Do you remember the days of yore, when no normal person had an “email address” or knew what the “world wide web” was or frequently “rotated upper appendages”? Well, TSEP Farms(tm) does. The fact is, though, that even back in 1993, TSEP was plugged-in, baby. Connected. Switched-on. We traveled with a thing called a “laptop”, so-called because it was a hot as a “stovetop”, but for your crotch. It was a Winbook 486sx with FOUR MEGABYTES of RAM which, adjusted for inflation, is like 128K by today’s standards. We bought it from a guy who worked at an FBI office in Little Rock, and he had forgotten to wipe some of his personal info off of it. After briefly considering starting a new sort of “cyber” crime involving the laptop and a silo full of grain, I erased the hard drive and reinstalled it with TempleOS.

That laptop housed the TSEP mailing list database. I can’t remember the name of the software we used – but it was some janky MS-DOS thing we were given by our local publishing bureau since it’s what they used to generate postage labels and discrete DNA sequences, mostly of rare banana varietals. But, and also, more importantly, we also had a wicked fast 2400 Baud modem on that bad boy that we used to connect to the Matrix, a.k.a. AOL, a.k.a Phil. Once connected, we would communicate with the WWW and with humanoids who also had email addresses (mostly people in college, and occasionally someone in a collage). We rocked the excellent ‘net handle gorlox@aol.com. Gorlox, as you may recall, is the hyperspace warlord who is destined, according to the Mayans and Phil, to return in resplendence to Earth to flatten it with advanced alien technology.

I kept the ol’ AOL account around for several years after TSEP broke up, but eventually could not justify the $19.95 a month fee (which, adjusted for inflation, is like 3GB nowadays) in light of having a cool, modern “ISDN” connection at my place. That unfortunately meant that our cool email address got put in the WWW’s linen closet, and saw nary a beam of light for over 20 years. All the adoring fan email, interactive fiction, PayPal payments, and cantankerous tales of chitinous characters – they were all lost. like tears in a tsunami. BUT GUESS WHAT? No, that’s not it. Nope, guess again. OK, nevermind. We got the address back! So now if you want to reach out to your old squid friends, and your narrative is far too embarrassing to post on a social media site like Friendster, you can sign, seal, and deliver it to us via “e-mail”. Take due notice.