C00LeS WaReZ UNiON MeMOiRS: cHApTER #0x90

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0x90  -  Kuopio  -  dArK sTuFfEr  -  1997-08  -  194 lines
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We founded C00LeS WaReZ UNiON in the summer of 1994, before starting the seventh grade. By the summer of 1997, our compulsory education was over, and we scattered around Finland for further studies: mR.mEgAsTuFf to Helsinki, myXTer to Oulu, wArlord to Kiuruvesi, Othra to Lapinlahti, DaRK FuCKeR and MoTHeR FuCKeR to Iisalmi, and myself, dArK sTuFfEr, to Kuopio.

My belongings were transported from Lietevesi to Kuopio in a trailer rented by my father Taisto. Othra's belongings were also transported to Lapinlahti at the same time. My student apartment was on the eighth floor of a building, but thankfully, we managed to get most of my things moved up by elevator. Only my Heteka bed had to be carried up the staircase.

After Taisto and Othra left, I was left sitting alone in the corner of the bed. At that moment, I experienced a rather peculiar mix of emotions, including a sense of novelty, excitement, and inspiration, but also uncertainty. The most rational impression was that a completely new chapter was beginning in my life: I finally had my own room, a locked one at that, and I wouldn't be accountable for my life to anyone but myself. This change would definitely open up all kinds of new occult possibilities!

Besides the Heteka bed, there were a small table, a desk lamp, and a 386-based PC with a VGA monitor waiting for their final placement. There were also three other computers in cardboard boxes (an Amiga 1200, a Commodore 64, and a Sony HB-75P MSX), a black-and-white portable TV suitable as their display, some literature I considered essential, a few clothes, and some household supplies. However, arranging the belongings could wait, as I was captivated far more by something else in my new life situation.

I had moved to a city, Kuopio, whose population was tens of times larger than that of Lietevesi. Therefore, Kuopio probably held tens of times more places and secrets waiting for me to explore. Lietevesi had no bookstores at all, let alone ones specializing in occult lore, but Kuopio surely had dozens. There would also be dozens of esoteric secret societies, space-topologically anomalous crossroads, brothels, topless bars, genetic engineering research laboratories, underground tunnel networks, and incarnated spirits and extraterrestrial beings with their gathering places.

I was overwhelmed with excitement just seeing my apartment building for the first time. Located in the Särkiniemi district, it was an eleven-story apartment building with more windows than the entire village of Hautataipale had residents, and presumably, a whole host of mysteries behind each one. And since the city had hundreds of such apartment buildings, I considered it absolutely necessary to thoroughly explore the city. Kuopio was as mysterious to me as Lovecraft's Arkham.

Right on the following Monday, I went downtown to get a map of Kuopio, a highlighter pen, and a notebook. I would highlight the places I'd visited on the map, and write notes in the notebook, especially about locations with a particularly esoteric feel. I spent the entire rest of the day exploring all the streets in the downtown grid area. Having a bicycle significantly sped up the operation. When hunger struck, I ate rye bread from S-market, unsliced and unbuttered. The next day, I targetted my research at my new home district, Särkiniemi, and some of the surrounding areas.

Kuopio wasn't new to me, as I had spent several summers there. However, being an official resident of the city set possibilities and obligations different from the role of a countryside tourist. The difference is the same as the one I felt when I got my Commodore 64: from visiting my friends, I had obtained a rather superficial and cursory picture of the device (mostly through games), but once I get one of my own, the opportunity for independent, unlimited research opened up its true esoteric essence to me. I could hardly wait to discover the bugs, raster tricks, and anomalous exceptions unique to the city of Kuopio.

Just a few days later, I started missing my girlfriend at the time, Othra, who was then living in Lapinlahti. I wanted to explore the mystical and occult-tinged Kuopio with her. But how would I convey my wishes to her? Othra didn't have a computer for communication, and we didn't have each other's new apartment phone numbers when we separated, only the street addresses. On the fifth day of my Kuopio residency, I finally decided to use snail mail.

I wrote the letter at the university's lobby at a VT320 terminal, after which I copied it by hand onto paper. The place was familiar to me from my previous visits to Kuopio, as I had managed to get myself an account for the university's IBM RS/6000 server called Messi, even for two consecutive academic years. "Familiarization with the university's IT systems before the studies begin" was a "spell" passed from user to user in the BBS circles, and writing it on the application form had proven to be an effective way to get it approved.

Working at the VT320 was a pleasure for me, as I could be indefinitely connected to the Internet, especially the IRC, without constantly worrying about the per-minute landline charges. I had been missing this form of creative work, especially since the Lietevesi violence monopoly had declared our self-built CWUnet 2.0 network illegal and shut it down.

Around 19:00, I finally finished writing the letter, copied it using my anti-christian blackletter handwriting, and sealed it in a stamped envelope. I dropped the letter into the mailbox located at the university, and rode my bicycle back to my apartment. Upon arriving, I was surprised and delighted to find Othra already there. She had traveled to Kuopio several hours earlier and was waiting for me in the hallway in front of my door, reading a book.

After exchanging quick updates and affections, we quickly moved inside to engage in what's known as "reunion sex", which continued until almost midnight. I won't go into detail about the session, but it should be noted that the apartment offered quite a variety of possibilities due to the fact that the other two rooms were still uninhabited in July.

We spent almost the entire rest of the summer together, mostly in Kuopio. We did visit Othra's place in Lapinlahti, but as a small town, it wasn't nearly as inspiring as Kuopio. However, over the weeks, Kuopio's magical aura gradually faded, and many places began to look ordinary, and most people began to look like mass-produced extras. Othra insisted that townspeople were genuinely as individual as villagers, but in my opinion, most of them didn't even have a proper soul.

But a new Arkham was found in cooking. I had cooked before, and had even chosen home economics as an elective course in the junior high, but cooking with Othra took on a whole new dimension. Our experiments with different ingredients and processes were almost alchemical in nature. Our progress was significantly hampered by the fact that there was no kind of rigorous systematic theory available for cooking, no axioms to mathematically analyze. We had to create a whole new sub-area of alchemical theory in the midst of our experiments.

While waiting for the food to cook, and generally while at my apartment, I used my time to restore my BBS system to working order. Although Decrepitude had suffered from a decline in visitors after December, it was still the most significant occult-focused bulletin board in the 017 area. The apartment already had a phone line installed, so the procedure was relatively straightforward. There was a phone jack in each of the student cell groups, and I had negotiated the use of mine with Kuopio Student Housing Association.

wArlord, who had moved to Kiuruvesi, had already gotten his own Frontline BBS up and running. This BBS was also our WHQ, and it had been out of operation for about a month, and it was particularly important for wArlord to get it back online. I also tried to help revive Frontline's discussion areas, but there didn't seem to be a lot of time available for writing messages.

The few times I could focus entirely on writing messages, I spent most of my time using the university's VT terminals. Although the terminals were intrinsically excellent for reading and writing BBS messages, I encountered many technical difficulties while trying to do so.

First, the QWK message packet file from Frontline had to be transferred to my Unix home directory. Dialing from my apartment to the university's dial-up node would have been the easiest solution, but it would have been foolish due to the phone bill. It was better to copy the file to a diskette and perform the copy at the university premises.

The only computers with floppy drives easily accessible to me were the PCs located in the university library. However, these PCs ran MS-DOS, which didn't have a secure file transfer solution, only FTP. I certainly wouldn't agree to enter my Unix password over FTP or Telnet. I had to install my own temporary private FTP server in Messi just for transferring the QWK files.

The next problem was that there was no satisfactory QWK reader available. SkyReader and jmr, which I had used on Linux, weren't particularly willing to cooperate with AIX, and running the program from the Linux server over an SSH connection didn't produce a satisfactory result either. BlueWave-type user interfaces with their numerous windows and highlight bars were quite unbearable to use at a 9600 bps terminal speed. Newsreader programs were designed to be fast to use on terminals, but why would authors of QWK reader software instead choose to succumb to unforgivable DOS lameness? I eventually ended up dumping the contents of the QWK files into text files, which I read with a text editor.

Our IRC channel, #cwu, was rather quiet in the summer, as all non-members had been kicked off a while ago. The channel's discussion consisted mostly of two-way conversation between myself and mR.mEgAsTuFf. We rarely sat at our terminals at the same time, so our communication consisted of long monologues. From time to time, DaRK FuCKeR and wArlord would share their updates on the channel, but nothing was heard from myXTer, who had moved to Oulu. However, I will now let mR.mEgAsTuFf tell about his new life, as his accounts were perhaps the most startling.