Confab-
ulators gigs  Crunch-land has had a number of house bands, starting with the Confabulators.  Later Fuzzbass played bass for the Paul Barers, who are sadly now defunct. 

Phaedrus recalls the Confabs gig where "some drunk woman fell over while dancing and had another male Crunchlander fall on top of her. Try as they might, neither could get up for several moments. I remember thinking, 'I must stay away from that woman.'

I'm now married to her..."

Current house bands include Phaed's Tone Popes and the Bad Weather Boyz featuring Tyrone Shuz.  We also follow some groups promoted by Crunchland's own Calvin.  See the Local Music sub for current listings.

Cracks The Crunchland BBS was famous in the BBS community as being the largest selection of cracks and cheats for games in the world. Not warez kind of stuff, but "in order to play this game, enter in the 3rd word on the sixth line on page 53 of the manual" type info.  The cracks section was discontinued around 1995 when cracks started to become readily available on the Internet.

Crunchland Bar-B-Q  When Crunchland got on the Web, the old dialup BBS was burned at the pyre.  It fried so hot it set the paint on DSF's grill ablaze... 

Crunch-
land Geekville Bowling  Each November we have a bowling contest. Trophies have been given out for the highest score, the lowest score, as well as Best Dressed/Most Stylish. These awards are highly coveted.

The Crunchland Cow Pun threads used to run rampant on the Crunchland BBS. These threads consisted mostly of extremely labored "jokes" regarding some common topic. The most popular one was the COW pun thread, which was started with Natasha admitting that she had once tipped a poor cow. 

SAW remembers: "Scottie and BadBill (had) a short series of letters back and forth from A.O. Phillips and Bull Rumford that set the cow in stone. The shocked look in the cow's eye had a reason once....These letters were funny--no, beyond funny. Crying funny. I wish someone had kept them--Electro-Bossy was a blast."

Due to the popularity, Crunchland adopted the cow as its unofficial mascot.  Since then, the cow has made appearances on official Crunchland invitiations, as the meat (as it were) of the coveted Crunchland Bowling Trophies, as well as the Crunchland Golden Cow Award, which is given to websites that show excellence in technique, design or web technology, or are otherwise just plain cool.

D&B's  Dave and Busters is a video game/arcade/restaurant in Maryland where people like to go play blackjack and other games.  Some Crunchers are real regulars and very good at the games there.

Double Uploads  Users used to access the Crunchland BBS via programs like Qmodem and something called OLXTD (for Offline Text Display). You could answer mail offline, then upload it when you were finished. 

A glitch in the interface would occasionally cause someone to upload two or three different copies of his/her replies (a 'double upload'). Some people were really bad about this...the one who took the most heat about it was probably Natasha, who earned the nickname "Nat-nat" due to her unfortunate tendency.

Events  In addition to the regular Happy Hours, people will occasionally come up with parties or concerts for Crunchers to attend.  Some of these are legendary.

Fockes List  A guy named Focke used to maintain a list of D.C.-area dialup BBS's.  The thing may still be around, but most dialups have gone the way of the dinosaurs in early 1999.

Forbidden Topics  Basically, these are subjects which were/are either done to death (drug legalization, gun control) or are unresolvable and easily ignite into flamewars (abortion, gun control).

(G)o for the (G)old!  A not-so-subtle hint given to someone making a pest of him/herself.  The logoff command for the BBS was G,G, so different abbreviations like this would turn up.

inpitUL There was a virtual module on Crunchland for a while called Virtual State University.  Part of the game involved getting a "desk" and writing "notes" to your friends on the door of your "dorm room".  When you asked for a dorm roommate who wasn't registered with the game, VSU would spit out '(X) is not presently in the User List'.  Somehow this got corrupted into the word inpitUL, which is usually used to refer to something vague or inexplicable.

Oyster Crackers  There's a restaurant in Arlington where people go after happy hours to eat chili.  They serve crackers along with dinner, and sometimes people go home with them down their coats, in their bags, and in their shoes...

Pantlegs Paul Styrene wore some really loud sweat pants to a happy hour, and was teased mercilessly about it. It's where "pantlegs" got started for reviewing things. The pantleg scale goes from 1 to 4, with 4 as the highest rating. 

Quake LAN parties Every few months there's a party at DSF's house where computers are linked together for a big game of communal Quake.  See QE's Kill Your Friends Fest page for more details.

Rutabaga Years ago, someone was offended by this word because he couldn't stop certain users from including it in their posts. Of course, EVERYONE then started using it.

("The capping moment for me was when DSF wrote a big long rant about how disappointed he was at people's immaturity.At the bottom, plain as day, you guessed it...R - U - T - A - B - A - G - A ...I still laugh just thinking about it." --Peanut)

"...and SEX!" At one point several users were convinced that lurkers were scanning our message topics for the word SEX. So everyone started to put "SEX" in their topic titles to see if this brought more attention to their postings. 

SFZ, or Spelling Free Zone Insurance against the occasional Spellchecking Nazi who nitpicks spelling errors in an otherwise well-thought-out post.  Sometimes used in conjuction with GFZ (Grammar).

Taglines The old software people used to access the BBS (Qmodem, etc.) had a feature allowing users could include pithy sayings at the end of their posts. There was somewhat of a limited selection, so every now and then a random phrase ("Hey! Somebowy sritched my keytops awound!", ***Round is a shape isn't it?***) will show up.

"Wet, naked, and upside-down!" Every summer, a bunch of Crunchers takes a roadtrip to King's Dominion, a theme park near Richmond, VA.  There's a water park there and a bunch of roller coasters.  "W, N, A U-D" started to describe the state of most Crunchers while having a good time at the park.

Kings D, as we call it, has spawned some other traditions, such as jumping in various groups off a really huge bungee platform.  (The guy that runs the ride has a dopey accent, which gave rise to the expression "1...2...3...FLAH!")  See the photo gallery for some images of us having a good time at K.D.