• Role-Playing Games, a popular Internet pastime in which people assume other identities and interact as characters, are seedbeds for new-form neterature. Astonia, for instance, is described by its creators as a "massively multiplayer online role playing game."
Each player, the rules explain, chooses to be "a battle-hardened warrior or a powerful mage." In Astonia (www.astonia.com), the player undergoes battle training and "the experience gained as characters solve quests, discover new places, and kill evil monsters, can be applied to raise any of a large number of attributes, skills and spells. Characters gain rank and power, qualifying them for better and more powerful equipment for the new and greater challenges that lie ahead." One of the greatest challenges is writing anything pithy while the game is being played. Many of the comments found on the games' sample pages consist of gruntly prose such as "hi everyone!" and "hi zoe :)"
There are moments of fancy: "You have been frozen by ice demon. You feel like you'll never thaw again." And "dimples, you still got an orb at my shop ;)"
• News Filterese. Scattered throughout the Internet are witty, wiseacre sites that troll the Web for news. Some are looking for political stories, others for sports info. And then there are vibrant, visionary sites such as Metafilter.com and Fark.com that are often ahead of the conventional curve. From Lexington, Ky., Drew Curtis oversees the latter (www.fark.com), an irreverent, mature-audience site that seeks out -- and attracts -- witty, weird, wired and worldwide news on the Internet and posts it, with discernible farkian attitude.
As introduction to a Bloomberg wire story about former Tampa Bay Buccaneers wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson being robbed at gunpoint in Berkeley, Calif., Fark.com posted this paragraph: "Thieves, knowing that he couldn't catch them even in the unlikelihood that he could out run them, mug Keyshawn Johnson." This was next to a link to the news story and a link to a message board about the news item.
That tagline, like most of the prose on the site, was provided by a reader who has caught on to Curtis's wry style. A 31-year-old database consultant, Curtis describes the summaries as "kind of like 'Daily Show' lead-ins."
• Spam Poetry. Kristin Thomas uses the strange lines from spam-mail to quilt together new poems. Here is an excerpt from a recent work:
Men don't love the fat gals My husband gave me a pill This pill fixed everything I lost 40 lbs in 6 weeks and you can too.
Are you happy being alone?
lose it Nobody ever died on THIS pill I want you to be Happy, Maggie.
