Usenet: The Flaming

Funny story: I got an email from sj@io.com asking if anyone wanted to contribute to Usenet: The Flaming. Usenet: The Flaming was a joke on Magic: The Gathering. It skewered online tropes and card games at the same time. It's the kind of thing you see fly through your mailbox every day. I threw a few ideas in and promptly forgot about it. What I didn't realize is that yes, sjackson was Steve Jackson, the man himself. And Steve has never let me forget it -- I am more popular for my contribution to a fictional card game (Usenet: The Flaming v1.2) than all my published works combined!

• THE POWER OF THE SPOKEN WORD
  1, You skip the cold, impersonal world of 7-bit ASCII and verbally intimidate the hell out of the target player. You get to look at the top card in his deck.
• IS THIS THING ON?
  1, Your parents become "hip" and get onto the Internet despite your best efforts to stop them. They confuse email with news postings, and write to you about your acne problems and how they think they know a good dermatologist, etc. Lose 1 cred as your carefully constructed net.persona is exposed as a fraud.