How to Enjoy Reading Talk.Bizarre

Preface

Possibly you will regard some of the following newsreading tips for talk.bizarre with suspicion, coming as they do from a member of the talk.bizarre cabal. However, many of the same points are made in Matt McIrvin's "A simple trick that makes Usenet more pleasant.", and as far as I know he doesn't even read talk.bizarre.

Why read it?

You are presumably here because you have heard that talk.bizarre is a great wealth of creativity and novelty, but when you looked at it, it was a great, steaming mass of crossposted banality. "Where are the gems," I hear you wonder, "and how do I sort through the ocean of sewage to find them?"

There are gems, however, as a quick trip to the talk.bizarre voting page can demonstrate. But reading articles over a month late, even the very best articles, is a bit trying; I hope to demonstrate easy ways to cut the chaff and make reading the newsgroup itself both safe and effective.

How to read talk.bizarre.

These are guidelines. Suggestions. Hints. And like all such, even if phrased as absolute statements, they are not to be taken as absolutes.

These suggestions all rely on assistance from your newsreading software. Most newsreading software has some kind of ability to sift through news, either discarding articles that you have instructed the newsreader are unlikely to be worth reading (typically called "killing" or "killfiling" the articles, even though they disappear only from your sight), or at least prioritizing or sorting the articles so the tastiest, most tender articles are near the front. But even without a clever newsreader, remembering the guidelines and applying them manually can help.

Hint 1: Kill All Crossposts

Configure your newsreader to kill articles which are posted to some other group and talk.bizarre. (Check the Newsgroups: line of the article.)

There are two main types of cross-posted articles seen in talk.bizarre, neither of which are generally worth reading. There are

  1. Articles posted by someone in another group who does not read talk.bizarre, has some tired, banal joke to share with a newsgroup they do read, and (due to their limited experience of life) figures it must be terribly unusual so they'll add "talk.bizarre" to the Newsgroups line. They are usually wrong. (They are invariably if they are quoting a newspaper or magazine article, or something they heard from the TV or radio.) Any good course on writing will use the old phrase "know your audience"; someone blindly crossposting to an audience he has never even seen is highly unlikely to be writing for that audience.
  2. Articles posted by someone to a large number of unrelated groups, with some outrageous or stupid content, solely for the purpose of making large numbers of people follow up to the article and cause a lot of noise. From the fact that the content is not designed to be interesting, you can conclude that this form of crosspost is unlikely to be, well, interesting.

If any rule for reading talk.bizarre is absolute, it is this one. It has been years since I have seen a worthwhile crossposted article in talk.bizarre.

Note: some newsreaders don't have the ability to kill crossposted articles. Don't worry -- Hint 2 takes care of 99% of them anyway.

Hint 2: Kill All Followups

If the Subject: line starts with Re:, that's about as far as you need to read in general. Most followups are by people who wish they were as witty as the author they are replying to; and it has been observed that the very best articles don't attract followups, which lowers the starting gate there quite a bit, doesn't it? If you're reading talk.bizarre for originality and novelty, are you going to find it reading the seventy-first article of a thread?

Hint 3: Read the Good Authors

Check out the talk.bizarre voting page and see which authors routinely get high marks from readers. Read their stuff. Then try authors in the middle of the pack. See if you can identify some favorite authors of your own, and automatically select their articles (if your newsreader has that capability). Then try some of the authors from the bottom of the pile. While talk.bizarre readers don't often agree on what they like, they show astonishing unanimity when presented with pure crud, and you may find that you can clear out a lot of deadwood by killfiling the dependably uninteresting authors.

Read, Learn, Evolve

The first two hints (which, by the way, reduce the perceived traffic in the group by a good 80%) are sufficient to raise the signal-to-noise ratio of the group to Olympian heights. But once you get comfortable reading talk.bizarre and have learned what's really good, you may start wondering what you're missing; time to evolve.

Followups are not always the root of all evil.

I think newbies are well-advised to regard picking through followups to be a task for seasoned readers, a task that they are unlikely to find rewarding until they've already figured out what they like by reading the original articles. But interesting followups do exist; some commonly seen types are:

  1. The group-composition thread. Frequently someone will post an article which is intended to be followed up, as long as the followup is creative, innovative, and interesting. (Note: "cascades", those one line explorations of the outer-limits of tedium, need not apply. I am talking about story lines.)
  2. The theme thread. Someone posts an article with an interesting theme, and others run with it. Usually this degenerates into in-jokes, though; fortunately, talk.bizarre's in-jokes are usually a cut above those of most groups. Not that that is much of a recommendation.
  3. Springboards (as I like to call them). Someone posts a mindless piece of pap, but some really creative individual finds inspiration in it and posts a marvel. Often, people just don't find that the muse strikes them out of the blue, but need some kind of prod. This kind of author usually has at least a few spontaneous articles, so you'll probably spot them and add them to your autoselect list.
  4. Rants. Someone posts a really, really stupid mindless piece of pap, and some talk.bizarre regular goes Right Over The Top with a flame. Not the childish "oh yeah, well you're another!" flames that alt.flame degenerated into long ago; the kind of angry yet witty excoriation for which Mark Twain was famous. Things like:
    So, as long as ata boy wants to make me sick in MY newsgroup, I'm just going to have to vomit down his goddamned throat until it gushes out his ears. Hell, I needed a new hobby anyway.
    This is not everyone's cup of tea. If you like them, though, you will need to wade through the followup cesspool to find them.
  5. Occasionally, you'll see contrarians who hear that newbies are being advised to discard followups, and who rush out to post original articles styled like followups. Well, creative people are often cranky.

It has been observed that the longer a thread is, the less likely it is to have been interesting in the first place; 10 followups was once suggested as a cutoff point. I think that nowadays, most of the interminable threads are crossposts, hence can be disposed of that way.

Note that I don't also suggest eventually trying the crossposted articles. That's best left to trained professionals.

Scored newsreaders are your friend.

Some newsreaders (strn) support an idea called a "scorefile" rather than a "killfile"; you can assign scores to various features of articles, and judge whether to read them or not based on that. This is an ideal way to kill crosspost noise and tedious followups, while still making sure you see good articles from reliable authors even when they followup to tedious threads.

Conclusion

So, I've presented some quick hints on how to cut down the noise in talk.bizarre, and leave a pleasing, lilac-scented residue behind. I hope this helps you to find reading talk.bizarre an enjoyable experience.

You may want to check out my other mini-guides to the talk.bizarre experience:

jfw@funhouse.com
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