Monthly Archives: February 2003

Some recent emails

Sunday, February 9, 2003

This letter is not actually from a parent who was looking out for their child and pre-screening, as far as I can tell this is from a parent that spied on their daughter's email, then logged into her account and deleted it…. Although from the style of writing, I am half convinced its from crazy Whitestar (a former member who was removed from the pregnancy forum for causing disruptions, and then took to attacking the pregnant women there in the most hateful ways possible).

From: "irockhard"
Subject: Experts advice

Dear IAM@bmezine.com.

I have been cruising your pages, at BME and IAM - well the ones that I could get access to, which was yours. My daughter wanted to become a member of IAM, and as you suggested, I looked over the site (BME and the community chat) on her behalf. I have a few questions:

1. Do you pay experts for the advice that you proffer on your site, or is it submit as you feel, whether the contributors are qualified or not?

2. Who is your advising medical practitioner for this advice if in fact you have one, or is it your misinterpretation of hastily researched information that graces the "risks" sections of your site?

3. How many of these "doctors" like Steve Hawath are actually doctors? We saw him on Ripley's the other day, and just wondered how an unqualified person like himself can actually practice this type of stuff without certification?

The skin is being cut, sutured.

Alot of the content you show is pretty dangerous and your encouragement of these practices is downright negligent, considering the age range of persons who use your site - my daughter is 16.

You are obviously quite the egoist to compare yourself to Ghandi in what could only be an explanation of your life? Have you been laughed at, and are you winning now? I suspect you are still being laughed at - in fact I know you are.

My daughter will not be joining your site, as the restrictions to content are not to my liking. You need to have a WARNING that is highly visible, in preference to it being hidden behind a link that really doesn't indicate legalities lay behind. I believe this warning should come up before each offending image, and you have not managed to secure your site in this manner.

My daughter can pierce and colour herself as much as she wants, but I don't believe that your site is a positive place for her. It seems to be full of under-age whining American and Canadian loser children (saw some more at a friend's house today, after not being satiated with only your page for comment) with not much clue to the world, or to who they are. My daughter is better without this type of person also.

Why do you encourage your site users to have harsher and harsher body modifications carried out on themselves? Is it that you have nothing left of your own to modify. How's about you chop your dick off?

I don't see any safety here. If I had the power, I would ensure that your grotty little effort was closed down, but the net is a free place (not so on your site though - my friend's daughter got an automated message, due to saying something about nothing she was referring to - SOME robot wrote it to her.You need to check your filters or something. There is nothing wrong with the word homosexual. Surely you are open enough to understand that?) - so I just thought that I would let you know you lost two customers today - perhaps you shouldn't bother telling the children you service to ask their parents to cruise around with them on your site. Surely even you can understand that this sort of stuff is not mainstream, and any parent worth their salt would not want their child encouraged into the world you live in.

Now, I suggest YOU unplug your computer and throw it out the window - your site is useless.

Perturbed Mother.

The kicker is that it only takes a few crazy parents freaking out and IAM gets shut down. Child endangerment laws are very aggressive, and if parents wanted to, I don't think it would be difficult to force me to remove every underage user… I'm taking steps to make IAM legally untouchable, but nothing is foolproof. Anyway, here's a recent message I got to BME/Risks, regarding melanoma:

Regarding: Melanoma

Comment:
it sucks!!!! FUCK ALL MEN!!!! that's dope...it's absurd!!!! wut the hell do u think of ur fucking selves?????

This next email is from a guy who's tattoo experience was turned down because pretty much every word was misspelled, including tattoo, and little to no effort had been made to be coherent. In all seriousness, it was one of the worst experiences submitted in that timeperiod:

From: "Billy S"
Subject: Re: My tatoo!

OMG you guys are such losrers! Thats ok I've got better things to do than write an 800 word "experience" to you people, and by the way, I'm a DAMN good writer , and I will be a journalist someday!

This is from a fan in France:

From: "phil" ***@free.fr
Subject: Crazy ..

Hello .
Not a long registraded user , but fan since 1999 .
I like the Bonus Gallerie . But too much guys nows .. And they ' re crazy ...
Too much blood . Too much crazy men . Not as many women as before . Nothing erotic in their stupid ( poor ) splited coks .

I think just a minority can be excited with this .. Most are ....... Stupid maso , even not erotics .
I don t know the worlds in English .
Just thx Misty and Christine ..

Phil

It's weird; it's fine by me if people file complaints/recommendations, but I'm surprised people don't realize that if you want to get your way, it's best if you're polite. I continue to get mail for the late “No Hand”:

From: "ICE_QUEEN"
Subject: for no hand

personally i think your a sad individual . who needs to get a life and stop using this as an excuse for ppl to take interest in you. shame they cant amputate your head and do us all a favour. i watched as afriend went through agony with a 3 year old boy with cancer , how doctor did pioneering surgery on his hand and arm to save it by taking veins tendons etc from elsewhere in his body , and how they succeeded wonderfully , and there are sad lame fucks like you out there willingly doing this to yourself. well i hope you make your parents proud they mustve wanted to bring someone into the world whos gonna take himself out of it bit by bit. at least with tattoing there is a degree of change yes but its accentuating parts by making them stand out .this is pathetic attention seeking.

I got this next email from a guy who was deleted for going around to various people's forums he didn't know and signing them “I hope you die” and telling people (again, that he didn't even know) the world would be a better place if they killed themselves, and so on. Anyway, he emailed me asking why he was deleted, and I'd replied, “you know EXACTLY why you were deleted”.

From: joseph f
Subject: Re: WHAT THE FUCK?

no I don't.could it be for the same things that your militant straight edge friends do to anyone whos not like them?yeah I'm sure of it.and no warning of it either?your fuckin bullshit.

Well, that's the closest I could get to a “funmail”. Sorry it's not more “fun”… Most of the mail I've been getting lately is just really hateful and vicious. This is actually the lighter end of it… Most of it is so fucked up and full of rage I don't want to even print it here because I know it's going to hurt the people reading it.

Those of us that are interested in heavy modification forget sometimes that the world is still a very very long way from accepting these practises. Because of the high media visibility, we're entering a phase of enormous backlash. It's not going to be fun for the next couple of years in some ways.

A number of us have been prosecuted.

A number are currently being prosecuted.

It will still get worse before it gets better.

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Advice: travelling with gear to the UK

Saturday, February 8, 2003

I know I'm going to have to turn the cameras on and off and all that sort of thing to prove that they're not bombs, but is there anything else I should expect? Will they hassle me at the border if I'm carring far more film equipment than a normal tourist would? It'll be pretty damn obvious that I'm travelling as a journalist — I assume no special visa are required for that sort of thing?

Or do I just say “I'm obsessed with videotaping everything?”

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Sticker-O-Rama

Friday, February 7, 2003

Just placed an order for about 4000 new stickers. The first three are “official”, and if Ryan wants some they'll be in BMEshop as well (the media section is where we put things like this). I got 1000, 1000, and 1500 of them. The last three I just got 250 a piece of (thanks Sticker Guy) and will just be fun giveaways.


Hockey Logo
This is on a 2.5″ round black vinyl sticker. 		Calm Logo
This is on a 4.25″x2.75″ clear vinyl sticker (good for windows!). 		BMEZINE.COM
This is red ink on an 8.5″ wide black vinyl sticker. 		RAYNUTZ
Ack! He ate my balls!. 		Laugh it up
This was submitted as a take-off on “Why can't we all just get along?”. 		Eisenpenis
Both of these two are on 5.5″x1.42″ vinyl stickers.

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Is this too cheezy?

Friday, February 7, 2003

When people donate via PayPal, if I'm able to, I like to send a little thank you back, so when I can, if the person included their address I send out some stickers and various other silly things I have here. I don't know — I love getting stickers in the mail from people like Lukas Zpira and Mr. Ballhair — my computer is plastered in them.

But I was thinking — I've donated to a lot of sites over the years, and while about 20% do send a thank-you email, I don't think any have ever sent anything in the mail. I'm not complaining at all, I don't think they have a responsibility to, and that's not what I was donating “for”… but… It got me paranoid. Is it weird/cheezy/etc. to do so?

Anyway, I think I'm going to order a little set of new promo stickers today…

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February 7th

Friday, February 7, 2003

My stupid Internet connection has been crashing every fifteen minutes this morning; very very annoying. I did want to mention one story from the BME news feed today (and thank you to those that have been helping):

My dentist gave me Hep C

Anyway, I have a lot of admin work to do today…

Here's an experiment for you. Next time you're taking a shower, turn the water down by “2 notches” and then turn it up again by “1 notch”. The end result may well be that you feel the shower has gotten warmer, assuming that you don't push it into freezing… but in fact you'll have gotten colder. Bush's con game budget is sort of like that, or as the Libertarian Party points out,

[The] Bush budget contains $10 in new spending for every $1 in tax cuts ... Celebrating Bush's tax cuts is like thanking a pickpocket for returning $10 of the $100 he just stole. Federal spending would be $571 billion per year higher in 2008 than in 2003.

Rumsfield is asking for even more billions for his wars at a recent speech to the house armed services committee (“Repeatedly, committee members questioned whether the administration was asking for enough money and suggested additions, citing specific equipment manufactured in the home states of many committee members.”). Come on, it's not hard to see how this game is going!

One of the scary things though is that anyone who actually points out “hey — something's not right here” is immediately fired. Remember all the 9/11 whistle blowers? Another good example is Beth Osborne, who was hired in 1992 (by Dick Cheney) to do a report on the civilian casualties in the first Gulf War. Because her report was “too honest”, she was fired, her report disappeared, and they re-published her report with dramatically lowered numbers.

We had a scary “what if” talk here last night about North Korea. Buchanan debunks the Kim-as-madman theory, and again points out,

Iraq denies it has weapons of mass destruction. U.N. inspectors cannot find any. Yet, Iraq faces invasion. But North Korea brazenly fires up a plant to produce fuel for atom bombs, as President Bush offers repeated assurances he has no plans to attack.

Buchanan goes on to explain how Kim is winning, and this current policy by the US will erode US credibility internationally… But what if Bush plays it the other way? He's either got to surrender to North Korea's demands and admit that he's a liar and that the nation acts in a cowardly fashion, or he's got to stop the nuclear buildup. Could the following happen in six months?

  1. The US makes an aggressive move on North Korea.
  2. Los Angeles is wiped off the map by a nuclear attack, killing millions immediately and millions more over the next couple of months.
  3. US launches an immediate nuclear retaliation.
  4. China responds with its own nuclear attack on the US.
  5. Goodbye world.

And don't forget Afghanistan. Yeah, we bombed the hell out of them for a while, but since then the country has collapsed back into chaos, fundamentalists are seizing power again, and they're successfully forcing US troops to retreat. al Qaeda is said to now have a dirty nuke that they're set to unleash on America within weeks.

Did anyone watch Colin Powell's ridiculous UN speech? You've got to love that the mainstream media has dubbed the “evidence” as “damning”. What evidence? At best it's circumstantial. Let's take a quick look at some of his facts:

  • The UK intelligence dossier on Iraq. While presented as up to the minute secret intelligence, it's in fact a bunch of plagiarism! They just stole some newspaper articles and college papers (literally copied them — even typographical errors were included), and then made up changes to make the case more damning.
  • The audio tapes (my next few points also summarize from that link). A couple of unauthenticated low-grade tapes that are brief out-of-context snippets are far from evidence, especially from a country that has numerous times fabricated evidence (even in the first Gulf War evidence was fabricated, and Saddam impersonators were hired to make fake propaganda broadcasts, and so on…).
  • The satellite pictures. Have you looked at them? A bunch of blurry undated pictures have no meaning at all… Especially given that the inspectors said that the site was not the same as shown in the pictures, how do we know these aren't ten year old photos?
  • Mobile manufacturing units. The only “evidence” that they have is some claims by “defectors”, and a bunch of “artists impressions”. That's not evidence. I'm sure that there are a lot of people who would tell you nasty lies about me, and drawing a picture of it doesn't make it true…
  • al Qaeda links to Iraq, including training camps in the north. Fact: if the US knew where the camp was, they'd eliminate it. Even the Kurds have said the claim is ludicrous.

Well, I could go on and on and give you endless links on how the case for war is circumstantial at best, and more likely largely fraudulent. But the fact is that at this point the US has painted itself into a corner. To not now destroy Iraq, and to not follow it up by launching war in North Korea, will prove to the world things that the US can't afford to have proven.

Time for some good old fashioned killing!

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