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September 12, 2013:

DEJA NEWS

Bruce Kimmel Photograph bk's notes

Well, dear readers, I must write these here notes in a hurry because I have been a bad hainsie and have been reading for the last three hours and it is now late and the notes must be up shortly.  I was pondering with interest a few things yesterday.  The pondering began when someone mentioned how Google was trying to take over the world or the Internet or whatever.  And it brought me back to my beginnings on the Internet when there was no such thing as Google – Google was then something called Deja News, which was the search engine back then.  It was a wild and wooly time that thankfully passed as the Internet changed rapidly.  Back then, there were really not discussion boards such as these – those came later.  No, back then there was Usenet and the Usenet newsgroups.  I discovered these before I even had a computer – I was very late to the computer game.  I got my first real computer, if you want to call it that, probably in 1999 when Varese Sarabande purchased a seven-hundred dollar Compaq Presario for my office.  It made no sense to me and any attempts to get on the Internet via that computer failed miserably with the Varese dial-up lines.  No, I got on the Internet when I was given Web TV for Christmas, the year it came out.  Of course, like most, I instantly became addicted as I surfed whatever sites I could find, surfed by sitting on my couch like so much fish with my Web TV keyboard in my lap while the Internet sites showed up on my television.  I loved my Web TV and I kind of already hated computers.  I quickly, within the first week, found Usenet thanks to the Web TV booklet’s recommendations of some Usenet newsgroups.  Once there, I discovered rec.arts.theatre.musicals, I discovered rec.arts.movies and similar groups for film music, classic films and all that stuff I was interested.

I knew instantly that these newsgroups were populated by some well-meaning regulars, by bullies, and, most importantly, by trolls whose sole aim and joy in life was to sit at home and make people’s lives miserable.  If you want to know just how bad it was, I fictionalized a real-life event in my short story, Your Worst Nightmare – it will tell you everything you need to know, and save for my having to make it work dramatically, all of it happened.  It’s part of my short story collection, How To Write a Dirty Book and Other Stories.  It is the least read of anything I’ve written, and yet I feel it contains some of my strongest work as an author.  As dear reader Michael Shayne will tell you, he wrote me an e-mail after finishing the book saying he’d really enjoyed the stories save for Your Worst Nightmare, which had really offended and bothered him and he felt it was way out of proportion to anything that could happen in real life.  I then went to Google and found all of the postings that I fictionalized in the story – one troll’s merciless and endless attack on an elderly gentleman that resulted in that gentleman’s death from the stress of it all.  When Shayne saw those horrifying posts he then understood how potent the story really was and he ended up really liking that story.  Yes, it was wild and wooly, and yes it was also horrifying to watch.  But like the old man in my story, I learned from some well-versed Internet sleuths who populated those boards how to do reverse searches on usernames and other stuff, and it was sometimes amazingly easy to identify the troll because they’d left such a slimy trail and would frequently slip up in their nefarious doings.

But even a decade ago, Usenet was almost completely gone – so swiftly it was almost shocking.  Boards such as these became the norm and suddenly trolls, for the most part, were out of luck because they could be banned, something that never happened on Usenet.  Then Google bought Deja News and became the search engine of choice.  In my early days of Usenet I was fynsworth@webtv.net and I was quite the colorful character and only a handful knew who fynsworth was.  When I created a new label in 2000 I used my Internet name for it, and that was the end of fynsworth on Usenet.  Eventually, Web TV was too annoying and in 2000 I got my first laptop, a Toshiba.  I got into it, loved Word and wrote my first novel on that Toshiba.  I still have it and it still works.  I then got a Dell and that was a monster and not in a good way.  When a virus got into it (despite my Norton Anti-Virus), I called India and the idiot who talked me through trying to fix it in essence wiped the hard drive clean.  Thankfully, most of its contents were backed up on both floppy discs and zip discs (remember those?).  But I was so angry and screaming at the idiot, that I put the Dell on the floor and literally stomped it to death.

From that point on, things moved so quickly on the Internet it wasn’t even funny.  I wrote the first Adriana Hofstetter book in 2006.  In that book, Adriana reluctantly goes sleuthing on the biggest social media site and ultimately get clews there that help her solve the crime.  Facebook, right?  No.  Facebook was a private kind of site that only college kids could join.  It wasn’t even a blip on the Internet radar.  No, in 2006 it was MySpace.  MySpace was what everyone did.  It was incredibly popular and growing daily.  I wrote the second Adriana Hofstetter book in 2007 and by that time MySpace was dead and Facebook had taken over the planet.  It was that swift.  From there, it’s just one new thing after another, whether Twitter or Instagram or whatever.  I know there’s Google Plus, which was supposed to be Google’s answer to Facebook, but I still don’t know what one is supposed to do on Google Plus – it makes no sense to me on any level and I’ve never used it.  I don’t know what “circles” are, I don’t see how you see messages – it’s a mess, if you ask me.  And that’s what I was pondering yesterday – how swiftly things change in cyberspace.  All of this cyberspace interest is stemming from the book I’m currently reading, which I’ll probably finish after I write these here notes.  Despite some annoyances with the author’s style, it’s pretty compulsive reading.

Yesterday was kind of a pleasant little day.  I got up after eight hours and fifteen minutes of sleep, I answered e-mails, and then I did a three-mile jog.  I had several telephonic conversations and then Lanny and Sandy came over and we moseyed on over to Jerry’s Deli for a quick bite.  I had a patty melt, Sandy had some chicken soup, and Lanny a Caesar salad.  I then picked up no packages and we came back and ran the Ira Gershwin show.  My intention was to do detail work that I hadn’t been able to do when we threw this together for her Signature Theatre appearance.  So, we stopped and started, I gave little notes, we did some staging things, and it will be tighter and smoother now.  We’ve also finalized the packaging for the new CD, so the designer is just waiting for the hi-rez final photos he’s using and then we can get this thing to the printers.  My goal is to have it ready at some point in October.  Sandy had to go visit here son, who’s going to college here, so we’ll reconvene today at two-thirty, but it was a very good work session.  We’ve also begun discussing what will probably be a third album – it’s something Sandy suggested a month ago that I didn’t really even take seriously and then I started to think about it and I think it’s an interesting idea and we’re going to probably do it.  Can’t say more at this time.

After that, I had some really long telephonic calls, I went to Subway and got a footlong Subway club (with the patty melt and that and the jog I netted out at around 1300 calories, which is perfect), then sat on my couch like so much fish and ate it all up.

Last night, I finished watching a motion picture on Blu and Ray entitled The Fly.  Anyone who’s read my first novel, Benjamin Kritzer, knows my history with The Fly, as it is that movie and my seeing it at the Picfair Theater that opens and closes that book.  I’ve always been fond of the film, although in later years I came to see how badly paced it is and how clunky it is, but its central drama is still compelling, but it took our very own dear reader Pogue and director David Cronenberg to take that central drama and turn it into a brilliant work of art.  I’ve read nothing but raves for the transfer, but while it’s certainly a nice transfer with no real problems, I can’t quite go to rave status – there have been many other Fox scope transfers that best it by quite a bit, most notably Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.  Frequently The Fly is just a little too soft, the color is fine, contrast is occasionally weak.  I certainly can recommend the Blu-ray and certainly the film, but I would not quite give it the high marks the wags on the Internet sites are.

I spent the rest of the evening reading DarkMarket.

Today, I have a noon lunch with Mr. Jason Graae, then hopefully I’ll pick up some packages, then we have our two-thirty work session where we’ll begin to assemble the new launch show, then I’ll jog (won’t have time in the morning), and then at eight-thirty we have a meeting about the benefit I’m directing in January, said meeting taking place at The Smoke House, so garlic cheese bread here I come, baby.

Tomorrow morning, we have a short rehearsal, then Sandy heads home.  I have some liner notes to start, but other than that, I’ll try to relax.  The weekend is unknown to me at this time.

Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, have a lunch, have a work session, do a jog, hopefully pick up packages, and have an evening meeting.  Today’s topic of discussion: What were your first experiences on the Internet?  What were the first sites you discovered, what newsgroups did you do, what was the best of it and what was the worst of it?  Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland where I shall continue to ponder the portals of the past all the way back to Deja News.

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