I had been expecting it for a while, but it finally happened. One of my favourite websites, The Temple of the Screaming Electron, has gone off the map. Totse.com was first created as a dialup bulletin board in 1989 and at one time boasted the world's largest internet acessable text file archive. By the time I came to it, however, it had migrated to the worldwide web. Totse began as a haven for radicals and for electronic copies of the anarchist's cookbook, but blossomed into a clearinghouse for information on fringe ideology, firearms and explosives, comptuer hacking and security, and also, though perhaps not its brightest moment, a point of focus for federal investigation.

Because of my conservative disposition, the site offered me an opportunity to cut my teeth on opposing opinion, sharpen my debate skills, and stake out a position as the site's resident political black sheep. After a year, I became moderator of the politcs forum, followed later by the linguistics forum and the legal forum, a position I maintained for the better part of three years until the site was finally shut down today. I didn't like many of the ideas I encountered there, but I did learn how to confront them and in the years I spent at the site, meeting viewpoints and people from around the world, I gained a richer perspective on the breadth of human culture. I met my best friend there, one of my first true loves, and a great many other people whose opinion I value and whose presence I cherish. I met people I never would have met otherwise, some who live in my town and I might have passed on the street without knowing, and people who live on the other side of the world, whose language and culture I never otherwise might have had the chance to learn about. With all its lunacy and outrageousness, high technology, and high emotion, the Totse community was a microcosm of the internet at its best and worst and it will be sorely missed.