I Don't Freakin' Believe It

by Smoot

April 24, 1999

"You can never take our freedom!"

Okay, welcome back, everyone. My rant covers two topics today, something that pissed me off and turned me into a raving madman, and something that scared the wits out of me and made me into a paranoid, scared little boy.

First off, I was finishing up Chapter 6 of It's Who You Know (just for you, SB!), and then clicked on my bookmark of Fortunecity to go update my page. I write in my username, "Smoot", and my password, "**********", and then hit Enter. And sit there. And then get very angry when it says "incorrect password".

So I try again a couple of times, and still nothing. Finally, I go to my page to see if it had been hacked or something. Well, it hadn't been hacked. It just wasn't there. Someone else's page, SunshineGal, (gag) was there instead.

Understandably, I'm upset.

So like the raving madman that I am, I rant and rave for all of fifteen minutes before busting my butt and writing a letter to FC asking for my page back and saying that there was nothing wrong with it. Here, you can read it too.

-------------------------
 

To Whom It May Concern:

Until recently, I was the maintainer of a web page on your overall site, Fortunecity. My alias there was Smoot, and my web page was located at http://westwood.fortunecity.com/storey/355 and was called "Slightly to the Left of the Middle of Nowhere". The page itself heavily featured X-Men original stories and art of the X-Men, along with quotations, poetry, Dragon Ball Z, and links sections. Rounding out my selection of subpages were a section about me, and my personal rant.

My page has roughly one thousand and one hundred hits, and I was quite proud of that fact, and recently I had finished my latest chapter of a story and went to update my page, first to check on it to make sure that it was okay.  When I wrote in my addy, I did not, as expected, go to my page. Instead, I find a page entitled "Sunshine World". Hardly something I would put up.

I check my email immediately, and find that on April 22, the day that I was doing all of this, at 7:56 PM Eastern Standard Time, I received an email from [email protected] which read as follows:
 

"Your page(s) at westwood/storey/355 have been removed
as they violated our rules on page content.

Our content regulators had the following comments to make
regarding your content:

unsuitable content

These comments, and the mail address [email protected] ,
have been posted in the FortuneCity Jail to deter other
users from breaching our content rules.  You may view
the entry at:

http://www2.fortunecity.com/cgi-bin/homepage/showjailcell.pl?block=M&cell=91

Your account for user Smoot has been deactivated.
You will not be able to use this account, nor will you
be able to set up further accounts using the mail address
[email protected] .

If you think you have received unfair treatment, you may
apply to have this restriction, and the posting in the
Jail, removed by mailing [email protected].

FortuneCity Administration
[email protected]"
 

I received no forewarning that anything on my site could be considered "unsuitable content".

I quickly brought up Netscape Composer and looked my page over carefully, wondering what it might have been that would have placed my corner of the web under "unsuitable content". I found little if at all of anything fitting that description.

So, curious as to what I might have done, I went to your "page content guidelines, which are featured at http://www.fortunecity.com/lavender/hoskins/399/guidelines.html, and I read them over quickly. I did not remove any of your advertising banners, I did not set up a "gateway" site, and I did not link to any evil and horrible pages. I did not make any password-protected links, I did not use my web page as a data warehouse, I had no advertising banners for any other web sites featuring free web space, and I did not promote any companies that were restricted in your list. The only company I promoted on my Fortunecity web site was Fortunecity.

I read on, and my page was still very much active. It received numerous hits a day, and I had last updated April 1st, 1999. I had many of the perks that Fortunecity featured in use on my site. I found nothing wrong with my page, and I would like it to be reinstated to its original site, http://westwood.fortunecity.com/storey/355 as soon as possible.

-Matt "Smoot" Bowyer, [email protected] , [email protected]
 

---------------------------------

What happened? Thanks to the support of my fellow fanficcers and other friends, FC got the shnikeys blown out of them and apologized to me, and repealed the restrictions on my site. Sadly, though, SunshineGal still has my original site.  Grr... do not fret, though, the day of reckoning is still to be at hand!

And as for the other thing....

On Friday, April 23, 1999, I arrived at my high school talking with Johannes and James, and saw many people standing outside talking. The three of us went inside and were greeted by one of the administrators saying that we either had to go into the cafeteria or stay outside. We head back outside and run into Billy and Wendy, and the five of us just get to talking.

Spade shows up and sits down while we're talking about the possibility of this being a drug bust, and how everyone seems to be leaving. But after thrity minutes, we're allowed inside, and I wander off to Mr. Roberson's class. Luckily he doesn't make us do any work, because he says that we need to hear what happened.

Well, then our principal came on the intercom and told us that the reason that school was delayed in starting was because they had a quick faculty meeting, and it just ran over too long. Then she says for us to have a good day, and not to worry, because she feels that all of us are quite safe.

Safe?

Safe?!

Safe?!?!?!?!?!?!?

From what, we all kindly (okay, not) and patiently (okay, not that either) wanted to know. And we found out soon enough.

Turns out that some kid, whose name I know but cannot release here, had planned on doing something not unlike the tragedy in Littleton, Colorado, except he wasn't going to come into the school and shoot us all like a demented Trench Coat Mafia member. He was going to blow the school up.

Okay, who hasn't thought of that? Really, I mean. Fantasized about blowing said school of the face of the planet. I have, most my friends have. But how many people obtain blueprints of the school, work out the whole plan, get accomplices, set up a web page devoted to how much they hate the school, and construct the bomb?

Only the really determined and the really disturbed.

So when I found out about this, I don't mind telling you that I was scared out of my mind. I was paranoid, nervous, edgy, and tense for the entire day. Can you really blame me? I mean, someone was all ready to blow me up and my friends up and my trumpet up, and wouldn't have thought twice about it. Man, if my trumpet had been damaged, I would have been SO angry...

Well, I would've been angry for other reasons, one of them being I probably would've been dead....

But they did catch the kid, which is good, but they haven't caught the other kids that were working with him. This whole thing smells like Conspiracy Theory to me, really, seeing as one kid gets caught, the others use that as the diversion to do what they want to do... man, still gives me chills.

So that frightened me, knowing that there are people in my school that hate it enough to kill everyone in it. I knew that kid. Not well, just an acquaintance, but even so, I never pictured him ever doing that to us, or to anyone else.

I don't know how to close this. I'm scared to go to prom tonight, but I'm going anyway, because I rented the tux, I bought the ticket, and even though my date cna't make it anymore, I'm going to have a good time, and then drop by her house later and say hi. So that's it this week for me, so I guess I'll get outta here.

Keep it real, and relatively rational.

-Matt Bowyer