=========================================================================== BBS: The Cutting Edge! Date: 12-15-95 (17:13) Number: 528603 From: WIRED CHILD Refer#: NONE To: ** ALL ** Recvd: NO Subj: Can You Forgive Her? Conf: (23) Lyceum --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6x6 -- from wall to wall Shutters on the windows -- no light at all Damp on the floor -- you got damp on the bed They're trying to get you crazy -- get you out of your head They feed you scraps and they feed you lies To lower your defences -- no compromise Nothing you can do -- they day can be long Your mind is working overtime -- your body's not too strong -+- Allow me to interrupt your perusal of this week's mindless pissing contests for a moment. This forum you're reading -- /Lyceum -- is dead. Actually, it's been dead for a while. Recently the forumop in a fit of anomie declared it officially so. You can't respond to this post. The only reason I was able to leave this one was the result of some residual sysgodly powers left to me after the latest Great Purge. In a way, it seems somehow fitting. If you browse through what's left here, you'll come across my name a few times. Occasionally I look back at what I've left. Usually I cringe, once in a while I grin. (In particular, I do hope "Puss n' Boots - the revisionist version" makes the textbooks next century.) But this isn't about me, so much, as about a time that's now gone, represented by a literary flowering I doubt we'll see again here. A few years ago, when TCE! started, bulletin boards were in the ascendancy. The Internet was something you perhaps got a glimpse of through a gopher menu if you hacked a UALR account. People thought nothing of leaving their modem on wardial for a few hours to get onto the more popular boards to check their messages, all of which originated locally. 2 or 3 line boards were an odd rarity, and usually only linked in the most rudimentary fashion. It says a lot that I actually have to explain all this. Of course, many will tell me, hobby-type BBSs aren't dead, and Joe's Hupmobile BBS still gets 50 to 60 calls a day, only half of whom are playing LORD. I don't doubt it. Hell, I don't doubt that there's still a C-Net BBS merrily running on a Commodore 128 somewhere in the ether, where a legion of 20 or 30 die-hards trade the same .SID files with a steely glare in their eyes, wondering when DesTerm will support HTML. I also know that in the past year the Internet hit each and every one of us to a varying degree over the head with a sledgehammer, and many of us are still out there somewhere, lost in Usenet or that last URL. The seductiveness of the Net is its relentless minutae. Anyone can be an Emporer of their own demesne, if they spend even a reasonable amount of time at the task. Take three examples here locally -- Diogenes, Silky and Blue Devil. Each of them chose a very narrow field of mastery (ancient history, the "Klik n' Play" program, and the works of Harlan Ellison), and all three have, in the past 6 months, become among the most noted (if not THE most noted) resource on the Internet in their field. If you search for Harlan Ellison on the Web, you WILL find Blue Devil's page. If you look at any ancient history reference on the Web at all, chances are good you WILL find a link to Dio's page. And Silky's site is far more comprehensive then the manufacturer's itself -- the corporate officers of which have been popping up with more and more frequency in her message base. Global domination, for the price of an HTML tutorial. Who can argue with that? But the hang up in that is precisely in its incredible balkanization. I realize that it is necessary... no human being, not even Blue Devil, can sit down and "read usenet", the WHOLE THING. It's out there, and there's more then a whole box of people can comprehend. Tell me how this helps with our fundemental crisis of alienation, won't you? -+- Hold on, hold on They put you in a box so you can't get heard Let your spirit stay unbroken -- may you not be deterred Hold on -- you have gambled with your own life And you face the night alone While the builders of the cages They sleep with bullets, bars and stone They do not see your road to freedom That you build with flesh and bone They take you out -- the light burns your eyes To the talking room -- it's no surprise Loaded questions from clean white coats Their eyes are all as hidden as their Hippocratic Oath They tell you -- how to behave, behave as their guest You want to resist them -- you do your best They take you to your limits -- they take you beyond For all that they are doing there's no way to respond -+- You see, probably one of the most invigorating rushes of those moments of literary clarity was the fact that, as much as we dared ourselves capable of, we weren't just speaking to a room of like minds. In some ways we were, and the land of the modem is of course the land of the emotionally dysfunctional. Yet it seemed for a time that connections were being made far beyond the cutting remark and the turn of phrase -- what we were writing became us, as we became that which we wrote, and in so doing, opened our souls for others, and showed them that they were not alone -- that there were others out there, who felt some of the same thoughts, thought the same feelings. And this was from a sense of community -- a virtual small town. We all knew each other, like any other small town, and became obsessed with the gossiping and the daily to-and-fro of the alpha males and females therein, but somewhere in there we grew from the experience. And I think all the veterans of those days have grown. I know that I have. Time has a lot to do with that, but also from seeing our small town become a metropolis, with teeming hordes whom we only have a vague idea of their existence. Fatherhood tends to force a person to grow whether they are ready or not; and I think we've all been midwives to the much-vaunted Next Wave(tm). Do a /# sometime and look at all the SURFERs and PIONEERs. I don't know about you, but I can say "I made those", and not just because I happened to create poorly-operating software disks. But because we paved the way; saw the potential in what many thought a hobbyist's money pit, and took the future as our own. And now the future is here, and we come back to the halls where we once played, and there's other folks running around therein, and they aren't as seasoned as we are, and we decide it isn't worth it. -+- Though you may disappear -- you're not forgotten here And I will say to you -- I will do what I can do You may disappear -- you're not forgotten here And I will say you you -- I will do what I can do And I will do what I can do And I will do what I can do -+- Maybe a new legion of teenagers and twentysomethings will populate new forums with their views of life as it unfolds. I certainly hope so -- I'd hate to think that the town where we grew up would just die when we left.