The Dude Abides

In the Second Age of the Internet, before EQ and UO, the virtual multiverse was conquered by an unimaginably ultrahumongous horde of orcs and savage barbarians from the world of Half Life and Quake, and there were a million websites where Quakeclans talked shit 24/7 and did their best to spread the Foulest Cultural Manure Imaginable, with Stick Figure Cartoons to Illustrate All the Evil Technicalities That Were Easy To Miss in our insults, because it made us laugh.

At the time, the population of people playing Counterstrike (and just Counterstrike) on the internet every night was roughly equivalent to amount of subscriptions EQ had in the first height of its populairty.

And that is where the term "toon," and "owns," and among many other, more horrible things, comes from.

And Lum knows this, and Dundee also knows, because I know they were both there, in the Second Age, with their umbrellas, trying to avoid the splatter of human body fluids.

Hell, Dundee was there in the First Age, where we downloaded pr0n and the shareware versions of Test Drive 1 and Wolfenstein 3d from BBSs and we ended up with cool viruses like Stoned (that actually made your computer run slower and slower every time you booted it up) and Monkey (that did something random everytime you booted your computer up) and stuff.

The Text Based Multi-User Dungeon People were almost entirely invisible in those days, nobody wanted to play text-based anything when we could wander around in Binary Space Partition Trees, pretty much right off the bat, after the 386 came out.

What I'm saying is that while there was a culture on the internet before the Quakewhores showed up, we didn't even notice it, we were totally oblivious to it, and we certainly didn't adopt anything from it, because it was just a couple of Scientists whispering to each other in a corner somewhere, and we were this gigantic Military Operation, marching along, singing songs about what we'd like to do to your momma at the top of our lungs.

And then UO came out, and it wasn't in 3d, so only a wussbag would play that, and all the wussbags who played it, and didn't play Quake, called us d00ds, and dewds, and l33tspeakers and shit.

And then EQ came out, and it was in 3d, and it even used the Quake engine, and every time us Quakewhores hit the spacebar, we heard the familiar "hoot" huff-of-effort noise from Quake, which made us feel right at home, and that's how The Brad managed to finally bring us into the fold.

But its strange that nobody, but me, will tell you this.

And instead, you new guys think we all came from the Invisible Land of MUDs or some shit.

Just because the Scientists tell you that.

You are not the spawn of the Scientists who played games on a mainframe.

You are the offspring of orcs and barbarians who ran up and down virtual corridors and beat each other to shit with grenades and crowbars and bathed in showers of gore and laughter.

And Scientists are not the only ones that played D&D, either.

It was a counter-cultural thing in its day, as well.

You'd be more likely to find Hell's Angels and Hippy Underground Comic Book Collector guys and Punk Rock Chicks smoking pot and eating Doritos and playing D&D than you would to find uptight Mainframe people doing it heh.

Not that they weren't invited, 'cause we got along fine (for the most part) with Nuclear Submarine Scientists and everything too, but they weren't by any means the majority of the people at the table, as a matter of fact, they were the only ones that didn't join in and sing along when everybody would suddenly break out into a rousing rendition of Come On Baby Light My Fire, 'cause they didn't know any of the fucking words ahaha.

So let's just accept the ugly reality of our roots and shit already, y'know, there's really nothing to be embarrassed about, we might be all crass and crude underneath these smooth, stainless steel exteriors, but we were never a bunch of stupid people, even if we weren't a bunch Nuclear Submarine Scientists and Mild Mannered Librarians.

Y'know, I dunno if its still true, but for a while, the two guys who did the best as adults on the IQ test (in the US, at least, heh) were a Bouncer in a Bar (he was, and still might be, the Head of MENSA), and a motorcycle repair guy with a criminal record.

And the Clock Cycle Gods who wrote Wolfenstein and the Quakes (to whom we are all indebted) were a bunch of smelly wannabe Death Metal Guys who wore spandex to work.

And Wolfenstein 3d made over a million in upgrades from shareware, and Doom made over ten million (I still can't believe anybody actually paid them anything when you could just download the wads of the full game from some hive of scum and villainy for free ahaha).

That is really where most of it comes from, y'know, it wasn't all made in some clean-room laboratory where they use probabilty field cameras to take pictures of quantum particles, people like my stepdad, who worked for Intel when they came out with the 80x86, originally put computers together by hammering parts into a piece of plywood in their garage heh.

And before that, he had to ride a bicycle to work at McDonalds, 'cause he was a poor kid with an alchoholic momma and no dad.

So this Everything Comes From the Revenge of the MUD Nerds and shit bothers me a little, not because I hate nerds, y'know, 'cause I've never hated nerds, some of my favorite people are nerds, man, and all of us got a little Nerd in us, I got a lot more Nerd in me than the average guy at the bar does, that's fer sure, and I love nerdy chicks, as long as they ain't too freaky with the Acting Like Spock shit, 'cause I don't think my delicate sensibilities could survive taking a shower with Leonard Nimoy.

Well, yah, mebbe if it was a young Leonard Nimoy, then sure.

It just bothers me 'cause it draws a picture that ain't even remotely accurate, and then nobody but me ever says anything about it.

I know why Lum and Dundee don't say nothing, its 'cause they used to get hassled by the Quakewhores, they fucking hated the d00ds that robbed their houses and generally ruined their gaming experiences in UO, its like some kinda Hatfield and McKoy thingie going on there.

But man, that was a long time ago, y'know?

And I wasn't even there, 'cause UO was too much of a "stupid little icon game" for me and the Real Life Dwarf to be caught playing, at the time.

But we were picking on the guys that were bothering you, in Real Life, for playing such a "stupid little icon game," so we were sorta on your side, if you think about a little.

Heheheheh.

Bah, whatever, now I'm starting to see how pointless it is for me to try to correct shit that's going wrong with gaming history ahaha.