While several of our "awards" elsewhere in EGR are obviously bogus, these are for real -- interspersed with links to sites that have linked to us, reviewed our stuff, or that we liked for some other reason that's really none of your damn business.
RageBoy® Tells All in The Rocky Mountain News. Thanks Lisa!(Oh damn! The Rocky Mountain News decided -- in its wisdom -- to make this site pay-per-view, so the link don't go nowhere no more. Good goin dudes!)
Proto-RageBoy® Rides Again
Sprechen Sie Deutsch? If so, be sure to check out Helmut's excellent collection of funny zines -- many of which are in English. Es wird immer schlimmer...
Thanks to Esther Dyson and Jerry Michalski for this nice plug:"People express themselves freely on the Net through personal home pages and opinionated zines (see Release 1.0, 6-95). Some of our favorites are Doc Searls' Reality 2.0 (and his personal pages), Chris Locke's irreverent Entropy Gradient Reversals and Dave Winer's DaveNet. Over time, more of these sites and zines will point to each other, forming a loose layer of perspective, judgment and opinion that others can use to navigate the Net."
Cafe Compendium by Kathy Biehl features excerpts from Ladies' Fetish & Taboo Society Compendium of Urban Anthropology. Tell Lady Kathy we sent you.
"Visit the 4WORK Passionate Site O' the Week (PSOW), which is still Rage Boy's Entropy Gradient Reversals. If you happen to be unimpressionable, or easily offended by biting sarcasm, stay here where you'll be safe."
"EGR is one of my favorite hyperactive gonzo cyberburpings," says "The Second Hardest Working Author In Internet Show Business" and author (among many other things) of The Internet Guide For New Users, published by McGraw-Hill.
Tasty stuff from a guy who can actually write. Definitely worth a look.
on...
Our favorite feedback on The Gate's dynamite review: Your attraction to fame is bourgeois stink. It'll suck you in and then the media moguls will consume you, transform you, and assimilate you. Not pretty. I recommend ignoring any attention you may get in the future. I certainly don't want to hear about it. And, I'll save you the task of ignoring me by not engaging you further in e-mail diatribes. I won't subscribe to EGR if I have to read self-masturbatory dribble. Otherwise, keep up the good work and I'll be glad to peek under your skirt now and again. Cuz, I really do like your stuff.
We get a birthday present from Ziff-Davis. Sadly for their ass, this pub went defunct shortly afterwards. Can this be mere coincidence?
EGR lands the Short Attention Span Site of the Week award from the Centre for the Easily Amused. Cathie Walker says "In the land of the blind, EGR keeps one good eye peeled for further news of its kingdom come."
It seems EGR has been nominated for something called The Webby Awards, sponsored by The Web Magazine, The Discovery Channel and a bunch of obscure cyberadvertisers. This allows us to display what must be one of the all-time lamest gifs ever hacked up for an award (see graphical abomination at right -- what is that, an irradiated rubber glove?). But what the hell, click on it anyway and go vote for us. Think about it: if we win, you may be able to hear John Belushi's terminally disembodied voice shouting "Holy Shit!!!" over the Discovery Channel. [see Special Issue.] "Hey hep-cats!" indeed. How emabarassing.
The Funniest Sites on the Net
Among other things, this review of EGR says: "As for all the laughing, well, that's obvious. It's in every nook and cranny. I'm thinking I should have checked the document source or tried starting my browser backwards to find even more." Actually, if you can start your browser backwards, there is more. Try it. Thanks Jadie! (Be sure to check The Archive for a lot of piss-yourself-laughing material.)
t@ap online gives EGR its highest-ever rating ("89% YOW!") in Zine Review Stomp. Among the many cool things Tara Calishain says about us there, our favorite was:Reading this newsletter is like riding down a steep hill on a Big Wheel with no brakes. Christopher Locke, Man Behind EGR, has a command of the language that makes reading a great ride.Thanks Cal!
On 10 January 1997 we land a "This is Cool" designation. The review says:
Entropy Gradient Reversals is basically one man's newsletter rant on the current state of the Internet and life in general. Very funny rants, delivered irregularly, on everything from the sudden unexplained popularity of The Weather Channel to the predeliction for media predictions at the end of the year. Available via the web and email.Yeah, turn your sound down in the office, wage slaves. Thanks Lynn!(ps: A warning for families: There's nothing really that objectionable at EGR content-wise (unless you object to clever writing), but be aware that it does contain a liberal sprinkling of 4-letter words and has a "holy sh*t" soundfile that plays on page loading. Possibly not great for the office.)
Our writeup says "Deadly but delightful, Entropy Gradient Reversals skewers Internet stupidity, yet subscribers include the savviest people in the industry. Go figure!" You can also go to the site and vote for EGR. We'll pay you good money to do this. Send email for details...
Sponsored by Border's Books, Salon is one of the most literate sites on the web. In a feature piece for their Special Holiday Issue (December 23-January 5) entitled The Good, the Bad and the Webly, Mary Elizabeth Williams reflects on the best and worst of the web in 1996. "In the midst of all this masturbatory glee," she says, "some folks with original and intriguing points of view actually managed to create a forum where they might otherwise never be heard." Search on "intriguing" to find the link to EGR. Thanks again Mary Beth!
In this new volume from Wiley Computer Books, authors Jeannie Novak and Pete Markiewicz (who "once launched his pet mouse 6,000 feet into the air") catch EGR's editor/publisher in several rare first-person pronouncements.
Page 20:
The Internet is already well on its way to becoming a mass medium, but it will never support "mass media" in the sense most people attach to that phrase. However, in the aggregate, the myriad micro-audiences online will, in effect, create massive opportunities in both business and entertainment.Page 55:In fact, the net is already a major entertainment medium for a large proportion of its current users. Network TV share stats are down across the boards I understand. Where do you suppose these folks went?
Like other corporations, traditional media companies are typically scanning the horizon for competitors their own size. Thus, they miss the ants eating away at their feet! One little Web outfit may take away only a fraction of a percent of any established company's market. But thousands of them can erode an existing market overnight. I believe a lot of companies -- and not just in radio and television -- will wake up one day soon to find their audiences and markets have evaporated.Christopher Locke, Chairman/CEO
Entropy Gradient Reversals
Callahan Online
"This is DAMN NEAR the greatest electronic newsletter ever created" reads the sign-up form for the Callahan Online Dog Rocket Newsletter -- with a killer link to EGR no less. Thanks to Mark Grimes, the preternaturally twisted intelligence behind eyescream.com, we are also listed on the masthead as RageBoy® - VP of Noise & Mayhem. Callahan's humor has a savage quality. It offends some people... and that's why we like it. Thanks John!
EGR makes the Weird section's "Hot 5" lineup in the January 97 issue (#2) of this new hardcopy pub. The review says "Entropy may boast the most self-effacing bravado on the Web. Created and maintained by Christopher Locke, one of the few people who's ever worked for IBM and kept a sense of humor, Entropy is a mishmash of rants, articles, and links -- crabby, but in a cheery way." That's us to a T -- cheery motherfuckers all! Thanks Mary Beth!
EGR was at first recognized by Yahoo as reflecting the same high quality as The Atlantic Monthly, Paris Match, People and Popular Mechanics. However, we've recently been downgraded to the News and Media-Magazines-Alternative category along with all the other scummy webzines. Something about entropy we guess; we knew it was just a matter of time...
While their tag line -- More Signal, Less Noise -- radically contrasts with our commitment to bring you All Noise - All the Time, Netsurfer Digest is a terrific resource. The review of EGR says in part: "You'd figure from the title... that this little e-zine would bring order to the universe. You'd be wrong... It quotes Alexis de Tocqueville and Samuel Johnson, yet literally shouts 'holy shit!' at you - repeatedly..." In few words, they seem to have captured our True Essence. Thanks Laurie!
Our listing under Pop Culture reads: "Gonzo web journalism from the front lines." Thanks Todd! (If you like his list as much as we do, let him know.)
EGR is listed on this extensive zine collection in Singapore. Thanks to somebody hip over there!
From: John Labovitz <johnl@meer.net>
To: clocke@rageboy.com
Subject: howdy
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 08:30:22 -0700
the royal we at the e-zine-list think your zine is wonderfully fine (and we'll be adding it to the list soonish). EGR makes me scared to claim to make a living from 'this internet thing' -- that's probably a good result.
Our listing reads: "AK-47 irony aimed at self-inflicted Internet cluelessness." Thanks John!
Look for EGR among the top rated -- 100 Hot / 100 Popular -- zines on this site. Thanks Otis!
Doc Searls' Millennial Musings on various aspects of technology and "deeper stuff." Caution: you may encounter an unacceptably high signal-to-noise ratio here.
The file is 382K but well worth the wait. A richly rewarding experience. For this and the "Holy Shit!" wav on our base page, thanks, Sassy! If you're not using some hotshit browser the link to the left will not work. Try this instead.
In addition to his takes on "technology, human beings, and everything" in Chronicle Stream, Jake Prescott's homepage has these fine things to say:
To be hip to what's going on out there on the Net, there are a few things you gotta read regularly. One of the bellweather guys is Chris Locke. His e-rag is called Entropy Gradient Reversals, and if you don't bother to read it, you're on your own, bud.Thanks Jake!
As part of an ongoing experiment in anti-memic disinfotainment, we cloned a bit of a previous EGR issue into FEED's recent discussion of the CDA court decision. To our amazement, this got incorporated as a marginal callout in the Document section (the main body of which begins here). Thanks Steven!
VermontWebEGR gets killer positioning, on VTweb's Everything page, beating out, among others, Michael Kinsley's Slate, USA Today and Time Magazine. At least in some quarters of the net, sanity still prevails. (Hint: we're under the animated gif of Bill Gates.)
Thanks Gary!
EGR makes Top 100 Magazines List -- named Magazine of the Month (May '96) in the Style category. Our listing reads: "strongly restricted access for readers without sense of humor..." Thanks Greg!
We like what Mark Amerika is doing. The hard part is trying to figure out exactly what that is.
With no false modesty, we salute our roots in a long tradition of word butchers pushing the envelope beyond all sense and reason.
Last updated 28 August 1998
