The Inferno

Usenet has always been the seedy underbelly of the Internet, the dark alleys where trolls eat the naive and feed on the bloated carcasses of the deformed, pulled down because they tarried too long on an unsavoury topic.

Apart from that, though, before the emergence of the WWW and forums and messageboards and all that fancy stuff (thanks, Berners-Lee), Usenet, or Internet newsgroups were the watering holes for most of us, rapidly adjusting to a new medium.

So after the mandatory visits to alt.sex.your.fetish.here and alt.binaries.*, where could one really lurk? Find a place to call home? Relax one’s tired feet at the end of a long day?

If you preferred ads relating to buying and selling chattels, it would be a place like van.forsale. But if you liked thrash metal or anything heavier, there was no better place to mill about than alt.music.slayer, despite what those poseurs in alt.rock-n-roll.metal.oldschool might tell you. The regulars were knowledgable about metal as only people who truly love something can be, true connoisseurs of the metallic genre indeed.

Woe betide anyone who admits to liking mall-metal, or some of the more commercial forms of metal floating around at any given point. While the occasional Nevermore fanboy crawls out of the woodwork, most of the regulars are a hoary bunch, not shy of letting their disdain for anything released after a band’s first album show.

The other regular features of this newsgroup are the postings by the Anus.com troll, an individual with pretentious claims to intellectual sophistry. Almost everyone hates this Hessian, but he reposts his tripe every week, on top of committing the cardinal sin of cross-posting to a million newsgroups at once.

A lot of the famous regulars have all but disappeared now. There was the mighty Venmlegion, older than Father Time himself, who had seen Metallica on their first tour. There was Significant Pickle, who was the calm voice of reason and possessed a rapier wit. Brutal Noodle took on the more belligerent role, but came across like a good guy, like Steven Seagal in one of his innumerable B-movies. War Nipple argued with everyone over everything, most notably Venmlegion in one of the longest running threads in thrash history. J, from England was the typical token Britisher disgusted by the lack of civilization in the colonies. Kramer, who stopped posting for long periods, would show up intermittently and post crazy talk. There was cailinsdad, a former metalhead turned system admin who still loved thrash. CalgaryRob from Calgary was the grim Canadian on the site, who revelled in tormenting Mike Mosh. Mike Mosh who had pictures of himself in front of Nazi swastikas, desperately awaiting the start of the Fourth Reich. Matt Tulini, who posted pictures of himself looking like a stoned Italian metalhead, which he was, big surprise there. John Chedsey, of SSMT fame, would cross post his lists of CDs for sale.

That was then. Now, of all the people mentioned above, the only ones who post regularly are Brutal Noodle, Significant Pickle albeit under a different handle, and Wyrd. Wyrd is not of the above, but has been there since 1999 or so and has been Brutal Noodle’s trans-atlantic comrade in gay jokes. When the level of homo-eroticism reaches massive levels thanks to these two, they taper off for a bit, but then slowly resume again. Despite its name, a.m.s is a deep reservoir of knowledge about all things metal, and almost all genres, be it black or thrash or doom or grind or melodic or Swedish or old school or whatever, you name it. In fact, in recent years, there have been lesser and lesser posts about Slayer and more about all types of genres in general. This might be because there is a limit to the number of times one can name their top ten Slayer songs, or top five albums or whatever.

Yes, alt.music.slayer is one big happy family and you should visit today.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006 at 1:49 am and is filed under The usual. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.