pweened!

Edited by author 08-29-2002 06:06 PM
I thought "pr0n" was created way back when to get around filters. I could swear back in 1995, a friend showing me usenet on campus computers said it was the only way to get to certain groups, around the campus lockdown word filter that blocked those groups.

I was under the impression it became so widespread it was just sort of a running joke. That you'd say "pr0n" instead of "porn" in email to get around your company's stupid abusive language filter, and eventually it just became a way to hint at the absurdity of controlling things based on simple word matching.

Thanks, Joey! I needed this!

I've been thinking about OwnzOred for awhile. At first I had some problems with the inaccessability of the language, then I got thinking about James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. Here are two writers whose imagery was not easily accessable to the world at large. Their lit. voices were full of embedded vocab. that was hard to understand, invented words, slang, foreign languages, etc. We celebrated their genius. Why not do the same with this? No matter how obscure the language to non nerds, it's a helluva story.

I thought I'd drop in my comment that I liked the story very much.

That's all for now.

mathowie: I went by the Jargon File's origin, although yours sounds more hackish.

I often mistype "porn" as "pron" and have occasionally gone into Jeff K. territory with typos like "liek" and "teh".

Pat: You're very welcome!

Not only are you going to get the tech-speak decoded for you, but you'll also get Cory Doctorow former-lieutenant insider knowledge as well. There's a lot of Cory in this story.

I just wanted to let you know that this short story rivals many of my favorites by Ellison, Heinlein, and other greats. It 0wned me the same way Ellison and Heinlein can.

Hey Cory, just wanted to join the chorus of cheers re: "0wnz0red". Clever, funny, and leaves you thinking after it's over. The comments at Slashdot haven't been as kind as I expected, but I think this story perhaps hits a little too close to home for them. Nevermind the buggers.

Cory, I read the story a few days ago, and overall I like it, but... do any hacker/programmers really *use* l33tspeak in everyday conversation? Everytime I hit on the characters talking about getting 0wnz0r3d or r0x0ring th31r b0x0rs or whatever, it just threw me for a loop.

Maybe in the future things will be different, but excessive use of l33tspeak seems to be most prevalent in script kiddies and wannabes, not amongst actual l33t h4x0rs.

Thanks for all the props, folks! I know plenty of hackers who say things like "I am leet," and "dude, that 0wnz" -- it's almost always in jest, but they were meant to be bantering.

Hey Cory, I'm relatively new to this site. I just thought it was you know a site, a blog, whatever, some guys put up a site. It's a nice site, so I stuck around... following this link got to me Campbell Awards page. Holy #$@. You're on a page listing other honorees such as Spider Robinson and Barry Longyear. I will now enter this site with the proper respect. Wipe my feet and all that. Wow.

I've read the first page of your story on Salon and then got more interested in the Awards stuff. But the story is excellent. I can't wait to read more of your stuff.

Yeah, I was quite taken aback by the bitchiness on slashdot. Odd. I really enjoyed the story. Didn't take it too seriously, dug the concepts, smirked at the l337n355.

Robert: 's funny, I read Gardner Dozois' anthologies religiously (big, thick, smack-people-round-the-head books, solid with great scifi, mmm) so of course I'd read and enjoyed Craphound* quite some time ago. And I first found boingboing quite near to its inception too, I think (I have vague memories of another blog pointing it out along "it's just started up, it's cool, go look" lines). Yet for some strange reason I didn't put two and two together until within the last month or so. One of those odd brainburps.

* put me in mind of some Unknown Armies stuff as well, oddly.

I don't know why I never joined these two media in my mind before: I read sf (Heinlein's my guy) and I surf the Internet. But never before had I encountered sf on the web. I guess the closest I'd come was reading Snowcrash. But now I'm enjoying that Periodic Table thing and have discovered craphound and a couple other sites related to sf. Cool. And here you get to hobnob with the authors. How cool is that? Maybe it's because I spend a lot of time reading dead sf authors. Heinlein, Wells, etc.