The best time to post this intro was while I was still the forums' newest member. The second-best time is now.

Hi, my name is Austin Loomis and I... am a weasel on acid. I'm also a Mamorien on Bob's forums; he and one or two others can vouch for me. I also too formerly played as Strong Bad, The Cheat, and a number of other peoples you might have accidentally heard of, in the same LJ RP comm where Jen used to puppet Optimus Prime back when she wore a younger man's clothes.

Before that, I was part of the Mystery Octagon Theatre 3000 writing team, in which capacity I cannot, in good conscience, deny that I yielded to peer pressure and joined in the general dogpile on DJ as part of a sporking of NXE. I am specifically and personally responsible for having somebody call him an "egregious little snot". In turn before that, I was on io.iou (the Usenet-adjacent incarnation of another place Jen used to RP back when it was a BBS) as polymorphic power-fantasy Zedd Staarlinn and some of his hilariously convoluted supporting cast.

I got on the original Illuminati Online about four months into September 1993, mostly for access to the "Metaverse" MOO they'd advertised in the then-print edition of Pyramid magazine. I actually got on the Internet so I could get to IO. In the process, I made several different kinds of fool of myself on Usenet. I was secretly famous for all sorts of things. If anyone here followed the Ultimate Video Rumble, I am in fact the Austin of Austin's Glosses. That led me to working with Thomas "Wanderer" Wilde when he took over from Birdman effective UVR2, which led me to the Ballad of Shame and Wasted Lives (his message board), which led to MOT and Milliways, which led to all sorts of bizarreness that doesn't need exploring at this juncture.

I also discovered Otaku Rising (hi Mario!) and UF, in that order. I think it was Cybertron Dreams that got me on the road to hooked, but I know I was a hopeless weasel by the time TWILIGHT started. Sadly, somewhere along the way, I started lurking the forums without taking time to accept the acceptable use policy, so I locked myself out of here for over 20 years before deciding to test whether a new computer would give me a clean slate. As you can see, it did (unless Gryph or someone else with a Danish wants to revoke me).

I have years of bottled-up ideas, and I may very well inflict the lot of them on y'all before I'm done. Media I have, over the years, thought I would incorporate into this whole sort of general mish-mash if I got a seat at the table include BLEACH, Daria (even if it was just for her getting to say "I'll take the New Vegas odds on that one"), and my favorite movie of all time (PM me if you're curious; it's not gross IMO, just fucked up as a Seeker's bat).

And now I've introduced myself (right on!) and you know at least as much as you need to know about me. What you do with the knowledge is up to you.

-Z

Oh, there's a name from the old interwebs.

>I got on the original Illuminati Online about four months into
>September 1993, mostly for access to the "Metaverse" MOO they'd
>advertised in the then-print edition of Pyramid magazine. I actually
>got on the Internet so I could get to IO. In the process, I made
>several different kinds of fool of myself on Usenet. I was secretly
>famous for all sorts of things. If anyone here followed the Ultimate
>Video Rumble, I am in fact the Austin of Austin's Glosses. That led me
>to working with Thomas "Wanderer" Wilde when he took over from Birdman
>effective UVR2, which led me to the Ballad of Shame and Wasted Lives
>(his message board), which led to MOT and Milliways, which led to all
>sorts of bizarreness that doesn't need exploring at this juncture.

The tragedy of the old internet is losing a lot of the old forums and archives that had a lot of great content on them. Wanderer ST'd an actually pretty entertaining set of RPs way back in the day that I'm not sure can be found anywhere after his hosting on dimfuture went away.

>I am specifically and personally
>responsible for having somebody call him an "egregious little snot".

Eh, fair. The thing that practically nobody twigged to at the time, or at least nobody who cared to share it with me if they did, is that he was supposed to be abrasive at first, because he was fronting like a maniac for basically all of season 1. In spite of his background, he was still not prepared in any way for the situation he found himself in. The only way forward was to act like he knew what he was doing, so fiercely that he himself might start to believe it.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>I also discovered Otaku Rising (hi Mario!) and UF, in that order.

Hello! And I apologize. :D

Holy crap, you're the second person I've heard of, besides myself, who got into UF through MOT. Welcome!

Nice to meet? you. Were you just a fan, or do I know a different name for you from the Ballad?

I helped riff the third Nightmare James story, though I don't think it released before MOT died.

A rough draft went up, in which you were credited as one of "the first-year students in the Yawaraken Group" and I was rightly said to be "the monster in Elliot McGucken's closet" (I can explain that one, or at least attempt to, if anyone accidentally cares). The innocent, the eager and the doomed can find The Mark of Zenretsu at https://web.archive.org/web/20050205190756/http://www.dimfuture.net/elsewhere/mot/ep202.txt, but be warned: when I posted the raw text to the Ballad, I described it as having "been clinically proven to cause rats in laboratory cancer."