From: charless@sco.COM (Charlie Stross)
Subject: Smarm alert!
Organization: SCO Technical Waffle and Blurb Department
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 07:56:44 GMT
Summary: Charlie is getting wound up ready to flame


I'm peeved with peeves.

Call me a barbarian, but I'd been looking forward to the October
hunting season when that endangered species, the naive sophomore,
raises its scraggy neck above the parapets of alt.peeves and gets
chopped off short by the mighty thews of Banta weilding a
high-pressure napalm pump and a cigarette lighter.  Times are
boring, and I'd even been hoping for a chance to exercise my
chilli-breath on something capable of cringing more creatively
than a block of sushi.  I mean, being Mr incoherent net.nice.guy
wears thin after a while and, let's face it, I wouldn't have
spent the past year or two hanging around alt.peeves if I wasn't
after some action.

But come October, what do we get?  It's pink fluffy bunnies in
Peevetown time!  GACK!!  And they're being _civilized_ about it.
Foo!!!  This is of course utterly intolerable to the goods of
peevedom, and in due course various antideluvian swamp things
raise their rugose heads from the foetid depths and rumble in a
suitably Lovecraftian manner about the necessity of actually
being _peeved_.  This is all well and good, but does it deter the
fluffy-bunny-wabbits?  Hell, no!  It doesn't even stop them
grazing round these parts.  In fact, they go on the offensive,
and bloody offensive they are, too.

We've been rounded up and smarmed. Ick.

Now I am a cautious guy and not about to step in where one of the
Great Old Ones has come to grief, but I cannot be the only person
in peevetown^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Halt.peeves who is getting sick of
the remorseless cheerfulness which jennyg is smearing around our
odious hole like honey around the opening to a wasp's nest.
Maybe it's unfair to pick on Jenny; she's relatively new here,
she writes well, and she's not the only culprit.  Nevertheless,
she -- and her adoring coterie -- have dragged alt.peeves down to
a level from which it may never recover.  A level of such
remorseless untempered niceness that we are in danger of
attracting an influx of tourists from the more civilized parts of
the net, from which we could never recover.  They would sanitize
the place, call in the exterminators to decontaminate Banta's
beard, take Geoff's toy fighters away from him, drink
Claudio.terrorist's tea, make !Al listen to Mozart, ban firearms,
drugs, {things that go fast and explode} and strange sex, and
they would generally make life a misery for everyone except the
noisy neighbours downstairs, the BDI's, the persons unclear on
the concept, and -- of course -- the traditional flambe desert.

This, I assert, is intolerable.  And it will not be stood for.
Moreover, I will not stand for it.  In fact, I won't even sit
still for it!

This is your last [polite] warning.

Allow me, Jenny, in my best villainous fashion, to advise you to
get serious.  Flame the fuck out of someone and you'll earn our
undying respect; but if you carry on this way, with all the smarm
and sweetness, you're _really_ going to get me mad.  You wouldn't
like me when I'm mad: I grow six inches taller -- rising to all
of five feet two -- grow six-inch incisors, foam at the mouth,
and my eyes pop out on stalks.  Oh, and in true alt.tasteless
fashion I squeeze my intercontinental ballistic pimples at you.
I am *not* cute and furry.  Furthermore, insisting that I am --
and that alt.peeves is anything but a dark and gloomy den of
treacherous ogres and rabid ferrets nesting among the bones of
their cruelly-slaughtered repast -- is gonna get you chewed up
and spat out of here before you can say ``Bugs Bunny''.  Yes,
there is a place for niceness on the net -- but this ain't it.
Indeed, this is the one retreat from niceness to which we shady
types can slink and indulge in our nefarious hobbies of
tormenting innocent newbies and grumbling about the lack of
marrow in the thigh-bones of the current generation.  We aren't
wilfully nasty, but if you corner us we will bite.  And you're
doing a fine job of putting the wrong backs up ...

-- 
Charlie Stross aka charless@scol.sco.com ..... UNIX oriented text mangler
WARNING: The opinions voiced in the preceding electronic document are the
product of a warped mind. Take two before meals.