I go onto the TML, though, and there are scads of posts with a subject of "Ramen and Whipsnade are Dead." (snip) But every posting I saw about "Ramen and Whipsnade" gradually made me angrier and angrier until I got fed up and unsubscribed! I have no idea why it made me so mad. I'm almost afraid, even now, to go back and look at those weird postings.
Jeffr0,
Although I'll be taking the thread further off course, let me briefly explain the whole Ramen & Whipsnade thing.
When I first joined the TML, instead of merely lurking in the archives, I did so under a pseudonym. I did that because of my first experiences with the internet back in the early 1990s. I'd gotten "online" way back then in search of wargame opponents. I traveled quite often for work at the time, so arranging FTF or PBM games was difficult. PBeM seemed like the ticket.
In those days, you bought a service at Sears (yes, Sears) and accessed very primitive BBSs through modems you actually placed your telephone receiver in. You'd dial a long distance number, d/l the BBS' content, ring off, and then read it on you computer.
I accessed a few boards devoted to the Avalon Hill game
Diplomacy, joined several games, and quickly realized I was being used as a patsy. The three(?) boards I visited had many of the same people on them and those people were very cliquish. They'd allow newbies (yes, they used that term then) to join the games in order get the players they needed. They'd then kill those players off first and continue with the game.
Diplomacy is centered on just that, diplomacy. There are no dice, no combat tables. You talk, talk, talk, and talk some more with all the players involved hoping to influence the movement of their pieces. As a game-filling newbie, no one on the BBSs would bother talking to me. I'd last three or four turns, in the dark, until one or more of the other players gobbled me up. Let's just say I didn't take very kindly to being used in such a manner and left the early internet with a very bad taste in my mouth.
Jump forward nearly a decade to 2001 and I really, really, really, wanted to become active in the then premier
Traveller forum online; the TML. The trouble is I'd been burned before and the TML at the time was noted for flamewars. (The worst flamewar I've ever seen was on the TML.) I love
Traveller, but I don't want to burn any bridges online. Although I hate using pseudonyms, while understanding the internet etiquette behind their use, I subscribed to the TML as "Larsen E. Whipsnade". I figured if things got bad I could later resubscribe under a different name.
Let's just say things didn't go bad. They went very good instead, too good as a matter of fact. When I tried slowly shedding my defensive pseudonym people got upset. They didn't recognize me, it was if I were typecast. Making matters worse, the bits of fluff Fred Ramen and I had improvised together were so well liked that people wanted nothing but more improv from us. We'd get dozens of private emails a month suggesting, demanding, and pleading that we write
Traveller novels, scripts, webcasts, and so forth.
We both tried to live with the typecasting, but it wouldn't work. While Fred was the first to suggest out loud that we kill off our alter-egos, I suspect we'd both been thinking about it for a while. We then collaborated on a huge story full of in-jokes and sci-fi references in which Ramen & Whipsnade died. High profile members of the TML got cameos, even Mr. Miller and Mr. Wiseman showed up.
After killing them off, I unsubscribed from the TML and resubscribed under my own name.
The trouble is that I'd already joined COTI. Dan "Red River" Roseberry, bless his soul, had migrated here from the TML bringing some of my materials with him. He contacted me saying folks had questions, so I joined up under the Whipsnade moniker. Unlike with the TML, I can't change my name here and still keep the statistics I've developed under it.
So I'm stuck with being "Whipsnade", no matter how I sign my posts.
Regards,
Bill
