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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 w e l v e
-- --- ------------------------------------------------------- --- --

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

! [ ] .-' '-.
| [ editor in chief alienbinary | .' .z$$$$$$$k. '.
| [ co-editor, co-founder turnspike i / $$$$$$$$$$$$$ \
! [ co-editor mephyt ! / j$$$$$$$$$$$$$l \
| [ deputy co-editor angel ice i d|b $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ d|b
[ editor nemisis ! $$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ $$$
[ editor red dragon $$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ $$$
[ guidance for ab aliabuse ' '$$ '$$$$$$$$$$$$$' $$'
[ contributor artemis '$$$$$$$$$$$'
[ editor manuel o'kelly magazine!
! [ editor kello '#$$$#'
[ contributor greynin
[ contributor danger girl
| [ follow the... white rabbit
| [ bandwidth warlord cheezi [ pa1n magazine vol. 12 ]
[ contributor rumbling sky
!

- pa1nv12x01 - letter from the editor alienbinary -

- pa1nv12x02 - letter from the co-editor turnspike -
- pa1nv12x03 - project loki archives: rebirth alienbinary -
- turnspike -
- pa1nv12x04 - will you remember me? mephyt -
- pa1nv12x05 - xanax and popcorn alienbinary -
- pa1nv12x06 - understanding irda remote control codes alienbinary -
- pa1nv12x07 - road trip: geek style turnspike -
- pa1nv12x08 - reincarnation mephyt -
- pa1nv12x09 - life underground alienbinary -
- pa1nv12x10 - notes from the field alienbinary -
- pa1nv12x11 - what we own alienbinary -
- pa1nv12x12 - hacking the social structure alienbinary -
- pa1nv12x13 - outro alienbinary -

featured artist: chemlab!@#

 contact? email alienbinary at: pain@e-lite.org
email turnspike at: turnspike@spfd2600.org
email mephyt at: mephyt@nocturnalradio.com

[---------------------] ----------- - --------- - -- -- - - - -

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

-?------------?------------???????????????????????????-------------------??----
pa1nv12x01----------------------------------------------------------------[ 1 ]
[ letter from the editor ]
[ alienbinary ]
[ 1 ]----------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv12x01
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

it's been a long time since i sat at the keyboard and hacked away another
issue of pa1n. this particular issue is of incredible import to me, mostly
because it was very close to never being released. the last few months have
been an absolutely mindbogglingly painful rollercoaster ride. as an aside, i
should mention that i abhor that expression, so please forgive me. regardless,
a lot of things have happened in a very short period of time that i never even
considered. the whole idea that at any moment life might throw a curveball has
never been more starkly apparent in the fact that everything i do seems to end
up in some sort of mess. regardless, it's fucking imperative that we remember
to keep getting up and moving, no matter how many times we are beaten down.

at this very moment, the senate and several other bodies of legislation
that i don't even want to speculate upon are working very hard to accomplish
absolutely nothing in regards to digital rights management. i think that
someone should notify the riaa and the other evil syndicates involved that the
primary reason for lack of sales (which statistically are a lie, see college
music journal or billboard's digital sales tables, available monthly,) are
primarily rooted in the lack of anything good to sell.

recently, i found myself in a craving for the song "kashmir" by zeppelin,

but alas, i couldn't legally download it (and i won't buy the cd), so i settled
on the london philharmonic symphony orchestra's tribute. this turned out to be
a disgustingly worthwhile way to spend a few bucks, but unfortunately i can't
even play it for a friend of mine without my own authentication key. how stupid
do these executives have to be? what must happen before they realize that the
internet is not comprised of people that are such low lives as themselves, but
primarily other human beings, just shucking and jiving to get along in this
world. as a college student facing possibly another year tacked on to the
prescribed four required for my ba in english and writing due to the particular
nature of the career i wish to pursue, i find it hard to cough up even ten
dollars for a peice of software, which you should never forget that drm encoded
music ultimately is. and this, ladies and gentlemen, is why i bring forth the
newest feature of pa1n magazine: the featured artists section.

as you know from previous issues, porn on beta and halorazor have willingly
donated songs for legal download without drm or any registration whatsoever,
and these links have appeared in issues previous. now, i am pleased to announce
that chemlab, the kmfdm of underground industrial music has agreed to release
several songs for the readers of pa1n in conjunction with the release of the
new album "oxidizer." i should very much like to thank jared louche, lead
singer of chemlab for initially contacting me several months prior. yes, i have
been delinquent in my pa1n related work, i apologize, but then again, this is a
labor of love, not monetary gain. i urge all of you to support non-mainstream
artists like pob, halorazor and chemlab to prove to the industry that they are
in fact trying to accomplish something that amounts to no more than a mess of
red legal tape that will ultimately solve nothing.

as for this issue, you will find in it's contents a set of dark and
introspective writings that might cause alarm, might chill the blood, or might
just bore you. regardless, these are the voices of those who won't be silenced.
this is pa1n magazine, borne of rantradio.

- alienbinary 2004

---------------------- get your chemlab fix here ------------------

parent site: http://www.hydrogenbar.com/sounds.html

off the new album "oxidizer":

http://www.hydrogenbar.com/sounds/chemlab-oxidizer-binary_nation.mp3
http://www.hydrogenbar.com/sounds/chemlab-oxidizer-monkey_god.mp3
http://www.hydrogenbar.com/sounds/chemlab-oxidizer-scornocopia.mp3

-?------------?------------???????????????????????????-------------------??----
pa1nv12x02----------------------------------------------------------------[ 2 ]
[ letter from the co-editor ]
[ turnspike ]
[ 2 ]----------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv12x02
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

thanksgiving will be here soon. there are many stories about the pilgrims and
this holiday. each story offers a different perspective, and new insight about
the sort of seed that america grew from. last thanksgiving, alienbinary offered
his perspective on thanksgiving in pa1n #4:

http://www.spfd2600.org/topic.asp?topic_id=688&forum_id=30&cat_id=17&
topic_title=pa1n+e%2dzine+issue+%234&forum_title=pa1n+zine

this issue, i would like to offer you a short piece from "evaluating books,
what would thomas jefferson think about this," by richard j. marbury. i had
heard this read over the radio a few years ago, and it has stuck in my head
every since. enjoy, and have a good thanksgiving.

"each year at this time school children all over america are taught the
official thanksgiving story, and newspapers, radio, tv, and magazines devote
vast amounts of time and space to it. it is all very colorful and fascinating.

it is also very deceiving. this official story is nothing like what really
happened. it is a fairy tale, a whitewashed and sanitized collection of
half-truths which divert attention away from thanksgiving's real meaning.
 the official story has the pilgrims boarding the mayflower, coming to
america and establishing the plymouth colony in the winter of 1620-21. this
first winter is hard, and half the colonists die. but the survivors are hard
working and tenacious, and they learn new farming techniques from the indians.
the harvest of 1621 is bountiful. the pilgrims hold a celebration, and give
thanks to god. they are grateful for the wonderful new abundant land he has
given them.

the official story then has the pilgrims living more or less happily ever
after, each year repeating the first thanksgiving. other early colonies also
have hard times at first, but they soon prosper and adopt the annual tradition
of giving thanks for this prosperous new land called america.

the problem with this official story is that the harvest of 1621 was not
bountiful, nor were the colonists hardworking or tenacious. 1621 was a famine
year and many of the colonists were lazy thieves.

in his `history of plymouth plantation,' the governor of the colony,

william bradford, reported that the colonists went hungry for years, because
they refused to work in the fields. they preferred instead to steal food. he
says the colony was riddled with "corruption," and with "confusion and
discontent." the crops were small because "much was stolen both by night and
day, before it became scarce eatable."

in the harvest feasts of 1621 and 1622, "all had their hungry bellies
filled," but only briefly. the prevailing condition during those years was not
the abundance the official story claims, it was famine and death. the first
"thanksgiving" was not so much a celebration as it was the last meal of
condemned men.

but in subsequent years something changes. the harvest of 1623 was

different. suddenly, "instead of famine now god gave them plenty," bradford
wrote, "and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of
many, for which they blessed god." thereafter, he wrote, "any general want or
famine hath not been amongst them since to this day." in fact, in 1624, so much
food was produced that the colonists were able to begin exporting corn.

what happened? after the poor harvest of 1622, writes bradford, "they began
to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better
crop." they began to question their form of economic organization.

this had required that "all profits & benefits that are got by trade,
working, fishing, or any other means" were to be placed in the common stock of
the colony, and that, "all such persons as are of this colony, are to have
their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock." a
person was to put into the common stock all he could, and take out only what he
needed.

this "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need"
was an early form of socialism, and it is why the pilgrims were starving.
bradford writes that "young men that are most able and fit for labor and
service" complained about being forced to "spend their time and strength to
work for other men's wives and children." also, "the strong, or man of parts,
had no more in division of victuals and clothes, than he that was weak." so the
young and strong refused to work and the total amount of food produced was
never adequate.

to rectify this situation, in 1623 bradford abolished socialism. he gave

each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they
produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. in other words, he replaced
socialism with a free market, and that was the end of famines. many early
groups of colonists set up socialist states, all with the same terrible
results. at jamestown, established in 1607, out of every shipload of settlers
that arrived, less than half would survive their first twelve months in
america. most of the work was being done by only one-fifth of the men, the
other four-fifths choosing to be parasites. in the winter of 1609-10, called
"the starving time," the population fell from five-hundred to sixty.

then the jamestown colony was converted to a free market, and the results
were every bit as dramatic as those at plymouth. in 1614, colony secretary
ralph hamor wrote that after the switch there was "plenty of food, which every
man by his own industry may easily and doth procure." he said that when the
socialist system had prevailed, "we reaped not so much corn from the labors of
thirty men as three men have done for themselves now."

before these free markets were established, the colonists had nothing for
which to be thankful. they were in the same situation as ethiopians are today,
and for the same reasons. but after free markets were established, the
resulting abundance was so dramatic that the annual thanksgiving celebrations
became common throughout the colonies, and in 1863, thanksgiving became a
national holiday.

thus the real reason for thanksgiving, deleted from the official story, is:
socialism does not work; the one and only source of abundance is free markets,
and we thank god we live in a country where we can have them."

-?------------?------------???????????????????????????-------------------??----
pa1nv12x03----------------------------------------------------------------[ 3 ]
[ project loki archives: rebirth ]
[ turnspike and alienbinary ]
[ 3 ]----------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv12x03
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

[ intro from alienb. ]

welcome to the return of the project loki archives, the subcomponent of

pa1n magazine that seeks to illustrate the changes that are occurring in our
world every day, often unnoticed, through the use of photography. the archives
were started as an idea, a way to comment on the things i saw around me. i had
just recently purchased a palm zire71, the first of the mainstream palm pilots
to incorporate an integrated digital camera. since then, i have been taking
snapshots of things that strike me, and occasionally, i find the time and
inspiration to put them in virtual galleries, digital exhibits of which pa1n
staff members are the only curators.

lately, the archives have become a side project. although i have remained
active in taking these pictures, i have become hesitant to the idea of
assembling an actual archive. danger girl had previously been the person who
helped me assemble each exhibit, and even went with me to find images for the
project. however, people's priorities change, and it no longer became feasible.
now, i have opened up the archive to the pa1n staff, and this issue features
the debut of turnspike's photography, which is altogether 1,000 times more
aesthetically pleasing than my own. as a trained photographer, turnspike can
see the implications of an image, as well as the appropriate angle from which
to shoot. his insight as a 'shutterbug' will provide, i hope, new quality to
the archives.

the new format, however, will credit the photographer with the peice, which
is different than the previous layout. this will enable me to give credit where
it's due, and to offer a wider variety of images and styles. as i wrote to ts
in an aim communique, 'a short caption would be tight, but if not, i can write
up a response. i just find it's better when the artist explains why it caught
his/her eye.' in other words, if you submit an image, please write a short
statement about what it was that made you take the time to photograph the
object in the image. without further rambling, i bring you the new, pla:
rebirth.

[ exhibit: signs of the times ]

url: http://www.spfd2600.org/turnspike/loki/360_01.jpg
photographer: alienbinary and danger girl
subject: medical experiment classified ad

doctors are becoming more and more unscrupulous in what they choose to
study, and how they choose to study such things. this can be shown in
surprisingly, brutally honest postings in the "metro," a boston based free
newspaper. thanks to danger girl for holding the paper while i snapped the
shot.

url: http://www.spfd2600.org/turnspike/caution.jpg
photographer: turnspike
subject: caution sign on tailgate of trailer

i was on my way to visit kello, which is an hour drive by interstate. i

have witnessed some strange things while on this highway, but this was the
first time i risked tailgating a trailer hauling a dangerous cargo at 75 mph
while operating a camera to get a picture of it. in case you have trouble
reading the sign on the trailer, or even are doubting what it says. it reads
"caution: inside this trailer is a highly contagious and incurable disease".
and you might also notice that this trailer is driving in both lanes. i
guess when you are sporting a sign like that, you can pretty much drive
wherever you want.

url: currently missing. sorry.

photographer: alienbinary and danger girl
subject: train advertisement

have you ever seen the "sixth sense?" yeah. well apparently there are an
awful lot of funds available for people who claim to have a sixth or seventh
sense for that matter. this is the first of a serious of rediculous train car
ads i found with danger girl. these images were taken with a palm zire, in
boston, mass., on the mbta subway system.

url: http://www.spfd2600.org/turnspike/loki/set239_01.jpg
photographer: alienbinary
subject: train advertisement

one of the most important scenarios that sean kennedy brought up with tales
from the afternow, albeit a work of art, not a documentary, was the concept of
guns being outlawed. i've said before that i don't like guns, and i don't. i've
been held at gunpoint, and when that happens to you, you realize the false
sense of power that such a weapon gives to people that need it the least. a
firearm is no joke, and it's certainly nothing to be irresponsible about.
however, in that same right, i think it's downright irresponsible to ignore the
obvious warning signs that soon we'll be called upon to turn in our neighbors.
as sean said, it happened before with the nazis. in fact, what a lot of people
are unaware of, is that the german army prior to the onset of wwii, but post
treaty of versailles were forbidden to practice firearms drills with guns. for
this reason, they did rifle drills with shovels. i took this photo while the
train car was moving, and it attracted a lot of attention i would rather it
hadn't, but i thought it was worth documenting.

url: http://www.spfd2600.org/turnspike/loki/nativeslaughter.jpg
photographer: alienbinary
subject: bas releif architecture

on a recent visit to the "windy city" of chicago, illinois, i was walking

around the city near navy pier, and i stumbled across a series of releif
carvings into the pylons that were holding up the bridge across lake michigan.
these carvings depicted the "civilization" of chicago, and celebrated the
"heroic" efforts of the soldiers that died fighting the natives for the land.
this particular peice was fortunately accurate, in that it showed a union
soldier using his saber to garrot the caratoid artery of an indian brave, while
other natives were frozen in stone around them, screaming in agony at the
sight. the greatest irony was that the caption below illustrated an entirely
contradictory story, one in which the city commended the efforts of the white
settlers to "tame" and fight off the very people who lived there first. it was
as if the city had decided to openly admit that they saw nothing wrong with the
american conquest of the native peoples.

url: http://www.spfd2600.org/turnspike/loki/chicagograf.jpg
photographer: alienbinary and firehazard
subject: graffiti with a point

i'll be the first to admit that this isn't exactly museum quality
commentary, but i do beleive that you can tell an awful lot about a city from
it's graffiti. in this case, i think it's certainly safe to say that chicago
residents feel that if they have the urge to be heard, they might as well have
a developed message to go with it. partisan bullshit aside, it's refreshing to
see art being used to steer the public opinion. dissent is a critical
ingredient in art, and lately i've been seeing quite a bit of dissent and quite
a bit of artwork, and very little combination of the two.

url: http://www.spfd2600.org/turnspike/loki/chicagograf1.jpg
photographer: alienbinary and firehazard
subject: graffiti with a point

this particular peice is a follow up of the prior one, and instead of

offering the artist's opinion on bush, we have a rather disturbing caricature
of donald rumsfeld. these were both found posted on newspaper vending machines.

url: http://www.spfd2600.org/turnspike/loki/379_01.jpg
photographer: alienbinary
subject: controversial train ad

the caption reads "abortion is a choice between a woman and her god."
broken down into nuances, you'll notice the distinct lack of mention of any
doctor. while i understand the slight twist of words, i think that the ad
agency might have become far too heavy handed about this issue. this photo was
taken while i was riding the "t" (the boston subway system) with dg, and when i
showed it to her after i got up and took the snap, she admitted that she had
trouble determining what the agency was trying to say. truthfully, it could be
an ad for or against pro-choice. what i found provocative, however, was how
aggressively the sides were campaigning. it seems that the issue will never die
down.

[ exhibit: out of order ]

url: http://www.spfd2600.org/turnspike/loki/ooo.jpg
photographer: alienbinary
subject: parking meter gone down

greynin and i were walking along the main thoroughfare of the newbury
street and boylston area when we happened across a bank of cars that for each
meter that was functioning, another one wasn't. this was, ironically, exactly
what he and i were discussing as we had just dropped some six bucks in change
to park the fucking car. no sooner had i told him that seeing all these
computerized meters made me direly hope for a kernel panic so i wouldn't have
to keep running back to his car and feeding quarters into the slot, had such a
thing happened. it was fanfuckingtastic. that particular photograph is
dedicated to whoever it was that stuck the peice of matchbook into the coin
slot, causing the error.

url: http://www.spfd2600.org/turnspike/loki/set493_01.jpg
photographer: alienbinary
subject: the editor was on vacation

this was the headline of a major newspaper, page one, in chicago. i'd hate
to be living in that area and have the name "wrigley." i am, however, quite
aware that there's a stadium with that name, so don't bother writing in to tell
me that i'm a moron.

url: http://www.spfd2600.org/turnspike/loki/bikeintree.jpg
photographer: alienbinary
subject: anyone else think of catch-22 when they see this?

this was something that stopped both greynin and i in our tracks for a good
five minutes, mostly because i was laughing so hard. people are so unobservant
lately, that no one had bothered to notice that someone's bicycle had been
parked fifteen feet above the ground. when i stopped to adjust my palm's
aperture, other people realized what i was looking at-- and photographing-- and
began laughing as well. i can't help but be reminded of two things: one, the
book "catch-22" by joseph heller, and the scene where the funeral is
interrupted by yossarian watching the procession from a tree, completely naked.
the second thing that comes to mind, is the rediculous scene i posted in the
last archives, where someone had decimated a city block of newspaper vending
machines.

-?------------?------------???????????????????????????-------------------??----
pa1nv12x04----------------------------------------------------------------[ 4 ]
[ will you remember me? ]
[ mephyt ]
[ 4 ]----------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv12x04
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

i'm not even sure how to begin writing this entry, as i don't know where to
start, where to finish, or anything in between. i have a feeling that i won't
like it, but i'll publish it anyways. it's not a matter of quality in writing
in this case, it's just the matter of getting it out there, getting it seen,
and maybe i'll feel better about myself in the end because someone i'll never
meet will read it, think to themselves for a brief moment that it is an honest
moment, and then keep going on with their lives.

i'm completely and utterly jaded and useless at the moment. i've no clue
what to do, and i have no clue where to do it. being completely lost has it's
disadvantages at times. usually, i just shrug it off and pretend that it
doesn't matter, that it's nothing to worry about. it's always so much easier
that way. it's always so much easier to just pretend there is nothing wrong
with me, and that life is going as fabulously as i usually can con myself into
thinking. tonight though, it's not working like that.

i spent a while tonight at the local coffee shop, pretending that i still
had an interest with mingling with the rest of humanity. it sounds so horribly
pathetic, even when i read those words. "that i still had an interest in
mingling with the rest of humanity". i feel lonlier than i think i've ever felt
right now, yet for whatever reason, i don't want to really see anyone. this
might be because i know that anyone i see right now is probably going to
disappoint me. they'll somehow, even if i have no expectations of them, come up
with a way to do it. i just wish that that thought would leave my head, and
stay the hell away, but it persists, so i sit here, writing about the useless
thoughts i'm having.

while i was there, i just sat on a couch, one of many, wishing that the
perfect woman would walk up to me, say "i've been waiting for you", take my
hand, and lead me somewhere better than where i am. i don't mean the perfect
person in general, i mean the perfect person for me. their odd little flaws and
all. perfection is something i fear far too much, probably a good thing i'll
never get there, myself. i just wish that at this point, i had someone here to
tell me that something good was going to happen to me, and get the thoughts out
of my head that nothing really matters in the grand scheme of things. i wish
that i felt i could actually make a difference, or actually be happy about
something for once, but every victory i have is always bittersweet somehow.
it's always tainted with "it could have been just a little better if i'd put
more into it".

i sat in the bathroom there for a while, doing nothing. i just sat there,
not smoking, not doing my business, just doing nothing. i sat there trying to
figure out what the hell was my issue. i sat there, trying to figure out why i
can't just fucking feel satisfied with whatever i'm doing at the time. i ended
up carving "will you remember me?" into the wall. at least i spelled it
correctly, which is more than i can say for the rest of the people who had done
the same for whatever reason. at least mine meant something...

the carvings on the wall are almost like an art form. a piece of the
history of a collective of minds. like every insane facet of the psyche, they
tell a story, i can't quite figure it out just yet, but it makes sense in a
twisted way. it's the history of the people that go there. many of them, i know
the writing of because i've read their own journal entries over their shoulder
while they listened to the most depressing music that artists from around the
world could record legally. they sat there, putting down on paper what they
were thinking at the time, trying to prove their own individuality and
originality. they would later post their notes on the internet, scanning the
pages directly so as not to lose any of the depressingness. the only thing they
could have done to further prove how much of an individual they were was
anything besides what they did. i saved some of those entries they made, long
ago, then lost them shortly after i thought i'd aquired a life. part of me
wishes that i had them back so i could see just how close to that i've actually
gotten.

after a while of sitting there, moving from couch to chair and back again,
talking to people i'd rather not see for various reasons, my friend and i
decided to take off. we said our good-bye's to people we really don't care to
see, and probably won't see again for months so as to preserve the small amount
of civility we share with each other. giving half hearted hugs and careless
fare-thee-wells, we eventually depart and cram ourselves back into the car to
go home. the entire time, i kept thinking that something wasn't right when we
were leaving, much along the same thoughts i'd been having all night anyways.
no surprise i suppose, that i finally couldn't take it anymore and just started
talking about how i'm going to eventually go to a country and have to shoot
innocent civilians who are just trying to make their life so some fuck in a
suit sitting in an oval office can say that the stock market is still
recovering and that we've officially defended our nations oil supplies. it'll
make everyone happy knowing they won't have to pay that extra $0.02 at the pump
come tomorrow. if they only knew that myself, and the rest of the soldiers on
that field had burned down 3 villages, killed off all the occupants with gases
and chemicals, then scorched everything or trampled what was left with a war
machine driven by blood and fueled by hatred of things we don't quite
understand.

towards the end of the conversation, i decided that i really wish that i
had a tape recorder so i could have later scribed all the info into here, or
somewhere, so an amateur script-writer could have found it, put it into some
crappy b-movie that would eventually win an award for how original the story
was. then, that movie would have made a million dollars, caused no less than 20
people to kill themselves based on just how depressing it was, gotten turned
into a digestable made-for-tv-movie, and then some jackass in another state
i've never visited would review it and call it the "feel good movie of the
year". add a happy ending onto the end and you've got the same shite that comes
out of hollywood that we love to eat for $7.00 a ticket. i'd eventually sue to
get royalties, end up with an out of court settlement, and be well enough off
to buy myself enough guinness to drink myself to death every day for the next
100 years. sounds like a plan to me. i wish i'd had a tape recorder.

to kind of wrap up the entire thing, i suppose right now i'm lonely, i have
no direction, and i really don't care enough to even light a cigarette so i can
pretend that i'm just going to get over it and move on. the entire concept that
i've been dealing with tonight i've had to deal with for a long time, and
although my words are horribly lacking, they're the best i can come up with on
the fly. i just want for at least one of these things to go away so i can turn
my attention to something that doesn't depress me quite as much. then i can get
back to dreaming about a life i'll never be able to afford, a person i'm never
going to meet, and happy thoughts that i'll never have. i might as well try to
get to sleep soon enough, at least i have a shot in hell of having a dream that
doesn't involve any of these concerns, but i'll probably end up just staring at
the ceiling, wishing there were tiles i could count.

if there was anything to say that would make this sound remotely better, i
would say it, but since i can't, i'll just leave everyone with a few sound
effects i can't get out of my head.

click. click... click. bang! thud.

-?------------?------------???????????????????????????-------------------??----
pa1nv12x05----------------------------------------------------------------[ 5 ]
[ xanax and popcorn ]
[ alienbinary ]
[ 5 ]----------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv12x05
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

preface to xap: the following peice of writing is the result of

several online conversations with people during times of stress.
there are a small number of people in this world that have the
patience and fortitude to deal with me when it's past my bed time
and i'm cranky as hell. the people who do posess these powers are
also responsible for keeping me sane. this is a tribute to these
people, who should be regarded as heroes and heroines.

special thanks to aliabuse and turnspike for keeping me from

beating myself over the head until i passed out during the few
days over the course of which this peice was written.

* * *

"i'm on enough xanax to kill a pony right now," is the first thing she says
to me during our long conversation online. i have conversations with aliabuse
like this all the time; one of us has gone neurotic, and the other gets to
untangle the madness. it's not that either of us feeds off of this, it's just
that it's frighteningly hard to find someone who can deal with me in a state
like the one i find myself in right now.

on an entirely different note, i spent an hour today reading a book about

the history of human cadavers while i boiled down some vitamin c tablets to
make a sizeable amount of ascorbic acid solution. i was doing this, simply,
because i had nothing else to do to occupy my mind. i think if i hadn't been in
need of a good project, this would have had to wait, but today's been one of
those days that you know will get worse the longer it drags on. "did you know
that they use red dye in embalming fluid?," i ask my dad. he didn't. he also
informs me that he would have been perfectly fine not knowing this in the first
place, and was not at all thrilled with learning the lurid details of how the
dye makes it into the capilaries of the body for that rosy appearance. he
doesn't get it.

"i'm considering doing away with the whole dating thing altogether, and
just marrying the next girl i fall in love with." i tell aliabuse, in one of
our chats. there are a lot of ways to take this remark, and most of them would
fall under the 'i don't want to hear it.' category. fortunately for me, i
already know that such innovations in the field of modern romance aren't beyond
ali's possible trains of thought, and she replies that she, in turn, has also
considered if this sort of attitude wouldn't be much easier. she didn't type in
that acronym that sounds out like "roffle", she didn't respond with a
laugh-out-loud cop-out, but instead took this to be exactly what it was: an
honest musing, not a joke. see how this works so much better? i could have gone
to one of a million people and given background on how i got to this possible
train of thought, and then, if i hadn't forgotten it already-- and it still
kept it's novelty-- told them my idea. i could have, but they would have
thought i was being foolish. that's because good ideas are always struck down
by more practical people.

being practical is not always a good quality. a practical person has no

business trying to make good conversation with me when i'm in a hyperanxious
mood, because they always try and rationalize things for me. no one, and this
is universally true as far as i know, likes to have things rationalized for
them when they're palpitating and sweating and anxious. it's the same sort of
irritation that occurs when you slip and fall on a patch of ice, skinning your
elbow, and some clown comes up and-- the scary part is that they're totally
serious usually-- asks you if you're okay.

practical people would suggest that you can combine jack daniels with
coffee on your own, instead of buying coffee grinds that are presoaked. but the
whole novelty is lost then, and the practical person misses what someone with a
very tangeantial mind wouldn't: putting jd in your coffee can be alcoholism.
brewing jd coffee, however, isn't.

"oh my god, they make jack daniels coffee! it's a personal gift from god,
to me." she says. although this has nothing to do with the fact that we were
discussing my inability to stay serene just moments before, i leap onto this
train of conversation because i'm wired to the gills on my own adrenaline, as i
have been since the day began. if there is one thing that anxiety can be
credited for, it's that it has the unique ability to allow you to think about
everything all at once, without redirecting your train of thought. this feels
an awful lot like having the equivalent of a fourteen car pile up in the middle
of an airport runway occur in the confines of your own skull.

when you're this anxious, you get the creepy sensation that you are aware
of things that you have no way of knowing. i have left the building of a place
i'm staying with an umbrella, because i know that it will rain at some point in
the next 1-72 hours. now, this isn't statistically hard to predict, especially
when it's cloudy, but i get irritated when i don't act on these intuitions. if
i leave the house without sunglasses, even when it's dark, i'm not satisfied.
i'm also going to focus on this dissatisfaction a whole lot more, because i'm
anxious-- and this is why having to give background information to someone
before you start talking about what's on your mind is a really huge problem,
and why it's vitally important to appreciate it when you find someone with whom
you can just start up a conversation at any point.

cheezi on the other hand, is always in a state of mid-conversation. it

should be noted that i've just resumed working on this, after a siesta that
lasted three days longer than the one or two hours i anticipated. "luke, i'm
yer father, eh..." says the message of the day program for e-lite.org's main
server, impact. according to impact, that quote is from the movie strange brew,
which i'll admit, i've never seen. why this quote is funny, i have no idea. i'm
searching for a distraction, though, so i load bitchx remotely from the ssh
window that connects me to e-lite.org. as a side note, you don't need to be
familiar with unix to follow what i'm doing; in simple terms, i've let myself
into my portion of cheezi's computer, then begun using it to do something
entirely different. this is the digital equivalent of a slight change of
scenery.

the message of the day for this particular irc channel writes
"congratulations, you've failed as a goth. that makes you emo." the credit for
this great two liner goes to one 'unknownlamer.' i briefly consider whether i
should pool the collective wisdom of impact and socrates (the sarcastic motd
program for the irc channel in question) in order to come up with a slightly
wittier, but more dynamic set of insults. when i'm highly agitated, and i am
right now, this sort of thing seems like a good idea. this is because i don't
like too much cheer infecting my depression. i need to talk to ali again.

"i can't walk to the store because i can't find my headphones," is

aliabuse's reply to my instant message that suggests i've reached a new level
of boredom. this is the perfect response to my dillemma. here is a problem that
i can solve. i think i can solve this. regardless, i understand this
completely, because i wear giant dynamic studio monitor headphones used for
sound production, so that there's no way i can hear what other people are
saying, and cannot possibly be held accountable for ignoring their jeers.

the conversation immediately switches to the subject of ebay, and why

certain people just shouldn't be allowed to be auctioneers. i understand this
completely as well. i spent last week bidding for an airport card that used to
cost two and a half times less than what it goes for now. unfortunately, what
she's bidding on? i have no idea what the hell that particular type of
collectible is. to her credit, she did try and explain. "it's depression era
glass..." now we're getting somewhere, sort of. she's bidding on something made
of glass, manufactured during either the depression, where no one had any
money, or during an era in the particular artist's life that was so bleak, it's
now known as the depression era. this is how uncultured i am when it comes to
collectibles.

and now, i have become completely lost in conversation. a few hours pass,
and my newest anxiety attack occurs, one in which i realize that i have
completely forgotten the password to my yahoo! mail account. this is, actually,
in many ways hysterical, except it happened to me. the longest i usually get
locked out of an email account is two hours, after which i can usually dig up
the ciphertext from temp files. unfortunately, this isn't going to be one of
those cases, because i spent last night wiping the temp files of my computer
after visiting a site with an embedded trojan. in an effort to insure that i
didn't get jacked, i changed the password, after which i promptly passed out.

"sounds like the stupid shit i did," replies turnspike when i tell him
about my dillemma. being optimistic, which is uncharacteristic in every
possible way, i try pleading with tech support. in the meantime i ask him how
long he thinks it'll take for my account to expire so i can just reclaim the
yahoo! id. "forever, i forgot the password to turnspike@yahoo.com about six
years ago, and it still hasn't been cancelled," he replies. this does nothing
to lighten my mood. "i'm drowning my sorrows in non-alcoholic beer. this is
fucking depressing." i reply, and the conversation more or less falls over.

"insert witty, clever and provocative away message here," i post as my

auto-response. for once, it's time to take a rest. and i do have a random
craving for popcorn, but only the type you find at the movies.

alienbinary, 2004.

-?------------?------------???????????????????????????-------------------??----
pa1nv12x06 ---------------------------------------------------------------[ 6 ]
[ understanding irda remote control codes ]
[ alienbinary ]
[ 6 ]----------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv12x06
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

you know that scene in the overwhelmingly controversial flick "hackers"

(which you either love for it's campiness and open reverence of phone
phreaking, or hate for technical innacuracy) where the characters 'razor' and
'blade' say "remember, hacking is not just a crime. it's also a survival
tool."? (or something to that effect.)

i always thought that line was kind of stupid and kind of funny at the same
time. for one, hacking's not a crime, it's an art form. second, real hackers
don't abuse their power, and their power is something akin to a god's. i've
been hacking since i can remember. anything i can get my hands on, i want to
know how it works, and i want to take it apart and make it work better. at the
same time, i've always been fascinated with the concept of making things work
to my advantage, after mastering their inner workings. such is exactly the case
with remote controls and infrared or irda technology, just as you might find in
a remote control for your television, a furby, or a sony clie. our whole
technological world is controlled remotely for the most part, by a series of
circuits and technological curiosities that are so small they fit on keychains
and can be lost behind the sofa.

[ when the palmiii was king. ]

when i was in public high school for a whopping one year before i was
pulled, i had the unique ability to control every television and vcr on the
school grounds. before and after class, once word got out that i had the "key,"
people would ask me for requests of different shows they wanted to magically
appear instead of the history video that the teacher had planned. as an
insecure adolescent with something to prove, i did more than once indulge these
requests by turning the wwii video input into a feed from public access
television and then depending on the nature of the request, the ultimate
destination could have been anything from just "off" to the jerry springer
show. for the latter, i apologize to this day.

all of this was accomplished with a simple palmiii, and i claim no genius
on my part for making this work. at the time, omniremote.prc had been just
released to the public as shareware and was revered by pda experts as one of
the most important programs of the year for technical enthusiasts. it's
interface was eerily similar to that of apple computer's hypercard studio, a
developer's environment that became the toy of both educators, amateur system
crackers and even phone phreaks attempting to duplicate the dtmf (dual tone,
multi frequency) tones of the pstn (packet switched telephone network.)
omniremote allowed the developer to create buttons and various controls, and
then assign scripts to them in an environment that later earned the title of
object oriented scripting. you can find it's successors in vbscript, realbasic
scripting language, graphical implementations of apple's applescript and
appleevents, oneclick (favorite of aol kiddies) and facespan's scripting
language. it was a template based design. you could build as many different
virtual remotes as you liked, and you would train each button by aiming the
original (or close match) remote control at the infrared port on the front of
the palm pilot.

i was able to accrue a remote for roughly every major manufacturer used in
my school, house and even neighborhood, and my palm became a universal remote
for everything with a remote. i was so proud of myself, but in truth, i didn't
really understand what i was playing with. the next portion of this article
will go into depth about the actual hardware implementation of the universal
remote control, the one you can find in any drug store.

[ cracking the universal remote. ]

remote control manufacturers encountered a problem when it came to

designing a remote that would control only specific devices. for example, if
the home user was running an rca television and a magnavox vcr, then the power
button for a remote would control both devices, if there wasn't a way to
distinguish signals destined for each device. the solution's used included
limited range (which just irritated the shit out of the end user; they would
have to go so close to the device to make it work that they might as well
control it using the buttons on the actual receiver itself), advice in the
user's manual that said to only operate one device at a time (which was even
stupider. imagine using your vcr without a fucking television to replay the
data on the casette? it would be like masturbation without genitalia.) the
final, and currently implemented solution was to incorporate a numeric code
into the header of each packet that would designate the manufacturer and limit
the number of devices that could respond to the transmitted signal. for our
purposes, i'm going to cover the three digit string, as it's the one
implemented in the devices i'm doing the experiments on to write this.

remote control codes are three
each proprietary remote comes with
manufacturer, like a password, for
well and good until ten days after
the remote to the dvd player.
digit strings, that act as device addresses.
the string already programmed by the
the convenience of the customer. this is all
the warranty expires and the dorm can't find

breaking down the codes:

------------------------

for this example, we'll use a remote control with the code '060.' i'm using
this, because that's the code to the tv that i've gained control over in the
common room of my suite in college. according to phillips, who make the phdvd5,
the first digit should correspond to a list of possible manufacturers. for our
purposes, we'll recognize that this a fruitless excercise, since there are
hundreds of manufacturers. instead, we'll turn straight to a code library.

a code library is a built-in feature of a universal remote control that

contains all known (anything a company has made public, without infringing on
copyright and trademarks) irda codes, sorted numerically from 0-9. again, i am
using a phdvd5 as my model, the specs could vary from remote to remote, but for
the most part the rules are the same.

1. by looking at the code libraries offered by the manuals of several

different companies that make urc's (universal remote controls), you can gather
a list of possible codes. i suggest getting your hands on the pdf manuals of as
many urcs as possible from the urc manufacturer, and printing out the code
libraries.

2. search each code reference table on the printouts for the manufacturer
that corresponds to the device you wish to control, and with a highlighter,
highlight each list offered.

3. once you have the most possible codes you can find for your target,
record them into a text file using a powerful text editor such as textwrangler
(osx), bbedit lite (mac classic), vi, picospan or kwrite ('nix.)

4. now sort the list by alphabetical order, and use the option of sorting
by leading numbers. this will generate a list in order of lowest number to
highest, allowing you to see any potential duplicates. beleive it or not, not
all lists are the same, which is admittedly very strange, but for the most
part, you'll find a dupe for each manual you used as a reference. next, "remove
duplicate entries", and you have your new code library.

5. print out your new list and try each possible code. every code that
fails should be crossed out and eliminated from the list. each code that works,
however, shouldn't be the only code you keep. i'll explain this in a moment.
 6. every device code you discover that works for your device is at least
marginally effective. however, because each urc is built differently, there is
usually a single specific remote control code per device. with this in mind,
take the example of a dvd player. after i programmed my urc to work with one of
the codes i found in the manual for the remote, i noticed that if i pressed the
"eject button" for the dvd functions, then the "picture in a picture" function
would be activated on the tv. this is because i found the right make, but the
wrong model. don't throw out this code, but understand that this isn't the
exact match.

7. once you've found the code that works perfectly, corresponding to each
button, or the most you can utilize with your equipment, do yourself a favor
and mark the code number down on the back of your remote. urcs are picky, and
need to be reprogrammed often. the last thing you want to do is go back through
your own code library code by code.

now, the first thing you're probably wondering is "doesn't it say all this
in the user's manual that came with the remote i bought?" the answer is a
resounding no. i was able to find two workable codes from the table that
phillips offered for the jvc tv in the lounge, but the actual code was
something else entirely. for this reason, you'll want to do your research and
brute force it.

[ cracking the code with in-store models ]

every universal remote that i've seen that looked like it was worth buying,
has a feature on it called "learn." take your remote control, and carve
something identifying on the back of the device. this will distinguish yours
from store models.

now, take your remote, and the make and model numbers of the devices you
wish to control, and go to the nearest radioshack, best buy or circuit city (or
whereever you wish) and find a match for your device. the remote control is
often wired to the display, which is just fine for you. you don't need the
store's physical remote, just the data housed in the memory. aim your remote at
the store's remote with as little interference as possible. realize that
infrared is a rediculously picky and finicky light source, and is subject to
interference from anything.

using the "learn" button, you can select the type of device on your urc,
and program each command without the code by holding down the learn button,
pressing the button you want the remote to learn, and storing the command one
by one. this may be tedious, but it's pretty much a surefire way to dupe the
remote. if an employee bothers you about this, don't hesitate to tell them that
you lost the remote to a very expensive home theater system you bought at the
store who's remote your using. this should be enough. once you have programmed
your remote to work with the model you wish to control, thank the clerk on your
way out. you now have a working universal remote. this works even on devices
whose manufacturers refuse to make public the remote control code.

incidentally, certain universal remote controls allow you to determine the

code programmed into it through a procedure defined in the manual. if you do
the in-store programming method, and then you follow the afforementioned
procedure, it's not entirely unfeasible that you can determine the code to your
device, deobfuscating a peice of information you really deserved to (and paid
for the right to) know in the first place.
 [ conclusion. ]

i hope that this at least was entertaining to anyone who has wondered about
those little black boxes that seem to spell "power" in every living room.
although a lot of this information is rudimentary, i wrote this so that anyone
interested in how these devices work and why they don't work out of the box can
learn. have fun, but don't be a dick. i used to work at a gadget retail store,
and people who use wire cutters to steal the remote controls when they got
impatient. if you think this is a faceless, victimless crime, then you need to
know that chances are the employees on the sales floor at the time will have to
pay for your greed. it's much better, and a lot more interesting to pay the
extra ten to fifteen dollars to learn the inner workings of remotes.

-- alienbinary, 2004

-?------------?------------???????????????????????????-------------------??----
pa1nv12x07 ---------------------------------------------------------------[ 7 ]
[ road trip: geek style ]
[ turnspike ]
[ 7 ]----------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv12x07
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

looking over my list of things to bring on my week long trip to the east
coast from my home in missouri, i realized just how much of a geek i really am.
my list read like this verbatim: clothes, toiletries, laptop, power inverter,
power strip, fm transmitter, wifi gear, digital camera, memory cards, radio
scanner, headphones, tickets and hotel confirmations, batteries, and cell
phone. thinking back, i remembered how my mom would make a similar list before
a family vacation, but my list had no symbolence to her list at all. i was so
amused by it, i showed my girlfriend later so she could laugh at me too.

i can thank my girlfriend, jeepgurl, for this vacation. before i met her
she scored some nascar tickets for the october race in charlotte, nc. and by
the time we met, she didn't think she was going to make it there. but i really,
really needed a vacation, so i made plans to go with her. and since we were
that close to the coast, i had to go see the ocean. as a midwesterner, ocean
visits are few and far between, thus i made plans to drive to myrtle beach for
a few days after the race before heading back home. with a little research on
the interweb and with a copy of microsoft trips & streets on my laptop to look
at locations, i was able to book our rooms in both charlotte and myrtle beach,
and managed to get good rates. charlotte was the toughest to book because since
the race was that weekend, rooms were either booked, or going for $130 a night
with a 3 night minimum stay. i found a motel 6 close to the track for $79, so
we can stay one night and get out to myrtle beach. at myrtle beach it was the
off-season, so suprisingly i scored a romance suite at the sea mist resort for
about the same rate per night as the motel 6. and according to the mapping
software, the sea mist was around where alot of the nightlife happens in town.

so we set off on our trip, leaving that morning about 9:00am in a rental
car. we relied entirely on the mapping software, which already laid our route
out. my parents warned me that they have had bad experiences with mapquest and
that sort of electronic mapping. they had told me to buy an atlas...something
hardcopy. but i wasn't using mapquest, and i checked for and recieved updates
to trips & streets the night before the trip. i did the driving, and i
entrusted jeepgurl with the navigation on the laptop. there was only one
highway we stayed on until we crossed missouri and into illinois, where we were
to be just a few minutes before the road dipped down to kentucky. about 15
minutes went by and we were still in illinois. there was no doubt we were a
little lost. at the end of the next exit ramp jeepgurl and i found our
location, and decided not to double-back to our route. instead, we found all
the county roads and highways that kept us heading east, while eventually
merging with our original route. our side trip took us through metropolis,
illinois: home of superman:
http://www.spfd2600.org/turnspike/trip/images/superman.jpg

the rest of our first day was uneventful, and we arrived in cookeville, tn
about 6:00 pm that night, and easily found a motel with net access. in fact,
they all had wireless internet access. i ran netstumbler and picked up two
access points in our motel, and one from the motel next door. using our motel's
own ap i pulled in just enough signal to im kello and chat for a while, check
the weather (since it had been raining since we left), and i checked my webcam
to see what my cat was doing. i ran a network scanner, and as i expected, i
was the only computer on the router. i played around with the router a little
longer, using default passwords to see if i could get in. no luck. it's good to
see that at least some level of security is being used. bedtime.

the next day, we took a scenic route into the smokey mountains, and
jeepgurl took to zooming way in on the mapping software and naming the roads we
were about to pass before we got there. and doing so while we were taking
hairpin turns and climbing up and barreling down hills. you have to love a girl
who can pay that much attention to a laptop for that long under those
conditions and still manage to take in the scenery. after a beautiful drive we
arrived in charlotte and found our motel without a hitch. the following day,
saturday, we left about noon to pick up another set of rechargable batteries
for my digital cam, and a 5-pin transfer cable to connect my cam to my laptop
(should have put that on the list), then we were off to lowe's motor speedway.

the speedway was everything i expected: crowded, noisy, and as full of

commercialism as a fan can stand. nextel (the sponsor of the cup) was running a
promotion where if you were spotted wearing a yellow sticker, you could win
prizes. everyone had these stickers, but never once did i hear about anyone
winning a prize. and the drivers and racing teams all had their merchandise
trailers at which the products were going as fast as the workers could sell
them. we bought a few things ourselves, excused ourselves from the crowds, and
found our way into the stands just after the gates opened. i took the time to
take some pictures of the track before most the people filtered into their
seats. midget cars were racing while i took the pictures to make this panorama:
http://www.spfd2600.org/turnspike/trip/lowes.jpg

closer to race time, i took out the radio scanner i borrowed from kello and
began to cycle through the driver and official's frequencies, listening to the
chatter of the participants, and occasionally recieving a fan with a family
band radio as well. a few drivers were playing a loop over their frequency to
allow their crew to check their radios, and some had friends and family talking
back and forth to the crew, wishing them luck. a little later, as the race was
about to start, i dialed kello's cell and thanked him for the scanner by
letting him hear the sound of over 40 cars issuing about 130 decibels of noise
as they started the race. maybe i should have given him some warning... the
rest of the race was very entertaining. however, the regular fans tell me that
it was a little boring than usual because there were few wrecks and because the
leader had the race won well before the finish. the scanner did make things
more entertaining. i listened to drivers talk about how things are running,
who is on their bad side, and more; all without the restraints of censorship.
moreover, i listened to the officials talk back and forth about track
conditions, give warnings to the drivers, call yellow and red flags to restrict
the race, and just give patter back and forth. it was well worth the effort to
bring the scanner.

after joining the exodus away from the speedway after the race, back to our
motel, we rested up for the night, and headed for myrtle beach. using trips
and streets, it was no problem cruising across south carolina to the coast.
arriving at our resort, i was dismayed to find it did not have wireless access.
in fact, none of the marquees in front of the hotels and resorts mentioned
wireless access at all. this was strange compared to all the other sleep spots
between here and home, which made wifi a big beal on their signs. checking into
our suite, i noticed a advert for dial-up access sold to short time users that
seemed to be backed by the local chamber of commerce. just speculation, but
maybe this is why there is a lack of wireless at these resorts.
with only a few days to enjoy the beach and our suite, we tried to do as little
shopping as possible. maybe it was better i didn't have the wireless to
distract me from enjoying the beach. i did however take some great pictures
with my cam again, here is a few:

http://www.spfd2600.org/turnspike/trip/images/card4%20052.jpg
http://www.spfd2600.org/turnspike/trip/images/card4%20047.jpg
http://www.spfd2600.org/turnspike/trip/images/card4%20061.jpg
http://www.spfd2600.org/turnspike/trip/images/card4%20049.jpg

after two days at the beach, and a awesome stay at sea mist, we had to head
back to reality. we headed back at a slightly different route as we came, which
brought us to columbia, sc. we happened to be listening to a fm station out of
columbia that said the eastbound lane if i-20 was partialy closed while a crime
scene investigation was underway. we were driving in the westbound lane and
witnessed about 2 miles of interstate closed to one lane of traffic, right in
the middle of columbia during noontime on a tuesday. we had no problems with
traffic in our lane, and before we could hear anything else about why csi was
searching the interstate, we were out of fm range.

we stopped that night about 600 miles from the coast, once again at
cookeville, tn. instead of staying in the same motel as last time, we stayed in
the one next door, whose ap i picked up when i ran netstumbler in our motel
room during our last stay in cookeville. while getting the room, the clerk
asked me whether i wanted a smoking or non-smoking room. for the first time
ever, i replied by telling her i just needed a room close to the access point.
she gave me a odd look, acted like there would be something on her desk that
might tell her where the ap is, then yelled to a young east indian man on a pc
in the lobby. he began to try to explain where the ap was, then just resorted
to telling her to give me a room on the ground floor, near the lobby. after
this his told me i would need a computer that could get wireless, i smiled and
nodded, thinking that he must've had some idiot come in and be all upset that
the motel had free internet, but no computers to use it. after moving into the
room for the night, i connected to the net and found the website for the
columbia paper, the state. here i found the sad story of the crime scene we
passed earlier in the day:

http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/local/9963362.htm

in the morning, we packed up and prepared to finish our trip. the 500 miles
went by very smooth. the vacation gods seemed to be taking it easy on us,
understanding that we would have to be at work the next day. we were at kello's
house by 6:00pm, and we visited a little while before returning the rental car,
and driving one more hour to my house. long trips are like airplane flights,
it's only after you land back on safe ground that you can call it a good
journey. i really enjoyed this trip, my first big trip as a geek. we were only
really lost when we didn't pay attention to the information in front of us.
having volumes of info made this trip easy, informative, and comfortable. we
have already talked about our next tech-injected journey, maybe taking a train
into boston. it can't come soon enough.

-?------------?------------???????????????????????????-------------------??----
pa1nv12x08----------------------------------------------------------------[ 8 ]
[ reincarnation ]
[ mephyt ]
[ 8 ]----------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv12x08
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

editor's note: "reincarnation" was written on sept. 4-5, 2004,

two days before mephyt had to pack up and leave
for active duty in the united states army,
19 delta, as a cav. scout.

an epiphany is something that i've never really had the priveledge of being
able to say i'd experienced up until tonight. a sudden click, a gunshot in my
head that seemed to make life make sense for a brief moment. it imparted me
with the answers to so many of my questions, while posing whole new scores of
them. a sudden shot, that long awaited bullet finally entering my brain, and
nearly drawing tears to my eyes.

my dreams as of recently have been less than hoped for, or desired. they've
tended to make me depressed because they've been featuring the things i know
i'll never have. someone to love me, a place to call my own, a feeling of home.
the things that people all want. in a certain respect, these dreams were a
small miracle, in and of themselves. these are the things i won't allow myself
to think about during waking hours because of the lingering sadness it leaves
me with. i look on most of it at this point as a lost cause, but in my dreams i
possess all these things.

it's been said that a coward lives 1 life and 1000 deaths throughout a
lifetime, while a man lives 1000 lives and only a single death. i'm not a man
under those terms, but something in the middle. i feel that i die a small
amount every day, going from one life to another. just waiting for the spark
that i have to give out, to be rekindled again. i don't know how many lifetimes
away i was born, nor how many lives away i will die, but i sense, that in the
grand scheme of things that my waking life is coming to an end, and the spark i
hold is slowly going out. that the spark i have is fading away, and when it
runs out, the night will finally encompass me. this feeling is actually
beginning to become comforting, the idea that i'm going to be accepting of my
own time.

the dreams are becoming more lifelike and lucid as time goes on, especially
in the last few weeks. since i've decided to enlist, and put my own life on the
line, an evolution from within me has occured. i used to fear many things, now,
i just want to live life as best i can. i don't really care about my last
impressions, the last thing i am to someone is hardly what they will remember
me as. they'll remember the small things down the line, at least that's the way
that it has worked for me in the past. those that i've loved wasn't because
they told me that they cared for me at the 11th hour, it was because they gave
me a friendly greeting when it was out of their way. it was because they gave
me a bit of food when i was hungry, or because they listened to me when i
needed someone to talk to. there really aren't many people around that have
done that for me, but i remember them all, and time hardly passes without their
memories
coming to surface. these waking dreams aren't as saddening for me as my own
dreams while sleeping, but they still bare a striking resemblance.

i've talked with many people over a long period of time, from one life to
another, and they have helped to shape me into what i have become, and am
becoming. they have changed me without knowing it, and they have shaped my life
for both the better and worse. they gave me what i needed to progress forward.
in life, there really is no regression, simply revisting on something that was
possibly considered lost.

my dreams though, they've been the replacement for the usual interaction
that has helped me evolve. they have become my consolation, and i realized
tonight that i have finally given myself, at least in my dreams the things that
i have always wanted. i have felt like i was at home, i loved the person i've
always searched for, and i had a place to call my own. it wasn't just a dream
to me though, it was the life i'll never have. it was the things i'll never
live to see. in my heart of hearts, i know that i'll never know these things to
be true outside of my own dreams, but even if i only have them for the course
of a night at a time, they are mine, and i will cherish them until i do pass to
somewhere else, if there is anything left out there for me to experience after
this. my dreams are my salvation, and in turn, i've found salvation within
myself. i finally discovered the things that no one else could give me, my own
world. my own life. my own evolution. my own dreams.

good night.

-?------------?------------???????????????????????????-------------------??----
pa1nv12x09 ---------------------------------------------------------------[ 9 ]
[ life underground ]
[ alienbinary ]
[ 9 ]----------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv12x09
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

sometimes i wonder why it is that my life seems to entertain other people

when put into prose, yet when i'm going through the daily grind myself, i find
it rediculously mundane. still, one of the biggest sources of feedback i get is
regarding my various accounts of the strange things i've done to amuse myself.
it seems that other people find my life vastly more interesting than i do. i'm
glad someone's having fun.

* * *

walking into the notorious manray, located somewhere in between boston and
cambridge mass, i felt an awful lot like an investigative journalist; i felt
very little like a scenester. manray is a club that has a reputation for being
one of the most outrageous clubs in the boston area, famous all over the east
coast for the fetish nights and campus thursdays, when they transform into a
gay bar. i should make a quick note and explain that i went on a friday, where
the majority of the guests and patrons are female.

the idea to go to the nightclub in the first place had come from greynin,
whom i've only known for about a week, at the time of this writing. greynin has
seen me through a lot of shit lately, he's been the one to slap me back to
earth when i start on a diatribe about my tales of woe that really need to
chill out. i don't mean to say he's violent, far from it. although he's quite
capable of reducing a human being to a bag of bones, he's a peaceful cat, and
doesn't much care for the testosterone filled machismo that leaks out of the
nearby tufts university campus fraternities. in point of fact, he's actually a
seasoned hacker, and one of the wogs. it was after a week of refurbishing and
resurrecting dead computers and turning them into powerful teaching tools for
the disadvantaged that i felt ready to pen in my schedule a block of time for
unwinding and having fun. looking back, i think that this sort of activity
should become habit for me, as it may very well have saved my sanity and given
me a new lease on life.

four of us approached the club, looking for what sean k so lovingly

referred to as "a weep of goths" to point us in the direction of the main
entrance. having spotted a promising looking group of fishnet and vinyl clad
clove-smoking scenesters, we veered straight for the mouth of the club. i
turned to one of our motley crue, who had made the mistake of wearing a "the
used" tshirt to work, from which we picked him up on the way to the club. we
sort of plucked him out of work, without time to hide his emo side. i breifly
suggested safety pinning my skinny puppy patch over the big "u" on his shirt,
and writing "i hate emo" in the white space that made up the band's logo, but
we decided it would be a much better social experiment to see if anyone hassled
him. they did, actually.

greynin made it past security without so much as a bat of an eye, and sage
just sauntered through. the bouncers let him past without so much as even an id
check. he was, after all, the last person in the entire club, i decided later,
that one would ever consider harassing if they intended to survive the evening
to see the burlesque show that was promised to go on at random intervals
between industrial sets.

i was halfway through security with my tactical nylon police wallet out,
and dan was stopped by the bouncers. the only trouble i had was that-- as i
forgot to anticipate-- they wanted my id card out of the wallet. being only
about five foot four, i felt vindicated that the gentleman was breif with the
id scan and gave me a bracelet and told me to have a good time. dan however,
was stuck in front of a panel of bouncers and security guards, even a bartender
i would later learn, turned into judges to decide if he was fit for entry. a
brief visit to the manrayclub.com website will explain that 'fetish fridays'
or, as it was that night, 'xmortis,' required a minimal dress code of all black
and no sneakers or brown shoes. once inside the club, it became clear that this
wasn't the only way to dress, but between the four of us, none of us had any
fetish or industrial gear to dress him up in, and i don't think a black vinyl
gas mask with three centimeter spikes would have suited him all that well.

after carefull deliberation and many clove cigarettes later, the panel
finally agreed, presumably, that since his sneakers were black suede and gray
shoelaces, they were acceptable. i paid for the both of us at the door, and the
cash handler smiled at me, but with a hint of that knowing gaze of someone who
has seen people try and smuggle emo kids in before. i found out later that dan
had been told he "wasn't to drink, wasn't to touch a drink, and wasn't to even
hold a drink." i thought this was excessive, because later he couldn't even
legally hold my non-alcoholic beer. this was also unexhaustably funny, because
he looked more like he should have been my older brother than my younger
friend. more to the point, it was he that knew patrons of the club and had the
connections to the scene. the rest of us were kind of tourists. however, the
cruxshadows and icon of coil will be playing manray in september, and this made
me feel like any rantradio industrial veteran should be given vip access to all
five rooms and both floors. without question. i was there to represent, damnit.

i noticed, however, that once i was in the building, the only glances i got
were of welcome, some with a little playful flirting, as the night was one
giant goth dance party with clubbers getting up on the tables and stages and
performing their own burlesque shows impromptu. everyone was there to have a
good time, even though the range of variation on the concept of "having a good
time" was exhorbitantly large in this particular audience.

i received a few smiles as the back of my shirt was blacklit from the
hundred or so blacklight bulbs in both major hubs, and the word "coroner" was
brightly illuminated amidst a sea of black for all the other attendees to see.
when i had chosen this shirt, it was after thinking about an interview i had
read in rolling stone magazine about a billion years ago when i was a hardcore
marilyn manson fan, and the reverend marilyn himself recalled a punk rock club
that had a thursday night reserved for goth and industrial communion where he
first started playing down in florida (where mr. warner is actually from.) he
recalled that the scene on those nights could be so intense, that you "had to
be so goth, you were dead" to gain admission. all arguments about the gothic
qualities of the shock-rock artist's music aside, the quote remains in my head
to this day, and made me smile.

i've always been a fan of his interviews. if you pay enough attention to
the subtle references he makes, you can learn a lot. on this note, i took a
good suggestion from the reverend, and put on a shirt that would make me the
leader of the pack, so to speak. if this was a celebration of the beauty of
death, then motherfucker, i was going to be the shepherd. so, coroner it was.
later i realized that this was the way i was referred to when someone made an
inquiry into the whereabouts of a short guy with a non-alcoholic beer and a
stupid grin on his face, grooving out to the sounds of bauhaus remastered over
heavy drum beats and basslines.

i began to feel more at ease when i was alone at the bar. one of the female
crew members was looking in my direction with the tiniest of warm smiles, and i
tried my best not to return it i a way that would suggest i was stupidly
flattered. the lady in question was a girl who i would estimate to be about
twenty years old, probably an art student, and clad in one of the more tasteful
corsets i'd ever seen. hers was either victorian or edwardian, striking
nonetheless, and she had the air of someone who knew that they were missing the
rest of their clothing, but that it was okay, because they did this sort of
thing all the time, and had trouble understanding why other people didn't. i'd
had one of the most depressing nights in recent memory the night prior to this
experience, and i was inexplicably releived to see that i wasn't invisible to
the opposite sex. when she was called away to do whatever it was that her
activities at the club entailed, she didn't leave without a slight wink and a
smile. i could give less than a damn whether she was just being courteous or if
she really meant it; what mattered was that i had been engaged in a wordless
conversation with a gorgeous gothic princess, who seemed to find something
about the way i didn't oggle her like fresh meat to be refreshing and
endearing. in my wounded ego, i tried to tell myself that there was some sort
of brief chemistry, but i resolved later that it was probably a drug
interaction with medications and the trace amounts of grain alcohol in my
drink. i should note before i forget, that the bar had a secret.

i beleive the secret to manray's success financially resides in their

ability to sell even non-alcoholic beer such as the one i had (which really did
taste like watered down urine, albeit i've never had occasion to drink the
latter) at four dollars and twenty five cents a pop. this isn't that surprising
for a bar in a nightclub, what was surprising was that they could sell a 16
ounce bottle of spring water for almost the same price. halfway into the hours
of midnight and one o'clock in the morning, i found myself purchasing a three
dollar bottle of water that looked remarkably like the six or seven hundred
identical bottles of the same make in my refridgerator at home. the brilliance
of this marketing technique was that upon receiving a bottle of water that cold
in a room that hot full of dancing, undulating party-goers, one felt inclined
to add an extra dollar tip, raising the price of water to four dollars a bottle
out of simple gratitude.

the atmosphere was playful, it was like mardi gras and the day of the dead
celebration had come to life in some cyberpunk fashion somewhere in a
dilapitated former warehouse in the middle of boston's major college town. each
room blended seemlessly from one to the next, and it was possible to actually
navigate through a room playing a remix of sisters of mercy or bauhaus to
another room playing girls under glass and stromkern without being disoriented.

i was located by greynin with the news that we would be leaving soon, while
engrossed in a jewelry selection i couldn't afford. there seemed to be a bazaar
set up in the middle of the lounge, where all manner of rings and anklets,
pendents and earrings were being sold. the thing that made this so fantastic
was it's ironic situation between old-school atari arcade game machines and
oversized couches that glowed under one of the many different lights that
played over the crowd. the juxtaposition of this boutique was, kind of a
endearing, and i was probably better off when i had been hauled away before i
could dump the contents of my wallet out for even more sterling silver and
black onyx. in point of fact, it was nothing short of a miracle that i left
when i did, as for reasons undisclosed, there were a couple police cruisers
with their hazards and flashing blue and reds on outside the entrance when we
drove past on the way home. the driver explained that it was probably a drug
bust, as he had found a bottle of valium and lsd laced peppermints a week
before.

so this was the "home of boston's undergound." it was a place of debauchery

and burlesque, joined with art and comradery. it was like coming to a home i'd
never been to. on the way back to my house, as i had bummed a ride from someone
whom greynin knew (somehow they did indeed know eachother, although the
foundations of their friendship remains a mystery to me,) i realized that i had
just done one of those rediculous things i had on my mental checklist of things
to do; you know, that "one day..." list. i had my impromptu cabbie drop me off
at a convenience store a few miles from my house, because i'm terrible with
giving directions, and would be much kinder to simply let him drop me off at a
place we both knew and walk home.

i went inside the convenience store after the car drove off, and i was
shocked and a little disappointed to hear soft new agey sort of pseudo-rock
music playing through the shoddy instore speakers. i looked over at the clerk
who desperately seemed to need a nap, and wondered in my head for a solid five
minutes if he would ever be able to groove out to the music he was listening to
day in and day out, or if he, like so many others, could never live the music.
i decided that although i was no expert in the relationship between audio and
the human psyche, his chosen genre of music was selected for it's ability to
completely drop from the foreground and kind of sit in the background almost
inaudible, out of the way of anyone's more discerning ears. a shame, i thought
to myself. i had spent the last five hours in a gigantic party of cathode ray
screens playing monster movies and "bela lugosi's dead" with dancers and
feathered boas, while another room featured such heavy industrial beats that
you could feel them integrate with the pulse of your palpitating heart. i had
been living the music for a solid five hours, and this poor man is probably
still listening to something that makes him want to live just a little less.
 so, i suppose, i did go to manray as an investigative journalist. i didn't
mean to, i went there to have a good time, and i did. at the same time,
however, my brain absorbed so much information that i'm still processing it
right now, and the best way to let it out is to write about it here. there are
precious few lessons to learn from this account of a night in the life of
myself, but you can take away the knowledge that when you are absolutely sure
that nothing is going on and that your life has turned to utter shit, you're
probably wrong. i say this because there will always be an underground, full of
people who are turning the everyday into the macabre, people who can turn black
and white b-movies into backdrops for theatrical productions and performance
art. there's a whole fucking world out there, you just have to seize life (or,
i suppose, death) by the balls and go find it. whatever you do, however: don't
for the love of god wear sneakers, because it pisses off the bouncers.

-?------------?------------???????????????????????????-------------------??----
pa1nv12x10---------------------------------------------------------------[ 10 ]
[ notes from the field ]
[ alienbinary ]
[ 10 ]-------------------------------------------------------------- pa1nv12x10
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

the liberal male.

i'm taking a moment's respite from reading one of the only stories i've
ever had to read in a single night. the book in question is kate chopin's "the
awakening," which was cause enough in it's day to cause chopin to be exiled
from her community. as subtle and slow moving as it is, compared to the quick
and fast paced eroticism of modern women's studies literature, there is an
undertone in the book that somehow managed to scare the hell out of everyone
reading it. here's the shocker: she has an affair. that's it, that's the whole
fucking plot. this woman suddenly realizes that her marriage is shit and she
slowly metamorphs into this independent, sexually aware woman. if any of this
is shocking, i suggest you take watch at a local mall. this happens in less
than an hour, if you look carefully. it's a neat experiment. i've done this
countless times; you go into the food court somewhere in the back with a decent
view of the herd and watch as people cheat on their spouses, buy and use
illicit drugs, break into hysterics, storm out of restaurant lines in disgust,
break friendships and form temporary alliances with enemies to further personal
goals. these things happen so much and so often, that ironically, the book
which is now revered in women's studies circles as being courageous for the
time is bland by today's standards.

why am i writing about this? the course for which i'm reading that
particular novel is entitled "banned books and dangerous ideas." it's an
english course that doubles as a multicultural and women's studies course too,
in case you need the credits. personally, i don't. i'm actually quite shocked
to find as of late that i might have more women's studies credits than i do
english (concentration in creative writing.) this happened somehow because i
was taking philosophy and religion courses just for kicks, and managed to
aquire a decent number of credits without realizing that they qualified me for
a minor in the afforementioned subject. this brings up a question, though. what
the hell would you think of a heterosexual male who just so happened to have a
minor in women's studies? think spectrum here, try it from all angles.

would you think that i had taken this minor in order to get in the pants of
my fellow classmates? is that the conclusion you would come to? would you
secretly wonder if i was trying to attain some level of comfort with the other
sex that i hadn't been able to reach through some freudian mishap? or would you
perhaps just think that it was kind of ironic, but nothing worth dwelling upon?
before you actually answer that question, consider that at my school, there
used to be an enormous number of nursing majors. the nursing major was
predominately female, in that only about two of every three hundred students
comprising the nursing department were male. as liberal and openminded as i
would like to beleive i am, i still fall short when it comes to making
assumptions. i'll admit that every time i hear about a male nursing major, i
have a momentary lapse of confusion. it's been so ingrained in me that the word
"nurse" implies "female" that i have trouble associating men with the practice.

in all honesty, i don't know what i'll do with the minor. i'm pretty sure
i'll keep it, as i have earned it. i'll undoubtedly have a hell of a time
explaining it to people who come across my college transcript, but i think i
can live with that. besides, anything that could conceivably give me some
insite into the female mind would be greatly appreciated. women are
incomprehensible to me, when compared to the basic drives of men. although i
doubt that the work of jane austen or kate chopin or even my favorite feminist
mary wollestonecraft shelley will shed any further light on the female mind, it
would be pretty nifty if that was, indeed, the end result.

blood and rust.

infancy. that's the first word that comes to mind whenever i sit down to
write, and it's a peculiar thing to be stuck on. why be stuck on the concept of
infancy? what does the word mean? what cryptic message am i not fully sending
myself from the quagmire of the subconscious? i could ask a million questions,
lord knows i've been whispering them into my glass every time i take a drink or
mouthing them into my pillow pretending that i was holding someone who cared
about what i had to say. what i know fell upside down and turned over again and
broke, for the billionth time in my life. i'm only twenty one and i feel that i
have made enough mistakes to distribute them out evenly to the people of the
world who appear to have things under control. i feel like i could provide
enough solid mistakes for the whole of north america to divide up amongst
themselves so that angst ridden teens and preteens will finally have something
other than new growths of body hair to fret about.

that's not to say that i don't believe that what is currently upsetting me
is the only valid thing over which a person can be distraught. i'm certainly
not suggesting that, in fact, i propose that the world is so far gone right now
that i might not be doing all that bad. regardless, i feel as if i'm being
punched repeatedly in the head and kidneys every time i try and map out my day.
why is it that i can't remove "jump in front of a speeding bus" from my to do
list top ten? i don't have any interest in dying right now, i don't want to
kill myself, nor get hit by a bus, but it seems like a comforting thing to know
is always there. rock bottom is not entirely like starting from infancy with
all the disadvantages of a crackbaby. when stuck at the lowest possible tier
you can be on in your own personal emotional spectrum, you're crawling around
in two things: blood and rust. allow me to explain.

if you look at life like a house, you can see that it's born, through the
drafting of the blueprints and the clearing of the site. this is conception.
when the house is given it's final touch and fully decorated and ready for
habitation, then it has reached the age of about three years old. everything
that happens to the house from now on will shape the development and the future
success or demise of the structure. just like architecture, life has a tendency
to completely abandon all logic and come apart at the seams. when i think of an
image to best describe how i feel, i'm reminded of winter several years ago. i
can clearly see the water damage that very quickly ate away at my walls and
ceiling. it went from clear to dark red and then brown before the leak was
plugged. a simple reservoir of water that had come from ice along the gutters
had eaten up the attic like acid.

as for the blood, i can't get this odd visual out of my head of someone who
is mortally wounded. they keep trying to get up, but they also, in turn, keep
slipping on the mess that they've leaked all over the floor. they thrash and
thrash, and the exercise causes the heart rate to speed up, and the blood pumps
faster into the veins and therefore right out of the open orifice that was
causing the bleeding in the first place. it's a lose-lose situation. the only
thing that you can do in a situation like that is sit tight and hope somebody
comes along with an extremely large band-aid.

to be coherent is overrated. at a certain point, trying to make sense to

whoever might come across a given piece of writing is purely masturbatory. the
more you try and make the dervish spinning around in your mind sensible and
linear enough to articulate, the worse it becomes. i'll make no such effort
here. prepare for sudden loss of cabin pressure, and consider putting on a
helmet. i suggest this because my train of thought has been thoroughly
derailed, and is now plotting it's own course without me. i seem to have lost
control of even the small space inside my skull. the day is getting even better
with every word i punch into the keyboard.

i have absolutely nothing to say, and i'm going to see how long i can draw
this one out. right now hardcore and metalcore are coming straight into my
eardrums via studio headphones and rattling the hell out of my eardrums. i am
overloading every possible sense that i can, so that none of them might pick up
on what's really upsetting me. i will push that rock up the hill, sisyphus, but
i'd rather puree my left arm than address the noise inside my head. the skin on
my forearms has turned a strange orange gray, due to overexposure to the cold.
i haven't eaten in a significant amount of time, and i'm twitching as i write
this. the discoloration on my arms is due to the fact that i have all but
frozen every top skin cell just because i refuse to get up from this chair and
turn the fan off. i'd rather freeze, while pushing the rock up the hill,
thrashing around in the rust, than say what i'm thinking.

the subconscious is a really twisted organism. it plots behind your back,

almost literally, and then leaks small frames of imagery to entice you before
disappearing for hours again. in the meantime, i always try and sort through my
thoughts to find what i just thought of, but it's a complete waste. the whole
time i'll be digging around, i'll have let the rock roll down the hill and let
myself go before i even realize i'm doing it. we can only hold ourselves
hostage for so long.

i'm scared, i'm scared like i haven't been in a long long time. everything
seems to make me angry and all i can think about is screaming. each new lyric
from the headphones provides a new opportunity to visualize some muscle bound
punk rock anti-hero scream his bloody frothing mind out into the microphone. i
can almost taste the sweat as the words well up inside him, right before they
break through his chest into the air, assaulting the audience. i am completely
in my element right now; for i am bathing in aggression.

most people are afraid of aggression because they don't know where it might
lead. i think that's the romance of it. why would you possibly get up in the
morning if you had a complete knowledge of what the next day would bring? it
wouldn't be of any use to you because you already know everything you would
learn. for this reason, it's times when i feel like i can't even hold onto the
rusty nails to hold myself up that i give in and surrender myself completely to
the anger. the rage is so strong that when i was a little kid, i was afraid
that my hands would set fire whatever i was touching. i would sit on them and
rock back and forth on them until the danger passed. the truth is, i should
have let my hands roam free. no matter what i could have done, i have very
little doubt that i would have still ended up right here; the only difference
is that perhaps i would have more to show for it.

to surrender to the passion and ecstasy of rage is an antithetical orgasm

of both pain and release. every part of your body is burning adenozine
triphosphate to fuel the motions that your limbs are carrying out. it's one of
the only times you can watch your body cooperate with every other part of
itself. all the energy and angst and fear that has been welling up inside you
forms this crude oil that catalyzes the endorphins in your brain until the
explosion is a climax like no other. i used to break my furniture and smash my
stuff until i skinned my knuckles. looking back on it now, i would always smash
something that i would regret breaking later, just to inflict a little extra
damage on myself. it was my way of sending me to my room; i had to assume the
function of disciplinarian because no one else was even remotely up to the
task. when the destruction was complete, i would lay down and cry into my
bloodied knuckles and feel like i had just wrestled the whole world and won.
each day was a battle for me, and days like today, i can't believe i made it
past boot camp.

remember what i said about all the atp in your body being burned to fuel
your rage? the aftermath is the state in which i now find myself. my arms are
almost limp, and every muscle in my body hurts. the only thing i can be
absolutely sure of now is that there simply isn't enough time in the day to go
over each emotion, which is a pity, because we're told to suppress anger all
the time. whatever you suppress will come back and swallow you whole. the mind
is a really warped place indeed. if nature had a health department, i think my
brain would be one of the first structures to be condemned.

-?------------?------------???????????????????????????-------------------??----
pa1nv12x11---------------------------------------------------------------[ 11 ]
[ what we own ]
[ alienbinary ]
[ 11 ]---------------------------------------------------------------pa1nv12x11
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

at the time of this memoir, i am only a few days away from starting my
junior year in college. the room i try so desperately to keep clean at my
parent's house is littered with all the signs of someone who's trying very hard
to ignore the fact that they are merely tenants. i hate packing up and moving,
it's a pain in the ass, because it always makes me think about things i don't
want to think about. last week i learned from simply sorting out all the
various cuffs and rings and other accoutrements that i'd aquired only in the
past year that i had enough shit to properly clothe an entire dormitory for any
counterculture event you could name.

i surprised myself when i pulled from a metal lunchbox a glow in the dark
pyramid spike bracelet which i purchased in harvard square while firehazard was
visiting 'beantown.' after deliberating over what to do with that, i tossed it
into my woodland camo dickies pack, and eventually gave it to artemis right
before i did something i hadn't done in years: diving into her pool in just my
boxers like a drunken freshman. the pool was ice fucking cold and it seemed to
galvanize my skin. i remembered instantly how to do all the things i had
learned when training for my red cross certification and my lifeguard test
which i honestly don't know if i passed. regardless, i realized that i was
entrenched in such garbage that i was ignoring the things right in front of me.
i felt kind of stupid having ignored her pool for the entire summer, only to
realize it was kind of fun when i was a few days shy of enrolling for my third
year of college.

palahniuk was right: the things we own, they own us if we aren't careful.
being obsessive compulsive, i have a particular hatred for packing, because it
lends to the obvious compulsive checking and rechecking of my bags to make sure
i have everything i need. this summer, though, i haven't really checked the
trunk or the chest or anything. i don't care as much. the only bag that gets
any mileage lately is my pack. i had taken for granted that as a wog, i was
always prepared for things, and that the "little things" didn't phase me. but
i'm not sure that this is so, considering that there is nothing more mundane
than whether or not you packed a toothbrush. for fuck's sake, i packed cash,
and there are toothbrushes at the bookstore on campus, it's not a life
threatening ordeal. still, i littered one of my many notebooks with list after
list of the things that i beleived i would need.

even so, the more i dug into my closets for the things i had stashed away
for this semester, i began to wonder why i was bothering. if i had stashed
these things away, and i had to write down lists of things to augment my memory
to remember what i needed, then did i really need them? it's likely the answer
is a "no." if i haven't touched these posessions in the four months that they
have been locked up at my parent's house, i obviously didn't need them during
that time. four months is a third of a year; what, does everything become more
object intensive for the other two thirds of the year? unlikely.

i yanked out my alice pack, a black nato issue rucksack that i bought
something like three or four years ago at an army navy store, prepared to fill
it with all the things i needed, when i realized that i had already packed the
shit into an army duffel. more importantly, i had paid good money for the nato
bag to buy it new, but the army duffel was my dad's, from the vietnam era. the
thing is almost forty years old and in perfect condition, what's the point of
another pack? you might say that they suit different purposes, and you'd be
sort of correct. it turns out that the purpose that the alice pack had been
suiting was to hold a multitude of other things that i didn't remember i owned
in the first place. obviously, something is wrong. at some point a few days
ago, i stuffed the pack with a laptop that greynin and myself had fixed up as
well as four or five new tshirts to be given to a homeless shelter. i handed
the pack to my friend, and told her to keep it. when she asked why i didn't
need it anymore, i told her that it would be useful for her if she wanted to
keep helping out with the hfth project, seeing as carrying a monitor and a
keyboard in your arms up and down mission hill to and from various shelters is
an activity best done clandestine.

where the pack used to be, there's space vaguely occupied by too many
jackets. i haven't tackled the jacket problem yet, because they're all army
surplus and i like the different camouflage patterns. so, somewhere in the
basement is a trunk, a metal safe that resembles a gun box, and a translucent
plastic bin full of the shit that i used last year, in the hopes that i'll need
it again this year. i'm not entirely convinced, though. last night i inked a
drawing i was working on by the light of a candle, and it worked out just fine.
i didn't need two lamps to eliminate the shadows caused by angles and strong
lighting, i just needed a little light to see by. suffice to say, even the
things that i beleive are the core necessities that are downstairs aren't
exactly meeting the test, since at the moment, i'm not using them. so what's my
point? why should you care about this? i dunno. perhaps the things that you
keep around just in case are actually hindering you. maybe you should consider
if they might be more valuable to another person, that's all.

i think this year i bought the least amount of school supplies because it
has finally dawned on me that they will find their way into my possession
whether i try to aquire them or not. if you don't understand what i'm talking
about, take a walk around your room, house or flat, and when you find a
ballpoint pen with the name of a hotel or insurance company or some
pharmaceutical, think about it. why buy a package of twenty ballpoint pens from
the store, when the first week of school, you'll end up being flooded with
promotional junk that should include at least as many ballpoints. posters,
those are easy. i used to buy about three or four posters for the always drab
dormitory walls, but seeing as i'll be living in a place much more akin to an
apartment-- albeit on campus-- i don't even know what to expect. the full
extent of my decorations that i have purchased includes a single bathmat i
intend to place at my door, adorned with a broad smiling jolly roger and an
eyepatch. in a way, that sort of sums up my feelings about going to college. a
little cynical, a little happy, and the rest is just there. i'm tired of
fretting about making things work out for me, it's a stupid concept. as it is,
i'm going to pack up that one bag i mentioned before, because i should be
heading out later to meet up with greynin as a last hurrah before the college
business gets underway.

- alienbinary, 2004

-?------------?------------???????????????????????????-------------------??----
pa1nv12x12---------------------------------------------------------------[ 12 ]
[ hacking the social structure ]
[ alienbinary ]
[ 12 ]-------------------------------------------------------------- pa1nv12x12
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

to my left, purrs a newly refurbished doorstop. well, actually, it's no

longer employed as a doorstop, it's actually a compaq presario notebook with a
pentium iii processor, but up until it was brought back from the dead, the
computer in question was being used in the only capacity it was capable of
fulfilling: propping open a door. soon, this computer will be shipped out to
the local homeless empowerment agency, where a kid whose family cannot afford a
computer will be able to pick it up and take it home. this kid can set the
computer up in his bedroom, and increase his chances of success in the
corporate school systems by an unmeasurable percentage.

for those of you who aren't paying attention, or just simply didn't go to
school at all, it has reached the point where the majority of teachers and i'd
estimate ninety nine percent of professors will require that most assignments
be completed on the computer, and printed out. if you're not particularly good
at following basic logic, this means that to survive in school-- part one of a
child's entrance into our society-- he or she must have unrestricted access to
a computer. without the tools that the rest of us enjoy, a child has almost no
chance of success.

in the backseat of my friend's car, there lays a stack of tshirts, courtesy

of several record companies; of course the recording industry doesn't know that
they are donating these tshirts, they would never part with such valuable
promotional materials if they might actually help another human being.
regardless, these are prize tshirts. high quality, too. soon, they'll be in a
shipment to a battered women's shelter.

in the closet, there's a dell flatscreen crt monitor and an hp 660c deskjet
printer. these, too, will become part of a unit to be donated for another
disadvantaged kid. this is part of how the lot of us at pa1n intend to change
things for the better. in essence, we're hacking the social structure.

when i was a regular on the hotline bulletin boards, i used to hang out
with a guy you may or may not have heard of known as the h1tman. h1tman wasn't
exactly rolling in money. in fact, i remember having several conversations with
him via a 200mhz powerpc, while he was trying to run the fat binary
distribution of hotline on his old as dirt 68k architecture macintosh. h1tman,
however, was able to program better than myself, despite the fact that i lived
in a school district with computer science classes as sophisticated as those
offered in some colleges.

why am i telling you about that? because what a lot of people don't
understand is that the current definition of obsolete or what is or is not
useful is set by a vastly ignorant status quo. it's within their narrow
self-interest to make us beleive that the things they discard on the curb
really are just peices of trash. but they aren't. when the g3 came out, h1tman
was passing us all at breakneck speed with his dusty equipment.

and now, i find myself thinking of the newest bits of dusty equipment that
i've aquired. it seems that people are incapable of grasping the concept of
putting one brand of monitor with another brand of cpu, and therefore don't see
the individual peices as being important. i find myself sorting through stacks
of monitor, ps/2, power and interface cables that might be the key component in
restoring yet another box. this isn't merely computer restoration or altruism,
this is an organized hacking system. hacking is about doing things a different
way, about making technology do things it couldn't before do. when we root
these suckers, we aren't looking for data, we're looking for hope. if someone
donates a machine that's too locked up and he or she can't remember the
passwords, then when the crypto is cracked, the thing that lays just beyond is
a wealth of opportunity for someone who couldn't otherwise tap into it.

so, now that you realize that we are in fact serious about the hacking for
the homeless project, you might be interested in getting involved. that being
the case, i should give a few pointers on getting your own crew started to
undertake this task.

gear:

security screwdrivers - if you take a look at the bottom of a laptop,

you'll notice that they're most often held together by an obnoxious type of
screw-- the likes of which you won't find a matching screwdriver on your swiss
army knife-- often resembling an asterisk drawn by an overzealous reader. the
reason that these are called "security screws" is because the average person is
unlikely to own the proper kit needed to work with them. i have seen people try
and get into boxes locked with these before, only for the sysadmin to come by
and suggest using the proper tools if they didn't want to further thread the
screw. you can find these at any radio shack or office supply store.

airdr - you can use compressed air if you like, but the shit is expensive,
and you'll run out of it fast if you're working with old junk. i was at an
office supply chain recently and found a pocket sized keyboard cleaner that
uses co2 cartridges instead, and these are cheaper and more replaceable. also,
they don't lend to those nasty chemical burns the others do. this should run
you about 12 bucks, but after cleaning just one keyboard, you'll realize that
the alternative would cost twice that.

static wrist guard - this is a simple device comprised of a bracelet, wire

and an alligator clip. you attatch the clip to the case of the machine you are
working for and strap the bracelet (suprise surprise) around your wrist. this
reduces the chances of shorting out equipment with residual electricity by
grounding your body. beleive it or not, these silly looking things are actually
imperative.

windex - i wouldn't normally push brands, but there are few cleaning
solvents that have been tried and tried and proven to be as effective as
windex. you can use windex to clean the monitors, the outside casing, anything.
the upside of this particular solvent is that being ammonia based, it
evaporates quickly, and you don't have to worry about it drying.

multitool - this pretty much goes without saying. it will come in handy 90
percent of the time. i would lean towards the ones with a wire cutter and a
needle nose, such as a leatherman pulse, which is what i use.

van - you'll want a car or vehicle with lots of room, and one that you
don't mind scuffing up the interior of. that's because you'll find yourself
screeching to a halt at the side of the road sometimes and jumping out,
grabbing something someone threw out, and tossing it in the back. after a
while, this takes a toll on the interior.

where to start:

the first thing i would suggest is that you look around your primary
dwelling: whereever it is that you sleep at night. chances are, you have
hardware that you don't use anymore. try to stay away from the extraneous parts
like game controllers and joysticks, but for the most part, everything has a
use. if you want to be organized about it, keep a notebook or a mental log at
the very least of what you have in your stock. building hybrid computers from
yesterday's trash is very much akin to playing with lego building blocks. you
have to know what will fit where, and how. when you look at a keyboard that you
just bought from someone for a dollar down the hall, don't see it as a
component unto itself, but a peice of some larger machine that hasn't yet been
realized. each part is to be treated like a patient, or a part of a patient.
when i see a printer laying around in a pile of junk, i sometimes start going
through a list in my head of possible compatible systems being built, to
determine if it might prove useful. you aren't looking at computers per se, but
potential computers. once you start dealing with the potential machines, you
will realize them through restoring the peices you have collected.

remember that these are to be given to a child who needs a word processor,
or something to that effect, so putting the newest security patches and hot new
mods for half-life aren't your focus. and as tempting as it is, please, for the
love of god, refrain from trying to convert your charges to linux users.
they'll get there when they are ready. what's important is to include as much
productivity software as possible. they will need word processors, text
editors, paint programs and fonts. generally you can get these from the donor
of the cpu, as they usually leave the whole bundle out. if the machine is a
dell, it will have a restore cd, and on that cd you can find extra fonts and
crap that will prove useful to the new owner.
 i should hope that if you've read this far, the rest is intuitive. check
the yellow pages for homeless shelters, shelters for battered women and their
families, or any program that could benifit from what you're doing. if you have
a high volume of donations, consider writing down the contat numbers. often,
shelters will drive to your house and pick up donations for you, in a sense,
meeting you half-way on the deal. no matter what you do, though, remember that
this isn't about theft. don't go stealing hardware or software for this
project, because ultimately we are trying to help people by tapping an untapped
resource, not diverting other resources. if you can't find the os for the
machine you restore, that's okay. run a vmlinux distribution from the cd rom
drive, to make sure the logic board is in tact. let the next person take care
of the rest.

as i draw this particular update to a close, i can't not wonder whether i

should keep working away at the original 'halo', my first generation ipod. at
the moment i have it restored to the point of working fine as an external
drive, but i can't not smile a the idea that should i ever fix up a relatively
recent model mac, i can throw a working 5 gig ipod into the mix just for the
hell of it.

-?------------?------------???????????????????????????-------------------??----
pa1nv12x13---------------------------------------------------------------[ 13 ]
[ outro ]
[ alienbinary ]
[ 13 ]-------------------------------------------------------------- pa1nv12x13
-?------------?---????????????-----------???????????---------??????????????????

pa1n issue 12 was stitched together over a series of maybe four months. for
a long time, i was considering abandoning the project, because no one was
contributing. my server for the loki archives went down, all my contact
information was useless. moreover, my life had become so unbelievably complex
in ways that i couldn't quite pin down, that i didn't think i would have time.
i wanted to and still do, want to do proper justice to every single person that
has contributed effort and work to this project. i could never put out an issue
i did not completely feel confident was solid.

last week the elections happened, kind of. i'm not going to go into a
political diatribe because it won't be anything that you haven't already heard.
who hasn't heard at least two hundred people from both sides of the coin
complain about either the bureaucracy of the republicans or the petty insults
of the democrats. it's getting on everybody's nerves with damn good reason.

still, i couldn't help but think about the contents of this issue. mephyt
entrusted some of his finest work to me so that it would reach publication,
that he might have a voice after he left for active service. it would be
criminal of me to deny the world of what he has to say. it seems that everyone
from eminem to former president bill clinton has a strong stake in the outcome
of the elections. but what is it? is it the actual hypothetical changing of the
guard, or likewise, the reinstatement of the current president, george w. bush;
or is it something entirely different?

i think the answer has something to do with fear. springfield 2600 has had
an influx of news stories lately that have quite literally scared the shit out
of me. rfid chips in american passports, for one. i hate to say "i told you so"
in such dire circumstances. the entertainment industry is about to launch
another offensive against people that are probably your neighbors or your
friends, abusing the hell out of our legal system to meet their greedy needs.
'encore' was leaked to the public before it was supposed to make it to music
retailers, some two weeks before the intended release. loss of profits
projected at something like 36,000 dollars if memory serves are now spurning
the wrath of people who know very little about the nature of file-sharing. it
has become a matter of fact for me to have to look at each article that i put
in this magazine and examine it for anything that has been ruled on by the
supreme court at the highest federal level as being unprotected speech by the
first amendment. i live in fear of finding another news report on the
associated press wire at work with a casualty listing corresponding to someone
i know and love. i hear the song "sullivan" by 'caroline's spine' and i begin
to cry, because i miss my friend who joined the united states navy in order to
pay for college.

at work, people are showing fear and ask over and over that the contents of
their hard-drives be left unexplored, which i assure them with the highest
confidence that i have no interest in their private lives. people who lead
law-abiding, non-threatening lives are afraid of the things they have to say,
or anything that they commit to paper. what has happened? this was precisely
what the cyberpunk community warned about. a society ruled by people who don't
know that they are ruled by their own devotion to the machines they created to
run their lives; a society we live in.

a good buddy of mine laughingly told me as i bent intently over his sony
vaio, with motherboard and ibm travelstar drive exposed that i should never
worry financially again. "why?" i inquired.

the answer is astonishingly ironic: there will never be a shortage of

electrical and computer components in desperate need of being fixed. he
couldn't have been more correct. on the way into cambridge to look for a nice
new pair of shit-kicker boots, i watched a traffic light that must have had a
faulty logic board. a police officer stood among twenty five confused cars
trying to determine what basis he should use for when to tell people to go and
where. the red light flashed for what seemed like fifteen minutes before i
realized what was going on.

bank of america just swallowed up fleet, and now the atm machines on the
east coast have a peculiar tendency to display letters of apology for the
appearance as the "signage" is being changed, yet the atms no longer work at
all. the credit card, according to a boston globe article i read a while back,
has one hundred percent usurped the place of cash. money is no longer currency,
but something more abstract than before, and furthermore, it's become digital.
screens can be seen all over shopping malls in various stages of kernel panic,
and people are going through reams of plastic cards at stores until one is
reluctantly accepted. and when the card is accepted, identification and
authentication procedures are abound, some even utilizing signature
recognition. i was at a radioshack buying parts for the reconstruction of a
pentium ii, when the fucking kiosk in front of me told me i had the wrong
signature. was this a fucking joke? were they really telling me that i couldn't
sign my own name? yes. yes, in fact, they most certainly were, as i had to sign
about five more times in order for the database to find a close enough match. i
felt like at any moment ridley scott might yell from the set of bladerunner
that this "was all for the night." i half expected harrison ford to pull out a
nine millimeter and "retire" the kiosk.

all this has happened during the time since i last uploaded a fresh issue
of pa1n. all this, and so much more. i hope that chemlab's jared louche is
pleased with this issue, and i would very much like to take this opportunity to
thank him for his encouragement. i also would like to give a shout to the two
midnight raid(ers) that recently found me again after so many years. after a
year of bullshit, it's nice to know that at least friends who know me as i
am--someone with an attitude, but a heart--still find it worthwhile to track me
down. the internet community, the hacker community, the community in general,
actually, has become so much stronger. the frightening ability to aol im
someone from a college lecture hall with nothing but a nokia wap and gps
enabled phone has made it imperative to remaster the technology.

as for this issue, and as for anything further: what is contained in this
issue has been in my possession, and mine alone for too long. the efforts of
other people to do what i originally intended to do will not go unnoticed.
although i have great concerns regarding the safety and security of even
posting personal opinion to the world wide web, i must accept that there is
something infinitely more sinister in the silence. please enjoy this issue and
do distribute it. if you have the ability to mirror the issues, please do,
because i need ftp space. sorry for the delay, once again, and thanks for
reading pa1n magazine.

- november of 2004, alienbinary