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I Confess, by Mentifex

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  I Confess, by Mentifex mentificium@gmail.com - 2014-02-27 08:48 -0800
    Re: I Confess, by Mentifex RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-02-27 21:16 +0000

#1044 — I Confess, by Mentifex

I have done terrible things on Usenet, 
and I wish now to confess my sins.

In 1985 a former student of mine came to 
my Seattle apartment and got me on Usenet 
by posting to net.ai via the 300-baud modem 
in my Coleco (Connecticut Leather Company) 
ADAM computer based on a Z-80 CPU chip. 

The newsgroup net.ai later became comp.ai -- 
where my obnoxious posts caused the group 
to become moderated in 1999. 

Routinely I would make provocative Usenet 
posts resulting in over 500 follow-ups. 

One time I posted "The Economics of Cocaine" 
in four different newsgroups and the cokeheads 
made over a thousand Usenet posts in reply. 

The 'Net fought back against me and ten years ago 
on 26 February 2004 somebody made a "Mentifex FAQ". 

Mentifex-bashers began stopping my discussions 
dead in their tracks by linking to the Mentifex FAQ. 

Exactly ten years later, yesterday I created 
http://ai.neocities.org/mentifex_faq.html in rebuttal. 

My Usenet sins cannot be forgiven unless I 
confess to the specific wickedness of my ways. 

http://www.reddit.com/r/InternetAMA is too 
unforgiving for me to seek indulgence there. 

One sin that I did was to follow up a 
comp.lang.forth discussion only in 
comp.dsp for Digital Signal Processors, 
while setting the follow-ups back into 
comp.lang.forth -- with the grievously 
sinful result that Forthers saw mention 
of me in follow-ups but no original :-(

I discovered that in all the most important 
newsgroups, there was always one guy who 
considered the group his personal fiefdom, 
and he would try to chase out Mentifex 
the interloper, the challenger to the 
primacy of the self-appointed netgod. 

These king-of-the hill creeps hounded 
Mentifex by sending e-mails of complaint 
to his Internet Service Provider (ISP) 
and to GeoCities, redux NeoCities. 

One self-appointed Net Guardian 
made a practice of attacking any 
GeoCities member who cross-posted 
to five or more Usenet newsgroups, 
so Mentifex here slyly adopted the 
defensive measure of crossposting 
to only four newsgroups at a time. 

Usenet gradually fell into desuetude 
as social media reared their ugly head. 
Gone were the days when Usenet Netizens 
would thank Mentifex for using words 
like "ineluctable". Gone, too, were 
the unpleasant times when some ignoramus 
would take Mentifex to task for correctly 
using "teratogenic" in its rood meaning of 
"monster-causing" and would try to tell Mentifex 
that it only meant "causing birth defects." 

From where the sun now stands, I, Mentifex, 
will repent and mend my wicked Usenet ways.

Mentifex
-- 
http://cyborg.blogspot.com 
http://www.reddit.com/r/mentifex 
http://www.amazon.de/dp/B00GX2B8F0 
http://www.nlg-wiki.org/systems/Mind 

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#1057

On 2014-02-27 16:48:42 +0000, mentificium@gmail.com said:

> I have done terrible things on Usenet,
> and I wish now to confess my sins.

Ah, penitence over NNTP – clearly a recipe for an awful sort of 
purgatory.  I barely understand this mentifex thing, but this article 
helped a bit:
http://www.advogato.org/article/769.html

From that page's FAQ:
13. Is Mentifex actually useful to anybody?, posted 1 May 2004 at 17:57 
UTC by tk »
Yes, if one redefines "useful".

We live in interesting times.  I'm thinking i'd like to put Mentifex 
and Jaron Lanier in a room and let them slug it out.  Maybe film the 
thing and play it back, slow-motion, in black and white …

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