Non-escalating Verbal Self-Defense
A really interesting website I discovered from the r/InternetMysteries subreddit. This website is huge and has been updated fairly regularly since its creation in the year 1999. The website describes itself as a “Non-escalating guide to verbal self-defense” and that appears to be its aim, to educate users on how to respond to so-called “verbal attacks”. This in theory sounds like a great idea, the only issue is that none of the responses make any sense. I have spent a fair bit of time trying to uncover meaning through the chaos that is this website but it is a difficult task.
Information about the creator can be found on the site. He is Richard Hart, a taxi driver in San Francisco. This site is named after the taxi he drives, taxi 1010. Here is an extract from the website:
Richard programmed computers and invented algorithms at Dartmouth College (part of a work-study program in the late 'sixties), IBM, Atari, and a think tank in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The think tank spoiled him — He got used to doing good work on his own. So when Atari crashed in the late 'eighties, he landed in a taxicab in San Francisco, and started doing research in "emotionally mature ways to stick up for yourself”.
Further down I found some links to work by him and found that he was in fact a scientist who released this research paper, among others: Pattern analysis as a tool for inventing algorithms.
The website contains art created by his sister, Amoret Phillips who has also worked on other websites over the years.
There are a few forums and blogs that discuss this website (some of which I may go into more depth into in another post) and a few which mention actually meeting Richard, the site’s creator. In these posts they describe talking to him, generally about similar circumstances to what his site disscusses, and he hands them a business card with the URL to his website on it. The comments about the website generally state how the creator must be crazy, part of a cult or how he has created a 90′s style website.
Anyway, I was going to wrap up here, but there is one more interesting discovery that I have made. Taxi1010 appears on this wikipedia article. I find this to be rather peculiar seeing that this website is so obscure. I searched the edits for this page and found that the addition of Taxi1010 to it was by a user called YishE who has since been deleted. Checking YishE’s edit history, which you can view here, shows that on one day in 2010, in the same 10 minutes, he added taxi1010 to a range of different pages.
Anyway, I hope this post was interesting and I hope more info can be found about this interesting site and the mysterious wikipedia user YishE. If you liked this post and have any information to share leave a comment.
