I'm pretty sure at least part of my writing ability was honed by years and years on Usenet. There was a time when, if you were any sort of writer, you were on there, somewhere.
We used to troll people like Stephen King, Peter Straub, and Terry Pratchett. Along with everyone else, of course. We called it Usenet Performance Art.
There was at least one summer when it seemed like everything funny that we talked about ended up in a Saturday Night Live skit. We didn't know we were interacting with the writers...
And Usenet got me referenced in a Simpsons episode! I think the episode is The Frying Game. Homer does what is known as a "snuh cascade", something very annoying that we used to do on Usenet. A friend talked to some Simpsons writers at ComiCon, and they confirmed that they were talking about Dean Humphries and myself.
How about you? Were you ever on Usenet? What groups did you frequent? I was mostly in alt.flame, alt.fan.karl-malden.nose, alt.rock-n-roll.metal.death, rec.music.hip-hop and a few others. But due to the Meow Wars (the movie Supertroopers actually referenced that one), I probably posted in half of the 30,000 newsgroups at one time or another. Legend has it that I had over 500 psuedonyms.
http://elizabethbaxter.blogspot.com/2012/05/guest-post-jason-christie-on-lessons-of.html
[URL=http://www.giganews.com/blog/2008/12/worst-top-10-list-ever-10-things]http://www.giganews.com/blog/2008/12/worst-top-10-list-ever-10-things.html[/url]
We used to troll people like Stephen King, Peter Straub, and Terry Pratchett. Along with everyone else, of course. We called it Usenet Performance Art.
There was at least one summer when it seemed like everything funny that we talked about ended up in a Saturday Night Live skit. We didn't know we were interacting with the writers...
And Usenet got me referenced in a Simpsons episode! I think the episode is The Frying Game. Homer does what is known as a "snuh cascade", something very annoying that we used to do on Usenet. A friend talked to some Simpsons writers at ComiCon, and they confirmed that they were talking about Dean Humphries and myself.
How about you? Were you ever on Usenet? What groups did you frequent? I was mostly in alt.flame, alt.fan.karl-malden.nose, alt.rock-n-roll.metal.death, rec.music.hip-hop and a few others. But due to the Meow Wars (the movie Supertroopers actually referenced that one), I probably posted in half of the 30,000 newsgroups at one time or another. Legend has it that I had over 500 psuedonyms.
http://elizabethbaxter.blogspot.com/2012/05/guest-post-jason-christie-on-lessons-of.html
[URL=http://www.giganews.com/blog/2008/12/worst-top-10-list-ever-10-things]http://www.giganews.com/blog/2008/12/worst-top-10-list-ever-10-things.html[/url]
