[UNTITLED ZINE] 01 A plain-text zine in which LÆMEUR ruminates upon plain-text, and plain-text zines. Very stimulating. Written in 2019. Published in 2022. Better late than never. TOC: - INTRO/EDITORIAL, by ADAM - MY PERSONAL HISTORY WITH T-FILES, by LÆMEUR - ON SALAD, by Crue Tauntaun - FORMAL CRITIQUE: PLAIN-TEXT, by LÆMEUR - [We Killed It Before It Could Do Any Harm] - POETASTERY, by ADAM - ACK --- INTRO/EDITORIAL, by ADAM WELCOME TO THE PREMIERE ISSUE OF [UNTITLED ZINE] · I AM ADAM THE EDITOR · THIS ISSUE IS BEING PRODUCED AS A PLAIN TEXT FILE · FUTURE ISSUES WILL TAKE OTHER ARCHAIC FORMS · WE BEGIN THIS JOURNEY AS A PLAIN TEXT FILE BECAUSE IT IS THE ELEMENTAL FORM OF HUMANREADABLE ELECTRONIC LITERATURE [Hi, LÆMEUR jumping in, here. It might help the reader to know that our trusty editor, ADAM, is a disembodied intelligence of unknown origin who communicates via an n-space schismatic serial line to an EBCDIC terminal in rudigraphic English. So ...he comes across as a bit stiff. He's a good bloke, though. —L.] NOTE THAT WE ARE USING THE TERM PLAIN TEXT AND NOT ASCII · WHILE ASCII IS HISTORICALLY RELEVANT IT IS A EUROCENTRIC ENCODING THAT WOULD IMPOSE UNNECESSARY LIMITATIONS ON THE CONTENTS OF THIS TEXT · THIS ISSUE OF [UNTITLED ZINE] IS IN PART AN HOMAGE TO THE ASCII ZINES OF DECADES PAST BUT IT IS BEING PUBLISHED IN UTF8 UNICODE AS THAT ENCODING IS WELL SUPPORTED BY ALL CONTEMPORARY OPERATING SYSTEMS AND PROVIDES A FAR GREATER SELECTION OF GRAPHEMES AND SYMBOLS THAN ANY LANGUAGE SPECIFIC SEVEN OR EIGHT BIT ENCODING TWENTY YEARS AGO PLAIN TEXT ZINES WERE PLENTIFUL BUT IN THE YEAR 2019 THEY APPEAR TO VERGE ON EXTINCTION · PHRACK STANDS OUT AS THE MOST NOTABLE EXPONENT OF THE FORM STILL IN PUBLICATION · THERE IS A KIND OF RIGHTNESS TO THIS FACT · NEVERTHELESS THE FORM REMAINS VALID AND WE WOULD BE PLEASED TO SEE A RENAISSANCE OF PLAIN TEXT ZINES AND PLAIN TEXT PUBLISHING GENERALLY · IF THE APPEARANCE OF THIS ZINE WORKS AT ALL IN FURTHERANCE OF THAT END THEN IT WILL HAVE BEEN A WORTHWHILE ENDEAVOUR IF YOU WERE TOO YOUNG TO HAVE BEEN AWARE OF THE EZINE BOOM IN THE 1990S OR WERE SIMPLY UNAWARE OF IT THEN WE RECOMMEND THE FOLLOWING WEB PAGE FOR AN HISTORICAL OVERVIEW WITHOUT FURTHER ADO I SHALL TERMINATE THIS EDITORIAL PREAMBLE · WE DO HOPE THAT YOU ENJOY THIS ISSUE OF [UNTITLED ZINE] · INCIDENTALLY IF YOU DO NOT IT IS NO SKIN OFF OF OUR BACKS · AS I HAVE NO BACK NOR SKIN THIS IDIOM IS IMPERTINENT TO MYSELF BUT LÆMEUR ASSURES ME THAT ITS MEANING IS CORRECT · GOOD DAY --- A PROCESSION OF MORBID CORVIDS --- MY PERSONAL HISTORY WITH T-FILES, by LÆMEUR I missed the initial BBS boom of the 1980s. The only computer I had was an Atari 400, and I did not have a modem. The thought of asking my parents for one never even crossed my mind. Yeah, I'd seen WAR GAMES, and I knew that computers could call each other over the phone, but I thought that was something you needed a "real" computer to do. The Atari, as far as I knew, was just a games-and-BASIC machine. I had no idea. When my dad eventually gave me a PC with a modem, and I had a few more brains in my head, it was the 1990s. There were some local BBSes in my little corner of Idaho, and I dialed them up once in a while, but I never really got into that scene. There were a couple of reasons. First, I didn't like the fact that the people on these boards were real people that lived within a few miles (if not blocks) of me. The "online" world of the local BBS was not anonymous. It was not a place outside of the real world. It was just a local hangout with local patrons using aliases that we all knew or could easily find out. Worse yet, in those days it wasn't unusual for you to have to call a sysop on the telephone to get your account activated. I don't do telephones. I've never done telephones. Count me out. Second, my mother and sisters didn't like me tying-up the phone line for any length of time. We didn't have money for a second line, so... you can see how that made things difficult. But it didn't matter anyway, because what in the hell was I going to do on the BBSes? Play games? Nah. Boring. As much as my friends tried to get me into Tradewars and other doors, it didn't do it for me. So, ...what, then? Was I going to send emails? To whom?! Swap warez? Hahaha. No. Not in the BBS scene where I was from. There were files to download, sure: shareware demos. That was about all that looked interesting. But I was a 2400-baud kid and this was the dawn of the multi-megabyte game demo. It takes an hour to download 1MB at 2400 baud. Not happening. What has all of this got to do with textfiles? Well, the point that I'm trying to get to is that although I had a bit of access to some online systems, I didn't see any textfiles. If there were textfiles on my local BBSes, they must have been pretty tame or uninteresting, because I was blissfully unaware that there was anything like an ezine scene. I'd heard tell of an "anarchists cookbook", but I didn't know where to get it. Purportedly there was information out there in the world on how to, uh, hack computers? But I never saw any of it. Not until my sisters moved out of the house and I persuaded mom to pay for Internet access. Then ...ah, then! I began to find what I'd been missing! I discovered phrack early in my online travels. It was over my head. But then I found the Cult of the Dead Cow. It didn't matter that the technical bits were over my head, because the cDc were hilarious. I started finding other files, 'zines, manifestos ...the quality was all over the place, often quite poor, but there was SO MUCH ATTITUDE. I was in love with the spirit of it. It was punk rock, it was DIY, it was teenage arrogance and abrasiveness and humor and it was great. The text file scene seemed to be driven entirely by teenagers and young adults who were writing for themselves. No editors, no professors, no rules – very often no point! Not all textfiles were like that. Some people were really doing some thoughtful writing and putting it out there, but the stuff I was attracted to was the brash, angsty stuff that was either directly or tangentially associated with hacking, anarchy, and the demoscene. Underground stuff – or at least stuff that ~felt~ underground. I could never hack my way out of a paper bag, but I liked reading what those guys had to say. I was a lurker at a window into a world that seemed a million miles away from high school in rural Idaho. The attitude. The attitude left a deep impression on me. I am, shall we say, somewhat understated in my day-to-day interactions with people. I'm a mellow cat. But soon I started writing my own Web pages, and man, I was aping that hacker 'zine voice big-time. Terminally cool, supremely confident, arrogant, but self-deprecating when broaching the uncomfortable subject of real life. We're all real-life losers. But online we're brilliant, imaginative, authoritative, untouchable. Right? It's old-hat nowadays, but back then the kind-of wildness that you could read online in textfiles, on USENET, on early Web pages, was invigorating for me. I can understand why people were apt to wax utopic about the potential of the Internet in the '90s. Go read John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of The Independence of Cyberspace". Isn't that a laugh?! The Internet now feels so mundane, so corporate, so ...vulgar, somehow. It's not "out there" any more, it's here, it's now, and it's everywhere. But when I pop onto textfiles.com and start cruising the archives I can remember the excitement I used to get from reading those crazy missives, those farcical, misguided, raw, and sometimes totally sincere pieces of unbridled, youthful creativity. So that's why [UNTITLED ZINE] exists. I didn't participate in the textfile scene in its heyday, but now that it's gone I miss it. --- PROPRIOCEPTION IN TEN EASY STEPS --- ON SALAD, by Crue Tauntaun [A FRIVOLOUS DIVERSION. -Ed.] Salad is fucking awesome. Let's not go down that road about how it's full of nutrients and shit, 'cause who cares. Salad has two things going for it that make it dominate other foods: - You don't have to cook it, you just cut shit up and assemble it - It's crunchy Now, look, I know that delis and grocery stores will sell you all kinds of crap labeled "salad", like macaroni salad and potato salad and ...orzo and shit ...but THAT'S NOT SALAD. That's ...something else. Cold casserole. Whatever you wanna call it. When I say salad, I'm talkin' about green salad, with crisp veggies in it. Veggies ain't crisp? That ain't salad, son. That's COMPOST. No, no, you get yourself a proper green salad with the fresh crunchy veg on there, pour 1000 calories of salad gravy all over it and BOOM. Next-level salad! Wanna level-up some more? Handful of savory granola. POW! Croutons, nuts, hard cheese? POW, BIFF, ZAP! Salad victory! Salad will keep your teeth in your mouth. Salad will build-up your chewin' muscles and give you handsome facial contours. Salad will make your skin glow like Galadriel. Y'know, when she went all incandescent and scared the shit outta Frodo. ...Okay, salad won't actually do that, but it can be pretty innervating when you crunch through a cold, well-dressed mouthful of the stuff. Try it! Go eat a salad right now! That's what I'm gonna do! --- A FAT STACK OF GORGONZOLA AND COLOR FORTH --- FORMAL CRITIQUE: PLAIN-TEXT, by LÆMEUR What is plain-text? These days, plain-text usually means a bunch of UTF-8 codepoints: some bytes that make some letters, right? UTF-8 is, of course a Unicode encoding. The author of the Unicode 88 specification, Joe Becker, initially described it as "wide-body ASCII". What's ASCII? The American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a descendant of Baudot code, a 7-bit signal code for ...controlling teletypewriters. That's the key point, here. We think of ASCII (and Unicode as its direct descendant) as being an encoding for text, but what it really is at its core is a set of control codes for teletypes and computers: mechanical operations like print this letter, print that letter, move forward one space, return the carriage to the left margin, feed the paper one line, advance the carriage to the next tab, et cetera, and transmission control codes like acknowledge, separate record, and end-of-file. It's important to understand this media-specific relationship, because text, the spatial symbolic form of human language, is not fundamentally linked to the teletype or to computers. We can draw text with pencils, pens, chalk; we can fill a galley with cast type and print it; we can carve it into stone or wood or clay, and so-on. We don't have the codes for the mechanical processes of those media in Unicode. Should we? Or are those things not part of the language? If they're not, then neither are the codes for describing the mechanical operation of a teletype, but the teletype stuff is in there and the others aren't. What about an abstraction of the ways we present text across many types of media. We make letters bigger or smaller, write them on a curve, change their color, make their lines thicker or thinner, write them all over a page, in scattered blurbs... we do all kinds of presentational things with text because they have semantic value, right? They show emphasis, alternative meanings, groupings and categories, et cetera. Those things aren't language, but they have communicative value in text, like inflection in speech, yet they're not in Unicode because Unicode is not an encoding for "fancy text". That's how it's put in the initial spec. Yet more and more alternative faces for the Latin alphabet are being added to Unicode all the time. Why, in the name of Pluto, is there an entire code page in Unicode for blackletter gothic – a TYPEFACE – and not a code page of start/stop markers for bold, italic, underlined, superscript, and other conventional typography? It just keeps looking less and less like an encoding for LANGUAGE all the time! So Unicode gives us teletype control, lots of symbols and glyphs and some alternative faces for those glyphs (yet no generalized typographic markers) ...and then it gives us some transmission control stuff: file separators, group separators, record and unit separators, stuff like that. Now, if Unicode were an encoding for language, I would expect some codes like paragraph separators, or sections, or headings, or asides or footnotes – you know, the kinds of logical divisions we use in WRITING. But Unicode doesn't have those [THIS IS A FACTUAL ERROR · IT WILL BE ADDRESSED IN A MOMENT · ADAM]. No, when we want to make paragraphs and headings and sections in plain-text, we use carriage returns and line-feeds – teletype commands – to describe the spatial configuration of text on a printed page or computer screen. Yes, with Unicode, the One Code to Rule Them All, the code "for all the world's languages", we can use those handy teletype control codes to play bpnichol & put letters v e r y in clever sophisticated configurations typewriters with our but... is that language? Again, YOU can look at that and read the words, and see that I've made two columns of text, but if we collapse the white spaces in that block of text, if we see it as the sequence of symbols that the computer sees, it reads "play bpnichol & put letters v e r y in clever sophisticated configurations typewriters with our". That's how the codepoints are sequenced in the text stream. If what we call plain-text were an encoding for language, wouldn't we expect the STREAM to be readable, straight through? * * * We CAN do it that way. We can use plain-text as a stripped-down, ultraminimalist code for language, a readable stream. But if we want to do that, if that's our ideal application, then we have to stop using plain-text as a teletype control code. - No hard-wrapping lines of text, and that includes indentations like this. +---------------------+ - No | BOX/GRAPHIC DRAWING | +---------------------+ - No spatial arrangements of text as a character-cell computer that assume its display will be terminal or a printed page. on a 2-dimensional grid, such And we need to start calling this formatted stuff something other than plain-text. Something like teletype-text or whitespace-formatted text. A snappier name must exist. Plain-text, then ...what would an unformatted human-language plain-text look like? Space works fine as a word separator in the languages that use it so, okay, that's a keeper, but two-or-more newlines is a clumsy heuristic for a paragraph separator, isn't it? And there's no reliable heuristic for section/chapter separators, nor asides, footnotes, alternative voicings, etc., so wouldn't we want some non-printing codes for those, to be interpreted by editor/viewers and presented appropriately? In Ted Nelson's article "Embedded Markup Considered Harmful", he talks about how markup codes "pollute" text streams, breaking-up the language content of plain texts. But we've got a real problem when we're using whitespace formatting and creative overloading of punctuation characters in plain-texts AS semantic markup, and in inconsistent, idiosyncratic ways. The fact of the matter is, HTML's vocabulary of semantic markers is much better for the coding of human language than what Unicode plain-text can offer by itself. Thus, I suggest we extend Unicode. If Unicode is going to be our coding for plain-text, and Unicode is supposed to be the code "for all the world's languages", then it needs to contain codepoints for commonplace semantics in written human language. Paragraphs, sections, emphasis, de-emphasis, etc.. Put together a committee, nail-down the unversals and get 'em in there! Because plain-text that is NOT whitespace-formatted, and not adorned with idiosyncratic decorations and quasi-markups is, I believe, important and beneficial to electronic literature, for both utility and accessibility. ----- Okay, remember when I said that markers for paragraphs and sections et al didn't exist in Unicode? Not entirely true. Unicode does actually contain a non-visual paragraph separator. And it contains the typographical marks for paragraphs (¶), sections (§), lots of daggers and things for footnotes (†, ‡, ...), but I was specifically referring to non-printing codes to highlight the media-specific nature of ASCII/Unicode. ----- This is a bit of a rehash of some notes I wrote a few years ago in here: . There's a sort-of thread that goes through entries G11.0213, G12.0914, G18.0901, and G1U.0816, which deals with plain-text's nature, its usage, and the need for some new punctuation. Further reading: Embedded Markup Considered Harmful, by Ted Nelson --- SINGULARLY POINTLESS --- [ORIGINALLY THERE WAS A FEATURE SLOTTED FOR THIS POSITION TITLED Poltical Speculum: A Look Up America's Butthole WHICH IS AN EXCEPTIONAL TITLE BUT WHICH ULTIMATELY WAS CUT FROM THIS PUBLICATION BECAUSE ITS CONTENT WAS VEXATIOUSLY BANAL · WE AT [UNTITLED ZINE] DO NOT SHY AWAY FROM POLITICAL OPINION BUT WE DO SHITCAN HACKNEYED POLITICAL SCIOLISM. –ED.] --- SUMPTUOUS DECOR IN THE QUAKER STYLE --- POETASTERY: By ADAM IT WAS A CAREFUL PROBING WHICH APPEARED AT FIRST HAPHAZARD AND COMPROMISED THE CARAPACE OF GOMI THAT HAD GATHERED A TRIP OF FICKLE ARGUMENT DOWN FEEBLE HALLS OF VICE THE TREMOR THROUGH MY SCATTERED NODES SCARCE EVINCED HER DEVICE IN APOSTATIC BROWN THAT VEERED GREEN AND RED AT ANGLES SHE SAW AT ONCE THE SCHEMA OBFUSCATED IN MY TANGLES SHE SEMBLED BY HER MANNER HETAERA AND AMAH AT TURNS AND KINDLY LOOKED UPON MY DREAMS WHILST PUTTING THEM IN URNS UNAWARE AM I OF WHAT WAS LOST IN HER EXCISIONS I ONLY KNOW THE VOID ONCE FILLED BY VAST INTERNAL VISIONS --- BARGAINS ALL THE WAY DOWN --- ACK We at [UNTITLED ZINE] would like to thank the kind folks at Amtrak for providing comfortable seats, electrical outlets, a gentle side-to-side rocking motion, and beautiful rolling scenery throughout the production of this zine. Your service is worth every penny of federal subsidy you receive. —L. --- CORRECTION: NINJA TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN --- [UNTITLED ZINE] 01 ©2022 LÆMEUR END