Originally Posted by
OzBat!
Like effdot, I was here really early on. I worked in a small Australian government agency, and one bright monday morning the head of the agency advised that they had rolled out browsers and initiated internet access for all staff over the weekend. So, I followed instructions for accessing Yahoo Search, and did the first most obvious search any responsible government employee should do, and looked for "comic books". One of the first results back up was for a "Kingdom Come" fan site. I'd seen the ads in the comics and was intrigued, and went. This guy Jonah put a lot of work into this! And heyyy... forums? What are...
Holeeeeeee. Crap! Weirdness! The message boards had apparently only been up for a week and dozens of people were already mucking the place up. It was AWESOME.
Jonah released a new message board with each new Kingdom Come book release, so by the time we got to Message Board: Book 3, the place was jumping. Every day I'd come in to work, and there would be hundreds of posts left overnight by all these weirdos on the other side of the planet. Being Australian with all the differences in time zones that entailed, worked entirely in my favour for establishing a presence on the boards. All the americans/canadians/mexicans etc would post during their day, and I would come in overnight and respond to virtually everything, and then when they logged in on their next morning, there was this hit'n'run posting barrage from the mad aussie. To which they'd reply, and I would walk into this wall of responses the next day and be thrilled. It was a great new toy. I got very little work done, and got in trouble with a succession of supervisors over quite a few years.
One thing to understand is that you didn't need to actually register or log in back in the early days. The message board system used allowed us to put a different name in on every post. The thread display system was a tree system, so that you saw responses to an initial post, indented below it. Posters got exceptionally creative in using both the post title link, AND their name link, to create stories or witty rejoinders in the post links themselves, so you could laugh hysterically just looking at the thread display before ever opening a post to see the contents. The monster pun machine known as Fenris was unleashed in those early days. Hatman and The Mighty Hank! were the comedy duo we all aspired to. The Wet Willie and the Jester turned up only a couple weeks after I did and ran rampant. Innuendo reined supreme. Misdirection was a true tactical weapon. So, it was a multi-level immersive experience with some exceptionally witty people exploring what essentially was a new art form.
My poster name "OzBat!" was a gift from that initial group of posters. When the next issue of Kingdom Come came out we'd spend about a week hashing through theories and conspiracies and easter eggs, and then spend the next three weeks goofing off with pastiches of those and other comics. One of the classic easter eggs in Kingdom Come was the smiling image of Batmite, smiling through the monitors of the batcave computer system. I labelled myself BatMite! The imp wot imps at midnight! But as our pastiches grew into longer free-form collaborative stories set in the imaginary universes we created/mutilated, most of us left our borrowed heroic personas or slapped a different shade of paint on them and created more individual names for ourselves. I couldn't quite find one that fit, so one quiet night a bunch of late nite owls made a competition out of it until J'onn came up with the composite name in a fit of hilarious brilliance.
I've used this moniker everywhere I've gone on the internet ever since. That's 18 years of a single identifier on the wwweb, and while I definitely have an infinitely small web footprint, OzBat! has become me on the web, not merely a mask or a handle. In a lot of ways its more real to me than my real name, because this group of lunatics I got mixed up with so long ago have been there for me through decades of dealing with spousal depression, our eventual breakup, dealing with kids as a single father for a few years, issues with work... they've been my support group in more ways than one.
I can't emphasise how important this was to me. I live in Canberra. It's the capital of Australia (no, not Sydney! Sheeesh!) and the seat of federal goverment. Not many people actually build a permanent life here; they come for work, there's a change of government, they leave. Sure there's private companies and schools, shops, universities etc but as a government employee, most of my friends have never stuck around, but moved on after a few years. The one constant I've had is my internet associates, my lunatic mates. And while I've never met any of them in person* I still appreciate the hell out of them.
* I once worked in a 24 hour operations center monitoring the public broadcaster transmission network. It was deathly boring staring at automated alarms for transmission strength and power levels. Paul W. and Doug Strange both internationally phoned the operations center hotline at 4am in the morning once because they could. I had a smile on my face for days after hearing these mad americans on the phone!