[talk.bizarre] Welcome to talk.bizarre! v. 1.7 (3/1/96)
Bill Coderre
Archive-name: talk-bizarre-faq
Posting-Frequency: fortnightly
WELCOME TO TALK.BIZARRE, the Usenet outpost of X Industries, Inc.
X Industries, the omnipresent corporation that everyone's been programmed to fear and love, has been "making the world safe for TECHNOLOGY" for an undisclosed amount of time!
You must be awfully excited to be a new "employee" (pitiful cog inside this mighty corporate leviathan), far too excited to pay careful attention to the information you will soon be subsumed in. So we're going to make the whole process as simple and straightforward as possible, in this brief yet comprehensive Employee Manual. Please take a moment to read all 7,619 characters and 1,113 words of it.
Naturally, as with any megalolithic corporation, we have certain employee rules and guidelines. Failure to comply results in Protein Recycling, so pay attention!
First off, these are the three hard-and-fast rules of talk.bizarre:
1) READ THIS FAQ before posting.
2) Please DO NOT CROSSPOST.
3) FOLLOW THE FOUR RULES of posting below.
talk.bizarre is a virtual community
talk.bizarre is one of the oldest Usenet newsgroups, founded (twice) in 1985 as net.bizarre. It was later moved to be one of the first two talk.* groups. Unlike other Usenet newsgroups, it has a history.
Also unlike other Usenet newsgroups, the denizens here all know each other -- perhaps not in person, but definitely in spirit. This is not a "bulletin board" or a "message area" or a "chat room" or a "support group." It is a community.
(And, incidentally, unlike what you've been told by the 193,817 "How to Connect to the Internet in Under 5 FemtoSeconds For Dogs" books, talk.bizarre is most definitely NOT the place to discuss romance, bondage sex, or alien abduction. There were, at last count, 419 newsgroups dedicated to discussing bondage sex with aliens alone, so go there. The authors of these books should be ashamed of themselves, for not bothering to ACTUALLY READ talk.bizarre before writing that crap.)
| bou...@netcom.com (Thomas Boutell) writes:
| I've come to believe that talk.bizarre must be simultaneously
| a loving, hugging, COME HOLD ME YOU BIG GALOOT community of
| sweet sensitive koala bears and a boiling death-swamp
| of fifty-foot fire-breathing clue mosquitoes.
We strive together to create something out of the ordinary, to express ourselves well, to create texts that defy mundanity and boggle the mind.
| Diane Wilson (thwi...@bnr.ca) wrote:
| One metamessage of talk.bizarre is, "This could be the truth,
| and you'd never know."
You can be part of our community. (Like you really have a choice, at this point.)
the rules of posting to talk.bizarre
1. Read Before You Post. (We call this "Read Learn Evolve.")
2. Never post non-bizarre things. (We call this: "Fail to Suck.")
3. Keep postings short and well-written. (We call this: "Editing.")
4. Do not crosspost. (We call this: "Mortal Fear.")
We'd like you to read talk.bizarre before you post to it, to get an idea of what the community members like to read, and what's utter trash. (Remember! Only you can prevent silly posting faux-pas that result in those messy Spontaneous Head Explosions.)
One excellent suggestion for posting is to identify your favorite articles in talk.bizarre, and then emulate their style. No, this does not mean DUPLICATE. (See http://www.funhouse.com/jfw/how-to-post.html )
We'd like you to post only material appropriate to the group, and NEVER CROSSPOST, because, after all, there are 675,008 Usenet newsgroups (maybe not on YOUR news server, honky), and only one of them is talk.bizarre. Since everyone here already reads all the other newsgroups, we get bored seeing the same thing over and over again. You don't want us to be bored, now do you?
(See http://www.funhouse.com/jfw/how-not-to-xpost.html ) (or else)
And we'd like you to keep things short because, after all, we are Busy Entities. Can't be wasting Company time.
Anyway, that's it. That's all you have to do.
Except for one thing, of course. You must report to X Industries Personnel (http://www.xindustries.com/ ) to have the Monty Python portion of your brain replaced with a thought transponder. We don't DO Python here. There's alt.fan.monty-python for that. Two doors down, on the left. Mind your head.
Here is a handy list of some things that are not considered bizarre:
unattributed work of other artists,
crossposts,
advertisements,
surveys,
moneymaking schemes,
Crossposts,
smileys,
Monty Python,
CrossPosts,
net "celebrities" (we created them),
any posts which COULD contain boastful uses of the words "me too,"
long .signatures,
personal ads,
anything that belongs in any other newsgroup, especially those whose
name contains one of the following: CONFIG, FAN, FLAME, HUMOR, IRC,
MISC, RELIGION, STARTREK, or TASTELESS,
and especially...
CROSSPOSTS.
| ce...@genmagic.com (C J Silverio) wrote:
| The management reserves the right to discriminate
| on the grounds of stupidity. It might enjoy mocking
| your self-hatred, in a casual way, but it's stupidity
| that gets you killfiled.
how to read talk.bizarre
One person assures that the "trick" to maximizing talk.bizarre reading pleasure is to kill all crossposts. Another says, "Not strong enough! Kill all the REPLIES." Another advises scrupulously maintaining a list of "sekrit k00l people" and killing everything else. Another says, "read the stuff that's VOTED on to be good!"
Well, you ask one brain, you get two or three answers, you know what mister x says. Everyone has their own opinions. John Woods wrote a nice one: http://www.funhouse.com/jfw/how-to-read.html
further reference
Since X Industries values corporate diversity, we are PROUD to recognize the hard work of our employees in providing FAQs, as well as many other items of interest.
The Talk.Bizarre Wasteful Archive was created and is maintained by Gerald Oskoboiny (Oldbie Level Plush) and Paul Lord (Oldbie Level Methylene Blue). The TBWA has an archive of tens of thousands of postings to talk.bizarre. You can read articles since before you were born (if you are under ten and a half years old)! Many famous "net.celebrities" got their start in talk.bizarre, and now you can read their humble beginning efforts. It's at:
http://tbwa.volcano.org/wasteland/tb.html
Paul Vader (Oldbie Level Cumulus) has maintained a VOLUNTARY (remember, "that which is not forbidden...") reader voting service, which allows you, the reader, to determine the nutrient level of your favorite t.b posters. It's at:
http://www.mcs.net/~pv/web/tb/
John Woods (Oldbie Level Magenta) has written a fairly extensive FAQ of his own, and created an archive of early t.b FAQs, artwork, and even talk.bizarre OFFICIAL SOFTWARE:
http://www.funhouse.com/jfw/talk-bizarre.html
Miles O'Neal (Oldbie Level AMC-Pacer) provides FAQs, software, photos from group gatherings (known as "BOBs"), and a generally bad attitude:
http://www.schoneal.com/tb/
Tom Boutell (Oldbie Level Ocarina) provides a list of t.b Oldbies who have web pages:
http://www.boutell.com/boutell/tb/tb.html
COMPLAINTS, COMPLIMENTS, QUESTIONS, QUATLOOS:
b...@wetware.com
bill coderre
...has been using the pseudonym "mr HEINOUS" in talk.bizarre since 1986.