#RACMX

[phoenix]

I wonder how long ago it was when I started referring to myself as "protector of the timelines," or something similar. I'm feeling very justified in my Rachel Summers love, today.

[otherpeoplescreativity]

Once upon a time there was a thing called “racmx”, pronounced locally as “rack-em-ex”, and actually named 

rec.arts.comics.marvel.x-men

and there was this early-twenties baby nerd who went by “Jarissa”

who was awkward and intense and extremely verbose and shy, all at once

and she felt like the only contribution of any value she could make to this gloriously creative community was to add appreciative responses to other people’s stories, including specific mentions of what she liked, and maybe a few (awkwardly phrased, often stilted) earnest discussions of what she would like to see enhanced or improved or reconsidered in future works.

But mostly she found new and supremely lame ways to say “you write good!” only in fifteen times as many words as necessary.

And one time she saw that one of the off-topic spammers had posted in racmx again, and one of the particularly fun authors had dashed off a short “response” fic of Wolverine on the phone making travel arrangements to go kick the spammer’s patootie

and Jarissa gave a favorable critique to the pacing and characterization of the -- let’s be honest here -- silly one-off bit

and three weeks later, her computer suddenly decided to eat its own ethernet card. It would take in signals from the internet and sometimes decode them into legibility, but it would transmit neither email nor usenet post of any sort. Nor would it tell why. 

And there was no money for replacement parts for much more than half a year.

When a pile of castoff parts could be built into a new computer at last, Usenet had mostly been taken over by the spammers and the phishing attempts. Evidence gathered after the fact suggests that everyone moved to something called the “Subreality Cafe”, which may or may not have been on Geocities? I’m still not sure. But any link to that was drowned under off-topic trash.

what was yalls first internet community you were in? mine was toontown in 2008

[nobodysuspectsthebutterfly]

Tumblrversary Q&A, part 5, and the last. Continuing questions from crocordile, asking how I met jimintomystery; favorite scenes and themes from the Vorkosigan Saga; reading a favorite poem; and reading a favorite passage from ASOIAF.

So! This was a lot of fun. I very much enjoyed doing these, even though it took me nearly two weeks to finish -- and I hope you had fun listening. Rambling about meta in particular was pretty neat, though not that unusual for me to do verbally (I’ve talked ASOIAF at meetups, and lord knows I talk Jim’s ear off almost every night), answering specific questions was still kinda different. Alas, all questions from now on will have to be in text format... at least until next year, we’ll see. :)

(Q&A part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4)

edit: pic from the 1999 meetup, under the cut:

That’s jimintomystery, me, and sodiumlamp, over 15 years back. Sheesh, time flies...

[nobodysuspectsthebutterfly]

I just found a tag of yours, 'Spider-man would definitely beat Jesus'. Sadly, it's hyphenated, which means Tumblr is too stupid to track it. Is this a Patton Oswalt reference, by chance?!

Ah no, it’s an ancient Usenet reference. :)

Once upon a time, in the old days of the internet when the web was new (we still called it WWW) and dinosaurs roamed the earth, there were very few forums as we would know them today (most were on services like AOL and Compuserve), and online fandoms mostly congregated on mailing lists, BBSs, and Usenet. Usenet, as a public unmoderated discussion forum with infinite threaded topics (you ever see a tumblr post that’s gone to 10000+ notes with lots of reblogs adding more conversation? like that but much much worse), tends toward the chaotic, but there is some organization. Usenet newsgroups are divided into hierarchies, like rec. (recreational activities), sci. (science), soc. (society), and alt. (all kinds of random things). Comics discussions could be found in rec.arts.comics.* (rac.* for short), with subgroups like rac.dc.universe, rac.dc.vertigo, rac.marvel.universe, and rac.marvel.xbooks.

Though in 1995, the time this story is set, there were still only very few divisions in rac.* — primarily only rec.arts.comics.misc and rec.arts.comics.xbooks, because the X-fandom was just. that. annoying. (The superwholock of its day.) Anyway, RACX/RACMX was basically my first home on the internet. :) (I met quite a few friends there, some of whom are even on tumblr today. *waves to sigma7 and phoenix and jimintomystery and sodiumlamp and norabombay and wheelr*)

So, as a comics discussion forum, you can imagine there were a lot of “Who would win in a fight? This guy or this guy?!?” posts. They were often quite repetitive, and the regulars tended to tune them out. But then there was… *drumroll*… Spider-Man vs. Storm. I don’t recall how it started, but the thread went for months, to something like 1000 replies… all because one guy simply would not let it go. He insisted it didn’t matter that Storm could fly and control the weather and could summon lightning bolts, Spider-Man was so agile and if he got her on the ground he could collapse a building on her and then her claustrophobia would kick in and Spider-Man would totally win! Also spider-sense means you can dodge lightning bolts and webbing is non-conductive! Oh sure, maybe Storm might win if they fought on a plain, but in a basement she’d have no chance! And he admitted he hadn’t read many Storm comics and didn’t know all her powers, but why should that matter? It was… something else. (If google cooperates, you can see part of the thread here, click to expand the posts — but the most classic one is probably this or maybe this.)

And then about a month or so after that thread had finally started to wind down, someone decided to research a term paper by making a post asking about the nature of good and evil. (Yes, really. FWIW he probably tied the question into comics somehow.) Anyhow it quickly devolved into a religious flamewar of the kind you’d expect, completely off-topic, does God exist, the historicity of Jesus, do atheists have morals… oh, it was just… so bad. So very very bad. And about two weeks in, someone said something like, “well, at least it isn’t another round of X vs. X.”

And so David R. Henry, a RACX regular known for his dry wit and fantastic writing style (famously for this review of X-Men Unlimited #4), who had been a voice of reason in both the religion thread and that Spider-Man vs Storm thread… replied with Spider-Man vs. Jesus!, another instant classic. It made a great impression on me (a newbie lurker at the time). And ever since, whenever I see a “who’d win” question, “Spider-Man would definitely beat Jesus” has become my standard reply.

“I’d like to see Jesus multiply fish by magic when he’s trying to concentrate with a big glob of webbing in his face! Especially when Spider-Man starts whipping him around with his super-strength, I don’t think Jesus will be able to do much about that.”