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| Agent - My Favorite Newsreader/News-Poster (Win 98 Version) |
My new calendaring program has informed me that it’s my birthday.
On 14 March 1998 at about 0200 Pacific Time, the version of me that is the “Asbestos Dust” persona first saw light on the Newsgroup “rec.arts.prose”. I’d been online for years, but I needed a persona up to the specific task of “Combat Prose”, and thus Asbestos Dust was born. Nothing special about this particular birthdate — its just one of those “hard to believe” things that nearly a quarter-century has gone, and will doubtless be even harder to believe next year when AD hits the big “Two-Five”.
"Combat Prose," for those of you who don't remember/never were part of UseNet, is the written equivalent of an unsanctioned UFC cage match, sans cage, in which you could use whatever weapons you bring with you or happen upon during the brawl to break your opponent and grind him/her down into a bleeding lump of exposed nerve endings. You win when you get your opponent into such a frothing fury that he totally loses control, and/or threatens you and/or (best of all) "flounces" out of the group, vowing never to return.
It's a "specialty" sport - and I, unlike some of my peers, never played with non-combatants, although I would frequently troll for new meat. They had to be part of the "game" or I pretty much left them alone.
At any rate, I got to reading stuff from years and years ago. Have you ever written things that, on re-reading MUCH later, you can barely recall writing? UseNet is chock full o' memories like that. And what did I discover, shoveling through the enormous pile of brawling text? That I was a ruthless, vicious, absolutely amoral asshole back in those days.
And DAMNED funny, too.
I finally left UseNet because I was bored - the children there were too easy a target, and the population of no-talent dickheads had swamped out anyone worth screwing with, and, most of all, because I was getting soft, less willing to inflict that final, fatal, eviscerating blow when some hapless opponent left themselves exposed.
Ah, well. Us nice guys are just like that, I guess, and “nice” is one of the words most frequently used for AD. Ask around.
I got unwittingly dragged in because I was a “friend” of Glen Wall, who was prone to brawl with Hope, Sykes, et al. But I had been trolling Usenet in my way for a couple years and am still proud of myself for trolling the assholes of alt.anger off Usenet; I just didn’t realize it was a thing until I met you guys. But man did I ever take to it! I don’t think you and I went at it much, but remember Fundoc? Jesus, he cracked me up. We became friends at the end and I bought a few of his CDs. Good times…
ReplyDeleteYup -- my first time out was running head to head against Palmer, Gilbert Vanburen Wilkes III, and Robert Maughn, with an associated batch of others -- even Gekko was part of that first thread, I believe. Took to it like a fish to water -- it was almost addicting. There was some high-end writing talent going on there (amongst the dross), and battling them probably did more to improve my writing than any class ever would have. These guys were absolutely brutal. As you say, "good times".
ReplyDeleteOh wow, combat prose! Is that like, brutal repartee? Do you year apart characters or just writing styles? I can't think of anything more different from what I do every week... shepherd non writers gently through their morning quill exercises.
ReplyDelete"Brutal repartee". I like that. It was, without putting too fine a point on it, the purest form of flame battle you can imagine, deeply personal often as not, vicious as a bar fight with Bowie knives. Utterly no limits. We'd have people who claimed to be "flame lords" or "flame champions" show up and try us out, and assuming we bothered to stop flaying each other alive long enough to notice them at all, they ALWAYS crawled away mewling with a new understanding of how words worked.
DeleteA sample: Sometimes we'd create worlds on the fly while entertaining ourselves; bar-rooms, street-fights, and much less savory places were common. There was a particularly noxious poster named "Bill" who used to call himself "The Flame Giant" who'd annoyed me (as he did everyone) and was in the middle of getting his ass handed to him by a woman who was going by the pseudo "Mary Lincoln". So I wrote an entire world for him, and populated it with other battlers in the related newsgroups including particularly "Mary Lincoln" (from the newsgroup "alt.skunks") and "Mama N" who later morphed into "Gekko". That story, along with the responses and followups to it, is found at
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.prose/c/H9obalMj0L8/m/OEjl2LSfck8J
Just click on the "Asbestos Dust" name at the top of the list to expand the postings.
Heh -- quoting Paula (who was pseudo "Ultraviolet", a highly talented and absolutely stone-cold, vicious bitch in her Usenet days), "Good Times."
We've all mellowed some since then.
I 'member dem days. I wasn't one of the champions. Didn't care to be. Liked being a pseudo-Objectivist circling the arena with Zen and Hope and others snipping at my heels. They might have been right some of the time but not to the person I was then. I still have Hope coming by on FB to be an asshole once in a while. I unfriended Zen because he has no sense of humor. There's something depressingly mean about expat British attempts at humor.
ReplyDeleteEDIT. I unfriended Z for a lot more reasons than that but now I'm talking shit about someone not here so never mind.
ReplyDeleteI generally never bothered with unfriending anyone. Actually, not even sure I could on Usenet. In any event, there were pretty good chunks of them I wouldn't read at all because they bored the bejeezus out of me. My first two major opponents were Gilbert VanBuren Wilkes IV and Robert Maughn, I think. Wilkes would take off on one of his pedantic rolls and I'd rag him mercilessly. Maughn was pissy at about everyone, so he was no trick, although I found I could substantially enhance his annoyance by insisting on calling him English instead of Irish -- or the other way 'round, I don't recall. Good times. Ain't enough talent around these days to make it a useful endeavor, and everyone's got the same sense of humor as an offended Leninist Political Commissar. Ah, well. It was fun while it lasted.
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