Hiya. I started this website in 1994 on stolen UNI server space (it was called something different then, but the site is essentially the same) in order to put up some stories I was writing. It went through a lot of changes and early goofery (I've never been afraid to to my learnin' in public) the site settled in at neuron.net, where it has been since early 1997. I think. The details are kinda blurry now. From the beginning, my interest in building the site has not only been to tart up and show off stories I had written, but also as a platform for thinking about and messing with nontraditional methods of storytelling. In 1994, this mostly meant Hypertext to online people, but I was less interested in the hype of the new than I was in taking older ideas and developing them via new technology, from Oulipo-esque game structures to the invisible literature of paranoia and apocalypse theories to Chinese fragment-histories. I mostly do this by bothering people smarter than me and doing a lot of research and telling lies and avoiding theory at all costs.
The Journal of Speculative Disease is an oblique reference to one of my favorite writers, JG Ballard, whose collection of compressed novels The Atrocity Exhibition makes reference to Bernouli's Encyclopedia of Imaginary Diseases. If you're of a mind to hunt for such references, you'll find them all over the place on this site, but none of those things are necessary. You'll also notice the site only goes back to mid-93. That's because I was a moron and had to move shit around. The material itself goes waaaaaaaay back, and if I was less lazy I'd correct all the timestamps, but you definitely don't wanna wait on that.
This site is mostly powered by Blosxom, which is absolute genius, along with a grab-bag of plugins by Rael Dornfest (meta, config, foreshortened, rss10), Fletcher Penney (entriescache, find, writebacksplus and mods to config) and Tatsuhiko Miyagawa (gzip), all of which are awesome. This site should validate as XHTML1.1. I'm working on it, but I'm probably not giving it full attention unless it's a problem for someone, so if something's not working for you, yell at me and I'll get right on it. I did this not so much because I think it's the wave of the future or anything (in fact, I kinda think XHTML1.1 sucks the dick, to be honest), but because it was long past time to update the site, and XHTML fit my goals: make the site as simple to update as possible, make the site reasonably reader-friendly, and postpone another big redesign for as long as is humanly possible. All the text should be set up via Cascading Style Sheets to default to relative sizes, so if anything looks too small/big, hit the view tab in your browser and change your text size as you see fit. The sections handled by Blosxom have 0.91 and 1.0 RSS feeds, which allows you to subscribe using an rss reader, which will automatically check for updates, allowing you to check your websites the way you check your email. Snag the main JSD feed to get everything, or pick and choose topic feeds as you see fit. 1.0 contains more info than .91, but either one should work fine. As far as RSS reader suggestions, I'm still keen on Syndirella, which is apparently in some kinda development handoff limbo, but I've been messing with SharpReader and it seems to be working well. All entries also have working writeback links, so that if you post about something I wrote on your weblog, and you have trackbacks working (all you Movable Type kids have this by default, and the rest of us can use the standalone implementation, which Blosxom makes super-easy to implement) you can ping my original post, and thus create a link, or you can just leave regular old comments, whatever works. Note that I check the trackbacks all the time, so there shouldn't be too much spam in there. I've tested the site on IE6/Win, Moz1.5/Win+OSX, and Lynx with no problems; I'm gonna try to give it a suitable Mac and Linux test as soon as possible. While I'm on the subject, I've built this site over the years on Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD and Amiga (no shit) machines, and I don't want to hear your crybaby ass bitch and moan about OS zealotry. Just so you know. Speaking of zealots, I occasionally get messed up in the head and work on XML/RSS/RDF goofery, but don't worry, I won't start yelling at you or anything, I'm not one of them.
This is something most reasonable people know, but it seems like reasonable is in short supply these days, so pay attention: Anything on this website can change or even vanish at any time. Anything on this website could quite likely by a lie. Anything on this website might hurt your feelings. Anything on this website might be unsuitable for children. Choke on it.
akasa: a call-and-response game. A story goes up, and readers send in questions about the piece, I pick one, and answer it with another story. Essentially a simple way to get at interaction.
anaskyfish: noise-scholar, enemy of satan. Ana's been a friend of mine since wayback, and often pops up as a character in my stories. See also the livejournal mirror.
dronesick: the JSD studio. Ha! Studio? You call that a studio? Info on modified instruments, mp3s of unlistenable noise, the occasional freakout rant.
idiopathic: notes on generative narrative, cross-media, sugar abuse. Idiopathic also includes a series of essays, which I should write more often than I do, and links to interviews I've done, which are all very informal.
meta: the site talking about itself talking about itself. This is where I keep notes about the progress of the site, and personal notes of questionable interest. I try not to do too much of this (in the "Today I went to the store and bought a loaf of bread" sense).
phantomnation: an on-again off-again hermetic serial novel. This is my second attempt at a proper novel (the first crashed and burned a couple years ago), and is making considerable progress, mostly because I've actually been planning it out and doing the backwork instead of just diving into the writing. It was originally intended to be a daily episodic story, but time constraints unsuprisingly made that impossible, and now it's updated irregularly, but a comeback is always pending.
reviews: harping on about various media. Mostly albums, but I'm working on expanding.
scrytch: mirror of material sent through the scrytch list, updated every night. Scrytch is a mailing list dedicated to creating media which is free for reuse.
The Journal of Speculative Disease:
Written and produced by myself, A.
Skyfish, S. Dghyr, H. Dairyman, V. Serin. Shot on location in northwest
Iowa, southern Minnesota, and central Texas, 1995-2003. Engineering by me. Assistant
Engineers: A. Skyfish, Abbadon. All sound engineered at Dronesick Studios, Waterloo
IA. All animation created by Der Puppetkultus Novelties. Site hosting and technical
assistence: Neuron Internetworks. Research
and equipment assistence: the University
of Iowa libraries (in particular, the International
Dada Archive in Iowa City), the University
of Northern Iowa library, the Mankato
State University library, the Walker
Art Center, the Austin Public
Libraries, the Hudson Machinery Network, and the Ben-Jakob private collection
at Kara-Bakos.
The versions of the stories on this site, and these versions exclusively, are to be considered the definitive versions.
Give it up for my associates: Constant Narrator, A. Phenix at 54 Monkeys Studio, C. Grey and the Grey family, RJ Moore and the Moore family, C. Flink, J. Church, D. Siegel, A. Rosenblatt at Neuron Internetworks, those scrytch people, and everyone that's had to put up with us these past few years.
For further information, please consult the resources and outside sites page.
Thank you for your patronage, and please enjoy your visit.