textfiles/magazines/HOE/hoe-1107.txt

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     $$     .d""b. .d""b.                  HOE E'ZINE #1107
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     $$  $$ $$  $$ $$ss$$        "The History of Aethelwulf's Utopia"
     $$  $$ $$  $$ $$        Chronicled by Quarex, Master of the Universe
     $$  $$ $$  $$ $$  $$                      06/28/00
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     $$  $$ "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.

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 [ (c) HOE E'ZINE -- http://www.hoe.nu      HOE #1107, BY QUAREX - 6/28/00 ]