[DECtalk] How many of you are familiar with the Talking IRC Inside Jokes

[Tyler Zahnke]

I remember, several years ago, when the DECtalk Archive was a public
website, the Miscellaneous folder had all these little odds and ends,
and some of them were just totally off the wall, including a song that
says "CutieCat is leet". The Vocalwriter section had a parody of the
Beach Boys song "Fun Fun Fun" about the BOFH (which stands for
something I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say on this list). Now, I
kind of knew about the BOFH stories as they were originally written,
and I knew about LOLcats and other silly cat pictures, but not
CutieCat, and I knew about people calling things leet (or l33t, or
1337) and I knew about n00bs, probably because I felt like one. But I
didn't really understand what context these particular bits were in.
But today I discovered the Talking IRC site, which includes files of
synthesizers using leet language, including the CutieCat song and the
BOFH song. Were any of you mailing list members familiar with this
Talking IRC culture? Someone who was good with making DECtalk sing was
picking on people for not being leet, and it almost always used the
same format; "He sucks, he sucks, he suuuuuuuuuucks". Who were these
users getting picked on? I'm guessing they were part of the
#talkingirc channel. They must have been some rather annoying users to
get that treatment. How many of you were part of this, or were at
least familiar with this? And who was the DECtalk programmer telling
people they were leet or not leet (more often not leet) using songs?
Tyler Z