Remmers 'Fesses Up!

Oct 14 15:36 UTC 1991

Heretofore I've always taken the position of neither confirming
nor denying accusations of pseudohood lobbed in my direction.  And
lord knows I've been accused enough times over the years.  People
have said they think I'm mulberry, crimson, briori, czara, and
various other characters of dubious authenticity.

But you know, every now and then you reach a point in your life
where you say enough's enough, it's been fun, but it's time to
move on to something else.  And it really *has* been fun doing
pseudos for all these years, but I don't want to any more, and to
put a cap on my pseudo period I'd like to make a clean breast of
it and say "goodbye" to the various pseudos characters I've
created in my years of conferencing from 1984 to the present.

response 2 of 34:

Oct 14 15:38 UTC 1991

Another pseudo from my early days was "bhoward", full name Bruce
Howard, a brash, happy-go-lucky U of M undergraduate who was
actually a composite of several friends from my college days.  I
think most of M-Net believed that Bruce was a real person.

As a little twist to the "bhoward" pseudo, I also invented a
pseudo named "seldon" to serve as Bruce's roommate.  "Seldon",
a.k.a. Joe Saul, had a sober world-view that was the polar
opposite of Bruce's.  I made Joe into an outspoken M-Net policy
critic, some of whose views I really agreed with and others I did
not.

response 4 of 34:

Oct 14 15:39 UTC 1991

It's not often that what starts out as a pseudo turns into a real
person, but that's what happened in triplicate with my "family"
pseudo.  For years my driving route from Ann Arbor to Ypsilanti
had included Geddes Avenue, and I had also heard of a local family
named Geddes and knew the names of several family members,
although I had never met any of them.  In what I admit was a
rather brash bit of impulsiveness, I took out an account as "Meg
Geddes" on M-Net, followed soon after by sister "Katie Geddes" and
mother "Jan Geddes".  They all attracted quite a bit of attention
on M-Net, so much so that after a few months word got back to the
real Geddes family, who were understandably upset by the whole
business.  I got in touch with them, 'fessed up that I was the
impersonator, and in the course of our conversations, much to my
surprise and delight, they started getting curious about computer
conferencing and thought that it might be fun to try.  The upshot
was that we decided that I'd give them the passwords to the three
Geddes accounts and that they'd start logging in themselves.  So
it was that three of my pseudos quietly turned into real people.
I don't think anybody noticed the transition.

response 6 of 34:

Oct 14 16:56 UTC 1991

John, you *promised* you wouldn't tell!  <griz sulks>

response 8 of 34:

Oct 15 17:10 UTC 1991

Wow. It looks like I should have been here earlier.

response 10 of 34:

Oct 16 02:11 UTC 1991

I hesitated to mention one of the most elaborate pseudo hoaxes
I've been involved with because a number of prominent Ann Arbor
citizens were in on the conspiracy, but it's been a few years now,
and I won't mention any names, so I guess it's okay.

In the mid-1980's, an Ann Arbor telecommunications company called
Network Technologies International (NETI) was running a for-profit
computer conferencing system called Arbornet.  After a few months
of operation, NETI decided that Arbornet was unlikely to be a
profitable venture in the forseeable future and wanted out.  A
group of venturesome and forward-looking local professional and
business people, yours truly among them, seized the opportunity to
try their hand at running a public-access conferencing system and
bought Arbornet from NETI.

Because of the riskiness of the venture and the somewhat dubious
public reputation of bbs's in the public mind (because of all the
hacker and pirate boards that had received media attention), the
new owners of Arbornet did not wish to have their names associated
with it until it had had a chance to prove itself and establish a
reputable image.  To this end, we invented a fictional family --
the Joneses -- to serve as the owners and managers, to give
Arbornet the image of a down-home mom-and-pop enterprise:  "Susan
Holzer Jones" was the president, her husband "Allan Jones" served
as secretary and treasurer, and their son "Mason Jones", a
dyed-in-the-wool bbs'er and U of M computer science major, was the
technical manager.  As American as apple pie.

I won't reveal the names of the folks who portrayed the Joneses
on-line, but the person behind "Susan Jones" was a prominent local
writer with a number friends who are active in city and county
politics.

After a year or so, the anonymous backers of this enterprise, who
all tended to suffer from short attention spans anyway, got bored
with it, passed Arbornet on to other hands, and the "Jones family"
quietly disappeared from the local conferencing scene.  A lot of
folks who were users of the old Arbornet probably still think they
were real people.

response 12 of 34:

Oct 22 05:23 UTC 1991

Remmers , were you one of the people behind the "mike" pseudo a few
years back ?

response 14 of 34:

Nov 2 04:59 UTC 1991

what about that annoying "kite" pseudo?

response 16 of 34:

Jan 22 02:27 UTC 1992

Remmers is my pseudo.

response 18 of 34:

Jan 23 02:58 UTC 1992

*Laugh*

Nice one.

response 20 of 34:

Feb 24 04:25 UTC 1992

Actually, the ennui-ridden Ms. Toothbrush might have been one of those 
inferior pseudos (been?...), but she certainly never was Spite. Why, just
the other day I saw her hitch-hiking on Washtenaw Blvd., and I would have
nothing to do with her.

response 22 of 34:

Mar 13 05:52 UTC 1992

Indeed, I offered Mr. Lemon-Lime Spite the first ride I procured, but he 
was entirely too busy holding down the median with his body.

response 24 of 34:

May 20 05:24 UTC 1992

I had to come up with *something* special for you.