"I tend to answer the phone with either "fish?" or "who's dead now?" - when I have to answer the phone, which I don't like doing."

"I tend to have some phrase that I say alot, which varies with the months, such as 'DIE!' or 'fish'.

"My official symbol is the <FISH><, pronounced "fishfish". Yeah, it's confusing. Get over it."

Picture listening to this, over and over and over, and ask yourself just how cool this would seem to you. Pretty obviously, when reality isn't what Tim would like it to be, he blocks it out of his mind, as we see here (keep in mind that Tim complains of another student getting the program coordinator position in his dorm, and yet he claims ...

"I'm currently the last major social leader in Allen Hall - against my will."

It must be hard, Tim. Picture trying to reason with someone like this. He expects you to follow his lead, because he knows best and he'll ignore anything that doesn't fit in with his picture of himself. So, when you present him with a counterargument against one of his positions, guess how far you're going to get. He won't even hear it. As, we shall see, Tim will not in the dispute that follows.

Under normal circumstances, that can be really annoying. But combine it with a petty vindictiveness which shows up whenever he doesn't get what he wants, and one begins to have a problem. Such as, for example, when Tim urged his followers to ignore a Ms. Glish, because, as he later admitted, she rejected him and he was angry about the rejection. Small hint, Tim - if you want to make a positive impression on a woman, try not referring to her as a "wench".

When you take a look at the sheer size of Tim's hate page, an incredibly repetitious affair in which he says things like "accusation : terminal cluelessness" and has his imaginary friends basically saying "well, Tim showed him ! Plonk !" over and over, you begin to see just how much energy Tim is willing to waste on his vindictiveness. So much so, apparently, that his school work suffered, and he almost ended up not making it into graduate school. Not to worry, though. After a delay of a few years, it seems, Nepotism finally came to the rescue and Tim got into a Computer Engineering program at U.Illinois - Urbana where (by an odd coincidence) his father was one of the faculty members (albeit in a different department).

But, is Tim really that out of it ? Oh, yes.

To see just how far out of touch with reality Tim is, let us note that this is someone who will claim

"I'm the founder of the Groundlings of the Quad."

even though he was born in 1977. For those who don't know, the groundlings are the students who heckle Max the Evangelist when he visits UIUC. Max's visits have been dated as far back as the early 1980s, according to faculty at a number of big ten schools.

Do the math. Tim turned 5 in 1982. He was a freshman in 1995. Either he spend a really long time in the University high school or he was not doing anything University related during the early Reagan years.

So, how did this little nobody gain such fame? In large part, by being willing to mortgage his future in exchange for his 15 minutes of online fame. He spent far more time than his opposition was willing to, joining in on flamewars, talking with his fellow trolls electronically, cultivating his political base, and spreading rumors. One of the problems with Usenet, as a forum, is that in order to gain influence in it, you do have to spend so much time in it that your offline life will suffer. So, the Net ends up being dominated by those childish enough to be willing to flunk out of school, or lose their jobs or relationships, because the time they should have spend on those more important concerns was wasted online. And, to think that some wonder why the level of online maturity is as low as it is!

Tim's first big break came when he "found" a copy of an amateurishly drawn cartoon called "The Spirit of Christmas", "pirated" it, digitized it, and put it online. This was the pilot for "South Park". What our outlaw doesn't quite seem to have figured out, though, was that he was meant to find the thing. This is the oldest promotional technique on earth. Take something that nobody really wants, put it under light guard, let someone "steal it", and count on the natural human fascination with "forbidden fruit" to get people to want it. This is an almost exact repeat of the old story of how potatoes were introduced to France, to take one of the better known examples. Skirvin was a unwitting shill the whole time and never figured it out. If he hadn't "pirated" this tape, somebody else would have. The Studio would have seen to it.

The Cabal has never been known for its intelligence. To this day, Tim's follower's are still acclaiming this manufactured "victory". But then, coherence was never their hallmark. As Tim puts it,

"You will never understand why I say 'fish'. "

Nor will we care. Your fifteen minutes are up, Tim. Happy graduation. Click here to continue.