Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

So I just got back from Toronto… one forgets not having been in a big city for a while not just how stinky and smoggy those places are, and also how rude. The big-city media I think has very effectively purputrated this myth that small town equals closed minded, when all of my experiences suggest the opposite.

I can walk freely here in tinytown; no one particularly cares or comments, and when they do, while it may have a yokel tone, it's entirely nonthreatening. Toronto on the other hand was nothing but whispers and surrepticious angry stares… I don't know if it was fear, or anger, or what it was, but it was pretty unpleasant and uncool.

I think the answer is the picture below, taken from our front yard by me a few minutes ago. Somehow I think the only way those people are going to see this scene is if nuclear armegeddon strikes in their backyard. And that's very sad, and it helps me understand why they are so full of despair (not that it justifies their hostility).

I remember years ago when a friend moved up to Toronto to live with us (who some of you may have seen on the cover of various pro BMX magazines). Like me, he had stretched ears; his were about an inch at the time (this was long before that was subculturally “normal”). He came from a medium sized town, big enough not to know everyone, but small enough still to maintain some decency and courtesy.

Several weeks into living in Toronto, I remember him sitting on our kitchen floor, sobbing… because he wasn't used to everyone staring, everyone insulting him under their breath, and everyone treating him poorly just for having stretched ears. In a small town, you're still a person… In a big city, you're just a stereotype I suppose.

I'm back to 18 hour workdays (although that's interspersed with meals and stuff; not really a “true” 18 hours of work), and even with that I'm falling behind… Every tool though that I build these days is integrated into IAM's user verification system with a goal of being able to have others helping — so the time is an investment I hope — but it seems like all that accomplishes is making schedule space for the next task.

It's like a hydra.

And it really makes me understand how these businessmen fall into sad lives that are nothing but work — at least I like what I do (it's just the exhaustion that gets to me). They're trapped I think; not knowing what to do, being on one-way paths where no one can see the sacrifices they make except them, and eventually their misery explodes out and destroys everyone around them.

It's “funny”… Years ago when BME would have a couple hundred images added per month, I'd get a lot of “thanks for the cool update” messages*, and zero complaints minus the “you so sick” funmail. Now the monstrous majority is people saying “why are BME updates getting smaller and smaller”, even though I'm literally adding thousands of images every week — more all the time — if it wasn't for the fact that people seemed happier when things weren't updated so much, I'd have assumed that maybe it was that some people have a “cup half empty” attitude, but it's more than that.

* This isn't a request for such messages — I know those people are all still out there… I learned a long time ago, that for every happy person that emails you, there are five thousand who sit silent, whereas unhappy people are hundreds of times more likely to write.

I really think it's a reflection of a much larger global malaise.

Maybe the grass is always greener in the past, but I have this notion that there were simpler times. Are people starting to clue in that every day that passes is a day closer to the apocalypse, and that there's not a damn thing we can do to stop it? I think everyone feels trapped; we know how to fix things, but we also know that unless we all commit ourselves to fixing the problem, those of us in the ethical minority will “lose”. And we just don't have enough trust at this point in society it seems to step out onto that plank.

I mean, what is there that makes life good? Friends? Food? Sex? Really, it's pretty damn simple.

St. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians
Said, “It came to me upon a midnight clear
I finished writing all of my gospel
Now all I seem to want is sex and beer”

Back in '96 or whenever it was that Shawn and I launched BME/extreme, “extreme” was the big catch-word. Everything started getting that label… and it wasn't just marketing… maybe it was at first, but it's a chicken-and-egg thing. We collectively turned the contrast up on life, and jacked up the saturation, and either observed the effects or induced them. Everything — especially ideas — become full-throttle or dead with not a whole lot in between. Not only that, but the concept of “truth” has all but disappeared from Western culture, making reality obsolete, and the idea of any sort of objectivism irrelevant.

I've seen some amazing stuff, I mean, really wonderful stuff. I've seen some horrible stuff as well — and little inbetween… It's a strange thing being told you saved someone's life… Wonderful, but strange in what it leads to. It's an even stranger thing to watch someone kill themselves and then have their friends tell you that you could have stopped it (three times now, that I know of…). I don't think it's normal to find out you introduced your young friends to predatory pedophiles… it's even stranger to see one of them on the news getting arrested as a serial killer, and then suddenly everyone pretends that they never knew them.

“Jack who?”

Well, back to work now.

The BME experience update is in place… Thank you to the writers and staff who helped create it, and especially to Vicky for her bulk of features — I think the most one person has ever written in a single update?

Anyway, enjoy the update, and be sure to check out Jim Ward's first column on the history of modern body modification, an almost totally undocumented subject. Oh, and that's Xeon on the cover.

PS. I'm glad Jill didn't die!

Some of you probably have already seen this story on online bookmaking via Slashdot, but since online casinos are how I “made my first fortune” I thought I'd tell a part of my story as well, starting back in late 1994 (WIRED magazine later covered our site in Issue 3.10). Because of being the first online casino to open, we generated monstrous amounts of press — we got into it because at the time we were developing phone sex software and stuff like that and many of the early online casino operators came from that market.

We were uniquely positioned because we'd designed our IVR software to be gaming-oriented and had casino-like functionality built in from the group up. While we were monstrously inexperienced when it came to web development (luckily so was everyone else back then) — as evidenced by the atrocious web design — we were in the right place at the right time.

The character we worked with was an odd one — his “office” was set up as a giant candy store, built around a six foot globe gumball machine and surrounded by cutting edge computers. He regularly filled the place with local kids and we found out later that he was accused of a plethora of improprieties… We stayed involved until the site got big and the gaming kicked up, and then built up the framework of their sportsbook pages. About a year and a half later if I remember right the business actually moved to the Caribbean (even though they'd claimed that's where their offices were, there were in fact domestic until then) and our company stopped working for them.

A few years later I heard of numerous people I knew getting arrested when they returned on vacation to the United States and to a lesser extent Canada (which has less aggressive laws on double-taxation and foreign gambling), and that those who had the sense not to visit family and friends in their home countries were becoming permanent exiles. Then to make matters worse, many of the Caribbean and Central American banks that were being used by both the casinos and adult processors started randomly seizing assets for no good reason (as many of you may remember when BME was caught up in it when our processor stole $1.2 million from myself and some business partners — my share of that was luckily fractional).

About five years later I bumped into one of the owners of the casino company I'd helped create on the street (haggling over the price of a laptop computer that he wanted to buy with cash). Surprised to find him, I took him out to lunch to see what had happened since I'd last seen him. He'd made millions when the company went public (typical internet story!), and then millions more as the casino, then nearly a monopoly, started raking in increasingly large winnings… and then it started to go sour.

First he started having visa problems — local officials would show up at his door at random times, sometimes monthly, sometimes more often, and say things like “your visa has expired; we will need $10,000 in cash by the end of the week or you'll be thrown out of the country and your assets seized” — yeah, it's true that these were “tax haven” countries, but local officials were in with the banks, and knew exactly how much they could extort. To make matters worse, the private banks were “losing” increasingly large amounts of money. My impression was that they were assessing the profitability of the business, and then simply stealing whatever they thought they could take safely, like some sort of strange protection racket.

I'm sure at that point he must have been wondering why he didn't just stick with the far more profitable and legal businesses we'd first built for him, but then it all came to an end anyway… the bank “disappeared” something like three million dollars, and when asked where it was, basically answered with, “what three million dollars?”

I'm not even kidding. I guess they'd decided that due to the serious legal challenges, coupled with the stiff competition — all of the legal US casinos were on the edge of getting in on the games back then and everyone assumed the shady companies would die — they probably decided that the revenue stream was coming to an end and just looted what they could. So now he found himself owing insane amounts of taxes in numerous nations, facing criminal charges in America and Canada, and being virtual broke. He spent a while hopping through Eastern European countries trying to get things restarted, and then with the help of friends ended up in the Toronto area under a false identity. I'm told that he's back in the game, and some cursory net searches confirm that, but I haven't seen him since…

I guess it's one of those “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is” stories. Everyone back then thought it was going to be easy money… How wrong they were…