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- - --- ---------- ----- ----------------------------------- --- - - -
"we don't need to try to change the world,
only our perception of its boundaries."
__ ___ _______________________________________________________ ___ __
p a 1 n m a g a z i n e v o l u m e t h i r t e e n @#!
-- --- ------------------------------------------------------- --- --

[-----][ pa1n staff ][-----]

! [ ]
| [ editor in chief alienbinary |
| [ co-editor, co-founder turnspike i
! [ co-editor mephyt !
| [ deputy co-editor angel ice i
[ editor nemisis !
[ editor red dragon
[ literary sniper rumblingsky
[ contributor artemis
! [ editor manuel o'kelly
. ! [ editor kello
| [ contributor greynin
.--' [ contributor danger girl
| | [ follow the... white rabbit
| | [ bandwidth warlord cheezi
| [ guidance for ab aliabuse '
| [ shouts zerachiel .
! [ new writer!@ pinion_blue |
. [ new writer!@ the unduhtakuh :
!
 '----[ "i recognize no rights but human rights."]----.
-- angelina grimke |
|
!
[ table of discontent. (welcome to the revolution.) ][----------]

pa1nv13x01 --- introduction alienbinary ---

pa1nv13x02 --- letter from the co-editor turnspike ---
pa1nv13x03 --- nepenthe alienbinary ---
pa1nv13x04 --- marijuana, bubblebath and masturbation angel ice ---
pa1nv13x05 --- snowtracks: a journal , pt 1. alienbinary ---
pa1nv13x06 --- snowtracks: a journal , pt 2. alienbinary ---
pa1nv13x07 --- my wep adventure the unduhtakah ---
pa1nv13x08 --- mkultra for the new millennium rumblingsky ---
pa1nv13x09 --- untitled mephyt ---
pa1nv13x10 --- all he wanted alienbinary ---
pa1nv13x11 --- over-advertising pinion_blue ---
pa1nv13x12 --- ebook: the new paperback alienbinary ---
pa1nv13x13 --- origins of self-censorship alienbinary ---
pa1nv13x14 --- outro alienbinary ---

alienolotry (6:55:00 pm): yes-people creep me out, because

sometimes i get really fucked up ideas, and if i were to
propose them to a yes-man, i'd get the go ahead on something
probably criminally insane, or at least lewd.

contact? email alienbinary at: alienbinary@spfd2600.org

email turnspike at: turnspike@spfd2600.org
email mephyt at: mephyt@nocturnalradio.com

[ for maximum reading ] ----------- - --------- - -- -- - - - -

[ pleasure, please ] 1. http://www.rantradio.com/rr-industrial128.pls
[ tune in to one of ] 2. http://www.rantradio.com/rr-industrial24.pls
[ the streams. - ab ] 3. http://www.rantradio.com/rr-punk128.pls
[ ] 4. http://www.rantradio.com/rr-talk64.pls
[ ] 5. http://www.rantradio.com/rr-talk24.pls
[ introducing... ] 6. http://www.nocturnalradio.com/listen.pls
[---------------------] ----------- - ------------- ---- ------ -

-??????-??------------???????????????--??--------------------------------------
pa1nv13x01---------------------------------------------------------------------
[ letter from the editor ]
[ alienbinary ]
---------------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv13x01
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

'-. '
'-. "shit! i hate not being the bad guys." ./
\ - "jack" in tcor (2004) \
'----.___ .---------'

so, welcome to the world of pa1n magazine, rantmedia, and the digital
revolution. sometimes when i write these introductions, i feel like i should
list off all the potential consequences of free thought and free expression,
much the way sean k does in the 'afternow' intros. nonetheless, when you
actually boil it all down and ignore what the straight media says, this is the
most honest thing you might do all day. here is unadultered free speech. this
is the last respite of communication and ideas. some of the people that come
across this issue may regard what is here as crude, irreverent or even
criminal. if you come to that conclusion, i'm truly sorry your head is that far
up your ass.

the timing of the release of this particular issue coincides with the
releif efforts in areas hit by the tsunami, also with the ongoing offensive
against iraq, the introduction of the ident card into everyday life, and the
continuing fight that a select few of us have kept alive: the fight for our
right to think freely and express ideas, even unpopular ones. adlai stevenson
once said that "a truly free society is one in which it is safe to be
unpopular." if this is the case, and i beleive that his statement has a very
valid underpinning, then unpopular ideas must be treated with the same respect
as any other idea. although i make no apologies for what is published in this
magazine, i also sincerely hope that everyone understands the merit of each
peice. there are peices of articles in this issue that i don't necessarily
personally agree with the viewpoint, but i respect their right to say it.

todays times are incredibly sad ones indeed. it is an actual constant

concern of americans that they will be persecuted for their beleifs or the
things they say. next time you are at a restaraunt, make careful note of how
many people are apparently obfuscating their conversations, openly fearful that
someone might overhear and misconstrue what they are saying. we do not live in
a free society, although many people are under the impression that we do.
however, that is in many ways irrelevant. whether it is forbidden or not,
whether other people defend our right to speak or not, whether it is considered
immoral to voice one's own opinion should it be contrary to the opinions and
beleifs professed by those in positions of power, there are people who will
still make their voices heard.

it's not all doom and gloom, however. there is a great feeling that you can
aquire by suddenly realizing that only you have the power to render yourself
silent or powerless. you are the only person with control over your voicebox,
regardless of what the media, the politicians and the corporate state has to
say about it. you can at any time, should you feel that it is necessary, rise
up and raise your voice in dissent. and if someone should physically take away
your ability to speak, you cannot be robbed of your right to think freely.
there is a common misconception that people can have their rights to
free-thought taken away. this is not actually true, because once you lose your
right to think for yourself, you are no longer alive. "it's the struggles that
defines us, it is the hardships we endure." (hatebreed, "live for this")

every day, each and every one of us in the world, no matter who you are, is
confronted with a barrage of mass media, an on-slaught of the hip thing to be
scard about. one week it's terrorism, the next it's a tsunami, and after that,
it'll probably be back to the war in the mideast. ultimately, however, none of
this is as terrifying as the subtle war that goes on, the war that we each
respectively identify as our lives. it is a constant struggle to maintain a
sense of dignity, direction, integrity and morality in a world where only the
morally bankrupt hold power. we have to re-affirm for ourselves each day what
it is that we beleive in. most people will throw their hands up in frustration
and say the hell with it, and become sucked into the undertow of consumer
culture. but for those of us who refuse to give up, the few that are gaining in
numbers, this is the battle that defines our lives. don't get me wrong, i don't
spend every waking moment thinking about this. i spend every moment thinking
about this, period.
 on the other hand, there is no point in being completely depressing, if
it's possible to fight back with humor. a lot of the articles in this zine are
satire, and are designed to take a little swing at the mainstream, and maybe
make some people laugh. since the world is a very, very wierd place, it helps
to take a moment and laugh at it once in a while. you will find the means to do
so especially in this issue. i'm proud to announce the returns of both
rumblingsky and angel ice, as well as the early return of mephyt from the us
armed forces. instead of droning on incessantly, however, i'll let you get to
the issue. please enjoy pa1n magazine, issue number 13.

- alienbinary

-??????-??------------???????????????--??--------------------------------------
pa1nv13x02---------------------------------------------------------------------
[ letter from the co-editor ]
[ turnspike ]
---------------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv13x02
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

[ smiles and smileys ]

i downloaded a file using bittorrent this week that was a training video from
mcdonald's circa 1972. the video was about how smiling and being curtious when
working the counters at mickey d's made your job easier. it was a simple idea
really. grumpy customers plus grumpy employees made for unsatisfied customers,
amd more stress. however, grumpy customers found it hard to be grumpy in front
of friendly employees, and the "smiles are contagious". beyond this message, i
noticed something more revealing about how things have changed in 30 years.
in one scene the video instructed the employees to look at the customer as much
as possible while interacting with them. more interesting was the fact that
when the order was being taken, the cashier had to write the order down on a
pad. ordinarily, i get just a glance or two during my whole visit at the
resturaunt, and today their fingers merely have to hit one button to signify
that i ordered a double cheeseburger meal. but it isn't just that mcdonalds
have gone soft on their training methods, this is the way we live now. getting
more done with as little interaction as necessary.

i had just this conversation with my girlfriend, who seems to be rapidly

becoming a retrogrouch. she is upset that i spend so much time on the computer.
this isn't so much that i do this when she is around, but that she knows i am
planted on my office chair during my freetime when she isn't here. furthermore,
she has no clue what goes on in cyberspace that would be so interesting anyway.
i tried to explain to her that the internet was a modern-day oracle that from
which you can pull information about every subject imagineable. as an example i
told her that if i wanted to know how to brew a better cup of coffee, i could
google the subject than the answers would be right there. her retort was that
if she wanted to learn how to brew better coffee, she would just go talk to the
person at one of the coffeeshops in town. my reply to that was: why go to a
coffeeshop when you can access that information form my desktop, and i wouldn't
have to talk to anyone. again i found myself seperated from actual human
interaction by convenience and efficiency. although i believe that technology
may be the factor that will save mankind from ourselves, are we heading to a
point that when we redeem ourselves, the high-fives will be from behind our
firewalls?

[ 5up3r b0w1 ]
the big game of american football will be played in jacksonville, florida on
febuary 6th. the reason the former sentence sounds so awkward, is thanks to the
nfl's copyright policy reguarding this game. if you listen to broadcast radio,
you might have heard your local djs attempt to side-step around the nfl's list
of forbidden words like "super bowl", "super sunday", "national football
league", or "afc". and to make matters more complicated the nfl has been known
to shut down parties for showing the game on tv screens that were "too large".
and if there is a fee anywhere related to watching the game live at an
establishment, that too is considered an infringement in the eyes of the nfl.
that means clubs must be careful asking for cover-charges if they have the game
on, and cruise ships may not be able to show the game live, since you must buy
a ticket to board. you may not be a fan of football, but if you are interested
in a case-study of the abuse of copyright law, watch the news wire for the next
few weeks.. here's a few links reguarding this subject from copyfutures:

http://lsolum.typepad.com/copyfutures/2004/10/the_nfl_is_noto.html
http://lsolum.typepad.com/copyfutures/2004/11/ive_talked_alot.html
http://lsolum.typepad.com/copyfutures/2004/09/nfl_attacks_tiv.html

[ how's the weather? ]

the weather always amuses me. here in the heartland of america, i spent new
year's eve at a party at my brother's house. it was so warm that all his
windows were open. i should have worn shorts. there was talk that winter would
never come this year. of course it did, as it always does. eventually the warm
air bubble was popped by cold canadian air, and it will be another 3 months
before the warm air will cram that cold air back north where it belongs.
however the global weather is changing in a big way. my adopted "brother" in
switzerland says that some of the snow that usualy tops the alps is permantly
gone. also the ice sheets in the artic and antartica are both melting away,
extreme weather seems to be getting worse (something that is hard not to notice
here in "tornado alley"), and a new study using "shared computing" by
www.climateprediction.net shows models that predict a global rate as much as
twice what was prevously thought. for a decade, i tried hard to play these
signs off as some left-wing attempt to control the way i live, but the evidence
has won me over. and now my president needs to make the same change of heart
and take positive actions to agknowlege the problem and join other world
leaders in supporting improved enviromental policies. although this maybe be
either a natural cycle or a man-made entity, our actions as industrious humans
are no-doubt speeding it along.

another interesting sidenote in the weather situation is the huge sunspot that
faced the earth on jun. 17th and shot an x-7 class solar flare this way. nasa
said it was the most intense radiation the earth had felt from the sun in 15
years (this suprizes me, since the news-making solar peak we last had was in
the middle of 2000). it not only caused wide spread auroras across canada, the
upper united states, and europe, but it also threw some satellites into
convultions, including the the solar observatory (soho), and a new satellite
launched to measure the earth's "wobble". nasa sent the team on the
international space station to a specialy shielded module for the storm, where
the crew recieved an amount of radiation about equal to an x-ray. nasa has a
story on what would have happened if a moon base was present and the explorers
were outdoors during the storm here:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/27jan_solarflares.htm

-hope my tidbits were as interesting for you as it was therapeutic for me.
issue 13 is our first nestled in the bosom of rantmedia forums. thirteen must
be our lucky number because it feels like we are home, and the response we have
recieved so far has been uplifting. i expect you will write something for us
soon. till next issue.

-??????-??------------???????????????--??--------------------------------------
pa1nv13x03---------------------------------------------------------------------
[ nepenthe ]
[ alienbinary ]
---------------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv13x03
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

! |
\ .-'
'-. '
' '
"...with it, we anesthetize grief, annihlate jealousy, obliterate
rage. those sister impulses towards joy, love, and elation are
anesthetized in stride, we accept as fair sacrifice. for we embrace
prozium in its unifying fullness and all that is has done to make us
great." .
! - equilibrium (2002)
'-.
\

my eyes are having trouble adjusting the harsh glare of the laptop screen.
it's fifty past midnight, or ten of one, two days before christmas, as i write
this. screaming from my headphones, a cocktail playlist of hatebreed, barcode,
slaves on dope, poison the well, converge, and nj bloodline throttles my brain
like an auditory baseball bat. i love this feeling. all i know at the moment is
the selective sensory input that my brain chooses to pay attention to. i am
aware of the smell of amber resin, coming from a small one half by one incht
wooden box on the other side of the room. i am also aware of the throbbing of
my eyelids, as my pupils strain to dilate and expand in accordance with a dark
room in contrast with the white of the unfilled space of the text editor's
window.

i'm just letting my mind wander over the events of the last few days, which
have been peculiar, to say the least. for the most part, i've done something
that i rarely do, which is sleep. i've found that there is something exquisite
about staying in bed for a solid day when you haven't been properly sleeping
for a week. it's like abstaining from smoking a cigarette if you're a pack a
day smoker, and then buying some expensive import cigarettes three days later.
it's a terrible habit to get into; either of them are, actually. the smoker is
rewarding themselves with carcinogens, while the insomniac turned sleep junkie
is gorging himself on melatonin. our brain chemistry is so fragile, yet all we
do is fuck with it. i'm a little over thirty five hours into an accidental
experiment involving the disuse of stimulants. i, like half the fucking planet,
am prescribed a stimulant for attention deficit disorder, and like most of the
prescribed population, i rarely think of going off the dose. today it happened
by accident, a sheer case of botched planning turned into a full fledged
neurological experiment to determine whether or not i was the one behind the
helm when it came to the complete control of my brain. the results of the
experiment are more obvious in the side effects of the situation. i woke up
around 4 pm this evening, way past the dose. i made a judgement call that i've
never done before: i just skipped it. i've been feeling like utter hell lately,
perky in the morning to the point where i worry myself, and crashing fast to
the ground around 6 every night. this winter vacation i've been working at the
radio station, building x86 towers for the offices, screwing around with scsi
arrays and pci configurations, trying to make the best use of all the possible
components at my disposal from the machines that have been dormant in the
offices until someone, cheifly me, had the time to rearrange them back into
usefullness again.

it had become a very upsetting pattern for me, that around the time that i
was halfway into my buddy's radio show, listening along as i worked, my mood
would plummet like debris from a botched space shuttle launch. every night i
felt like i was crashing, as if i had been on coke or meth for the morning and
was paying the price later. i tried abstaining from the coffee, but it didn't
make a difference. i've been wondering what to do lately, i can't very well
keep up this game of moodswings while school is in session, i'll get sent home
for fuck's sake.

so today was different by accident, as i've said. mind you, i worry that
what i'm writing won't make an ounce of sense, as i've been conditioned to
beleive that my performance is dependent on my dilligence in maintaining the
strict pharmaceutical regimin assigned by my doctor. they are the experts, are
they not? funny i should have picked "equilibrium" as the movie to watch
obsessively before break, and "gattaca" as the film of choice for the duration
of break. it was during the second viewing today, that i realized i was feeling
differently.

side effects have a funny way of showing themselves. often, people

attribute the symptoms to something else, since it's not in the american value
system to distrust medicine. quite the contrary, actually. science and medicine
have surplanted our faith in god for the majority of americans. ironic i should
write this two days before the christian portion of our nation celebrates the
birth of jesus. still, it is a singular fact of importance that explains a
great many of our mistakes in daily life. i've been looking around to external
factors for the last week, blaming my lack of a significant other, most of the
time, for not being happy. this will be the first christmas in recent memory
that i haven't shared with a girlfriend or date, and it's lonely as hell.
still, given the opportunity to medicate the feeling of loneliness away, i
would flush the pills down the toilet.

my limbs are shaking, and my eyes still haven't adjusted to the harsh glare
of the laptop screen. you know that your body is not entirely under your
jurisdiction when some of the critical faculties can't do their job if you
neglect to take a small pill. i'm going back and forth from stages of blinking
rapidly to long periods of forgetting to blink. welcome to the world of
withdrawal from ritalin. my skin feels dry; it feels as if it's crawling. my
mouth is always parched, my ears are always ringing and my eyes are constantly
readjusting. tell me that there isn't something wrong with this. i'm prescribed
something to help me focus better, but nowhere in the bargain did i sign on
board to become addicted to speed again.

don't get me wrong. if this weren't winter break, when i can get away with
not acting 'normal,' i wouldn't. fortunately, every single person in the united
states is all kinds of fucked up right now because of the pressure of the
season, and i could wear a clown suit covered in blood and traverse fifth
avenue without anyone so much as pointing a finger. i'm all atwitter, to be
honest, for this year's last minute shopping carnage shots. do you remember
last christmas? at some kmart, two women beat the ever loving snot out of
eachother over the last whatever-the-fuck for their kids, afraid that they
wouldn't be able to purchase their children's affections. it made front page
boston globe, new york times and boston herald. i had the clippings for a
while, and i think i even had the security camera footage on my g4 for a while.
nothing screams of the improprieties of capitalism than two people beating the
shit out of eachother in competition for their children's respect, all in the
name of goodwill towards man. yet none of this has registered until today. what
the hell have i become?

it's important for me to point out that i'm not against medication, unlike
many of my colleagues in the electronic zine world. there are copious articles
on the dangers of a drugged society, many of them with their merits that
shouldn't be ignored. "prozac nation" and the like have sparked mainstream
controversy as well, and it's a good thing. i'm a mental health volunteer, to
add to the irony. for all intents and purposes, i'm a counselor. i work with
children who have been newly diagnosed with mental illness, and help them come
to terms with it. as i've written honestly before, i'm obsessive compulsive,
and i feel no shame about it, as well i shouldn't. i'm potentially manic
depressive and a former drug addict, but i don't make any fucking apologies. we
are what we are, and all we can do is try to improve our situations, but we can
do fuck all about the hand that we've been dealt with. besides, even with all
the bullshit that goes on in my life due to my disorders, i think i would
rather bleed a geneticist dry than let him or her fuck with my dna. blood is
sacred, that i do beleive, and no one should ever be ashamed of the blood in
their veins. we are all human, and that means something, so fuck you if you
have a problem with imperfection.

i digress.

tomorrow morning i will go to starbucks and have a double espresso, and

take my pills again, but the damage is done. i've done an experiment and found
the results to be shocking. something is wrong. how, as a society, have we
become so dependent on pharmacy as the new religion? when was the last time you
left things to chance or tried simply hoping that things would work out? as i
mentioned sensory input at the beginning of this article, i shall return to the
smell of amber resin, for it has something to teach us. amber has been used for
thousands of years holistically. formed from a dried sap, amber resin crystals
give off a divine odor that at once entices and mollifies the senses. there is
something warm about the smell, and it's uses are many. among them, it has been
used to bring harmony to a place of discord, purification to places of unrest
and ill memory, and to raise the positive energy of the sick. never forget the
power of ancient medicine. shamans knew something that we choose to forget: we
come from nature, therefore nature knows at least a little bit about what makes
us tick.

please don't come away from this article thinking that i have bashed
medication, because i'm not an opponent of it's use. please don't think that i
am advocating the medication holiday that i took today, as i've seen literally
lethal effects of people doing so without consulting a doctor. the majority of
people are on medication for a damn good reason, and i have seen very dangerous
pills save people from suicide before. i only mean to let you in on what i am
thinking, because it is so rare that i am in this particular state of mind. i
beleive in the power of science, as i too, am i scientist. but this brings a
conundrum to mind. how do we embrace science without forfeiting our free will
to it? if today i had woken at 8 or 9 in the morning and taken my pills, i very
well might feel the same as i do right now. at the same time, it's important
not to discard the data that we are told to ignore. an hour ago i was in bed,
rocking out to rage against the machine and the pist, trying to thrash myself
to sleep. now i beleive i might simply wander back to the bed and lay down to
rest, having purged my mind of all these thoughts. having done so, because i
feel that they are important. take one thing from this article, if you will--
if i choose to publish this-- take the knowledge that no matter what anyone
says to you, it's your body and your life. feel free to destroy it or repair it
as you see fit. no one person has all the answers, i can promise you that from
a professional standpoint. as a regular person, i can attest to the fact that
it's hard not to want to find the person with all the answers, all the same.

-- alienb, dec. 23, 2004.

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pa1nv13x04---------------------------------------------------------------------
[ marijuana, bubblebath and masturbation ]
[ angel ice ]
---------------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv13x04
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

.-----' '---------.
/
\ "this is a show about the truth, you motherfuckers,
/ as opposed to the lies you get everywhere else. and
.--' the truth is, i'm about to light up a cigarette,
| because they're good for you."
! - decoder, mindwar
'-.

so i was on the way home from rhode island tonight from our
extendeded family christmas party, and i got to thinking about how it had taken
us almost half the time to get there as it was to get back. traffic is what
you're probably thinking, and under regular circumstances you'd probably be
correct, but not tonight. an accident? no. weather? umm... not really, in fact
it was freezing rain on the way there and pretty clear by now. the reason this
drive was taking so long was because my mom had driven there and my dad was
driving now, and i kid you not, he did not go over 70 the entire way home. in
fact, most of the time he stayed in between 55 and 65. honestly i was starting
to get a little frustrated and feeling a little out of control, and i could
tell by the way my mom was sighing every few minutes that she felt the same.
that's when i realized just how bad society and our daily lives have screwed us
up. since when is it not acceptable in certain peoples brains to go the speed
limit, and even to go only 5 miles per hour above? who am i to get frustrated
because my dad is driving safely when there is ice on the road? our lives have
become so fast paced that when anything breaks our stride it is suddenly
immoral and bothersome. the art of relaxation and leisure are now things of the
past that can only be bought, through tylenol p.m. and yoga sessions.
everything we own now has to be shiny and fast to catch our interest. and
everything we watch has to be short and condensed to keep a hold of our
attention; a.d.d. isn't a disorder anymore it's a way of life. the "norm" now a
days is to be running from practice to practice while popping pills to block
the screams of pain from our bodies and guzzling caffeine to make sure we don't
miss a step or god forbid, take a second to breathe. even sex has become
something that fits neatly into our crammed schedules. it's no longer something
we can find ecstasy in but something that is done in hushed quarters on our
lunch breaks or quickly before we finally hit the pillow to get our average of
4 hours of sleep. passion has become "tivo'ed" into our lives. hey if we can
start and stop our favorite shows why can't we plan pleasure? ok stop, right
now. we have now officially gone so far as to take the romance out of making
love. my prescription? masturbation and bubble bath. ok let's not freak out, it
makes sense, just stay with me. first off, if you have ever been in a bubble
bath it is quite literally impossible to feel the pressure of the world around
you, especially if you add the girly stuff like candles, and music (guys you
can for go this the bubbles are good enough on their own). second off, this is
where you can truly relax, knowing you have no other care in the world and give
yourself the attention that you really deserve. this is where the masturbation
comes in. in this kind of setting we can take all the time that we want and
truly enjoy what was commonly known as "pleasure" up until we condensed it at
least. if you look at it in the right way masturbation is actually rejuvenation
and pampering for our over used bodies. this act will restore our appreciation
for ourselves and the need for this kind of ecstasy in our lives. this will
transfer over to our daily lives outside of the tub and greatly increase our
pleasureful interludes with others.

now back to the topic at hand. since i have now fully explained two parts
of the title of this work i will now unveil the meaning of the first part. like
i said before, we are over stressed, over worked, and over tired. it used to be
that the only people who were normal were the athletes and the cheerleaders and
now they are more fucked up than any of us what with the pressure to win and
all of the eating disorders. the only people who take the time out of life that
they deserve, and don't stress themselves with mindless crap are the stoners.
now don't get me wrong i'm not saying that we should all go out and do drugs,
i'm saying that we should all go out and smoke weed. oh don't be so damn
shocked we're all on drugs already anyway! we are addicted to everything,
prozac, botox, adderal, zoloft, advil, hydroxycut, uppers, downers, and
caffeine, yes our precious energy drinks and venti starbucks are drugs too.
we'll take anything to make sure we're happy, perky, attractive, pain free, and
efficient human beings. hell we'll take stuff that causes heart defects, and
even a three day erection thanks to viagra. stoners understand what life is
really about; they get it. you won't see them racing from one thing to another
or stressing themselves out over what clothes we're wearing or how quickly
we're getting to death. instead they sit around with their buddies, or even by
themselves because they don't have the widespread paranoia of being alone, and
they contemplate. they mull over all of the things that we take for granted and
don't even think about. you know what they used to call these people?
philosophers. what the hell ever happened to this occupation? man, what i would
give to sit around in a room with a bunch of other chill intellectuals and come
up with theories. it would certainly be better than waiting on people who think
they're better than you just because they aren't serving the food. then again,
if i were stoned i guess working in a restaurant with food at your fingertips
probably wouldn't be such a bad thing. hmm... that must be the reason that the
food service industry doesn't drug test, now it all makes sense. if only
everyone had the mindset of a stoner no one would ever be rushing anywhere,
there would be no traffic, no long lines, and of course we would never be
bored. we wouldn't have to spend all of our money on the newest, fanciest
electronics because our own hand would be enough entertainment for a life time.
everything would take on new importance and we might finally get our true
priorities in order. and just to put your politically correct minds at ease,
the only thing marijuana is a gateway to is contentment. so light up a blunt,
hop in the tub and fuck yourself. have fun!

-??????-??------------???????????????--??--------------------------------------
pa1nv13x05---------------------------------------------------------------------
[ snowtracks: a journal, pt. 1 ] a memoir.
[ alienbinary ]
---------------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv13x05
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

december 25, 2004.

rocking out to "binary nation" by chemlab. you know you've reached that age
when everything's not so much fun anymore, when the best gifts you have to go
buy for yourself. no kidding, i went out two days before christmas on request
of someone who won't be named, to buy myself something small because they had
forgotten to get me anything. isn't family fantastic?

naturally, though, i went straight for the jugular on this one. i picked up
my own personal 'oxidizer' cd at the only place i'll still buy physical cds and
wrapped it up. "to me, from me, with love." jared louche, if you're reading
this, you've outdone yourself this time. i heard parts of the album when i was
putting last issue out, but now i can honestly say, you guys rocked hard with
this one. also, it's kind of an ego trip to see a song called "binary nation."
regardless, i'm chilling up in my room at my parents house, as per usual, on
christmas day. i've never been happier to have a holiday over with and done.

normally, i'd be writing in my journal or talking on the net to my friends,

comparing the loot, but i don't think that's in the cards this year. i feel
old, though. everytime i found a gift card to a book store, i thought about
what manual i needed, and how it would save me money for my job, and more than
that, i've never had so many fucking starbucks cards at one time. you'd think
that everyone i know had a surplus of them, and was in dire need of a person to
pawn them off on. i wonder if i'm hard to shop for. i wonder why i care.

* * *

for the first time in a while, the phone hasn't made a peep. not even to
say that it's running low on juice. i only hope that means everything's fine,
and not that i've horribly mangled the insides of it from playing around too
much. it can happen. i remember a month ago i was bored and set my desk phone
lcd to read "alienbinary" when i should have been studying. i ended up spending
so much time hacking around in the bios that i even reprogrammed the ringtones.
on a corldess. who does that?

* * *

i was talking to a friend of mine about something blatantly sexual tonight,

and as i was lacing up my boots, i went off topic and explained that i just
bought new bates enforcer paratrooper boots. she replied that this had nothing
to do with sex, but that was still interesting, to which i made the following
statement:

alienolotry (7:35:46 pm): not for me. boots and sex go hand in
hand in my mind because i'm not okay in the head

* * *

"some motherfuckers always trying to ice-skate up a hill."

-- blade

december 26, 2004.

i love that quote. if i wasn't so picky about the scars i choose to keep on
my skin, i would probably have it tattooed on my arm, but i digress. i went to
the movies for the first time in several months. it's not that i don't like
movies, it's that most of them suck, since the industry has taken hold of film
completely. still, i have an almost unhealthy obsession with the "blade"
trilogy, and it just so happened that i had the day off. actually, that's a bit
of a misnomer. the truth is, i work freelance, so i never really *have* to go
to work, unless i get called in on an emergency, which happens more than i'd
like. so, like any junkie needing his fix, i dropped down into aim, to see who
was around. my memory works in wierd ways, and i was thinking about the last
blade flick, blade ii, or, as it's less commonly known, "bloodhunt". see? i
have a problem. i need a new hobby. sorry, back to the story.

i went to see bloodhunt with a girl i may have referred to in earlier

issues as metalgirli. it seems like it would have to be three or four years
ago, i'll have to check the dvd case to find out. anyway, before i go on about
my fixation with snipes' masterpeice, i'll have to tell you a little side
story. roughly a million years ago, when i was fifteen, i was going to take
courses at this quasi-camp style school over the summer in c programming. when
i got there, i found that it was boring as shit. on the other hand, they did
give me a shell account, and that was good enough for me. they had all sorts of
technically oriented courses at this place, even one in rc modeling. i entered
the demolition derby contest with one of the cheapest models out there, and i
won. unfortunately, i was sort of disqualified, because on close inspection of
my wonder-craft, they found that i was reinforcing the little sucker with steel
and polymers. being a day student, i had the benifit of going home and into my
little workshop where i had access to all sorts of gear. i'm glad, in
retrospect, at least, that i restrained myself from looping an ignition switch
to the main servo motor and an estes rocket engine, because i think i would
still be paying people back for the damage i would have done to their rc cars.
it makes no difference now, though. that steel shod worked great. i would smack
my controller like the batteries had died or something was shorted, so the
other competitors would get all riled up for an easy kill, and they would gun
their engines straight at my apparently frozen vehicle. at the last moment, i
would either toggle the switch and accelerate at them head on, move out of the
way so that they would slam into the concrete and the laws of inertia would
destroy them, or my favorite, to just let them find out "what my car was made
of." a 400 dollar model met it's end at the merciless hands of my little
deathmachine, all because the steel plate i put under several coats of plastic
glue and krylon spraypaint acted as a ramp, and the damn thing flew off and
overturned, smashing itself to peices.

like sean kennedy says "wear body armor."

so it turns out that there is a such thing as bad-boy appeal.

unfortunately, i don't have an ounce of it anymore, because i cleaned up my
act, but when i was a punk kid, i had oodles of it. this attracted the
attention of one of the cits, a gorgeous girl who taught the intermediate html
course. wouldn't you know it, when i was disallowed from returning to the
program, i never got her number or contact information. four years later, or
something to that effect, she found me through a website i used to run under my
"christian" name. (i hate that term, but it beats "real name", since
alienbinary is my real name.) we met up again soon after that, and i have to
say i was impressed. ladies, there is nothing sexier to a decker than a girl
who knows just as much as we do. it's just fucking hot. i'm still a little bit
miffed on a couple of the various stunts she managed to pull. number one, how
she found me. number two, how she hacked my livejournal. number three, how the
fuck she managed to learn more about digital audio player tech than i do, which
i found out she does. i'll explain this in a bit.

feeling nostalgic, i dropped into aim and it turns out that it was my turn
to play, and wouldn't you know it, metalgirli was online. it took a whole forty
five seconds to convince her to see blade: trinity with me. before the show, we
were eating thai food, something i had never done before. she, being the
cultured one between the two of us, was explaining the various customary dishes
and what to order, and what not to order. after the waiter took our menus, we
somehow got on the topic of pdas. i think it started with a conversation about
cellular phones that grew out of some bitch ten feet away with a ring tone that
was so loud i almost wet my pants, but i'm not sure. regardless, we were on the
subject, and it turned towards digital audio players. wouldn't you know it,
like i said, she knew more about them than i did. in retrospect, my pride would
have been seriously injured if it had been anyone but her.

we got to the theatre early, and i bought the tickets, about ten bucks (us)
a peice. ten dollars is a lot to see a movie, when you think about it. i mean,
i've been to music shows that have more action than half the "action" films out
there, and the music's better, plus the price is often free or five bucks. this
is the first gripe i have with the money grubbing assclowns at the mpaa.

eventually, we got in to see our film, and there were about 11 people total
in the whole theatre. before you make a judgement on the successfullness of the
movie, understand that we had snuck into several other films prior to ours
starting, and there were significantly less people in the other ones, so blade
3 is doing just fine, thank you. i'm used to those wierd "don't smoke, drink,
eat or fuck" etc., psas that they show before the coming attractions, but this
was the first time i've ever seen an anti-piracy ad on the silver screen.
motherfucker, i almost broke something when it started. it was like this: "you
wouldn't steal a car." (show man stealing car) "you wouldn't steal a purse"
(short clip of man stealing handbag) "you wouldn't steal a dvd" (you can guess
what this frame was about) and then "buying bootleg dvds is stealing." in big
bold, sort of trembling letters all over the screen. i'll go into that at some
other time.

at the moment, i think i'll just go back to watching blade ii before i pass
out and have to go to work. i hope you enjoyed this odd trip down memory lane
and the pseudo rant, because i had no idea that was what i was going to write
about until i was halfway through this entry. that's why they call it stream of
consciousness, i suppose. goodnight.

* * *

12.27.2004 introspection.

i just got done with the movie "pieces of april," which is a tremendous
peice if you haven't seen it. i was watching it with my sister, because i
wanted to share it with her. it's odd that sometimes all we have to do in order
to open up to the people we love is to share a movie or a song. not in the
file-sharing sense, but in the sense that by playing a film that means a lot to
me for another person, i feel like i am letting them into a part of me, and who
i am. when you identify with art, it's because something in your very soul
cries out "that's me!," and holds on as fast as it can. when we see
representations of lives that have paralells to ours, we can find insight into
what we would otherwise be blind to. perhaps this is why art is so important,
and why i spend all the time i can on the projects i do for rantmedia, because
ultimately, the aim is to give everyone a voice.

originally, in the story above, i included a peice about how the mpaa put
an ad in the movie even at the theatre, and my reactions to this. i took it out
because it detracted from the story. ironically, it wasn't the story of how i
met metalgirli that i originally intended to tell. it's hard in this day and
age, as a cyberpunk especially, to try and sort out what is and what is not the
enemy. ultimately, it would be nice to say that there is no enemy, and that we
should just be happy, but that's not the case. still, it is not unlikely that
for the warrior in the battle for our minds, determining friend from foe will
become increasingly difficult if you don't know what you're looking for.

as i watched 'peices', i was thinking about how the dvds i own are all in
some way giving money to an organization i don't support. that's not entirely
true, though. a lot of my films are independent, but even then. i bought this
particular flick because it spoke to me. it spoke specifically to something in
my past and in my life, and i wanted to own it. what the corporate/political
state has got to learn is that we are not below paying for the things we want.
indeed, if something warrants the fee being charged, then i'll pay it. if not,
i just abstain from it, but i know i'm a minority in that situation.

music, film, visual art, sculpture, dance, whatever, these are all things
that remind us why we're actually alive; albeit some of them remind me why i
don't always treasure that fact. still, art is a form of communication that is
vital to the survival of our species. if we are ever to find a solution to the
controversy over digital rights, it must come from the understanding that art
is an entity that exists independent from it's corporate masters. art isn't
something you can bottle and sell, and even putting a film on dvd doesn't
guarantee that the consumer will get the full experience. for me, i'm a softie,
so i can be moved to tears by a lot of movies. give me a good plot, a mild
sedative, and a melancholic climax, and you can find me blubbering like a baby
in a corner. it's something i'll admit to. but see, that reaction is fucking
magic. when this happens, that means whatever i'm watching has reached out to
me on some fundamental level that you or i can only try and understand. most
people will watch a film or look at a peice of art and not have any reaction to
it except the basic neurological responses to the uses of color theory. but
once in a while, the peice will slam someone to their news in it's
righteousness, and for that person, there are few gifts greater.

-??????-??------------???????????????--??--------------------------------------
pa1nv13x06---------------------------------------------------------------------
[ snowtracks: a journal, pt. 2 ] a memoir.
[ alienbinary ]
---------------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv13x06
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

12.29.2004 10:24 pm "my name is alienbinary, and i'm an addict..."

i've been reading "dry." by augusten burroughs, one of the paperback

memoirs i picked up when i worked at a bookstore, before it came out. i have
advance versions of almost every book that was worth it's salt on the new york
times bestseller list for the past year. anyway, burroughs has an incredible
style, passive in the sense that it never assails the reader, but aggressive
in it's ability to convey forcefully that which must be expressed. in "dry.",
he's telling about getting sent to rehab by the advertising agency he used to
work for, and how he chose a place called the "proud institute," which is a gay
rehab facility in the middle of nowhere. when i say gay, by the way, i mean
homosexual, just in case anyone was misinterpreting what i've written as being
if nothing else, euphemistically in poor taste. burroughs is writing as a gay
alcoholic advertising executive from manhattan, which is pretty much the cream
of the crop for stereotypes, but you don't find stories like this one in other
books. no one's got the fortitude to be as honest, which is why i'm reading his
book, when for all intents and purposes, i should probably be reading something
much lighter and sunnier. i've been having a wretched time lately, and
rehashing old drug habits is salt in the wound.

as he described the institutionalized chairs with the industrial molding

and the fireproofing, i let my mind wander, and match up with memories of my
own. unlike a lot of people, i admit to what i am. i'm someone who has fucked
up a lot in his life, and is doing his best to stay afloat. he was just
describing the type of glass where the chicken-wire is embedded inside the
pane, so that it can withstand blunt force and still remain intact. his
descriptions were not loaded with adjectives, because every single one of us
can pull up a memory of the clinical glass walls. i realized that as i was
reading. no matter who you are, you have probably been on one side or the other
of that chicken-wire divider, and you know exactly what it feels like. if
you're a police officer, you might be used to interrogating prisoners behind
the protective shield. if you've ever been in an er triage, you know that the
nurse's station is plated that way for people who lose control. if you've ever
been to a bank in a seedy part of town, you know what it means. that wire and
glass tells everyone around that there is a gigantic division between the
parties on their respective sides. that glass speaks of loneliness.

as the first character in his group therapy session was introduced, i could
feel myself getting red-faced. i was embarassed, i felt like i too, was a new
member of an aa meeting, and i had to listen to a complete stranger pour out
his soul. after the story about the man who drove drunk and crashed the car
with his mom inside, i put the volume down and went to the kitchen downstairs
for a bottle of water. yes, i am eccentric in the sense that i prefer my water
bottled, not from the tap. eat me. anyway, crossing the threshold of the
stairs, with each passing step, i began to feel more at ease. i realized that
there are thousands of people in the world who will read that chapter and
seperate themselves from it. they won't internalize the story because it scares
them. they will learn nothing from it and waste their time. myself, on the
other hand, i embraced the story and allowed it to carry on in my mind as i
read each passing line. to me, the chance to identify with a situation that's
not entirely unlike something i've been through before is a gift. furthermore,
i've been through this sort of thing already. the world can either be a scarier
place or a simpler place once you experience what burroughs details; either you
can run away from what you know, or you can accept it, and when you emerge
alive and almost unscathed, you can thank god for every moment of the
tribulation. just a thought.

"scars remind us that the past is real" - papa roach

or, if you prefer dr. lecter...

"what a collection of scars you have. never forget who gave you
the best, and be grateful. our scars have the power to remind
us that the past is real." -- thomas harris

* * *

january 1st, 2005 happy new year. i guess.

i went to a party last night, saw nemisis for the first time in ages. it
was good to see him. before the party, a mutual friend of ours picked me up at
my parents' house and we cruised around running errands. it occurred to me
while i was shooting around with him, buying the milk or pausing to pick up a
pack of butts, that it had been almost a month since i was riding shotgun just
running errands. the peculiar thing was, i was digging it. what a lot of people
don't realize, is that the things most of us consider to be trivial or routine
are actually incredible. allow me to explain.

if you have a moment to pick up a gallon of milk for someone, you have to
consider that you actually had a moment in which you could do that. this means
that for at least a few minutes, you actually had free time, or rather, choice
over what to do with your time. this is extroardinary. these days, people plan
out for days, weeks, months, even years in advance what they are going to do.
they have their itineraries all planned out; most of these agenda packing
people think this is a good thing. i venture that it's really not. i think it's
actually a really sad, pathetic way to live. if you have everything planned
out, you leave no room for life. you leave no space for the flux that comes
with the impossibility of actually pinning down the day to day life on this
planet; you ignore the fact that every day something new can happen that will
fuck up your day planner and send you into rescheduling, scribbling out,
changing plans, color coding and rain check hell.

on the other hand, if you allow yourself to have gaps in your day, you can
learn to appreciate them. they can be so damn sweet. ironically, the time spent
at the pizza joint stealing food from nemisis' workplace while he closed up
shop was some of the best spent all night. i think on estimate, we spent about
three hours, just drinking doctor pepper from the machine, supressing laughter
at some of the customers, digging up old stories about each other that the
other had strategically repressed-- for all the right reasons one would repress
a memory-- was the highlight of the night. i got caught more or less with my
pants down when someone brought up the time i emptied this boat looking trash
can in the cafeteria, put a chair in the middle of it, hopped on it and had
someone wheel me around while i sang "row, row, row your boat"-- right smack
into the drug counselor (an accident, i swear)-- landing me my only
pseudo-suspension from public school that i can recall. anyway, back to last
night.

we planned to go to a party where it was five bucks a head, all you can
drink. i thought this was a terrible deal, at least for me, since i don't drink
at all. more to the point, i don't do any drugs, so i was shit out of luck when
the alternative was passed around. i went anyway, my buddy spotted me for the
five, since it wasn't fair to expect me to pay for the alcohol i wouldn't be
drinking, and we hung out. i will say one thing: no one got into a knife fight
or a brawl, which is a plus for this particular crowd. in retrospect, that
being the norm, i don't know why we went in the first place. regardless, the
party was kind of funny, a little cozy in a two room apartment (with kitchen)
and about twenty or thirty people. i spent the majority of the night catching
up with an old friend of mine who seems to have made it his hobby to get
himself caught doing things that aren't legal. he had been drinking since noon,
and it was nearing, and then past, midnight, so he was pretty much 'krunked'.
at one point, he dropped a blunt on his polyester and about two minutes later,
he responded-- way after the blunt had burned a hole in his crotch-- by jumping
up and spitting out the words "anyone seen a blunt?" he said those words, i
should mention, but not exactly or necessarily in that particular order. he
gave me a look of resignation when someone handed him a freshly chilled bottle
of champaigne for the countdown to 2005, and explained that this meant he was
just going to have to drink it, he supposed.

after the whole count-down, happy new year thing, i text messaged a kiss to
metalgirli, and we left the apartment. nemisis wasn't short in following, he
was busy explaining how it was physically impossible for the fireworks we had
been watching to have been the ones from the charles river, if for no other
reason than the fact that it was an hour and a half past midnight, not exactly
the time when they shoot the pyrotechnics off the famous barge in boston
harbor.

on the way to the rendez-vous point, my friend and i observed with the sort
of cool reserve you would expect from the crime scene unit (i was wearing a csu
black t-shirt, army/navy surplus, after all,) a splatter pattern that occuppied
a large portion of the rear part of our train car on the b-line. someone had
been quite clearly clocked because they forgot to bring what must have been a
half pint of their own blood with them when they left the train. a woman across
from us-- the only other person in the rear of the train-- asked me if it was
really blood, and i pulled out my palm pilot and said "if it photographs like
blood, it's blood... yep, it's definitely a splatter pattern. someone got
maimed hardcore." i still have that picture in ram on my palm, if anyone would
like to see it. first stabbing of the new year, i guess.

i'll leave this journal entry for now, as i feel like either taking another
nap or simply going back to bed. my lungs are still tired from the overly smoky
apartment and running around int he cold last night. i think i'll burn some
sage in a bit and take a shower, but that's assuming i get out of bed at all
today. like i said, happy new year, sort of.

-??????-??------------???????????????--??--------------------------------------
pa1nv13x07---------------------------------------------------------------------
[ my wep adventure ]
[ the unduhtakah ]
---------------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv13x07
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

so there was this great article at securityfocus that spurred my curisosity

to mess with wi-fi in ways that i have never messed before. the article
was titled wep: dead again, authored by michael ossmann [1]. in it he
discussed korek's new statistical wep (wired equivalent privacy) attack and
subsequent tools. again, a jump start to my curiosity.

i'm just going to splay out in this article everything i tried with
wireless, success and failure. well, maybe just the success. i'll
give commands, as well as some tips and tricks - i will not tell you how to
install programs in linux. speaking of linux, i use red hat 9 on my laptop.
and an orinoco wireless card. and so should you.

[ editor's note: freebsd and a first gen ]

[ airport card, so there. - ab. ]

i was dying to crack wep after reading the article. where should i begin?
well, i already had kismet up and running so i started there.

but before we go into kismet, let me discuss how my networking is

configured. i don't have my orinoco configured to come up automatically and
grab an ip. no, no, no. i comment out the following line in
/etc/hotplug/net.agent and bring it up manually:

exec /sbin/ifup $interface

this does two things. first, it solved the old "bap" error. second and
more importantly, it allows me to bring the interface up exactly how i want
depending on environment and circumstances. you'll see what i mean later.
props to dekonta for figuring this out [2].

so i fired up kismet to see what was around. hmm. three networks, two 54g
and my 11b. two of the three were encrypted, including mine, and all three
were using the default channel, 6. of course i would never attempt to crack
my neighbor's wep, nor could i with my b-only equipment. i did learn that i
was too lazy to perform a wireless survey previously to reduce interference
and improve performance. oh well. at least i changed my net to channel 10
then to focus my packet collection efforts.

now i'm ready to crack some wep. from the article, i decided to try the,
seemingly, most effective tool, aircrack [3]. it also made sense to use the
associated tool, airodump, to collect the packets. first i had to bring up
the interface. and i always, always, spoof the mac before i bring it up.
hence, the hotplug hack.

to do that, i use a simple script by dual_parallel called macninja [4].

# perl macninja.pl -b eth1

with the -b switch macninja spoofed a belkin mac and brought the interface
up. from the aircrack docs came the command to put the card into monitor
mode.

# iwpriv eth1 monitor 1 10

i then went and surfed furiously. but it was taking forever to get any
amount of ivs (intialization vectors) that would be useful. ah ha! i'll
stream my favorite internet radio station [5] to generate the necessary
packets. no dice. in fact it was slower. i decided to start a torrent.
torrent sites still do exist, and, oh yeah, jackpot. the "interesting"
packet numbers were flying. how many do i need? michael had the quickest
crack times between 300,000 and 1 million packets. the aircrack docs
stated 500,000 to 1 million packets. i shot for 500,000.

# airodump eth1 wlan.pcap

i collected half-a-million packets, manifested in wlan.pcap.cap and

wlan.pcap.csv, and started cracking. i thought it fairly obvious to stay
with michael's aircrack fudge value of 4.

# aircrack -f 4 -n 128 wlan.pcap.cap

i let it run for a few minutes, became impatient, and hit ctrl+c. damn my
television generation attention span. since michael had single-digit crack
times in the 300,000 to 500,000 range, i aimed for 300,000 packets. i let
that run for an hour, but since it only had the first four bytes of the
key, i ctrl+c'd out of that.

hacking takes time. this i learned.

the next night i started another torrent and went to bed. my goal was to
collect 1 million packets. i awoke to about 980,000 packets and stopped
the capture at 1 million. before leaving for work, i started the cracking
process, only to find the results when i returned.

after a long hard day of corporate slave labor, my spirits were lifted by
two simple words...

key found!

with 1,004,664 ivs aircrack found the wep key in just over six minutes,
trying 297 keys at 48 keys per minute.
 newer equipment and wpa (wi-fi protected access) are making these attacks
less and less likely. it's still important to know how to do such things,
and to know the vulnerabilities surrounding your information security.
manufacturers aren't going to secure your network for you. the government
isn't going to ask if they can look at your data. the proliferation of
encryption needs to be accelerated within the community. it needs to be
used properly and universally.

hacking isn't about breaking into other's networks. it's about securing
your own and those you care about in the community. strengthening that
ideal was the payoff at the end of my wep adventure.

[1] http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1814
[2] http://www.kismetwireless.net/forum/general/messages/1058245225.517217
[3] http://www.cr0.net:8040/code/network/aircrack/
[4] http://www.oldskoolphreak.com/tfiles/perl/macninja.txt
[5] http://www.rantradio.com/rr-talk24.pls

-??????-??------------???????????????--??--------------------------------------
pa1nv13x08---------------------------------------------------------------------
[ mkultra for the new millennium ]
[ rumblingsky ]
---------------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv13x08
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

x--- o.o ---x

"the cure will be administered to survivors once it has

been decided that enough people have died."

- biohazard, sound byte from "uncivilization"

x--- o.o ---x

just when you thought it was safe to take hallucinogens...

in december of 2004, a story was released to the mainstream media about how
the us food and drug administration (fda) had approved a harvard proposal to
test the effects of the drug ecstasy in terminally ill patients. specifically,
the study was reportedly aimed at those suffering from severe anxiety related
to being diagnosed with terminal cancer. of course, as always, most of the
major mainstream news sources simply cut and pasted a couple of articles
written the same way rather than actually think or speak for themselves. well,
fear not my inquisitive friends. that's what i'm here for.

for those who do not know, there has all ready been a major study performed
by the us government regarding psychotropic drugs and the effects they have on
people. it was called the mkultra program. in april of 1953, cia director allen
dulles approved the mkultra program which was initially aimed at helping the
united states gain the upper hand in the clandestine "mind wars," concept.
however, the program's goals were quickly broadened to encompass the entire
concept of mind control. despite the fact that numerous documents have since
surfaced that somehow managed to avoid the cia paper shredder, it would seem
that the government, with the aid of the media, continues to do a fine job of
keeping the realities of the mkultra program buried in the shroud of,
"conspiracy theories."
 writer jon elliston quotes one cia auditor who wrote: "precautions must be
taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to
conceal these activities from the american public in general. the knowledge
that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have
serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles."

so, how is the fda approved study related to the old cia mkultra program?
well, it looks as though it only took 51 years for the government to figure out
a way to remove the, "unethical and illicit activities," aspect from the
project, allowing them to go public to some degree. despite the fact that
history has a way of repeating itself, it is possible to learn from one's
mistakes.

the goals may be the same, but the method is what has changed. instead of
using tactics such as secretly dosing unsuspecting victims and studying their
reactions, now they can openly say they are searching for ways of easing the
suffering of terminally ill patients. they've taken an insidious, secret
project and disguised it as an openly discussable, humanitarian issue. could
the honey be any sweeter? after all, who better to use as guinea pigs than
those who are all ready slated to die? especially when you can say you're
trying to help them. what's almost amusing is that you can't legally kill a
terminally ill patient who wants to die, but you can test the effects of
illegal, thought altering drugs on them.

of course, fda approval for studying the "potential" medicinal properties

of hallucinogens has been going on for quite some time. there are a number of
studies underway as you read this across the country using drugs such as lsd,
ibogaine, mescaline, dmt, and pcp, just to name a few. the practice of telling
half-truths by the fda regarding hallucinogens and the studies involving them
is confirmed in an article posted on their own website. paula kurtzweil wrote
the article, "medical possibilities for psychedelic drugs," in which she gives
an account of the history of hallucinogens. she states, "during the 20 years
following world war ii, lsd was used to study brain chemistry and to determine
its effects in patients with schizophrenia and other mental disorders. it also
was studied for use in conjunction with psychotherapy--with, for example,
alcoholics and cancer patients. due to concern about possible unpredictable
side effects and abuse, lsd research came to a virtual halt by the mid-1970s.
unsupervised use of these drugs by millions of young adults in the 1960s made
use and abuse of psychedelic drugs a major public health concern." the
discerning reader would note that there is absolutely no mention of the mkultra
program, despite the proven existence of the project during that same time
period. could it be a coincidence that "lsd research came to a virtual halt by
the mid-1970s" while it was during the mid-1970s that the truth about the
mkultra project began to surface? perhaps it was merely an oversight on the
part of the author. more likely, it was just another attempt to conveniently
"forget" a vital segment of our government's history concerning experamentation
with psychotropic drugs.

whatever the reason, on or off the record, it is clear that the united
states government is still experamenting with the effects of hallucinogenic
drugs upon the psyche of human beings. the names and places may have changed,
but the song remains the same. you can call it a conspiracy theory if that will
help you sleep better at night. personally, i'd prefer a few sleepless nights
if the result prevents me from waking up with a sore rear end in the morning.

sources:

baldor, lolita c., associated press writer;

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041228/ap_on_he_me/
ecstasy_cancer_treatment_4

elliston, jon, mkultra: cia mind control;

http://www.parascope.com/ds/mkultra0.htm
(note: this is an incredibly thorough article, complete with the authentic cia
documents that somehow managed to escape destruction.)

kurtzweil, paula, medical possibilites for psychedelic drugs;

http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/795_psyche.html

-??????-??------------???????????????--??--------------------------------------
pa1nv13x09---------------------------------------------------------------------
[ untitled ]
[ mephyt ]
---------------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv13x09
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

i've recently come to a junction in my life, just as real as any train

station, or bus terminal. hundreds of doors i could open, many more i either
haven't seen, or aren't allowed to open. each of these is a different
destination, in it's simplest form, but first i have to run an obstacle course
to get to whatever i want to do. i have the option to do nearly whatever i
want, but first i have to choose.

this choice has been one of the hardest, and simplest for me to see. i have
to choose to succeed, to a degree, in the world. it almost feels as if i have
the eyes of a thousand generations on me at times, looking down on me with
scorn and anticipation. watching and waiting to see if i'll stick to what i may
have
started, or abandon the nothing that i have achieved. to build structure out of
matchsticks and hope that it survives the hurricane that is my life. to
describe what has happened in my life in the recent past couldn't be done in
a single sitting, as i could never fully do it all justice without explaining
how i managed to get where i am from just a couple of months of changes.
conversations between ab (alienbinary) and myself on the subject have taken up
the better portion of the dark hours of many an evening. pacing back and forth,
trying to communicate the things in me now that i can't begin to fathom the
full repercussions of. it is in this, that i have begun to think that possibly
a spark of something has begun to emerge. perhaps something that will help me
at some point to either become a new individual, or a stronger version of
myself.

often, i find myself trying to describe to various people the ways that i
have been feeling about life and survival recently. promises broken and ideals
created. the very stuff that dreams are made of and lives crushed by. oddly
strange how this can all be within a single thought, but these things reside in
the same corner of my mind, and refuse to take their seperate corners as i have
been trying to force them to do. like a pair of tired boxers about to overthrow
the referee and declare a tie on their own, my thoughts wander about my head.
refusing to take orders any longer, and nearly gaining their own personality
unto themselves.

in what manner could you feasibly describe a hunger to succeed, and a fear
of the same?

the situations i find myself in recently are giving me nearly everything

i've wanted, but i still can't believe that half of what i've achieved is
remotely real. constantly, i've found myself trying to force my brain to
comprehend the reality that i've chosen to envelope myself in. heavy fog or
mist can hide nearly anything, as most individuals who have to drive through it
know. the problem i now have is that everything i need was within reach what
only seems to be moments ago, and now it's managed to become seperated from me,
still
heading the same direction, but their voices are becoming fainter as i
progress. possibly, the direction they were going was the one i should have
gone in the first place?

to all questions, there has to be an answer. a question without an answer

isn't much of a question at all, in at least a practical sense, a real sense.
something has to have at least a semblance of tangibility to be remotely
believable. life right now, doesn't have that same feeling of reality that my
own thoughts are giving me. life seems to almost be less real than my own
imagination. how an artist would love to be in my mind, i'm sure.

[ alienb's note: i'd nominate jackson pollack ]

[ for the dubious task of illustrating meph's ]
[ mind, but that's because i have a really ]
[ sick sense of humor. -ab ]

back to the matter of choices though. i have the choice to do with my life
as i please at the moment. i have the choice to leave, and finally achieve the
fear in my mind of being forgotten completely. i also have the choice of
trudging onwards, pressing against the winds and the elements, attempting to
locate where everything i think that i need is. or, i could simply stand still.
the choice, i suppose, is really mine. no one else seems to be able to make it
for me unless, that is, i'm hiding some facet of myself that could take over my
body, personality, and everything that makes me that which others percieve me
as. choices, choices...

in the meantime though, i have to work on finding the things that i need,
or at least think i need. perhaps if it were less difficult to figure out what
i was looking for, that "thing" in the haystack wouldn't be so difficult to
discover. if i could get my body and mind to cohesively work as a unit, instead
of fighting each other, there would be a greater chance of finding this fabled
"contentment". or maybe i should let it all fall to pieces around me, and wait
until the ground has all settled so i can more easily pick apart the remains
and sift through the rubble. at least then i'd know where i went wrong.
unfortunate that you can never truly revisit the things that you left behind.

-??????-??------------???????????????--??--------------------------------------
pa1nv13x10---------------------------------------------------------------------
[ all he wanted ]
[ alienbinary ]
---------------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv13x10
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

in order to get yourself in the right frame of mind for what you're going
to read, read the lyrics to "hanging on the corner" by blood for blood, here:
http://www.plyrics.com/lyrics/bloodforblood/hangingonthecorner.html

"down past hayes square is where the wealthy dine /

where they laugh and drink fine wine. / well two blocks
over is where the sergent died / in a hail of gunfire /
on a warm summers night. / all you forgotten in the
 projects i hear ya'. / all you numbers in the cell block,
we care. / all you sweatin in the detox, / we care."

-- blood for blood, 'hanging on the corner'

if you ever want your mind blown, find someone down on their luck enough to
sit in the freezing cold with an empty coffee cup trying to gather enough
pennies for breakfast. that person is not only hardened, but experienced. time
and society may do their numbers on these people, and often they do. some are
so far gone, understanding what they are saying is next to impossible. however,
if you put in as much patience as you can, the stories you will hear, and the
perspective you might gain is astronomical. i could stay at college for nine
years and not learn as much in classrooms or lecture halls as i do from my
urban excursions. don't get me wrong, i don't go out like a missionary, looking
for the poor. i just go out to do something i need to do, and it always happens
that on the way, there are about fifty vagrants or transient bums who are just
itching to tell a story. i guess i'm a sucker for idealism, because i've
listened to so many of these, and i beleive it's something i must do. if your
wallet has a twenty dollar bill in it, then you have a voice, according to the
socioeconomic system right now. imagine what life would be like if you never
had the chance to say something. what would you do if you could never tell
someone about your day? i dunno, ask a homeless person. the following peices
are about various encounters in my travels that stand out in my mind. they are
the ones that needed to be relayed, these stories are told by me, because too
many people don't have a voice of their own. i can only hope that i do them a
little bit of justice in my storytelling. everything in this peice is true,
don't doubt that for a second. you can, but you'll be missing the point.
extroardinary encounters happen every single second, it's just that only once
in a while are you the person having one.

* * *

everything in me said 'go.' open sores on his lips, alcohol on his breath,
the man on the corner of newbury and boylston was a poster image of what people
are reduced to when the system fails. i reached into my pocket and fumbled for
a bill amidst a plethora of crumpled holiday receipts, hoping against hope to
pull a single out. there are very few moments more awkward than the one in
which you accidentally flash a twenty dollar bill to a starving man.

i dropped the single into his beggar's cup, hoping that i might be on my
way right after the transaction. to be honest, i was already too high strung,
worried about things that were ultimately not that important. the holidays tend
to do that to you; the whole season makes me forget reason and my priorities
get all kinds of screwed up. strapped on my shoulder was my blue hemp fiber
messenger bag that i've had since i was sixteen. sewn almost completely across
every available surface are patches for bands, mostly hardcore and industrial.
this was the last thing i expected a man on the brink of starvation to care
about.

"you a punk?" he asked, not in any derogitory way, but just curious. "you
look like a punk rocker, man." he explained. i didn't think so, and i still
don't, but it's neither here nor there. music is a conversation peice and
obviously this man just wanted to talk. having six or so hours before i had to
be anywhere in particular, i obliged him for a moment. that moment turned into
almost twenty minutes if i had to estimate. "name some bands." he said,
explaining "i used to be into punk, before all this," at which he gestured to
the way he was dressed, his beggar's cup and haggard expression. "you're
favorite?," he prodded, obviously excited to talk about music. it occurred to
me right then that he wasn't playing me either. this man hadn't stopped me to
talk about music so i would think he was cool. he was past that. i think when
every meal is almost guaranteed not to be there for you, you stop caring about
the petty things. music's universal, it's like the way people share things they
can't express any other way. when you sing, or even share music, you share
something that's important to you. almost a peice of you.

"my guilty pleasure lately has been hatebreed, to be honest." i told him,
truthfully. he blanked for a moment, and then when his mind snapped back to the

then and there, he was oblivious to what had just happened. he asked again what
my favorite was, and i told him again that i was listening to hatebreed at the
moment. he seemed to not understand. it was then that i began to peice together
that the person i was talking to wasn't entirely of sound mental condition. his
blackouts were frequent, and i could smell booze. i gauged from his pupils and
his speech that he was suffering from a combination of low blood sugar and
thinning of the blood from too much liquor.

his head suddenly focused in on the skulls on the patch for hatebreed on my
satchel, and he said out loud "ah, hatebreed." i looked at him quizically, not
sure if he knew what he was talking about. he told me he wasn't familiar, but
it sounded like his kind of music. "name some more."

i swung round my bag, so he could have a full view of the collection of

bands on my bag, and take his pick, to see if he liked any of them. he smiled a
sort of half sad, half distant smile, and said "i knew you was punk."

"whatever, man. if you must label me." i said.

next came where was i from, how old was i and more. we shot the shit for a
little bit, i was making up parts about me as i went. as i was leaving, or
tried to leave, he asked with conviction, pleadingly "what do you want to do?"
i gave him a simple answer, kind of a joke. i told him:

"i just want to have a good time. you know." with a hapazard shrug. i
didn't mean it though. i knew what he was asking me. i may not have the balls
to walk in his shoes, but i imagine that from his standpoint, even i can see
that he must reflect on the poeple who squander their lives, as his had
obviously not gone in the best direction.

"no!" he exclaimed louder than before, with twice the conviction. "what do
you want to do with your time on this planet?"

i don't know if you've ever been sideswiped with a question like that from
a total stranger, but it will knock you the fuck off your toes. it's a heavy
thing to ask even your best friend, let alone some stranger. i looked at his
dark black lips, his dark skin and his bloodshot eyes. i thought about what it
must be like to see a million people a day, all doing everything but live their
lives, even though opportunity is there. his question wasn't as much an inquiry
as a rhetoric. it was a mantra. he wanted me to know that he was more than some
transient filfthy bum. i'd like to beleive that i hadn't been acting as if he
was, but i've found that the homeless are always infinitely more sensitive to
body language than the priviledged.

at a loss for words, he told me what he was getting at. "you should change
the world." he said, out of the clear blue. "change something, for me." that
was what he asked. i was thinking a mile a minute now. who the fuck was i
talking to? never in my life had i met a man so destitute, yet so full of
conviction. he didn't seem real, but at the same time, his realness was more
glaringly obvious than the authenticity of anyone else around me. nothing about
him was fabricated, and he was speaking his mind, saying all the poignant bits
first, in case i should bolt and he wouldn't have a chance to talk to me
anymore. that's when i began to understand. in response, i shifted my bag to my
lap and sat down on the stoop next to him, a gesture that although innoccuous
in my eyes, meant a lot to him.

"you're sitting down, that's amazing." he said. it hit me like a bomb, all
this man, this broken shell of an anonymous human being wanted was someone to
talk to. more than that, i was sharing the same peice of shitty concrete with
him. i was not above the filfth or grime that had become his home. i was
another human being, and we were having a lively conversation as people do. i
was his society, his audience and his entertainment. there's a lot to be said
about this.

i sighed deeply, and i tried to figure out a way to explain that i wasdn't
being one hundred percent honest when i said i wasn't trying to change the
world. after all, those of you reading this are likely familiar with hacking
for the homeless, a project that puts computers and the people who can teach
computer skills in homeless shelters, one of pa1n's many projects. he pointed
at my left forearm as i was mulling this over, at a neoprene case that was
strapped to my left bicept, containing my ipod.

"what's that?" he wondered out loud.

"it's um, it's an ipod, a digital music player thing." i said, unsure how
much he understood.

"that thing that holds 10,000 songs or something?" he asked wide eyed. i
have to admit, i went wide eyed as well. here was a man that had been begging
for food money for the last twenty minutes with only a mild cough to show for
it. what the hell did he know about ipods?

"it's a smaller model, my friend. i'm on a budget, it's got a couple

thousand songs." i told him, not wanting to ask why the hell he was up on the
stats of the ipod.

"1,000 songs. right there. my oh my, no shit." he mused. "play me

something. one song" he asked.

i wish i had understood then what i understand now, because i said no to

that. i was wearing earbuds and i wasn't about to share earbuds with a man who
looked like he should be visiting a clinic next chance he got. if i had
understood what he was really asking, i would have played him anything he
wanted, and let him keep the earbuds. fuck 'em, i have a ton of headphones, i
work at a radio station, remember?

he tried to convince me to let him hear a song, but i wouldn't relent. next
he wanted to try on my sunglasses. it was odd, i thought. he was so interested
in things i used every day. i pulled my red chrome mirror lenses off my head,
and handed them to him, which he put on immediately. he smiled at me through
the lenses.

"these are some nice shades. they're all... red and shiny, it's like
metallic red, that's crazy. how do i look?" he asked, playfully.

i told him the honest truth, he looked good. if i hadn't fought so hard to
find a pair of red chrome lenses that weren't over 80 bucks, i would have let
him have them. for the next ten minutes, he wore my sunglasses, and you could
almost taste the pride in the air, he was exhuding it from every pore in his
body. like i said, simple things. this meant so much to him. i was showing
trust, i was sharing my things, i was talking about important things. i was
treating him as he should be treated: my equal.

the conversation that ensued is personal, it was a real conversation that

will remain between him and myself. i threw caution to the wind and decided to
just hang out with this man. david, that was his name. i had to leave
eventually, and i told him as much.

"look david, i gotta run, family's coming home for the holidays, i haven't
seen my sister in a long time." i told him truthfully. he smiled at me with
that same mixture of distance and sadness.

"you go on, you be with your family." he told me. "when you see your mom,
tell her merry christmas for me. will you do that?" he asked.

"absolutely." absolutely. and i did. as i got up, i went to shake his hand
and he pulled me into a hug. i'll be the first to admit i was scared. he had an
open sore on his lower lip, and my germ fear was off the chart. i was in broad
daylight on newbury, so i didn't think he would pull anything, but the gesture
took me by surprise. the final part of our encounter is completely true, and it
blew my mind.

his eyes were filled with tears as he looked me up and down. i, his only
companion in god knows how long. some kid off the subway had spent a bunch of
time with him, not afraid of him, not disgusted, simply there. his gratitude
was overpowering. "i love you. merry christmas." he said.

later i was thinking this over. for about three days straight, actually.

love? how does love enter into it? simple. i gave him something that no one
else would. i had taken the time to hang out with him. i shared a part of my
day with him. i was his friend. no pretenses, no bullshit, just hanging out.
it's easier to understand if i explain the music part now.

imagine never having access to music. imagine the awesome gift it would
bring if someone were to give you the opportunity to hear what you wanted to
hear, even if only for a moment. music is essential to life, it is the most
intricate and celebrated form of communication. he was asking me for the chance
to feel like a regular guy for just a moment, that's all. i blew that one, but
i'll try and pack some extra headphones i stole from an airplane in my bag if i
ever see him again. all the things that i took for granted, including my own
family as he eluded to in his request, were things he understood to be divine.
he even said himself the greatest of ironies.

"these people don't realize, they're two steps away from where i am. it
happens all the time. they don't think it applies to them. fuck them." his
anger was real, but it was justified. he was right.

of all the thousands or millions of people he must see in a day, i was the
only one to treat him as people should be treated. i treated him with respect,
courtesy, and decency. i wasn't saccarine, and i told him when he was making me
uncomfortable. i was straight up with this man. all he ever wanted, i came to
understand on the subway ride home, was for just one person to treat him like a
human fucking being.
-??????-??------------???????????????--??--------------------------------------
pa1nv13x11---------------------------------------------------------------------
[ basic cable and over-advertising ] rant!@
[ jon wilson aka pinion_blue ]
---------------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv13x11
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

amongst the overflowing amount of blink-182 videos that never seem to

go away, and the reruns of growing pains.....with that lovable chump turned
fundamentalist christian kirk cameron. i noticed something on the godbox
yesterday. cox cable, the local conglomerate on all things digital
entertainment in our area (and when i say our area, i mean jupiter....just
north of that flaming ball of hellfire), was showing commericals for its basic
cable service. now correct me if im wrong, but if you are the only cable
company in the area and you are advertising your basic cable service on the
only basic cable service in the area, then what possible difference, or for
that matter profit, would you make by placing these spots on television.
granted im not too worried about missing the preview commericials for "who
wants to live on the real-survivor-idol millionare island dance and chili
cook-off" or the newest line of products from the gap, but i honestly dont
understand the thought process the executives went through to get these
commercials on air. if i did understand it, it would probably go a litlle
something like this:

[exec walks into room, straightens tie, sits down at top position of table]

executive head: "good morning gentlemen. i trust this meeting will be short?"

[two lower level executives, obviously crying inside from the

pathetic bastardazation of all things sacred and holy in their
lives, clear their throats and begin their presentation]

lackey number one: "yes, sir. very short. we are going to present an idea to
you for the commercial to fill the 30 seconds right before "the spanking
new adventures of donkey kong and miles davis (sponsored by mtv and clorox
bleach)"

lackey numero dos: "sir we have an absolutly outstanding idea for this
spot! picture this: a commercial on both our basic and digital streams,
advertising our basic and digital streams!

[the head executive holds his open hand up, as to gesture a stop from
the moron lower level executive from speaking out of his mouth-hole]

executive head: "you want to run an ad on basic cable, for basic cable?"

lackey first one: "yes, sir. that is the plan."

[as if waiting for the head to go greco-roman and raise his thumb in
approval or lower it in utter dismay of the very notion that they
could pass a green light for something so incredibly idiotic....
the lackeys wait for what feel like 4 minutes....but is really
only 3.925 minutes]

executive head of retards: "thats absolutly brilliant steve!!!"

retard number one: "thank you!, and my name is paul sir..."

executive dead by five-thirty: "thats what i said.....steve...."

number one guy man: "....yes sir...."

executive nicknackpattywackgivadogabone: "the project is green-lighted, bring a

rough draft back to me when im not drunk!"

[lackey/moron/giraffes walk out of boardroom in a stupor, surprised

that something so meaningless was actually good for launch....]

/end pathetic excuse for a skit youll never see on the kids in the hall, or
performed by the west chester, pennslyvania comedy skit troup: chester nut bars
on parade (featuring weird al and the 1991 denver broncos!) but since i dont
know what they were thinking.....i can only begin to think that the higher ups
had one of five things on their minds:

a: make the commerical and put it on every thirty seconds that the
season finale of will and grace isnt on.

b: show it to some girl scouts in the hopes that they and their
families would get free cookies/sexual favors

c: take the hard copy betamax tape of the commercial and sacrifice
it to the devil of all things decent and entertaining on television
(read: the same devil that let pauly shore do "jury duty")

d: mix the commerical with some mayonaise and bread (white because
all bread companies are racist) and make a nice crap sandwich

e: frank zappa

again, only god and the denver broncos will ever really know the truth as
to the decision that was made to put this commerical on air and rot away all
other neuro-pathways inside my cerebral cortex. hopefully, they will share with
me and all the other white bread loving americans when we all die from the
ebola virus....

right now, a necrofiliac is having his way with christopher reeves

corpse....and theres nothing you, the government, or incubus can do
about it...

hows that for a curveball...

running out of time to look for the holy grail/jebus h. mccullock

jon wilson

----------------------------
note from ab:

there are reasons i don't own a tv and this is one of them. also,
having a background, albeit mostly academic in communications law and work
experience in broadcast media, i feel obligated to make a few comments about
what "basic cable" actually is, and why this is actually even funnier to those
of us in the industry. basic cable is a concept that was cooked up when major
corporations and the fcc got together and began to seriously fear the idea of
cable television. for one, the fcc had incredibly limited jurisdiction over
cablecasting for a long time. previously, it was up to the federal trade
commission and the secretary of something that i can't remember and you
wouldn't know if i could anyway. in the beginning, cablecasting was boundless,
and traditional, over the airwaves tv was declining in viewership. this
prompted the fcc, once given limited jurisdiction over cable tv, to create the
"must carry act", a series of rules and regulations that state that basic cable
companies must rebroadcast local broadcast (remember, that's "over the
airwaves" as opposed to "cablecasting") television programs, in order for the
major networks to actually stay above water. beleive it or not, there was a
time, and i consider this to be a great time, when even fox was scared shitless
of being bankrupt. this being the case, cable providers are actually frightened
of losing their viewership, because it resembles broadcast television so much,
thanks to the fcc and the must carry law. in response, you have television
spots from companies that actually remind you that you are watching what you
are watching. they really do beleive that you are that stupid. - ab

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pa1nv13x12 --------------------------------------------------------------------
[ ebook: the new paperback ]
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despite the digital rights management debacle that surrounds every single
peice of digital media, there is something inexplicably attractive about the
portability of a book that can be carried in something as small as a
microdrive, or stored on a flashcard a quarter of the size of a credit card. as
the preface encourages, i was 'beaming' a distribution of "the hacker
crackdown" by bruce sterling to a colleauge of mine at the station, where i'm
director of computer services/affairs, only a few days ago. recently having
acquired a palm v from another job contact, the slightly off-kilter engineer
you know in this magazine as crazy ivan was verily frothing at the mouth for me
to come and fill his palm with freely distributed gnu docs. crazy ivan is my
co-worker, except he's not the technician. his job is to maintain clunkier,
more rudimentary machines that make my head hurt and remind me of old
vax room-warmer computers. his world at work is populated by tubes, fuses,
slider switches, coaxial cables, audio only switchboards and optical lasers,
where mine is primarily dedicated to software and advanced microprocessing
technology. being a non-profit station, we both have the job of taking
technology that may be slightly out of date, and making it state of the art,
but i digress.

when asked what "the hacker crackdown" was, i told him it was a bit of
light reading for the train or long car rides. the latter is silly, because his
peice of shit stanza won't die, and he likes to drive everywhere, but when on
the train, he can't stand still. i told him that it was a history of "operation
sundevil", a peice of history that he should get to know, as a history buff and
tactical student, he would find it fascinating, if not downright funny. i also
told him that he would have to accord a bit of respect to the author, as it was
a free gift from sterling, as it says in the preface and introduction.

the crackdown was one of the most successful "true crime" blunder stories
every written, and it would never be out of date, or out of print. still,
sterling, an avid supporter of the rights of computer hackers, decided that the
best possible step for the distribution of his book would be to be placed in
.pdb format, the palm database format for 3com/palm computing's palmos which is
standard document format for handheld computers that don't run wince. so,
giving the analogy of leaving a paperback on the train for another person to
read, once you have finished, he suggested that the book be distributed, be
given freely to whoever desires. the information inside was more important than
the profit. he did, however, add his own concept of drm: he suggested that the
second anyone choose to try and profit from his philanthropy, they might find
themselves in a world of shit, as bantam books has an army of lawyers that's
not at all to be scoffed at. indeed, i fear that any major publishing house of
the late 20th and 21st centuries indeed had and has a formiddable legal team
that would make any opposition turn to buttermilk. something about this
reminded me of eminem's off-hand remark about how he wouldn't file a lawsuit if
someone was bootlegging his music, he'd just beat the shit out of them. i
thought this was a fair trade. the second money changes hands where it hasn't
been earned, something is amiss.

however, this sort of philanthropy isn't the driving force behind the
electronic book format. in fact, i would say that it's quite far behind in the
ladder of the electronic book food chain. the most popular of all, it appears,
is actually the audiobook, in particular, audible.com seems to be making a
veritable killing off of the concept.

audible.com is a company that strikes deals with major publishing houses to

republish the material in audio format, read whenever possible by the author,
but otherwise read by a professional narrator. you can expect to pay about 20
dollars, roughly the same price as a hardcover edition of whatever novel or
peice of literature you intend to pick up, and the chosen outlet for audible
has gone to apple's itunes drm, the m4p encoding, a derivative of mpeg audio
layer 4. as an english major, among other disciplines, i have to read copious
amounts of literature in very small periods of time. often this is downright
impossible without someone chronically dispensing visene into my eyeballs so
that i don't have to blink or sleep. at the rate of approximately 300-400 pages
a week, in addition to working full time as a sysadmin, volunteer counselor,
and the various other things that are required of one living on their own, it's
an accomplishment to be able to break even. for this reason, i found quickly
sometime in my sophomore year during a course in which i had to read the
entirety of walt whitman's leaves of grass in a week, and know most of it by
heart, that the best practice was probably, and indeed, turned out to be, the
forking over of what was at the time nine dollars and ninety nine cents for a
digitally signed version i could stick on my cd player, mp3 player, mp3 cd
player, ipod, etc., and listen to while i worked on something else. indeed, i
was one of the only students in the entire class to pass the course, let alone
ace it. i do attribute a stupid amount of credit to the ingenuity of what i
call "the new paperback."

as a sort of "independent librarian" as sean k calls it, as well as a

bibliophile, i'm privy to a lot of the history of publication. from the times
of the iliad, when the story was passed down by orrators like homer, or legends
were handed down to children like the story of anansi or the complete stories
of the asutru pantheon to the norse children, all the way to the gutenberg
bible and the pamphleteers of the 1700's, i've studied the history acutely.
it's important, as you might imagine, as part of a growing independent media
outlet like rantradio and rantmedia, as often people forget that pa1n magazine
is. for clarification, pa1n magazine is an electronic zine borne of the
subculture, cultivated by rantradio, the brainchild of cimmerian and later on
an immense number of like-minded people. i discovered rant by suggestion,
actually, it was forced on me much to my delight. sapphire, a person i've known
for a while, contacted me over an instant messaging client and told me to tune
into the sean kennedy radio show, back when it was still live. i hungrily
downloaded all the episodes, and was in love with it, much as i had become
entranced by the spoken word of henry rollins, jello biafra, and to a lesser
extent (only due to lack of distribution) leonard cohen.
 having been an indy zine writer for many years prior, the idea had brewed
in my mind for quite a while, and it was 2003, as those of you who have been
paying attention, that brought issue #1 of the zine, thanks in great allegiance
to turnspike, my ever loyal compatriot, and the gracious bandwidth of cheezi,
proprietor and founder of e-lite communications (as well as a personal friend.)

cheezi, like myself, was no stranger to zines, and i think that it's
important to any budding librarian to recognize the significance of the
electronic media in both audio and visual format. during the late twentieth
century, which i doubt anyone reading this will be unfamiliar with on
publication, the paperback book took over as the dominant force in physical
book publishing. hitherto, i remember that any book past the sixth grade
reading level, which was my first grade bread and butter, was hardcover. if you
wanted anything, you either had to get the horrible newsprint version of the
book, yellowed and battered, or the expensive hardcover which made it bulky and
cumbersome. it was seventh grade when i personally remember carrying a
paperback book everywhere, but this is all personal experience.

incidentally, it should so happen for this article that the very audiobook
that inspired this article should have been a teaser of michael crichton's
"state of fear" from the apple online music store, courtesy of audible.com, as
the first book i remember toting around with me religiously as i trudged
through it's pages was jurrassic park, arguably the most successful book to
ever deal with paleontology and genetic engineering ethics in the same story;
jurassic park, if you haven't paid attention for the last ten years, was a
michael crichton novel, then movie, then book again, then interactive theme
park ride at universal studios. so how appropriate, indeed, that i should dub
the ebook the new paperback.

the allure of a paperback, from a librarian's perspective is

cost-efficiency and portability. i consider it my personal duty to educate
anyone i know, if they so desire, in any field they are interested in, and
therefore i am constantly lending out books. as it stands, i need to make a
note to myself to grab one of my copies of chuck palahniuk's "fight club" for a
friend of mine, who wants to see what i mean by experimental writing.....

..."i am jack's hacker zine..."

[ history lesson ]

project gutenberg, arguably the most famous of the electronic book

movements was started in an effort to convert the world's classics to public
domain via the internet. started in 1971, by michael hart, the project was
named after the inventor of the first printing press, johann gutenberg. until
the time of the printing press, the bible was the most distributed of all
books, and each individual bible had to be hand transcribed onto parchment.
literacy was for the clerics, and the masses were left in the cold. upon the
invention of the printing press, one of the first things to come out of it was
what is now called "the gutenberg bible." contrary to what the name suggests,
it's not a revision of the scriptures, but a cheap, easy to make version of the
bible that could be hand cranked out of a press and mass produced.
shortly after this became a major success, pamphleteers took up the press
and began distributing leaflets, arguably the first underground zines. leaflets
were the primary means of political propaghanda then, as there was no radio or
television. with the invention of the printing press, gutenberg is seen almost
as a "promethean" figure; he brough literacy to the masses.

centuries later, michael hart and a small crew of volunteers began the
arduous process of transcribing print into electronic text, to create a freely
accessibly library for the world. like gutenberg himself, hart brought books
that would otherwise be only enjoyed by an elite few to everyone with access to
the internet. copyright issues, however, did cause a bit of a stir, and i do
recall years ago being on a hotline server that had to hide it's share of
project gutenberg texts, for fear of being charged with copyright infringement.
now, however, pretty much any book is freely available online, and the project
is now a full fledged institution. if you prefer your ebooks in plain text
format, you will very much enjoy the gutenberg project's site and distribution.

currently, you can find an enormous collection, or "collection of

collections" as they refer to it on their site at the ibiblio website. ibiblio
is a massive ftp archive of everything from gnu open source software to text
files to a large mirror of project gutenberg.

the advent of the palm pilot, or the personal digital assistant in general,
brought about an entirely new wave of portable libraries. palm digital media,
otherwise known as "peanut press" ws one of the first digital presses to make
an actual publishing house on the internet. since the flash card was recently
introduced into the pda, palm digital media made custom anthologies by genre
that could be purchased much like a cd or even a paperback anthology online. it
would arrive via mail, only it has a watermark, like a serial number to unlock
the collection. once entered, the whole smart card was a portable library
containing about a dozen different full length novels that could be inserted
into a palmos device and browsed like a small library.

today, there are inordinate numbers of documents available online in public

domain format, particularly in palm's .pdb document format, many free for
download. after a few choices, you can hotsync the palm, and suddenly your day
planner is also carrying the digital equivalent of a full bookshelf.

the most profitable industry, however, appears to be the audiobook.

although books on tape have been around for a long time, only recently did they
hit the mainstream with force, as companies like apple began to make deals with
publishing companies and offering them for purchase via a search bar within the
itunes software itself. mary wollestonecraft shelley's "frankenstein" is
approximately 7 hours of audio, hardly a dent in the ipod, which as of late is
selling in upwards of 40 gigabyte capacity. it is entirely possible, as i've
done it before, to have more than a solid week's worth of audio on the ipod.
one of the benifits to mp3 (although audiobooks via itunes are .m4p encoding)
is that it can be reripped. if you find yourself in possession of sun tzu's
"the art of war" and you don't have 11 hours worth of room on your portable
media player, you can decrease the bitrate by half, since there is only one
critical layer to spoken word. from experience, i can say that the quality
difference is almost completely unnoticeable.

teasers have found their way into the electronic book world as well. you
can now download both audiobooks, pdfs of the first few chapters of new
releases, and even .pdb docs from the publisher to ensnare potential customers.
i'll be the first to admit that it works. ironically, when they did this in
paperback books, i hardly paid attention; james patterson's slasher detective
novels almost always had at least one teaser for the next book, since he put
out a book almost every month for a while.
 while i was working at the sharper image, the only thing we could possibly
do to alleviate our boredom, which was bordering on neurosis, was to
demonstrate products. having just done something horrendously unintelligent to
my old palm vx, i decided to upgrade to the palm m505, which was one of sharper
images featured products during the christmas season that i worked there.
unbeknownst to them, however, i was not entering notes to myself, or trying to
seduce customers into asking questions, but actually plowing through the same
paperbacks that were in my satchel in the backroom, where i couldn't get to
them. since 3com's palmreader software automatically opens up to where you left
off, i could shut off the palm immediately, and not lose my place. in fact, you
can actually bookmark several documents or books to the very line you were on,
allowing you to browse magazines and books at the same time, without having to
remember your place. this was the perfect setup for me, as i was often finding
myself in a rush to get back to what i was doing when a customer asked for
help. i was able to go paragraph by paragraph seamlessly, without losing my
place, because my palm would tell me where i had left off. it most likely is
the reason that i didn't up and leave during the holiday rush at that store.

also, as an engineer, i find it a little difficult to carry manuals for

each system on hand all the time, since the average network manual is over 500
pages long, and comes in a clunky binder (and also costs about $350 dollars.)
instead, i've managed to compile the important features of the manuals into
seperate documents using programs like aportisdoc, isilo or palmreader, and put
them on the pda instead. the weight and size difference, for those who are
curious, can be expressed in ratios.
something like... "manuals:palm = hummer:matchbox toy car."

get my point? in a world where we have to pack everything but still pack
light, the ability to carry huge quantities of data that is easily accessible
without consulting a full fledged computer terminal is inexorably helpful. and
as a guy with four jobs, it helps to be able to have all my reference materials
at my disposal in a device that's about the size of a pack of cigarettes.

project gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/

http://promo.net/pg/
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/

http://www.ibiblio.org/about.html
http://www.ereader.com/free/ebooks
http://www.openarchives.org/

http://www.palmdigitalmedia.com/free/ebooks
http://pda.tucows.com/palm/docs_books_default.html
http://www.ereader.com/promo
http://www.ereader.com/free/ebooks
http://www.palmpilotarchives.com/e-book.html

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[ origins of self-censorship ]
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a society in which you cannot speak your mind freely, without the fear of
being persecuted is a horribly diseased one indeed. self-censorship, or
compliance with forms of censorship used to be known as "expurgation," a really
clinical sounding word for a rather grotesque process. walt whitman once wrote
of his publisher's requests to edit out some of the more racy imagery and
segments from 'calamus' that "the dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book."
(whitman) what he meant, if it's not clear, is that even the most conservative
of people should recognize that the watering down of art should be considered
more obscene than the most contraversial peice.

in sociology and psychology, the phrase "self censorship" refers to the act
of being ones own auditor, and it's one of the most prevalent problems in our
society. if you had to count the number of times that you've bit your tongue or
not said what you felt deep down should be said, you would lose track. every
day we think of more things not to say than things to actually share with
others. although the mechanism itself is a social defense, one which when used
properly can avoid conversations that are unpleasant or downright cruel. most
males can think of a girl who asked them in the past hour if they look fat in a
particular outfit. any guy who has ever had to do this assessment knows that
the report is an imperative negative. as men, we are not allowed to tell women
if the dress makes them fat. granted, this is a completely arbitrary example,
so take the idea of political dissent.

although my feelings on michael moore are always wavering, the trend

surrounding him is fascinating. if you recall the aftermath of the release of
"bowling for columbine," easily one of the most important films of the last few
years, whether for better or worse, you most likely recall moore as being
hailed as a champion of the freedom of speech, and a bold filmmaker, etc. his
documentary was a bestselling dvd. a few years later, moore released "farenheit
9/11", which i have not seen, and have absolutely no opinion on whatsoever.
this became incredibly popular as "bush-bashing" was growing in it's popularity
as a sort of lunch-break community activity. somehow, after the elections,
michael moore became known as the anti-christ to the very people that applauded
the film. one person i know returned "bowling for columbine" as he explained
his new distaste for the man. this, it should be noted, was someone who saw the
movie immediately, and considered it at the time to be a cinematic masterpeice.
at the very least, this behavior was peculiar.

so how is this a form of self-censorship? after the elections, and bush

won, people wanted someone to blame. a few weeks prior to november 2, a movie
called "farenhype 9/11" came out, bashing moore and calling the documentary
trash. the public for some reason ate this up, and once again i have no opinion
on the movie in question, but then somehow determined that moore had undermined
the campaign of senator kerry through his rediculous stunts, and that the man
was a prime example of liberalism gone wrong. soon, moore was shunned and
bookstores began selling anti-michael moore books and propaganda that
essentially claimed that the liberals were responsible for the degradation of
american culture. after that, no one wanted to be associated with him. i
imagine that if you were to watch carefully at the average video retailer,
anyone who purchases the film now probably carries it home in a paper bag like
pornography. it's as if people all realized that they wouldn't be accepted as
dissidents. for a month or two, dissent was strong, now, with the peculiar
decline of moore's favor, so went the support for political dissent. the
insidious fact of the matter is, no one realized that they went hand in hand.

by denying yourself the right to voice an opinion that you hold, or show
support for the opinions of someone you agree with, you have effectively
socially castrated yourself. you become incapable of having a point of view,
because you stop yourself in every sentence, afraid how the statement will be
taken. a third, and more disturbing form of self censorship is the decline of
independent sources of information. in the 1960s, although political activists
were hounded constantly, the demonstrators didn't stop showing their support
for the anti-war movement. when not allowed to talk about it in school,
students put black handkercheifs around their biceps, like armbands in protest
of the war. these students were suspended and a couple expelled. at this point,
dissent had made it's way into popular music like never before, and classic
rock became a statement in itself. it was popular to explore different forms of
art and poetry, socially acceptable to read even marxist literature.

twenty years later, then thirty, and now almost 40 years after the vietnam
war, a congregation of people peaceably assembled to show their concern for
current events is not tolerated. although the first ammendment explicitly
states that the people have the right "peaceably to assemble," police have
forcibly removed peaceful demonstrators for speaking out, and this time, no one
said a word. was it because they didn't feel that strongly about the cause and
didn't care? i doubt it. after bush's re-election, several people i know
actually wept for days, scared for their loved ones overseas, afraid for the
future of the country, or just horrified that a man who would invade a country
for economic gain could possibly be the popular choice. so what was the motive
behind the silence? did they just not see it on the news? unlikely. i don't own
a television, and it was hard to miss the footage of shock troops in full riot
gear clash with people holding picket signs. even cnn reported what the
protestors were saying during the president's re-innauguration a few days ago.
so then, could it be fear? absolutely.

for every person who took up a pen and began to transcribe their thoughts,
you could find another person shredding their notebooks or hiding their
political bumper stickers. afraid of being pegged as just another fucking
liberal, americans all over the country zipped their mouths willingly and
turned the other way as the first ammendment was violated in full view of the
public on international television.

self-censorship is a subtle demon. there are volumes of phrases in the

english language that can be rephrased into "i better not say that or..." but
there are far fewer that express the dangers of silence. what you have to say
may not be popular, but it doesn't mean it's not important. one of the most
common excuses people give professors here for not wanting to read their work
aloud in class is that they claim it's not very good. my response to that
statement is that if it's not very good, why did you bother to bring it in the
first place? why the hell would you submit mediocre work? the real reason they
won't read aloud is that they don't know if they might clash viewpoints with
other people. another common phrase is, "i'm not done" to which one of my
professors always insists "read what you have." i would say that fifty percent
of the time, the peices that the authors claimed to be unfinished were not only
finished, but polished and edited.

although i wouldn't recommend saying every single thing that occurs in your
brain, i would certainly suggest that it might be a good idea to say one or two
of them. at the rate i see, self-censorship has taken enough of a toll that
soon i will be able to walk past any political rally and have no idea as to the
nature of the platform of the demonstrators. soon people will hold blank signs,
or mouth slogans without making noise. even the internet has become
homogenized. in a place where you can find any sort of pornography, recipe for
explosives, personal journals or newsgroups about the possible existence of
loch-ness, people are still afraid to say what truly bothers them. that old
saying about not having anything nice to say, and the subsequent instructions
not to speak at all should be rephrased to "if you have something to say, but
you're too chickenshit to say it, don't bother getting on the podium."

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[ outro ] goodnight
[ alienbinary ] for now...
---------------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv13x14
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

it's about 4:30 in the morning as i write this outro. i've been up all
night and early morning because i can't seem to put my thoughts in order enough
to go to bed. all the same, i'm so pumped to get this issue out that i would
very much like to pound out the outro so that when the final peices of the
issue make it into my inbox, it'll be ready for publication. this has been one
of the fastest assembling issues, one of the highest quality in my opinion, and
one of the most fun to do. never before have i been met with such support,
enthusiasm and creativity. in my opinion, i know i have something going when
both cimmerian and sean kennedy are responding to my emails within a few hours
of the original transmission. turnspike was right to call on the support of
rantmedia and it's subsequent projects, and i'd like to personally thank him
once again for porting the old issues to the rantmedia forums.

one of the most surprising things about this particular issue was that i
got articles from people i either had talked to maybe once or twice in my
entire life before, or people that i didn't even know of. it's pretty humbling
when you get a submission on wep from a guy who knows more than you do about
the subject. i felt like i should have been responding with "are you sure you
didn't mean to send this to 2600?"

to have mephyt back on the team is an incredible asset. other than the fact
that no one writes depressing shit better than him, his "emo peices" he calls
them, he's one of the few pa1n crew i can talk to on the phone for literally
hours long distance and just bitch. if you haven't picked it up by now, a lot
of things piss me off, and i have a lot of weight on my shoulders, so for
someone to be willing to help share the burden is a gift from god, or server,
or whoever you choose to pray to. to be perfectly honest, i even called meph
right after he got back from the service to ask him about what kind of combats
i should buy while i was actually in the army navy store, staring at about 12
racks of different boots. the sales chick was cool about it, but it must have
been odd watching someone check out combat boots talking on a hacked cellphone
in between conversations about what to write and various aspects of publishing.
if they didn't know me, they would probably assume that i was trying to run a
publishing company that sold books about military hardware.

other than good fashion advice, mephyt's work is always a solid rock for me
to put in the layout. this particular peice is something i can identify with,
and without a doubt, i'm sure everyone who reads it can as well. sometimes,
when you've made all these choices in a short period of time, the prospect of
making one more, just one more choice is extraordinarily daunting indeed. in
one of our conversations, i asked meph to relay some of his experience since he
was gone, and we got into a debate about whether or not combat was something
that could be brought home at least in part through writing. when he started to
argue against the idea, i had a strange inclination to try a new approach.
"soldier," i began my sentence, and i proceeded to ask him a series of
questions, playing the role of commanding officer. much to my amazement, he
snapped immediately, instinctively, actually, into the role of a reporting
officer; the conversation was eery. after i made my point, and he realized what
was going on, mephyt told me that he had actually snapped to attention (with
the exception of the cellphone in the crook of his neck) and was almost
automatically responding the way he was trained. much of the conversation that
followed was about choice, and whether or not an organization like the armed
forces has the power to strip an individual of their will to make their own
choices. a lot of that conversation subsequently found itself into this issue's
article.

angel ice was one of the people who shocked me by submitting an article for
the first time in a while, and one of the funniest ones i've ever read at that.
strange she should have been writing about the drug culture of america at the
time i was working on "nepenthe." i think it will take a long time, possibly
forever, to forget how funny it was to hear her read it over the phone in it's
unpolished form. especially the part where she suggests you "fuck yourself." i
think i almost spit up the water i was drinking, but i can't remember for
certain.

so, here it is motherfuckers. the thirteenth issue of pa1n magazine is upon

you. enjoy.

- ab