A Reply to Comment and Criticism

Over the past couple of years ZeroZero has grown. It has grown from a page hastily constructed to provide links to an I-Ching Oracle and Cannabis campaigning websites to a site consisting of around 200 pages covering a whole plethora of subjects. It has grown 'organically' with periods of neglect and attention. It has been updated, written, maintained and advertised by a small number of people who have various interests in common, and we make no money from the venture. In fact, all we have received for our trouble are a couple of free CDs so if anyone wants to send us more CDs then you know what to do. As the site has grown in size, visitor numbers stand at around 20,000 a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. This has led some to comment on the editorial content of the site. These comments have become more numerous, and we feel it is time to address some of these comments we have received on the ZeroZero guestbook, and via email.

Most pressing is the inclusion of black metal reviews from bands such as Emperor and Burzum. As has been pointed out by Joel in our guestbook, these bands have or (have had) associations with the far right, particularly Norwegian racial supremacy and other questionable ideas. We have since seen more information pertaining to this in a book about Satanic metal. These reviews are offered because we enjoy the music - its intense, harsh, brutal; the lyrics are about Nordic battles, Vikings and pagan rituals. This isn't hate metal which we would not listen to or buy and have not encountered to the best of our knowledge. Keeping in mind the political attitudes of artists is at times important, but this music is not overtly racist, nazi or fascist and it doesn't fund organisations which sanction these beliefs. This music is simply music, and we treat it as such; people don't ignore classical composers because of their dodgy beliefs either. If we ever feature music that funds right-wing extremist organisations, we will immediately remove it from the site. We clearly wouldn't listen to music with lyrics spreading race hate or racial supremacy ideas.

Our regard to music stems from the basic ethos of this site. We present information that you may or not find interesting, may or may not agree with. If its helped you form an opinion, or find information that you needed then great. If you disagree with elements of the site then you can let us know. This information is offered freely and you can make up your own minds about whether to agree, disagree or even read it. If you hate the site, then leave! This ties in nicely to the comment by A. Das (via email) of the Original Sources/Biomass Energy Foundation who claimed we were in it for the money and we were censoring a page that was uploaded by ourselves. This is clearly illogical : This site does not operate systems of censorship, we put what we like onto the site. As you can tell by the content, we are not bothered by 'mainstream' political opinion or various rules which we believe to be inherently wrong.

Similarly, a member of the Socialist Party (not sure which one, there are so many!) stated in email and in our guestbook that 'smoking a bit of puff' doesn't make you a radical...you're just pissing about with anti-capitalism'. She finished by telling us to visit a website so devoid of life and character that it seemed rather strange to be slagging us off. What can we say? Again, we offer this information because some of you may find it interesting. If people feel inspired to create for themselves that's great; we're not going to turn it into a communist manifesto site or a page about how Marxism is better than anarchism (which it isn't!) just because someone wants us to.

In regard to security issues, it has been brought to our attention that Counted - who keep track of the number of visitors we get - operates with the use of Cookies. Cookies are files that can be used to track people's behaviour on the World Wide Web. From Counted, we have this information : " we are using cookies to tell you if a visitor to your web site is a unique visitor or just somebody who is coming to your site several times a day, in which case we will split it up again into reloads (returned within 1 hour) and returns (returned after more than 1 hour but on the same day)...We do not store personal identifiable information. We just give the browser the surfer uses a unique id to recognize it when the browser comes to the page again. We don't track anything else with that unique id." Depending upon the browser you are using, you can turn off cookies althogether, which is recommended when surfing commercial sites.

Finally, we've been asked to change the layout of the site, remove the admittedly annoying 'back to index page' features and change the graphics. These are all things we would love to do. If anyone can provide us with the right HTML code to prevent us from having to return people to the index page then that'd be great. As stated on the index page, this code has been introduced so that visitors have access to all of the pages on the site through frames. As for the 'text heavy' look of the site - we're slowly changing the site to include more pictures etc, but don't expect anything particularly astounding will be accomplished.

Anyway, a big up to everyone, in particular those who leave supportive messages! Have a merry Xmas and a messy new year.

ZeroZero (December 2001)