h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

dayyum - i was meandering through a bunch of threads in hootoo earlier, and saw a phrase i haven't seen for about a decade...


[rewind to the time in question]

in my early days on the net, i registered with the 'Virtual Places' (VP) a selection of real-time chatrooms, hosted by Excite.com (like AltaVista, an early competitor to Google & Yahoo)

chat took place in 'rooms' which were just webpages used as backgrounds - they could either be hosted by Excite (eg. for interest-groups, such as Poetry Cafe, Quiz rooms, etc; Age ranges; and country-based, such as Sweden, Japan, UK, etc) or you could use your own webpages

you appeared in the room as an 'avatar' (any small graphic or photo image you chose or created), which you could place near the avatar(s) of the person/people with whom you were chatting

iirc, you could trigger smileys to be displayed in real-time as you typed, next to your avatar - they would display for a few seconds then disappear (i think you could roll yer own graphics, too)

boy, that was the most fun i've ever had with my modems on

i met some great people in those 'rooms', mostly in the US, and we had some good laughs - and also a few serious convos, too

of course, there was an endless supply of iriots, also - there wasn't really a word for them then, but now we'd call them "Trolls"

(actually, i believe some US friends occasionally used the word "slimeball" in reference to them)

these shining (slimy?) examples of humanity would either try & belittle you, or sometimes male visitors would start 'chatting up' any avatars, or screen-names, which they believed to have a female owner - with an intent which ranged from mildly transparent to blatantly obvious

i'm not sure that this disruptive element always realised *just* how transparent were their modus operandi (imagine a werewolf hoping to pass unnoticed amongst a Sunday-school picnic)

screen-names were as varied as here in hootoo - some figurative, some real (first) names

i used my own name (as did some of my friends, with their own names)

now my first name is a fairly common male name in Scotland (my roots) and the Scots nickname for it (by which i've always been known) is the same as used in the US, where it's almost always a female nick for a different first (female) name

this appeared to be a constant source of amusement to my US friends - don't ask me why

the predatory males would arrive in rooms without warning, usually 'wearing' an avatar that was a cross between Sylvester Stallone and The Terminator - of course, in VP, poor old Sly & Arnie only possessed one rather minimal 'posing' vest between them, so there was always a copious amount of freshly-oiled muscle on display (not least between the ears)

since my screen-name appeared to these highly-evolved specimens to be female, and i didn't feel the need to display any gratuitous muscle in my avatars, usually choosing something abstract, these guys would 'hit on me' as they say in the States, with a vengeance

my friends and i would string these guys along for a while, with me showing an apparent increasing interest in their 'smooth talking' - which was obviously headed in the 'cyber' direction, leading towards an invitation to accompany them to a 'private' room, where no doubt they would be keen to show me their extensive collection of etchings

i was sometimes a little concerned at the enthusiasm of some of the more impish females amongst my group of friends who, camouflaged with indeterminate usernames and avatars, actually seemed to enjoy getting a little too much 'into role', acting as my pimp to egg these guys on!

anyway, as soon as the 'handsome stranger' had made his intentions clear towards my apparently female usename, one of the group would suddenly ask why he was getting all misty-eyed with a strapping father of two young children, and i would be expected to swap smartly from my abstract avatar to something slightly further along the scale towards the XY chromosomes (usually a photo of Jim Broadbent, iirc)

when ape-man realised that the whole room was in on the joke, he usually departed for more gullible shores

"What shores?" you might ask...

well, thanks very much, i'll have a Guinness

...sorry, couldn't resist...


where was i?

oh yes - what HAVE i been rambling about?!?


well, you might remember (if still awake) that earlier this evening i mentioned i'd seen a phrase which reminded me of those good old VP days

you see, these smooth-talking charm-monkeys had all the grace and wit of a ... well, a smooth-talking charm-monkey

after the first few times that i got chatted up by the latest Rambo, i said to friends, "i keep getting approached by these guys and their opening line is ALWAYS 'a/s/l' - what the heck are they going on about?"

at which my friends would say something equally obscure (to me, then) like "ROFL" and explain that these STCMs were jumping straight into their chat-up with those three most profound questions - nope, Not "Life, The Universe, and Everything" - but "Age/Sex/Location?"


and so now, if you've managed to stay with me this far, you might understand that i am somewhat concerned with my choice of 'AlwaysLunchtimeSomewhere' as my screen-name - i'm just a bit worried that other hootoovites might misinterpret my signature, which i sometimes use when signing-off a post

a-l-s

That's terrific. And informative: now I know what als stands for.

Late to the conversation... and so slow I didn't even make the connection to a/s/l!
I suppose hootizens go on omegle much. I've only seen it on http://artoftrolling.memebase.com/ actually.

LOL ...not as slow as me, Milla - when i followed your link to 'artoftrolling', the only thing i understood was the 'Draw Bridge" item!

but it was worth the visit, just for that