Musings from Brian J. Noggle: Things You Can Find On The Internet

Things You Can Find On The Internet

Back in the early 1991, I was a sophomore in college. I'd finally gotten a PC (we called them "clones" in those days) the year before, but I still had my Commodore 64 hooked up on the desk beside the PC, and I still hung out on C64 Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes). One, called the City of WISE (Waukesha Information System Exchange, as I recollect), I called every night (because in those days, you had to dial up with your modem to connect to a bulletin board system, and you often had to call late at night when you wouldn't tie up the phone). I ran a trivia message board, and I even started a message board for a Call of Cthulhu game.

Someone else was going to run some sort of roleplaying game on a message board, and I signed up. But that gamemaster never showed. Instead, one of the other users (Brass Orchid, handle derived from a Samuel R. Delany book I still haven't read) and I started riffing absurdly, playing somewhat to roleplaying game conventions. Eventually, Brass Orchid collected these messages and sent me a copy on disk to see if we could make some sort of story out of it.

Fast forward fifteen years to the present day, and I'm browsing TextFiles.com, a repository of text files from that era, and I get to thinking about The Forgotten Legacy (as the message board was called, undoubtedly some grand sweeping sword-and-sorcery campaign that we subverted to our own ends). So I Google Brass Orchid by his real name, and lo, there it is, on his Web site:

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12/21/91; 12:43PM
From: Brass Orchid [3]

We could always play without him. All the GM 
does is provide structure and coherence to the game.
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12/21/91; 10:39PM
From: L. S. Creetor [62]

I'll take my bastard sword and stab the Ultimate 
Reality in the gut.
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12/22/91; 5:08AM
From: Brass Orchid [3]

The Ultimate Reality suffers 120 HP's damage and 
falls, semiconcious, to the ground, muttering, "That
Bastard sure knows how to hurt a guy."
L. S. Creetor collects 20 Exp. Points and finds
the Medallion of Adaptation.
Suddenly, the sky splits open and a stairway to
the stars appears. Branches off of the main stairway can
be seen, dwindling into the distance.
Your move...
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Suddenly, I'm nineteen years old again, connecting through LotusWorks, and casting spells I made up on the fly. I can see the wood paneling and smell the light must of my basement room, I can feel the keyboard in my lap (because that's all we had for ergonomics, you damn kids--you could put your keyboard in your lap), and I played late into the night with my short stories, with my bulletin boards, and with simple games without 3D rendering. I had most of college and all of my life ahead of me, and I was as optimistic as a college Objectivist could be.

Crazy, the things you can find on the Internet. I am of the first generation that can find its youth.

UPDATE: Revised a sentence to make clear I looked for Brass Orchid elsewhere but TextFiles.com.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:06 PM