John H's post from Bureaucracy shows why the Phoenix Board really is like crack:

There's a fundamental point that needs explaining here -- I might err on the side of the patronising here, but it's in a good cause! -- we control this place. It's ours!

With TT/WX, there was a database behind the scenes, which we could only interact with by clicking on things and hoping the right stuff came out. The database was their secret, and the only way we could get stuff out of it was with a browser.

The Perl script I wrote, and the search engine someone (Tom?) wrote, and the number-of-times-we-mentioned-porn counts, were all done by imitating a browser and getting the stuff from their database.

It's like when you go to buy drugs from one of those places where there's a steel-reinforced door with a small hole in it. You shove your money through the hole, ask politely and hope for the best. You've got no idea what's going on. Someone can take your money and give you nothing in return, take your money and give you baking soda in return, take your money and shoot you, or just plain not take your money at all.

So when we create tools to grab content from WX or TT, we're the customer.

On the Phoenix board, we're the dealer as well.

We've got our people on the other side of the door.

So, when people plaintively, endearingly, wistfully ask "would it be possible, maybe, one day, to make a search engine which searched this site? Please?" -- yes, you should imagine ita, and indeed everyone else doing an evil laugh of total mastery, because yes, we can do it right away, in fact it's already done!

I can't quite explain why this makes me laugh so, but it did.

Dana, in Firefly:

Uh, helloooo?

Written and directed by Tim Minear.

Ple, in Firefly, on people asking for deaths (of various characters, or just in general):

You guys, death isn't Mad Dog 20/20 to just whip out for a thrill. Death's a fine wine, dark and red and bitter and intoxicating. It's Valhrona, not Hershey's, Titian, not Kincaid.

Sheesh.

On John Doe in Natter:

PMM

They are making the mistake of watching John Slow.

Burrell

I think it should be called John D'oh!

I'll do the killin' 'round here, if you don't mind.

Unca Tim

Allyson:

I hate John Doe. They are playing "Behind Blue Eyes," to drive home that no one knows what it's like to be the bad man, the sad man, the man that spews trivia all fucking day and doesn't know who he is and no one cares who he is because obviously no one is looking for my sorry no longer naked ass, behind blue eyes.

Edit: aw, crap. A.S. too fast.

DX:

if you took a five kilogram anti-raccoon and tossed it into a reactor with a regular five kilo raccoon, the resulting annihilation of the two raccoons would provide about 20 trillion Kcal of energy, which is the equivalent to the caloric content of 100 billion twinkies, or of a single 6.5 billion pound twinkie.

That's one big twinkie.

Is that all something DX said? Or is there a difference between the quoted and non-quoted text?

DX said the stuff about the raccoons and the kilocals of energy. I was a wiseass and added the thing from Ghostbusters.

Because twinkies are cool. Or Ghostbusters is.