I'm having one of those freakouts where I stop working on whatever I'm working on because the level of disgusting mess here has moved past my threshhold of what I can bear… So dealing with this is part of today's mission:
PS. This is pretty disgusting too.
The book is coming along very well… I've totally rewritten it and swept the layout so it doesn't look so amateur. I really think this is going to be one of the best books on modification ever… With all the text that's been added, including a half-dozen “lost” interviews (that I'd done five years ago with many of the ModCon attendees when I was writing my first book, the since-turned-down Modern Primitives II — RE/search told Jon and I “no one wants to see that freaky stuff” after seeing a sample chapter), it's very powerful…
Anyway, I'm giving it a final go-over, then a few others will proof it, and then it goes to press. I can't see any reason it won't be available by the end of March (so about a month from today).
One of my servers (the one that hosts BMEshop, Live Chat, the Experience Engine, the Search Engine, etc.) had a hardware failure last night. I assume it'll be back up later today. I don't know yet what it's nature is or what caused it. This is the message I woke up to:
Subject: Message from DataPipe SupportYour server on IP 64.27.109.240 has had a hardware failure. Feel free to contact us if you should have any questions.
Uh, yeah… I'd like to know why it crashed, what I lost, and when it's going to be back up!
As I said, all my time is spent on the book until it's done. There's sooo much content in this book. I'd say something like five to ten times as many photos as the first book easily, plus about fifty thousand words of text. It's a fairly “heavy” document!
Here's the current draft of page 79…
Two modern forefathers |
On History
As a publisher and writer, I am often asked to provide some historical context for these body modifications. Most people make the assumption that these things are some sort of a modern trend — in fact, I made the same assumption. Even though I'd seen photographs as early as the 1920's of healed piercings of all kinds, including tongue piercings and even neck piercings, I wrote it off as simply sideshow culture without a “real” context as far as the average person was concerned.
With the exception of moments in time where piercing was popular among the aristocracy (most notably in the late 1800s) and when it was incidentally depicted in crowd scenese in paintings (such as the work of Hieronymus Bosch in the early 1500's), body modification, especially erotic body modification, is largely undocumented… So I started asking the older people I knew with piercings how they got into them.
Of course the majority of people told me that theyd come up with the idea themselves, and it was only recently that theyd even known there were others into the same subject. This was what I was expecting, so it came as a shock when more and more people started telling me about the “piercing club” that their parents had been involved with, or about the “gay uncle” they'd met when they were a teen, who'd been pierced since the early 1900's.
Yes, you're probably seeing these things a lot more… but that is a byproduct of changing media attitude to the subject than anything else. This community has always existed quietly, and always will. The only thing that's changed is that because people are now able to learn about the entire modification world in one night of reading is that it's taken body modification out of its slow growth and self-discovery mode.
I believe that the expression is “he who is not a radical at age twenty has no heart, but he who is still a radical at forty has no sense.” I worry sometimes that the young people involved in heavy modification are rushing ahead with a bit too much heart and a bit too little sense.
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My time in the next week will be primarily dominated with preparing the ModCon book for final edit… It's basically all done, but when I finished it six months ago, my head was in a different place. I've now had more time to reflect, and watch both successful and unsuccessful healing. In addition, from a selfish point of view, the US border is cracking down on pretty much everything, so I have to make a few concessions to keep the book legal as well.
Anyway, yesterday I'd mentioned the US's chillingly 1984-esque “Office of Strategic Influence” which serves to, among other things, provide false news stories to foreign media in an attempt to control the populations of those countries (sort of like how they currently control the US population through government control of “news” agencies like CNN, which at this point has degraded to being a government front, at least on certain subjects). Anyway, here are three more links if you want info on that:
If you don't think this is the greatest idea in the world, best mention it to the king…
Oh, and just to show stupid ideas are not limited to the public sector, check out this woman who's suing Volkswagen because her jackass drunk husband smashed (totally intoxicated of course) at 55 kph into a telephone poll… She says that the VW doesn't have “adequate subframe reinforcement”… Uh, yeah, it's VW's fault because they didn't sell you a car you could drunkenly crash into telephone polls safely.
Oh, and if no one saw, it seems they've figured who the Anthrax guy is… but… he's a well respected (and full-of-secrets) government scientist, so they are aparently not worrying about it to much…
