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Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

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December 13, 2025 at 6:30 PM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

What I post from

Backstage Right,
next to the stage of The Muppet Theatre,
by the dressing rooms and stage door

December 13, 2025 at 4:59 PM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

First Real-Time Passenger Information (1974)

Imagine not knowing what platform your train has been changed to or if it's running late. Well, that's what things were like before Dina St Johnston. Her company, Vaughan Programming Services (VPS), started working with British Rail in 1974, supplying real-time passenger information systems at busy stations such as London Bridge and Gatwick.

Telent Technology Services, with thanks to Simon Lavington

December 13, 2025 at 4:24 PM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

Radioactive 50-ft. Woman Has Period in Space!

Constance Penley and Robin Moore

Science as a Prize in a Crackerback Jox
#Mondo2000 #Cyberpunk

CONSTANCE PENLEY: Canned cultures like Biosphere Il are interesting because they are one place where ideology is more important than actual information. Real science projects have to project themselves like this to be popular. For example, NASA modelled itself on Star Trek. They had a hard time getting support for the manned space program—scientists know you get much more information from unmanned flights—so they tried to tap into people's love of Star Trek. They named the first shuttle the Enterprise. They hired Nichelle Nichols—Lieutenant Uhuru—to run a recruiting program for women and minorities in the astronaut program. The Challenger crew was modelled on a kind of Star Trek lineup: a mixed-race, mixed-sex crew.

MONDO 2000: What's your take on MONDO and the sexification of technological culture? Do you think it goes too far in glamorizing tech?

CP: I like projects that go too far. I loved JFK. This time (Stone's) insanity went the right way. Just when people are feeling Iran-Contra is never going to move, here comes someone making a film on conspiracy, coverups, etc.
Now that kind of frothing at the mouth, being a little too shrill—love the way it breaks the smugness of what passes for political discourse in this country.
We always find issues of sexuality and sexual difference around technology.

I teach a science fiction film course where right from the beginning, anxiety about technology gets projected onto women's bodies. In the class we go from Melies' Trip to the Moon, through Godard's Alphaville, to Blade Runner. Just take Metropolis. Fears about emerging technology get projected onto the body of the woman becoming a robot. And the number of exploding/radioactive women in science fiction film is phenomenal!

When I was doing all this Challenger explosion and Christa MacAuliffe research, I was collecting kids' sick jokes about it. The very first one I heard was:
"What were Christa MacAuliffe's last words? 'Hey guys, what's this button?'"

M2: It's too consistent to just be a pattern of scapegoating women.

CP: Right: when technology was on the rise, women's political power was increasing. I think fear of technology being out of control and fear of women being out of control got conflated.

M2: It clearly fits into Christian ideas of sin—the apple as techno-knowledge. And technology seems to be an equalizer, physically.

CP: When women were tested in the early phases of the astronaut program in the '60s, they were better in every skill! There was a famous article in Ms. magazine in 1973 about this. Women had more stamina, more dexterity, more psychological stability…

M2: I remember hearing women couldn't be astronauts because of some weird thing about menstruation! They weren't sure if gravity was necessary. And I thought—I was 12 then—they can send a man to the moon, but they don't understand tampons? Wouldn't it be worth it, on the verge of a new age, to find out?!?

Aroused by the space-period question, I called OB/GYN at NASA's Johnson Space Center. Dr. Richard Jennings was kind enough to answer my questions.
He said women were excluded from the early space program because President Eisenhower decided that 1500 hours of
training at the Test Pilot school would also be required—and the academy at that time excluded women.

He also gave me a history of the prejudices against women in aviation, which were doubtless inherited by NASA. There were accidents in the 1920's involving menstruating women pilots—like a wing of the plane coming off—that were fully exploited by journalists.

About menstruation in space, he said "Even if there were a problem—there still wouldn't be a problem." Retrograde (backflowing) menstruation has never been found to have any consequences.
"So do they just bring tampons along on space flights?"
"Basically, yes." Other options available for years to Olympic athletes and mountain climbers have been suppression with pills or menstrual extraction.

December 13, 2025 at 1:41 PM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

Case could be one of Burroughs's wild boys… in a way. I'm
deeply influenced by Burroughs… he found 'fifties science fiction
and used it like a rusty can opener on society's jugular
#Leary #Gibson
I think America is ready for a female lead who beats the crap out of everybody
#Mondo2000 #Cyberpunk

Timothy Leary: If you could put
Neuromancer into one sentence, how
would you describe it?

William Gibson: What's most important to me is that it's about the present. It's not really about an imagined future. It's a way of trying to come to terms with the awe and terror inspired in me by the world in which we live. I'm anxious to know what they'll make of it in Japan. I'm starting to feel like Edgar Rice Burroughs or something. I mean, how did Edgar Rice Burroughs finally come to feel about Tarzan in his own heart, you know? He got real tired of it. Wound up living in Tarzana, California.

TL: You'll end up living in a space colony called Neuromancer.

WG: That would be okay. I don't think we're going to have this kind of future. I think this book is so much nicer than what seems to be happening. I mean, this would be a cool place to visit. I wouldn't mind going there.

TL: Where?

WG: To the Sprawl, to that future.

TL: Going up the well?

WG: Yeah. Go up the well and all of that. A lot of people think that Neuromancer is a bleak book, but I think it's optimistic.

TL: I do, too.

WG: I think the future is actually gonna be more boring. I think some kind of Falwellian future would probably be my idea of the worst thing that could happen.

TL: Yeah. That was a wonderful scene where you have those Christians who were gonna mug those girls in the subway.

WG: It's not clear whether they're going to mug them or just try to force some horrible pamphlet on them or something.
Personally, I have a real phobia about guys like that coming up to me on the street…

TL: That's a powerful scene! And you describe the girls as like hoofed animals wearing high heels.

WG: Yeah. The office girls of the Sprawl.
I like the idea of that subway. That's the state-of-the-art subway. It goes from Atlanta to Boston, real fast.

TL: You've created a world.

WG: What you're getting when you read that book—the impression is very compli-cated, but it's all actually one molecule thick.

I've got to do a different kind of book now, because I'm already getting some reviews saying, "Well, this is good, but it's more of the same stuff."

It's different for somebody like Douglas Adams, where I think that the whole thing started off as such a goof for him that it was just a stroke of good luck that he built on.

TL: And they're nice. It's a nice tour.

WG: Yeah. They're funny.

TL: These big books…

WG: I can't go for that.

TL: I'm glad about that. Norman
Spinrad…

WG: He wrote a book called The Iron Dream. It's a science-fiction novel by Adolf Hitler, in an alternate world where Hitler became a science-fiction writer. It's a critique of the innately fascist element in a lot of traditional science fiction. Very funny.

The keys to Case's personality are the estrangement from his body, the meat, which he does overcome. People have criticized Neuromancer for not bringing Case to some kind of transcendent experience. But he has it within the construct of the beach, and he has it when he has his orgasm. There's a long paragraph there where he accepts the meat as being this infinite and complex thing.

TL: In some ways he reminds me of some of Burroughs's characters.

WG: Case could be one of Burroughs's wild boys… in a way. I'm deeply influenced by Burroughs… he found ‘fifties science fiction and used it like a rusty can opener on society's jugular. I was like 15 when I read The Naked Lunch and it sorta splattered my head all over the walls. And I have my megalomaniac fantasy of some little kid in Indiana picking up Neuromancer and pow!

TL: Well, that happens, dude. Don't worry. There's 500,000 copies already.

WG: I had to teach mysell not to write too much like Burroughs. I had to weed some of that Burroughsian stuff out of it. In an interview in London, I told this guy that the difference between what Burroughs did and what I did is that Burroughs would just glue the stuff down on the page but l airbrushed it all.

TL: Burroughs and I are close friends.

TL: What would you say about Riviera?

WG: It's like Suddenly Last Summer. Riviera is like that, a feral child. He's smart, incredibly perverse. But all the stuff that he does—the little projected hallucinations and things—are relatively low tech. He's just projecting holograms.

There's this amazing German surrealist sculptor named Hans Belmer who made a piece called "The Doll." He made a doll that was more his fetish object than a work of art, this totally idealized girlchild that could be taken apart and rearranged in an infinite number of ways. So I have Riviera call his piece "The Doll."

Riviera also represents the fragmentation of the body. People see things like that, sometimes, out of the corners of their eyes.

TL: What about Armitage?

WG: He's a synthetic personality, a character utterly lacking character: As Molly says, "This guy doesn't do anything when he's alone."
This book's fraught with psychotics.

TL: (Laughing) You see, there are a few of us who think it's a very positive book in spite of that.

WG: Really? Well, I just try to reflect the world around me.

TL: I know. You're a mirror. How about Lucas Yonderboy?

WG: Lucas Yonderboy was my reaction to the spookier and more interesting side of punk. Kind of young and enigmatic. Cool to the point of inexplicability. And he's a member of the Panther Moderns. They're sorta like Marshall McLuhan's Revenge. Media monsters. It's as though the worst street gang you ever ran into were, at the same time, intense conceptual artists. You never know what they're going to do.

TL: What recent book have you most enjoyed?

WG: Bruce Sterling is my favorite science-fiction writer. Schismatrix is the most visionary science-fiction novel of the last 20 years or so. Humanity evolves, mutates through different forms very quickly, using genetic engineering and bio-chemistry. People will be mining that, ripping off ideas for the next 30 years.

TL: Like Gravity's Rainbow.

WG: Yeah. That's one of my personal favorites.

TL: It's dark, so I waited 'til dawn and picked it up. And it was Gravity's Rainbow.

WG: Perfect! Of all the books you could get, that'll last you a while.

TL: You should only read that book under those circumstances.

WG: It stopped my life cold for 3 months. My university career went to pot, I just sort of laid around and read this thing.

TL: I read it all day until dark. I woke up the next morning and read it. For 3 days, I did nothing but read that book. Then I went back and I started annotating it. I did the same thing to yours. Yours is the only book I've done that with since. The film industry's never been able to do anything with Gravity's Rainbow.

WG: It's got eight billion times more stuff in it than Neuromancer does. It's an encyclopedic novel.

TL: But there's a tremendous relationship, as you well know, between Neuromancer and Pynchon. Because Pynchon is into psychology. But you've taken the next step, because you've done that whole thing to computers. You don't have any new drugs in Neuromancer.

WG: I've got the beta-phenethylamine.

TL: That's the one that makes your teeth rattle the nerves.

WG: Yeah. That's actually a brain chemical. We all have a little bit, as we sit around the table. When you fall in love the level rises. I called Bruce Sterling, and I said, "This guy's been modified; so he can't do traditional stimulants. So, what can he get off on?" And Bruce said "beta-phenethylamine." It's in the book. Beta-P. About a month after I finished the book, there was an article in Esquire, "The Chemistry of Desire." And they talked about beta-phenethylamine, which is structurally similar to amphetamine. And it's also present in chocolate.

TL: Ohhh! I’m a chocolate addict.

WG: Japanese kids get high on big candy bars that are just sucrose and caffeine.
They eat 5 or 6 of these things and go to concerts.

TL: One of the things that's wonderful about Neuromancer is that there is this glorious comradeship between Molly and Case.

December 12, 2025 at 11:05 PM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

Get Lycos… or Get Lost.
#Mondo2000 #Cyberpunk

Get
Lycos...
or
Get Lost.

a lady’s torso tattooed with lycos.com over flames surrounded by cherubim blowing horns

Mondo 2000 Issue 16 (1996)

a lady’s torso tattooed with lycos.com over flames surrounded by cherubim blowing horns

Mondo 2000 Issue 16 (1996)

December 12, 2025 at 9:33 PM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

…a futurological Tarot deck of spirits of the urban wilderness.
I'm connecting shamanism, computer technology, subatomic physics and the collective unconscious
#Mondo2000 #Cyberpunk

The only drug I write on now is, occasionally, a cup of coffee. I think you can get jacked up enough just by a state of mind.
Almost all of the cyberpunk writers write while listening to music.

M2: We want to see the Max Headroom shows you wrote.
JS: It was about people who don't believe they are real unless they see themselves on television. The problem isn't really television: it's mass insignificance, and also—a failure of community.

M2: Aside from Max Headroom?
JS: Peter Wagg is going to do a movie that I'm scripting with Bill Gibson called Macrochip.
Do you know about the New Rose Hotel movie? Gibson hacked out a very intense script. His draft reads like literature.

It seems natural to me to be writing for movies and television.
I think visually. My books are written in scenes like movies. I try to compose a cinematic image in the mind of the reader as exactingly as a director would do it. That's hard to do with words on paper

M2: Have you thought about extending the words on paper? What about composing graphic novels?

JS: The graphic novel as a newborn art form interests me. And the best of it—like Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Sienkiewicz—is a vindication of the comic books of our childhood, which influenced every science-fiction writer, and which no one dared claim as an influence…
Now we're all literature.

Quinn felt himself there physically, sweating, aching, short on breath, heart banging, but getting his groove, going into the trance that made it seem possible to dance forever, realizing that the gateway to the other continuum had a corridor and this corridor was the infinite dance; letting your own bodyheat melt you down and steep you along, moving your hips into the pocket of the beat, completely lost in it… And it seemed to him, as he danced (BAM BAM BAM buh-BAM) in place, in the suit of lights that was his perspiration, that he was on his way somewhere…
He touched the fetish at his neck. A circuit closed.
—Shaman, Asimov's SF, November 1988

December 12, 2025 at 8:54 PM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

Dropping Science
Blastmaster KRS-ONE Speaks

I'm concerned about the kids who don't know what time it is. I want to show them that there are different ways to be radical
—KRS-ONE

#Mondo2000 #Cyberpunk

"Were you sleeping?"

It's 9:00 a.m. and, though he knew I'd be calling, KRS-ONE sounds completely disoriented.

"Noooo," he groans, but I think he's just being polite. The man has every reason to be frayed. The past seven days have been a blur of airports, college halls, kiwi-and-Evian receptions, and giddy student programmers.

For the past two years, rap's tenured professor has taken his solo discourse on the road to wake up the youth of America. Now, it's up to me to revive the teacher before he heads off for another speech.

l explain MONDO. He livens at the word "revolutionary."

Seven years ago, Lawrence Krsna Parker was sleeping in the streets of Manhattan. A runaway at 13, Parker spent his days seeking shelter and knowledge at the New York Public Library. He wanted to learn "the lies." Everything he had been told about history, philosophy, and music was deceit.
"School was not it. Home was not it." Educating himself was the only solution.

At the Bronx Franklin Shelter, KRS-ONE hooked up with Scott Sterling, aka Scott La Rock, a counselor hip to the emerging power of rap. Together, they formed Boogie Down Productions (BDP), an uncompromising, sucker-slamming, truth machine. Their album Criminal Minded ripped through the streets as rap's premier rebel essay.

When La Rock was innocently shot and killed a few months later, KRS-ONE dedicated himself to the uplifting of humanity. "I'm concerned about the kids who don't know what time it is," he said. "I want to show them that there are different ways to be radical."

What followed were three of hip hop's funkiest, most conscious LPs. By All Means Necessary launched a crusade against black-on-black crime with
"Stop the Violence," a song and a movement that raised over a half million dollars for the National Urban League. Ghetto Music: The Blueprint of Hip Hop reinterpreted the Bible. Edutainment rallied for vegetarianism, improved education, and Afrocentricity.

Along the way, he's collaborated with R.E.M., Ziggy Marley, and Jonathan Demme. His all-star rap effort HEAL (Human Education Against Lies) is still earning money to help abolish illiteracy in the inner cities. Now comes Sex and Violence, in which "the almightee blastmaster KRS-ONE settles the score." Stay tuned.

Listen up class—KRS-ONE is wide
awake and wants you to join him.
—Dave Kushner

MONDO 2000: What's the concept behind the lecture tour? What can you achieve through lectures that you can't achieve in concert or on record?

KRS-ONE: It's a totally different experience. My albums would be spoken word if I had my way. But as a recording artist, you must add a little music. [Laughs]
Unfortunately, you can only speak for 5 minutes per section of music, and the music has to change. With lectures, I'm able to speak for two hours without music They give me a chance to explain myself to those who might not get what KRS-ONE is about.

My views vary according to the lecture. I wrote a lecture called "Sleep Techniques," then there was "Civilization vs. Technology," and "HEAL Yourself." This is a Black History Month lecture where I'm urging respect for our ancestors and their teachings so that we won't repeat the same mistakes. This goes for all races and cultures.

The first lecture "Sleep Techniques: Ways of Opening and Waking Up Your Mind" deals with educational and religious systems cutting off the minds of people-forcing people to believe and memorize rather than intellectualize and feel. We say that if you're not asking any questions, then you're not an intellectual.

December 12, 2025 at 7:08 AM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

Contact your elected representatives. Call. Write. Protest.

Let them hear us.

Text SIGN PSBRWS
to 50409

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Vote to advance All Three articles of impeachment

December 12, 2025 at 6:43 AM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

IBVA's key point—mobility—is gonna change the way we think of VR

Imagine hearing/watching/feeling Brian Eno's cranial activity while he wanders thru a NYC crowd. You too can become a walking sim-stim director, in a weird kind of neuroelectronix-meets-Merry-Pranksters montage

#Mondo2000 #Cyberpunk

SLIDING SCALARS
Imagine taking IBVA in tandem with available desktop technology for VR...
After learning to generate EEG signals for 3D spatial control, imagine the legal fun you might experience next to any blank wall with a laptop, a vid projector and IBVA.

Other VR products provide IR sensor arrays programmed through DOS scripts for "virtual funhouse" construction. Add 3 walls and an IR array to the Senses/IBVA combo and you could literally dance your way through cyberspace.

MUCHO MAS MEDIA
Kahata-san keeps the headband /electrode technology evolving. With an optional cable extension you can pull the radio xmit off the headband and hang it in a pocket—or under a pillow. (Tim says that's what he does—keeps the wires out of his mouth.)
That cuts movement errors and weight. VR researchers at Seattle's HIT Lab talk similarly of designing a "data jacket" to offload radio/battery weight on torso bone structures, use appendages for antennae and even pick up body power from temperature differentials and heartbeat piezoelectric effects(!!)

FORWARD INTO THE FURNITURE
IBVA's key point—mobility—is gonna change the way we think of VR more than anything we've seen for a while. Frankly, people may want to party on my desktop, but I don't live there.
With the IBVA unit, I can wander about in daily life—sports, parties, fun things nowhere near a computer—with the xmit jacked into a camcorder audio track, recording walkman or micro-cassette recorder. Later on, I download the BEG signal into the Mac, already synched to video.
Imagine hearing/watching/feeling Brian Eno's cranial activity while he wanders thru a NYC crowd. You too can become a walking sim-stim director, in a weird kind of neuroelectronix-meets-Merry-Pranksters montage.
I can hardly wait until Empty Vee phinds out about this.
IBVA has a phew problems, crashes, etc., but they'll get phixed. Beyond headbands, data jackets, shaved patches, etc. look forward to flaunting your mind, IBVA style.

December 12, 2025 at 12:03 AM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

Where Television Shatters Chronology and Logic, Rap Shows Us How to Dance on Shards

Sampling is the Auditory Form of Hacking through a Database

By Rickey Vincent
#Mondo2000 #Cyberpunk

$Musically the 1980's will not go down in history as a decade of new ideas. The 1980's will be remembered for its fetish for nostalgia and rampant consumerism, with rebel artists struggling to provide marginal social commentary under the paternalistic guidance of record executives and Congressional decrees. The hyper-escapism and insularity of popular culture is merely a symptom of America's fear of the future, fear of technology, and in many cases, fear of reality. Yet out of the digitally recorded rubble of today's American culture, one indigenous post-modern movement is thriving completely on its own terms. The musical culture of rap music, known as Hip-Hop, has proliferated to the point where American tradition is forced to define itself in terms of this inner city phenomenon. Musically, a technological revolution in sound production has occurred, and the most prolific example of its possibilities is in the production of rap music. The surgical sound-grafting of sampling, the symmetric sound distortion of "scratching", the audio strobe effect known as "transforming" and a number of other recording and production techniques have opened an entirely new and vital medium which serves as everything from news broadcast to pop art. Hip-Hop finds the rhythm in the dissonance of the electronic media, makes sense of it, channels it and spits it back out of your speakers in the form of stories, boasts and lessons. Hip-Hop is the deliberate manipulation of beats and recorded sound inputs from any source into a musical experience with its own authentic rhythm and consciousness. Jon Pareles of the New York Times said of rap: "In its structure and content, rap is the music of the television age, and the first truly popular music to adopt the fast, fractured rhythms, the bizarre juxtapositions and the ceaseless self-promotion that are as much a part of television as logos and laugh tracks. Where television shatters chronology and logic, rap shows us how to dance on shards"$

Most Americans are cursed to suffer in submission to the technology of their environment, but the Hip-Hoppers control many of the tools of the technological revolution, they are making millions of dollars, and dragging American culture kicking and screaming into the 21st century

This relentless technical revolution began in New York dance clubs in the 1970s, when disc jockeys began to gain fame manipulating records on a pair of turntables, adjusting their speed and mixing two songs "on beat" to create a new sound sensation all its own.
They would then interject sound bits or lyrics from one disc onto another by rotating one record manually back and forth. This activity caused a "scratching" sound, and mutated the once sacred recorded song into a twisted snippet of percussion, signifying whatever message the deejay decides to leave in your helpless, dancing soul. These musical medleys provided the backdrop for the rhyming, hyped microphone styles of the club MCs and soon-to-be-professional rappers

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson concedes: "Hip-Hop may very well be the most radical expansion of our culture since jazz." Africa, one of the members of the Jungle Brothers explains, "rap is a positive disease, and it's going to get beneath the skin of everybody."

Sampling is the auditory form of hacking through a database. A certain functional anarchy is involved which one might argue is good for the soul. But what's good for the soul has not always been good for capitalism. Sampling is a multi-million dollar business with far-reaching implications for the way we view art and the world around us

William Gibson's famous cyberpunk statement that the street finds its own use for things is surely true. And armed with an African tradition of rhythm and vitality, black youth are obligated to become masters of these postmodern noise makers. Nevertheless, the only claim they make is that they can "rock the house." Who will pay attention to these
"masters" of post-modernism?

December 11, 2025 at 4:27 PM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

‘trode Stubble and MIDI
by Paco Xander Nathan

Case sat in the loft with the dermatrodes strapped across his forehead, watching motes dance in the diluted sunlight…

Be-It-Yourself Tech: IBVA
#Mondo2000 #Cyberpunk

SHADES OF CHIBA
I feel my skin curl with anticipation as I tear open the dermatrode package, strap a radio xmit unit across my forehead, and jack into the machine to hear notes dance in the jazzriffs of my own bio-signals.

This, thanks to Masahiro Kahata, genius neurohacker of Psychic Lab Inc., who reached through a mytho-temporal warp to pull an enabling technology out of Gibson's near-future and thrust it onto our Macintosh desktops.

IBVA: the Interactive Brainwave Visual Analyzer: a small velcro headband holds adhesive trodes close to the skin, picks up EEG signals and radio xmits to a receiver
connected to the serial port on a Macintosh. Mac software then filters the EEG input stream to detect changes in brain-wave states and displays a 3D graphic for FFT data visualization: alpha, beta, theta, delta. "Brain Switch" options tie changes in brain-wave states to an output stream for controlling animation, Mac sound synthesis, MIDI events and even an RS422 controller data stream.

TEX SPEX FOR MAC HAX
New Moon Communications president Timothy Childs makes his intentions clear:
"We're not here to make a buck and get out. Our motivation is long term: to turn cool people on with cool tools."

What you do with realtime brain-wave data on a PC is key.
My kana may be a bit fuzzy, but a first glance through the user's manual suggests mind training, psychic healing, stress reduction, meditation, sleep work, etc.
Standard brain-toy bullet list for any GnuAge grokabilly shopping trip.

TEX HAX NIX MACS
News travels fast. At the mention of a working IBVA unit, a cloud of Austin's finest neuronauts descends in a cybernetic feeding frenzy on my desktop—MIDI hackers, biofeedback junkies, psychiatrists, occult leaders, roboticists, games writers-all eager to auto-launch their own heads.

JUST SLIP INTO THIS SLICK TACHYTECH
Meanwhile, John Witham consciously pulls himself into Alpha in mere seconds, then thinks a melody thru his MIDI sampler. Bill Craig peruses IBVA signal processing and rambles off a half dozen alternatives to the FPT: "Finite impulse response, wavelets, peak-period ratios, etc. could be faster and more noise resistant."

Omni-sensory composer and Robot Group alumnus Matt Ridgeway manually patches our MIDI synth array to parallel IBVA's built-in Mac sounds:
Cymbal Crash for head movement, Monstrous Thunder for signal noise, Fuzz-Box Synth items for the Beta-wave melody and Cool Sawtooth texturing for the Alpha background. Matt muses over IBVA applications in his biofeedback engineering work: "I need a programmable mapping for EEG/MIDI events, even just a lookup table—but I can hack that using IBVA & MAX."

DIY MIDI 1/O, KI-YAY MIDI hacker/composer Elijah Meeker of Austin's Musicmakers extols "Most MIDI products are still designed around a keyboard as input; now we're looking at the human body as an I/O device." Whereas keyboard input is coldly digital, EEG modulation provides the fluidity necessary for modemn composition and performance.
Elijah looks for music that evolves over time-timbres, rhythms that change as you play. "Something like MidiMouse or MAX (both from Opcode Systems) would be great to modulate with brain waves."

JUST LOOK AT THESE ENTICING ACRONYMS…

ITTY BITTY PRETTY TECH, WITH FEELERS
I had trouble getting a good connect with the 'trodes at first. And my butt-length hair got in the way of antenna xmission, but hair can be tied in the name of cyberspace. Radio links seemed to die off at about 3 meters: it depends on EMF environs, but that's fair enough range for an apartment or small stage. You can use a Nady wireless to boost the range onstage.

December 11, 2025 at 3:23 PM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

I don't need to be part of something! I don’t need to give myself to some guru! I'm the boss of my universe!
#Mondo2000 #Cyberpunk

As far as reading a book that I don't think is great literature, I don't have time for it. If I pick up something and I don't like it, well, then, I'll toss aside. I don't feel compelled to finish it.
Disappoints you, doesn't it? [laughs]

M2: Well, maybe William Gibson

TCB: [laughs] You were hoping I was going to tell you of my great love for Neuromancer and the whole business. I guess it's just too alien to what I'm trying to do

M2: Why don't you think there's more bizarre and versatile writing going on?

TCB: There are people just picking up their guitars, learning how to play right now and some of them are going to do folk and some are going to do neo-punk and some are going to do retrograde.
What if I were to stand up tonight and do some songs? They would be blues songs.
That's just what I like. So this is the kind of literature that is uniquely appealing to me.
And why? I love poking holes in pomposity and the established order and the way things are supposed to be. I love to just make fun of that. I love, in regular conversations, to say unusual things for fun (laughs). Let's just lighten up a little bit, you know?

We talked about the information overload we have. You can't really know anything, there's too much. People lose their way and they need some kind of guru or Führer or boss or political leader or whatever to tell them what to do. I stand in opposition to that, because, from my generation on in America, we've been raised to be punks, to kowtow to no one. No one's ever told me what to do in any way and I'm glad

I don't need to be part of something! I don't need to give myself to some guru! I'm the boss of my universe! For better or worse, I stand on my own. In my circle, I'm the guy who wrote the novel! If there's going to be a movement, I'm going to be the leader! All the bands I've been in, I chose the songs! I don't want to collaborate with anybody! I don't want to be part of anything! I'm very suspicious of that, and that in myself too

December 11, 2025 at 6:26 AM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

van Dam: We were working in the hammer-and-chisel phase of this industrial revolution… But these guys had invented machine tools. They’d built tools to build tools: This whole recursive Bootstrap idea, starting with the system itself, and working all the way up through augmenting the human intellect

Valley of Genius
The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley
(As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
Adam Fisher

December 10, 2025 at 3:59 AM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

Internet 'may be just a passing fad as millions give up on it'

Tue Dec. 5, 2000

Net loss: Two million Britons have logged off the Internet

Daily Mail, Tue Dec. 5, 2000

Internet 'may be just a passing fad as millions give up on it'

By James Chapman
Science Correspondent

The Internet may be only a passing fad for many users, according to a report.

Researchers found that millions were turning their back on the world wide web, frustrated by its limitations and unwilling to pay high access charges.

They say that e-mail, far from replacing other forms of communication, is adding to an overload of information.

Experts from the Virtual Society project, which published the report, say predictions that the Internet would revolutionize the way society works have proved wildly inaccurate.

Many teenagers are using the
Internet less now than previously, they conclude, and the future of online shopping is limited. Steve, director of the society, said:

“We are often presented with a picture of burgeoning Internet use, but there is evidence already of drop-off and saturation among users.

Teenagers’ use of the Internet has declined. They were energized by what you can do on the Net but they have been through all that and then realised there is more to life in the real world and gone back to it.”

The project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council, gathered together research by universities across Europe and the U.S.

It estimated that in Britain alone there could be more than two million people
who regularly used the Internet but had now given up.

Analysts say some simply became bored…

December 9, 2025 at 11:35 PM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/acade...

The Mathematics Of 1950's Dating:
Who wins the battle of the sexes?

Great Theoretical Ideas In Computer Science
CS 15-251
Steven Rudich
Carnegie Mellon University

Advice to females:
Learn to make the first move.

December 9, 2025 at 7:48 PM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

People do use the word Weird when referring to Brenda Laurel. In some cases it's because they don't know her very well, and in others because they know her intimately

But Brenda's seriously weird. Weird as in the Weird Sisters—the Norns. Weird as in prophetic and other-worldly
#Mondo2000 #Cyberpunk

Brenda Laurel the Lizard Queen
by Jas. Morgan
Photographs by Bart Nagel
Mondo 2000 issue 7

Now, it's true—people do use the word "weird" when referring to Brenda Laurel. In some cases it's because they don't know her very well, and in others because they know her intimately.

But Brenda's seriously weird.
Weird as in the Weird Sisters—the Norns.
Weird as in prophetic and other-worldly.

But Brenda can also be very this-worldly. She's a ready and eloquent public speaker, edited The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (Addison-Wesley, 1989) and wrote Computers as Theatre (Addison-Wesley, 1991). She's a formally trained actress, video game designer, and outrageous personality—and maybe most remarkable, considering all this, she's a wife and mother. She changed my life. That's probably the
least she aims for—she's got a Ph.D. in Interactive Fantasy. Nevertheless she can be gut-level real. Her rants may seem fantastic, but they are dreams that are coming true. You'd better listen to Brenda Laurel.
—Sally Rosenthal

December 9, 2025 at 6:57 PM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

…finding ways to communicate things that take a single moment
#Mondo2000 #Cyberpunk

FM: Film is just so literal. For one thing you use real people. It's much more powerful than comics, there's no competition there, but a comic can crawl inside your head better.

I mean, a movie may shock but it will rarely stick with you for a long time. A comic, even a little Calvin & Hobbes strip, can be something you'll remember ten years later and that's where the form is much more the brother of prose than it is of film. I think comics have much more in common with prose. They really work on the deepest level, because they work much more inside your head. The drawings themselves can be illustrative and ornate but they need not be, because the reader is doing a tremendous amount of image making. Not just finishing the pictures in front of them but filling in all those little white gutters between moments. That's the beauty of the form, but it's also part of what makes it very hard to practice. You’re constantly playing a dangerous game with your reader. You know, will this connect, will it hit them on the right level and does it still make sense.

M2: It seems there's a process of interpretation and communication taking place between moments that's more direct than film, or even prose, could ever be.

FM: I guess the thing I find so wonderful about comic form is that you're really in a situation of communicating with one person, but it's also a visual experience. So the author is getting across the intimacies of something they wrote but it's amplified by the fact that you re seeing reality interpreted by that person.

Getting back to the Calvin & Hobbes example, I hope that Watterson continues not to let anyone touch that. I don't ever want to see some little actor try to be Calvin. Calvin is that scribble.

M2: A very elegant scribble.

FM: Beautiful, beautiful work. I really think he's the premier strip practitioner. I find his stuff remarkable; it's such wonderful eye candy and it charms constantly.

FM: Even when the U.S. Senate vindicated comic books, the comic book industry took it upon itself to do something about William Gaines' Company, EC comics—which did Tales from the Crypt, the Crime Comics, Mad Comics etc. That's the whole reason there was a comics code for all those years… so that it would prohibit exactly the titles Gaines published.

M2: That little shield in the corner of all those comic books…

FM: They shut down the best comic publisher in history. But you know, William Gaines was a very smart fellow. He took little Mad Comics, turned it into a magazine and did rather well for himself.

M2: I've enjoyed hearing your thoughts on the medium.

FM: I'm always afraid of being incoherent when I start talking about that end of it. I mean, so much of my mind is spent there that I'm afraid I come back sounding like I'm speaking in tongues or something.

M2: It's a unique medium: so little is used to produce such a rich narrative…

FM: I think one of the reasons I found myself so entranced with the Japanese stuff is because as I studied it more, I studied the Japanese more. When I was there for a few weeks I came to realize how iconographic a culture they are. Of their two written languages, one of them is pictographic. The pictographs are kind of hard for us to sort out because they ve become so stylized over time, but to me that was a real clue that there's a common ancestor to both the word and the picture. In a lot of ways comics are an attempt to bring the two back together. So when people ask whether I like to write or draw better, on some days I'll say I like to draw better, it's more physical, but most days it's like the two are really one thing.

M2: It seems like an unfair question. If you preferred one or the other, then that's what you'd do and you don't… you do comic books.

FM: Yeah. I'm not a novelist and I'm not an illustrator. I'd probably fail at either. So I'm glad I've got comic books.

December 9, 2025 at 1:50 AM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

A new movement in science fiction.
This movement was quickly recognized and given many labels: Radical Hard SF, the Outlaw Technologists, the Eighties Wave, the Neuromantics, the Mirrorshades Group.
But of all the labels pasted on and peeled throughout the early Eighties, one has stuck: #Cyberpunk

Mirrorshades (1986)
The Cyberpunk Anthology

Edited by Bruce Sterling

"A knowing bunch of guys, bristling with rock, pain and octane."
-Brian W. Aldiss

Contents:
Preface (by Bruce Sterling)

The Gernsback Continuum by William Gibson

Snake Eyes by Tom Maddox

Rock On by Pat Cadigan

Tales of Houdini by Rudy Rucker

400 Boys by Marc Laidlaw

Solstice by James Patrick Kelly

Petra by Greg Bear

Till Human Voices Wake Us by Lewis Shiner

Freezone by John Shirley (Two Versions)

Stone Lives by Paul Di Filippo

Red Star, Winter Orbit by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson

Mozart in Mirrorshades by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner

December 8, 2025 at 8:15 PM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

"And they knew not their hole from an ass on the ground"
—The Book of Holes #FiresignTheatre
#Mondo2000 #Cyberpunk

Journey to Kooktopia
Gareth Branwyn & Mark Frauenfelder

The Church of the Subgenius uses the term Bulldada to refer to "that which is good because it has no idea how bad it is." While most people might immediately think of kitsch art or the Home Shopper's Network as primary sources of Bulldada, we recently stumbled on a whole universe of do-it-yourself practitioners who put all the artschool surrealists to shame. Imagine this…

You live in a world embroiled in an interdimensional/intergalatic war being fought on an infinite number of battle fronts. A golden age of super-science and psychic wonders—our birthright—has been stolen from us and only a handful of weekend warriors have discovered the truth and are brave enough to fight for it. The very laws of physics (among other things) are at stake.
Free energy, immortality, space-time travel, and the ability to hack the laws of thermodynamics should all be available to us. So what's holding up the perpetual engine of progress?

In the Bulldada universe next door, the enemy goes by many names: the Elite, the Men In Black, the Illuminati, the Shadow Government, the Gnomes of Zurich. Whatever they are called, you can blame the gravity dump we currently live in on them.

They are the ones who have bought or stolen Utopia's blueprints and shelved them in the dusty safes of old government buildings, or sold them to the Soviets, or slipped them to bug-eyed monsters through gaping holes in space/time. Composed of a nefarious alliance between corrupt humans and evil space aliens, the Elite is hell-bent on keeping the working stiffs of the world addicted to petroleum, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals-all products of greedy global corporations who have signed pacts with the Shadow Empire.

For years the Russians have been blasting massive doses of electromagnetic energy into our skulls with enormous transmitters. These waves are eating away at our brains, corrupting our morals and preventing us from realizing what's really going on. Now the world-dominating shadow-elite-alien-government-conspiracy has us believing that they aren't the same one-world-and-we'll-bury-you freaks they've always been. And now that our guard is down, they are about to initiate Phase Two of their dastardly plan—triggering cyclopean earthquakes across North America by resonating geomagnetic polarity bands.

And, as if all this weren't enough, we've also got the "independents" to deal with such as the Deros, a race of sinister dwarves living in honeycombed tunnels throughout the Earth's crust, and bee-like Martians with Mensa-level I.Qs who buzz their tiny saucers over our sleepy Spielbergian neighborhoods.

Some of the Earth's quixotic protectors believe that the Earth and its inhabitants are actually owned by an alien race that has "a legal right to us, by force, or by having paid out analogues of beads for us to former, more primitive owners."

But fear thee not! For there is amassing, in the garages and foreclosed farmlands of America, a fearless army of self-educated stalwarts standing at the gates of the Elite's citadel. They have designed and built awesome weapons and bewildering gizmos to fight (or a least befuddle) the Shadowy forces that threaten us.
Armed with glass bulbs filled with exotic Tesla gases, gyroscopes, redesigned AC generators, polar negative discs run by vibratory circuits of sympathetic polar attraction drawn directly from space, and ether pumps, they are going to demolish the tyrants who have turned the human race into a bunch of slaves and mind-mutilated cattle.

They are the kook-tech inventors and salesman and this is their story. So, snuggle up in your Orgone Blanket, fix yourself a mug of Hydrogen Peroxide, crank up the UFO detector, and read on!

December 8, 2025 at 7:49 PM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

Is it a fact that verticals are assertive, horizontals quiescent, and diagonals dynamic and transitional? Does a ziggurat-like form inherently suggest the idea of hierarchy? Does a monochrome surface inherently suggest the idea of unity?
#Mondo2000 #Cyberpunk

KAMECKE Futiques
Justine Herbert

"Are there formal configurations that inherently place themselves within a limited range of philosophical contents? Is it a fact, for example, as design handbooks say, that verticals are assertive, horizontals quiescent and diagonals dynamic and transitional? Does a ziggurat-like form inherently suggest the idea of hierarchy? Does a monochrome surface inherently suggest the idea of unity?"
—Thomas McEvilley

"Fascist aesthetics… flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain… the grouping of people/ things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader figure or force… The tastes for the monumental and for mass obeisance… are common to both fascist and communist art, reflecting the view of all totalitarian regimes that art has the function of 'immortalizing' its leaders and doctrines."
—Susan Sontag

They look futuristic—or like relics of some future.

Theo Kamecke's future-past cabinets, obelisks, reliquaries, boxes and unidentifiable objects mark the passage of the computer through some theoretical space from innovation to institution to monument to myth.

"My works," he says, "are the representation of technology at a moment in history when it is about to disappear. It wasn't hard to see a steam engine in the 1800s. But now things are becoming miniaturized, just shrinking out of visibility. A hundred years from today, nobody will have any idea what technology looks like, any more than you can tell by looking at another person what kind of cells they're made up of."

The hidden guts of late-20th century workhorses—even washer-dryers have circuitry—provide the basic elements. Kamecke collects, catalogues and affixes the circuit substrate to wood forms for a slightly raised finish—an effect reminiscent of champlevé. He either dyes the circuit boards opaque or leaves them transparent to be lit from within.

Techniques learned in his days as a documentary filmmaker—like repetition and a certain degree of eye-fooling—create an illusion of monumentality. Anything reproduced in a series is perceived as a logos of that particular civilization. The total effect is nothing less than an emblematic art statement.

Dominant by design, their beauty represents the toil a civilization renders unto Caesar—the things it values. Kamecke has fully exploited the inherent design possibilities of the printed circuit boards. "Their properties of symmetry and repetition seemed to exicude other aesthetics in favor of those of Egyptian, Byzantine or Tang Dynasty eras," he comments. "It was an exploration of what was possible with this material. These objects give an impression of visual richness. They look as if a thousand slaves labored on them for a hundred years!"

—Justine Herbert

December 8, 2025 at 6:13 PM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

You always thought David Bowie's videos sucked. You could do better yourself for 30 bucks.

Now's your chance.

#Mondo2000 #Cyberpunk

distorted painting of David Bowie’s head
Illustration by Eric White

Jamming Good with Weird

You're one snotty consumer. You always thought David Bowie's videos sucked. You could do better yourself for 30 bucks.
Now's your chance. Jump They Say, David Bowie's first solo single for 6 years—perhaps his first good single for 6 years—is being released as an interactive single on CD-ROM. (In fact, it's bundled with the new Apple PowerCD player, so you can even get it for nothing—as long as you buy a PowerCD player.) It gives you the chance to "meet the band members" (Mick Ronson, Lester Bowie, Nile Rodgers), tell them how much you loved their last album, and then make the video
over the way it should have been
done in the first place.

Interactive CD-ROMs that rock

The package is being put together by desktop rock impresario Ty Roberts for lon
(CD-ROM publishers). He was part of Bogus Productions in 1987 when they released Jam Session, a program for the Mac that saved you the bother of learning the riffs yourself—slotting them in for you at the touch of a key. Ty designed the rock videos included in the original QuickTime, and for the later version added an interactive jukebox featuring the likes of Todd Rundgren and The Residents in a 3D environment.
So what is Interactive CD-ROM? Here's the deal. It comes with picture files, narrative, HyperCard-style interactions, and you can organize the information to your own specs.
Don't throw away the Christmas wrapping though, there's probably some music in the box as well. It sounds like the 90's answer to rock opera and the concept album—and the only virtue of those two 70's monsters was that they forced punk rock into existence. But Ty Roberts has a different take on things.

"Records will be like this in the future. You'll be bummed out when you get a record and it doesn't have some kind of interactive thing on it. The first one will probably come out as early as the beginning of the summer. I think the Peter Gabriel will be the first album, and followed then by a host of sundry others. Todd Rundgren has a shot at being first or second. By the end of the year there ought to be four or five incredible examples. Next year will be a watershed."

So let's take a look at the rest of the product…

by Paul McEnery
Illustration by Eric White

December 8, 2025 at 7:03 AM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

Computers should be furniture again

In Sneakers (1992), Cosmo and Martin Bishop talk, sitting on a Cray

Cosmo: In prison I learned that everything in this world, including money, operates not on reality…
Martin Bishop: ...but the perception of reality.

C: Posit: People think a bank might be financially shaky.

MB: Consequence: People start to withdraw their money.

C: Result: Pretty soon it *is* financially shaky.

MB: Conclusion: You can make banks fail.

C: [imitates buzzer] I've already done that. Maybe you've heard about a few?
Think bigger.

MB: Stock market?
C: Yes.

MB: Currency market?
C: Yes.

MB: Commodities market?
C: Yes.

MB: Small countries?

C: I might even be able to crash the whole system. Destroy all records of ownership. Think of it, Marty: no more rich people, no more poor people, everybody's the same. Isn't that what we said we always wanted?

Martin Bishop: Cos, you haven't gone crazy on me, have you?

Cosmo: Who else is going to change the world, Marty? Greenpeace?

December 7, 2025 at 9:54 PM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

A uniting force that knows no geographical boundaries. Without regard to race, creed, or color. A new era where communication truly brings people together. This is the Dawn of The Net.

Warriors of the Net (1997/1998)
www.warriorsofthe.net

December 7, 2025 at 8:50 PM

Tao Neuendorffer

@taonf.bsky.social

One of the most interesting things at this con was the mix of people. Typically, a developers’ conference is almost entirely male computer engineers. Not only were more women in attendance than in the past, there were also many people who knew more about content and potential solutions
#AppleNewton

December 7, 2025 at 8:35 PM

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