The Time I Got A Shout-Out On The Simpsons
Way back in the prehistoric days on the Internet, when life
still made sense, there was Usenet. There’s still a Usenet today, but that’s
not the point. For many of us, Usenet *was* the Internet, and continued to be
the biggest component for us, even after the introduction of the Web. The era
of 1996-2001 or so was a golden age of trolling. AOL people were flooding in,
after some point in time. There was literally a sucker born every second.
But deep within this now forgotten culture of Usenet were the Meowers. I’m not going to get too far into that whole thing. Here’s a bloody Vice article on it, and there are plenty of versions of that story out there if you care to look. It’s a wildly interesting tale on its own.
It’s important to note that
trolling at that time was an art form. It wasn’t merely being annoying or
offensive, oppositional or off-putting. That’s griefing. Trolling had endless modes,
collectively falling under the title Usenet Performance Art. It was usually benign,
funny, and intelligent.
The essence of Meow was this: “Meow.”
Yes, it was as silly and fun as it
sounds. Find some poor bastards who were deeply engaged in some technical or philosophical
discussion, posting four thousand words of their dissertation over a metered
dial-up connection, quote the entire message, and reply “Meow.”
Simple. Effective. Infuriating.
Great and bloody ascii wars were waged over this practice. People were blocked, censored, stalked, and even fired for the practice. Usenet being the wild west, there was but one rule: Don’t be excessively annoying, and don’t be excessively annoyed. By violating the first tenet in a relatively benign way, you could get a lot of other people to violate the second. The system worked.
Deano and I were Meowers. Meowing
wasn’t the only practice Meowers were engaged in, but it was central to the
culture. The Zen of Meow involved endless surrealism, wit, and the tweaking of
noses.
I took a liking to Dean
immediately, possibly because he and I seemed to be the only two people out of
millions posting under our own names. Daring, foolish bravado.
Meow went on for years. Somewhere
(I’m guessing on Usenet), it continues to this day. Perhaps as a shadow of a
memory. But somewhere, someone is Meowing today. That’s somehow comforting.
We were also both Simpsons fans.
The thing about Usenet that made
it the best platform of all time was the general lack of rules or censorship.
Yes, a few people did get their messages cancelled by others. But that was
aberrant behavior, temporary, and against the general spirit of the medium. The
polar opposite of today’s Internet, sadly.
The *second* best feature was
cross-posting.
You could send a single message across multiple groups, usually limited only by your own ISP’s settings. I remember sending messages across eighteen different groups with a click. It was glorious, the chaos we could generate.
WHAT THE HELL DOES THIS HAVE TO DO
WITH THE SIMPSONS, you ask, annoyingly annoyed.
Snuh?
Snuh was of course a largely unnoticed meme in a few early Simpsons episodes. The first, I believe, was in “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge” (season 2, episode 9) where a protesting Marge wields a sign adorned with the words "Join S.N.U.H. now!".
Springfieldians for Nonviolence Understanding and Helping...
Fateful words indeed.
But what really cemented things in
our minds was an episode in the next season. Homer, in an effort to avoid a
question of Marge’s during some pillow talk (Lisa’s Pony, season 3, episode 8),
instead replies with the non-committal “Buh.” and “Snuh.”
The word that launched a million
posts.
It was also used in a Radioactive Man parody of the Batman TV show, as one of the words in a fight sequence in season 7, episode 2.
Usenet is a mess to try and search, but at some point, Dean started Snuhing.
This turned into a thing. But not
merely replying to a post with “Snuh?”. People began to reply to “Snuh?” in the
same manner. “Buh?” “Guh?”
To be perfectly fair, there were a
lot of people involved, ultimately. But Dean started the whole mess, and I was
pretty instrumental in helping him further it.
The quoting system in the text based medium Usenet used “>” to indicate quoted posts. Two replies in would show “>>” and so on. We called it cascading, and it existed long before Snuh became a movement. It generated a pleasing visual when combined with single word replies. In fact, cascading (without the single word stipulation) was a trademark of Meowers.
There were some incredibly witty cascades back then. But
looking for them now, I see Google has pretty much ruined everything. The search
function is trash, the ascii art is ruined. I am not going to bother. “Fuckhead”
was just as valid of a reply as a string of song titles altered to incorporate
cities within the Soviet Union. And those are much easier to find.
Here are two pages from alt.tv.simpsons that give a
taste of both the Meow culture, and the dawning of Snuh. Click on the subject lines to reveal the content of the posts. The rabbit hole runs deep, mind you.
Needless to say, the endless spamming of the word and its variants (not to mention our whackingly big signature files) annoyed a lot of Simpsons fans in alt.tv.simpsons. Pretty much all of them. And that’s fine. That makes sense. Out of respect, we eventually moved it to our own group, alt.tv.simpsons.snuh. Eventually...
What made decidedly less sense was
when the practice began to upset Meowers.
Because it’s a difference of four
letters. Philosophically, it was the same thing. Imagine our consternation when
we began to raise the ire of the fierce Meow clique. It was a Soviet-level
unpersoning.
I was told there was to be no Snuhing
from the Databasix server, which was a Meow-friendly Usenet server for trolls.
Naturally, my response was “Snuh?”
Booted. Flaming being a subset of
trolling, the whole situation led to endless vitriol.
Much like Meow, this went on for
years. But now we had a mission. What we felt was unconscionable hypocrisy on
the part of the Meowers caused us to raise the flag of battle, taking Snuh to
levels it otherwise wouldn’t have reached.
Yadda yadda, the climax of this
movement can be found in “The Frying Game”, season 13, episode 21.
When Homer discovers an axe in the
back of an old woman, he unleashes a mini Snuh cascade. He even pauses for a
moment, in an effort to find a Snuh variant he hadn’t used already. This is how
it really used to happen when you were in a thread with 23 Snuh variants in
place.
Hold the phone, we said. Did he…
did they... HOLY SHIT. A SNUH CASCADE ON THE SIMPSONS.
Not content to assume that was the
intention (afterall, they coined the initial phrase to begin with), Dean
attended a San Diego Comicon and had the opportunity to ask some Simpsons
writers about it.
“Yeah,” one said casually, “That’s
about you guys.”
For a time, I’m not sure anyone
believed us. Or didn’t want, to, anyway. All that really supports this insane
story is a single line on Wikipedia.
Snuh lives on. On Usenet, I’m sure. Amy on Futurama uses Snuh and its variants as exclamations in her speech. "Snuh-uh!" appears at around 8:30 in this clip.
"Snu-Snu" is also arguably a Snuh extension.
I *think* even Disenchanted incorporated it, but I can’t produce any solid evidence of that without watching them all again.
It’s a weirdly proud moment, to have been a part of that. My daughter, a second-generation Simpsons fan who undoubtedly listened to The Simpsons in the womb, even has a QA/QC credit on Simpsons Tapped-Out for mobile. I’m even more proud of that.
I’ve achieved a few things that may be considered noteworthy in
my life, but to me, getting a general nod from one of the greatest TV shows of
all time definitely ranks high on the list.
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