Pyramids Don’t Roll!

In the early days of the Internet (~1995), there was a massive bulletin board called UseNet. It looked more like Reddit than forums today and it was all in text, but it had the same effect. However, someone brilliantly came up with a forum called the “Best of UseNet”… and these were gold!

Because let’s face it, even back then, no one really wanted to sort through the thousands of forums to find the piece of gold in the trash. However, since the Internet has proven the “infinite number of monkeys can produce Shakespeare” principle, by the same nature, if you found an incredibly funny post, you could copy it to the Best of UseNet forum and share it with the rest of the world. This made for frequent checks by a young Marcus.

So one of those stories that stuck with me was originally on the Babylon 5 forum (which JMS actually commented to while the show was happening) where one people goes on a rant when someone else makes a mistake about how gravity works: “When an orbiting ships are borrowing gravity from the earth’s rotation…”

This led to this man running with this idea. “My God! The entire Big Wheel industry must be shut down YESTERDAY!” Which led into a Babylon 5 digression. “Why do you think the Minbari are so hooked on that “tri” thing? Simple – pyramids… don’t… roll!”

I liked that phrase so much I used it in the first chapter of Fatebane. Let’s face it, I’m not that original…

Then there was the guy who was thinking of “pimping out his ride,” unfortunately, his ride was a rusty VW bug. So he thought of the most outlandish things he could do with it. “So yeah, I can paint it rainbow colors and get a personalized license plate called DETHBUG.” But the brilliant part was the idea of putting a megaphone with yellow and green lights (perfectly legal for a civilian) on the top of this monstrosity. So when he got to a stop light, he could turn it on, flash the lights, and call out “Citizen! It is legal to turn left at a red light!”

“Well, if the guy with the megaphone says it’s all right…” the folks in front of him would say and drive off. And as he concludes, “And I get to my destination 15 seconds faster!” 🙂

Gee, I miss that. Sure, you can have friends send you stuff, and memes on Facebook, but it’s not as much as fun as this long-form gems. But I can’t be the only one – what’s some of your favorite early Internet stories? Tell me them in the comments below!