And now a message from our sponser...

Ok, so there is actually no message from a sponsor. I just felt that two consecutive blog postings from me would be just plain unnatural.

So, what does Liquid Paper (a.k.a. White-Out) have to do with my BBS life? Evidently quite a lot. It seems after just one night of boredom waiting for everyone else to get done (so we can go to our favorite restaurant) I grabbed a bottle of white-out off a neighboring desk and start to color things with it.

...the Liquid Paper bottle...
...someone's shoe...
...other objects...

I mean it's perfectly normal, right? Low blood sugar. Lack of Sleep. Lack of something relevant to do. I mean the brush mounted in the cap is just WAITING to be used. Well after that one night, TM.Cavalier and Liquid Paper became one of the running jokes of the Motel West (there were a few I recall). When you get a large group of friends together typing out their life and adventures on a green and black screen each day, little one-liner zings quickly become part of every post. A little jab here and a little jab there to generate some friendly banter.

The BBS scene was very much like Radio -- it is the theater of the mind. What someone says on the BBS becomes a kind of reality...a virtual reality you may say. Every alias developed a persona that had elements of the person behind it, but at the same time was quite a different person. Frequently people who hit it off well with the group on-line didn't mesh well with the group in a real life situation. Why? The person was friendly and outgoing only in the virtual world. In the real world they were a petty self-centered jerk. Almost nobody that I met on-line ever turned out to be how I expected them when I finally saw them in person. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing. I remember user with the alias Your Conscience who was very obnoxious and quite brutal on-line. In real life this guy was hilarious to be around. Once you realized who he really was, the on-line persona morphed into a person hitting you with abstract random information just to throw you off kilter.

So, back to white-out. In the on-line persona of TMC, Liquid Paper became the drug of choice...or more correctly a battle axe in the hands of someone recently returned from the "hospital" who is anxious to tell you that they "are all better now."