Back around 1991-2 era, I joined an on-line community. Or rather, I started participating in a Usenet newsgroup called alt.folklore.urban, the core membership of which was turning into an on-line community, pretty much before the idea of “on-line community” had been invented. We cognoscenti called the newsgroup “AFU”, and the core of the core were known as “the hats” or “old hats” (or later “Best Mates”). One of the first “old hats” was a guy named Phil Gustafson. He was funny, he was smart, he made wicked puns, and he was part of the memes of the group (one of which was that Phil would “rearrange your diodes” if you didn’t behave). He travelled to all the real life meet-ups (which at the time were almost always on the west coast) and it was frequently his descriptions of these meet-ups that had the rest of us rolling in the aisles and wishing they’d have some out this way.
Continue reading “Phil Gustafson, diode re-arranger”
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Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.