Flamoot / Snee

About 10 years ago I met this guy from Canada who sometimes called himself Flamoot and sometimes Snee. I think we emailed each other a few times before actually meeting at a hacker convention in Detroit called Rubicon. His way of saying hello was tricking the front desk into giving him my room key so he could sneak into my room. (There’s an old post somewhere about this.) I can’t remember if he was at Rubicon the following year or not.

We’ve emailed each other occasionally over the past 10 years. He used to call into The Phone Show and it always seemed to be under bizarre circumstances, like he’d be calling from pay phones but connected through weird PBX systems or something like that. Anyway, back in the early 2000’s, the thing I really loved about flamoot was his journaling. He wrote some really incredible stuff on his web site. Very lengthy posts. And of course he couldn’t write down his thoughts on LiveJournal like a normal person. He had to put them on his own weird system where the URL ended in cgi-bin/index.pl because that’s how real hackers do it.

I’m not even going to try and describe how much I loved the stuff he wrote on his page, but there was a ton of it and I read every word. I think I even went back and read a lot of it again when I was finished. It was like reading my favorite book or something. Some of it was just mundane, day-to-day stuff, but then he’d rant about random things and it was just so fascinating to me. His writing really made me admire him a lot.

Of course, his personal server disappeared eventually and all his writing went away with it. I was sort of devastated and I think I asked him about it and he told me he lost it all too. Maybe a crash or something, I don’t know. Years later I found archive.org which archived a huge portion of the internet starting back in the late 90’s. Ever wonder what Google used to look like? Yahoo? CNN? Your own homepage? It’s all on there. His page was missing from it, though. Archive.org missed a lot of sites that weren’t really popular and his didn’t make the cut. Until recently.

Every couple years I’ll remember how awesome Flamoot was and I’ll go looking for his journal on archive.org and it’s never there. But today I was talking to a mutual friend of ours and that reminded me to try again and there it was. This is pretty exciting for me. I’ve read half of it already and I plan to try and read the rest of it tonight. It’s not all there, unfortunately, but my hope is that archive.org will someday have the rest of it up. I think he was writing at least as early as 2000 and that’s probably where all the really intense stuff is. Maybe I can click on some of these links from the 2003 archives and be taken back to then.

This post from December 3rd, 2003 where he’s pushed to awareness of something by the pattern adorning the surface of his bed’s comforter is a perfect example of what I love about his writing. (Just a short excerpt here) “It bears only a vague resemblance to the mini-spirals on my comforter. It does bear a passing resemblance to an “e”. But none of that need mean anything. In those and other numerous recent incidents, the theme of magical numbers, cosmic constants, natural geometry and how they’re all interrelated has come up again and again, unreally often. It hasn’t been ME talking about it — it’s been a series of things I’ve been subjected to which have been RELATED to each other, which are tied to each other with a web of common-sense-defying convenience. I guess my hypothesis is that this is because I’ve been thinking about this stuff lately, or maybe this was just a statistical hiccup and I started thinking about this stuff before it happened as a reaction to a future memory, or like, the backwards time-quake of solving this deep fucking fractal synchronicity period shit. But what’s a statistical hiccup? What the hell kind of weird primal shit-magic fills your life with cosmic constants? Man. So I wonder if it’s gonna stop now, with my bedsheet (which had the Pi tie-in through Graham, remember ^-^). The universe, in conclusion, is an INSANE FUCKING PLACE TO LIVE.”

I’m off now to read some more of his rants and you should too!

Thanks for all this, Snee. And thanks, archive.org, for saving it!

Sunday Update: So what is the elusive Flamoot up to now, you must certainly be asking. He’s been developing some weird game for Linux called telepathic-critterdrug that I don’t fully understand because I don’t ingest nearly enough acid, but you may want to check it out. Here’s a video of what it looks like.