Hah.
thirty students to write ten pages about any subject or famous person
Resulting in twenty copies of what the World Book Encyclopedia says on the topic, and fourty-five pages that might be publishable after spell checking, seminars, workshops, and a top-notch editor, and five pages publishable with only thirty or forty more hours of work.

Aahahahahahahahahahah.

good paying teaching position

AAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.

Sorry for wasting space in your comments section, Mrs. Nielsen-Hayden, but the laughter just came pouring out.

Gah!

Double-gah!

(glyph of Bill The Cat, cross-eyed and coughing up a hairball)

Teresa, how did you get past the all-caps on this man's website? (Never mind the insane content.)

I like the bit (having gone and read his page despite the flagrant use of caps) about public libraries being taxpayer parasites that compete with self-publishers. Goodness. I had no idea!

How do you *find* these people?

Obviously this guy never had the benefit of a formal education (or any other type), and so cannot see why anyone else should.

Catie, if you like this one, you'll love some of the tirades from frustrated wannabe screenwriters who are certain of the Zionist/Catholic/Dalek conspiracy that's keeping their scripts from being turned into the next Hot Movie. And it's never Their Fault that studio execs aren't amenable to receiving their raving phone calls and E-mails, either. (Admittedly, any sufficiently large collection of incompetence is indistinguishable from conspiracy, and it's not hard to find examples of great work from the slushpile that was buried in both New York and Hollywood, but the reason why they're noted is because it's rare enough to be newsworthy.)

Teresa, kudos on this one as well. If I didn't know better, I would have thought that you'd reprinted an editorial from "New Pathways" circa 1989. (Just so long as you don't reprint the movie reviews; one of these days, someone's going to hunt down the rat bastard who wrote those "Smoking Movieola" columns and beat the crap out of him...)

I went back to take a further look at the site, and I actually think the poor man-child has a point. And when he wears a hat, you can't see it.

Next month I start teaching English 102: First-Year Composition at a local junior college. Please expect to see my first manuscript around February. If you're interested in books on a particular topic, now's the time to let me know. Thank you.

BSD, I take it you've taught. I'm expecting to get a reaction very like yours from every schoolteacher who sees that thing.

Beth, I skimmed through the all-caps stuff. Further on down he switches to u&lc, which is where I found that screed.

Catie, I heard about him because he's been hanging out on SFF Net, posting copious advice about writing to anyone who'll listen, and a friend who hangs out there forwarded me specimens for my amusement.

Obviously, Adam. Also, he's the most important man in the world.

When you lose your reasoning and judgement, all that's left are character and habits.

Paul, I've always assumed that screenwriting has the same Oort Cloud of pathologies and wanna-bes as prose fiction, only bigger and weirder.

Thank you, Greg. You've finally explained -- as nothing else could -- the manuscripts one sees from writers who begin their cover letters by saying that they teach English at their local community college.

(MCC or somewhere else?)

MCC. I've never taught English before, so this should be an adventure. Needless to say, I'm keeping my day job.

Teresa, if you want a great view of the insanity of Hollywood when it comes to genre projects, go pick up Brian Michael Bendis' "Fortune and Glory", a brilliant graphic novel published by Oni Press. Bendis doesn't really fall under "genre" (his specialty is crime fiction, but he's been known to delve into the superhero stuff from time to time), but he goes into detail on the insanity of trying to adapt two of his comics, "Goldfish" and "Torso", for the screen. Viciously funny and very sad-making at the same time. (You just have to read the bit about how one exec wanted to make Elliot Ness, who's a major character in the reality-based "Torso", a nineteen-year-old to help catch the youth demographic that was then rushing to go see "I Know What Jennifer Love Hewlett's Breasts Did Last Summer".)

The point I was getting at was that Bendis related one very, very scary situation, where he was in a waiting room full of other screenplay writers, nervously watching these people as he awaited his meeting. One of the points that LA-residing friends kept telling him was "If you think the price is too high, don't be afraid to leave, because at least you can go back to comics." Not only were the majority of the writers in that waiting room frustrated wannabes who had that one script as their big hope of going somewhere besides back to their jobs at McDonald's, but the studios hire a lot of beginning writers for positions as scriptreaders. Just imagine incredibly bitter wannabe writers with the power to decide whether or not a script gets put on the desk of a Scorcese or a Spielberg. And novelists think they have it tough.

Oh, and this guy was polluting SFF.net? Why oh why am I not surprised at this? How much do you want to bet that while he screams about the conspiracy to keep his work and that of his fellow dittoheads from getting printed, he's also making plans to attend the next WorldCon and get all close and personal with the very editors he's been insulting? (I mean, _I_ was stupid enough to do that, but I had a death wish.)

Sorry, I forgot: TorCon is in Canada, and Canada is all full of loggers and lesbians, so he won't attend unless he can bring his extensive gun collection with him. You never know when some crazed liberal might try to inject him with a disease that can only be cured with socialized medicine.

My mother taught public school for thirty years (the last fifteen or so the really smart kids) and even after retiring last year (well past 55, by the way), not once has she expressed any literary ambitions of any kind. Oh, and she did the vast majority of this teaching in Georgia, which is a right-to-work state (read here: no unions).

But after reading this, I must have a word with her; she's obviously been holding out on me. With luck, I'll be able to finally get on the fast track with that breakthrough novel.

Wow. So now at last it can be revealed: the method James Hilton used to write Goodbye, Mr. Chips. This guy is really something--such a gloriously crackpot loon, he actually once in a while makes a point. Then loses it in a morass of kneejerk Limbaughian tautologies. I haven't read anything this transcendently wacky since my last bottle of Dr. Bronner's soap. In factt, maybe that's the solution to his problems getting published--they could probably use some fresh label copy. (He's already got the typography down.)
I also particularly liked:
I SUSPECT SUCH WRITERS WATCHDOG GROUPS ARE TAKING MONEY UNDER THE TABLE IN THE FORM OF PUBLICATION OF THEIR WORKS, IN EXCHANGE FOR THEIR ORGANIZATION'S PLANTING MINE FIELDS OF FEAR AND DOUBT IN THE AVERAGE PERSON.
If anyone knows of any job openings in this field, please let me know.

you'll love some of the tirades from frustrated wannabe screenwriters who are certain of the Zionist/Catholic/Dalek conspiracy that's keeping their scripts from being turned into the next Hot Movie...

Paul -- I'm reminded suddenly of the lunatic politician up here whose husband has been trying to pass the bar exam for ... seventeen years, I believe it is now. He and his wife are convinced it's a Jewish conspiracy to keep him from practicing law in Alaska, and this (ending the conspiracy) is one of the platforms that she runs on. Alaska apparently has a particularly difficult bar, but you'd think after seventeen tries you'd know all the variants so well that you'd pass by default. (The gentleman in question has apparently passed the bar in Louisiana and possibly one other state, thus making it clear that it's not *his* fault that he can't pass this one!)

slow moving, silent slime that's feeding off the creativity of American children.

Hm. He so desperately wants someone to have been stealing his ideas. Maybe I'll steal that one...

>slow moving, silent slime that's feeding off the creativity of American children.

Invasion Of The Essay Snatchers!

Gosh, if we told him why he's unpublished, you think he'd believe us?

(Delurking here - hello all...)

I was especially taken by our friend's deep knowledge of the publishing trade, as here:

YES, [LIBRARIES] ARE THE TAX PAYER PARASITES THAT CENSOR AND PROMOTE WRITERS AT THE WHIM OF ENRON STYLE PUBLISHERS MARKETING DEPARTMENTS.

Of course, that's what marketing departments had always reminded me of! The $5000 suits, the serried ranks of shredders...

Libraries do have sheredders, sort of. Just ask Nicholson Baker...

WE NEED TO PULL THE DOLLAR PLUG ON PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND USE THE MONIES TO FUND NEW, UPSTART PUBLISHERS TO COMPETE WITH THE OLD GUARD, CORPORATE GIANTS THAT ARE RECEIVING TAX PAYER SUBSIDIES TO FUNNEL THEIR BOOKS INTO THE LIBRARY SYSTEM. MY QUESTION IS, WHY NOT ALLOW THE AMERICAN PUBLIC TO CHOOSE BOOKS AND AUTHORS BASED ON PUBLIC DEMAND?

Tell me, Teresa, why not allow the American public to choose books and authors based on public demand? I had no idea that the only thing keeping Tor in business is taxpayer subsidies funnelling copies of Wheel of Time and Ender's Game into public libraries. How appalling. I shall write my congressperson immediately.

The editing and crit group stuff amuses me, as does the total misapprehension of cons. I'd think this guy was spoofing this sort of thing, except I really think a spoof would do a better job of it.

What I want to know is, why isn't my crit group letting me do any parasitic stuff? I think that would be neat, to be the dandelion in their cement. They haven't asked for a single thing that would allow me to get royalties (or even a one-time payoff) on their future bestsellers. I guess I'm in the wrong crit group.

Huh. My dad taught high school English for 25 years and never published anything. Imagine the frustration of dealing with class after class of slacker students who couldn't produce plagiarizable content. No wonder he drank.

"And when he wears a hat, you can't see it."

Mr. Riddel, you owe nCUBE Inc. for a new keyboard. (Dell Model ATA101W).

No, I take it back. The hot espresso I snorted up seems to have freed up that stuck F3 key.

My eyes have been opened!

As a librarian who spent the last (muffle muffle)years assisting geniuses like these to clean up their grammar and find addresses to publishers, I can tell you there are rich pickings here:

1. 12,547 (give or take) Lord of the Rings imitations, complete with elves and magic rings

2. 2,510 rip offs of old Heinlein juveniles

3. 42,750 (almost exact numbers, except that I don't know whether to count multiple-volume sagas) pseudo-Dunes

4. 5,682 God-helped-me-when-I-turned-to-vegetarianism (for those into nonfiction)

4. 72,620 detective stories with heroes who actually used phrases like "make my day".

My God, what I fool I was! If only I had held on to some of this stuff, I could be sitting at an outdoor cafe in Monaco sipping red wine and arguing marxist dialectics with interesting young men in black berets.

David, I won't deny that libraries are a valued part of our customer base, bless 'em; but we merely propose, whereas the librarians dispose.

The other thing I find interesting about R. D. Peters, aside from his density of error, is that his rants are the nakedly obvious versions of the same arguments you see over and over again from other unsaleable writers. The others are a little smoother, is all.

Basic form: He can't get his writing published. The fault can't possibly be with his writing. Therefore, it must be the publishing industry that's broken.

If I'd known they would turn out to form such a distinct pattern, I would have been keeping a file of all the belligerent-sounding startup "publishers" out there who are, for the first time, going to let the American Public choose books directly. Or who are, for the first time, going to publish books solely on the basis of their merit. Or who are the wave of the future. Or who are all those things at once, and several more besides.

If you go clicking through their lists of titles, it's surprising how often you'll find one or more books by the company's founder. Sometimes those are their only titles. Others also offer no-hope books by other authors. Trouble is, what they actually need isn't new publishing channels; it's a mechanism that'll force people to read their books.

What they always remind me of is the Revolutionary Communist Party, a group that was active in Seattle when Patrick and I lived there. They were neither Revolutionary nor a Party. We used to refer to them as "the Trekkies of the Revolution," though what they were into was more a Creative Anachronist kind of trip. Their version of political action was to put on those old-fashioned cloth workers' caps plus their uniform red RCP t-shirts, go to some populous public area, and shout slogans at people through megaphones. As far as we could tell, their long-term plan was to sort of hang around while they waited for everyone else to form up in parade order behind their glorious vanguard. Naturally, no one ever did.

It wasn't politics. What R. D. Peters and his ilk do isn't publishing. I can only hope it makes them feel better and keeps them out of trouble.

Emma -- don't forget all the projected multivolume mystery series, the zero-plausibility political thrillers, the short story collections the author's trying to sell as a single volume because they can't place any of the individual stories, and the innumerable books in all categories whose main character is all too recognizably a spiffed-up version of the author...

(from THN's earlier post)
Trouble is, what they actually need isn't new publishing channels; it's a mechanism that'll force people to read their books.

This is really scary. I was going to say even more scary than the site you're quoting from, but on thinking further, you've just arrived at the logical conclusion of those attitudes.

*shudder*

Thanks for the weblog.

Mr. Peters ought to have his work vanity
published. Then he could camouflage the
copies as library books, and stealthily
insert them into the collections of various
libraries. Surely, the librarians would
eventually say "Huh. Not in the system."
and put it in.

He could even put it on the "New Releases"
or "Staff Picks" shelves.

From there, word of mouth will cause a
grass-roots surge in demand for his work,
and teeming masses of humanity will storm
the gates of TOR books demanding you
publish him, with large print runs, and
many, many interviews with Katie Couric.

#tangent
Hm. I wonder if unpublished Muslim
extremists issue fatwas against the
evil editors and publishers. Almost
an inverse Rushdie.

Obviously this guy never had the benefit of a formal education (or any other type), and so cannot see why anyone else should.

Of course not: why go to school when you know that the teachers are "slow moving, silent slime"?

More fun from R.D. Peters: "Totallyon" - order now!

http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/pmrmystery//MYBOOKSindex.html

I'm particularly intrigued or appalled or something at his equation of liberal and centrist. Um er? I guess his buddy Rush has succeeded at making the right so far to the right that a moderate position seems horrendously liberal. Or something.

MKK

Someday, Mr. Peters will push the Publishing Powers that Be too far, and he'll wake one morning to find that cow's head in his bed.

> > However, I
> >supply a copy of my police report with every book I sell over the
> >internet. I doubt if any other poster will match this.

It might be worth it to buy a copy of _Totallyon_ just to get a copy of his police report.

I was astounded to learn that _Totallyon_ was based on Total Lion, or perhaps Totalitarian. Here I'd thought it was based on Totally On, as opposed to Just Sorta On, or perhaps Compeletly Off.

Stefan, I have good news and bad news for you, since I'm obviously to blame for your misfortune. The good news is that I'll get you a new keyboard. The bad news is that you'll have to buy a Macintosh to use it.

Oh, and Emma, I'm ashamed of you. You forgot "5,888 collections of essays by high school/college/weekly newspaper/science fiction magazine movie critics who honestly think that the world will fundamentally change the moment their brilliant deconstruction of "Total Recall" reaches the public." (Yes, the self-loathing runs deep today, but I also saw a disturbing number of "humor columnists" in the weekly newspaper and magazine business who threw tantrums when editors tried to tell them that there wasn't a market for collections of humor columns or movie reviews from a publication with a total readership of 850.)

Reading the whole ongoing issue about this character, I actually pine for the Old Days, before the Internet. Back then, when a crank wanted to flood the marketplace with half-chewed and half-stolen concepts, he actually had to put down some money. If he couldn't get his short stories published, at least he'd decide to start his own magazine, alternating between bitching about how the "media elite" had no understanding of good writing and beseeching the readership (which consisted of about thirty wannabes who saw his address in "Locus" and figured that they'd have a better chance of selling their stories to him if they bought a subscription first) to give him money and/or sexual favors "to keep going". This would last for about six issues, until Yon Crank either realized that he was wasting his money or he was evicted from his efficiency apartment because he was paying printing bills instead of rent, but at least he was putting some of his money down instead of just bitching about the situation.

Now, though, that money issue is gone. The ease of posting gibberish on the Internet doesn't improve the material: at least before the Web, there was a touch of grudging admiration mixed with the pity because the Crank wasn't going to let little things like a lack of profitability or a nonexistent market get in the way of The Vision. These days, these AOL or GeoCities pages just say one thing: not only are you crazy, but you're cheap, too.

In that earlier, benighted time, the Timecube guy would be stuck just ranting on streetcorners, perhaps with a sandwich board, or maybe handing out poorly-mimeoed sheets of gibberish. Without the Internet, he couldn't have inspired the Timecube role-playing game.

(If that latter link doesn't load, try this Google-cached one.)

Well, if all else fails for R. D. Peters, there's always the E-Bay option.....

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1975962275

F

Avram notes: "or maybe handing out poorly-mimeoed sheets of gibberish."

Doctor Bronner, mentioned upthread, might have been reduced to this, had he not come up with the clever strategy of pasting his sheets of gibberish to bottles of soap. (Pretty good soap, friends tell me. For washing hands, at least. None of them has admitted to using it as a contraceptive. All-One! All-One!)

Wow. I just read the lengthy blurb for "Totallyon" and am in awe. I had once thought I'd read the worst genre book in the world when I was writing my review column, but this certainly looks to top it.

"Manned cruise missile." Didn't Kubrick and Slim Pickens predate this one by a few years?

This much I know about R. D. Peters. He never taught English in the public schools if he believes that student essays are rife with new and original ideas, interesting plots, or colorful exposition. The odds are about one of 300 (one weekend's work) even barely readable. 28 years in the classroom produced zero readable short stories 97the most difficult of all writing assignments, I believe. The odds are better on poetry if you discard all the impending death and unrequited love poems. Of course a teacher could collect these and retire, because everyone knows what a hot commodity poetry collections are. Incidentally, Greg, if you do no more than teach a stylebook and transition, you'll serve the community well. 102 is the research paper, so begin the year with a diatribe against plegiarism and tell them you surf all the hot spots on the Internet.

Looks like the eBay seller had no bidders...
Hey, I was just thinking: why don't you hook up Peters with Shrxpshxrx? They'd probably have loads to talk about...Maybe they could publsih each other's work...

Thanks for the advice, Barbara. It's truly needed and appreciated. My approach to grading papers will include a big magnifying glass and a deerstalker cap, and I'm already planning to use poor Stephen Ambrose as an object lesson.

Two minor dissents:

1. My high school english teachers could've plucked some wheat from the chaff-- of course, my school produced people like Ted Chiang, among other talented folks. Ted was one of the few to stick with writing, though. (And this, BTW, was a public school.)

2. When I ran a belligerent-sounding startup publisher, I don't think I ever brought merit into it, only the changing economics. And ironically, I was undercut by people like GeoCities. But you do have to admit that the Net's changed the publishing equation dramatically.

I'm reminded of one of the reasons why I went cold-turkey on reading Usenet back when it was the hot new technology. The more experienced people used to pass snarky remarks about the "September effect", the predictable floods Usenet got because most of its connections were in U.S. universities. Several years later a colleague observed "With AOL, it's always September." (relating to a previous discussion -- the Web lets wannabes go public with their insults instead of addressing editors directly.)

Teresa: would it be cruelty to dumb animals to hook him up with some of those scam "publishers" you reminded us of a few weeks back? Or would sending them a customer be encouragement of noxious weeds? (I followed a number of the "Writer Beware" links. If I had a way to tap all that brass I could open a scrap-metal business and retire on the proceeds....)

Chip, Cruel and unusual. Please. This poor dumb cluck is going through life with enough strikes against him already.

Emma, why is this cruel and unusual? Telling him that he'll get a six-figure, three-book deal if only he buys a booth at the next WorldCon and sells his book there is cruel and unusual. Now sending him to Dragon*Con instead, where he'll be surrounded by wannabes even more paranoid and psychotic than he is...now that's funny!

The latest addition to Iron Pyramid, taken in brief, where Our Hero is complaining about how the regular rejection letters he receives are due to his refusing to take the Point Of View of the editor who rejected his latest work:

"This intellectual whitesheet way of thinking has a name, POV or point of view. Oh, that's right, it's a perfect work but it doesn't promote an agenda of leftist, liberal, centrist thinking. Usually this POV must be that dictated by some Femi-Nazi that seeks to castrate the minds of men while whoring and sleeping with every young female that comes her way."

Ah, so now I understand why I didn't get groupies when I was editing SciFiNow.com. I wasn't enough of a Femi-Nazi. Or maybe I was too much of a Femi-Nazi, because my POV insisted that the world didn't need any more "Battlestar Galactica" fanfiction. And I really want to find the young lady who's been castrating my mind of man again, because now all I want to do is sit in the window and purr.

De-lurking; I haven't posted a comment before, but I've enjoyed the blog for a few months. What made me de-lurk was the fact that no-one commented on this:

"It's as easy as the teacher assigning thirty students to write ten pages about any subject or famous person, and then handing it over to an editor, teacher partner across the country"

Or rather, no one commented on the fact that even if all those pages were worth publishing, it would basicly be the same 10 pages. 30*10 pages about a subject does NOT equal 300 pages, but rather it equals perhaps 15 pages.
Of course if this is how Mr Peters belive that one should write then it might explain why he hasn't been published.

Okay, I confess: I've been stealing ideas from high-school children and selling them to Gardner Dozois by the bucket-load. Bwahahahaha! Hey, this means I must be part of the conspiracy! Way to go! (Either that, or the tinfoil lining in his hat is leaking again.)

Seriously, has anyone pointed out to this guy that without the teaching profession he'd be rather short of potential readers?

(Thanks for cheering me up, Theresa: I needed it -- the bad news is mounting up right now.)

They must be assigning some pretty whacked-out essay topics in your part of the world, Charlie.

Write a 500-word essay about your summer vacation as a transgendered atheist Pakistani role-playing critic. Cite at least three sources.

Not a teacher. A recent college grad, now a law student.

But you see, I know from whence I came. I certainly haven't written anything publishable yet. And probably will never write any publishable fiction. Almost no student has. Any 16 year old writing publishable fiction? Well. That's MARKETABLE.

This is the first conservative I've seen to use "centrist" as a synonym for "communist". Well, he doesn't quite control the discourse...

Paul, I think that translates as "Not only am I not getting published; I'm not getting laid." They'd always rather believe it's a political conspiracy.

One of the things I've wound up saying to them when I've run into them online is "No, no, you're taking this all wrong -- you have to understand that it's completely personal."

Teresa, I hate to be the one to bring this up, but not only is he not getting laid, but I'd put down bets that he couldn't get laid in Tijuana with $100 bills jammed in his jockstrap. I've met this type before: in the comics business, they're called "Cat Piss Men" for obvious olfactory reasons.

Teresa, I hate to be the one to bring this up, but not only is he not getting laid, but I'd put down bets that he couldn't get laid in Tijuana with $100 bills jammed in his jockstrap. I've met this type before: in the comics business, they're called "Cat Piss Men" for obvious olfactory reasons.

...he couldn't get laid in Tijuana with $100 bills jammed in his jockstrap.

Okay, that was a visual I REALLY didn't need.

I've got to quit reading this thing at work. My cubemates are gophering to see what all the giggling is about.

It brings joy to my heart that you've all discovered the paranoid-delusional lunacy that is R.D.Peters. I'm the school teacher who inspired his web rants on the public school system. I only wish you could have seen him operate on a day-to-day basis, where he proclaimed I attended cons so I could sleep with publishers in exchange for publication, and I lured minors to cons so I could sleep with them in exchange for promises of publication (I'm not a publisher, so no one could track that one).

If you want a real giggle, he's currently offering a free FirstBooks deal for the person who can buy his "Totallyon" and best edit it for his third printing.

Tempting, isn't it?

Sleeping with publishers? In order to get published? That's insane. But let's suppose we were in an alternate universe where that maneuver worked. Given that R. J. Peters is unpublished, wouldn't that necessarily mean that you're better in the sack than he is?

I am not the least bit tempted to edit his awful book. I have plenty of good manuscripts that need editing. Besides, finding problems that need fixing in R. J. Peters' writing would be like kicking a three-legged dog: no great achievement in its own right, unpleasant for all concerned, and he wouldn't get any better in consequence of your doing it.

Like Ef Deal, I've had the joy of witnessing RD's village-idiot routine for years. Believe it or not, the posted sample may be one of RD's more sane and lucid commentaries. Maybe someday you'll learn how the Department of Defense and Boeing got their idea for a major weapons system directly from his book, "TotallyOn," at least ten years before it was vanity-published. Or how NASA didn't know rockets would operate in the vacuum of space until Johnny Carson explained it to NASA. Or that for a number of years RD was charging _$125_ for his murder mystery, a book that he touted as being indispensable "if you've been the victim of a murder."

But I'm sure I'm leaving out some of the REALLY crazy stuff.

Ef Deal and I have had the joy of witnessing RD's village-idiot routine for years (I hesitate to call it an act).

Believe it or not, the posted sample may be one of RD's more lucid commentaries. Maybe someday you'll learn how the Department of Defense and Boeing Corporation got their idea for a major weapons system directly from his book, "TotallyOn," at least ten years before it was vanity-published. Or how NASA didn't know rockets would operate in the vacuum of space until Johnny Carson explained it to the engineers. Or that for a number of years RD was charging >>>$125

I'm sure I'm leaving out some of the seriously crazy stuff.

Woo. Makes me sort of nostalgic for the old days when it was possible to identify the current worst loony on the internet. This guy would have made the grade.

I think Mark Ethan Smith still wins on style points. I hadn't realized Radcliffe had a collection of his personal papers; reading it must be like a trip to the rare books room at Miskatonic University.

-j

J Greely: MES was a bush-league net.kook. He wasn't even terribly kooky so much as that FTM trannies were almost literally unheard-of at that point, and the mind of your typical Usenetter simply couldn't encompass him.

My own interactions with MES were all civil.

You want a net.kook, you try Archimedes Plutonium. Now THERE was a kook!

Alan, I remember all of the Usenet postings that the excerpts I linked to were extracted from (and a few more). On a clear day, with the wind in his sails, MES was a serious kook. When he announced his intention of suing Usenet for violating AA/EEO laws, it had nothing to do with his choice of gender.

Quoting: "Only Meitner had both the ability and the necessity of making such a momentous discovery. The penis-bearing morons were all great men and their careers were assured. But Jews, women, and other subhumans were destined only for the gas ovens of Auschwitz, to be used for slave labor, and turned into soap."

Not kooky enough for you?

My example of a bush-league net.kook would be the day Daniel Bernstein appeared in comp.std.c, relentlessly arguing that the new C standard was completely useless because the sum of two pointers was undefined. Everyone up to and including Dennis Ritchie bent over backwards to explain in incredible detail how this would be not only pointless but harmful, and it didn't even slow him down:

At the USENIX contest for "name your favorite proposed window manager feature", whose results were announced at 2pm yesterday, one of the entries of note was `dbwm', the Dan Bernstein window manager: it argues with you for 10 weeks whenever you want to move a window.

-j

Hey, we were remarking on cracked Usenet pots like Archimedes Plutonium all the way back in the dawn of Electrolite. "Remember, there are no kooks better than Usenet kooks--ask for them by name!"

Yhee Ghod, the kooks. How could one forget Grubor or Hipcrime.

And, you know, back when they were the problem of the Internet? That was the glory days. I'd gladly take 100 Usenet Kooks rahter then the crap we deal with nowadays.

Be very, VERY careful what you wish for, Erik.

Much as I loath email spammers, I don't find them to clog up my inbox quite so much as the times I underwent serious mailbombing by one specimen.

Alan:

Subject: Spam Count

Date: 10/18/03 11:55 pm

From: "Erik V. Olson" (address elided)

To: eriko@mvp.net

10818

What more do I have to fear? I'm mailbombed on a daily basis anymore. (That's a month-to-date count )

I always thought that Archimedes Plutonium should have stuck with "Ludwig". "Ludwig Plutonium" just sounds classier to me.