Article 92504 of alt.religion.kibology:
From: mcirvin@fas.harvard.edu (Matt McIrvin)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology
Subject: Re: Usenet Math! was Re: Killing Cats
Date: 4 Sep 1995 18:11:30 GMT
Organization: Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
NNTP-Posting-Host: fas.harvard.edu

I think I first started seeing cryptic references to Kibo on
alt.folklore.urban, then started seeing posts of his that were
crossposted to all sorts of weird places, then eventually concluded
that a.r.k was a newsgroup that was sort of a friendlier and therefore
more fun alternative to groups like talk.bizarre.

Surreal humor is hardly in short supply in the modern world, but most
of it is hostile, exclusive stuff that revolves around narrowly
defined forms of shock value and takes itself way too seriously in the
process (take most of the stuff that passes for humor in rock music--
the reason I like They Might Be Giants so much is basically that their
jokes are *not* of this variety, not even when the songs get dark and
twisted).

Kibo's posts contained plenty of shock value (his most famous ones
*were* sick stories about a tortured puppy, after all), but beneath
that they were so fundamentally good-natured, so devoted to sheer play
rather than to being self-consciously avant-garde, and so unbeatable
for *density* of well-crafted, unexpected humor, that I was soon
looking forward to reading themm.  For some reason, I found his big
.sig deeply hilarious.  And the newsgroup that revolved around him,
unlike just about all of the similar ones, didn't devote most of its
effort to flaming timid newbie outsiders curious about what was going
on.  You could do anything there.  It was perhaps the least culturally
restricted place on Usenet.

I started posting to a.r.k, joining in the fun-- this must have been
around the summer of 1992-- and though the humor in my early posts was
kind of forced, and one of my first acts was to fall for a troll of
Kibo's about the MBTA Green Line, I soon started making huge numbers
of posts, and since nobody told me to stop, I kept doing it.  For a
while I was actually the third highest-volume poster to a.r.k, after
Kibo and, I think, Matt Welch.  This was back when a.r.k was a pretty
low-volume, laid-back place (it seems to be heading that way again,
maybe only because Kibo doesn't post).  Since I lived in the Boston
area, it was only a short matter of time before I met the guy.

People today seem to think that I knew Kibo much earlier than I
actually did.
-- 
Matt    	01234567   <--  Indent-o-Meter
McIrvin         ^       	Tab damage as window on reality!