In years past, flipping someone

off tended to earn you a

mouthful of calcium chiclets.

These days, you extend your

middle finger and someone

immediately crowns it with a

big, gaudy brass ring. Whether

you treat it as a noose or a

crown, it's still a puerile

prize. But who gets it?

Well, you do, of course: Suck

2.0. But with browser-crashing,

patience-defying,

ad-dollar-slurping prizes like

the one before you, the

colostomy bag has officially

been rendered obsolete.

Observant readers will no doubt

notice that Suck has undergone a

few changes. One early Suck

office guest was heard to opine

that the new layout was "an

affront to the eye of

proportions unseen since

Medieval applications of the

white hot poker." Well, the

background's still white...

The first thing to go was the

courier Suck logo. Friends,

family, and colleagues urged us,

in as forceful terms as they

could muster, to persevere with

the "classic" Suck beacon, in

all its third quarter '95 server

push glory. Eyes welling with

sincerity, they further told us

that stretching, folding,

expanding, embellishing or in

any way altering the simple,

intuitive Suck site design would

be an idiot's haul down the path

of disaster. That's when it

struck us that we were already

treading water, and something

was starting to smell just a bit

fishy.

Defenders will laud the "classic"

Suck's streamlined simplicity,

its cohesive observance of "form

following function." "You don't

have to re-invent the wheel

every time," they'll counsel. But

you know what? If you don't

reinvent the wheel, you wind up

riding around in carts mounted

on stone disks - sure to be

slow-going and

hemorrhoid-inducing, an

experience not unlike surfing

today's Web.

In the past, we did our part to

grease the axles of everybody's

vehicle, making sure that Suck

accommodated pushcart 14.4s and

DeLorean T1s alike. While the

addition of sections like

net.moguls will leave more than

a few browsers writhing in the

dust, remember that most of the

pipe-impaired don't give a damn

as to who the net.moguls are to

begin with. But, even more

likely, if you're not on a T1,

the net.moguls probably don't

care about you, either.

Blissful ignorance accorded to

both sides of the bandwidth, we

now turn to frames. Difficult to

ignore, likely to get in

everyone's way, and even more

likely to inspire the kind of

mail that turns frames into

flames in one move or less. But

frames are as crucial to Suck's

new nav system as they were to

Windows 1.0, and the only reason

people should tsk-tsk is that

we've made navigating within

them intuitive rather than

entertainingly impossible, in

the finest frames tradition.

Think fish. Thank barrel. Think

smoking gun. Think countless

letters: "So who are you guys

anyways? And how do I find that

Suck essay on Fast Company?"

Bang!

Or bang-bang. Because we've

started to Suck twice as hard,

if not exactly twice as fast.

From here on out, Suck doubles

its output. And though it's our

understanding that a vacuum

can't double its strength, we've

made the hole a lot bigger.

Maybe more stuff will fall in -

and we've got places for it: the

mail gets sucked into Vacuum,

the resumes get Pitched, sig

files get filed in Filler,

subscriptions to various smudge

factories GOTO Zero Baud, and

when you can't beat them or join

them, you set yourself up to

keep score.

One of our favorite stories is

that of a friend of a friend who

has never once in her three-odd

decades tasted Coca-Cola. As a

child, she once had a glass of

7-Up, and instantly renounced

carbonated beverages forever.

The part of the story we love is

that nobody really believes it,

which brings us to Suck's new

sponsors.

Do you follow adlinks? We follow

their logic, and, as of today,

their money. If you've got a

beef with our answer to "Where's

the beef?", remember that money

talks: protests should be sent

with check or money order in the

amount of $10, made out to Suck

Ventures, Inc., 510 3rd St., 4th

Flr., SF, CA, 94107. (Empty

SASEs still get packs of

Suck-branded garbage -

heretofore known as "promotional

merchandise.")

Anybody can wallow in their own

sick - the real pros get paid to

do it on stage. Does collusion,

moral prostitution, and wanton

avarice take the edge off Suck's

gay blade? As if! We're proud

of our commitment to be at least

as threatening to the titans of

New Media as Rage Against the

Machine is to The Evil Empire.

As with the sedated shark in

Jaws 3D, immobility should not

be confused with innocence.

It all reminds us of Lender's

Bagels. The process by which

freshness is preserved in

far-flung iceberg bagels, the

Lender campaign informs us, is

exactly as brilliant as it is

counterintuitive: "They're fresh

because they're frozen," is the

refrain. We like the tagline so

much (if not the bagels), we've

made a note to steal it. Suck:

tasty because it's putrid!

No doubt there are those who will

pine for the days of yesteryear,

of a Suck without ads, frames,

Java or, as we'd like to point

out, a payroll. But to lose your

innocence, you've got to have

been a virgin, which implies we

weren't screwed from the start.

We hear they've got procedures

to restore one's purity, but

we're not ready for that frontal

lobotomy just yet.