We’re at a point in the cycle of OS tides where it seems like a lot of reminiscences about the days when OS was the Algonquin Round Table keep washing up on our plastic-strewn beach.  Maybe it was, and maybe my memory is wrong.  Too bad.  I’m in my sixth day of being heat-free in Vermont “spring” and Dog 2 has had diarrhea indoors for five of those days, probably because she isn’t drinking enough water for the Cushing’s disease that makes her pee all the time.  I’ve got nothing better to do in between moppings up and huddling over the tea kettle.  Typing keeps the fingers from stiffening up. 

I was an early newbie, part of the first wave that pissed off the betas after the glorious summer of seclusion in ought-eight.  There was a quaint custom of the “editor” to put two or three of a newbie’s posts on the cover.  This was both useful and funny – it hooked them like that first big haul on the crack-pipe (“I’m on the cover! They recognize my brilliance!”) in those impressionable first days of being here, for the comments would come in and you’d feel all warm and cozy.  Then cold reality would hit, and no more covers and very few comments (because new newbies arrived and were given the limited amount of cover space that wasn’t devoted to the regulars, and omg if you think there are regulars now, you have no idea…), and you’d see the newbies staggering around whimpering for months afterward.  That was the funny part.  Some of them disappeared.  Some of them mounted campaigns to be accepted into the Group.   Some of them formed their own Groups.  Some of them sat around and started talking to themselves (that would be me).

About those regulars on the cover – there was already suspicion that some of the posts that got slapped up on the cover as soon as they appeared were by people imported specifically to be cover material.  Maybe even paid!  Jocelyn Testes-Harder was one of those looked at askance, although for the life of me, I could never understand that one.  The squirrel, perhaps.  Anything is possible. (JTH lives on elsewhere, but abandoned the thankless OS some time ago.  Nothing left but comments – an X marks the spot.)   I think the idea was that they were solicited in order to bring in their massive pre-existing audiences, which – well, if it worked, the effect was not obvious.  Maybe it did.  Maybe that’s where the spam started.  Anyway, cover favoritism was established way back.  I miss the gossip that it involved money. 

It’s true there were parties.  I’m not sure they were as much fun as they are in memory.  There was a lot of drunk blogging back then, too, and it may have made the parties seemed more filled with sparkling wit than they actually were.  I suppose it’s possible it was just like being at a New York cocktail party, but having witnessed mostly the cigarette butts and discarded glasses on Saturday mornings, I never got the hilarity.  It was just another of the many mysteries of OS, like dirty haiku Thursday, something else I don’t miss.

What was true about the parties was that they could consume the feed for days, an impossible feat now.  People would rush hither and thither to see what had just been said at the various party sites, and posting at these times was just like – well, posting now.  Only instead of being able to take comfort in being hidden by the spam flood, you would have to acknowledge you were not part of the Party Gang (you could be, but it was a lot of work.  Not everyone thought it was worth it.  The various kings and queens of OS always think it is worth it, until it isn’t, and then they disappear). 

Sometimes a newbie would wander in and look around and not “get it.”  If the newbie was so unwise as to post something to this effect, the Mean Girls (and yes, there really were Mean Girls back in the day, and there were Mean Guys, too, but I didn’t read the Mean Guys very often, so that’s someone else’s story) would descend and beat the crap out of them, their view being that if the newbie didn’t like it, the newbie could leave. Flouncings supplied more fodder for ridicule, so it was a satisfying cycle.   My favorite MG comment during one of these pummelings was that the problem with OS was that there were too many neurotic shut-ins holding forth now.  Being a neurotic shut-in myself, I could see the point, but still.  It seemed a little de trop.

The pummelings and the meta posts would often produce two fascinating side-effects.  First, lectures on the community’s behavior would appear.  These used to be very popular after what we now call “dust-ups.”  Then there would be more fights over how the “community” should behave, and whether the blogger had any right to nag the “community” in the first place.  I never understood the need to lecture the peasants, but some people had it bad.  It’s always fun to see it crop up again, but now the responses are mostly articulate and polite.  Really!  I mean, in comparison to the old days, when they hauled in the racks and gibbets.

Second, there would be meta posts about the meta posts clogging the feed (yes, this was possible back then, as with the parties) and sometimes the complaining poster would furnish a list of topics the other idiot meta posters could use to write about instead of writing their idiot meta posts.  People would even thank them for the lists!  It was something.  Of course, other people wouldn’t thank them for the lists, and there would be more fights.

Come to think of it, it really was more fun in the old days.  The flame wars February/March 09… now those were flame wars.  You could have roasted marshmallows at your monitor, except you wouldn’t want to because of all the leglifting.  That added a hefty dose of nutty salts of pee to the fire. 

And then there were the infamous meet-ups, and all the fall-out and fallings out following the meet-ups and more fights and more parties and it seemed a lot more like Danielle Staub and Andy Cohen than Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott.

Of course, this is my memory of it. Your mileage may have varied.

I’m not saying there weren’t plenty of good aspects to OS in the “olden days.”  But the notion that it was some paradise of fabulous writers and wits strikes me as weird.  For one thing, we didn't yet have Bellwether Vance.  What we did have that was truly spectacular was life without spam.  We didn’t appreciate that enough.