by Nancy Taumoulis

Liberate your body and your mind as you encounter the intensely cerebral ("I think, therefore I am") to the overtly sexual ("I think I love my dog!") on Mindvox. With no GIFs or questionnaires, you are free to penetrate the many minds you will engage...and find your way to etemal bliss!

You won't find megabytes of XXX-GIFs on Mindvox, nor will you be asked to fill out a questionnaire stipulating your breast size. Defining what is sexy means defining what one finds sexy. If your brain cries out for heated discourse with a broad cross-section of humanity, from musicians to hackers to scientists, on the philosophical aspects of virtual reality and other cy berspace topics, Mindvox is your panacea. Cybersex is definitely in vogue here.

Patrick Kroupa and Bruce Fancher, the proprietors of the New York based Mindvox and former members of the famed hackers group Legion of Doom, launched their board in May 1992 to fill a void in cyberspace. "We iust saw that a lot of interesting technologies were not being used for anything but file-servers," says Kroupa, a tall, 25-year-old high school dropout, referring to the scores of boards that pump sex for sex's sake.

Piece of Mind

"People from all walks of life, from your average waitress to major business executives, call in.... Most BBSs I call are like a big family. We go out together, we chat a lot, we argue like a family, but all in all, we have a lot of fun here!"

As reported in the magazine Mondo 2000, before MindVox was even born, it seemed that "within hours every resident of every virtual community around the globe had read "Voices In My Head," "Mindvox: The Overture."

"Overture," written by Patrick Kroupa, also known as Lord Digital, is an on-line history of Kroupa's odyssey through life in cyberspace, a fascinating glimpse into the life and psyche of a brilliant young man.

As stated in "Overture," Kroupa cites "Cyberspace as the ultimate equalizer. It is a place where one person can wield as much power as 100, 1,000, or 100,000 people. Physical limitations are cast off, and in the event of con flict, the playing field becomes that of mind vs. mind. Sheer numbers and mob rule mentality cease to have any meaning when you can create infinite numbers of electronic organisms to do anything you want them to do."

Kroupa continues "There is only one ultimate truth, which is BEING HAPPY and experiencing LOVE. How you choose to perceive it is a very individual matter. While it might mean blue to you, orange to that guy over there, and silver to me, it's all the same thing. In the real world if we held fast to those beliefs and behaved as people have been classically shown to behave, then we'd be killing each other over who has the right idea about love.... Cyberspace allows everyone the freedom to coexist without harming anyone else's worldview or belief systems."

Mindvox's cerebral banter gets down and dirty as well. Enter the Erotica/Sexuality forum and browse through postings from a wide variety of on-line "exhibitionists" as well as the sexually needy. Meet "Elan" who draws a parallel between high technology and a sexual dearth, "Damn this pile of junk! Now my entire existence has been sucked up into my head and dithered into a binary nightmare! I have no sex life! I am an organic count ing machine. I forget what it's like.... the feel of a woman. Maybe I should start looking for those cool boards with all that pornage slithering down the sides of the drives....A little peek-abook thrill capsule.... Maybe the CRT radiation has affected my libido?"

A user named "Simon" who obviously has some kind of strange relationship with his VAX mainframe computer quips, "What kind of sexual being do you call yourself, if the mere touch of your fingers to the keyboard, the power ful sound of a floppy inserted into a drive, the loving, if somewhat...vacant, stare of the monitor didn't arouse passionate longing in your every appendage. There is no return to the dull pleasures of 'sex' once you have experienced the true bliss of connection to a VAX cluster. And UNIX never makes you sleep on the wet spot."

"Plusgood" expresses a strong interest in B&D, but with no willing partner cuffed and available. "Plusgood" posts a "need to explore far beyond mass media's idea of what good sex is all about. Maybe performing a sexual rite before a group of worshippers on the altar of the deity of Sex (with all fertility symbols present and accounted for)? I'm really interested in the Virtual Reality idea because it gives you the prototype without having to adopt the model."

"Kayotae" details his yen for four-legged lovers declaring that after engag ing in sexual relations with any of his pets, they all get along much better. Interestingly, the response is surprisingly open-minded. "Simon" posts "it sounds like you have a healthier, saner and more friendly sex life than many people I know. It's not quite my shtick, but, hey, give your dog a lick from me."

The ultimate in international flagrante delecto takes place on the IRC, the Internet Relay Conference, the world's largest real-time conference system drawing callers from all over the world. Mindvox offers a client server con nection directly into this hotbed of libidinous overload. Spanning all time zones, there is always a plethora of activity on IRC, with an average of 500 to 3,000 participants simultaneously climaxing on-line. In addition to live chat, hundreds of kinky narratives are on file. Or head to Maelstrom, a mul tiuser fantasy role-playing game, a digital nether-nether land, where the rules are only as confining as your preconceptions.

For information contact, Phantom Access Technologies, 1562 First Avenue, Suite 351, New York, NY 10028, (212) 989-2418 (voice), e-mail: info@phantom.com. Accessible through PC Pursuit, SprintNet, and many other discounted data carriers. Mindvox offers an Internet connection. ?