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> “Marie Sue” was a character, generally in fan fiction, that was clearly intended as an unrealistically perfect projection of the author; I'm pretty confident
by jchw 2y ago
> “Marie Sue” was a character, generally in fan fiction, that was clearly intended as an unrealistically perfect projection of the author;
I'm pretty confident it's specifically spelled "Mary Sue", and probably predates the Internet entirely, though I guess whether it predates the Internet or not doesn't really mean you wouldn't learn about it on the Internet.
> For reasons unclear to me, /b/ stood for “random.”
This is inherited from the Japanese imageboard that inspired 4chan, Futaba Channel. As I recall, the original /b/ was actually "Anime / Random", but /a/ was already taken for the general "Anime" board, thus it was christened /b/.
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I do have some more things I was going to comment on but I'll show some restraint since it's not like anything is really inaccurate, even if the commentary is weird to me in some places. That said, I wasn't really able to ascertain the point of this story. Like, about that headline: What does "the decentralized nature" tell us about "Anonymous's" power? I didn't really get much of an impression from the article.
Despite that, it was still an interesting trip through some of the more fascinating things in Internet history, and I found it amusing in that regard.
Unrelated tangent: I have a tendency to think of the early 2000s as the "early Internet", as it's used in this article, but it feels a bit silly when you think about it. It's still relatively early, but it's nowhere near the beginning, especially if you consider before the web. But, I guess since many of us were not there for much of the part before that, it's easier to think of the late 90s and early 2000s as being "the beginning".
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- duskwuff 2y ago> I'm pretty confident it's specifically spelled "Mary Sue", and probably predates the Internet entirely... It specifically originated as the name of the main character in a 1974 parody of bad Star Trek fan fiction. So, yes, it's pre-Internet. http://web.archive.org/web/20100830041159/http://www.fortunecity.com/rivendell/dark/1000/marysue.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20100830041159/http://www.fortune...
- 0dayz 2y agoAfaik it was just that moot had made /a/ and was unsure of what /b/ should be about so he labeled it random.
- jchw 2y agoFinding good sources for something like this is fairly hard, but actually /b/ was the very first board 4chan ever had.[1] Though, actually, the explanation I gave still doesn't add up, because actually, I don't think Futaba Channel ever had an "Anime / Random" board. Whether there was already a similar nomenclature from another contemporary imageboard like world2ch is unclear this far away in time, but either way, even though an /a/ board didn't exist, presumably moot already "reserved" /a/ for a normal anime board, whether it was inspired by another imageboard or what. It's not too clear since there were a lot of potential choices and /b/ is a strange one in the grand scheme of things, and I don't think moot ever really explained it too well. [1]: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/4chan-10-years-christopher-moot-poole/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/4chan-10-years-christopher-mo...
- 0dayz 2y agoGood work, it's nice in a way that moot-era 4chan still has a legacy, since I think post-moot the site has been slowly drifting into irrelevancy.