The Internet Oracle

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Our Oracle That art in Cyberspace Emailed be thy name. Thy news be read On IRC as it is in gophers. Give us our daily FTP downloads And forgive us our archie and Veronica accesses. For thine is the HTML, The TCP and the IP For ever and ever, Web without end. Amen.

The Internet Oracle, also known as The Usenet Oracle, is quite possibly the Internet's earliest New Media work, and crowdsourced humor at its finest.

It was created by Steve Kinzler in October 1989, although the software predates his creation. Yes, The Internet Oracle is Older Than the Web (although, obviously, the website isn't).

How it operates is simple: one sends an email to a particular address, asking it to "askme" a question or "tellme" the answer to a question. Every "tellme" gets sent to an "askme", and the recipient of the question answers it and sends the answer back. The best questions and answers are added to the digests.

What sort of questions are asked, and what sort of answers are given? Let's put it this way: before the Web, the Usenet Oracle had its public home in the UseNet newsgroup rec.humor.oracle. This is not a place to ask about the amusing minutiae of Oracle RDBMS queries. Nor is it a place to ask about the quantity of lumber that a groundhog could toss if groundhogs could toss lumber. They've heard that one before, with various wordings. Repeatedly. This is a place for original humor - and, with over thirty years of questions and answers, that's asking a lot.

Of course, with three decades of humor under its belt, the Oracle has a few running gags: High Priest Zadoc (who is rarely competent) and his occasionally-appearing assistant Kendai, ZOTting supplicants for poor-quality questions or grovels, the Oracle's beautiful (and kinky) girlfriend Lisa the Net.Sex.Goddess, a random assortment of deities, and the caveman Og -- among others.

Like so many other great Net.Classics, it has an entry in the Jargon File.

Tropes used by The Internet Oracle include:

• Archive Binge: As of June 2019, there were over 1500 digests of Oracularities. You can panic now.
• Audience Participation: The audience is the Oracle.
• Bumbling Sidekick: High Priest Zadoc.
• Head-Tiltingly Kinky: Lisa, the Oracle's girlfriend, allegedly.
• Hulk Speak: Og the caveman.
• Incredibly Lame Pun: Many queries are simply setups for jokes, asked in the hopes that the recipient of the query will recognize the setup and deliver the necessary punchline. See the quotes page for some examples.
• Magic Staff: The Staff of ZOT.
• Never Heard That One Before:
  • The woodchuck question.
  • Employment ads for Oracle programmers.
• Ms. Fanservice: Lisa, insofar as it's possible to be such in a purely text medium.
• Shock and Awe: The Oracle is prone to ZOTting supplicants who ask about w..dch.cks, are insufficiently respectful, pose stupid questions, or... Hm. You know, let's just leave it at "The Oracle is prone to ZOTting supplicants".
• Ur Example: of New Media.
• You Owe Me: Every answer comes with a required payment to be made to the Oracle, always in keeping with the subject of the question and always humorous in nature:

} You owe the Oracle a copy of "A Child's Garden of Awfully Nasty Things." } You owe the Oracle a truth table, and a falsehood couch. } You owe the Oracle a glossy interior latex paint that leaves his walls minty-fresh and kissable. } You owe the Oracle a mixed salad, hold the veggies. } You owe the Oracle some topological pornography.

See the Quotes page for quite a few more.

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You owe the Oracle a truly original trope.