Here are some posts that I made to the Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.kibology.
A.r.k started out in late 1991 as a group devoted to the strange and hilarious writings of James "Kibo" Parry and some of his friends. It quickly became much more than that-- a public humor showcase, hot-air valve, social club, and goofing-off lounge for a collection of odd people on at least three continents and an assortment of islands.
See also the Samantha Wilkinson Adoration Page for posts by the lovely and sharp-witted Samantha Wilkinson, whom I met on a.r.k.
I've watched too much bad science fiction, and here are the results.
My longer posts tend to include musical numbers. I don't know why, since I am a completely unmusical person, though I guess I am pretty good at doggerel.
Kibology predated alt.religion.kibology by several years, but I wasn't in on the prehistory; go ask Kibo about it. The history of a.r.k may be divided into several fuzzy eras:
A.r.k is a fairly small and close-knit wad of in-jokes, punctuated occasionally by Kibo's funny stories about Spot and Einstein. He's been posting them in other Usenet groups for years, but now they have a home. Other posters are overwhelmingly male, fairly young, and frequently friends of Kibo.
One day, persons in the mass media learn from reliable sources that something called "the Internet" has just been invented by Albert Gore[1], that all the hip GenXers of today think it's totally rad and will spend money because of it, and that the hippest person on the Internet is Kibo. Kibo gains fleeting fame in places like Wired magazine, is interviewed on local TV, and writes an introduction for an Internet how-to book. A.r.k is overrun with gawkers and wannabes. Apocalyptic events occur when Kibo pulls pranks in certain other newsgroups and EVERYBODY follows suit at once, giving a.r.k a bad reputation that it will have trouble living down. Eventually Kibo tires of the attention. Around that time, Usenet is marginalized and largely forgotten, because the same persons in the mass media have discovered from undisclosed, well-connected sources that the World Wide Web has colorful pictures.
[1] Believe it or not, I wrote that sentence years before the 2000 presidential campaign, when Gore was falsely accused of actually claiming this. Just for the record.
Kibo suddenly drops off the face of the net for a year. A few of the more tenacious gawkers and wannabes hang around, annoy each other, get into fights, gradually become wittier, and form a brand spanking new a.r.k culture with its own posting styles and in-jokes. It becomes clear that a.r.k is in for the long haul. For a long time, records from 1995 were fragmentary, because it fell in the gap between Kibo's record-keeping efforts and those of DejaNews. The recent recovery of much back material by Google Groups has revived the possibility of studying this era in detail.
However, I'm absent from the net for the entire middle of the year, hiding from the professional crisis of confidence that tends to hit grad students when they've been in school for a while and can't quite see the way to their theses. In fact, I'm spending much of that time hanging out with Kibo, watching bad movies. Late in the year I get several swift kicks in the butt and begin to recover.
In early 1996, Kibo suddenly comes back. Volume increases again. Later in the year, an unprecedented number of publicly disclosed romances blossom on a.r.k-- some between newsgroup regulars, some bringing new SOs into the group, if only temporarily. The newsgroup appears to have gained magical powers as a love machine. The reason may be that the female population is increasing, and some women who had mostly lurked in the past are posting more often, thereby attracting lots of geekly men like flies to syrup. The subject is also less of a taboo than it used to be, largely because of the efforts of long-time a.r.k regular Ellen Holmes, who's willing to talk about it. I meet Samantha Wilkinson.
Some of the romances break up (mine doesn't), provocateurs jump in, some folks try to give a.r.k a taste of its 1994 medicine, and, generally, people seem unusually touchy. Vast ideological battles over the nature of Usenet spawn subsidiary flames in a.r.k. The imminent death of the net gets predicted every couple of days. It's not much fun. I get a job. Kibo gets a better job than he had.
Things are hard to categorize without the benefit of a historical view. A.r.k is as healthy as it's ever been, on the whole. We have periodic flamewars (one particularly bad one sprouted in 1999 for reasons I don't feel like describing), but even the worst ones don't last very long any more-- we move on and roll them into jokes. The public romances seem to have subsided, probably because the novelty of having lots of female posters is past. We had a strange little celebration in Boston to celebrate the Moon blowing out of orbit in September 1999; while it wasn't any more spectacular than previous real-life Kibological gatherings, it had a special historical significance for us, and we bade Martin Landau and Barbara Bain a fond farewell as they went careening into interstellar space.
2000 was a busy year for me, and I didn't have quite as much time or mental energy to devote to my online presence. There was some political strife on a.r.k following the messed-up 2000 US presidential election. Then things became quiet... too quiet. To tell the truth, I can't remember much about what happened on a.r.k in 2001 prior to September 11. I'm sure that you'll cut me some slack here.
Online communities provided communication lines and moral support for many people on and after the terrorist attacks of September 11. A.r.k was no exception. Many of the regular posters lived somewhere in the Northeast corridor, and though we didn't lose any posters, certainly some regulars did lose friends. What followed the immediate are-you-alive posts was a remarkable outpouring of raw emotion; the interesting thing was that it wasn't just about Sept. 11 but about all sorts of other things: deaths in the family and Cold War paranoia and bad dreams and loneliness and fear of heights and the twinges of guilt associated with feeling that you weren't as affected by events as the people around you. For a little while, everyone felt entitled to vent about these feelings, whether connected to the attacks or not, on what was usually a humor newsgroup. I consider myself fortunate to have witnessed this and equally fortunate to see that it didn't last too long.
Of course, bickering about the prospects for war and related issues began almost immediately, and continues to the time of writing, with all viewpoints from wider-war advocacy to pacifism to conspiracy theory well represented. My own cautious support for the administration's war policy, combined with extreme skepticism about its domestic security policy, managed to offend nobody greatly, which probably means I lack integrity. Anyway, some of that angry energy has been diverted lately to acid satire, which I take as a sign of good health.
Here are some Kibologically relevant sites elsewhere on the net. This is just a short list of selected highlights, since some of the sites below have more extensive link collections.