C00LeS WaReZ UNiON MeMOiRS: cHApTER #0x96

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0x96  -  Helsinki  -  mR.mEgAsTuFf  -  1998-02  -  294 lines
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We found a two-room apartment in Käpylä with Osmo and moved in at the end of November. It wasn't a second too soon, I swear. I wouldn't have lasted a day, NOT A SINGLE DAY, with those freakin' glue-sniffing maniacs in that crummy dorm, damn it!!

So, our apartment has this bigger "living room" which is technically ours but mostly Osmo's, especially since he dragged his bed and desk in there. Then there's this smaller room, like my room. The door doesn't lock, but the soundproofing is pretty good, so I can't hear Osmo's snoring. And Osmo doesn't even come in without knocking if the door's closed, which is a major bonus: at least I can wank in peace!

We got a cable modem, so goodbye to the phone lines and their per-minute charges! Osmo doesn't really use the Internet much, but I compensate by using it a lot.

Somewhere along the line, Osmo started bringing work home. He couldn't stand hanging out at KJM-Systems' office anymore. One weekend he drove all the way to Lietevesi to get some tools and an oscilloscope to get even more work done at home. He's been talking a lot lately about starting his own company, getting to be the "boss" again instead of the "servant". He says he'd have more work than he could ever handle.

I promised Osmo I'd try to find a job once I decided vocational school wasn't for me. So, I went to a few different places, talking to all sorts of morons. Most of them just said no thanks, but then, at the beginning of December, I got surprisingly hired by a web design shop, CyberMedia Interface Services.

CyberMedia's boss is some dude in his late twenties with a black-dyed hair shaped like a ski jump ramp, and the kind of fashionable new-media glasses. I took Garlick, our demo from last summer's Abduction, to the interview, and bragged about having founded the group. He ran it under some fucking Windows NT thing so he couldn't even hear the music and the retrace sync didn't work, but he was still like "wow", and he kept repeating how cool the young Assembly talent was and stuff like that. It was mostly Samppa's code anyway, but he didn't even bother to ask who did what. So far, so good! NOW I'D BE IN THE WORKING WORLD, DAMMIT, GOODBYE TO THE SCHOOL SUCKAGE AND POVERTY!!!

My coworkers, in addition to Ramp-hair (aka Jani), include a chubby guy who seemed quite irrelevant (Jorkki), and a woman who used to be a graphic designer (Jaana), and a couple of others whose names don't start with J. All pretty annoying characters, but I tried to be a "team player" at least in the beginning (damn those fucking sports terms), so I wouldn't get kicked out right away.

I hadn't even considered trying out HTML coding before, but it started to click, even though it was a fucking pain. As soon as something looked decent, I had to switch it to another browser or resolution, and everything looked like fucking garbage. A real pain in the ass before the page looked halfway decent in both Netscape and Explorer. Luckily, we didn't have to support any other browsers, because Ramp-hair said we'd only be using new tech for our websites. The two version-four browsers and the two most common resolutions, that's what we'd test with, and we'd put little NS4 and IE4 banners on every page so visitors using other browsers would realize they need to upgrade them. Theoretically, we should also test it on a Mac, but apparently, there are so few Mac users that it's not really worth worrying about.

It was a real pain in the ass, but when all kinds of optics stores, bakeries, and ad agencies were willing to pay ridiculous prices for their own websites, what's the harm in getting the money?

Of course, half the clients wanted some Java effect on their websites just because they'd heard Java was "the latest technology." And then our boss was advertising to everyone that I, Mika, was this "young Assembly guy" who could do "cool graphics" with Java. For the fuck's sake! Luckily, I could easily find some American morons' sites with ready-made stuff like starfields and rotating cubes in Java, and the clients were all like "wow!" And when Samppa came back to IRC, I asked him if he wanted to try coding a Java effect, like a "CyberMedia" text exploding, but he didn't seem to get very interested, even though he promised to try. I even offered him some money for it, so let's see.

Sometimes a client would want Perl on their website too, so they'd have the full tech inventory. Then I'd have to dig up some Perl-made guestbooks or visitor counters and get them working on our office's Linux server (which was some leftover 486 that Fat-Ass-Jorkki had installed some Red Hat on). I sometimes get some help from Jyri and Samppa for getting those Perl turds to work, and I'd give them permanent access to the server in return.

Jorkki would occasionally suggest we put the Linux machine in some secure server hotel, but Ramp-hair thought it didn't matter much yet. Nobody's going to notice if a visitor counter doesn't work sometimes, as long as it works most of the time. The actual HTML pages we always put in Saunalahti's web space, because the client companies also usually had some consumer Internet package bought from Saunalahti.

Around X-mas, Ramp-hair was feeling generous and bought each employee a bottle of red wine (bleh, our kilju was better) and a ticket to see the Titanic movie (seriously, what a sappy drama, even though almost everyone dies). Then he asked what we were planning to do for X-mas. I said I wasn't doing any X-mas! I'd rather work overtime than spend X-mas at that fuckin' Raimo's place, damn it! Besides, our firm had a project that needed to be finished before the new year.

So, Ramp-hair respected my decision, and I spent X-mas at the office, mostly chatting on IRC. Ritu and Osmo brought me some ham and casseroles and even some crappy present.

I spend a pretty big chunk of my working days on IRC even in general, but whatever, the client pays me for it, bwahah. But sometimes I use my "creative thinking breaks" for all sorts of "professionally interesting" things, like checking out what other people have put up on the web. And FUCKING DAMN! The more I see, the more I'm convinced that web page lamers are the most miserable fuckin' lamers EVER! (Or "the worst pällis," as my coworkers would say.)

I could at least accept that the MTV3 or AltaVista homepages were full of epileptic flashing ad banners, but why does everyone else want everything else to flash too? That one bakery owner said the page didn't have enough "multimedia," so I threw in some fuckin' useless cat animations just so she'd say it looked "much better" even though they really ruined the whole thing. Seriously, what kind of clueless morons! But whatever, they paid us for our "WWW design," so I'm not complaining.

Luckily, no one even needs to AltaVista and its crappy ad-infested website anymore, thanks to Google. The Google site has nothing useless or flashing, and it even finds everything better than AltaVista or Yahoo combined! I recommended everyone to just use the fucking Google, they actually put the users as the first priority. Someone asked what their "revenue model" was if they didn't have any ad banners. I said it didn't matter to me as long as there weren't any fuckin' banners! That moron started arguing that it was some kind of communism or something suspicious if someone didn't think about "revenue models" first. Luckily, I managed to drop that argument before Ramp-hair got involved.

But who even cares about the ad-banner hells really. Even the MTV3 site is not even close to those vomitous messes that the 12-year-old MBnet clowns create! Many of those wet-ears actually think they have the "best websites in Finland" (Seriously, "sites" sounds even lamer than "pages"!) Apparently, they think a website is better the more webrings and link lists it's been spammed into, and the more gifs, Java applets, and fuckin' "free guestbooks" and "free forums" from some external ad hellsites it has. And of course, they all have to get a "fancier" address from some fuckin' redirect service like cjb.net or come.to, which, of course, throws in their own ad banner into an extra frame. And then they exchange some fuckin' award badges with each other, hoping to get a reciprocal circlejerk banner in return. Seriously, what a bunch of losers!

I lost it over those kid's "sites" so much on IRC that even Jyri started losing it too. He only uses Lynx as his client, so the graphic hellsites just show up as [INLINE] [INLINE] [INLINE], but I did manage to convince him to check them out with a graphical browser sometimes so he could get a proper meltdown experience. Of course, he had to make sure the computer lab was empty so no one would notice him using anything but Lynx. But he did start losing it on those sites.

Then Jyri noticed that a lot of those dubious "free stuff for your website" sites were seriously hole-ridden. Like Nettilinkit.com (where you can rate the sites that have copied their voting form), it doesn't check the ratings you send, so you can easily change the parameter to give a rating of minus one million or something, sinking the sucky sites down to the lowest hell. Bwahahahah!

And that Freebok guestbook all the shortdicks use had an even more glaring hole in it. In its user settings page there was a form with a hidden field that held the user's login name, and we could just substitute it for any other user and use that to obtain their passwords. I could just get the MBnet homepage listing and collect the Freebok passwords and real names of all the sucky sites that were using Freebok, and then try those combos in the MBnet login prompt. A surprisingly big portion of them worked, so the now CWU has a fuckin' arsenal of MBnet logins once again.

But we haven't even bothered using those logins much. A couple of years ago, their lameness had still been the lamest ever and therefore entertaining, but now it feels like nothing because all the website lamers and the IRC dating clowns have surpassed them by kilometers. Somehow I feel that even a large portion of those MBnet kids have started to prefer Internet for chatting, so the MBnet chat no longer has that senseless "PLAY DUKE WITH ME JOKERIT IS THE BEST" flood like a year or so ago.

Many of the homepage kids are so pathetic lamers that they don't even use IRC but some fucking' WWW-based KissFM chat, or then some fucking ICQ that has fucking number sequences instead of proper nicks, and shit like that. And even if they do use IRC, they use it with mIRC, and they actually think the entire IRC is called "mIRC". And if they also happen to be Quake lamers on top of that, they always only use that Quake-lamers' own QuakeNet and don't even know about the other networks!

And then they always have some fucking "ShowDowN PrO" script installed in their fucking mIRCs, spamming IN EVERY FUCKING OCCASION to every channel that ShowDowN PrO is the best script and go grab it from that URL. Luckily, the decent channels on the IRCnet side have automatic kickbans on everyone using that piece of crap. And everyone else whose version reply has mIRC color codes. Actually, every fucking mIRC clown should be autokickbanned everywhere dammit.

At some of point of time the mIRC lamers started sending a file called SCRIPT.INI to everyone via DCC. It turned out that it's a kind of worm that automatically spreads itself from a user to another. I've heard that mIRC auto-accepts all the DCC sends by default and even overwrites the user's script.ini file that the client runs on every startup. Seriously, what a fuckin' lame client! Jyri took a few versions of those script.inis and noticed that many of them have backdoors to send commands, and some even send a message to a secret channel where the script reports when the infected clown joins the IRC. Okay, we modified a version that sent those messages to our own channel instead and then used the backdoor to join the clowns to places like #fingay to find some fuckin' homo buddies, and other sick stuff like that.

Once, the CWU gang joined a channel of a really stupid guy who was advertising his own "mIRC room" on his homepage, which of course was on QuakeNet. Okay, we easily took over that channel, since his mIRC also had a script.ini with a backdoor. Then that fuckin' lamehead started crying about how "IRC is fuckin' garbage" and put some Java chat on his homepage instead. But that chat was also an IRC-based thing, but he didn't realize it until we showed up with our IRC clients and showed him who the boss was, bwahah.

But even mIRC isn't that lame compared to Micro$oft Comic Chat, the favorite client of our ex-schoolmate Mikael! Seriously, what kind of unbelievably incompetent morons use that!! Most of them haven't even realized it's an IRC client, because it only defaults to the Micro$oft MSN IRC server. Once we took over some fucking #helsinki channel for ourselves and put in a bot that kicked everyone who had those comics-mode vomits in front of their messages. Then the blokes starteed crying like "why can't we chat with those comics in this room" and then we played kickball with those morons. That was so fucking satisfying! Especially after getting annoyed at work by some really stupid client representative, some IRC kickball removed the annoyance quite efficiently!!

At some point of time Jyri noticed that, in that irc.msn.com server, it's not allowed to use certain words in the topics and channel nimes, like "fuck" and "shit" and "nigger". If you try to use any of those, a "SysopBot" joins the channel the next second and changes the topic into "IRC/IRCX Standard Topic". What the fuck is "IRCX"? They're always making up their own "standards" no one else has even heard of, dammit! And that censorship always fails when the net is split. Once, Jyri was able to found a #nigger channel there during a split and even added all the known banned words in the topic as well. And then when we invited all kinds of lamers in, and the server started to shout at them stuff like "this channel name is offensive!" and automatically kicked them out of the entire network every time they said something! Bwahahahahah!!!

But we did harrass ordinary IRCnet users too, even ones who didn't use mIRC. Once we joined the channel of one irrelevant clown and started to mass-invite folks to there from the #italia channel. Italians are like the lamest IRC users ever, and they always use some mIRC-color-vomiting PizzaIRc script installed in their mIRCs, and it even automatically spams some CIAO A TUTTI FRUTTI messages on every channel, and on top of all that, they have autojoin-on-invite activated by default. And there, the founder of the channel was all like "help help, where are all those italos coming from" and didn't even dare to kick them the fuck out!! For the fuck's sake, that was FUN!!!

I've been thinking for a while that CWU should have its own website. A site that totally insults the whole fuckin' modern Internet lamer scene. Jyri was initially of the opinion that real groups should stay away from the WWW and everything those mainstream lamers use, but I managed to talk him around a bit. He still insists that no bitmaps should be used on the CWU site; all the graphics should be ASCII or ANSI. And if you want to show off with some WWW technique, it has to be server-side, because those MBnet lamers have never even heard of any cgibin stuff.

In January, I started getting more and more annoyed with my job at CyberMedia, especially with all of my conflicts with Ramp-hair, Jorkki, and especially with that fucking Jaana bitch. She had some seriously clueless ideas about what the Internet should be like, like that every fucking homepage should be some fucking ad. I'm starting to think that maybe I've seen enough of this "web-numedia" and I should maybe try to get a job at some game company next. With my demo background and showing our stuff, I might even get into some pissy wannabe game company. But let's see.

Another option would be to create a seriously hardcore prank website with the CWU guys, and then let that URL spread to every fuckin' IRC channel around the world, and then have some seriously addictive thing on it that everyone has to check out multiple times a day. Like some fuckin' hardcore porn chat or some other even more outrageous idea. Jyri might have some occult methods to maximize that addictiveness. And then, once the hooks are optimal, we'd just fill the site with ad banners and wait for millions to pour into our bank account. All the fucking lamers of the whole fucking world would be at our mercy!!!