s$ $$ .d""b. .d""b. HOE E'ZINE #1107 [-- $$""b. $$ $$ $$ $$ -- ------------------------------------------- --] $$ $$ $$ $$ $$ss$$ "The History of Aethelwulf's Utopia" $$ $$ $$ $$ $$ Chronicled by Quarex, Master of the Universe $$ $$ $$ $$ $$ $$ 06/28/00 [-- $$ $$ $$ $$ $$ $$ -- ------------------------------------------- --] $$ $$ "TssT" "TssT" This is a brief (and yet somehow incredibly long) synopsis and/or history of Aethelwulf's Utopia, the BBS I ran for nearly five years. Those were the five worst years of my life, let me tell you. Actually, no, they were pretty damn sweet. I love you, Aethelwulf's Utopia. (If you want to just read the part of the text file that actually specifically chronicles the BBS itself, skip to ***) (But I do not recommend it! This is funny shit!) It all started in 1993. In late January, I finally got myself a shiny new 14.4 BOCAModem for my 486/33DX. Man, I felt like THE SHIT! Going from no modem to a 14.4! I did not have to endure 2400 or anything! Not that I even knew what those numbers meant by that point. In any case, I did everything my friends Ogre and Neo Jesus (now known as Spirit) told me, and ended up on my first BBS, Midwest Online. The only redeeming feature of Midwest Online was the fuckin' awesome game of Trade Wars they had going, with real intrigue and betrayal and everything! In any case, I rather quickly fell in love with the very idea of BBSii, and therefore did the only logical thing; I created six fake accounts, each over the age of 18, so I could play Trade Wars and download jpegs and .gls of naked women all day long. This was beginning to create a problem after only a few weeks, however, as I was taking up my family's only phone line for about six or more hours a night, and none of my friends, or my parents' friends, could ever get a hold of us. So, we started thinking that something should change. Nothing did, though. The best part about my first couple weeks of BBSing is that my modem was faulty, and connecting at 2400, but I did not have the slightest fucking idea. I replaced it with another BOCAModem from the same place at this point (Fox Computers, the shittiest independent computer dealer on the planet--which later went to set up the Dave's World internet provider, sadly netting the owner a lot of money), and finally started enjoying 14.4 access. Only problem was, every download I tried would give me about 100 errors after a few seconds, and then abort. Fuck. Does any piece of electronic equipment I own EVER work? In any case, I just put up with this for a while, even though it created lots of line noise in addition to the download errors. One day, sometime in April, I was in St. Louis, and went to an Amiga store, where I found a CD-ROM full of MODS! Considering CD-Roms were actually not yet standard fare on every fucking computer like they are now, that was really quite amazing. I had just finally gotten into mods a few months earlier, and started writing them myself, however horribly. So, I had a CD full of mods now, and not only that, but a CD full of mods set up specifically to be put on a BBS, as every mod appeared in both a standard directory, and a LHArced directory, complete with file texts. This alone, however, did nothing for me, beyond make me listen to mods 24/7 (a habit I still have not exactly shaken). However, sometime in May of that same year, Ogre and I successfully figured out some setting we had wrong in Telemate that we thought was causing all of the line noise and download problems. We decided to test this theory out on the largest file the board we were connected to (Adventurer's Corner) had to offer, and as it turned out, that file was the WWIV BBS software, v4.22. The download progressed perfectly, and we went nuts. I was so happy, and now, I had this "BBS" thing to fuck around with! *** After a couple weeks of playing with it, and having my friends call, I decided I wanted to put up a MOD board of some sort, as I felt like it would make me nearly as cool as those Finnish people who had been doing it since the late 80s. So, after a couple weeks of promoting the BBS on other boards that were actually worth something, like Obsidian's Lightspeed and Ankst's Constant Enigma, I finally handed $100 over to my parents, and had them install a second phone line. A quick aside: The $100 I handed to my parents for the installation of the second phone line came from a "friend" of mine named Jason Sharpe. He was an employee of the local chapter of the Special Olympics, and he took great pride in robbing them blind every chance he got, and then giving all of his friends $100-200 every summer. Now that the statuate of limitations is almost up on this crime, I can certainly feel free to put it into writing. Yes, you heard correctly. Aethelwulf's Utopia was founded completely on money stolen from an organization that tries to help retarded people. I think that was certainly the absolute best signifier of things to come. My BBS rather quickly flourished. After only a few hours of being up (July 23, 1993, Aethelwulf's Utopia came into being!), I already had about 20 users, most of which I did not even know (though RottenZ was among them, before I had any dealings with him whatsoever! I love you, buddy!) I, of course, stopped every new user to chat with him (I say him, because we all know no girls ever used BBSii, ever), and had a grand old time. One of my new users included Swiss Pope Winans, aka, well, you know who. The amusing fact behind this, of course, is where his handle came from. In 9th grade, in our Regional World Studies class, he and I came up with a religion based entirely around the Cheese Toast that our school served every once in a while at lunch time. Man, we loved that shit. In any case, we declared ourselves the rulers, and accepted the titles of Swiss Pope Hunt and Swiss Pope Winans. Our other luminaries included Archbrie Baker (Ogre), Archbrie Beaupre (Some fag), and so on. God, were we stupid, but cool. By the time I got up the next day, we had about 30 users. It felt so cool to be in charge of something that people seemed to be finding fun already! Our message boards at the time were rather sparse, consisting of boards with names like "Arj! The Sysop Speaks!" "What's up, Shalz?" and "No More Tears: Johnson & Johnson Shampoo Discussion." I had a couple online games, specifically Pimp Wars (registered to Laenadon's Cheese Toast Outpost, a rejected name for the BBS [just like Guayballanal's Mod Hut]), XCalibur, and probably BBS Chess. The file section was essentially a miscellaneous base, a text file base, and 30 or so MOD directories. Oh man, those were the days. My BBS continued to pick up steam, unsurprisingly, as it was pretty much the only board in town maintained by a sysop who was under the age of 35, to say nothing of the fact that I did not censor anything, and clearly loved talking to people. Things expanded pretty quickly, I had probably 15 reasonably active message bases by the end of the first few months, and added more file areas (like DOOM WADS, and WINDOWS ACCESSORIES!). Everything was going great. Then, disaster struck. I was brutally killed by a truck full of shotgun-toting rednecks. After recovering from my senseless death, things pretty much went on the way they had been going. I got new users at a pretty steady rate, had a decent amount of posts, and met lots of fun new people through other BBSii that popped up, and the subsequent Magic: The Gathering/BBS Meeting night declared for a local Garcia's Pizza. By 1995, my BBS was pretty much just the only acceptable form of communication between all of my friends. We were also, subsequently, essentially the only people who posted on it from 1995-1996. But that was okay, since we basically posted enough to keep everyone interested, and even had a few decent games of Trade Wars along the way. All the file bases and message boards continued to grow, regardless, with the few random contributors we would get, and my user count was up around 200 by this point. In 1997, Aethelwulf's Utopia probably reached the absolute peak of any WWIV board in the history of the world. The new year saw the recruitment of a guy we were in drama with named Fiyaball, who then brought his little brother on, who then brought about five of his friends on. Sometime just before the school year ended, one of his friends made a post bashing gay people, which triggered the greatest SUMMER O' ONLINE STUPIDITY that anyone had ever seen. Though the gay-basher was soon put in his place by our collective tolerance, the number of posts inexplicably stayed up. A few people who had not called the BBS since last summer (college in other states, ya know) suddenly started calling again, and before you know it, by late June/early July, Aethelwulf's Utopia would get 100 posts a day every day, and even broke the 200 mark on a few occasions. That may not sound like much to some people, especially in this day and age of the OBLOID SPHERE, but trust me, that is a lot of fucking posts. This number is even more impressive when you consider that Adventurer's Corner, the board that was both the Central Time Zone Coordinator for WWIVLink and WWIVNet, in addition to being the Area Code Coordinator for both of those networks, shut my link down for good. There is an important factor to understand when examining this scenario: I called a LD board to post on a WWIVLink Administration sub, to find out what I could do about having my network feed restricted by my distributor (Shadowspawn, the BBS of Adventurer's Corner, deleted any posts I made on his system to this, or any, sub). The answer, in short, was that I could either complain to my Time Zone Coordinator, or my Area Code Coordinator. Gee, fucking great, thanks. My only escape route is the very fucking guy who is DESTROYING MY CONNECTION TO THE REAL WORLD. I could have just called to some other area code to re-establish my networks, but I did not even know what that would entail, and things seemed fine even without the networked subs, though it is too bad I never did get to talk to Unholy Monk about death metal again. Amusing side note: The Nine Inch Nails networked sub we got hated everyone on my BBS, from RottenZ to Jook, to SwissPope, to me, for talking about how much Marilyn Manson ruled (in 1994, after seeing them open for NIN), and explained to us that we were complete fucking idiots for thinking a band like that would ever be liked by anyone in mainstream America. Ha ha, you fucking idiots, WE ARE ALWAYS RIGHT. Of course, the glory days could not last forever, and due to various circumstances, posting slowed to a crawl. One of those various circumstances was when Talan, Fiyaball's brother, posted a rant on my BBS about this girl he was obsessing over. Then, he told the girl about having posted this thing, and she asked to see it. He, being smart, and like 14, printed the post out, and showed it to her. She showed it to one of her friends, who showed it to the guidance counselor, who then got Talan suspended. Yes, my BBS was responsible for the suspension of a student due to "violent intentions" or something stupid like that. Granted, he was an idiot for printing out a file about how much he wanted this girl, but still. . . . In early 1998, my BBS was a virtual ghost town. Most of my friends still called the board at least once a day, but mostly out of sheer habit, perhaps to type //PESETA and then log off, since there were never any new messages at all. It was kinda sad, really. Then, one day in February, I made some sort of inane post about school, or something like that. SwissPope replied, asking me if I even knew why I was in school to begin with. It was almost a flame, so I took it as such, and argued back with him. Meanwhile, in another base, he had posted something about the future of the U.S. as a world superpower, and I responded to that with about three pages of information about the new face of China, and how likely I felt it was that China would easiy be the biggest superpower in the world in a few decades. SwissPope responded to these posts, and the entire discussion that ensued was some of the most interesting stuff I think I ever saw on my board. Therefore, it was only natural that my BBS was about to bite the bucket. SwissPope and RJ came over the next day, intent on following through with their plan to make my 486 a linux box, and turn AU into a telnet BBS. I went ahead and let them do it, since I had already told them they could, before my BBS suddenly had become interesting again. In the process of converting my system to a linux box, they broke both of the disk drives, though they finally succeeded in installing linux, and setting up the Aethelwulf's Utopia telnet BBS. It was running off my ISU dialup connection, and seemed even more sad and hollow than no BBS at all, in my opinion. Sure, it was basically around until May 1998, when we took my 486 to the house that Hrothgar, RottenZ, Spirit, Pagenwait, Ogre and I lived in, to function as a server. But it was never really the same. There is something about ANSI that makes life worth living, you know? The telnet AU never had anything but plain ascii. And thus it died. And hell, by the end of that summer, I do not even think any of my friends had terminal programs anymore. The internet was successful in completely destroying the need for a BBS whatsoever. Fuck the internet. So, really, what the hell did writing this accomplish? What the hell did my BBS even accomplish? Aside from providing a pretty useful distraction from real life, which almost anything computer-related is capable of doing, it did not do much of anything. Sure, I can talk about how cool it was that I ran a BBS for almost five years, and how I had all these great conversations with people, and finally got to use the Trade Wars Editor. Sure, I actually made friends with a few people thanks to my BBS, and my BBS was even responsible for a couple long-lasting couples, one that will undoubtedly end in marriage. But, regardless, whatever I accomplished, I cannot deny how much fucking fun it was, and how I feel whenever I think about the entire thing. I loved my BBS, I loved my users, I loved my file section, I loved everything about it. I could immediately identify the user number for any handle or real name someone gave me for at least a year after my BBS went down. I could recite the file descriptions of almost any zip file on the whole board. My BBS was one thing I could always look forward to playing around with. Then it was annihilated. But at least it left its mark in some, however insignificant, way. [-------------------------------------------------------------------------] [ (c) HOE E'ZINE -- http://www.hoe.nu HOE #1107, BY QUAREX - 6/28/00 ]