Confessional Reading

At one time, several years ago, approximately 1.2 million people used to get up in the morning, turn on their TV, switch to Channel 4 and read this:

"Steal-the-picture-me-do!"

I was one of that cult. We never met. We never wore cowls and chanted secret chants but we were united by the bitmap characters, the bright primary colours and a love for games. We were connected, like the followers of the religion in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Teletext: The old man's internet.

Digitiser provided gaming news and reviews in an irreverent way. And when I say irreverent I mean funny. And when I say funny I mean so funny there'd be tears rolling down your face because the cornflakes you'd been eating before school had been caught by an unexpected chortle, slipped down the wrong way and were starving your brain of oxygen.

Digitiser was AWESOME.

There can be no debate about that. And without trundling for the ifs and whys and whos, it was largely down to a man named Mr Biffo. Digi is sadly now defunct and he has moved on to writing for the bit of TV with moving pictures. He also jots down a column for Edge which is generally the best bit of that overly pretentious "Ooh look at us score so low!" publication.

He has recently written this book.

Disturbed? You will be.

Essentially, Mr Biffo (I staunchly refuse to use his real name) poses as a young woman, LoopyLisa: a batty schoolteacher and total newcomer to that hive of sophisticated communication and rapier wit (or, as the blurb puts it - that bucket of filth) The Internet Chatroom. Its never actually revealed what chatrooms he frequents in this guise but, to anyone who has ever fallen into the particular abyss Biffo documents, its all very familiar:

BigWang1112: A/S/L?

BigWang1112: Wat u look like?

BigWang1112: Fancy cyba?*

As LoopyLisa21f, Biffo lures these men in and proceeds to beat them around the head with the mighty Insanity Stick +3 he's been wielding so well for so long.

It is all, of course, almost breathtakingly bizarre. Mr Biffo's character is an amalgam of all the things you might remember from Digitiser if you ever read it. If you did as soon as cursory references to gin start slipping into the chat logs, you'll know exactly where you are. Its like visiting an old mad friend.

And its funny. I've read the reviews of other people who've got the book (yes, on Amazon) and they seem to think its pant-wettingly so. I've got to say, thus far in, I've been casually amused, certain segments have made me smirk but... well, I'm not completely sold on the subject.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying you shouldn't get the book. Indeed, you probably should. If you read Digitiser, if you know who Mr Biffo is, or even if you don't but you have some passing knowledge of chatrooms (to the extent that you even know what A/S/L means - and the inherent connotations of the question) you will enjoy it.

To a certain extent anyway.

My personal reservations are based around a couple of things.

Firstly, a lot of the publicity for this book sets the book up as an amazing revelation. As if the fact the internet is populated by a lot of lonely, horny men is something none of us expected. Indeed, the chatroom - in my experience - has cultivated a certain evolved breed of desperation, where the slower, weaker strains of horniness have died off and been replaced to the super virus of:

BigWang1112: 20/m/UK. WHO WANTS TO SEE MY COCK ON CAM?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

But this is meant to be some sort of hilarious surprise? Like Eddie Murphy jumping out of a big birthday cake?

Its just not.

Le pompt le funny?

Stemming from that is the fact that, at times, when the guys are really quite harmless - and not demanding LoopyLisa21f to rub their cock - Biffo tries to bleed comedy from the situation by just descending into the downright bizarre.

Its funny when the Insanity Stick smites the perverted. Thats comedy justice. When its just some guy who can't spell soaking up all the punishment its wasted space.

Indeed, at these points, LoopyLisa doesn't even have a conversation. She just monologues on a ream of absurdities. Now, if Biffo wanted to write a full comedy book based on this character's misadventures with her abusive dad and her epileptic boyfriend (no, really) he should have just done that. That would have been fine.

Shoehorning it all into a book that should just be about ripping into internet chatrooms for the contorted mess of evil they are is a bit lazy, I think. The passages which are most effective balance the two and retain the feel of a conversation, rather than just reading one of the Man's Diaries** in an unusual format.

Perhaps most worryingly, the actual "ripping into the chatrooms" idea does not have that much longevity. I mean, put it this way, you're paying good money for one joke. A joke thats totally revealed on the cover.

LoopyLisa21f is actually a middle-aged guy in makeup and a wig.

[Applause, Exeunt]

I mean, in terms of a concept, its not mind-bogglingly complex. I suppose it doesn't really need to be. Yet, there was a nagging feeling in the back of my mind, as I read, that anyone - you, me, anyone - could have written this book.

Go onto a chatroom and announce your ASL in the public room as 21/f, sit back and wait. You will get so many p2p communication ("whispers" the real cool cats call them) your bottom taskbar will do that thing where all the tabs scrunch up and you have to click down through them.

Honest, it will.

Of course, Biffo feels the need to expand the base joke by making his character totally absurd. In many ways, this book could be just as disturbing and funny without his bizarre character and her stories - if Biffo just sat back and let the ridiculous happen to him, rather than shoving it out at other people. I mean this is the internet. People here don't need any provocation to be astonishingly weird.

Then again, that would be a very different book. And a very different Mr Biffo.

Even with the bizarre riffing on the main theme, read two transcripts and your brain can basically extrapolate the other 200-odd pages. I mean, put it this way, there's no big plot twist at the end.

Mind you, for one of those "funny" books, this is about a billion times better than those little "Places that Sound Rude" and "A Million Euphanisms for Sex" booklets Waterstones sell in the racks on the cash desk. And for that, it should very definitely be praised.


*Not an actual quote from the book.
** A running character on Digitiser, The Man would be hired for a job at the start of the week, conduct himself bizarrely/incompetently and get fired by Friday.

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Jachap is not a middle aged man in a wig.