Scenes From WebZine 2001 by EricR *** WebZine.ws *** I'm Ryan Junell. I'm one of the organizers for this year. I did a lot of design work and promotional stuff, 'cause I've been doing it since '98. Back in 1998 I was contacted by Srini Kumar who does Unamerican.com, it was about 3 weeks before he had booked a venue to do something about Webzines and he had done really nothing, so we pulled together a team really quickly and just slammed, booked some panelists and some bands and it just took off. We realized that we could do a full on event, so about 6 months later we did WebZine '99, and it was about 3 times as big as the first one, 700 people, and last year 1000 people came to the one in San Francisco. I just needed to do anything that was for people, I think it really plays an important role, especially now, when all media is threatened to be taken over by big corporations, it's like the idea that someone can have a soapbox and a million people can hear it, I think that's really valuable. People need to speak and talk to people about what's going on in their lives. I think the internet is definitely the most current, most contemporary and most important medium that's been made available by technology. I think it just happens and I think right now, people just love to make web sites, they love to put pictures of their dogs on the internet, and that's the way they express themselves, and the event, WebZine 2001 is a reflection of what's going on, how people are using the internet to communicate their beliefs. *** I'm Heather Corrina. I do ScarletLetters.com. It's a pansexual erotica site that focuses on feminine aspects of men and women. There was nothing else there [on the net], we started in '97, so in terms of sexual content there wasn't anything that wasn't basically porn, and I wanted to try and kind of sat in the middle of mainstream publishers who say it's really good but there's too much sex in it and erotica publishers who say it's really good but there's not enough sex in it. I also run ScarletTeens.com. When we did Scarlet we had to put a warning up that said you had to be 18, and we felt really bad about saying if you're under eighteen "too bad". So, when we did that we did 85 pages tops and we thought it would be a little side thing that now it has more traffic then anything else we have. It's just sexual advice. Especially for the girls, if they come in with this expectations, especially the ones who buy into the virginity myth, that their sexuality isn't something they have, it's something that someone else gives to them, so of course if they're with this fifteen-year-old boy and the 3-seconds it takes, they're thinking "that's it, that's all I get? After all that." That's not all they get, and so if they explored their own body ahead of time and found out what that is, that they don't need it to be given by somebody else, it's what they bring to share with somebody else, so the expectation level is a little more realistic and it's more of a give-and-take then a "I'm just a receptacle for whatever you've got going". Every study that's ever been done has shown that [abstinence as the only way for teenagers] is really fallacious and it's making people sick, we've got teenagers who it's just killing, in terms of their getting STDs, they're not not having sex, they're just having sex without condoms or the information to know how to keep it safe. In some cases, not if you live in New York, but if you life in Mississippi, these are the kids who go through the whole pregnancy and throw the baby in a dumpster. *** [introduction garbled] Well, actually [BDSM is] something that I think a lot of people in the scene, we're just hardwired that way and I don't know when or how it happened, but it did, and it took me a really long time to come to grips with it, and the internet was partially responsible for that by putting me in touch with different people, that's why I'm thankful. It was for me to be happy and fulfilled that way. I got a computer, I was working at a mainstream newspaper, I was teaching myself HTML so I could work doing the newspaper on the web. The first newsgroup I discovered the second day I was on the web was alt.bondage, and the web was not a big deal back then, and the second was alt.personals.bondage, and the 3rd day I typed in a personals had and someone was like "hey, you're not that bad. Let's hook up." I met my husband through an ad online. We've been together almost 6 years, I'm very happily married. I expect that my middle child has those leanings, not based on anything she's done, but just on the fact that she's so like me. I'm very cool with that. I think it's a harder question when someone asks you, I have 3 daughters, sex work, I think is far more dangerous thing to be in without having it hurt you, any part of it. I did phone sex for four months once upon a time, in an attempt to supplement my income enough to support those children, whether it's dancing or being a prostitute or being a phone sex worker, it takes a toll, I have many friends who were sex workers at one point or another, it's such a harder thing to balance without in some way being a little bit damaged by it. You're selling fake intimacy, you're selling sex, and in drawing the line between what you do as a person and what you do for work, it ends up kind of blurring that line a little bit and building up defense mechanisms that might work against you in your real... I'm not morally opposed by any means to sex work, in fact, I think it should all be legal, and I think it would be easier that way. But it's a far scarier line then SM. [Regarding WebZine,] I need to surround myself with people who are doing what they love and what they believe in as opposed to doing everything for a dollar. Because it's one of the things that keeps me going and keeps me from burning out, I think everyone needs that support group. *** I'm Sam Sheckner, I'm the editor of Shout Magazine. We're in the midst of taking the magazine to the next level. Our August issue is a redesign, and it's got Christopher Walken on the cover, it's very exciting, we're coming out with a double issue, I'm trying to help make Shout into the best magazine in New York City. I was born and raised in New York City. There are so many magazines out there, and it's just a real treat to finally work somewhere where you're making what you think a magazine really should be. It's smart, it's independent, we cover culture and thought and film and music, not just what's in New York but from a New York point of view, for the generally for people in New York who follow trends and culture with their intelligence intact, unscathed by mainstream sensibilities. And it's just great to have the freedom to put that in packaging which you rarely see on stuff that's independent, that's glossy and high quality and they pull out all the stops to make a beautiful magazine about what I want a magazine to be about. *** I'm Bill Nissard from Netslaves.com. I'm here at the WebZine thing 'cause they invited me, I donno, what would you like me to say? Netslaves is our little revenge against the world of the internet and what it's done to all of us, and right now it's a basically a coping mechanism for people who've been burned by the dot-com thing. I started it because I started in this industry before everyone else and I burned out of it before everyone else; it was either do something different, tell my story or allow people to tell their stories about what really happened to them, or go get another dot-com job, so this seemed like a better alternative. We originally wanted to do a book, and everybody said "who cares", who cares about a bunch of pissed off techies, why don't you write a how-to book etc. etc., and we created this website as a way of validating our point of view. [I'm not a pissed off techie], I'm just a pissed off person. When I'm sitting at a computer I'm a pissed off techie, otherwise I'm just a pissed off individual. Netslaves is an experience - I don't like the word "Zine" - it's a web site. A Zine I think like 1985, I think Ben is Dead, I think Factsheet Five, it's kind of an arcane term to me. These proceedings are very 1995 to me. It's like back to the future. It's like all these other sites have gone away and now we're back to where we started from, back to the beginning, you're either the New York Times, or you're one of these do-it-yourself, bathtub gin websites like ours. It's human nature, that's why [the bubble burst]. The technology has changed, human nature has not changed, and people thought that they could make a few bucks off these bullshit companies and they tried and everybody else got screwed, it was bad management, no business model, it was a bunch of people who believed that everybody who goes to Hollywood becomes a celebrity, everyone who goes to Vegas hits it big at the casinos, it was the same mentality. It was a complete departure from reality, it was kind of like there was the economy on one side and then this parallel reality, sort of like Alice in Wonderland on the other side, and that was the New Economy where everything was backwards. It was like "Profitability? Who cares? We'll just give it away!" That's kind of the way it was. *** I'm Eric Zimmerman and I run a company called Gamelab. We make online games, single-player and multi-player games. I've made games for the last 8 years or so, big CD-ROM games, educational games - Gamelab is focused on online games only. I think the reason why I'm here speaking at WebZine is because we're not your typical game developer in the sense our games are not your standard, mainstream gaming fair. So we try and find new audiences for games, we don't design games for people who normally play games, we try and innovate within the medium and find new looks and feels for games that haven't been explored before and especially try to innovate on the level of game play. We pretty have the Indy spirit that infuses the work that we do at Gamelab. I think there's a number of reasons [we wanted to make online games], but maybe the biggest one is that online games right now because they're smaller scale then a Playstation or Dreamcast or Nintendo or even a PC retail game, there's more room for experimentation. The scope is smaller. There's two ways of thinking about what art is. Culture is culture, and it's meaningful by virtue of it's statistics within culture at large, so one way of thinking about art is that it has to do with the institutions, the museums and governmental cultural ministries and things like that and in that sense, no, games are pop culture. In the sense that you're asking, games provide meaningful experiences for people, certainly, and in fact the question is the relationship between high and low culture and certainly that's been going on for many decades now. My background is in art making, and I was drawn to technology and games because I wanted to do things that had never been done before, so in that sense, I was looking to create new forms of culture. Games are really innovative technologically, but they're kind of culturally retarded. There isn't anything like the Zine component to game culture, it's kind of like all Hollywood with no independent film, so at the same time that I think games are a really wonderful medium, I think they're completely untapped and sort of culturally retard, and that's kind of where we're trying to operate within the game medium, behind it's margins. *** My name's Microphone. I do stand-up comedy, I act, I've been in a bunch of movies, I'm a musician, I play in a band with Amy Young, one of the people running this event, and various other things. I'm not a serial killer, but I'm working on it. I am the spokesman of this thing along with my good friend Keith Welby here, but I'm primarily the spokesman of this event. [I wanted to get involved in WebZine 2001] to learn about computers. Because I know nothing. This will not help my curriculum whatsoever, but I'm here anyway. [The people here] are probably people who got pounded on in high school. They're geeks. About 75% geeks, 25% schlimazel. You've got your schlemiels and you've got your schlimazels, you figure it out. *** I'm an interested participant. I'm trying to start my own Zine, and I'm interested in the culture of Webzines. I want to put my opinion on the internet. It's a Zine about pop culture, and I think a lot about it, and have a lot of insights and that's something I'll try to prove in the actual writing. It's just nice to see other people doing it, it makes me feel like part of this community. Y'know, you're in your home doing this alone, it's nice to come here and see that there's other people doing it. I'm doing my thing alone, and I want it to be my own thing, and I don't plan to have anyone else submit to it. I value my privacy and my website's anonymous too. I'm not hiding from the feds or something, I just don't read other people's websites to find out about their life, my things a little more theoretical and my name doesn't really figure into it. People might be curious, but I don't think it's important to know. I'm very adverse to having my name and the idea of being famous is a very awful thing to me, not that I would be. I'd like to avoid that possibility. I just don't want people looking up my name and trying to find out who I am. *** I'm DaBitch. That's what I do. I bitch. I bitch about advertising, because I'm in it. Media actually changes the world and I think people who actually work in advertising have the responsibility to realize that with advertising you can top people. You're getting people to buy things they don't want. Spend money they don't have. That's a bad thing. You should get them to buy things that are good for them. At least, do something useful with it. That's why I don't have a job. I started my own ad company. It's going alright. I only pick up clients who sell things that are actually useful. Sonox.com, for instance. They pick up musicians or albums or bands that don't have representation in any other way and they put them on the internet. You could buy a song and it goes straight to the musicians. [My last company] they made me make a Loreal ad. And I quit. I couldn't do it. I produce Ad-rag.com where I bullshit about advertising and say nasty things and a lot of internal gossip about advertising people. Which is only interesting to people who are in advertising, but they don't want it spread, and then I put it on the internet, which just really kills them most of the time. So for five years I had to hide the fact that it was me doing it because if I was out looking for a job and they knew I was the person they would never ever ever hire me. I get cease and desist orders about once a week.