You’ve got the story more or less right, but what most don’t know is that my return from the dead and my explanation for my actions were also part of what I was trying to achieve… my words were meant to outrage some significant portion of the group. Some of them still revile and despise me for it, which is fine. Others, having passed through the filter I set up in the community, have remained my friends ever since.

It should also be noted that a secondary reason for faking my own death on Usenet was to effectively ban myself from it; I was spending so much time reading and posting that it had taken over my life like textual crack. I had a pregnant wife at the time and felt an urgent need to free myself of my addiction, so I devised my pseuicide as a stunt that would accomplish that goal.

The whole thing started with me musing over what I should do for Halloween. I had been toying with the idea of putting Xmas lights up so the house would be in costume, and this led to the idea that I should have a Halloween costume for Usenet. I decided to go as a corpse, and the more I thought about it, the more I saw in the idea. The rest is Usenet history.