either much of the online world really is mentally ill, or else everyone (online and offline) is! When you consider how complex an organ the brain is, with all the things that could possibly go wrong, it's really amazing that most of us are as stable as we are!

I'd always thought it strange that Elly's Slice of Cyberpie didn't have MIDI files blaring whenever I surfed there. She is, after all, a Lady of the Heart, and we all know about Ladies of the Heart and how they love those MIDIs. Well, today I discovered that Elly has finally put a MIDI file on her homepage. Her descent into the world of smarm is complete. I will say, however, that this particular MIDI file is not as bad as most I've heard. But it's still a pain in the ass to have to hear it playing alongside the Fugazi coming out of the headphones from the CD player!






S


omething about the cool weather (highs only in the 70s F!) makes this good sleeping weather; I didn't get out of bed until after 5pm.

Matthew Hart complained of having Poison Ivy on his face, so we went on a mission to pick up some Jewelweed (Impatiens sp.) out to the west in a moist ravine adjacent to Fontaine Avenue. Jewelweed is, as I've said before, the best antidote to Poison Ivy rash; it's better than any commercial product. I know; I grew up in the woods and I was no stranger to the plants of my world.



He swaggered and spoke in all those stereotypical redneck ways I thought I'd left behind with the cheerleaders and schoolbuses of high school.

B


ack at Kappa Mutha Fucka, I attempted to watch a trash SciFi show called Alligator II: The Mutation. I'm sure it was going to be appallingly bad, but one needs shallow thrills occasionally. Anyway, about this time Matthew Hart's older redneck friend from Waynesboro, CJ, arrived, along with the plump gay dude who'd chauffered him last time and a new guy. The new guy had closely cropped hair and arms festooned with bad tattoos. He swaggered and spoke in all those stereotypical redneck ways I thought I'd left behind with the cheerleaders and schoolbuses of high school. Both he and CJ clutched and fiddled with their cigarettes despite the fact that they weren't allowed to smoke them indoors. The über redneck was interested in being driven to Garrett Square (Charlottesville's "Projects") so he could buy some crack, that is, smokeable cocaine. He had an aggressive jonesing demeanor that I found familiar but highly distasteful. I was very pleased when, unwilling to wait for Matthew to get off work, they all left.

Monster Boy was drinking Coronas but he didn't offer me any. He has proven to be not only lazy, but also (partly of necessity) stingy as well. How soon he's forgotten my generocity from the days of the Dynashack, when whatever beers I bought I shared with him.

For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?970730