Printed in Undergrown 11. Forgot to add email address, heheh.
Comp.sys.art.scene
What is comp.sys.art.scene? Nothing, unless there is enough support for it.
If anyone is at all familiar with Usenet, you have surely come across the
newsgroups alt.ascii, rec.arts.ascii, or comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos. It seems
that out of the perhaps thousands of newsgroups out there, there is not a
single newsgroup that caters specifically to the art scene. Alt.ascii and
rec.arts.ascii are jokes. They are newsgroups made up entirely of gif-
asciis, and the occasional ansi are obvious gif2ansis. The Hornet news-
group, comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos, has shown quite a high degree of intolerance
for the art scene in the past, and i will seriously doubt theyd welcome
any sort of civil discussion in the future.
Why comp.sys.art.scene? Comp.sys.art.scene will be a newsgroup sponsored
by Teklordz Productions which welcomes everyone involved in the underground
art scene to participate in order to:
- Promote appreciation of the past accomplishments of the art scene
- Have discussions on art and art-related techniques
- Promote scene maturity
- Encourage more collaboration and community across art groups
- Promote your respective groups
- Promote appreciation of the artist
- Announce art group releases, release locations
- Improve communication in the art scene
- Show other computer scenes that the art scene deserves more credit
and more respect than they think
- Announce art scene related sites WWW, Ftp, etc
The last comment might prompt many to ask, but what about IRC? IRC is
great, but the nicest feature about usenet is the way it works. Usenet is
like one BIG bbs message base. Like a bbs, communicating parties need not
be present to communicate. You come, you post a message, you leave, and a
zillion other people read it and respond to it. When you consider that
North Americans no longer exclusively make up our art scene, one advantage
becomes obvious: via Usenet you will be able to communicate effectively
despite the extremes in time differences.
Binaries will be allowed in the newsgroup, if the intent is to facilitate
a discussion on technique, or to show off your work. In the spirit of
saving bandwidth it would be probably not a good idea to post entire art
releases.
I have decided not to make the newsgroup moderated. Despite this, unrelated
topics will not be condoned: Hacking, warez, whatever. Crosspostings,
intentionally insulting remarks, offtopic discussions often plague unmoderated
newsgroups, but ultimately individuals will have to decide for themselves
if they want this thing to work or not.
I posted a little message about this in the 0696 Teklordz Newsfile, and so
far I have only gotten a single response. I do not know whether this is due
to people not giving a shit, or whether they just tend not to read newsfiles.
Creating a newsgroup is not a fun nor quick process. I need to know if
enough people support it to be worth the effort of even attempting.
So if you think youd like to see something like this, email me. Let me
know youre out there. This doesnt have to be exclusively a Teklordz thing,
in fact Id welcome the help of any other groups out there that would like
to help out on this. It will be, after all, a newsgroup for everyone in
the scene, not just those in Teklordz. If youd like to help, email me.
Thanks for listening.
ts myee@hawaii.edu
Teklordz Productions
June 22, 1996