I participated in a bulletin board with _why about 20 years ago. Unknowingly participated, I should say. I'm not sure if the _why persona had been invented at that point.

In the early 2000s some of my high school friends started an invite only phpBB server. It functioned as a sort of proto-Facebook to keep in touch with one another as we became dispersed around the world because of college and jobs.

As our personal friend networks grew, the bulletin board grew till there were several hundred members. It remained invite only, and the content—while wonderful and funny—mostly reflected the interests and neuroses of sheltered twenty-something Utahns.

As the site grew we naturally developed a set of norms and rules of etiquette that governed the way things were discussed. New users who blasted in and violated those norms were gently redirected initially, ignored eventually, and banned at worst. But in all, things were pretty staid. Since you had to be invited by an existing user, the type of people that joined were of more or less self-selected tastes and temperaments.

Then a user called `phonequail` joined and began posting bizarre threads. Bizarre relative to the typical discussions of workplace drama, Mormon theology, 24, and indie rock, anyway. As an example, he started a thread in which he GM'd a Belle & Sebastian-based RPG. In another instance he satirized a thread called "Shooting the Breeze", which functioned as a pre-Twitter for short thoughts and observations not worthy of their own thread. He declared it had too many words and too much discussion. Conesequently, he started his own thread "Muting the Breeze", in which users were only allowed to converse using images—except images of baby ultrasounds, which were too violent for polite conversation.

His magnum opus was another series of threads in which he played out a sci-fi RPG he called "Spacelab". Participants traveled around the galaxy, and he gave paragraphs of vivid, hilarious descriptions of strange worlds and aliens. Each post ended with an arbitrary, seemingly meaningless choice, which would ultimately propel the player into another offbeat adventure. E.g., "Do you pick up the calendar on the desk, or relax on your bed with a magazine". Meanwhile other users participated as "fans" of Spacelab imagining it to be a long-running sci-fi universe in the mold of Star Trek, with ego-driven stars, fan conventions, and a children's show spinoff.

I realize that some of this might strike people as an insufferable bit of "Katy t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m"-style forced randomness. And perhaps it would be if it weren't carried out by someone with such a staggering imagination.

Several years later when I was deciding whether I wanted to learn to program, I kept reading about the poignant guide. I decided to check it out. I was struck by how similar the tone and style was to phonequail's. It was uncanny. Finally, when one of the examples of ruby variables was `phone_a_quail`, I had my Keyser Soze moment.

Eventually Facebook, Twitter and increasing responsibilities at our various jobs atomized the board and its participants. Phonequail himself was a divisive figure. Being a far more competent programmer than the guy who initially spun up the phpBB server, he took the board's technical helm. At one point he tried to replace the phpBB with a homegrown bulletin board app he'd written himself. Users voted against it after trying it for a few weeks, and we switched back to phpBB. Phonequail more or less stopped participating.

Anyway, either you played along, looked forward to his posts, and marveled at his imagination, or you proclaimed you didn't 'get' him. I was among the former, and, if nothing else I am still fascinated by how by sheer force of will he got a group of young not-quite-adults who were struggling to be taken seriously to _play_ in a way we hadn't done in years.