Under the Influence: Usenet

 

I have previously discussed, in more broad terms, my entry into and participation in the world of online communication, starting when I was only 14, discovering the existence of email and bulletin boards through the local high-school computer network. There were, and are, many different ways of participating in social interaction online – email in its many guises, bulletin boards, IRC, LiveJournal, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook – but the one that has been the longest-enduring for me, and certainly the most influential on me over the years, is the decentralized, widely-distributed, once-dominant, now obscure, discussion forum known as Usenet.

 

Born in 1980, Usenet still exists today, although it has dwindled to a fraction of the activity that it had in its heyday, when it was THE hub of electronic social communication. I currently access Usenet through the "eternal-september" service which provides free Usenet access for those with some form of online connection.

 

Discussions on Usenet are done on "newsgroups", divided up into categories in a manner similar to the way that web addresses are today, but more specifically meaningful: rec.arts.sf.written, for example, denotes a group in the category of recreation (rec), specifically under the arts (arts), focused on speculative fiction (sf), and further focused on written rather than media SF (written).

 

Usenet's primary advantages as a discussion forum, which remain to this day, is that it is (A) a noncentralized forum mechanism, which means it is not dependent on any group or organization to distribute it or make it available, and (B) a deliberately threaded discussion medium, making it easy to have long, complex, and easily followed discussions on topics, something which is much more difficult to do on many modern discussion forums.

 

I originally encountered Usenet in the late 1980s, through a friend of mine named John Bunch; the first group I accessed was rec.games.frp, a newsgroup focused on roleplaying games like D&D. I quickly found this to be a fascinating community, like a worldwide bulletin board made better, and it wasn't long before I became a regular of several groups; besides rec.games.frp, I joined rec.arts.sf-lovers, rec.arts.anime, and shortly afterward alt.callahans, the latter being a very deliberately designed community echoing "Callahan's Crosstime Saloon" by Spider Robinson.

 

What I found was a huge, wide-ranging community of people interested in the subject areas – people spanning the globe, so that a conversation might have participants from Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, and Russia. It was a mostly uncontrolled gathering as well; while there are "moderated" newsgroups, none of the groups I participated in for any length of time were moderated. Thus, there could be – and were – acrimonious discussions which could degenerate into immense flamewars, just as much as there could be in-depth discussions between multiple reasonable people. But those so inclined could simply "killfile" individual threads, or even specific people, and not see them.

 

As "Sea Wasp" I became a resident of these communities, and I mean "resident"; early on, I spent a large proportion of my hours that weren't in classes online, discussing anime, RPGs, SF novels and stories and books, and just about anything else. A couple of times, I was in the top 25 posters of all Usenet through sheer volume of posted replies – not an inconsiderable feat when there were, even then, some automated posting programs.

 

On Usenet I met a lot of people – by various names both real and completely invented – who came to be significant acquaintances, even friends in some cases, people whose input I looked for and whose messages were almost always interesting. James Nicoll, of the many cats and almost infinitely many near-death experiences; Lawrence Watt-Evans, the author of some of my favorite books; Danger Mouse, one of the more refined and talkative members of Callahans; Ethan Hammond, fist-shaking overenthusiastic fan of catgirls on rec.arts.anime; Gharlane of Eddore, educated and outspoken fan of Doc Smith; Terry Austin, God-King of Trolls; the legendary Kibo, who was ego-Googling before Google existed (by grepping the entire newsfeed!); Speaker To Minerals, AKA Carl Lydick, one who suffered fools poorly and could produce the most amazing dissections of anyone idiotic enough to argue with him; Ron AKA Werebat, whose carefully-crafted other personas such as BATTLEHYMN amused us for many a time on the D&D newsgroups; and many, many more, enough more that I could fill pages just naming them all.

 

As Usenet grew, individual newsgroups would become extremely heavy with traffic, and often would eventually split. Sometimes these splits would be simple, easily agreed-upon affairs. Sometimes… not.

 

The conversion of rec.arts.sf-lovers into the rec.arts.sf.* hierarchy was an epic affair, a conflict of word warriors that shook the net from one side to the other, and birthed the first (and as far as I know, only) Usenet Olympics, a satiric mocking of the entire process narrated in the same style as the then-current Olympics, complete with ASCII-art torches being lit and stick-figure sketches. I participated in it to a small extent but mostly stood by and watched the combat in awe. The later splitting of rec.arts.anime and rec.games.frp were, by comparison, trivial affairs, although neither was without its own loud drama. (I was never in favor of splitting; I never had trouble parsing the heavy traffic myself, and these days, with traffic way down, I suspect it would be better if such groups were no longer split)

 

Usenet was, for me, not just a community but an EDUCATIONAL community, of a sort I never encountered elsewhere. Those who've met me often have a hard time realizing that my natural state is to hide away in a corner and read books; Usenet gave me an efficient and effective way to end up talking to people from many walks of life without having to actually FACE people, something very important, as it allowed me to feel comfortable enough to listen to them on occasion.

 

Sometimes that taught me things I would not have learned elsewhere, or simply showed me perspectives that I wouldn't have encountered normally. There are few things to help break down some of your preconceptions than having someone deconstruct your assumptions efficiently and precisely in front of a bunch of people you respect… but on Usenet, I had the insulation of actually BEING at home to allow me to be able to LOOK at the deconstruction rather than just REACT to it, which is, and was, vital to being able to *accept* the truth in the mirror, even if it wasn't what you expected or wanted to see. (One particular event that always comes to mind for this was having my insular impression of "the Unchanging East", i.e., the belief that the Chinese civilization had been essentially static for thousands of years, completely and contemptuously disassembled by a gentleman who I believe went at the time by the name "Coyu" and I have seen on LiveJournal as "carloshasanax")

 

At the same time, the community gave me a chance to have equally positive experiences talking to people with similar interests and views, even if we were separated by thousands of miles and many different political borders. Many of the books I read since the late 80s or early 90s were ones I heard mentioned on Usenet – most prominently the works of Vernor Vinge, Elizabeth Moon, David Weber, and S.M. Stirling, among others. Without Usenet I might have missed out on many wonderful books.

 

Similarly, many great gaming experiences had their roots in Usenet, where I learned about new RPGs I hadn't played, or was given new ideas and perspectives on gaming that I had never considered before. And I learned of many new shows I had not seen on rec.arts.anime, and through it met Michael Collins, who was the anime pusher…er, kind soul who first showed me Dragonball, Sailor Moon, Wings of Honneamise, Tenchi Muyo, and Ah! Megamisama!

 

Usenet was also a great *creative* outlet; it was on the RPG groups that I posted my gamefic "An American Gamer in Gondor" which became quite possible; on the anime newsgroups I posted anime fanfic by my wife and myself, including "Wild Card" which was probably the first English-language Saint Seiya fanfic ever online, and for which I continued to receive requests up through 2011, at least. On the SF groups, I would be inspired to post short vignettes, poems, even story fragments, including "Doc Smith Fashion", "The Symmetry of Corruption" which propounded a rather… peculiar theory about the actual fate of the One Ring, and – with author Brenda Clough – "Terminators of Endearment, OR Pride and Extreme Prejudice", a fragment of a novel that combined what Eric Flint described as the only two interests he and his wife shared in fiction – the Terminator movies and Jane Austen novels.

 

But the greatest influences of Usenet on me and my life were in two contacts that I made, the first in the very early 1990s and the second in the very early 2000s.

 

In 1991, when I was enrolled in the University of Pittsburgh, I was contacted by a gentleman going by the name of Mavra, whose real name was Peter Adkison; he and some friends had started a new RPG company and were getting ready to release their first product, and he wanted some people – a certain type of gamer – to look over the product before release. I agreed to do so, and was sent the draft of this book called _The Primal Order_ -- an RPG supplement that gave interesting and playable mechanics for handling gods in FRPG campaigns. It was an overall very fun book, and I was able to make some useful editing and substance comments. Peter was going to pay me about $25-30 for my services, but I said "eh, that's about 2 pizzas; it'll be gone in a few days. Tell you what; just give me whatever that would be in stock, if you have stock for your new company. Then, if you go anywhere, it'll be worth a lot more, and if you don't, hey, I'm only out a couple of pizzas."

 

He agreed, and for a while that was pretty much it. His company released The Primal Order, and I helped with some conversion notes on it and its follow-on, _Pawns: Strategies in Motion_, which was a deific-level beastiary. They seemed to be doing okay, although Palladium Games took exception to the inclusion of conversion notes for Rifts (their main RPG).

 

Then, looking for a relatively simple game they could print and sell to provide an alternative income stream to support their RPG work, the company found a game designer with what he thought was a new wrinkle in card games, and after a bit of work, released it as Magic: The Gathering. For that company was, of course, Wizards of the Coast, and Magic EXPLODED into popularity, in one year turning Wizards from a company with one full-time employee and a couple part-timers with a few more working out of hope and love for the game into one with over one hundred MILLION dollars in sales.

 

The incredible success of Magic was both boon and bane, in more ways than one; in the end, it led to the cancellation of their entire RPG line, as they had no time or energy left to focus on it, but it gave them the money to grow and become a major force in gaming. At around that point, I talked to Peter and he realized they'd forgotten about me as a stockholder – something he remedied. And I then discovered one more perk of being one of the FOUNDING stockholders:

 

I got one of everything WotC made. In the case of Magic, that meant one CASE of everything – one case of the original black-border cards, one of every single supplement. And if I wanted, I could buy more at wholesale prices.

 

Wizards was also generous when leaving the RPG field; in my case, they paid me almost as much to terminate my contract for the Primal Order supplement _Unorthodox Strategies_ as I would have been paid for publication.

 

Combined with the suddenly-valuable Magic cards, that meant that Wizards basically FINANCED my ability to pay off some of my debts and then move back home to the Albany area, where Kathleen and I got married in 1995. The stock itself rose until the very late 90s when Hasbro bought it out – for $1,000 per share, again a windfall that helped me when I was on the edge of financial disaster.

 

The second contact of great influence, of course, came in 2000, when I engaged in a massive flamewar against the butchering editing practices of a certain Eric Flint, a story I've told multiple times. This directly led, of course, to my publication, and I also have no doubt that the fact that I, as "Sea Wasp", was well-known in many parts of Usenet also assisted in selling a significant number of copies of my works and spreading the word.

 

Usenet still exists; it is smaller than it was, less busy, but in my mind is still a far better *discussion* forum than any of the others out there. Perhaps it will experience some form of revival; I'd certainly like to think so, as it has been one of my longest and most beloved homes for decades now. It is still accessible, and – through servers like www.eternal-september.org -- still available for free.

 

Take a look around sometime. It's quieter than it was, but if you add your voice… and others add theirs… you may find what I found, long ago.