Interest: alt.callahans
Jul. 28th, 2003 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alfvaenBack in 1992, when I was working as a research assistant at the University of Alberta, I happened to discover that the NeXT workstation I was using had a program on it called "Newsgrazer". I wasn't sure what it was--some kind of online newspaper thing?--so I tried it out.
There was a bewildering variety of things there, in a vastly confusing hierarchy. The details are foggy now, but somehow I managed to find a list of newsgroups with one-line descriptions. One that caught my eye right away was alt.callahans, which was described as an online equivalent of Callahan's Place, from Spider Robinson's stories and novels. At the time, I was a big fan of Spider Robinson, so it seemed like just the place for me.
I lurked for as long as I could bear it, then I delurked with a post titled(as is engraved upon my brain in chagrin)"Evil! Lurk! Nay! Lurk no more! Bang! Bang!".
alt.callahans was an interesting newsgroup, but it was not, really, Callahan's Place. Callahan's in the stories had some kind of internal harmony externally enforced--by the author, really. There was no author writing the people in alt.callahans, so there wasn't always harmony. There were disagreements and flames, certainly.
But there was a certain consciousness of community that might have been absent in, say, talk.politics.* groups. One generally didn't just start posting--one introduced oneself first, because that was how other people seemed to do it. Many people did third-person writing, describing a virtual setting, and some people took this as far as interactive writing involving their Callahan's characters. I did to some extent, but not to an extreme.
When I got interested in Ackanomic, I drifted away from the newsgroups I was falling increasingly behind in, and posting with decreasing frequency. I've checked alt.callahans a few times in the years since, and I might have briefly delurked once or twice, but I have never returned full-time. Usenet as a whole is probably petering out a little bit, but I imagine alt.callahans is still more or less the same.
There was a bewildering variety of things there, in a vastly confusing hierarchy. The details are foggy now, but somehow I managed to find a list of newsgroups with one-line descriptions. One that caught my eye right away was alt.callahans, which was described as an online equivalent of Callahan's Place, from Spider Robinson's stories and novels. At the time, I was a big fan of Spider Robinson, so it seemed like just the place for me.
I lurked for as long as I could bear it, then I delurked with a post titled(as is engraved upon my brain in chagrin)"Evil! Lurk! Nay! Lurk no more! Bang! Bang!".
alt.callahans was an interesting newsgroup, but it was not, really, Callahan's Place. Callahan's in the stories had some kind of internal harmony externally enforced--by the author, really. There was no author writing the people in alt.callahans, so there wasn't always harmony. There were disagreements and flames, certainly.
But there was a certain consciousness of community that might have been absent in, say, talk.politics.* groups. One generally didn't just start posting--one introduced oneself first, because that was how other people seemed to do it. Many people did third-person writing, describing a virtual setting, and some people took this as far as interactive writing involving their Callahan's characters. I did to some extent, but not to an extreme.
When I got interested in Ackanomic, I drifted away from the newsgroups I was falling increasingly behind in, and posting with decreasing frequency. I've checked alt.callahans a few times in the years since, and I might have briefly delurked once or twice, but I have never returned full-time. Usenet as a whole is probably petering out a little bit, but I imagine alt.callahans is still more or less the same.
