We’re transitioning back to “we” in honor of Queen Elizabeth, whose passing today elevates to the throne a man who accepts shopping bags full of cash from shady characters. He has a consort, which sounds a bit risqué, who has gotten too much sun.
We don’t know much about Queen Elizabeth. We’ve met an angel, though, and we commend her to his care. (Here he is being a bit more luminous.)
We’ve made a lot of friends online. Our experiences began in earnest at the late General Electric News and Information Exchange (GEnie), a vast bulletin board system with endless topics on which one could converse with similarly-minded — and sometimes bloody-minded — folk.
That residency began in the late 1980s, we believe, and lasted several years. Then we spent a year or two on America Online, as it was known before transitioning to the much cooler AOL.
(The company had a peculiar business model which saw them mailing out vast quantities of free six-month trial CDs, which resulted in people switching usernames every six months to avoid ever paying for the service. It was eventually sold for a massive amount of cash to some giant corporation which sold it on for not very many pennies on the dollar a year or two later.)
Most but not all of the GEnie and AOL relationships have dissolved. By far the majority of our current online and occasionally in the flesh friendships originated in either the late and truly lamented Slate Magazine readers forum, The Fray, or in the pages of our blog, the late and sometimes lamented BTC News, which we sold on for what seemed like a lot of money at the time, or on Facebook (we’re old, we’re not cool).
We were the maid of honor at a wedding which consummated a relationship originating in The Fray.
Our Fray residency spanned much of the early aughts; the blog was active for about eight years starting somewhere in there. It died of consumption after a lingering illness, romantically, like a Victorian poet.
Two of our friends from The Fray turned up in the past week. One of them, whom we’re seen now and again on Facebook, writes for the long-running Angry Bear blog; his recent link to one of our pieces alerted yet another cherished friend from the Slate and BTC News days that we’re still extant and writing.
So that was good. We’re not as prone to meeting our online friends in the flesh, which we think helps cement relationships, as some people we know, but we’ve nevertheless developed valued friendships enduring ten and twenty years and more, and counting, and we’re hoping for more.
Grateful for them one and all. Sláinte, motherfuckers!
And now, ladies and gents, please rise for the British National Anthem.
(Musical contributions to this post include The Stranglers, “Peaches: The Very Best Of The Stranglers;” and the Sex Pistols, “Never Mind The Bollocks.” If you have music recommendations, please leave them in the comments.)
LOL! Video unavailable - "The uploader has not made this video available in your country" Alas, I know the song by heart and will sing it out loud at some point today.
And I'm glad that I got to meet you in the flesh, once, at least, before we both shuffle off to Buffalo, or wherever Hades is these days.
A lot of familiar "names" on the page you linked. Gregor and Fritz were two of my favorites. I wonder if they're writing somewhere else.