What I learned on Facebook this week

My friends are truly, madly, deeply nerdy. I knew this in a superficial way, but didn't see quite how nerdy they were until now.

Srsly. Nerds.

so say we all

h/t to: Darth Mojo

How to tell if you are a total nerd

You're supposed to go have cocktails and see the Sex and the City movie tonight, but you've just realized that you're going to miss BOTH Battlestar Galactica AND the National Spelling Bee finals if you go out. This makes you sad, and you wonder if it might be better to just stay home and see Sex and the City another night.

Yep. Total nerd.

My new favorite word!

cha·toy·ant

adj.
Having a changeable luster.

n.
A chatoyant stone or gemstone, such as the cat's-eye.

[French, present participle of chatoyer, to shimmer like cats' eyes, from chat, cat, from Vulgar Latin *cattus, perhaps of African origin.]

internet radio

I heart internet radio, and a new copyright law is going to kill it unless a ruling on copyright fees is reversed. For more info, see Save Net Radio

just for the record: Harry Potter prediction

I'm pretty sure that the mysterious RAB who got to the horcrux in the cave before Harry & Dumbledore is Regulus Black, Sirius Black's brother.

Once upon a time on teh intertubes...

Way back in the early 90s, I had a 1200 baud modem and a 2-meg hard drive, and a boyfriend whose BBS alias was Cogitor. He taught me how to dial up a BBS, which for you young folks out there, was sorta like a website at the end of a telephone line. One user at a time could dial in, as it was basically hosted on one computer in somebody's house. (some BBS's certainly were bigger and more complex, but this was the basic configuration).

I named myself Jezebel on account of we spent a lot of time debating fundy christians on 504-area-code WWIV boards and a name like Jezebel just put them right out of sorts from the git-go. The Guild was my home away from home, and I still miss it. But also there was the Ugly Truth and Cat's Cradle and a bunch of other boards I used to call all the time. I was never a hacker, never into code, so my visits to a BBS were social and political in nature. I never got long distance codes and dialed long-distance boards for free, but a lot of my BBS's had networked discussions, so you could find yourself in long debates with users from all over the country. Topics ranged from politics to education to book clubs and music, you name it. There were flame subs, poetic war subs, pagan subs, wiccan subs, recipe subs, and I'm sure a zillion others I've forgotten because I didn't fool around with them. Lots of tech/code oriented subs, I'm sure.

Every christmas newbies with new modems would flood into the boards and make a nuisance of themselves by acting a fool and TYPING IN ALL CAPS and all the other crap that newbies do. One christmas I got a 2400 baud modem and I tell you whut: I was ROCKIN the BANDWIDTH. Woot. So I made friends with people online: Cerridwen, HappyDogPotatohead, Steveo and Minx, Dee, and Shinobi and Slasher and more. The Ugly Truth started hosting crawfish boils/barbecues/beerfests in City Park and a lot of these friends crossed over from BBS friends to real-time friends or at least acquaintances. The Ugly Truth in particular was a sort of tattooed scruffy alternative bunch of geeks.

I'm still Jezebel(la) but once the internet - AOL and Prodigy and Compuserve - got more widespread, the BBS community got smaller and smaller. Eventually the sysops gave into the inevitable and took their boards down. WWIV wasn't the only BBS platform, there was at least one other I can't remember the name of, but I stuck to those. Most WWIV boards had lists of numbers for other BBS's - I guess like today's blogroll, yeah?

Now I find the occasional online community on a blog somewhere, where there will be a thriving community of regular posters, but these tend to be cults of personality. One person rules the roost, and determines and directs the topic of conversation. A good BBS sysop was truly a moderator, teaching newbies, banning fools, and directing conversation while keeping subs maintained. Chrysalis at the Guild was in my view the perfect sysop. I bet she's still got an email address somewhere with the name chrysalis in it. There are people who still call me "Jez," after all.

So here it is, over fifteen years after I first dialed up the Cat's Cradle & the Guild & the Ugly Truth, and I'm finding blogs and livejournals written by people I met online back then. One BBS friend, Cerridwen, recently became real-time friends through LiveJournal with a mutual friend I went to high school with. She's Zeldakitty now, but when I read her posts I was sure it was Cerridwen. Sure enough. Cerridwen was the final sysop of the Ugly Truth, which was so beloved that it was passed from one sysop to another (Naked Jester, Steveo, then Cerridwen).

It's a strange little world these days.


***Jezebel***

This is not the blog you're looking for.

tsia

come to the pink side, skywalker...

via Manolo for the Men:

Can you get brain-freeze from cuteness? Can you implode because all of your sci-fi goober nerves are being tweaked at the same time as your loving-cuteness nerves AND your irony center? It's all too much. I don't know who this guy is in the Vader suit, but he's a freakin' 21st century pop culture mashup GENIUS.

confession re: internet radio

I can't help it, I adore the flashback alternatives 80s internet radio station. It's all the 80s with none of the hair bands or bubblegum pop. Except sometimes, they play Nina Hagen, who irritates the fuck out of me. So then I switch to the exceptionally smooth flamenco station - all flamenco, classical, and baroque guitar, all the time.

The poet keeps telling me to just download music from one of those p2p sites but I'm scared of the music downloading police.

exciting, oh so exciting

on Tuesday, I dyed my hair red and bought a label maker. Could my life possibly be any more exciting?

At least my storage closet is tidy and labeled, and I have a car full of stuff to take to the Goodwill.

I really need to move to a real city.