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.

34 responses total.

One of the biggest goodbyes goes to my most sustained and
fully developed pseudo, "valley", a.k.a. Orange Gopher, a.k.a.
Jeremy Mathers, a.k.a. various other things.  For years, Orange
Gopher was M-Net's premiere twit, a person with a knack for
raining on other people's parades, for identifying excatly what
would he could say to get under somebody's skin, and then saying
it.  Mike Myers would blow up and kick him off the system from
time to time, but O.G. would always come back.  O.G.  was actually
a collaborative effort between myself and a programmer at NETI
named Doug something-or-other.  The serious entries by "valley" in
the technical conferences were written by Doug, and I did all the
twit stuff.  In a way, Orange Gopher was my most successful
pseudo, because to the best of my knowledge nobody suspected that
I had anything to do with it.  People figured I just wasn't the
caustic type, I guess, but the thing that surprised me about doing
O.G. was that it was so easy.  O.G.  was the purest manifestation
of my dark side.

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.

I've done a few female pseudos.  In 1986 Marc VanHeyningen and I
got together and invented a fictitious sister for him named "deb".
Deborah VanHeyningen was supposedly an undergraduate at Mt.
Holyoke College in Massachusetts, spending her summers at home
working to earn money for college and getting onto M-Net whenever
she could cajole Marc into letting her use his Apple II.  I wrote
most of deb's conference responses and handled her mail, while
Marc did virtually all of her marathon !party sessions.

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.

Lately I've been doing a number of pseudos on both M-Net and Grex
which, now that I've decided not to do pseudos any more, I'm giving
up.  They've become rather high-profile personalities on those
systems, so in the interest of continuity I've made arrangments
for other people to take them over.  Hopefully the new folks
behind these pseudos will try to maintain consistency,
but if you notice subtle changes in the writing styles or
odd lapses of memory on the part of 'griz', 'polygon', 'lk',
'igor', 'md', 'bad', or 'arthur' -- well, now you know the
reason.

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

        Yes, I am not a psudo.
        John starts me off well. I am my own Psudo now. Even though I am not
to good yet. I will try better.
q
wq
s
/es

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

        And nice job, John, of taking over that old "remmers" pseudo I 
had lying about. It was getting stale.

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.

(Gee, won't Joe be surprised to find out he's been nothing but a
remmers pseudo all these years!)

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

Not just behind it, but also in front of it, on top of it, and on
both sides of it.

what about that annoying "kite" pseudo?

  I must say that "Mason Jones" was masterfully portrayed.  Getting
him to show up for code reviews was a coup de grace, but I always 
suspected.  I noticed that I never saw the two of you in the same 
room, and then he inexplicabily moved to S.F. .  I see now that was
your code.

Remmers is my pseudo.

Oh, my deer!

*Laugh*

Nice one.

I have become bored with the endless harrassment of David Parks,
and have returned to my original pseudo-form.
My apologies if I inconvenienced anyone in any of my incarnations 
(spite, kiter, kiterr, kiterrr, kiterrr-r-r-r-r (my motor was turning 
over, but I did not get anywhere with that one), persimmon, brain, 
lobe, neuron, chelsea, popcorn, retik, newno, or scintillation).
It will not happen again.

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.

heh...

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.

That and the first ride that you procured was being tied with a rope to the
bumper of an El Camino.

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

Well, it *was* special watching you pavement-ski like that.  

I had no idea what friction can do to the human body.

Okay. I confess. I'm the real ID; remmers is my pseudo.

What really impresses me is how many people have actually believed in this
one down through the years. I apologize to everyone, especially 'his' wife.

You *should* apologize to his wife--if that's the truth, it's an amazing
thing she hasn't left him!

But, but... chelsea is another of remmers' pseudos.  Someday, their
gonna make a movie about this man.  It'll have a cast of thousands
and be titled, "Son of Sibyl" or "How to Have a Large Family Reunion
While On a Tight Budget".

s their/they're

I don't believe it. One man is having an entire conference item talking to 
himself. Pathetic. Next thing you know, someone will realize that besides
whoever that guy is, there are only two real people in this conference.
Spagh!

Well, at least I'm able to call my own behavior "pathetic".

That's one of the few things we have in common.

Bye, polygon.  Miss 'ya!
 :-(

JOHN! YOUR SELDON?????  What si with your rpg confrence on M-net no offence
but, It stinks compared to mine

Response not possible - You must register and login before posting.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss