AOL/AIM Guide for the Perplexed 90s Child

I had the abrupt realization the other day that I no longer use America Online Instant Messenger (AIM). Their instant messaging program used to be the very cornerstone of my existence, and it's simply faded into the obscurity of my impending (okay, imminent) adulthood. Though functions like Facebook Chat and GChat keep us messaging our friends instantly, the loss I mourn is of our quirky but universal rules of AIM etiquette and practice.

Hearken back, if you will, to a time before Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and all other social media. Back when your online persona had a single avenue of emergence. When our away messages, chat icons, and AIM profiles defined us so completely to our judgmental online peers. A time when just the right balance of ~*~*~* to words with aLtErNaTiNg CaPiTaL aNd LoWeR cAsE lEtTeRs were enough to make your profile sparkle.

Yes, it was a simpler time. My boyfriend and I were discussing the issue and he mentioned his previous middle school AIM addiction that bordered on meriting a 12-step program. "I remember thinking to myself that if I were really rich, I would make a handheld device so I could take AIM wherever I went," he mentioned. Just imagine how it would shock his middle school self to learn that nearly every one of us has one of these in our purse or pocket right now. They're called cell phones.

Evidence of a simpler time. Oh AOLBuddy and InternetFriend, how we miss your newbie-like innocence

Before we were constantly plugged in to ten different networks of social media, we were a single-minded bunch. There were a complex set of unwritten rules that governed our AIM behavior. Let's explore a few of the universal norms and mores that drove our socially conscious AIM activity:


Create a Screen Name that Conveys Your Personality

Generally, these types of screen names included words like "Sweet" and "QTpie" for a girl and sports or athlete names for boys. Because our middle school minds were so achingly unoriginal, at your suggestion of a screenname AIM would inevitably spit back something like, "How about QTpie18483134852?"

Inclusion of birth year, age, or graduation year numbers was a popular motif, one that would likely have brought many of us into To Catch a Predator-like scenarios in the current online climate. In the early days of AIM, choosing a non-conventional or highly unique and personalized screenname was akin to social suicide. Yes, we had 12 versions of KittenLuver on our buddy lists, but it was far better than having been perceived as an individual.


Read Everyone's Away Message Religiously and Addictively

Nowadays we can get our fix via Facebook or Twitter, but it was back in the AIM glory days that we first grew enamored with the notion of broadcasting our every activity cyberworldward. If God forbid our internet was ever down, we would shake and convulse with the pains of voyeurism withdrawal.


Update Your Own Away Message to Show How Interesting, Witty, and Popular you Are

Helpful Hint: Single word informative away messages are always a social faux pas. To simply write "Showering" or "Eating" is the equivalent of admitting how boring and mundane your life really is. No, you needed to be "Gettin' my shower on" or "Foodin' it up" instead. See how much more interesting you seem?

More often than not, it was important to let people know that not only were you out doing something, but that you weren't alone. "Out with my girls!" or "Playin Bball with Dave and Dan" were variations on socially acceptable norms. No one would ever, ever write "Quietly reading alone in my room". The only time you were allowed to be alone was while studying, and you better have used that away message to complain about it or you'd be suspected of (gasp!) enjoying schoolwork. For shame.


Choose the Perfect Icon


When AIM released the icon option, we all eagerly pored through the catalogs with Talmudic levels of focus and analysis. Was I more of a kitten or a flower? It was a tough call. Deliberation over whether I made the right choice haunts me to this day.


Select the Most Emo Available Pre-Emo Era Song Lyric for your Profile

This was before the coinage of the term "emo", but it's generally a good fit for the style of song snippet we placed meaningfully (or so we thought) in our profiles. The lyrics were supposed to have some type of personal meaning, but usually you just saw it in someone else's profile, thought it made them look wise and thoughtful, and adopted it as your own.

Extra Credit: Include a link to your angsty xanga or LiveJournal


Pick a Fun Sound to Chime when your Boyfriend/Girlfriend/Crush/Stalkee Signs Online

What's your auditory fancy? AIM had you covered. Rather than the basic open door/slam door sounds, you could choose an "Eep!" or "Ding Dong!" to alert you of the arrival of a socially significant peer. That signature noise was enough to make any of our pre-adolescent hearts skip a beat or two.


Know the Lingo and Punctuation Norms


The moment I realized that when I think to myself "I don't know" the letters IDK appear instantaneously in my mind's eye, I knew my love affair with IM had probably gone too far. Most of the old standards are still in circulation today ("OMG", "WTF", and the like), but we did have a few incredibly complicated ones to deflect our parent's curious eyes.

Speaking of i's, no one dared capitalize theirs in casual online conversation. The aforementioned alternation of capital and lowercase letters was, however, acceptable. Also, the proper way to end every sentence was with an ellipsis, even if it gradually trailed off an incomplete thought...


Choose Your Emoticons Wisely


Writing online comes with the added trouble of people misinterpreting what you wrote. The upside to this, however, was that you could always, always claim you were "jk" if what you said went over like a ton of bricks. Accidentally tell your friend they looked fat in their swimsuit at Susie's pool party? Simply add a :p or a ;) and you were totally off the hook.

Extra credit for more technically difficult but wholly unnecessary shapes such as:
A rose: @>---,---
Elvis @;^[)
Fish <')))))- <


Group Your Buddies by Lists with Ridiculous Names that Contain Words like "Peepz" and "Homies"



It's important to categorize all of your friends into groups, so be sure to come up with some catchy and vaguely descriptive names. Any sort of trite, overused slang to describe your friends was always a good move, especially if it was something your parents didn't understand and thus re-cemented their position as ignorant no-nothings. There are only so many times that you can explain to them that the categorization "Tight People" was not a sexually loaded term.


Find the Font and Color that Represents Your Personality


This was especially important, as it stood for how people would perceive your online identity. Were you more of a powder blue Comic Sans or a neon green italicized Helvetica? You better pick something and stick with it, because nothing was more irritating than those AIMers who would change font style and color every time they signed on. That's like them speaking in a falsetto or false baritone every time you had a conversation. It wasn't tasteful, and it just wasn't done.


Play Semi-Cruel Mind Games Through Use of AIM Functions


Not all AIM actions were well-intended. In fact, some were rather diabolical. When you were fighting with a friend, it was critical to use your AIM functions to your advantage. For example, you may select the "do not show as idle" function that forces people to worry erroneously that you're there, but you're ignoring them. Very tricky, yes, but very effective.

Blocking certain users was another popular ploy, as was clicking "Warn" to up their warning level. Bonus points for using your away message to write cryptic, esoteric things like, "You know what you did." Come to think of it, plenty of us employ these very same methods on Facebook today. You can take the 90s kid off the AIM, but you can't take the AIM out of the 90s kid.


It just goes to show you that no matter how mature we may think we've become, we can still read through these and think, "Oh, that's a good idea!" So, farewell for now, everyone, or TTFN for those of you who are so AIMily inclined. Check back the rest of this week for some wonderful 90s Thanksgiving TV episodes to tide you over for the long holiday weekend. Until then, *~*~*~hAvE a GrEaT tHaNkSgIvInG eVeRyOnE~*~*~*

The Real World

Last weekend, sometime between my many hours wasted watching For the Love of Ray J, World's Strictest Parents, and MTV Teen Cribs I got to thinking where exactly reality TV has veered off course. We all know it's far cheaper and easier for networks to produce reality shows that actual scripted TV shows with content and purpose, but somewhere along the way the phenomenon has spun out of control. While now we're now looking for the greatest American dog and giving Brett Michael's most curious female cast-offs their own half hour of television, in the 90s reality TV was still a burgeoning idea. It may shock and amaze you now, but the modifier "reality" once preceded the noun "TV" without even a trace of irony.

The Real World is still on of course, but we can all agree it's gotten a whole lot less real over its 22 seasons-to-date run. Now at open casting calls I imagine they have check boxes with labels like "Drunken Frat Boy Likely to Pick an Ignorant and Poorly Thought-Out Fight" or "Frustrated Psuedo-Intellectual Racial or Sexual Preference Minority Prototype", but in 1992 when the show premiered the show was a fresh concept.

Producers (and now reality show moguls) Jonathan Murray and Mary Ellis-Bunim initially considered making The Real World a semi-scripted soap opera, giving the preselected cast members a blueprint of their character development and storylines. You know, like they do nowadays on reality TV. If this idea had come to fruition with the quickly dissembled so-called "Season 0" cast, we could have seen Tracy Grandstaff (the then-future voice of MTV's Daria) play out as a character on The Real World. The pilot was soon dropped and exchanged for an actual set of seven strangers, forming the 1992 premiere season of The Real World.

In 1992, we first heard of MTV's grand social experiment, as the New York season premiered with these now-familiar words:

This is the true story... of seven strangers... picked to live in a house...work together and have their lives taped... to find out what happens... when people stop being polite... and start getting real...The Real World.


For your viewing pleasure, a montage of Real World Intros. I couldn't find them any other way. The first one on there is New York, my favorite part of which has got to be when they intone "...and start getting real," after which we hear a cast member yell, "Can you get the phone?" This was them not being polite/being real in 1992. Amazing.

So, what exactly happened when people stopped being polite and started being real? In 1992, this was actually a provocative and novel question. MTV brought in Becky, Norman, Heather, Julie, Kevin, Eric, and Andre to help us find out. I'm going to go out on a limb here and side with pop culture critic Chuck Klosterman in declaring the first season to be the only season of TRW that was actually "real" by any definition of the world. There was no meta self awareness going on, nor was there shameless self promotion in pursuit of low-tier fame. The first cast was the only one with no idea what was in store, what would get them screen time, or how the show would look as a finished product.

This was a short-lived phenomenon, of course, and soon the show was riddled with the kind of drama producers and sponsors salivate over. Here are just a few of the many, many ratings-skyrocketing dramatic moments that characterized the show in the 90s:



Puck vs. Everyone, Especially Pedro (San Francisco)


Sometimes good heartedness and good TV just don't mix. David "Puck" Rainey was a prime example of this phenomenon. No one could deny that watching his puzzling, over-the-top, and frequently unhygienic antics was entertaining. His worldview, however, was not quite as appealing to viewers as his penchant for picking his nose and eating peanut butter from the jar with his fingers. Puck was a notorious attention hog who represented the brazen new class of wannabe fame-seekers who made up the rising underclass of reality TV. He came to blows with pretty much everyone in the house, but the most memorable and shameful was his confrontation with Pedro Zamora.

Zamora had been diagnosed with AIDS, and his kind spirit and desire to battle ignorance against his disease made him the ideal target for Puck. Essentially, Puck became incensed that Pedro was a far more interesting character than him and thus was receiving far more attention. The only logical solution in his deluded mind was to attack Pedro constantly, instigating unnecessary confrontations. Pedro, in all his goodness, was ready to leave the house under the siege of torment until the other cast members decided to evict Puck. Sadly, Pedro died almost immediately after the airing of the San Francisco season finale, but his triumph over an asshat like Puck was a well-deserved minor victory.



Melissa and Dan Fight Over Postal Rights (Miami, 1996)



I don't know about you, but I take the US Postal Service's code to honor the privacy of my mail very seriously. Which is why it came as no surprise to me when Dan exploded upon finding that Melissa opened his letter containing pricey materials for his work. He goes so far as to call her a stupid bitch, which seems a little harsh for some innocent housemate mail-tampering. Things escalate quickly, as they tend to do on The Real World. In retaliation, Melissa flung some anti-gay slurs at him, which in retrospect was probably not a wise move. The drama just oozes from this clip. It's ridiculous TRW at its finest.



The Slap Heard Round the World (Seattle, 1998)

Stephen slaps Irene
Uploaded by 1dobiedc. - Classic TV and last night's shows, online.

Possibly the most infamous of Real World moments was what MTV dubbed "The Slap Heard Round the World". Even this early in the game, MTV realized the value of branding and packaging TRW's drama and making it seem like news. I suppose it's a testament to the show's resonance that people still remember this moment, though to its credit it is absolutely crazy.

Irene was looking for an out, so she cried Lyme Disease and asked to leave the show. To be fair, she did actually have Lyme Disease, but her claims of its debilitating impact may have been just a bit exaggerated. In what must have been a Lyme Disease-induced bout of insanity, she outs Stephen as a homosexual. Smooth move, Irene. To retaliate, Stephen does what any normal guy would do. That is to say, he throws her prized stuffed animal into the watery abyss and then stops her moving car to slap her in the face.

If he was working to quell those murmurings about his sexuality, this may not have been his best move. All in all, Irene may have had the last laugh, or at least a validation of her character over Stephen's. In the early 2000s he was arrested for prostitution and then for stealing a 1988 Toyota Camry. Smooth move, Stephen. We can only imagine his indisposed clients asking to reenact that fateful slapping scene. Though to be honest, I'd prefer not to.


As many of you well know, these moments are just the tip of the iceberg. The crazy seemed to snowball with each new season, turning the show into a free-for-all frenzy of threesomes, stereotyped character molds, and general drunken debauchery. In the early years, though, it was more of a legitimate social experiment to see what happened what people stopped being polite, and started getting real. Okay, so that reality may have included a verbal pillaging for semi-innocent mail tampering, but it still beats watching The Real World: Cancun.

The Magic of Science: 90s Shows that Made it Fun to be a Nerd

Considering educational science-themed kids shows of today have names like Dude, What Would Happen?, you have to wonder how far this type of programming is going to backslide. In our day, these shows didn't need cheesy gimmicks to pull in our attention. Except science-themed music video parodies on Bill Nye. Oh, and the penguin puppets on Beakman's World. And the swashbuckling sword fights on Mr. Wizard's World. Okay, so I made that last one up, but the underlying point was that no matter what the decade, you usually need a little more than straight educational segments to sell science to kids.

These shows must have had something special, though, to get us to voluntarily subject ourselves to learning in our precious free time. I'm sure some parental coaxing or even in-class watching sessions may have been in order, but no matter the means, we were watching. These shows found a magical point of compromise between education and entertainment and served it to us in a bubbling beaker of science learning. The producers and writers knew that kids are inherently inattentive, so they were sure to throw a fair amount of explosions in the mix.

The straightforwardness of these show's educational value was remarkable. Unlike some of its edutaining contemporaries (I'm looking at you, Ghostwriter), kid's science shows weren't tricking us into learning while we thought we were simply enjoying some mindless show. With science programs, it was all out in the open. Sure, they took pains to make learning fun and interesting, but they never once tried to hide the fact that we were doing what amounted to extracurricular science homework. Whatever the impetus for our spontaneous bouts of learning, our teachers and parents weren't complaining.



Bill Nye the Science Guy



Catchy theme song, right? It's all I can do to not start chanting Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill! alone in the comfort of my living room. The folks behind Bill Nye definitely achieved their goal of making science seem fun and exciting, at least in the opening credits. They take all the vaguely science-y sounding words and use them as mere background noise for the the snappy theme. The things floating across our screens seem vaguely educational, yes, but when they're flashing in a maniacal strobe-light manner, they seem just a tad more exciting than they do in our Earth Science textbooks.

Bill Nye was a fast-paced, engaging show aimed at the learning resistant tween demographic. The show utilized humor and sight gags while constantly cutting from one experiment to the next. It didn't give us time to get bored and change the channel. If we were nearing that boredom threshold, though, Bill knew just what to do to keep us hooked.

Two words: song parodies. Yes, you heard (er, read) right. Nye offered us Weird Al-esque song parody musical videos with scientific themes. The "Soundtrack of Science" segment was truly ridiculous, but it demonstrated the show's good sense to not take itself to seriously. For your enjoyment, I offer my very favorite Bill Nye parody, the truly absurd "Bill's Got Boat" a parody of "Baby Got Back" sung by fictitious musical act (wait for it) Sure-Floats-A-Lot.

Can't you see she just wants to be buoyant?

To read the full post on Bill Nye the Science Guy, click here



3-2-1 Contact



The visuals in that intro really make you nostalgic for a simpler time. When I see that bar graph on that black screen computer, I just light up. It's kind of cute and kitschy-looking now, don't you think?

The show also made a version especially for in-class use, further blurring the line between formal and voluntary learning. You may have enjoyed watching it in school, but you were still essentially shackled to your desk by law. It's a fine line, don't you think?

3-2-1 Contact had a variety of segments including features on such exciting scientific topics as volcanoes and robots. My favorite recurring segment was The Bloodhound Gang, which back in the day meant cool scientifically-minded child detectives, but now brings to mind the images of humping music video stars dressed as monkeys. Thanks a lot, musical group Bloodhound Gang. You've tainted the innocence of my intellectually curious youth.

I yearned to answer the phone, "Bloodhound Detective Agency: wherever there's trouble we're there on the double!" I'm thinking of starting to pick up at work that way, just for fun.

This intro is pure mid-to-late 80s, and that song is amazing

Mr. Wizard's World




If that intro just doesn't do it for you, check out this 1990 promo. It just screams excitement. Learn to make clouds! Blow up two balloons at once! Run backwards! Golly, Mr. Wizard, is there anything you can't do?



This 80s and 90s version was a revival of Mr Wizard's (nee Don Herbert) show decades earlier. In the 1950s and 60s, Watch Mr Wizard launched thousand of Mr Wizard science clubs. If you're ever feeling a little nerdy for liking the third version of the show (that's the 80s/90s one), just think to yourself, by 1955 100,000 kids had applied to be club members. Now that's nerdy.

We may not have had local watch-along clubs, but we did get our own healthy dose of fun experiments at which to marvel. Mr Wizard would perform some sort of mysterious trick, we'd ooh and ahh, and then we'd be stuck sitting around for the tedious explanation. The show ran in reruns for several years and often played very early in the morning. I distinctly remember irritating my parents with my wide-awakeness at 6 am and being stuck in front of the TV for some good old fashioned science learning. Oh, the memories.




Newton's Apple



If you thought TV scientists from the 1950s were interesting, just look at the winners we got to host Newton's Apple. An NPR broadcaster, a museum director, and even future MTV News correspondent SuChin Pak. Now there's a selection! Of course, this was all over the span of several years, but you get the general idea.

I admit my allegiance to this show stems from a similar place to my fervent devotion to Mystery Science Theater 3000. Being from Minneapolis, these shows were something of hometown heroes, produced in my own backyard. Well, not literally in my own backyard. Though I do think our shed would have been a lovely scenic backdrop for bottle rocket launching.




Beakman's World


Beakman's World was sort of like a modified Bill Nye. It covered many of the same topics and scientific phenomena, only its eccentric host was fictitious. Beakman was played by Paul Zaloom, a lively pupeteer and actor who brought to life the world of science through amusing experiments. Beakman was quite popular with the lab-assisting ladies; he had three comely female scientific companions throughout the course of the show. He also had a guy in a rat suit. Don't ask, just infer that it was funny.

They also had the aforementioned puppet penguins, which were of course adorable. They were sort of crotchety and judgmental, but then again they lived in a place where it was consistently below zero temperature. I'll cut them some slack.




These TV shows prove that adults needed not be sneaky to try to get us to sit down and watch something educational, they just needed to be kid friendly and have a good sense of humor. Oh, and have lots of explosions. Lots of explosions.