June 8, 2002

Nutcase was still trying to call me in December.

Bitch, in an effort to look like a good guy, didn't interfere with her eldest daughter corresponding with me, until in December it suddenly stopped. Likewise, a few members left a week before our team's final game before several of us migrated to the first team I had belonged to. Before I did, I told the captains of my identity, and how I had troubles with Nutcase and Bitch. They knew I was coming back on board in part to find refuge after a devastating year.

It wasn't long before it became apparent that ADD had constructed a website which had Nutcase and Primadona as founding captains, Bitch, someone I brought to Acrophobia, teen, and the former offline friend (you remember? He was the one who was apparently pussywhipped by Primadona. It had also crossed my mind that Nutcase might have convinced him I was a womanizer. Let's call him Pussywhipped). I was heartwrenched in the summer; you can't imagine how I felt when I found this out. I was devastaded. [more]

DD 9:11pm EST on Saturday, Jun 8, 2002

So Nutcase was out of my life, and I could breathe a sigh of relief. Primadona was gone from the team, and it was more fun playing the game.

Seven and I met the ADD player and an old, old acquaintance from my first year on IRC during our trip. It was pleasant but hurried since we had a scheduled event to attend in the evening. She was more alet offline than online. I never would have guessed.

Some new player came up out of nowhere (Team Acrophobia by then was a very inbred sort of organization. Considering that most of the players were rednecks anyway, that was to be expected) who was befriending my TA administrative friends and the captain of a team I had discuss merging with. It became evident to me that this new person was in fact Nutcase, but I didn't let on.

[more]

DD 8:15am EST on Saturday, Jun 8, 2002

June 7, 2002

We were an interesting group: Among the team were:

• A dense chick with ADD who kept missing directions

• A Primadona stage mother with two kids driven to greatness

• A high strung bitch whose role model was Martha Stewart. She blamed the entire Jewish faith because her father was orthodox. She was ashamed of her heritage and didn't tell her kids they were technically Jewish.

• A 16 year old writer and poet

• A friend whom I knew offline and introduced the Internet to (more on him later. I know I keep saying that)

• An acquaintance from the whole following around thing who became a good friend online and off. Let's call her Seven, since that's her alias online lately.

There were others, but this is the core group for this story.

We had that aforementioned position of being the token clean team among hundreds of hipocrites. As the captain I took it upon myself to be the spokesperson and got a lot of flak for anything I said. Except that my team was anything but passive, and I did speak for us all and not just how I felt. Bitch thanked me on several occasions for sticking my neck out for them. [more]

DD 6:58pm EST on Friday, Jun 7, 2002

June 6, 2002

Online persona Captain Peter Blood
(I told myself that If I had to look like anything online, it might as well
be the best damned looking pirate this side of the West Indies)

Where do these characters come from? I mean, I know I was drawn into something during a pathetic time in my life, and the stress of what followed compromised my health so badly that by early 1997 there was discussion of signing up for Social Security. I was that messed up medically. Thank goodness for complementary medicine. It saved my life and I can hold a job and walk and everything. Well, not everything. More on that later. Suffice it to say, there's nothing like a male. Well, nothing is sometimes better. More on that later, too.

Anyway, on Thanksgiving 1996 I discovered #Acro hosted on two IRC networks. Loved the game. Hated the people. Same old same old white trash slugs you get everywhere. He's doing she who's stalking he is marrying she is... [more]

DD 10:48pm EST on Thursday, Jun 6, 2002

See, I had just broken up from an almost-relationship with this guy, and Nutty was divorced and taking care of her dying mother. I had lost my job and my health was declining. We had taken to being eachother's support group. We camped it up on the 30s channel so Sleez and others wouldn't hit on me, and guys wouldn't hit on her. We hung out online till about 4am. She couldnt sleep, and I'd tuck her in as Errol. Then she could sleep and then face the next day helping her mother and protecting the new IRC channel... [more]

DD 4:56pm EST on Thursday, Jun 6, 2002

It wasn't long before I got drawn into the world of cyberculture. IRC was and still is the true cyberspace. Only back in 1996, anyone who didn't live in a chatroom on AOL or CompuServe used it. The upside was its efficiency. The downside was that if you went to the default network of chat servers, you were in danger of being attacked by marauding packs of teen hackers, who'd take the channel you were on over, and either kick you out or flood you offline with an overload of data. (of course the newbies who went to the default network didn't know there were other, more secure places to make roots)

I stumbled onto a 30's aged channel. It was amusing that once they saw a pic of Errol Flynn I passed around, I immediately won operator status (means I had administrative privileges). I really thought I'd find people my own age there. It turned out many of them were either drunk or high, and some lunatic with multiple personalities alternately attacked the channel and cybered all the males (and some females). Let's call her "Sleez." Anyway, that's when I first learned that trying to be neutral didn't matter when a crazy had designs on you.

Someone made an annex channel and she attacked that too. I found among a handful of nice people someone from the midwest (she's in the Xena outfit in this picture). I told her I was female early on so she wouldn't *er* get the wrong idea. She did anyway in the end and stalked me in her delirium (let's call this new one "Nutty"). It's a long, ugly, convoluted story, but it came to a head when she left the channel we had started with an AI, stalked a new visitor, and msged her: "Did you know your boyfriend is a woman?" The fact was, my guest was expecting by her boyfriend in Alabama. Then came Nutty's deceptive plea to the Newsgroup magick community, which almost did me in. If ever there was proof that not only was magick possible, but that it could still affect you even if you weren't told, there it was. You can't trust someone who lives in a tiny house with 12 dogs and cats and doesn't clean the litterbox daily. Or could it have been the Prozac?

DD 12:36pm EST on Thursday, Jun 6, 2002

June 5, 2002

This morning, there was no sign of Tuvok or Tom (I got a Tom Paris so the ECH would have a spare uniform. This Tom wears a blue medic uniform) or their accessories. I Emailed our department as to their disappearance. I was totally freaked. I mean, who'd steal silly discount bin dolls with some rare Michael Jackson doll sitting on a desk nearby?

An hour later, someone found them deep in a shelf beside my desk, hidden behind a binder. Yikes! Not even I've ventured there!

By midmorning I got the Email. Someone who sits at my desk for the evening shift claims they started annoying him, then demanding popcorn, so he put them to bed.

Anthony posed Tom shooting Tuvok from high atop the desk partition.

I think Lewis comes tomorrow in homage to them airing The Swarm tonight.

Lewis

DD 11:36pm EST on Wednesday, Jun 5, 2002

My first online experiences in December of 1995 were under the controlled umbrella that was CompuServe. Or so I thought. When I went into their Internet Forum, I was greeted by a message window on which some twelve year old typed: "Now is the time for cybersex." Unfortunately, that was on my first day, and I didn't know enough to report him to a sysop and suspend his (parents') account. From then on, I used a first initial except in the comics forum (where they knew me and which was free and unlimited as I was considered part of the entertainment. Lots of networking was done there with fellow comic pros).

The only non-professional forum I ventured into after that besides the AFL (Aussie Rules) forum was for classic Hollywood movies. I began a rapport with someone who collected Errol Flynn movies on 16mm. He worked in Manhattan for some major broadcast network, and suggested I call him so we can set up a screening. I did. He was very elusive on the phone, made a quick reference to his girlfriend and their child (a bastich?) and hung up. That burned me up. Before that day, the only other time I was blatantly discriminated against because I was born dickless was in 1976 at a Phil Seuling comicon ("But you're a girl!" "That's right. Now are you going to sell this issue of Tales of Suspense to me or not?").

It was traumatically obvious that the world still resided in the Dark Ages, and to be taken seriously I could not afford to be female.

I started generic, until one day there was a press conference on IRC with DEVO during the Sundance Film Festival (this was about Jan-Feb 1996). Sundance had its own IRC channel, and by then I was using an Internet shell account (mind you all these early online years were done on a DOS machine in a plain text environment). I was Errol (heh), and I got about two questions in and no one messaged me for a photo. I had finally found my niche.

DD 12:54pm EST on Wednesday, Jun 5, 2002

June 4, 2002

...Came in the early 1980's.Myself and two others were interviewed by this nothing magazine for being a fan of Buster Keaton. They hung out with us and visited our homes to take pictures. They took us for brunch and asked us questions. I didn't know at the time that casual banter was considered inclusive, even when you say "Of course I'm not sure..." or "That's off the record."

The first wave when the magazine came out about a year later was interesting. The publisher-editor-reporters didn't tell us that it had been released. One of my friends called me up and asked me about something I never told anybody - or so I thought. I obtained my copies after calling the publishers, they handed me some obligatory dollar bill for appearing in their mag, and I read the most amazing things about myself that I never knew about. My friends were amused because,despite my artistic endeavors and coming off as the lunatic, of the three fans I was actually the sanest one.

The second wave occurred about a year after that. I was in NYU and preparing an animation reel to submit to the National Endowment of the Arts to fund an 8 minute, full-color cartoon a la 1930's (unaware at the time that they only took submissions of political or quasi-pornographic content seriously). I placed an ad in Backstage, a weekly showbusiness newspaper, for an Eddie Cantor impersonator. Oh gee. Seems I put my full name in that, didn't I? I got LUNATICS calling me up because of that fucking magazine article. One guy called during dinner and there I was with my parents watching and waiting for me to sit down, while he made Jimmy Stewart imitations over the phone in a desperate plea to meet me (Insert roll-eyes emoticon here: ). He was practically in tears. I think that's what made me realize that when I moved into my own place, I would see to it that my phone would be unlisted and I'd take out a P. O. Box.

DD 12:39pm EST on Tuesday, Jun 4, 2002

June 2, 2002

In 1971 I taught myself Japanese Kana to read their comics. My favorite collections were Young Boy's Magazine and Jump (forget the girl stuff. The art was entirely unintelligible, with so many sparkles in everybody's eyes, you couldn't begin to fathom how the characters saw where they were going). Somewhere past that was Champion. They had some great stuff in those days: Ash'ta no Joe (Joe's Tomorrow), Tiger Mask, Ryu's Adventure, Harenchi Gakuen (Shameless School - it's probably what you're thinking it is. My parents never knew), Gorgo 13, Kyojin no Hoshi (never figured out what Kyojin meant in that context. The series was about a star pitcher for the Giants' baseball team). Anyway, some of my favorite cartoons on TV I learned were Japanese, and thus began my quest into another world. Japanese comics were far more sophisticated than anything America could output. Even today, with all the vanity publications and graphic novels, none of it comes close to manga's heyday. And forget about any anime versions of these titles; they're just killing the classics.

It wasn't long before a style took hold. My biggest influences at the time were Go Nagai and Ishinomori Shotaro. The latter did these kickass adaptations of two popular henshin series: "Kamen Rider" aka The Masked Rider and "Jinzoningen Kikaida" aka "I, Machine."

It was then I decided to start drawing comics (Am I the only one who wasn't influenced by Jack Kirby?). At some point I remade myself and my friend into cyborg avengers, but I never got beyond single shot pics. Well, what do you expect for a twelve year old? The Great American Novel?

The US comics caught up with me by 1975 when I attended High School of Art & Design. Most of A&D were Marvelites, boasting a legacy of graduates including Neal Adams and Steve Ditko. That's about where I got into three heroes: Daredevil, Iron Man, and Dr. Strange. Rex Bell looked the spitting image of Matt Murdoch when he portrayed DD in Trial of the Incredible Hulk. It's a pity they've cast Ben Afleck. People who know me long enough suspect correctly that I am disappointed in their including Electra in the film, but that's for another entry.

By 1977 I had taken on a darker persona to accommodate my latest fictional affiliations...

DD 11:59pm EST on Sunday, Jun 2, 2002