(Note: It would be appreciated if responders would * out portions of G*ne and R*ckoids in their replies. Mr. St*enburg is using DejaNews to track down all mentions of his treasured book, and I would like to put off the inevitable confrontation for as long as possible. Many thanks.) WARNING WARNING WARNING **INTRO: The Explaining This post contains frequent mentions of Att*ck of the R*ckoids and G*ne St*enburg and should not be viewed by anyone who is sick and tired of him. Those of you who do not care about Mr. S, or his works, and those who have no wish to view yet another flame war should killfile this thread IMMEDIATELY. G*ne's discovery of this is only a matter of time, and what follows after that discovery will just raise your blood pressure and bandwidth needlessly. For those of you still here, I am proud to announce that the Misting of G*ne St*enburg's astounding foray into Science Fiction, Att*ck of the R*ckoids is back online at http://michris.com/R*ck*ids/(replace the '*'s with 'o's). We lost two webpages, three email addresses, and a good friend's job over this, so be grateful. That's my announcement, thought someone out there would like to know. The rest of this article details why it took half a year to get R*ckoids: The MSTY back online, and all the shit that went down during the saga. I am detailing the saga for several reasons. One, I need to vent. Bad. Two, I want the online community (or at least this little corner of it) to be aware of exactly what G*ne's been up to. From stuff I've found scattered across the 'net, it's apparent that he's been doing these things for a long, long time, and the more people who become aware of it, the greater the chances that he'll be thwarted the next time he tries. For those of you who know about R*ckoids already, skip down to "The Early Days", or "Email", which detail my personal involvement with all things G*ne. The rest of you, sit back and listen as I weave a tale about an inept author, a snake, a hero named Perkins, and the stupidest name for an alien species since Dr. Who was canceled. **GREAT NEW SCI_FI NOVEL: The Beginning It all started with a spam talking about a great new online ebook called Att*ck of the Rock*ids, available at eMatter.com. The sample chapter was bad. Really bad. Manos: Hands of Fate bad. Eye of Argon bad. UPN comedy bad. The author completely failed to admit this, even when the shortcomings were pointed out by some of the biggest names in the SF community. He got lots of fan mail from the lurkers. We must just be blinded to his greater glory. The guy was a jerk, (Note: this is opinion and not fact. G*ne is very big on fact.) and that solitary posting about a great new online book led to the biggest, longest, and most well behaved and verbose (on one side anyway) flamewar I have ever seen. Of course, I don't see many, so... In any case, this was around Winter Break and I was bored. This is not a good state to have me in, especially when faced with such wonderful material as Gen* and his R*cko*ds. There is an artform (term used very loosely) online known as the MSTY. MSTY is based on the television show "Mystery Science Theater 3000" which features a man and two robots trapped on a satellite who make fun of bad movies. "Mystery Science Theater 3000" is hilarious and lasted a decade before the Sci-Fi channel canceled it so they could have more money to make that glowing blue thing in Sliders. Farscape made up for this, but only barely (IMHO). The online MSTYs do the same sort of treatment with one-liners, quips, and riffs against horrid fan-fiction, usenet rantings, spam, and godhatesfags.com FAQs. R*ck*ids was a horrid piece of writing (IMOSHO) that needed to be riffed badly. No one else was doing it, so... The MSTY was completed in two-three days. Most of that time was spent waiting for my brain to recover from having to read R*ck*ids raw. I posted the MSTY to a site on GeoCities and let the folks on rasfc know it existed. I got a few posts back. People seemed to like it. I was happy to have contributed a little something to the ongoing maelstrom of creative activity that was the R*ckoids Flamefest. Two days latter I get two emails in my message box. The first was from G*ne saying I was violating his copyright by posting the MSTY, that I was a naughty person, he had lawyers, and I should take it down...NOW. I shrugged, figuring I would get a chance to explain the concept of the parody Fair Use clause of copyright law and moved onto the next piece of email. It's from GeoCities: my account had been pulled because of contract violations. The timestamp between the two was about 8 hours. G*ne emailed me at midnight; GeoCities at 8 in the morning. I went over to dejanews and posted something, asking G*ne why he hadn't waited at least 24 hours for me to get an answer back to him. G*ne answered that basically I had been a big meanie 'going around behind his back' and that I was flagrantly violating his copyright by adding in all my 'silly little comments'. I shrugged and took it to email, getting the impression folks probably wouldn't appreciate The Return of the Attack of the G*neoids. **EMAIL: The Flaming The early days of our email 'discussions' covered the following broad topics. 1: Did I have the right to post the MSTY of Att*ck of the R*ckoids-Chapter 5 because it was parody, or was I violating copyright laws? I say I had the right, pointing to passages in the Library of Congress' online documents, the advice of a *very* helpful Mr. F_____ of LA, who makes a living dealing in intellectual property, and a series of articles he was kind enough to send me on the subject. G*ne said I didn't have the right and used as proof certain articles he never showed me, and because a lawyer I never heard from said so. 2: That I might've had the right to post up the MSTY, but now G*ne was putting up a new version of AotR, and that would invalidate my right to post the original, but G*ne would be nice enough to let me MSTY the new version of the story with his permission. I was of the opinion that this was BS, and I valued my sanity too much to tackle the thing all over again. 3: That G*ne had the right to pull my GeoCities site without even waiting for me to respond to him first. I think he didn't and that G*ne should've at least waited 12 hours for me to get back at him, G*ne said that he had all the right, and that since I was an insensitive clod for posting the story, he could be an insensitive clod and pull my site without warning. 4: When was his lawyer going to email me directly and put all of G*ne's arguments into clear English (or even Lawyer-ese English) so I could have some official word in all of this? It was only after this question that my Hotmail account suddenly vanished without warning, even though I'd only used it to talk to G*ne. It seems that this question strikes a sore spot with him as this scenario will be repeated again. So we start with email account 2.0 (Everything from this point onward will be posted to the website so people can read it themselves. Yes, I know that there's no way to tell if I altered the text or not, you're just going to have to take it on faith that I didn't. Sorry.) The new Hotmail account did not last very long. It was used for only a few days while I was trying to get G*ne to tell me why he'd disconnected my account since it was the only way his lawyer could get in contact with me. G*ne's response was that I had insulted him. GO figure. The last message I got from G*ne on this particular account was a request to stop emailing him 'now that he'd discovered who I really was'. I sent a message back asking what was he talking about, and *blink* the account was canceled. The second Hotmail account is history when I get a call from my friend David, who'd been hosting the new R*ckoids MSTY page while I updated it. David was saying his boss had gotten a call and David was on three day suspended leave because some 'Mr. St*enburg had complained about copyright infringement on Time-Warner intellectual property.' David was fired the following Monday. **AFTERMATH: The Pissed-Offing This is where the R*ckoids fiasco stopped being a mildly humorous annoyance for me. Some background on the setup of this event. David is a friend of mine who, at this point in time, was working at a Mississippi service provider startup as Systems Administrator. When I lost the GeoCities account, he offered to let me put the MSTY up on his web-space on the company server, which he controlled. He was well aware of G*ne's activities online and with Tor books, but figured that G*ne would just send a nasty email which David could explain to the boss and they'd both have a laugh over. His insouciance was, admittedly, stupid on both of our parts. G*ne called the head of the company directly and complained. David never got the full details, but words like 'Time-Warner' and 'lawsuit' were definitely thrown about. Seems that G*ne-boy was saying that Time-Warner was considering buying the film rights to the R*ck*ids manuscript, and this MSTY would bring down their unholy wrath if it continued. Word of what happened crossed the desk of one of the chief investors of the ISP, he panicked, and David lost his job. I informed G*ne that David and I were not the same person, that he was hurting innocent people with his sh*t, and that I needed some number where I could reach him so that my attorney could get in contact with him. (Once again, I would like to thank Robin for all of her help in this, even if nothing ever came about it. When I say I have an attorney, I mean it. :). G*ne responded (quote) "Do me a favor and stop playing this sort of prank on me and my company. I am quite fed up with the whole thing and I would greatly prefer it if I never heard from you or anyone else about this ever again." (end quote). I got rather bitchy after this. G*ne continued to state that he had nothing to do with David getting fired, and that he never wanted to hear about this again. I responded: fine, I'll put it up someplace else, leave a number where I can contact your lawyer with the details. See Hotmail Account Number Three. See G*ne Cancel. Cancel, G*ne, Cancel. **EPILOG: The Ending And this is where it's lain for the past few months. Soon after I got the MSTY reposted to a site that's been assured as undeletable. My friend, Mr. Nameless, assured me he owns the server space, and his connection is run by one of his best buds. He's been informed of all the shit that's been pulled and seems comfortable he can take whatever G*ne decides to throw at him, I'm trusting him with that decision. Of course, I also have about ten other people who are willing to host the MSTY on their servers as well should it be canceled, including folks who run their own service provider networks, so... In any case, that's the torrid tale of the R*ckoid Fiasco. In another day or so, the emails I sent from Hotmail accounts two and three are available online at the MSTY site for those who would like to pore over them. I'm not posting G*ne's e-mail replies because that would be a violation of copyright. Unfortunately, Sal (my in-house copyright advisor) has told me that even if I just post up my own replies, I still have to paraphrase the pieces of text that G*ne had wrote himself. Sadly, there is much lost when you try to translate G*ne's unique style, so I hope that he gives me permission to post his original stuff as soon as he stumbles across all of this. (and assuming he even reads this far before warming up the phasers). Also to be included with that particular update, I have up a series of emails sent to me by one of David's friends who also tangled with G*ne a while back over the R*ck*ids message boards and the tendency of any criticism on them to mysteriously vanish. He's given me permission to post the conversation online, though G*ne has not. Just so we're all aware of matters. And that's that. Again, I would appreciate if people who might reply to this would refer to the perp and his writings with '*'s spaced throughout, because I know G*ne's using Deja to track down all mentions of his little work, and I do admit I want to put off facing him down again for as long as possible. And G*ne, for when you see this again, this is not going behind your back. This is respecting your wishes to never hear about this again. :) I would like to give a word of thanks to mom, Robin, David, Haystack, Jim, and Teresa for all the help that they've given me on all of this. It's all been very much appreciated Peace! James Kendall