Once Big Fun had been established as a vital social scene with its own emerging hybrid culture of punk rock, astrology, anarchism, intellectualism, and gross hedonism, the terms spoken there, some entirely unique to that one place, reflected to me a richness that I felt it important to document.

In February of 1996, I began the project with a listing of perhaps 150 words, for which I began to write definitions. Like many of my projects, however, the Glossary found itself on the back burner within a week. Occasionally Sara Poiron would ask me when I was going to finish the project.

I was convinced by this incident that Big Fun was a dreadful place full of spoiled selfish kids. I resolved never to return.

Then, in early March I had a massive altercation with Jessika, starting with my drunken arrogance and climaxing with her breaking a beer bottle over my head. I was convinced by this incident that Big Fun was a dreadful place full of spoiled selfish kids. I resolved never to return. But in so resolving, I hated to leave my promising Glossary project incomplete. So I buckled down and finished defining all the words I'd listed. This was a momentous accomplishment in and of itself in as much as it required a full week of almost constant work. The fact that I had such a dim and apocalyptic view of Big Fun all the while I worked is still evident in some of the entries (see, for example, Libra).

I released the first version of my Glossary to friends such as Jessika (with whom I was not yet back on speaking terms) and Steve Weiner in mid-March.

Over the ensuing months I added more and more definitions, expanded existing definitions, and spontaneously tossed in some extra terms, such as "love" and "consciousness" whenever I felt I had something interesting to say about them.

Occasionally people complained about their definitions, but I was hesitant to change anything I wrote. Normally I would include people's complaints as italicized sentences following the definitions. The most severe reaction was that of Aaron the SHARP, who, after having a copy handed to him that had been found in the Tokyo Rose, boasted to his friends of how he would "break every finger in [my] hands." More recently, Patrick Reed has made noises to the effect that he wants Comet.net, the Internet Service Provider, to shut down my site, presumably and (if so) appropriately because the Glossary calls him "the biggest dork on the Downtown Mall."

The Glossary found its way into many hands during the Spring of 1996. A stained, dog-eared and badly out-of-order copy provided entertainment to the patrons of the Rising Sun Bakery until it mysteriously vanished, while other copies were seen in the hands of notables and ruffians all over Charlottesville and even Malvern and Upattinas in Pennsylvania. I saw to it that many copies were available by making frequent forays to UVA's computer labs, where I could print out the 50+ page tiny-font document for free.

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n May, Jamie Dyer, using the connections with his job at Comet.net, set up a website for the Big Fun Glossary. Originally, the site existed mostly as a single long (400K) HTML document and contained few pictures (and these were of low quality). But after I started working at Comet in June, I started obsessively improving the web site until it became the jewel that it is now. It should be pointed out that, unlike most web authors and their projects, I learned HTML because I wanted to do the Glossary instead of doing the Glossary because I knew HTML.

The content of the Glossary's text has been frozen as it was at the end of the Big Fun community in early July, 1996. The only things I have changed in the text since then have been the spellings of some words, the presence or absence of hyper-links, the addition of photographs and captions, and the addition of single lines containing contact information. I have also added a small legion of supporting web pages, such as this one.

All of the contents of this Glossary, including all the text, graphics, animations, HTML programming, image scanning and altering, and even some of the photography, is by me, the Gus, except for some things (photographs, mainly) obtained from people or places I have acknowledged in the following credits.