Yo Ratz! More Whiskey!

Literary virtual reality in a high-tech low-life hangout

The Chatsubo was started in November 1990. There have, of course, been a few little discussions about how things were going along the way. The first person to say it had gone down the pan must have come along in, oh, December '90. They've been doing it ever since, but the traffic has been steadily growing.

Writing about the history of the Chatsubo is probably a bit dodgy if you came along in August/September 1995 like me. But hell, you experts can correct me if I'm wrong.

Prehistory

A prime mover in the newsgroup's formation appears to have been one Liralen Li, also known from time to time as Phyllis Rostykus. Jim Gaynor apparently got the technical side under way. In the 'Interface' thread in alt.cyberpunk, Liralen and others discussed the virtues of writing, particularly in the third person, as a means of direct communication. This thread eventually and indirectly led to the formation of the Chatsubo.

The Chatsubo got its first mention that I can find in alt.callahans, a newsgroup that has a lot in common with it. The Callahans gang had themselves a virtual bar maintained through cooperative fiction, but it was full of nice friendly people out to heal each others' mental scars or something (Joel shivers and looks the other way). Naturally, not everybody felt this way so after a brief sojourn in alt.cyberpunk which brought the first interaction in the bar and the first mention of Ratz the Chatsubo was born as a newsgroup proper.

So what's it all about then?

In between the stories, people argue. Newsgroups are supposed to have these things called charters, which say what they're for. I've found three charters for the chatsubo, they're in the Admin Waffle section. Nobody takes any notice of them.

Of course, people form their own opinions as to what the group is for. Here are a couple of my favourites:

The Point, by Tim Kuehn. A rather angry fellow called Cognos puts in his two cents.
The Enter Sandman thread. This was about the first Chatsubo post I saw, and it immediately convinced me that I had found the holy grail. Various regulars discuss quite what belongs in cyberpunk in general and the bar in particular. The Sandman entered, traded arguments and some lead with GodEater, Tranq's Vic and Jetta watched from the sidelines and finally GodEater came over all mature.

Sometimes they talk about useful stuff too. Guns and violence are popular items in the Chatsubo.

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