Crush...Yiff...Destroy!

JRR · Recusant Joined: 03 Jan 2004 Posts: 1

Those of you who read Usenet in the early nineties probably had a sudden spasm of terror when you read that subject line - for the rest of you, meet one of My Favorite Furries: John Palmer. John may have been the Internet's first true spammer, but he didn't spam for money - he did it for his ART.

Sometime in 1991, John (also known as Dr. Roger Rabbit) wrote a piece of fanfiction for the cartoon show Tiny Toon Adventures. Unlike most fanboys, John didn't write about Fifi, Buster, or any other character that you or I might have heard of. No, he wrote about "Mortimer," a one-shot relative of Babs Bunny who appeared on screen for roughly four seconds.

Having completed his Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, John was left with one question: how to distribute it? This was before the web, mind you, so the two basic options were uploading it to an FTP site or posting it on Usenet. Neither of these options would suffice for the brilliant "MORTIMER Story!" John set to work creating a distribution system that would be remembered (forcefully) for years to come. On July 30, 1991, he put a message on alt.fan.furry and alt.tv.tiny-toons announcing his story and how to get it.

Wow.

Not one, not two, but SIX servers were directly connected to the internet, dedicated solely to distributing his great work via email. One could request the entire story at once, or, if such a task was too much for one's delicate constitution, just request specific parts.

At first, things seemed tranquil. John's automated posting software announced his story on the relevant toon and furry groups - first once a week, then once a day... then multiple times a day. Sadly, it seemed that people simply weren't requesting the story in the quantity that John had expected. His servers sat idle, waiting eagerly to send his legendary screed to the masses - but the masses weren't massing,

At this point, John's already fragile brain apparently snapped. The problem, he figured, was that people simply didn't know about his epic tale. Well, he'd MAKE THEM KNOW, BY GOD.

What followed was the single most painstaking non-commercial spam attack the Internet has ever seen. Every newsgroup - whether its subject was nuclear physics, the Grateful Dead or buttsex - was bombarded with instructions on "How to get the MORTIMER Story" for five solid years. The list in the link above is just partial; news administrators mercifully killed the vast majority of his posts before they could clog up the archives.

John even switched to a new internet service provider after virtually every news server on the planet killed his posts on sight. His rampage reached a peak in 1996, when he began posting his spam at a frantic pace and even spread out to the developing world wide web to advertise on message boards and mailing lists.

Then, he simply disappeared. Did he die? Did server companies refuse to do business with him? Or did he at last feel that his work was done - the MORTIMER story had finally reached its audience, and now he could rest? We may never know.

But here's the funny thing, and the reason I wanted to post this little bit of furry history. Despite John Palmer's insane efforts, despite his thousands upon thousands of spams, despite having six servers dedicated to sending his story around the world, there is only ONE complete copy of "The MORTIMER Story" on the internet!

I came across a "How to get the MORTIMER Story" spam while digging through the newsgroups, and after a burst of nostalgia, decided that it would be fun to read it again (I'd read it wayyyyy back in 1994, when I was obsessed with cartoons and would read anything remotely related to them.).

John's six servers are long gone. Repeated Google searches were futile. Tons of "MORTIMER" spam, lots of people asking where they could find this infamous story and links to dead FTP sites were all that came up. If you use google, you know that the key to a good search is finding the "magic phrase" that only the page you are looking for has so you can filter out all the crap. Thankfully, I found it.

After an hour of searching, my brain, which can't remember a telephone number for ten seconds or what type of blood I have, suddenly sprang to life and announced, "the word 'lonely' was misspelled towards the end of the story."

Son of a bitch. I remembered a misspelling in a shitty story I read once TEN YEARS ago, but can't remember my mom's birthday.

Anyway, here it is. To summarize the whole story, "TEEN ANGST (with rabbits)." This is, without a doubt, the most well-publicized piece of fanfiction on the internet, and one of the most infamous - John Palmer was inadvertently responsible for introducing the early internet to the furry fandom in its golden "Quozl" era and making us all... a little bit ickier.

(by the way, OMG totally luv UR site here Computolio. It brings back the best and worst memories of early furry watching.)

mouse · Coadjutor Joined: 13 Jul 2003 Posts: 662

You should see if this can get placed on the front page

EDIT:

i liked this post also that was right there on one of the google links:

From: Hellena (112a-ak@sophia.smith.edu)
Subject: Re: How to get the MORTIMER Story
View: Complete Thread (509 articles)
Original Format
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Date: 1993-09-25 16:42:46 PST

In article <9646@buster2.michigan.com>, <rabbit> wrote:
>This posting was made automatically by machine. It will appear once
>a week or so. Direct any questions to rabbit@Buster.Michigan.COM
>
Once a week? I haven't read t.b in five days and I count at least a
dozen of the damn things.

This is part of a plot to bring about the downfall of the net. The number
of times this "How to get the MORTIMER story" gets posted over any given
amount of time is increasing at a geometric rate. Soon the net will be
inundated with millions of copies of this posting circulating like a
tidal wave of raw sewage. Once all the bandwidth is taken up, no one will
be able to post, and no one will want to read. The net will become a
self-consuming flood of MORTIMER story postings, a wasteland of servers
and phone lines. A technological desert.

Then again, having 500 cable channels would achieve a similar effect...

--
Hellena
112a-ak@sophia.smith.edu
Smith College

Computolio · Coadjutor Joined: 01 Jun 2003 Posts: 349

It's great to see you here, JRR.

I'm guessing that the reason you remembered how "lonely" was misspelled in the story was because, well, it was the one word that stuck in our mind. It was the one word that perfectly described what you had read.

About that Palmer guy though, it's strange how he just vanished. Perhaps it's because he saw the damage he did and decided to start anew under some different name in some other corner of the internet. Who knows?

Pycnopodia · Coadjutor Joined: 31 Dec 2003 Posts: 72

I didnt even know internet existed in 1991..
Im just curious, how can a man spam for an entire 5 years?

Anonymous · Coadjutor Joined: 01 Jun 2003 Posts: 767

:?: BTW, JRR. This is not Computolio's forum, he is merely a moderator of certain threads.

Chris Baird · Coadjutor Joined: 04 Aug 2003 Posts: 78

About that Palmer guy though, it's strange how he just vanished. Perhaps it's because he saw the damage he did and decided to start anew under some different name in some other corner of the internet. Who knows?

I'm guessing he's done a runner for financial reasons<1>. The latest message I can find from him was from November 1996, and the "rabbit.net" domain has been owned by someone else since October 1997.

I personally didn't mind JPP-- he was entirely civil and useful when he wanted to be (alt.pets.rabbits)... he just had a serious bug up his arse with the self-declared the Masters of Usenet, like most of pretentious fuckers in alt.fan.furry, who got off on demonizing him. The news.* crowd also got seriously shitted off at him for what we today would call trolling. Aside from his line of bogus contact information, spam, and offensive trolling, there wasn't anything really that that they could pin him for being criminal 'in the real world' for.

(<1> A circa 1995 newspaper interview with JPP regarding his ISP start-up RabbitNet mentioned having to take out dozens of credit cards to pay for it all...)

Chris Baird · Coadjutor Joined: 04 Aug 2003 Posts: 78

Im just curious, how can a man spam for an entire 5 years?

A Crack team of Virtual Lawyers... and that Palmer's net-abuse was for the most part targetted (Mortimer announcements posted to a.f.f every *minute* for a week... at least I found it funny watching the primadonnas' heads explode...), and that no such things as "Acceptible Usage Policies" existed back then.

Chris Baird · Coadjutor Joined: 04 Aug 2003 Posts: 78

The latest message I can find from him was from November 1996, and the "rabbit.net" domain has been owned by someone else since October 1997.

FWIW, I just remembered him posting to the free.* newsgroups for a while, back in ?1998 ?1999 ...

Tailgunner · Coadjutor Joined: 28 Oct 2003 Posts: 161

Bleh.

The story started off fine in the first half of the story, then degenerates into a smutty, incest involved sex-fest with the reading level of an eight-year-old.

I miss the good ole days of fanfiction where the smutty sexfest stories were the only fanfics worth reading on that site. At least with those stories, my expectations were so low that they were already met the moment I click on the story links.

mouse · Coadjutor Joined: 13 Jul 2003 Posts: 662

Bleh.

The story started off fine in the first half of the story, then degenerates into a smutty, incest involved sex-fest with the reading level of an eight-year-old.

I saved it but havent bothered reading it....its now been knocked to the bottom of the list where it will remain until further notice

I miss the good ole days of fanfiction where the smutty sexfest stories were the only fanfics worth reading on that site. At least with those stories, my expectations were so low that they were already met the moment I click on the story links.

How about something like THIS:

DragonBallZ fanfiction

78. Tayla of Astoria by Sawnya

reviews
*DONE* Frieza has terrorized the Astorian race for decades because their queen killed his mother.To hurt them further, he sends Vegeta and other minions to capture an Astorian child princess with the power to destroy him in order to exploit her talents.
R - English - Action/Adventure/Drama - Chapters: 112 - Words: 543847 - Reviews: 90 - Updated: 7-15-02 - Published: 9-24-01

over half of a million words....unreal

War and Peace might be somewhere in that range, I dont even know.

just for example is this was published in a book averaging 11 words per line and 35 lines per page - this thing would be near 1500 pages...

if you dropped it on someone you could probably kill them with it

Dogthing · Coadjutor Joined: 26 Oct 2003 Posts: 207

dbz crap

How can you get 1500 pages of fanfic from a such a shallow show?

How is it possible? :(

Paul · Coadjutor Joined: 01 Feb 2004 Posts: 138

if you dropped it on someone you could probably kill them with it

That would make for a perfectly ludicrous headstone: "Here lies John Doe, done in by a DragonBall fanfic. RIP."

mouse · Coadjutor Joined: 13 Jul 2003 Posts: 662

How can you get 1500 pages of fanfic from a such a shallow show?

"and then this happened, and then they did this, and then this happened, and then this, and then they went here and this happened, then this happened......"
ETC

repetition, mainly, i would imagine
I dont even want to think about trying to read this thing, although Im sure a bunch of people have

How is it possible? :(

Probably the same way the guy who wrote that epic Pokemon fanfic "...And The Rocket's Red Glare". Although I dont think that one was anywhere near as long as this DBZ one is. It was still a novel though.

Im sure being completely insane helps.

Tailgunner · Coadjutor Joined: 28 Oct 2003 Posts: 161

Thats why I stuck to the NC-17 fanfics, they were short, sweet, and to the point. They never pretended to be more than what they were.