Core Dump

For some reason, my long distant past on the internet popped into my head a few days ago. I’ve tried to categorize it, think through the details, dig up the minutia, and I have realized what a layered and rich history I’ve really had online. I’m going to do my best to recollect them, for no reason other than to create a written record of my wanderings.

I think it starts around 8th grade, say 1994. Seamus and maybe Matt were involved in something called MUD, multi-user domain or somesuch, where you walked around and made friends while accruing battle axes and pixie dust. I was never involved with this, but it raised my awareness of the multi-faceted world of computer interface. Eventually IRC, Internet Relay Chat came along. I think Matt got me involved in this, as he was on the cutting edge of internet technology from a ripe age. Soon, however, I was completely on my own. I don’t remember exactly how IRC worked, but I do know that there was some superstructure under which there were multiple rooms dictated by varying topics. There were teen rooms, and I frequented these. In each room, about 10% of the users were administrators. There was perhaps a different name for this, but I can’t remember. The most common question was “asl”, standing for “age, sex, location”. As a 15 year old poking around the internet, I would answer 16/m/NY. I was otherwise honest, but I tacked on a year until I turned 16.

I’m trying to remember how this all worked. You could make private chat rooms where you’d talk to just invited people. I met a lot of people from multiple countries. I knew a guy from the Netherlands, perhaps named Space Cowboy or some other Steve Miller Band handle. There was a girl from Australia who was a strawberry blonde, like every girl with non-descript brownish blonde hair claimed to be. There was an Afrikaner, I forget her story. I knew a girl that was 17 and had a child, lilpup she went by, her real name might have been Carly. She talked and I listened, and I think she cried quite a bit. There were others too, I knew a guy who claimed to make $200 an hour working as an anti-hacker for the government, and he had the tricks to prove it. Of course, this might not have been true. But you see, it didn’t matter. What people are, and what they do doesn’t matter in that world. What’s more important is what they want to be, what they hope to be, how they visualize themselves. In a way it’s a very honest form of existence, while never embracing reality, it embraced inner self. As for me, I wanted to be an admin in one of the big rooms. Eventually I was, sort of, right as I was leaving.

I don’t remember exactly why I stopped going there. All the while, I was also using ICQ, which is just an acronymized way to say “I seek you”. It was represented by a little flower that lived in the taskbar, and when someone messaged, it said “ut oh!” Very distinctive. I knew a girl from Missouri there, KC I believe, HHSOH, Hannibal High School Outside Hitter. She was apparently very much into volleyball.

As a mid-post bonus, I’m interested if anyone other then Matt, who is temporarily disqualified since he has a legitimate chance of remembering, knows my moniker in these days. I’ll come up with a prize if I’m sufficiently impressed at your memory.

In my senior year, Dawson’s Creek came out. Mike “Bogga” St. Lawrence somehow became enamored with this. You’d have to know the St. Lawrence boys to understand this. Anything they did was just about the coolest thing around. At the time I associated the both of them with Ken Griffey Jr and Will Smith, everything was golden in their hands. And so, despite the bizarre nature of the addiction, a group of us started watching Dawson’s Creek.

It was natural to go find message boards online to pick fights with people who seriously got into Dawson’s Creek. Now, this wasn’t my first time with message boards. Perhaps my earliest internet activity was on the doitsports message boards, where Brett Walker, some others and myself parried blows with the Warwick Cross Country guys, talking junk online before it was popular to do so. The Dawson’s Creek board was an entirely different thing however. This was a flame affair, blast anyone who came into your sites. We thought we were terribly clever, and, of course, I was even then. So some mental bullying occured, but it wasn’t real so it didn’t count. Eventually we inflitrated a Party of Five board and made little wars over there too. It was altogether silly, and eventually everyone got bored with it.

But I normalized, adopted the religion like the invading barbarian masses of the dark ages, and set up shop as a normal citizen. This period, roughly senior year in high school, involved a guy named Power-of-Ten, whose name was somehow politically or racially motivated. A very bright fellow, we got along well, even though I pissed him off at first. Then I normalized with people who went by real names. Spike wasn’t real, but Sandy, Sue, Tom, those were real people’s names. Eventually they picked up shop and left, for the cozy confines of “Cyberfive” their online web community, the last vestiges of which can be found here. NOTE: Press STOP immediately upon entering that link, otherwise this gets the NSfW(not safe for work), lest you be redirected in a very undesirable direction. These people were just friends. It’s not that I didn’t have real friends, it’s just that I shoved this sort of thing into hidden corners of my life. I know so much more about humanity by engaging varying forms of it in open forums such as these. It is an indelible aspect of my experience in life thus far.

Anyway, I had a few meaningful relationships in here, culminating in the summer before my freshman year in college, when the second phase of my internet life began pivoting around young lakotabean. Though an infinitely complex situation with ongoing and future ramifications, it harkened the end of the “people I don’t know” phase of my internetification. Eventually, around a year later, the current era began with the advent of “My Fake Homepage” on angelfire.

A journal with a small following including Kim Zimbal followed, evolving into the bigwhoop experience that we all know and love today.