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Note

In 1980 and 1981, I participated in an unauthorized online discussion forum sneakily hosted on the Indiana University Wrubel Computing Center mainframes. The forum, and the application, was called “Note,” and was written in 1977 or 1978 by then eighth-grade graduate Greg Travis.

In 2003, the younger brother of a fellow participant unearthed some hard-copy printouts of forum activity dating to August 1980 and posted the transcripts, along with commentary from Note creator Greg Travis, to Something Awful.

Fellow Note veteran Eric Sinclair passed the link along to me, and I have been corresponding with Greg, Eric, and others from Note over the past week or so. Greg did not keep his code – written in assembly language, natch – and wishes it was still around.

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Arc

UPDATE: For a much more impressive shot of the same rainbow, which really captures the intensity of the thing, see here.

Photo 080908 005-1

The image above is heavily color-manipulated from the original below, using only photoshop basic selection and color-enhancement tools. It begins to approximate what we just returned from seeing, sorta.

Amazing double rainbow, minutes ago at sunset. Sadly, no decent cameras to hand.

Photo 080908 005
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Cool

Remarkable. It’s barely 55 degrees Fahrenheit and raining under cloudy skies. This installment of the two-week summers looks closed.

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Neck

Leaving work, a passing joke about surgery awakened the memory of last night’s dream: I performed a casual sort of surgery on the neck of a friend, a musician.

He was pausing with me prior to playing a gig in a nearby locale, and for reasons not recalled, it was necessary to carefully flense two half-inch wide, seven-inch long, half-inch thick strips of fatty flech from the back of his neck.

Surgery completed, we were flummoxed by the suddenly-noted lack of dressings. Time dictated that my friend had to depart for the gig, and so he did, wounds undressed and bleeding.

The images in the dream seem to have erupted from one or more long-forgotten documentaries on whaling and sealing, and the vision of the bloodied, fatty flesh clearly reflects this.

Naturally, given the likely source of the imagery, there was only one proper denouement to the act of the flensing.

With a sense of compulsion and horror even within the dream, I ate both ribbons of human flesh

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Anniversary

Yesterday was my tenth anniversary. At dinner with Viv, we watched the nearly-full moon rise and reflect on the water, framed by scudding clouds. Just at dessert, trees framed a meteor. I watched it spark and fall flaming down the sky to vanish in midair.

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Independence Day

Endzone was the livejournal of SF writer Tom Disch, a master of dystopian SF and a treasured early reading companion of mine. The books that I remember best are 334 and Camp Concentration. Appropriately, he also executed the novelization of The Prisoner.

His perfect cynicism and hopeless view of the human condition are certainly the aspects of his work that remain with me most resonantly. Whenever I have returned to these works, I have always found myself chuckling in appreciation of the perfect blackness of the worlds he wrote of.

He ended his own life on Independence Day.