Ah! I have no complaints. Now, once again, this is the, this is the victory run tape.
So even if it's exactly A for our team. You know, so we're not under any, whatever, and
as soon as we're, you know, you're like, okay, we've evacuated it. Who gives? You know, you've
mentioned the wrestler, obviously, you got that guy in. Was there any other characters
that you think of that were just really... That were characters? Well, you know, characters
in terms of ego. Like, you see prototypes in BBSs that later make it onto the internet,
but there's stuff that's just like purely BBS. Because when you think about it, like,
the first BBS, one of the first... Okay. One of the places that claims to be the first
BBS, Community Memory, which is 1974, had four terminals. They were four terminals.
It was in a laundromat, a library, a office, and a record store in Berkeley, California.
And that was where you could post. They had a jerk. They had a guy who was a harassing
asshole on the thing. You need the asshole. Yeah. You need him. You don't have the board
until you get the asshole. Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm saying, but I'm saying, like, even
when it was a 110 printed terminal sitting in the second floor of a records shop, there
was a guy going... Just letting loose on the thing. And so, as a result, I like to pull
out people like that, even though there's versions of them now. Can you think of anyone
who was like a character? You mentioned wrestler, which I really liked. Yeah, wrestler was great.
Well, you give yours. I don't know if I have one right now. One of the BBSs that my best
friend used to call all the time was called the Anarchy Zone. And here's the trick behind
the Anarchy Zone. It was run by a guy called Master Hacker, and he was pretty larger than
life. He had a really big signature and a lot of personality. And his presentation on
the BBS was that he had taken over this BBS from the guy who actually ran it. He was running
it on someone else's computer. This guy had set up a BBS. Master Hacker had come in, hacked
the system so thoroughly that the guy couldn't turn off the computer, couldn't shut it down.
And now Master Hacker was running things remotely. And yeah, he was pretty elite. Any others?
That were actually sort of archetypes. I can't think of anyone like that. One of the coolest
things that I remember from BBSing is I used to listen to a talk radio show in Chicago
on WLS, 890 AM, hosted by a guy named Bob Lasseter. And it slowly became revealed that
he was a bit of a closet geek. His show was just a sort of political, muckraking, sort
of loud talk radio show. But occasionally you'd get a hint that he was a bit of a geek.
And it turned out that a board that I occasionally called called the Apple Tree, which was an
Apple II BBS, which was sort of an anachronism even then, was that this guy called that board.
He was friends with those guys. So I started calling that board more. And at some point
someone decided we should try playing diplomacy online. So we set up this diplomacy campaign.
And I've never played diplomacy and I'm not very good at it, but I'm calling every day.
I'm doing my moves. It's taking a million years because it takes a million years in real
time. And so I'm playing diplomacy. I'm playing against Bob Lasseter. I'm listening to his
show every night at drive time. And he's talking about, I really want to get home. He's talking
over a 50,000 watt clear channel radio station that they can hear in, you know, Hawaii, that
he really wants to get home and see what's going on in his diplomacy game. And I'm like,
man, this is cool. I am so cool.
Did you ever get him to mention you online directly or?
He just mentioned the game. I don't, I don't think he mentioned me on the air, but he did
mention the board occasionally. And that was awesome.
He gets more callers that way.
It was really great. Yeah, 20 more. I'm sure he had a lot more callers than he did people
he knew on the PBS.
I think of a subject that we haven't broached in some, in some detail. I mean.
We haven't broached relationships, like romantic relationships really. I don't know if that's
of interest to you.
The answer is twofold. A, it's very interesting to me. B, I usually don't like to force people
into that corner unless they want to talk about it. Cause a lot of people don't. If
you want to talk about it, sure. But I'm not, you know, I just don't like to make people
uncomfortable. So, you know, if you want to talk about a particularly amusing relationship
you either witnessed or were part of, all for it. Tragic. I'll also accept tragic. You
know, but I, I just don't, I don't, what, what's the word? I just don't, I don't corner
people more or less.
Well, I can tell you a couple of probably pretty funny stories that hopefully when these
guys see this documentary they won't be pissed off about.
You don't have to mention their names.
I won't mention their names. Although they'll know who they are. My very first boyfriend
I met online. I, the people I had known through school, I had always known them and none of
them were ever interested in me romantically. It wasn't until I met people totally outside
of the community I grew up in that I was seen as an attractive female. Now granted I was
probably seen as the only female, but nonetheless I felt good about myself because of it. I
remember a little bit before meeting this guy I talked to him voice for the first time
and that was really scary. Like some people don't want to meet because it ruins their
mental impression, but I didn't even want to hear someone's voice. It made me really
nervous. I remember he said, well why don't you, why don't you pick up? Pick up. And I
was like, oh I don't want to pick up. And I picked up and I talked to him just about
long enough to get his address and I sent him something. And a few weeks later we met
and we liked each other and we started dating. And we went out for about two and a half years
and but that was when I was from about 15 to 17 and I changed a lot and one of the things
that changed was my interest in him or my interest in, I don't know, I'll strike that.
I changed a lot through that relationship and at some point I began to be wooed by someone
else that was part of our BBS community. And what transpired was that I was up front with
my boyfriend about this. I said, you know, this has come up, this is sort of going on,
I'm interested in this guy, I still love you, what do we do? And so he created a private
sub board for the three of us to talk about it.
Did he have a good title?
I believe he changed the titles to his sub boards pretty regularly. Weekly if not more
often. But yeah, so he set up a private base for us to talk about how they felt about me
and what was going on. And that was really screwed up. I think it was in some ways his
way of kind of getting, feeling like a little, in a little more of control of the situation.
Feeling like things were more out in the open. But when I think about it now it seems really
really twisted. I think he may have invited a fourth party to just talk about it with
us at some point. But I don't really know what that was supposed to achieve.
Did it actually achieve anything or did you just?
No, not really.
You know, if you don't post that's pretty much the board.
Yeah, I mean I didn't really end up with either of them.
But it really worked. It told you you weren't interested in this one as much anymore. And
this one would have been a big mistake because he's the kind of guy that did this. How's
that?
Yeah, it was, I think it drove people a little crazy. I mean you talk about people feeling
cornered. I think the other guy felt really cornered. Okay, well you like my girlfriend?
Well let's talk about it here. What do you have to say?
Yeah, it's not traditionally how guys work. Usually they tend to be, there doesn't tend
to be a prospectus aspect to it. It tends to be more of a discovery aspect really. Yeah,
that's us here right now in your bed. Sorry. I'm going to go get something. You two talk
it out. I'm going to go over here. I'm going to go get something to eat.
I wouldn't have dated in high school if I had been online. My first boyfriend I met
when I was 15 and then when I was about 17 I started seeing someone else who I knew was
sort of part of that BBS community though he had been away at school. He moved back
to the area and I had heard of him and he did zines and so I had read those. I knew
of him and I encountered him on a D-dial and I started talking to him and I said oh you
know I know some people you know and he was like well I don't know who you are. I don't
know what you're talking about and he was pretty reluctant to get to know me and then
we got to know each other and it became abundantly clear that he liked me. The revealing, maybe
the clincher moment was when I logged in one night to this chat system that we both called
and I checked my email and you don't get a lot of room on D-dial email. You get 256
characters per message. So I checked my email and I guess he had logged on drunkenly earlier
that night and decided to send me some of the lyrics to your song by Elton John and
he hadn't really confessed anything to me at that point and I was actually seeing someone
else but that pretty much sent the message and I can just imagine how he must have felt
the next day waking up with a hangover thinking okay I went to the bar, I came home, what
did I do? Oh shit. I was drunk, I got online and I emailed the girl I like lyrics to your
song and then you know he still had to face me. Well no one could say it was one step
removed from say calling you at midnight. Yeah but you have that safety like he didn't
have to call me at midnight like you know he probably never called me on a regular basis
then. We were just sort of friends online and we'd see each other at shows or something
and you have that you have that impersonality. It's like being in your car you think you're
safe, you think you're insulated from the world and so you go a little further than
you would normally. Now do you think there's any irony in the fact that your parents who
were so you know insistent on everything about every person you were possibly meeting and
yet you still were able to find someone online? Well I don't think they originally thought
that I have no idea what they thought if they thought I was going to get prospected as a
girlfriend or what. I mean their worst fears were realized right away because when I was
15 the guy that I ended up with was 22. I came back from that first get together and
my mom said so was there anyone you liked? And I said yeah actually there kind of was
and she said not the 22 year old. Actually I think I might have told her he was 21. She
said not him right? I was like well but she wasn't threatened by him when she met him
and somehow I got away with being allowed to date him which is pretty crazy. I was also
going to mention that my best friend who actually lives in Boston now she told her mom we met
when we were 14 and it was only a couple of years ago that she didn't tell her mom that
we had met through debate which is what she originally told her. No we met on a chat system
and I thought she was really cool because she liked they might be giants. Which is no
criteria when you're dealing with people on a PBS but I thought she was awesome. That
reminds me of a story of me and my first girlfriend for lack of a better term who was named Karen
or Ren and I went to have dinner at her house on the other side of the city and we'd been
hanging around for the afternoon and having a pretty good time and stuff and then we were
called down to dinner with her parents and sort of as we were on the way down the stairs
she's like by the way my parents don't know that I have a modem so if they ask you're
in my English class and I was like what's our teacher's name and she says the name of
the teacher and her parents are like so you go to the school and I'm like yes. I'm like
just trying not to say anything and have food in my mouth through the whole meal. I didn't
know how to fake that I didn't use PBS's but she wasn't allowed anywhere near where all
the axe murderers hung out. How did she secretly have a modem? I think she, they bought it
from her and taken it away and she'd taken it, yeah that's what it was. Oh okay. Yeah
they'd taken it away as a punishment and she'd stolen it back. Okay so but the con, alright
so it wasn't as extreme as them not knowing what a modem or knowing what a modem is. Right
that was what I originally thought. Okay alright not as scary as it could have been. And then
the cat says hi look at me. Okay. I think it's an interesting thing about PBS is basically
it gives little kids an opportunity to practice like the workplace harassment that they're
going to have to toy with later on in their lives because like the way that a girl gets
made a co-sis offer gets wonderful access or something like that is to just flirt a
little. I mean the first step of that flirting is admittedly just typing F. I never flirted.
I mean unless they were the people that I wanted to be my boyfriends but I never flirted
for access. No. I'm just friendly and let me tell you if you're a girl online and you're
friendly people fall in love with you and that's all you need to do. Oh yeah. Because
I really got the impression that for some people that I encountered I was the first
girl that had ever talked to them and that made me their soulmate. Yeah that happened
for me too except you know it was a guy. Yeah. Other than that it was perfect. Yeah absolutely
but like on Pyrotas and things like that like you definitely wanted the girls on your side
because that was the surest way to ensure you would get to the top and win the game
as soon as possible. Yeah if I think about it right now if I think like when I was 22
and I pictured myself with a fifteen year old guy that was unbelievable to me. Fifteen
year old guys are actually twelve. Right that's part of the problem and theoretically fifteen
year old girls are what eighteen? Yeah something like that. So I mean I don't know like I was
seven years younger than the first two people I dated and I've almost I've never dated someone
younger not for any particular reason it just it never seemed like an issue to me. My parents
are thirteen years apart so I don't think they had that they had the difference argument
they had the you're fifteen and that he's too old argument on their side but they met
him and they judged him on who he was and he was a good person and they didn't find
him to be a pervert or that he was going to corrupt me. There were a lot of people that
were concerned his mother had her lawyer call him and read him the statutory rape act for
the state of Illinois just in case he was wondering and apparently fondling a clothed
breast counts as statutory rape so watch it but as much as it does sound a bit strange
now at the time it didn't feel strange to me and it still seems it was natural I don't
know. Well I mean because the thing is that now you know in press and media it's portrayed
as a victimization. I never felt like a victim but I'm sure some people are victimized I'm
sure people are victimized every day every you know at Walmart I'm sure people are victimized
but probably more than they know. I think I thought of it as a cool thing I think I
thought of it as a nice thing that I was talking to people on their own terms I was talking
to people because they were interesting people to me not because they were in my class or
my prescribed age group or in a social setting that was accepted by society or in a country
club or wherever people were supposed to meet when they were 15 at the arcade I don't
know I was talking to them because they were interesting and it was that whole abandoning
of snap judgments and the abandonment of the borders that are arbitrarily prescribed on
people because you know as adults we know that somebody's seven year age difference
is meaningless in terms of how good a friendship you can have with them and in terms of even
how good a relationship you can have with them you're going to have issues on how you
relate you may have differences in values depending on those differences but I think
that whether or not a person is good or good for you or right for you or you're in love
with them is not age sensitive. I think that one thing that's interesting about BBSers
and their friendships is like most of my friends I've met either through BBSs or later
through the internet and it's really funny that you can have been friends with someone
for like five years and then you're like so how old are you anyhow you know like that
would never happen in a normal friendship I guess and or you can be like you know you've
been really good friends with someone and then one day you find out they're black or
something like that like we played the game before of you know you walk into like a bar
or a restaurant or something and you're like so which table here do you think is a bunch
of BBSers like you know it's the it's the table that's full of like guys girls a bunch
of punks some geeks you know. This is the greatest place ever on earth. In terms of
meeting people and people that were were pretty impenetrable shtick there was a squirrel in
the Chicago area whose name was Nibbler and that was a challenge for me I saw that and
I said I gotta know I gotta get through the squirrel I gotta break the squirrel I gotta
I gotta meet the guy and I talked to the squirrel a lot online and he really he was just all
about giving acorns to people he liked and squeaking and nibbling on things and I thought
no no there's a mystique to this and I called him he's very very very awkward very timid
somehow I bullied him into meeting with me and he was so disappointing. I think maybe
maybe that really was his best way of talking to the world I don't know I'm sure he was
really nice but it was creepy that he couldn't relate to people I mean maybe that I mean
BBS's were a haven for people that couldn't relate to people and for that I loved it and
for that I love those people but you want the person behind a shtick to be brilliant
not dependent I guess on that thing and that was tough but I probably just scared the hell
out of him but you know you look back and you go like that was this girl and she demanded
I meet her and I went and I met her and I did nothing and nothing happened oh I was
such an idiot and 15 years later she's in a documentary saying how big a disappointment
it was that's the best time to actually have it it would be best if he's like walking by
and you know goes up on the TV yeah there was this guy there was a squirrel that's me
I'm still a squirrel inside making big rings on the cosplay circuit yeah I was gonna take
that somewhere the you know there's there was a guy who I I loved his BBS and one day
it crashed or went down and he put up an answering machine and the answering machine was as funny
as the BBS by far and he changed the message all the time tell you the BBS is down but
blah blah blah and he'd say the funniest damn things and so for a long time I just called
the answering machine just to listen to him and he was just like what was it he's like
I got turned off by the Mexican phone company Taco Bell it's one of the jokes I remember
from him and he like had all these other things he would say and you know it was an indication
the guy was what made the BBS I mean he was the funniest part of the BBS and he he was
the driving creative and he didn't need the BBS to be funny I mean he was he was funny
on his own just him talking on the phone was funny enough for me on a message dial a cool
guy they don't have a context for it yeah how do you do I mean how do you how do you
express it that's that's one of the reasons I'm doing this is because there is this enormous
amount of weight that is being lost there's a great character in the Toronto Eats newsgroup
he sort of faded away and I'm not sure how much of a character he is but it's the closest
thing to like a character that I've seen and a BBS like environment that I've seen in years
there's a guy that calls himself Demetri the Greek stud who posted this sort of dining
out newsgroup and he posts these fantastic elaborate detailed well considered qualified
reviews of restaurants around town he's got you've got their phone number he knows how
much he paid for everything he sampled the wine he sampled his girlfriend's dish it's
a great restaurant review he knows a lot about food interspersed through all of this you
know he's got he even knows if they've got handicap access interspersed through all
of this he mentions the ethnicity of every single person working in the restaurant and
the potential for getting pussy when you go there completely straight and half the people
think he's you know Satan and half the people think he's the fucking funniest thing there
ever was he's like this is a fine restaurant you know they've got an excellent selection
of these vintages blah blah blah we like sitting outside they were too close to the
smokers here the trout was good this wasn't as good the risotto was good the spinach was
not so good the Romanian waitresses are amazing if you've never tasted Romanian pussy you
have no idea what I'm talking about but you have got to get down there get three beers
in these women and they'll go all night the desserts were really good blah blah blah
he's unbelievable and I think he's not he's playing it up although I do think those things
are on his mind but do you have any other thoughts about being a sister about being
the person who ran a PBS because you chose to do it you chose to go with it is there
anything else that comes to mind it was a very satisfying thing to to run a board and
to make a board and yeah I I missed the the feeling like most of my friends were sissaps
too my close friends and it was just sort of an unspoken assumption that everything
we were ever doing any time could just sort of be put on hold every time someone called
one of our boards so we could just sort of take a peek at them which really gives you
a complex as a user by the way I mean I remember for the longest time when I was using other
people's BS's I would write everything very carefully because I knew it was important
not to say anything embarrassing and have to backspace it because the sissap would be
watching and he'd haul you into chat and say I saw that and I don't like what you're trying
to get away with it screw chat my old boyfriend my first boyfriend Andy he would break into
your message he would bracket what he was saying and write sissap colon and then he'd
put in his commentary on what you were working on at the moment and then you'd keep writing
and he'd break in yeah that's like if you're going through your life and it's like something
God says you know actually that's wrong oh my god scary
yeah but he's also he actually has a space premium yeah I don't know spaces in this I
mean in the bbs world I don't know I guess they take take up space but that's pretty
Well, at the time it was an S100. Which, I don't know if you've ever bumped into an S100.
I haven't.
It's old enough that, okay, it's old enough that 8K, the 8K memory board was this big.
Okay. I can see that they would be concerned.
So he was always very, you know, you didn't have to, but he was very edgy about it.
The original BBS, when you called, it reset the machine.
It pounded the machine so that by the time it hit the third ring, the machine rebooted so that it would answer your call.
And that was how they ensured that the machine was always up and ready for you.
It was pounded. It would actually power cycle the machine.
So you called it, and that was how they got it.
And the thing would just go, oh, someone called me.
That was how they got around the auto-answer.
Was that an auto-answer would power cycle the machine.
And the machine would go, whoa, answering.
That was the first thing it did.
Oh, and he got the first idea for the first BBS on ARPAnet.
That's always funny when people talk about, oh, there were BBSs and then there was the internet.
Oh, there was the internet, and they got this great idea.
And they went with BBSs for a while until the internet was done in the oven.
And then they went on.
Oh, this may not be interesting at all, but I'll bracket it maybe in an interesting way.
But you talk about PD boards, and I don't remember what I called them.
I think I must have called them real name boards.
And most of the time I gravitated towards the handle boards,
but I was living in both worlds quite comfortably.
I didn't have crossovers really, but I spent a lot of time on Mac boards.
That's how I learned a lot about the Mac.
That's how I got a lot of software, not pirate software necessarily,
but that's where I got a good grounding.
And then I sort of found the community aspects were stronger in the handle boards,
maybe because the people were younger, they were less serious.
They were more like me.
I don't know.
But I found it really interesting going to all kinds of groups, especially being young.
It wasn't so strange being young and meeting a bunch of kids in a mall in the suburbs,
but it was pretty strange going to a Macintosh users group where everyone was 30 or 40,
and I was 15.
And it was strange running, you know, running fighter net groups,
or I participated in the Stillwater BBS list, the big Chicago BBS list that was pages and pages long,
and they sort of had deputies for a certain range in the alphabet.
And my job was to call all those boards every month,
see if they were still up, and see what any changes were.
And they all just had one line.
I wish I could remember all the abbreviations.
I know there are still Stillwater's lists online, of course.
But I hadn't even remembered World War IV until you brought it up,
and I have this huge flashback, because of course that was the most popular one for quite a while.
WWIV.
Most people when I talk to them, that's a good example of pronunciation,
because to a person, anybody who mentions it,
and by that I mean not somebody who's responding to what I'm saying, calls it WWIV.
All of them say WWIV boards.
And I'll say, you know what it stood for, and they're like, oh yeah, WWIV.
Interesting.
Without an exception.
The Sysop-Sysop thing is another one I always like to pull.
Sysop, yeah.
I must have said Sysop for years, until I discovered I was being horribly, horribly gauche.
My friends and I always said Whizop.
I only say Sysop for the benefit of normal people.
Whizop.
Whizop was better than Sysop.
I mean, come on.
I actually have four separate pronunciations with Sysop.
And two of them, of course, are one person pronouncing it that way, and nobody else does.
And what are those?
Sysop and Sysdop.
Sysdop.
Sysdop, that's nice.
Does that have a lisp or something?
He just would reduce system operator to Sysdop.
And he did it enough times that I asked him about it.
And he said, yeah.
That's great.
And I mean, he's been running a BBS since 82.
Wow.
It's now a website.
And he went to BBScon.
So I bet you didn't.
I don't.
Well, he went to BBScon.
So he went to a convention of BBSguides and still came away with Sysdop.
So, all right.
It's there.
That's what it's like.
There's a few other ones that I'm forgetting.
Of course, I completely forgot about the Z thing.
My father-in-law constantly tries to get me into positions where I say Z just so he can laugh at me.
He's like, what's that letter after Y?
I'm like, Z.
He's like, ha ha.
That's great.
Just for fun.
Simple pleasures.
Just simple pleasures.
That's right.
Just a little extra little hang that he can give me.
In front of his friends, also very important.
He's not the American.
Hey, when you're a Peter, you're the forerunner.
You've got to always remember that.
You're the forerunner.
You're the funny one.
You come from that funny place with all the missiles.
Well, then there's the, I mean, what's the graphic interchange format, Jeff?
Compuserve.
Oh, GIF.
Or is it?
Yeah, it's GIF.
Or is it JIF?
That doesn't make any sense.
I know it doesn't make any sense, but at some point someone told me JIF was right.
It sounds like JIF.
Yeah.
Even though it's not traffic.
It's for good graphic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's, you know, you look at it and you say JIF.
And how do you abbreviate Compuserve?
CS?
CI dollar sign.
Compuserve Information Systems.
CI dollar sign.
Because it was expensive.
Or a source that you abbreviate to the losers.
Because there was Compuserve and there was the source and they already had his throats.
And then one day Compuserve bought the source and there wasn't really much of a question anymore.
And then AOL bought Compuserve and that was the end of that.
And then AOL bought everybody.
That's how all the fairy tales end.
I miss the fact that some of those people made it into the modern age and there were people actually posting to newsgroups
and living on the internet with addresses like 657113.291181 at compuserve.com.
Comma.
Yeah.
Comma.
Comma.
Yeah.
That's great.
What the fuck?
Respect yourself.
Come on.
Yeah.
I feel like, yeah.
How can you do that?
Hey, Ebert had it.
Ebert's, Roger Ebert was at Compuserve for a long time.
That's funny stuff.
They'd take his address and they'd go, go bother Ebert.
Ebert loves that.
Ebert happy.
I'm always interested in the guys who wrote the program because to a man they tend to be pretty funky.
How popular was Sapphire?
Is it even, or Sapphire or Pyroto, is it even worth discussing?
Or is it so unique to Toronto and Montreal that...
Well, A, well the two questions don't match.
It's always worth discussing.
I discuss AE lines.
Do you even know AE lines?
Yeah.
See, they disappeared by 88.
So they're pretty much, they're called ASCII Express lines.
They were the number one way to pirate Apple games.
There was a program called ASCII Express.
It was a terminal program.
Well, it had a, like an answer mode.
And you could call it, you'd enter a password and you were on the drives.
And you could say, look at the drives or give me a file from the drives.
Everyone used these things.
They were the king of the online world.
Now they're gone.
Nobody else with an AE line.
So I want that on tape.
So Sapphire and Pyroto, I've seen quite a bit on Pyroto.
Pyroto seems to have a following in other, in America and other places.
Sapphire, maybe not as much.
Tim tells me he sold about a hundred copies.
A lot of people used that without buying it from Tim.
Right.
So I mean, he looks at them, he doesn't look at any of his BDS programs as being a major success.
You know, but he's judging it by the amount of, how many times they were sold.
Right.
Now whether or not, I've seen people...
Yeah, I don't think he's, yeah.
That's the point I was going to make is that in terms of what Tim's success was,
like his programs were all social experiments.
And even though he never made money off of them and he was pretty unsuccessful.
And even though I disagree with him about a lot of things,
like there is just no refuting the fact that a large chunk of my worldview
comes from my experiences on Pyroto and Sapphire.
Like I probably, in the way I conduct myself in every life, everyday life,
I'm, you know, just as you were saying about that guy sees his routines in AOL these days,
like there are probably some of Tim Campbell's routines in me.
And that's a pretty weird and scary thing.
But yeah, I mean, like Pyroto forces a certain personality,
only a certain kind of personality can succeed.
And Sapphire, the same thing, but in a more democratic way.
But yeah, I mean, Pyroto, to explain a little further,
I mean, you have to post in a certain fashion in order to get points
that you need to succeed in the game, as well as you have to have the diplomatic skills
and questions and answers.
But your messages are all rated by the entity that is programmed into the game.
And you learn what that entity likes and it's really tough to ever unlearn that.
So you learn to speak concisely.
You learn that like certain types of arguments will get you a good rating
if they're well stated, well punctuated, well spelled.
And like even at the most subconscious level,
I mean, that has got to change how you express yourself.
Like I read the source code for Pyroto, so I know that it looks for certain keywords.
And I probably use those keywords in my everyday conversation more than I would otherwise.
You get so much esteem.
Yes, I do.
Tzotl is pleased with me.
You threw me by abbreviating Spirit of the Land.
What, you're going to say that every time?
Come on.
No, you say Tzotl.
Well, there's another pronunciation one for you.
Tostle? Tzotl? Tzotl?
It's obviously Tzotl.
Well, I didn't know what it was before today.
I've never actually played Pyroto.
My problem is whenever he says Pyroto Mountain,
I think of Crisis Mountain,
which was an Apple II arcade game
where you had to run up and down this little volcano solving things,
which was a great game at the time and very mind-blowing for its incredible graphics.
But you're solving puzzles.
But hearing people talking about, you know,
oh, and on Pyroto Mountain this all happened,
and I'm thinking like, oh, what, in between throwing the logs into the fire?
Toss! Okay! Exactly.
So, yeah.
Well, his mention of you was actually rather positive.
He just said that you thought you were a great guy.
He said, I don't think he has entirely great things to say about me in some ways.
We've had some, like, differences.
I thought that the system was about struggling and the way struggle forms you
and either makes you a good person or a bad person or evolves you in some way.
And I thought he thought that, too.
But as it turned out, he thought something different.
And at one point, he declared me and three other people who were playing Web Pyroto to be the winners.
And I was like, what do you mean? We can't win.
You can never win the game.
Which we thought was the lesson.
Yeah, I thought that was the lesson.
I mean, you can have supreme power, but does that make you the winner?
I don't think so.
But, yeah.
So I said to him, no, you're wrong.
I didn't win. Please take my name off the list.
And he wouldn't.
That's one way to get you out the door.
You're the owner of the bar.
Okay.
I talked to him about that.
I'd be poorly phrasing it.
He spoke a bit about how upon looking back,
there was a programmed spirit of the game beyond him calling it the spirit of the land.
But there was a spirit.
The real spirit of the land was the vibe that was going on between the people that were there
and the community that they were making.
And the problem that we had when we quit Web Pyroto was that he was, for various reasons,
some of them his own personal taste, some of them economic reasons,
skewing the data a bit by, I would say he was contaminating the results, basically,
by trying to steer things in a certain way.
Whereas I thought that the beauty of Pyroto was that the community was shaped out
of everyone figuring out their own power with each other
and everyone figuring out how to talk to each other and dealing with it.
And yeah, some people were going to come in and be assholes to you every day.
But you know what? That's going to happen to you in life.
It resulted in some very unpleasant circumstances.
But we liked that.
Right. It resulted in unpleasant circumstances that made some people want to not play the game.
And you know what? So does life.
But then, because he had certain things in mind like, oh, you know, that lady was nice,
or I'd like to get more click-throughs on my banner ads,
he would change certain dynamics or they would institute weird, weird,
like on Survivor when they switched the tribes.
He would just sort of throw in these things that had never been part of the game
that were suddenly new rules on that we all had to figure out how to get
such and such kind of points or such and such kind of other points
that didn't make any sense and didn't have anything to do with the game we had been playing
and were designed just to make things more fair by his hand,
which seemed incorrect because it seemed like the goal was for us together
to make things more fair or more evil or more scary.
Or if we didn't succeed in making them more fair to pay the price for that.
Yeah. Or whatever it was they were going to be.
But not because somebody had an object.
And when he put the object on it, that spoiled it.
One of the things he mentioned that annoys him the most or annoyed him the most
was when people would take issue with stuff on the web Payodo
by quoting from the 1988 manual to the original program.
The original program was the true program, though.
I'm surprised that annoys him.
That's when people would say, you know, back here,
because it's been 14 years, and people would quote from this manual you wrote 14 years ago
and go, you know, this web-based internet thing you're doing,
oh, quote into this manual, you shouldn't be.
I asked him why didn't he just rename it a new thing.
Yeah, I think he should have.
And he said because people would go back to the manual,
but back in the manual it was called Payodo, what have you done?
That's a cop out.
No, that's not true.
I mean...
They would have just gone, it's Payodo.
You're wrong.
You're calling it Magic Mountain.
I think that's what he...
At the top of his head he would have called it Magic Mountain.
There was a clone of Payodo called Magic Mountain,
so he wouldn't have gotten away with that.
There are two things to say about the clones that were pretty funny.
They were pretty pathetic.
Payodo was the only one that was any good.
Yeah.
I don't know if there will be other people I talk to who know of Payodo.
I throw it out at people and they go...
And we'll see what their response is.
I am interviewing a wide variety of people in Toronto.
The only reason I'm not interviewing many people this weekend
is because it's a family weekend.
Otherwise I'd be doing like three, four interviews a day for three days.
Hammering them.
Otherwise I'll be sure to ask other people about their opinions on Payodo and stuff.
That's very interesting.
I hope people...
Did you deal once with Free Speech or with Sapphire?
I don't know Free Speech.
Free Speech?
But yeah, Sapphire was...
Free Speech is the one that also had other...
Also had AI routines and also did stuff.
I mean, yeah, Sapphire was my board
and at least three or four other boards I called.
Most of which fortunately weren't called the Pinnacle Club.
And most of the Pyrotas weren't called Pyroto Mountain.
Again, against Tim's suggestion.
So as a Sysop, you take the staff of like...
It's nice what the creator had in mind, but that's great.
I'll file that under what the creator had in mind and go on my own way.
Tim provided a very nice starting point in my opinion,
but unfortunately he wanted it to end at his starting point
and I wanted things to evolve.
Okay, that makes sense.
Makes sense.
I mean, I'm also, by the way, I'm really trying not to pit you against Tim.
I am very grateful to Tim.
He provided probably the funnest game I ever played in my life,
but yeah, it just seems like we had a slightly different take on it.
Have you met him?
No, I haven't.
We moved to Toronto right around the same time we quit
and stopped going to the get-togethers.
It probably would have been confrontational if we met him.
Yeah, I would have wanted to smack him.
Well, you know, he took away our best toy, so...
Yeah, like his demented thinking kind of...
I don't know, at some point there were points where he was like,
yeah, you really get it.
He said to me, he's like, you really get it.
I'm like, great, because I'm really enjoying this.
And then I realized he didn't get it.
And then all of our friends...
I think that's the case.
The users got it because they were playing his very well-programmed game.
We honestly don't think that he really understands his own game.
Like, he doesn't...
For instance, here's a way I think you'll understand this.
He doesn't think that there should be a bad guy.
The guy that came to the door that didn't come in,
he's the bad guy on WebPyroto.
He's the baddest guy there's been.
And Tim fucking hates him.
And Tim, like, what does he do?
He antagonizes...
He changes his handle three or four times a day,
which makes it impossible to send him a message,
because you can only do it by...
He swears a lot. Tim can't handle that.
Swears a lot, changes his name.
He's changed his name enough times...
It's in the rules.
The game has a certain set of rules,
and different players have powers so that they can structure the spirit of the land.
And the servants of Soddle...
They're not called SysOps or WizOps even.
Servants.
They're supposed to serve the spirit of the land,
which is, in a sense, the greater good, the greater community.
And so they're not supposed to really, like, delete users or anything,
unless there's, like, real abuse, like, something extreme.
Breaking the rules.
Breaking the terms of service, for instance.
The rest of the things, the people who are in a higher position of power
are supposed to deal with that themselves, because it's their community.
You know, you don't want shit lying around your community.
You clean it up yourself.
So that was all fine, and everyone was okay with the rules.
Nobody ever disputed the rules or said there was anything wrong with them.
Soup goes, he changes his handle five times a day for four days.
Tim says, I'm gonna start a new rule that you can't change your handle.
Like, what?
But, you know, the users probably would have done that for him if he hadn't done that.
Yeah, the users, if they had had a problem with it, could have any time dealt with it.
But because it personally annoyed him,
he decides to change the rules of the game after 15 years.
Because, just basically because this guy's getting under his skin.
And he was getting under our skin, too, just to make that clear.
He was our worst enemy.
But when Tim vanished him and said he couldn't play anymore...
Just because he was mean.
That's when we quit.
Yeah. He unvanished him a few days later,
but we decided that if the people writing the game were gonna be that flaky and dumb,
we didn't really want to spend 10 hours a week or more.
Yeah, we didn't want to invest that much energy in something that could just
tip on its side at any point.
Yeah. Or where we would be forced to click a certain amount of banners in order to stay online.
I mean, fuck you.
They actually did that for a while.
Okay. That's this tape.
But yeah, he really didn't seem to understand that you're gonna need that guy.
Like, especially in a power game.
Of course there's gonna be a prick. There has to be a villain.
Have you ever seen a movie where there wasn't, you know, an adventurous movie
where there was a struggle, where there wasn't a dark side?
He would really like to pretend that there's not gonna be there
and that he would rather have a bunch of 50-year-old ladies talking about gardening
who don't get teased now and then
than have somebody who's pushing people to do better.