From an email to my sister

Urban myth I’m making up out of my arse:
Truth: One year in the first half of the 90’s, AOL released a Usenet feed to all its users. At the time AOL was the world’s biggest ISP – remember all those free CD’s given away with anything? This released the great unwashed over the whole of Usenet like an oil slick. Actually, it was more like a shit tide than an oil slick. Usenet’s never quite recovered, and reverberations of the event can be found in the old-timer’s habit of posting AOL! quoting the whole of the previous message; this refers to the AOLer’s habit of replying to a long complicated message chain with no snipping saying just ‘Me too!’ – quite annoying when dial-up connections meant that posting the whole chain (1000’s of characters of information which would have been already read) and adding a fairly meaningless 7 characters which would add a quite appreciable cost to the audience, especially when multiplied by the 1000’s of recipients.
This event happened in September of whatever year it was (93? 94?) and became known as the Rape of Usenet.

Truth: International Talk like a Pirate Day is in September and started in the first half to mid 90’s.

Urban Myth: getting the shit tide to walk around even one day a year talking like uneducated 16th century crims – and thinking it’s cool! – is not fun at all. Seriously.