Monthly Archives: November 2002

Another chart

This chart maps (non-genital) piercings as a percentage of the posted whole, with multiple submissions of the same piercing by the same person being counted as one submission, not many. I'm actually surprised the curves aren't smoother:

Anyway, the drivel continues to come in from “tat2man831@msn.com” in Nashville. Now he's threatening to come all the way to Canada to beat up some guy he doesn't even know. Yeah, there's priorities for you.

i can confirm that in a few months i will meat you,i mean meet,well run into each other one day until then i wont bother,i cant wait to rip your eyes out and skull fuck you,fuck with my cousin and it will be sooner than a few months,later big dick.

The punch line is that I have been getting messages like this for years. To quote a typical email that I got, “We know where you live. We know where your family lives. One will surely die soon bitch.” It's just a fact of live that if you do work in the public eye, eventually you start getting the loonies writing you.

Country Boy

I've been told there's a bug where descriptions can become mangled or where avatars aren't updated when you upload a new main pic so I went outside and took a couple pix to test with… In my testing the first attempt worked fine, so I guess I'll just upload these pix here.

I don't know if these are “country boy” pictures or not. They're either that or the too-much-dungeons-and-dragons-and-heavy-metal-and-too-few-girls look. In any case, in the immortal words of Hank Williams Jr*,

"I had a good friend in New York City
He never called me Bocephus just HillBilly 'really'
But he was killed by a man with a switch blade knife
For forty three dollars my friend lost his life
Now this dude's gonna get out in a year or two
'Cause the system don't work for me and you
But a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive"


* That was a half-joke. I don't really listen to Hank Williams Jr.

Heh…

You'd think this guy would have gotten bored of emailing me by now… At this point I basically don't even reply any more. That said, given the rather blatantly delusional (not to mention hateful) nature of the emails, it's not really a surprise. But here you go:

X-Originating-IP: [67.25.39.186]
From: "Bill Bush" <tat2man831@msn.com>
To: <glider@bmezine.com>
Subject: i want to watch football
Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2002 01:02:56 -0600
X-Mailer: MSN Explorer 7.02.0005.2201

talked to some of your canadian friends,we all ran our dicksuckers at first,ive got lots of canadian friends that live in nashville,but they hate niggers and fags,then somehow your friends and i started getting along,heres how i got in the middle of this,one of my cousins hangs from hooks,MR BIGMOUTH,my aunt told my mom there would be some shit in dallas on the 16 of nov. my mom said i should go make sure MR.BIGMOUTH didnt get hurt,ive been in martial arts 12 years and lifting weights for 20 years im 34 and could really give a shit about MR BIGMOUTH,i think hanging from hooks is stupid but its a free world,I LIKE WATCHING FOOTBALL ON SAT.SUN,AND MONDAY NITE,I DONT WANT TO GO TO FUCKING DALLAS,so please mail me that nothings going to happen so my aunt can read it,sorry i ran my dicksucker,i know MR.BIGMOUTH is a dick,but hes famialy.tell your friends to mail me,my hard drive bite the dust and i lost there mail names,if you want jump on my site,well three of us own it,www.thumbzilla.com/main.html.........please mail me back even if you lie

X-Originating-IP: [166.90.116.30]
From: "Bill Bush" <tat2man831@msn.com>
To: <glider@bmezine.com>
Subject: your a joke
Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 01:54:47 -0600
X-Mailer: MSN Explorer 7.02.0005.2201

so your not going to Dallas,how come that doesn,t surprize me,found out i fight with the Lions Den did you,here in the U.S.A.,the only country with balls i might add,we take pride in honor and freedom,you badmouth the U.S.A.,you are a joke,and damn ugly,lose that picture dude for real.the only reason you canadians have your freedom is because of us,you canadians are damn lucky that your country is on are border,if you,ll were at any other location,you,d have no freedom,your military is a joke,and you better not fuck with my cousin we,ve both been piercing science 89,i don,t hang from hooks,what a cry for attention,just like my cousin,your just jealous hes going to take it a lot farther than you,you come to Nashville,badmouth this country to my face,and ill rip you in half,then you,ll be modified for sure mr. shannin..

All I have to say about that is summed up below:

Ratings

There's been some talk lately by some people that I should institute rules about avatars and so on so that we can “send a more palatable message to the mainstream” or encourage tattoo artists to join (right now many won't because they get freaked out by the content). Let's be real clear about my response: it's not going to happen. To institute such policies would effectively kill IAM.

Take a look at where IAM came from: the snowball effect that allowed IAM to happen in the first place was the inertia of bme/HARD and BME/extreme. That is, IAM was “founded” by the bloody shocking avatar crowd. Now, I do think that people should rate their avatars so that people can browse in work mode and avoid them if they want, but I'd never restrict them.

A number of years ago the tattoo community attempted to stop people from getting their faces tattooed by banning it from tattoo conventions. Now there's more facial tattooing than ever. The tattoo community also banned piercing from many tattoo conventions. It's not like that slowed down piercing either. The fact is that bme/HARD and BME/extreme are a significant percent of this community. bme/HARD usually makes up between 25% and 30% of the monthly submissions to BME, and BME/extreme just over 20%.

Anyone who tries to tell those people that they can't express their interests here publicly is fighting a losing battle — and is no better than the person who says you shouldn't show your tattoos in public because it would offend the mundanes. There are lots of body modification sites out there nowadays, most dedicated to either just tattooing or just piercing. BME is the only one that's really emphasized the importance of covering all body modification interests. So naturally, that is what its community site will embrace.

So don't ask me to make decisions in favor of one community over another. Don't try and convince yourself that your modification has “more class” than another because you find it more tasteful. Not everyone agrees, and not everyone should have to. If you don't like looking at heavy avatars, just click on “Settings” on the main page and browse in not-safe-for-work mode. Simple as that.

PS. That said, I do expect people to rate their avatars honestly. If you are using the work mode, and you see adult/non-work-safe avatars, just drop me and IM and I'll manually rate them.


In the news, the US has said that they're worried weapons inspectors are going to give Iraq a clean bill of health. They are worried that Iraq will be shown to have no WMDs, as they've been claiming. As such, the US wants to have the UN inspection team's leader replaced with one of their own operatives. Yeah, that sounds real fair. (more)

On a related note, North Korea has now announced that not only did it secretly develop nuclear weapons, it also has full biological weaponry and other WMDs. (more) The fact that this is being utterly ignored by the US (who have admitted they've known these facts for half a year) should make the Iraq motivations increasingly clear.

Then of course there's all the new terror warnings. Apparently it's going to be a “spectacular attack” on a target of “symbolic value” that will inflict “mass casualties, severe damage to the U.S. economy, and maximum psychological trauma”. (more) I was thinking of all the targets that could either be taken out or severely damaged using one or more shoulder mounted rockets (which aren't hard to get, hell, I can get them and I'm sure anyone hooked up with Class III culture in the US can too).

PS. Bin Laden? (more)

Infoporn

PS. These numbers are all over the place because the current version of my log tool treats every image as a separate submission. I'm going to redo it so if a person submits ten pix of the same piercing, it counts it as just one… That should give more meaningful trendwatch data.