C00LeS WaReZ UNiON MeMOiRS: cHApTER #0x92

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0x92  -  Kiuruvesi  -  wArlord  -  1997-09  -  155 lines
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I moved out of Lietevesi in July, just like the rest of the CWU crew. I could have waited until August, but it felt right to make a grand exit with everyone at once. That gave me a nice, almost month-long stretch to get acquainted with my new hometown before school started.

I moved into the student housing at Kiuruvesi Vocational School, even though I was supposed to be going to high school. Luckily, the rooms were already furnished, so I didn't have to lug all those chairs and tables we'd crammed into the Valmet's trailer. I probably should have checked that out beforehand; it would have saved me a lot of cursing.

Each student apartment had a shared phone and a shared phone jack. I even brought a long extension cord with me, so I could take care of my most important civic duty: getting Frontline BBS back online.

Frontline had been offline for a while. First, the Lietevesi police took it for investigation on some bogus charges, and we didn't get it back for a couple of months from the Pielavesi police, who had taken over Lietevesi police's duties due to a municipal merger. After that, it ran at Samppa's (myXTer's) place until June, when Samppa's mom, Arja, moved out, and Osmo had to drive the BBS down and stash the machine in his shed. We couldn't have done that by ourselves at the time, because we were stuck in the "Pirttimäki anomalous zone" -- some kind of an insane time warp we didn't escape until mid-July.

Frontline had lost quite a few message-writers, especially after that Christmas police fiasco. They also took down our CWUnet 2.0 local network, which had a direct connection to the Internet, and a lot of people had used Frontline just for that. When the BBS came back to life at Samppa's place, it was incredibly hard to get the old users back, and the number had changed. Now I had to start the whole user retrieval campaign again after a month of offline time and a number change.

1995 and 1996 had been the golden years for BBSs, but 1997 showed signs of a downturn. Before, people used to dial into a lot of boards in their local telecom area and maybe occasionally to the Internet; the Internet was like one BBS among others. But by 1997, things had flipped: the Internet became the "main BBS" for many, and people only bothered dialing into one or two actual boards. If you wanted to let the users know that the BBS was back online with a new number, simply posting in the regional messagenet and a few of the biggest BBSes of the area wasn't enough; you had to track down each user individually from their favorite BBS or IRC channel.

Eventually, we did manage to breathe some life back into Frontline. Jyri and Kassu (dArK sTuFfEr and DaRK FuCKeR) tried their best to help with the messaging revival, but Meka (mR.mEgAsTuFf), judging by his IRC antics, seemed to have a life situation in Helsinki that didn't leave much room for Savonian BBSs. He had enough on his plate and probably would have had to pay for long-distance calls anyway.

Kiuruvesi was a decent place to live overall, but a little too city-like for my taste. The nature didn't start at the backyard; you had to drive for kilometers on a moped to get to the proper woods. And my sleep was worse than in the countryside, sometimes I could hear traffic noise really late. But fishing was decent enough so I wasn't just living on supermarket food.

I made a few trips to Iisalmi by train to see what Kassu and Masa (DaRK FuCKeR and MoTHeR FuCKeR) were up to. Since none of us had started school yet, there weren't any new schoolmates to drink with, so we had this three-person CWU crew hanging out. Even though Masa wasn't really a CWU member anymore, he was still one of us. For the last week before school started, we held a full-week drinking spree, kind of a final hurrah for summer vacation. And we had to make up for the month we'd lost because of that time warp. Masa had brewed several buckets of kilju, which we drank from daily.

We ran into some Iisalmi youth in a park one night and ended up with me spending one night at a girl's place. So that was that — my innocence was gone. Meka even seemed a little happy about it on IRC, considering it brought the group a little closer to the "pussy project's" original goal, which we had set back in 1995.

Then school started, and I got two roommates. The first week went okay, but then they started asking why I had the phone line all to myself. I tried to explain it in simple terms, like I would to an old countryside woman, but it went completely over their heads. "What the hell do you even do with it?" "Is that some kind of Internet thing?" "It's just some rambling nonsense from a high school student."

Well, they didn't really need to understand it. The important thing was that Frontline stayed online, whether anyone knew what it was or not. I had sworn on the honor of Lietevesi that Frontline would stay online as long as I had breath in my body, and keeping that promise was about as sacred as it got for me at that time.

I went to talk to the student housing board, but no one seemed to grasp why I needed my own phone line. Even though I was willing to pay all the costs, including installation, everyone just looked at me blankly and said they couldn't approve something like that because no one had ever asked for such a service before. I should bring it up at the annual meeting next spring and such crap. Damn it, that town had only become a city a few years ago, and now their city-slicker bureaucracy crap already made me sick!

So, I had to start looking for alternative locations for Frontline. The school building had rooms with their own phone jacks and numbers, but I couldn't convince the principal or anyone else of my need. The computer teacher knew about BBSs but she said they were old-fashioned. The Internet is what matters now, not those modem BBSs.

That started a pretty heated debate. What was so special about being newfangled? There are plenty of other traditions that people maintain, and isn't a BBS that's been online for over two years pretty traditional already? The teacher thought there was no place for any kind of tradition or old-fashionedness in computers. Computers are always new! What a bunch of jerks.

But I wasn't discouraged. I started calling all sorts of companies and municipal agencies, asking if I could set up Frontline in their premises for a small fee. It took a lot of calls before I found someone willing. It was a machine-building company that had a corner of an office empty. So, there it was, Frontline up and running, and me reviving the messaging once again. I put an ad of the company right after the BBS's login ANSI, and the CEO was happy. And once again, I had to start the "our number has changed" campaign. Luckily, we'd had the foresight to collect all the regular users' email addresses, so communication was a little easier this time.

When the school year started, I got a student card, which gave me a 50% discount on train tickets. I ended up visiting Iisalmi a lot to hang out with Kassu and Masa. And Phaserhawk (slash Cult of Power) showed up occasionally. But eventually, I didn't go there as often, because I started getting to know my new schoolmates and drinking with them. It was easier, too, because in Kiuruvesi I could go to bed whenever I wanted, completely independent of everyone else.

I couldn't really talk about BBSs or the scene with my schoolmates, so I felt a little lonely sometimes. One guy in our class had had his own BBS for a while, and another used to dial into MBnet pretty often. But no one understood why an old-fashioned, non-Internet BBS was so important to me, so I didn't try to talk about it much.

Frontline became kind of my own oddity, something everyone knew about but no one really understood. But otherwise, I was just a regular country boy who had moved in because of high school, doing the same things as everyone else. We went to school, drank on weekends, sometimes went fishing, and occasionally had some romantic entanglements. Some people started watching that hyped-up Babylon 5 on TV, but it never really resonated with me. Sci-fi just isn't my thing.