The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Beyond Yuletide Carols and Eggnog
Ho ho ho and so forth. ‘Tis the season to be jolly, and so off we went, searchlight and sandwiches in hand, to scour all of cyberspace for holiday cheer. I’d already e-mailed Santa at santa@northpole.net, warning that, since the quake, what looks like a regular chimney in Los Angeles is likely to be a framed metal pipe barely wide enough to accommodate an elf, never mind the Big Man.
My good deed for the year done, I headed for Prodigy, where the jumpword holiday took me to a Christmas-oriented bulletin board. Gen X-ers will want to steer a wide berth: The topics include Bob Hope, Rosemary Clooney and Andy Williams. On the other hand, Prodigy’s Just Kids area does have a nice feature on making homemade wrapping paper using stencils and other tricks, complete with step-by-step instructions and a handy bibliography about stencils and holiday crafts.
On CompuServe, I used the IBM File Finder (go IBMFF) with the keyword christmas to find more than 250 files, including animated Christmas cards, Christmas puzzles, season’s greetings in Chinese and Japanese, Christmas screensavers, words and music to Christmas carols, and more. The Religion Forum, for instance, offers “The First Christmas Story,” billed as a free electronic book complete with sound (if you have a sound card) about the birth of Jesus.
On ZiffNet, reachable via CompuServe, fun Christmas freebies include the complete text of “A Christmas Carol,” by Charles Dickens, and for the more allegorically minded, “The Pilgrim’s Progress” by John Bunyan. Both are copyright-free and available thanks to Project Guttenberg, the volunteer effort that is putting more and more classics of this kind on-line. For game-lovers addicted to DOOM II, ZiffNet offers a free Christmas module described as follows: “A sinister gang of mutants and mercenaries has converted Santa’s sub-permafrost toy factory to nuclear weapons production. You must clear them out so that the world’s kids don’t wind up with plutonium in their stockings on Christmas morning!” The file is said to include cheerful holiday colors and “a climactic battle inside a Christmas tree.” All decked out for the season, America Online has established AOL Holiday Central (keyword holiday), which brings together a variety of holiday offerings, including shopping and message forums. There is also a nice collection of Christmas images and things for downloading, including a multimedia Christmas card that will play a few holiday songs while you look at the pictures (assuming, again, that you have a sound card). The file to look for is amm xmas.zip.
Also on AOL, do a software search with the keyword christmas. I found 371 files, including images, sounds, even seasonal tiles for computerized mah-jongg games. But when I trudged wearily into the AOL Holiday Chat Room Sunday afternoon, exhausted from racing around cyberspace, I found myself all alone without even a single reindeer, elf or inebriated middle-manager with whom to wax sentimental.
My mood somewhat darkened by this experience, I headed out to see how the holiday might be making itself felt on the Internet’s anarchic expanses. Eager to erase the taste of saccharine, I headed straight for alt.bitterness, where the very first posting I read seemed to say it all: “I’m not a habitue of alt.bitterness. I prefer to be bitter on alt.angst, but my wife now lurks there . . . Yeah, this one’s gonna be bitter. Flame me to hell and back if I don’t follow local rules; I don’t care. But bitterness you’ll get. Why am I bitter? First, it’s none of your business. I don’t care anything about you.”
It was signed Happy Holidays. The Schadenfreude high I always get from visiting alt.bitterness was dampened this time around by the posting of one “brianbitterly,” who wrote of finding “a new group that I like quite a bit, alt.suicide.holiday . . . it’s about how nice it would be to die. The group’s long on technology, with some ‘I want to die!,’ ‘You shouldn’t!,’ etc., etc., threads.”
I went over there, and he was right; there was even “the semi-famous alt.suicide.holiday Methods File.” By now my mood was so bad that I ftp’d over to ftp.mantis.co.uk (pub/alt.angst), where I downloaded a perpetual calendar of angst. Its academic orientation makes it an especially suitable present for any despairing and underemployed instructor on your Christmas list. The message for Dec. 11, for example, concludes: “I would not mind dying tomorrow. What I fear is living out my life always finding it just barely tolerable enough to go on, such that in the end I will never have been happy.”
I decided that maybe I’d better get help, so I messaged joe@samaritans.org, complaining that I always feel even more alienated than usual during the month approaching Christmas, “especially here in the Sunbelt, what with the remorseless sunshine and all. This year I find my thoughts increasingly occupied by death.”
The Samaritans, based in England, say their e-mail is read and answered daily by a group of trained volunteers using the pseudonym Jo. Sure enough, they messaged back:
“Hello, Daniel
Glad you made contact. Do you know why you feel alienated? I can see that constant sunshine can be a problem, although its not one that we are familiar with here!
Does your preoccupation with death mean that you are suicidal?
I hope you will write again and tell me some more about your feelings and what you think may be causing your unhappiness.
In the meantime, take care and remember we are always here for you.
Jo”
Wow, I thought guiltily, cheered that such good people live in the world and sheepish that I’d tested them with a complaint about sunshine. It struck me that the Samaritans and their project exemplify much of what is best about the Internet. But then again, I thought, so does alt.bitterness.
Daniel Akst, a Los Angeles writer, is a former assistant business editor for technology at The Times. He welcomes messages at akstd@news.latimes.com but regrets that he cannot reply to each and every one.
Artistic E-Mail
Want to send season’s greetings by e-mail? You can find a marvelous collection of ASCII images for the holidays, from elaborate Christmas trees to New Year’s champagne flutes, in the Internet news groups alt.ascii art, rec.arts.ascii or rec.humor. Created by several artists and collected in a single posting, these text images can be cut and pasted into custom holiday greetings and zapped out to friends and relatives. No worries about whether the Postal Service will get them there in time for Christmas, either.
