Friends, Tildizens, countrymen; lend me your, uh... eyes?
As some of you know from past posts here, I've been digging into the history
of old online communities, particularly on Usenet, of late. I've posted
about the "Nomads of the Net", who settled alt.kalbo (and elsewhere); I've posted about alt.callahans, about alt.dragons-inn, and a few other places of yore.
alt.callahans still has a fairly steady stream of posts, by people who've
been there for decades. It's a strange place, modeled after a bar in a
series of books that are out of print. Even if you find, and read, the
books, you'll still only understand a small portion of the in-jokes, memes,
and references the place has spawned over nearly thirty years.
alt-dragons-inn still has readers, and occasional posters, but it's a place
for interactive storytelling in a sprawling medieval fantasy world. The archives are fun to read, but if fiction-writing isn't your forte, it
probably doesn't hold much interest. And even if it is, there's a
substantial barrier to entry, in reading (and just finding) the background material on the world, reading what's gone before, etc.
Nobody has, alas, posted to alt.kalbo in years, and the surviving archived posts suggest it was mostly a random social chit-chat group. This was
probably great when there was already a group of people there, but going to visit there now would be... a rather underwhelming experience, probably.
I offer this all by way of context for a newsgroup from the '90s that I'd
like you all to visit, and participate in - alt.pub.coffeehouse.amethyst
What is it? A casual social forum, a virtual world, built around the
metaphor of a small coffeehouse. It dates back to 1993 or so, and there are still a handful of folks there. I've been chatting with them for a couple weeks; they're nice folks, funny, smart... and they welcome new patrons
(i.e. you).
The group's FAQ is here:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/pub-amethyst-faq/
It's a bit long and a bit out of date, but it covers pretty much everything
you need to know in one handy-dandy, and not novel-length, spot.
The most important thing to know is this: posts there are made in the third person, a conceit that was popular on BBSes and newsgroups in the early
'90s; the FAQ refers to this by the metaphor of "virtual reality". (It's probably a carryover from alt.callahans, which did the same thing; as you'll see in the FAQ, the Amethyst was founded by Callahans patrons.)
I know; it seems kind of weird. But it's not that hard--as the FAQ points
out, you can write in the first person if you wrap your text in quotes, as
if "you" are "speaking"--and it *was* a very prevalent thing in the early
days of the 'net. And it allows for a degree of nuance, of exactitude,
that's difficult to convey otherwise. (It also solved the pronoun problem, three decades ago. *lkosov shrugs his shoulders.* Boom, preferred pronouns conveyed, naturally and with zero ambiguity. And people don't have to scroll back eight-hundred messages or use some special command to find it, they
just have to glance at your most recent post.) Also, it's honestly kind of
fun.
Another virtue of this place is that it's *small*, and you can assimilate
the whole virtual world very, very quickly. It's a coffeehouse. There's a
big room, there's a stage in the corner, there's a back room, there's a
kitchen in the back room. Oh, and there's a fireplace, with a mantel, on
which there are a bunch of Books. (See FAQ for explanation.) There's also a Charles, a Galileo, and a Mrs. Shelley... there, you now know everything
there is to know about the Amethyst Coffeehouse.
To read (and hopefully participate in) alt.pub.coffeehouse.amethyst, you'll need to connect to a (non-Tildeverse) Usenet news server, like AIOE or Eternal-September. (You could also use a paid service such as
usenetfire.com, which offers "block" plans billed by data transfered,
starting from 2 USD per 50 GB, which will last you a couple lifetimes of
purely text-based Usenet.)
Come visit, talk to the regulars, have fun, and experience the 'net in a quirkily early-1990s way!
--
Inanities:
gopher://tilde.town:70/1/~lkosov/ (with netmail address & GPG key) He/him/them/they/whatever. If in doubt, assume the above post contains sarcasm --- Synchronet 3.19a-Linux NewsLink 1.113