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Found it. As noted, much of this is no longer applicable... but here it is, for historical interest.
Barbelith FAQ v.2.0
best used by or before February 2001
Notes: Procedural section expanded, a bit of reshuffling, a small scaling-back of the geek factor. The all-important Question 2 should I think, be thrashed out in its own thread...
Thirty-two questions.
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I: BASICS
1. What is the Barbelith Underground all about?
The Underground started in Summer 1998 as an adjunct to The Bomb, a website dedicated to annotating writer Grant Morrison’s comic book series The Invisibles. The conversation expanded to encompass the larger themes of the comic book: freedom, insurrection, drugs, pop culture, sex, magick, and overall fabulousness. And as the conversation expanded, more voices were added, each bringing something to the party.
We agree on almost nothing: there are as many manifestos here as there are individual members. There’s no ideology at work here, and plenty of room to disagree, to debate, to learn. If we can be said to have a common guiding principle, it can be summed up in the single word that was put forth in The Invisibles as “the most important lesson”: disobedience.
2. So if you lot are supposed to be revolutionaries, why aren't you out causing civil unrest and throwing bombs?
Life's not a comic book: if and when the hideous trans-spatial overlords swarm down a breach in the reality grid and start devouring our world like so much overripe fruit, I'll be out in the streets chucking Molotov cocktails at their soulless drone-soldiers, driving them back to Dimension X with automatic weapons and boundless love. But almost everyone on the street, even the one you might think of as an "oppressor," is a real human being trying to make a life. I have no desire to blow them up. As for civil unrest: when called-for. If you do it all the time, people will get used to you.
Revolution can be inclusive. And it happens, first of all, in the head. Without that, it's just a punch-up, and the bigger guys are going to win.
3. But why aren't you discussing anything important/serious/cool?
We are. But if you don't see a thread that interests you, please go ahead and start one of your own. Posting interesting questions or ideas will usually get relevant responses. If people start derailing your thread with pointless jokes and sidelines, you can always tell ‘em off for it.
4. Does Grant Morrison hang out here?
If he does, it's not under his own name—and frankly, it’s pretty unlikely: Mr. Morrison is notorious for his lack of Web-savvy and for his technology-disrupting personal electromagnetic field. Besides, he’s probably too busy writing cool comics and helping maintain his own web presence at www.grant-morrison.com . If you want to communicate with the man, that’s your best bet--he’s been very good about answering his e-mail there.
5. How many people actually contribute to this thing?
It’s hard to say, on account of all the fictionsuits.
6. What is a fictionsuit?
We all are.
Grant Morrison (him again!) coined the term “fictionsuit,” and every time it was used in The Invisibles it seemed to have a slightly different meaning. In the context of Barbelith Underground, it’s simply an online name—or more properly, an online persona. People may have one or several, or several people can share one (although that gets a little crowded sometimes), and often a single person will use different “suits” to explore/express different points of view, different aspects of himself/herself.
6. What's does “Barbelith” mean, anyway?
Another Invisibles reference. In the comic, it’s first explained as a mysterious satellite hidden behind the Moon... but it gets much weirder from there. Grant Morrison claims the word came to him in a dream: depending on which spurious back-formation you care to believe, it means “alien stone” (barb as in barbarian = outlander), or perhaps “bearded stone” (cf. the Gnostic Christ who appears to Dane MacGowan saying “I am the hidden stone and break all hearts...” 
In any case, it sounds cool and seems fraught with significance but is ultimately of uncertain meaning—which means it’s up for grabs.
II: PROCEDURES
(Most of the following questions are also answered in the Ultimate Bulletin Board software FAQ, which you’ll find here. )
7. What are those little icons above people's posts?
The smiling face links to the poster's profile, the email links to their email address (if it's available), the paper & pencil let you edit your post after it's been published, and the paper & arrow let you post a reply that will quote the other person's message.
The edit function also lets you delete any of your posts. Useful in the event of double/triple postings and also if you post something and suddenly realise that it's stupid/deeply offensive (how many times I've been saved by that...) or if messes up the layout of the page (i.e., a single word that is more than 70 characters will cause annoying horizontal scroll bars).
8. What are the flames in the forum headings? Red folders with flames?
Red folders are ones that have been updated since your last visit. Ones with contain more than 15 messages, and are therefore considered "hot.”
9. What's with all the “Junior Member”/“Member” stuff?
To find out, keep posting.
10. How do the pages rule out? How does the system decide that it has a full page?
UBB creates a new page after each forty posts.
11. How do I make my words go in italics or bold?
Surround your text [ b ] with these tags [ /b ] for bold.
Surround your text [ i ] with these tags [ /i ] for italic.
Omit the spaces, and make sure you use square brackets.
12. How do I add hyperlinks to my posts?
If you include the full URL in the text of your post, the UBB software automatically turns it into a link (you don’t need to type “http://” . If you want to link to text within the post, use the [ url ] [ /url ] tags like so:
[ url = http:// www. somewebsite. com ] text within these tags will be linked [ /url ]
Omit the spaces.
13. How do I post images to the board?
The image you wish to post must already be up on the web somewhere. Post up the URL of your .jpg or .gif or .bmp with the UBB tag [ img ] and [ /img ] around it, like so:
[ img ] http:// www. somewebsite. com /someimage.gif [ /img ].
Again, omit the spaces.
14. How do I add smilies?
The UBB software renders standard smilies automatically when you type certain combinations of characters with no space between: for a full menu, see here.
15. Why can’t I automatically add my sigfile to my posts?
UBB allows for sigfiles at the moderator’s discretion. At the moment, this option is turned off, because the general consensus is that this board reads like a conversation, and sigfiles tend to break the flow of that conversation. So if you really want that Harlan Ellison quote at the end of every single post, you’ll have to type it out, every single post. It’s up to you: but sigfiles are at best a distraction and at worst the online equivalent of a “No Fat Chicks” T-shirt.
III: PROTOCOLS
16. Who moderates this board?
No one. All of us.
17. Why aren't you talking about Grant and The Invisibles any more?
There are two forums for this, Annotations and News, but since the end of the series they've seen a drastic downturn in use. The general consensus is that The Invisibles was the start, not the end. That doesn't mean you should feel discouraged if there's an element of the books you want to discuss.
18. There's about a kabillion posts on here—how do I find my way around?
The different Forums are for different topics. The areas often overlap, but in general:
The Playground is a place for people to sling shit, play games, and make pointless innuendo. Loose, silly, and generally lots of fun.
The Outside is a resource for arranging offline meet-ups.
Help is the place to ask any question not addressed in this FAQ.
The Core is where The Underground talks about The Underground. This place is a work in progress: it gets sorted out here.
The Information is the forum for current events—emphasis on "current."
The Future is for news with more wide-reaching implications—science, technology, medicine, cultural trends and the like.
The Inspiration is for collaborative writing projects, artistic exercises, language games, and discussions of issues related to creativity.
The Magic is dedicated to discussions of magickal theories and practices, and to odd psychic phenomena in general—mysticism, drugs, neuro-linguistic programming, and the like: changing the world with your mind.
The People is for profiles and information on the people and organizations that are behind the ideas and actions that are building the new world.
The Revolution focuses on the movements and the ideas themselves—political and cultural theories, philosophies big and small.
The Spectacle is for discussion of the media.
Annotations and News, as discussed in FAQ #17, are for discussions of the past and present works of comics writer Grant Morrison.
If you're not sure where your topic belongs, just take your best guess: but don't post the same topic to more than one forum, please. Tom, our Administrator, has the power to move topics to a different forum, in case you guess totally off-base.
Can anything be done to make The Underground easier to navigate? Sure. When you start a new topic, try to make your Subject line as clear and self-explanatory as possible. You may wish to use a subject header, such as
NEWS:
WEB:
FILM:
TV:
COMICS:
POLL:
EXERCISE:
INFORMATION NEEDED:
POINTER:
HYPE:
and the like.
19. Do any of you guys want to buy my comics back issues/drugs/guns/plutonium?
Possibly, but only once we've gotten to know you, and pretty much only in a more private, face-to-face situation. And we prefer barter to outright selling and buying. Random mercantilism will likely be met (like pretty much everything else) with heaped up ridicule and reinterpretation. Anything that threatens the continued existence of the board (i.e., outright illegal information) makes Tom, our Administrator and Grand Exalted Archon, nervous. When The Grand Exalted Archon gets nervous, persons, places, and things tend to disappear.
20. Can I start a thread to plug my website/comic/band/weight-loss program?
See above. Pointers and self-promotion are all right in moderation: using The Underground as an advertising medium for a wholly commercial enterprise—e.g., get-rich-quick schemes—will piss us off. And who knows what a bunch of freaks like us might be capable of, if we get pissed off?
21. Why did my post get flamed?
Did you start off by bragging about either (a) how much better/smarter/radical than us you are, or (b) a secret of existence that you know but aren't willing to tell us yet? We get those a lot, and they get old very quickly. Alternately, did you call someone a slag or act in a rude/hostile manner? There's a lot of friendly joking around here, but you may want to let us get used to you before you start throwing the insults around. Good manners are golden, even for anarchists—in fact especially for anarchists: a Collective can only hang together as long as the goodwill lasts.
22. Why do you lot make so many in-jokes? I don't understand them at all.
Because we are a twisted bunch of muppets.
You’re absolutely correct—we are constantly struggling with ourselves to keep our signal-to-noise ratio lean. In-jokes happen any time a large group of people hang out together, even virtually. At one point we thought we might use this FAQ to explain the in-jokes, until we realized that such a FAQ would be (a) 200 pages long, and (b) out-of-date the moment it was posted.
If you want to understand something, try searching in the archives or asking someone directly. Otherwise, what you'll find is that hanging around here for not very long at all will enable you to pick up on the gags and feel like one of the inner circle. Alternatively, bluff; or just ignore it. That's what most of us did.
23. Does the number 23 have any actual significance?
Well, that would be like telling, wouldn't it?
Quit reading Robert Anton Wilson and the Principia Discordia and make your own wack belief system if it's so important to you.
24. What's this "Nexus" that people keep talking about? I thought the name of the board was the Barbelith Underground...
It is: but for a while it operated under the name The Nexus, and some of the old-timers have a hard time remembering. Senility’s an awful thing.
IV: PERSONALITIES, PECULIARITIES & PARTING SHOTS
25. Who wrote this FAQ?
All of us. More or less.
26. Why does Kali talk about sex so much?
She really doesn't. Your perverse little mind is interpreting everything that she says into an unnecessary innuendo, you sick little monkeys. Now get your hands out of there.
27. What about this guy "grant"? Is that Grant Morrison?
Nope. He's some American dimwit with too much time on his hands. Has his own webpage at www.mp3.com/grant with pathetic pop songs on it. Best to ignore him, too.
28. What is The Johnson Family?
A sometimes-active collective of magicians and curious-types who first met on the Underground, a parallel board to this one with a (supposedly) greater focus on actual organization of work, as opposed to discussion & theory. It's at http://www.king-mob.com/cgi-bin/Ultimate.cgi?action=intro
29. What does the “High Fidelity” thread header in The Spectacle mean?
The “High Fidelity” threads are a call for posters to offer their “top five” songs or albums in various categories. It’s a reference to Nick Hornby’s book (and the Stephen Frears film) of the same name, wherein the characters are constantly making Top Five lists.
30. Which works better, magic or science?
Which side are you on?
31. Do you guys really think jerking off will change the world?
For some of us, it seems to have worked OK so far.
32. Any last advice?
Sure. Have fun, stay loose, don’t take it all too seriously or too personally. There are a lot of strong opinions here, but that’s all they are: opinions.
It’s only a game.
Try to remember.
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Hit me, baby, one more time...
[ 20-03-2002: Message edited by: Jack Fear ]
[ 20-03-2002: Message edited by: Jack Fear ] |
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