|
The History of the JihadWeb[tm]: The DeadSlug Era
In the beginning, there was Barney. And he was bad. Oh, so bad. I was first
subjected to the purple diablo in 1993, when a younger, less wise sibling
took a liking to his purple form. This offended my sensibilities, and when
I arrived in Santa Cruz in the later portion of the year, I discovered
Usenet, and then the Jihad, located conveniently at
alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die. I started to post, and found other
people who also agreed with me that Barney must die, and all else is
irrelevant.
Another important thing happened which allowed me to launch the JihadWeb
in its first incarnation: I met up with people with "the Armory," a
geekhouse in Santa Cruz which had a web server up and running in 1994,
when the web more or less ran off computers at NCSA. This would be about
a year before my school even had a web site, and three years before they
found out how to let students have pages. In those days, not many people
had access to server space. So I came upon the idea of creating the Jihad
on the Web, in order to get the word about the evil of Barney out to
more people.
And that word got out.
The Deadslug incarnation of the JihadWeb was less interested in the
structure and role-playing of the current Jihad (or really of the
Jihad of the time) but rather focused on what I believed was the
central message of the movement: Barney is bad, really bad, and must
be stopped. This simple message appealed to the masses; it focused on
what a lot of people could agree with: that purple dinosaur is really
annoying. Over the several years of the Deadslug era, the site got an
estimated 300,000 hits and was even featured on the Discovery Channel's
"CyberLife" program (which is no longer on the air). I'm not a role-player,
per se, but rather an evangelizer: I go out and try to convince people of
stuff: Barney is bad, Microsoft is bad, and so on.
Although the JihadWeb was immensely popular, I found that I just didn't
have the time to keep it up to date as it probably should've been. Various
school obligations, along with my involvement with the Fish Rap Live! had
reduced the amount of time I had to keep up with the site. So the content
got rather stale. Plus my involvement with ab4d had also declined as
other things took up my time. Furthermore, Barney's mass-media popularity
had diminished somewhat; although he was still on PBS, he wasn't
merchandised or promoted nearly as much as he was at first. The threat
had been diminished somewhat.
The final days of the Deadslug-era JihadWeb came when increased interest
in the Armory had pushed their bandwidth to the limits, and it had became
necessary to move the pages elsewhere. Since I really didn't have anywhere
else to put it, and wasn't really keeping it up to date anyway, I gave it
to the next generation of Jihaddi, and as you've seen here, they've done
quite a job.
Barney is still around, and he's still a threat, as evidenced by his
recent involvement with Microsoft. Although he's not as badly merchandised
as in 1992 and 1993, children everywhere still aren't safe. The Jihad
is still needed. Only when childen and parents reject Barney will the
threat be fully removed.
Happy hunting to the Jihad!
--the deadslug, godfather of the jihadweb[tm] (retired)
--
o o David C. "Davy Baby" Brogden
__\_\__ deadslug@prtr-13.ucsc.edu "Don't f*** with Wendy Testaberger!"
/ \ _ --Wendy Testaberger of South Park
\_____ \ Fiat Slack / \
\ \___________/ /
Slugs \ / http://www.armory.com/~deadslug
Forever \______________/"UCSC opinions? They can sod off for all I care."
|
