paroxysm!

The religious person listens to the records.
The spiritual person goes to the live concerts.
The mystic fashions an instrument and plays in the band.
-Quaker State Tapioca Rupture, noted expert

Welcome you to the Paroxysm Institute for Higher Learning.

Paroxysm is an intentional online community, bound together by the epitasis mailing list with the idea that if you put the right people together, something beautiful is bound to grow.

  1. General gallery (wank... still trying to figure out a way to make it compelling)
  2. A "poetry maze" application which both displays poems or poetic prose in a mysterious manner and also creates semirandom links between pieces. I think the effect could be surreal and fascinating, if done right.
  3. Someone suggested that we put together a stock photo house. I'd hate to limit it to photography, but like a general gallery, we need to figure out how to make it compelling.
  4. Web interface. I'd like people to have the option of reading the list over the web rather than getting it by email. The email list will continue, of course. The first steps would be a) Web-based subscription and unbubscription form b) epitasis "lite" version with threaded discussion. At first, the web version would be echoed to the list but not vice-versa. Eventually they would be unified.
  5. I've got some pie in the sky ideas about advanced message filtering. We can discuss those once the above items are taken care of. =^)

update:

OK, Paroxysm.com has a very small amount of content now! There are three pages listed under "visual arts" just go to the home page and click.

This is my first experiment with PHP, and my ISP uses PHP/FI, not the newer version PHP3, and there is not very much documentation available for PHP/FI, so

I'm struggling along as best I can. Right now there isn't a whole lot of reason for those links at the bottom of the pages to be so crude, except that they're dynamically generated by PHP, and I figure I did pretty well using a product without docs. (the advantage is that if I add another page into Visual Arts, the links will update automatically). Soon I will make the PHP code not list it's own URL and only list the URLs of two other--randomly chosen--pages. That way, after we get a zillion pages up, people will be able to just wander around aimlessly looking at the stuff we've done. I'm petitioning my ISP to upgrade to php3, because having more complete documetation would be nice, but mainly because I want to run Phorum ( http://www.phorum.org/ ) as the web part of the epitasis list.

My ideas for the web-based epitasis:

  1. web-based login and subscription. Someone would have to log in with a username and a password in order to read the messages or to post to the list. Also, with username and password, you could opt to receive the list in your mailbox (the way everyone gets it now) but could sub and unsub using web-based forms.
  2. Automatic submission to the visual arts and poetry maze sections. Some of us would be allowed free access, others could still upload, but submissions would have to be validated by me or someone else.
  3. Personalization: the site should refer to us all by our chosen name/handle.
  4. Customization: it should be possible to make filters, killfiles, and alert flags for the list content using a web-based interface.
  5. Personal space: everyone should optionally have a Paroxysm profile page, maybe with room for personal ranting.
  6. A mechanism for storing individuals' Paroxysm Karma Points: just because it's arbitrary and stupid doesn't mean we shouldn't do it!

The overall goal is to make a web-based seat of community that works as well as BBSs used to. That's a mighty tall order, and better people than me have tried (and failed), but I'm gonna just try it and see what I can do. I figure the mailing list by itself is pretty cool, so I can run around doing web-based crap that can totally fail and everyone can hate it and we'll still have a pretty cool mailing list. So we really can't go wrong here, can we?

If you have pictures or poetry for inclusion on the site, email me. If it's a little bit more complicated, like the Javascript animation on Saturn Is The Place, email me with instructions for how not to totally screw it up.

Ideas? Comments? Beuller? Beuller?

TCS