The L0pht: What I Saw A sea of trash wafts across a battered wooden floor. In an antiseptic room that smells of vanished industry, the castoffs of corporate elecronics flourish beneath a sea of yesterdays high tech. The Vaxen, the behemoths of an age when technocracy was centralism, lurk like benevolent lords over an amassed army of dead displays and battered boards, all verged on the parralell brinks of operation and the trash. Peering out from the technorubble is the occasional active CRT; the occasional signal bursting forth from noise. A moto has been developed, half in jest (but then what isn't): "Entropy Rules". It's a double entendre or the technomedia set, displaying a brand of love for battered and discarded technology that verges on the sexual. All around are piles and piles and piles; stacks of fluff and garbage. But not really. Fluff and garbage canŐt begin to desribe this neo-industrial playground. This fluff and garbage, this TRASH, this is the playground of some of the most literate and wel connected people that have ever een the light of day. The discarded garbage of old tehnology provides the links, the connections to everything thatŐs going on, all that's out there, all that can be done. It's almost as if these broken boards and obsolete machines breed information, breed power. From all the garbage in the world, well, there's all the spare prts in the world. Or that's the way they look at it. If somebody else threw it out, thatŐs their good luck. This place, vestige as it is from another hypertechnical age, is a vacuum for technology. Every broken monitor and melted card seems to breed one that works. As the density of neophyte los grows greater, so does it attract even more. This place, this non-home home is more than that though. It's a place to chill, a place to party, a place to work: a place to owrship the technology that makes up itŐs members hearts and dreams. The members, the initiates, the visitors, these are people who live and breathe computers: who want and need them for all they do, who draw from digital devices the strength to do whatever they damned well want. In that sense, then, this is a place of worship. A mannequin sits armless atop a cabinet, wearing a veil and a mock IV: "Our Lady of the Vax". A joke, for sure, but a joke that everybody can get into, a joke that breeds other jokes: another of the mock-serious half truths that make up the fiber of those who made this place. All those things and more. Worship for the 'technomedia prietshood'. Part workshop, part playhouse. Rave center for the socially disinclined. Last vestige of the smart sleepless. A place for extra storage. The L0pht, man. It's got it all. -tfish GO-FORCE! -=RDT Synd.