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

[Nick Giannak]

Tyler,
     I was very much an outsider by choice to the Talkingirc culture. I 
went on a couple of times and found myself annoyed at the overall 
insider culture, found it unwelcoming, etc. To be fair, however, I 
myself did a lot of this in the communities I ran at the time. In 
summation, we were all foolish youngsters.
     The guy who programmed all synth material was Flint Million, who 
also wrote the BOFHNet IRC and Freedom Chat clients at the time. The 
networks associated with all clients BOFH, FC, TIRC, all merged together 
around 2004. I know this because he himself still takes responsibility 
for much of this by maintaining his classic website, as well as a 
revised version. Both can be found here. http://www.themillionweb.net/
     Cutiecat appears to be one Rachael Spangler. I know this only 
because a friend of mine referred to Rachael by that name, but I have 
never brought it up to her in conversation. Frankly, I have little to 
talk about with her from that time, in my limited attempts at visiting 
that network, I never, ever, ever ran into her.
     BOFH, of course, doesn't refer to the person by that name from the 
skits. His real name escapes me, but I know that cancer took his life 
around the same time as all of this was going down.
     Everyone else? Honestly, I don't know. I have a good idea who Mo 
was (mohaned sayegh), but that's really it. I hope this clears a few 
things up.
Thanks,
Nick

On 10/13/2015 5:58 AM, Tyler Zahnke via Dectalk wrote:
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Dectalk mailing list
> Dectalk at bluegrasspals.com
> http://bluegrasspals.com/mailman/listinfo/dectalk