Transformative Work in the Antarctic

My friend Lynn sent this article excerpt  to me in the 1990s.  No matter where you go, you will find people retelling and reshaping stories.

"Antarctic Life Proves Hard Even for Those Who Love Their Work" ... How boring is life in the Antarctic? People in one group wintering at the South Pole in the 1960s watched the film "Cat Ballou" 87 times. People in another, after tiring of the westerns, Disney features and pornographic films on hand, spliced the movies together into their own production and adopted a vocabulary based on their creation that was so strange that relief crews arriving in the spring could barely understand them. "

PS. This may also help explain My Little Pony slash.

Back When Dinosaurs Roamed The Earth Part I

Me, in 1994: "I have just successfully scanned my first Pros gif and can make it available to interested parties. It's a B&W (that's all the scanner can handle) photo of Bodie and Doyle. I have 3 or 4 other photos that I can also scan in if there is interest (and even if there is not I have found a new toy).

BTW, does anyone have access to character recognition software that is Apple compatible? We have an Apple scanner, 4 bit, black & white. We also have have Apple Scan 1.0.2. If we can get a hold of the software I will try scanning in more circuit stories."

Back When Dinosaurs Roamed The Earth Part II

My friend sherrold posted this to a private mailing list in 1995. It's been edited for brevity (keeping all the wit, I hope, intact) and a few details removed to protect the guilty innocent does any really care 17 years later?   Last year, she agreed to allow me to repost some of her earlier private emails to Fanlore, subject to my discretion. This one I am reposting under friendslock, but felt it was worthy of sharing. It is, IMHO, very Sandy.

A bit of context:  Back in 1995 if you wanted to see a photo, you had to go to a 'bulletin board' called Usenet. There, jpgs were stored in multi-part binary files (strings of 100011000s).  To "see" a picture you had to download each part one by one off the net, assemble them and then use another application to view them. This often took 10 steps - just to view a single image.

At some locations (cough cough work  school government defense facilities you didn't hear it from me), you could access computers with the ability to assemble all the binary files automatically and, with two  clicks, view them (one click to 'decode', then double-clicking on the created icon)

Sandy wrote: "Once I realize these facts, it is no time at all before I am glued to my screen, checking out alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.gaymen.   

Here I am, 2:30 in the afternoon looking at stills of two men, fully, ahem, inserted, and it took me just seconds to do it (so I immediately went out looking for more). I downloaded a few (trying to be alert for visitors) mostly misses (i.e., what I think of as 'male' porno), then I saw something called an .mpg. I thought it was just another picture format, so did the usual, 'hit the decode button, then doubleclick.'

Another application came up on my computer: a video player.  Next thing I knew, two men were going at it like ferrets on my desktop.  I could resize them, pause them, speed them up, slow them down (but I couldn't get them to act more romantic. Sigh.)  At this point, my paranoia *finally* kicked in, and I banished them to the electronic roundfile, but hey, for a minute today, there were men fucking on my computer!"

For me the best part is this: "I could resize them, pause them, speed them up, slow them down (but I couldn't get them to act more romantic. Sigh.)"