Every once in awhile I get e-mail from people wanting to know what cactus means and where it came from and why we're so obsessed with it. The original meaning of cactus was just to call up a person at random and say absolutely nothing to them except "cactus". For some reason, this really gets to people so it can be fun if you're bored enough.
From PLA035:I first heard some get cactused when a friend of mine, Amigados (618) came to my house about four years ago and he started calling people and cactusing them. So I decided to give him a call and ask him about the origin of cactus. In a phone interview, here's what was said...
"Me and some friends of mine were sitting around a friend's room and bored out of our minds. We picked up the phone and were pranking this girl that Steve used to like and she blew him off. At the time we were playing a game called Hero's Quest, but we were playing a really screwed up version that they invented one night when they were tripin' and there were cactuses sprouting up out of the ground because they were making up really stupid creatures.
"I called her right as my character was enveloped by a cactus so I said to her, 'cactus?' and she said, 'who?' and I said, 'oh, cactus.' and that's how it started. After that we kept calling her back and saying cactus because it seemed to really get on her nerves. All night we picked random numbers out of the phone book and cactused people and we did it for days and the next thing you know it just became a way of life."
That's the story, Brian Crecente, you shouldn't have tried to base all your knowledge of the computer underground on a couple of PLA files. Just go into #hack and ask tr1be about us and you'll hear, "They know nothing! They are lame!" Try reading Phrack next time.
A few more things about Amigados, he used to drive around in car that had a big cactus drawn on the front side of it along with the word, "cactus" and he told me that they went around stealing those gigantic real estate magnets off the side of cars (those huge advertising magnets, you know?), took them home and cut them out in the shapes of cactuses to stick on their own cars.
"To live the cactus is to live like no man." -Amigados, 1995
