Yes, I am that merry editor of the night. I am the Jerry whose e-mail address at teetot was on the first four NAGEE issues back when people still put their e-mail addresses out in public. I was going to say out on the web, but this was before I knew anything about the web. That address still works, believe it or not, and you would not believe how much spam it receives. I am told that the address will finally fail at the end of 2004.

The First Annual NAGEE came out on March 12, 1992. This was before the web came onto the scene in 1993. It was released only in text versions (for gophers and Usenet) and in an RTF version (for word processors).

It is easier not to believe in electrons than in dragons: electrons, at least taken singly, won’t try to make a meal of you.--Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age

That was the first bit of text for the first issue, and it set the tone for the first four. The fourth issue, and the last one that I edited, began with a similar Lem quote from the same book:

Yes, it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.

If you’re a shadowrunner, you could do worse than read Stanislaw Lem.

Editing the NAGEE was a blast. “A very special time and place to be a part of,” to quote Hunter S. Thompson. Dr. Thompson, incidentally, provided the opening quote for the third NAGEE: “This is the Nineties, Bubba, and there is no such thing as Paranoia. It’s all true.”