Hello --- The Mighty Nostrodomos here, and it has come to my attention that some of you do not understand the overt Tiki theme of Tikiopolis.com. In fact, you wonder: "Tikiopolis? WTF?!!" First of all, politeness requires a proper introduction. Here we are, Gloria and Pat, owners, proprietors, and victims of Tikiopolis.com. The Tikiopolis web site has this crazy tiki theme because it is fun. F-U-N. That's what we're in this for, brothers and sisters. We have created Tikiopolis for the fun of not only ourselves, but to whomever chooses, during a moment of utter weakness, to visit. Read below how Tikiopolis evolved out of the ashes of much greater civilizations.

There was this mortal male, a long long time ago, back in 1993, named Pat. His picture is above. And yes, that is really him. He wanted to try out this thing called the Internet. Perhaps you've heard of it? No? Anyway, he was forced to install Windows 3.1 on his DOS computer, which he only really owned because he liked computer games. Really, it's true. He tried everything out, NNTP, FTP, the World Wide Web, when it was non-commercial in its infancy, and something called IRC: Internet Relay Chat. It was this text-based thing where people could "chat" to each other with their computers. Why any one would want to chat in text was beyond his understanding. How dull. A few years later, a company called Microsoft put out a free product called Comic Chat. It was the result of a research project in human computer interface interaction. It took this popular, yet dreadfully dull, Internet protocol called IRC to a visual level. They chose newspaper-style comic strips as their method to bring text chatting into a friendlier visual world. There are articles somewhere on Tikiopolis explaining this in more detail, at least there will be, one day.

This individual found this to be rather entertaining, and he picked as his avatar the Xeno. But the chat server asked him to choose a nickname. He found this all very odd. He wanted to live within the alien theme, so he chose a nickname that he imagined that humans would call this alien, if this alien really existed on Earth. Humans, and this dude, lacking any imagination, decided to call the alien, and himself, Bug-Eyes. This type of chatting was surprisingly fun, and he did it for years. Eventually, Microsoft put out a character editor. This was great because fans of Comic Chat could create their own avatars, expanding beyond the original 20 or so avatars created by Jim Woodring. It was bad because lazy people created Magazine People.

With help of a chat friend named SunJam, Bug-Eyes became colorized. With his new colors, came a new name: MrBugSir. There were many fun days of chatting, until in 1997, Microsoft realized they had a cluster of chat servers that weren't actually making them any money. Since Microsoft was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, they abandoned Comic Chat and reinvented text-based chatting through their MSN website, where they could assault their victims with endless revenue-generating, seizure-inducing, mind-numbing web advertisements. But the last gasps of life had not been forced from the lungs of Comic Chat by this betrayal. The Comic Chat community splintered across the globe, finding refuge amongst the comic-codes hating text chatters on IRC servers that supported Comic Chat. New Comic Chatters would come and go, and in 1999, when people should have been dancing to Prince's song, they were fretting about the Year 2000 bug. A new personality grew inside of me, and he had teeth.

The Mighty Nostrodomos was born! Nostrodomos satisfied the needs of those seeking comfort from gloom of the pending rolling-over of the millennia (although, technically speaking, that didn't happen until 2001. Computers start counting at zero, humans don't, unless it's convenient). But irrational mortals do not take such immaterial matters into consideration. Nostrodmos was the philosophy-ranting, predicting-spewing, patronizing-as-hell tiki head with a body of a ferret that no one asked for, and no one wanted to talk to. The macros and automation built into the last revision of Comic Chat made random philosophies, insults, jokes, and predictions possible. Although good-natured, he was a tikigawd, after all, and did not suffer fools. I don't know about you, but I come across a great many fools in the chat room, and Nostrodomos would not let them get away with it. That was one of many reasons he was so "popular".

Along came CoconutGirl Meanwhile, Pat, aka Nostrodomos, aka MrBugSir, was deep into his new career IRL (in real life) as a network security specialist. This interested a certain administrator of a chat server, and enlisted his help. She's pictured above. Her name is Gloria, aka NightShade. During this work, which was difficult, mind-scorching, and unpaid, I became interested in mIRC, but only in the sense it could make the Nostrodomos automation more powerful, and amusing. Nostrodomos not only could respond back to countless messages sent into the channel, but he would attempt to start a conversation and keep it going. The best recorded example is with an individual named Tiltowait. Click to read the The Tiltowait Interrogation.

Nostrodomos/MrBugSir/Pat had (excuse the cliché) met his match with NightShade/CoconutGirl/Gloria, and as soon as that fortuitous day occurred when she broke her hand and was fired from her job, she finally grudgingly agreed to move in with him. They were soon married, although a TikiGawd's. perception of "soon" doesn't always match a mortal woman's perception of the same word. The battle of the sexes lives on! So that's it, nothing about the Tiki theme should scare any one, unless they have good taste, of course. But Nostrodomos does run the place, and he does like to decorate. If you have any questions, visit the Ask the TikiGawd forum. Have fun in Tikiopolis, and don't walk off with the artwork. Do you think it was easy to get such a large collection of Velvet Elvises and Dogs Playing Poker?!!