Comms: Signature Lines Over Time
Sun, 18 Dec 2005
Over dinner tonight my wife and I were reminiscing the old times -- you
know, the sorts of trouble we'd gotten into when we were young idiots in
school. (Sometimes I wonder wherever did those people go? When you're young
and foolish you'll do impulsive crazy things and get into all sorts of
trouble. If you dig deep inside, beneath that serpent-like necktie and
into your soul, will you reach that core of anti-responsibility we all
so fondly remember having while hoping our offspring will never show such
insanity? Hell, next time you're at Tim Hortons ask for the Extra Fat
Full-Caffeine instead of the Low-Fat Decaf - will they just melt some
butter into your coffee?) I digress..
I got to thinking about some old postings I'd made to Usenet and upon
the very early web, and in email and on BBSes. What signature-lines
did I use in them? What watermark did I leave in every fledgling 386BSD
or C++ posting? (A signature or sig-line is the post-text that is
automatically appended to a communicee and is usually used to announce
the name of the poster, their contact info or perhaps some particularly
non-funny in-joke or quote.)
Well my friends, I was there. I warlorded (giant siglines)
and showed my geekly nature with obscure references or heavy music
quotes. I championed the cause, and to this day I have some fear and
guilt that perhaps I, in the late 1980's, sparked the 'l337 sp34k' on
Commodore 64 BBSes. Anyway, here goes - in the name of shamelessly
embarassing myself publicly on the web (what could possibly go wrong!)
I hereby list of a bunch of my old siglines while listening to
Rush (Red Barchetta, I'm so with you!) and drinking Dr. Pepper. I used
to have a (shell)script
rotate through siglines once upon a time, so I know theres a bunch more
lurking in long lost emails but the following are some sigs
I had lieing around in backups or found through the
magic of Usenet archives in Google-Groups.
Heres a cross section of the anger-transformed-to-romance-to-uber-geek
that is me. Someday I'll dig out my email backups and fill it in more...
Man, so many memories while searching through the usenet; I really
must crack out Wizardry 7 and Thief again; hell with it, I'll go buy
Civilization IV instead.
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Current (latter half of 2005)
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If everyone would put barbecue sauce on their food, there would be no war.
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Sometime in 2005
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"Terrorists can attack our freedom, but only Congress can destroy it."
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2002-2005
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"Have you played Atari today?"
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1998-2001
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"It's murder out there. You can't even travel around in your own micro
circuits without permission from 'Master Control Program'. I mean,
sending *ME* down here to play games.... Who does he calculate he is?"
-- Peter Jurasik as Crom, _Tron_
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1998 - wow, what a Lisp nerd I was.
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"I'm CONSING NOW!" "Nature is for weenies." -- Hozhead
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1995
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SLvH | "Good - bad - I'm the guy with the gun."
Jeff Mitchell | "Hail to the king, baby."
skeezix@io.org | -- Bruce Campbell, Armies of Darkness
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1994-1995
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.------------. Skeezix and Ladynigh, entwined forever since July 1, 1994.
|_ __=--'
) ( "The Deliverator belongs to an elite order ... Those
'------' burger flippers might have better life expectancy, but
skeezix@acm.org what kind of life is it anyway" -- Neal Stephenson
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1994 - "SLvH" - Skeezix Ladyfingers von Humphries
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SLvH | "Death needs time for what it kills to grow in, you
Jeff Mitchell | stupid ignorant ugly American death-sucker."
skeezix@io.org | -- William S. Burroughs, Sr.
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1994 - I was drawing "NIN" (Nine Inch Nails) on my arms with a thick marker
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SLvH | "need you; dream you; find you; taste you; fuck you;
Jeff Mitchell | use you; scar you; break you; lose me; hate me;
skeezix@io.org | smash me; erase me." - "eraser", Trent Reznor (NIN)
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1993 - When I had a 386DX40 with 8MB of RAM, playing through Sirtech's Wizardry 7
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SLvH | "Only squids can be tranced." - Jack Deth, "Trancers"
Jeff Mitchell | "No matter how powerful the wizard, a dagger between
skeezix@io.org | the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style."
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