In message <3f2763d5_2@corp-news.newsgroups.com> "Tom Bishsop"
<aklsdjdf@054-here-39.nu> wrote:
>the following article is found at the following URL on 2001-11.
>http://member.newsguy.com/~shpxurnq/meow.html
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>The One True History of Meow
>
>By The 2-Belo
>
>
>The Meow Wars The largest flame war in Usenet history, involving hundreds of
>people from over 80 newsgroups, lasting over forty-five weeks. It was the
>Usenet equivalent of World War II. It was The Flamewar to End All Flamewars.
>
>It was the best of times.The Meow Wars It all began innocently enough: a
>small group of students at Harvard University - a band of future
>bloodsucking ambulance-chasing lawyers, medical specialists who phone in
>diagnoses from mobile phones on yachts, and caffeine-crazed computer
>programmers with way too much time on their hands - began to use Usenet as a
>local dorm room bulletin board/gossip clique area.
>
>The newsgroup they chose, apparently at random from among the hundreds of
>empty Usenet joke-newsgroup wastelands: alt.fan.karl-malden.nose. [The
>circumstances surrounding the birth of this newsgroup can now be told,
>thanks to the location of the original newgroup control message.]
>
>This small group of posters set up their little regime in this forgotten
>newsgroup, posting daily schedules and post count summaries, talking about
>this class and that event and this and that and the other. Eventually, they
>tired of posting articles about their immensely boring daily lives, so they
>turned their attention to the computer network world around them. First they
>tried their hand at penny-ante crossposting, branching out to claim other
>empty newsgroups, such as alt.fan.ok-soda and alt.fan.pooh. This soon grew
>stale as well, as each poster moved into a new group only to find the same
>bored people he/she left behind.
>
>Apparently as a result of the Ivy-League uppity belief that all the world
>should be like them (and also as a result of trying to avoid studying for
>exams), one of the posters suggested that they "invade" a real, populated
>newsgroup and "rile up the stupid people". When Matt Bruce, another of the
>Harvard band, heard this, he wrote this response:
>
>"I suggest that we start either posting or crossposting to
>alt.tv.beavis-n-butthead. I also suggest that we use big words and perfect
>grammar, and refuse to write as the young ruffians in question speak.
>
>"This could lead to some interesting 'dialogue.' "
>
>This article was posted directly to alt.tv.beavis-n-butthead. The regulars
>at that group, wondering what the world was coming to, scoffed at the notion
>of a couple of stuck-up geeks from Harvard calling them "ruffians", and a
>few unpleasantries were exchanged. This crosspost-tossing attracted the
>attention of an unknown poster going by the name of Dontonio Wingfield.
>He/she discovered that one of the Harvard posters, Chuck Truesdell, placed
>"meow meow" (a reference to Henrietta Pussycat of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood
>fame) in many of his posts as a sort of calling card, as his initials spell
>"C.A.T.". Matt Bruce picked up on this practice for one post (the quote at
>the top of this page), and someone, for some reason, took that article out
>of afk-mn, crossposting it to a dozen newsgroups as a troll against the
>"Nosers" (as the Harvard students called themselves). Dontonio Wingfield
>either instigated this troll, or was the first to reply to it:
>
>"What the hell is this shite? Would you mind keeping it the hell out of
>HERE?"
>
>The Dontonio Wingfield persona then, of course, vanished. The posters in the
>targeted groups, noting the "meow meow" elements, began to retaliate against
>the supposed original crossposter, Matt Bruce. These posters entered the
>'Nose and found it full of other Harvard students like Matt, and the
>counter-invaders flamed and spewed "meow" with vigor, In time, flames
>containing the word "meow" would start popping up all over the place, aimed
>mostly at areas where the high-class uppity Ivy-League snots were known to
>congregate, such as alt.college.college-bowl. Other flames targeted snobbish
>college kids who regularly huffed their freckled noses in newsgroups such as
>alt.music.nin. Some of the more daring souls decided to forge articles in
>Bruce's name, spreading the "meow" attacks to more and more groups,
>including afk-mn, to add to the onslaught against him and his
>"intellectually elite" cohorts.
>
>When the real Matt Bruce caught wind of the uproar, he and the other Harvard
>students first tried to write his attack on atbnb as a "joke". When no one
>bought his story, he attempted more forcefully to get the attackers to stop,
>which only sounded like more condescending talk:
>
>"Please stop. Cease and desist. You are only making yourselves look silly."
>
>When this only fanned the flames further, he threatened to cancel all
>articles containing the word "meow", and to netcop all the "meow" article
>forgers. This "Cancellation Notice", posted about a month and a half after
>the first "meow" troll, was apparently the proverbial last straw. A person
>crossposting into 12 newsgroups, then claiming it a "joke", when he
>obviously had no sense of humor? This pissed off the Usenet Performance
>Artists to no end. it was time to teach Matt Bruce - and the rest of his
>gang of snots - a lesson. Suddenly, afk-mn, alt.college.college-bowl, and
>scores of other groups were flooded to the gills and beyond with hundreds
>upon hundreds of huge meow articles from all corners of Usenet. Cascades,
>ASCII cats, hundred-line "meow" hello-world-type flood posts, and more were
>posted, reposted, munged, pureed, and regurgitated all over the servers of
>the world. The Harvard kids' protests were quickly lost in the feline tidal
>wave. Every post by a Harvard snot would result in fifty cascade follow-ups.
>alt.college.college-bowl, a known regular haunt of Matt Bruce, was reduced
>to a smoldering crater, so inundated with meows that its regulars could no
>longer use it. After a couple of weeks of this, Usenet in general looked
>like Chernobyl, or the Marina district of San Francisco after the 1989
>earthquake, or downtown Nagasaki the day after the fall of the Fat Man.
>
>A number of the attackers, calling themselves the "MEOW MEOW ARMY", were
>bent on taking over afk-mn and occupying it as their own. It soon was - the
>Harvard students, seeing a fire raging out of control in their cyber Dunster
>House, were compelled to escape to a local, non-propagated newsgroup on a
>Harvard server.The meow hurricane, however,simply refused to die:
>alt.college.college-bowl continued to be attacked until almost a year after
>Matt Bruce's now infamous post, and the Meowers now in afk-mn began to
>redecorate their new home (with the legendary Fluffy, formerly Matt Bruce's
>pet, claiming ownership of all of Usenet), merging with the verbal abuse
>powerhouse known as the Mighty Alt Dot FlameTM.
>
>Today, afk-mn remains as a sort of Usenet posting relay hub. The first- and
>second- generation Meowers also became alt.flame regulars. Other bases of
>Usenet Performance Art, such as alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk,
>alt.non.sequitur, and alt.stupidity, long bases of Meow action, also traded
>regulars with the Nose. These groups fused together to form what is now
>known as the Empire of Meow.
>
>This empire is still growing as you read this, as in 1998 the groups
>alt.flame.niggers and demon.local were recently annexed much in the same
>fashion as the 'Nose. There are hundreds of groups throughout the alt.*
>heirarchy who have at least heard of the Meow movement... every so often, a
>troll warning will be posted to these groups, sometimes even warning the
>inhabitants about elements that the Empire has nothing to do with:
>
>"You will be able to recognize a troll and an impending invasion from
>alt.syntax.tactical by cascades, numerous appearances of the word 'meow',
>and crossposts to alt.fan.karl-malden.nose..."
>
>Also, throughout its lifetime, the actions of the Empire have seemingly
>become a convenient scapegoat for real Usenet abuses. In February of 1997,
>several inhabitants of the 'Nose were placed under a Usenet Death Penalty,
>or UDP, for over a week by a certain self-made Usenet "spam canceller". The
>crime: cascades. Also, in 1998, Meow became the whipping boy for those
>persons who wanted a UDP imposed on Altopia News Service, which many Meowers
>use to post to Usenet, because of the few Altopia users who were committing
>blatant acts of abuse such as mailbombing and post flooding. These accusers
>were wont to include relatively harmless acts of off-topic crossposts and
>cascades in with the real problems. Apparently, there will always be those,
>like the Harvard kids, who will not tolerate the right that all Usenetters
>have to act silly, or to have a sense of humor, or to have the view that
>nothing should be taken too seriously. It should, however, be noted that
>without the existence of tight-sphinctered conservative snots, there would
>be no Meow in the first place. Hated or not, it would thus seem that the
>phenomenon known as MEOW, and its practitioners known as MEOWERS, have
>forever carved their place among the legends of Usenet, along with the likes
>of Kibology and the first MMF chain letter. Clealy, sir, the Empire of
>Meow's feline vocalizations will be heard forever more throughout Usenet
>history.
>
>Meow.
ime frum harvard, dood! an eye reclam tihs grope inta nam of amwp!
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