A Long Time Ago, When Only Letters and Numbers Were Allowed On the Internet…

I hope you folks will forgive me for indulging in a little sniping, but it’s always amusing to see how thoroughly bone-headed the hard-core insane can be. And this actually turned out to be a little different than I thought it was going to. Anyway, O Best Beloved…

Once upon a time, before blogs, and even before “the World Wide Web”, there was USENET. And, like most things in life, and particularly most things on the Internet involving any more than at most a single person, roughly 94% of what went on there was shit—then, as now, the trick was to find the worthwhile 6%.

Not that some of the contributors to the remainder weren’t (occasionally) weirdly entertaining, particularly in a USENET group like alt.magick. I know a buncha people from alt.magick days, although it took most of ‘em a while to figure out that 恐ろしき大鏡石=”Lefty, the occasionally extremely annoying, although admittedly smart, guy who worked at Apple”. cadmus, vakratunda, paulrhume, tim_maroney and others were all people I read and interacted with on and off in various groups, at various times. Tim and I had (if you can imagine) some hearty disagreements; it never kept us from exchanging emails saying “We _really_ should get together for lunch” when he was working at Apple (although in a completely different area, several buildings off, from where I was). cadmus and I had a flame war or two, but we’re feeling much better now, thanks.

And then there was dm_telvis. If you notice an odd coincidence between that name and a strangely-disused user ID on LJ, it’s only because there is one. Doing a Google Groups (or even a Google) search on that name turns up interesting stuff, as do fiaof93, dm_telvis5411, dm_telvis5412, dm_telvis5440orfight, and probably a bunch of others I’m not recalling or stumbling across.

This thread, initiated by paulrhume and aptly titled, “who’s the guy with the short fuse and the busted caps lock?” is a classic. Our marsupial here is the one using most of those user names AND MAKING ALL HIS POSTINGS ENTIRELY IN CAPITAL LETTERS.

He’s also the one, then as now, heaping idiotic and irrelevant vituperation on the people who started, quite a ways back, by attempting to talk reasonably to him, only to discover that NOT ONLY DID HE SHOUT ALL THE TIME, HE WAS CONSTANTLY SPOUTING A LOT OF HORSESHIT ABOUT ALL THE STUFF HE KNEW AND NONE OF IT MADE MUCH SENSE AND HE COULDN”T BACK ANY OF IT UP WITH ANYTHING EXCEPT INSULTS AND ABUSE.

So, people tired of this after a while, and simply began ignoring or abusing him. But there were some entertaining moments in there. At around message 41, you’ll note that the fellow who’s such a skryin’ fool today, at that time, was virulently antimagick.

This was after he’d spent a little while as a rabid and fundamentalist OTO member (until they pitched him out for bein’ too much of a headcase even for the OTO, and on the West Coast in the early nineties, believe you me, that’s sayin’ something), at which point he became a rabid and fundamentalist hanger-on to the anti-”Caliphate”-OTO crowd, posting endless annoying screeds to the effect that Crowley was spinning in his grave at a velocity which would soon propel him into orbit, which was a little more to my taste, but he was so boneheadedly thick and annoying that, in short order even none of those folks would give him the time of day.

Soon after this, he became for a fairly short while a hanger-on to the most annoying end of the “transhumanist” “Extropian” crowd, the Randroids, until he proved to be too annoying and unstable for them(and that’s really sayin’ something).

I was (vaguely) one of the Extropian gang around that time—at least I was on the mailing list, and I went to weekly lunches with the Silicon Valley contingent at a local Fresh Choice—although I liked to annoy the folks who were sending insurance premium payments to Alcor and wearing bracelets directing EMT personnel that, should they be found dead, they were to pumped full of glycol and someone should come to chop off their heads ASAP.

I suggested that those nifty Medalert baubles would probably find their way down a nearby sewer should they actually be found dead someplace once unlikely-to-follow-weird-directions EMTs finally got hold of them; I also suggested that if, in spite of the fact that freezing and thawing caused catastrophic damage to tissues, they believed that by the time their corpsicle heads got thawed “science would have advanced enough” to clone ‘em a new body or something, I could save ‘em a lot of money if they’d just send me a toenail clipping. I’d promise that I and my descendants would keep it in a marked 35mm film canister until science had advanced (and their savings had accumulated sufficient funds in interest payments) to clone ‘em from that.

Now, I didn’t realize until maybe a year and a half ago, from the time when our hero was guy_de_bored and had inveigled his slimy, crazy way onto my friends list for a couple of week, that the Extinct Marsupial and dm_telvis were, in fact, one and the same person. He got dopily pleased with himself, and posted links in my journal to some of his writings (”scribblings”, more like, as it happens—he just happens to be the same student who got a paper back from his professor saying, “This paper is both original and well-written, however the well-written parts aren’t original and the original parts aren’t well-written”), and, lo and behold, one of ‘em was attributed to dm_telvis.

I was astounded. Five years later, the same guy, pulling the same dopey horseshit. Five years, just as crazy, and just as crazy as he’d been going on five years prior to that. I banned him from my journal immediately, but in an instant, the whole antisense/litadarkstar/mysticturkey/etc./etc. ad nauseum zaniness made sense.

It’s the same fucking imbecile.

Anyway, the ultimate point of this turns out to have been to use our pudgy and psychotic hero here to illustrate something I frequently say (and, yes, it’s in Stone Mirror’s Book of Honest Truth, returning soon to a blog near you as soon as I can figure out what fucking month it was in):

Always be yourself. If you try to be somebody else, how will you ever know when to stop?

~ by stonemirror on December 27, 2005.