Forum Whores

In the early days of the Internet, relatively few people were using the web for anything more than creating their own websites or talking in Newsgroups. Search engines were in their infancy and engines such as Open Text, Info Seek or Magellan had nowhere near the algorithmic capabilities that Google or Bing possesses today.

Beatrice Fontaine was never the type of person that stood out, there was no real label for her and she just didn’t fit in anywhere. In grade school, she had problems with reading, following authority and was chastise countless times for her incessant daydreaming. In high school, she managed a B average while never actually participating in any extracurricular activities much less cracking open a book.

Sports didn’t appeal to her, even though she had an athletic body. Boys seemed to be hit or miss, with the occasional “sort of” steady, that would always seem to break up with her for the prettier, blonder, and louder type. Even the charm of recreational drugs that were so prevalent in the early eighties, didn’t seem to hold much interest with Beatrice. It was as if life to Beatrice Fountain were just one big waiting room filled with an endless wall of windows that held no great scenery for her to bother giving more than a passing glance to.

In the early Fall of 1992, Beatrice died her hair black and told her mother she was now, after unceremoniously graduating high school and working a string of dead-end restaurant jobs, going to enroll in college for computer graphics. Digital Art had become the one window in life that Beatrice could sit in front of and daydream out of for hours without ever getting bored. In truth, the world of gaming had become all of the great experiences that she should have enjoyed growing up all rolled into one endeavor that she would now actually show an interest in.

She would spend all night in front of the family desktop playing games like Battle Chess and Larry the Lounge Lizard, going through each floppy disk and each new game as if it were something she was born to do. Beatrice wanted to design these games, she was frustrated, even back then, in not being able to move the character into the next room, or out of the door that wouldn’t open. She wanted to know about the level that she couldn’t get to, and what’s more, she wanted to be the one who cracked the code and find the inner or secret corridors within the games.

Beatrice attended college and received her Bachelors in computer science in much the same way that she did most everything else in life~ without anyone, including herself paying much attention to it.

Three years later, Bea died her hair back to dirty blonde and finally landed a less than her dream job in the advertising department of a local newspaper. She quickly rose to the head of her digital Art department of which there were only two other employees, and within a six-month period was tasked with the responsibility of having the final say on things like font type and sometimes placement and typeset of certain ads.

One afternoon Bea came across a quirky little ad in her inbox that her supervisor had sticky noted, “if you can for this weekend’s copy Fine, if you can’t Fine”, somehow fit into the last page of the “Weekend Bend” spot. The two-page, sometimes three, insert was just about the whole purpose for Beatrice’s department and it listed everything from live bands to lost pets.

The ad that landed in her inbox read as follows:

Are you a Forum Whore?

Do you like to spend countless hours online talking about how much a Beta version of a particular online game sucks? Think you’d like to get paid for this type of superpower?

Hit us up with an e-mail, or check us out online at

www. Sophie’s Choice/yourgamesucks.html/forumwhore101

She opened Photoshop and quickly posted the ad somewhere between a Trek convention being held on Saturday at St. Vincent’s rec hall and a Look who’s turning 50 Ad with a rather embarrassing shot of a child wearing a bunny costume, saved the file, and shot it over to the press department with the subject Line Final copy.

Bea grabbed the piece of paper with the funny little ad on it, gulped down the rest of her ice coffee, which was now more Ice water than coffee, and shoved the piece of paper into her pocketbook. She shut down her computer, threw a couple of things she had been working on into her outbox, wheeled her chair under her desk, and headed out the door.

---

“It’s AIREANNA, and it’s not a misspelling!” Bea yelled at the screen on her laptop as she attempted for the third time to create a login and password on the Forum board for an online virtual environment called OuterWorldz.

She finally settled on a suggestion that the page gave, shortened the name, scrambled the letters, and went with an acronym.

A.I.R.E ~Animated Intelligence Representing an Entity.

She stumbled through the secret questions for a password, clicked a couple of times, went with the default female avatar, and was brought straight to her profile where a welcome message was waiting for her in her inbox.

Bea gave a half-glance at the stupid username she had to go with as she pushed her computer chair away from the desk in her bedroom, dug into her box of Cheezits, then crunched her way through the automated welcome message.

Her eyes mimicked the movement of an old typewriter as she scrolled back and forth through the lines mouthing out loud “Blah Bla, Thank-you for joining, please take a moment to read our TOS, blah, blah...” and then finished the line with a verbal “TING” sound as she munched another mouthful of Cheezits.

Bea was scrolling through the site's terms of service and heading down for the box to check its proverbial “I agree” so she could get on to the business of unlocking the game and it's forum board when she noticed another PM had come into her inbox.

She finished scrolling down without actually reading, clicked on the box then went up to her inbox to check out what she imagined would be another automated welcome post from the administrator or forum monitor with every intention of just glancing and clicking onto the next thing.

Bea clicked on the message with the subject Line Hey There! and began to read as she shoved another mouthful of Chezzits in. Crunch, Crunch, “Blah, Bla, Glad you could make it, we need people like you, blah blah, join us in-game and begin testing our Beta version of a new and exciting Virtual environment, yadda yadda, Crunch, Crunch, and we’ll see you on the Grid.”

Bea took a big gulp of her Fresca and clicked on the link that said Download our client and waited. Ten minutes later, Bea threw the empty box of Cheezits towards her small trash barrel in the corner of her room and was staring at a splash screen with a brilliantly colored avatar sitting on a bed of equally brilliant colored cupcakes then wheeled herself into computer desk for a closer look.

She followed the onscreen instructions, went back to her profile, created a short bio of herself, and then clicked on the launch Beta client button. She watched as the progress bar on her screen filled with a green line and progressed into a sort of panoramic view of a lake with cartoonish looking trees and information type kiosks dotting a winding yellow brick sort of road.

Her avatar, or what she assumed was her avatar because it had the label _AIRE_ over its head, was still rezzing and appeared as a puff of smoke. The instructions she had sort of read five minutes earlier indicated that it might appear whited out when she first logged in. What was actually happening was that the files were being uploaded and her client, (viewer) was in a way, creating the pixels known as Aire.

Bea was startled by a loud DING DING which she had, a bit later on, surmised was a default sound the client made whenever an IM came in from another avatar, or whenever the viewer was giving helpful hints, and so on. She wasn’t sure about much at this point in her game experience, but she knew right away that she had to find the volume button pretty damn soon or she would be deleting this ridiculous game and going back to downloading pirated song files so she could finish burning the CD she started the night previous.

Beatrice noticed that Aire had finally loaded and was encompassed by a huge black box that read MASTURBATING BE BACK SOON and dropped her mouth as she immediately clicked on the box that read local chat.

Outer Worldz login Successful

[Slater Milkshake is offering you an object named Masturbate box]

[Your inventory object named Masturbate box would like to animate your avatar]

[would you like to wear object named Masturbate box?]

Bea scrolled through local chat and immediately recognized what happened and although she was brand new to this three-dimensional environment, she was not new to the flame antics of a forum whore, she noticed a little bald avatar wearing the Tag Slater Milkshake just above his, head.

Bea started typing furiously in local chat as soon as she noticed the next automated announcement by way of local chat and a blue box that had popped up with an annoying Din, Ding.

[Slater Milkshake is offering friendship]

The Blue box up in the right-hand corner of Bea’s viewer read “Will you be my friend?”

She immediately clicked it shut and started typing the Words ~You need to seriously Fu~

when she noticed an IM box had popped up right next to her local chat box.

She Clicked on it to read

[2002/05/03 11:39]Slater Milkshake: Hey, OMG I am so sorry! Honest to God I thought you were my friend Ruz, rezzing back! That was meant for him, lol!!! He just got booted from the sim.

[2011/05/03 11:41]Slater Milkshake: hey no kidding, I don’t flame noobs, and sorry if this is your first rez 0.0 I just looked at your profi and noticed the date .0.o

Bea backspaced the rude comment she was about to send this Slater person after she noticed two more avatars were rezzing nearby and she retyped a message in response

[2011/05/03 11:41]Aire Xaris: Yea, no worries, but how do I get this thing off?

[2011/05/03 11:42]Slater Milkshake: Just RMC anywhere on your Avi and a pie chart will come up, choose drop or detach and it will disappear back into your inventory.

Aire kept looking over the black box at Bea and then back at Slater, which Bea surmised must have been some sort of script that was included with the object and she chuckled a bit as she just watched the expression on her new avatar. Bea was about to click on Aire and save her from any further embarrassment when the two other avatars had finally come into full resolution and both the male and female avatars were wearing the same black box with the large bold letters MASTURBATING BE BACK SOON and apparently Bunny Slippers.

Aire looked back at Beatrice from the screen as if to say "What the hell are you doing, get this stupid thing off me" and Bea hesitated from clicking the side of the box which would have brought up a pie chart that would have allowed her to choose drop or detach. She looked at the tags over the heads of the two other avatars as Slater was now wearing his own Black Box with the huge letters MASTURBATING BE BACK SOON.

Bea snapped to attention with the annoying "DING, DING" sound accompanying a fresh blue box that read Sophie Sautereau is offering you an object named Bunny Slippers". and Bea thought, I've met them, these are the Forum Whores.