I Rape Babies

07May08

Whoa. Well, I guess I’d better explain that title.

In the days before I wrote ill-advised and offensively titled blog posts under my own name, I had a couple of different online pseudonyms. Back in university when I played Quake and Team Fortress online, I logged into the deathmatches under the handle “self” — all in lowercase letters like that. That way, when someone fragged me, a message like “Deathstroke69 killed self” would pop up on the screen. Inevitably, poor Deathstroke69 would pause for a confused second to figure out if and how he’d accidentally committed suicide, at which point I’d respawn right behind him and railgun him in the head for real. It was cheap but effective. Once when I logged on, someone I’d played with previously spotted me and yelled, “Oh, man, self is here! He’s gonna school all you bitches!” It’s still one of my proudest moments.

My other main online pseudonym was I Rape Babies. I should say right now that of course I really don’t rape babies. In effigy, sure, now and then. But never actual babies. I don’t even like the idea in principle. But back when I worked at my campus satirical rag, there were often times in the wee hours of the morning when most of the writing had been done, but the writing staff still had to hang around until the paper was laid out, just to make sure all the space was accounted for. Otherwise, the layout staff might have had to write things to fill it, and they were generally layout staff and not writers for good reason. So we’d kill time by logging into internet chatrooms and stirring up trouble.

We frequented a teen-oriented chatroom, because, well, teenagers are idiots and easy to mess with. But there was still an art to this.* It’s easy to just say incendiary things. But it’s more rewarding to say completely innocuous things while posting under an incendiary user name. My colleague Justin, for instance, went by the name Free Abortions Here. I can’t remember what name Jason used, but within two sentences, it got him blasted as a “nigger-loving faggot,” a reaction surely wildly out of proportion to whatever it was that he did. I’m surprised he didn’t simply log out and return using the name Nigger-Loving Faggot.

I’d log in under the name I Rape Babies and just try to hold normal conversations. I wouldn’t talk about my supposed vocation at all, but people still would jump all over me. It’s a funny thing. Everybody knows that people lie on the internet, but people see a guy named I Rape Babies and automatically take it as an article of faith that he genuinely is an inveterate baby rapist. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. You’d think real baby rapists would want to keep it on the down-low, rather than proudly announce it right in their user names.

I’d get banned pretty quickly, so I’d just register a variant and come right back. Sometimes it would be just be I Rape Babies_98 or something like that, but once the site automatically suggested I Rape Babies And I Like It Like That. This is better than anything I could possibly have thought of on my own. It’s so unapologetic, as if to say, “This is who I am. I rape babies. Get over yourselves and deal with it. America — love it or leave it.”

Eventually, I got tired of the frequent re-registration process and switched to a new name: Ultragay. I really did nothing other than have that name and try to hold friendly conversations. Nonetheless, it always caused people to shout things. These were not things like, “Oh, man, Ultragay is here! He’s gonna school all you bitches!” These things were more along the lines of uncalled-for homophobic invective. However, I did frequently get more supportive private messages saying things like, “It’s totally cool with me if you are, but I’m just wondering — are you actually gay?”

Of course it’s none of their business, and they weren’t likely to get a straight answer out of me. My response was always “No … I’m ULTRAGAY!” And I may well have added, “And I like it like that!”

* There are other valid art forms to disrupting chatrooms, of course. This is where I first noticed Scott’s talent for writing believable pidgin English. He’d do things like type frustrated-sounding orders to everyone in the chatroom such as “1-2-3, shut up, okay?” People really thought he was struggling with English as a second language.

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