It's a newsgroup. It's a sewer. It's a social group of (not for) literate misfits. Or, to quote Tom Boutell,
I've come to believe that talk.bizarre must be simultaneously a loving, hugging, COME HOLD ME YOU BIG GALOOT community of sweet sensitive koala bears and a boiling death-swamp of fifty-foot fire-breathing clue mosquitoes.Otherwise, the koala bear population would get OUT OF CONTROL and INBREED, and pretty soon we'd have ALT.CUDDLE. Otherwise the fire-breathing clue mosquitoes would GET HUNGRY AND ATTACK REC.PETS.CATS, AND LORD KNOWS WE CAN'T HAVE THAT.
Wait a minute, they already have.
I have collected some of my own suggestions for how to make reading, and posting to, talk.bizarre a more pleasant and worthwhile experience. You can check out the following links:
Talk.bizarre has had several periodic Frequently Asked Questions articles, which don't so much answer frequently asked questions (except, perhaps, "why do you all hate me so?") but which have tried to offer guidance for what the group is all about. (Executive summary: don't post until you've read the group long enough to know what kind of articles people like, and what kind of articles people don't like. Or post anyway. We need fresh meat.) If you go to the Talk.Bizarre Wasteful Archive, you can find many of the FAQ postings by looking for the subject "Welcome to talk.bizarre!" (or you can look at my collection of talk.bizarre FAQs).
Note especially The teeDOTbee Community FAQ. And last but not least, the official talk.bizarre FAQ server.
Many of the accepted denizens of talk.bizarre have been around for a long time, as you can see for yourself. Others of the talk.bizarre community are recent, yet became oldbies because they
A special section for meta-articles that are about talk.bizarre itself (but which aren't quite attempts at FAQs).
This is a sampler of some of my better talk.bizarre articles. Sad to say, there are several hundred of my worse talk.bizarre articles, which can be obtained from the Talk.Bizarre Wasteful Archive. Some of my very best aren't here, because I didn't put up the really bad-tempered articles on my original web site (IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER).
Here are a very few of my top favorites by other authors on talk.bizarre. I will add more as I get the time. (All articles which aren't mine have attributions in parentheses.)
From the deep and ancient past, The Bonehead:
The Bonehead was so good that even followups to his articles were good, confounding the usual laws of physics.
First, if you have a Macintosh and Hypercard[TM] 2.0 (or later), you can enjoy my "Leonard and Bessie" Hypercard stack. Here is the announcement I posted: Leonard and Bessie
Some artwork that I've posted to talk.bizarre and elsewhere are available from my bizarre artwork page. Many of these are collages made from magazine advertisements (chiefly computer trade rags).