That's what you were expecting to hear, perhaps? If so, this ring is bound to disappoint,
as it's likely to about as sinister as a trip to an English Departmental tea, and a good less sinister
than one would be over at the School of Business, if only they knew what tea was.
Compared to what some have had in mind, my own evil ambitions have been mild ones, indeed. I set up
something called Café Satan, or rather, have
tried to set it up. The
results were as amusingly absurd as the ones to Pepe Ozan's opera, which I mentioned in
my former Webring profile.
Even with frequent mentions that the
whole thing is a (would-be) improvisational theatre company and (like theatre in general) an elaborate put on,
and that the theology of the fictive background of the cafe is in no way similar to anything I personally believe, I
still heard from a few interesting people who wrote to me, trying to save my soul from the forces of darkness,
or taking issue with my fall from G-d's grace into a lascivious embrace of moral turpitude, undoubtedly. Consider
the case of the gentleman who signed my guestbook, filling out every line with the same repetitive phrase: "men
like you never last", using the broken record game from assertiveness training in an attempt at psychological warfare
against this servant of the Dark One in his midst? He was absolutely serious.
Some people really need to get a grip on it, and that's a large part of what this ring is about. I'm looking for sites
like my Cafe Satan page which, if not necessarily philosophical in emphasis, tell the relatively few
very loud people who've been holding the process of conversation hostage in this country, with their screaming tirades
over nothing, to lighten up, merely by refusing to take their fixations seriously. "Irreverent humor", it used to be
called, and some of us miss it, longing for the days when comedy used to have a little less scatology and a little more
substance. I don't care who you offend or how many career protesters are ready to line up to throw a temper tantrum
to express their concerns about my admission of your site to the ring. My only questions are, did you go against some of
the sillier, more arbitrary or ill-informed societal expectations, and did you make me laugh without giving me real cause to take offense?
If the answers to these questions are "yes" and you're not running a commercial site, odds are that I'll let you in. Yes,
the ring is closed. After noticing that nobody had been signing up for a while, I got tired of checking in for nothing.
However, if you get in touch with me and have a site that took a little talent and a little effort to put together, and
which fits in with the theme of the ring, just send me a message and I'll be glad to open the ring for you. By the way,
as you may have guessed by now, yes, I do allow people to customize the HTML code, but would ask that you talk to me
first before doing so, and tell me what you have in mind, because there are some alterations which I might not agree to
(eg. removing one of the links, or changing the title).
There are two versions of this ring, one at World of Webring and the other at Ringsurf. The one you're travelling right now, the one at World Of Webring, is a closed ring, so
you'll need an invitation from me to join it. To ask for one of those, I'd suggest that you sign up for
this list and post a request for one. Don't worry, you're
not spamming the list. I specifically set it up as a place for the discussion of such things.
If I like what I see, I'll get in touch with you.
You can apply to one version of the ring or the other, but not both, as I have no desire to turn these rings into
clones of each other, on a continuing basis. I believe that should answer all reasonable questions, and I look forward
to seeing what people have to offer.
|
