Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/RUSirius & StJude/Characters

Text File | 1994-11-21 | 14KB | 279 lines

WRITERS & CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

HOW TO MUTATE & TAKE OVER THE WORLD revolves around
two primary characters, four secondary characters and
numerous contributing characters.  We see it as our gift and
our duty to bring humanity and personality to the technos at
the center of MUTATE.
   Four of the six primary and secondary characters are based
on real individuals; these are R. U. Sirius, St. Jude, Scrappi
DChamp, and Simone 3Arm.  Also, the band, MONDO Vanilli, to
which Sirius, DChamp and Simone 3Arm are aligned in this
book, is an actual recording group with a record contract, and
they will most likely have a CD recording for sale before the
release of this book.  All the real individuals will supply some
of the text for their characters, as well as provide Sirius and
Jude with information and ideas in this regard .  Simone 3Arm
will also will add a visual element to the book through
photographs of her astonishing surreal performances.
   The other two characters, who will be activists in the book's
Underground, will almost certainly also be written by real
individuals.  These people haven't been selected, but there are
many people within our circle of friends with the technical
knowledge, writing ability and radical spirit who would be up
to the task.  The "short list" includes some published science
fiction writers.
   We will also invite many of our knowledgeable, creative and
(occasionally) famous friends to write "cameo appearances" for
themselves, or to allow us to collaborate with them on same.
   Sirius and St. Jude will open each year with an entry written
from the perspective of 2002, casually reflecting on what the
year was like to them, and what was happening in the world in
general.   These are the narrative voices that will bind the
otherwise fragmented scrapbook bits.  Additionally, diary
notes, email letters between the two, email letters written to
others, and transcriptions from the psychiatrist's couch may
appear from time to time.  These make specifically personal the
self-doubts, fears and bitching about others involved in all
great enterprises.

Character Descritions:

R. U. Sirius is -- along with St. Jude -- the major mouthpiece
for this entire book.  Sirius is a writer, a blabbermouth and a
reluctant cultural activist.  Though not quite a foaming
pompous ACADEMIC cultural theorist, Sirius loves to theorize,
and his comments will be the most explicit in providing a point
of view for the book.
   Sirius is known for his perpetually bemused expression, and
within the context of his diary notes and occasionally through
his commentary, the ironic distance that is essential to his point
of view will also be expressed in personal terms.  Sirius views
himself as sort of a hapless puppet of an absurd historical
destiny, driven forward by some unexplained mystical force
that -- combined with an overwhelming lust and a peculiar gift
for stumbling into the maelstrom-- makes it impossible for him
to have the kind of life at an amused distance from human
affairs that would much be his preference.  So while Sirius is
perceived publicly as a sort of happy-in-the-fast-lane, slightly
daemonic clown, he sees himself from a tragicomic perspective.
   Since most aspects of Sirius' persona are already public in
reality, his entire personality will be pretty much explained up
front, by himself, in the context of interviews, song lyrics etc.
His reluctant activity will further be explicated in the media
portrait and in interaction with the group.

St. Jude is a satirical writer on cyber-culture and a radical
pornographer. She's had the handle since she first signed on:
somebody had her real name so she mutated into stjude,
patron of the hopeless, the hapless, and children's aspirin. She
is shy sometimes unto agoraphobia, happy to put her life on
the Line.  She has a fashionably evil reputation thereon: she's
into S&M, that sexual default common to nerds -- hey, it's
easier than sex! -- she's a bisexual nymph, a sex magician and a
weapons nut, all extrapolated from her postings on the Net.
Maybe not: playing with the non-meat identities is one of the
things this book is about.
   As an ex-programmer she shares the nerd bias that
intelligence and audacity are as good as nine-tenths of the law,
at least. Her self-view is almost entirely satirical: she feeds her
writing on twitching morsels torn from her most sincere
beliefs.
   A long-time warrior against censorship, she's become
completely engaged by the fight for privacy for the real
individual -- ironically, protected by pseudopersonas -- in a
mass-mediated, too-virtual world.  She has a long-standing
lovership with a perceived Cypherpunk "leader." In their
(encrypted and steganographed) email they make each other
laugh about their personal and political hoop-la.

SAMPLE
_________________________________________________
____
HACKING THE WETWARE: THE GIRL NERD'S PILLOW BOOK
started circulating on the Internet in the Spring of 1994 under
the byline "NerdGirl." It's a hands-on operating manual for
optimizing hetero nerd sex. [PILLOW BOOKS WERE  EITHER
DIARIES, OR INSTRUCTIONAL PICTURE PORN LEFT IN PRE-
LITERATE TIMES IN JAPANESE NEWLYWED'S BED.]
   In 1997, I copped to writing it.  I offered in evidence some
*timestamp-encrypted early drafts much funnier than the
release. [TIMESTAMPING IS A WAY OF DATING AND CLAIMING
AUTHORSHIP IN A COPYFREE OR COPYLEFT SITUATION.]

Section A: Booting Up
If you like each other, you may want to have sex
immediately, just to get the expectations out of the
way. But expect little: unpracticed sex is usually
useless. Even if the sex is better than okay, really
good sex is built on trained mutual coordination, rather
like dancing the tango. So you might make him take
ballroom dance classes with you. This is strangely
arousing and satifying at the same time: in fact,
dancing seems like a transform of sex. atisfying at
once, rousing and sMore and more nerds of all genders
are learning ballroom nowadays, and maybe this is why.

*  *  *  *

Section B: Learning the configuration
After you both get the idea that fitting tab A into slot
B is actually feasible here, repeatably, he will want to
customize for the individual case. Let him practice but
don't crowd him. (Even if he's badly trained or
inexperienced, if the early phase seems like a tutorial
he may quit the project before it gets interesting.) Let
him hack around on his own. If he's not going to be
completely useless he will discover the following things
for himself:

a) While fitting A into B, merely kludging angles and
pressures takes one only so far
b) A very small vector shift can make enormous
differences in sensation and response
c) The intensity of one's own sensation is closely
coupled to how enthusiastic one's accomplice is
d) Logically, you must find strategies to optimize both
your responses

This is good. It's time to hit the manuals. Machine
Architecture (Anatomy). Principles of operation
(Physiology). And some hands-on work. This leads
logically to...

The Erotic Pelvic
Treat this like the mutual research project it is. If
he's going to use the systems he must learn them. The
ideal male nerd will be developing a functional 3D model
of your unique sexual apparatus,that he can rotate in,
and around, hoopla, his head. The truly gifted nerd will
develop this goal without prompting, but you can propose
the idea. As it operates with this model the penis is
not a blunt instrument. It's a probe and a button-
pusher. It's a *sensor*. But the hand is a more
efficient data gathering device while it's all terra
incunnita.
   For the erotic pelvic it's helpful if your boynerd
has a thing about latex. He may not realize that he
does, yet. You can help this by assuring him that latex
is definitely the kink of the future, unless somebody
invents a yummier material for gloves and booties and
things.

The best-case learning environment involves:

a) Rubber-sheeted bed
b) Armpit-length latex gloves, yesss.
c) Large pots of flavored and unflavored lubes
d) An angle lamp with a magnifier attached
e) A pot of warm water with a couple of soft facerags in
it
f) Anatomy texts with pictures
g) A spirit of earnest intellectual inquiry in all
participants

*  *  *  *

...but any mis-step of the hand, any move that causes
discomfort should be offset at once by the above
counterpleasuring techniques. If he goes seriously over
the line say "OW OW OW," and wrestle him around a
little, playfully. Then give him the irresistible offer:
"Let's go get our email." The hackerly attitude is that
it's just something that doesn't work yet, some bugs
remain -- not that it's a horrid failure.
   Soon he'll hit the sheets with the same look he gave
his monitor when he was mastering UNIX. Now the interior
landscape is an intellectual challenge. He may start
talking aloud to himself as he does a readout of your
personal data, muttering "lateral nerve plexuses" or
"Gr
fenberg" as he goes along. Do not correct his Latin
plurals. Forget about umlauts. Just concentrate... focus
finely... and give him, as they say, feedback.
   Your nerd will accept standard English: "don't ever
touch that again," for example, or "I shall now have an
orgasm." But he would prefer precise reports in his
wonderful new language. Nerds love jargon. You should
know. Practice issuing calm statements like "5 cm to the
right produces a fasciculation in my right sartorius."
This sort of thing is good fun, and produces lots of
good data for y'all's notes, but if you want to help him
with his interpersonal skills, devolve to whimpers,
self-defense postures, toe-clenching, and howls. Being
able to infer *good*, *blah*, and *don't stop* will
benefit him lifelong.
   This research phase may wake up his kinkiness. Many
nerds have startling fantasies stored up since
pubescence -- or from even before. (You hear enough pre-
pube fantasies, you start rethinking this famous Latency
Period. Some of us were less latent than others. Just
how nonnegotiable must the age of consent BE? How many
of us had our lives ruined by *not* being molested in a
timely way? Didn't YOU long for that mysterious Other
when you were twelve? Damn.)
   I was saying: kinkiness. Given the basic situation,
he may, for an obvious example, want to insert his
*entire* hand into one of your orifices. What the hell?
Let him try, whyever not? Just make him take his time
and use the pain-countering techniques slatheringly. If
it works, good for everybody. You might like it a lot.
But if you don't, at least he's made his benchmark on
that particular kink, which might be sufficient for him.
What the hell?
_________________________________________________
_____

Scrappi DChamp is the even more reluctant creator of the
music, art and some of the more humorous realizations of
MONDO Vanilli theory.  Somewhat reclusive, DChamp's pop
musical ear and visual art abilities, his enthusiasm for the new
technologies and his spontaneous verbal and literary wit help
him develop a reputation as "the one with the talent."  Later in
the book, he also emerges as a strong voice for the concept of
MONDO Vanilli as a media multinational and, in response to the
ever-increasing puritanism of the cultural and political
environment, helps MV to adapt a new, clean-machine (though
still deeply ironic) image for the 21st Century.  Though a
weirdo by most standardsm Scrappi is the most normal of the
six main characters.  He's singularly dedicated to creativity and
success in media and the arts, interested in having a real life,
and skeptical regarding the excesses of Sirius and 3Arm, and of
any association with the underground movement.  In this
sense, DChamp provides a touchstone for the average reader.

Simone 3Arm, otherwise known as the CyborGoddess,
manifests a profoundly Dal-esque ability for the perverse and
the surreal, in the context of inexplicable yet affecting
combinations of imagery, which she uses in sexually explicit
public performance.  While not as text-oriented as Sirius or
DChamp, her personal ideology involves the modern
primitivist thirst for extraordinary and extreme experience in
the body and a sense for pagan ritual as a manifestation of her
own peculiar Goddess.  She is also a practicing dominatrix and a
performer in erotic films.  Simone 3Arm combines a peculiar
sense of earnestness about what she does with an ever-present
sense of the ridiculous.  Of the 3 faces of MONDO Vanilli, she is
the one most seen and most available in the context of public
performance, and she handles public life with almost none of
the reluctance expressed by the other 2 Vanillians.

Other Two Supporting Characters
The guerrilla underground will be the context for presenting
the two final main characters, (like the others, based on real
persons and--to a degree--writing their own lines) as yet
unselected, probably male, who will complete the main
ensemble of personalities for this book.  Both characters will be
radical technophreaks.  One will probably be a cypherpunk or
crypto-anarchist and the other more of a media pirate.  They
should probably have that Che Guevara heroic earnestness,
nerd-style, but not without a sense of humor.  Since these
characters are warriors fighting for freedom-- not merely
showoffs--they will perforce generate sympathy--in spite of
the implicit possibility of actual physical, not to mention
electronic, violence.  A distinct possibility is that these
characters could be written by a science fiction writer in
consultation with the "real thing."