Internet Oracle

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The Internet Oracle (historically known as The Usenet Oracle) is a collaborative effort at collective humor in a pseudo-Socratic question-and-answer format.

A user sends a question to the Oracle via e-mail or the Internet Oracle website, and it is randomly sent to another user who has asked a question. This second user may then answer the question (or not; if it is not answered within 24 hours it is put back into the queue to be given to another user to answer). Meanwhile, the original questioner is also sent a question which he/she may choose to answer. All exchanges are conducted through a central distribution system which also makes all users anonymous.

A completed question-and-answer pair is called an "Oracularity".

Contents

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Style

A representative (and famous) exchange is:

The Usenet Oracle has pondered your question deeply.
Your question was:
> Why is a cow?
And in response, thus spake the Oracle:
} Mu.

Many of the Oracularities contain Zen references and witty wordplay. "Geek" humor is also common, though less common than the early years of the Oracle's existence, when fewer casual home computer users had Internet access. Most Oracularities are significantly longer than the above example, and they sometimes take the form of rambling narratives, poems, top-ten lists, spoofing of interactive fiction games, or anything else that can be put into plain text.

A complex Oracle mythos has also evolved around the figure of an omniscient, anthropomorphic, geeky deity and a host of grovelling priests and attendants. Other staples in conversation with the oracle include:

  • A *ZOT* (administered with the Staff of Zot, see LART) is earned when the Oracle is irritated. *ZOT*s are something like lightning strikes and are usually fatal. Unscrupulous participants will sometimes administer undeserved *ZOT*s. (The particular word *ZOT* may be a reference to the comic strip B.C.)
  • Woodchuck questions are a sure way to earn a *ZOT*. The Oracle will often censor the word "woodchuck" as "w..dch.ck" or simply refer to it obliquely ("rodent of unusual size"). This is a reference to "The Woodchuck Question": "How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?", which in the early days of the Usenet Oracle, was over-asked to the point of being a cliché.
  • Traditionally, questions to the Oracle open with a suitable grovel such as "High and Mighty Oracle, please answer my most humble question," although grovels are often very creative and can be very long, or even part of the question.
  • Answers from the Oracle traditionally contain a request for payment such as "You owe the Oracle a rubber chicken and a Cadillac." This segment, often called the "YOTO (for "You owe the Oracle") line", often references objects that are related, in a punnish way, to the answer they are a part of.
  • If you mention DMP, Dumpie, or "the cooler incident" you will receive a free e-mail with details on how to profit by helping with a transfer of a large sum of money from an account in Nigeria.

An assorted mythos of recurring characters—or in-jokes—has accumulated over the years. These include the worthless High Priest Zadoc (sometimes with an assistant named Kendai), the Oracle's girlfriend Lisa the Net.Sex.Goddess, an assortment of deities, and the caveman figure Og. Many Oracle fans have mixed feelings about the mythos, as passing off an in-joke reference or story often becomes uncreative.

Delphic Research, Inc. is an alternate mythos for the Internet Oracle, created by a group of people who, for one night, flooded the Oracle's queue of questions with prewritten questions and responses involving the research adventures of three women.

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Administration, Digests, and the Priesthood

The Oracularities are compiled into periodic digests by a team of volunteer "priests", who read every Oracularity and select what they consider the best. These are posted to the Usenet newsgroup rec.humor.oracle, the Oracle website, and also distributed via an e-mail mailing list.

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Usenet discussion group

There is a usenet group, news:rec.humor.oracle.d, which is populated by a variety of participants in the Internet Oracle. The group is rife with TOIJs (tired old in-jokes), obscure references and dry humor. By general agreement, discussion of the Internet Oracle in the group is uncommon enough that posters are encouraged to prepend an OT: warning to those subject lines (to denote "On Topic").

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Origins

The Oracle was started in the mid 1980s by Steve Kinzler, as an indirect descendant of an older game program written by Peter Langston in 1975-1976 at the Harvard Science Center. Kinzler's version is based primarily on a version written by Lars Huttar in 1989.

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Internet Oracle derivatives

The Internet Oracle has spawned a sub-breed of question-answer website exemplified by the Conversatron, and the now defunct Forum3000 and TrueMeaningOfLife.com, among many others. These share the following characteristics:

  • Answers are provided not by users, but by an individual or group of individuals.
  • The group of responders stay largely behind the scenes, attributing responses to various characters or culture references.
  • Multiple answers are frequently given to each question.
  • Each answer is accompanied by a picture or icon of the character to which the answer is attributed.
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External links

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References

Online

  • Sewell, David R. "The Internet Oracle: Virtual Authors and Network Community." First Monday 2.6 (June 1997)
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