Lue42

In the mid 2000s I was a teen growing up in New Jersey trying to make sense of the world. There was no Reddit, no Twitter. Angsty teens like myself journaled on their Xanga, obsessed over the pixel-perfect layout of their MySpace, and some college student in Cambridge, MA was building this social network which was, controversially, about to allow high schoolers to sign up. It was called Facebook.

I spent a significant portion of these teenage years on a video game message boards site called GameFAQs. It was a sort of a wiki for video game tutorials and completion guides. I wasn’t spending my time looking up cheatcodes - most of the time anyway. I was on one of the site’s hidden message boards.

The message board’s name was “Lue42” - a reference to Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - whereby an AI named ‘Deep Thought’ spent 7.5 million years calculating “The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”…

“The Answer to the Great Question… Of Life, the Universe and Everything… Is… Forty-two!” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

But back to GameFAQs.

Tucked away in this video game wiki / cheatcode repo / community message board /site, hidden from any navigation menus, unacknowledged by the site’s developers, Lue42 existed only in rumor. It was only fleetingly referenced in throwaway comments, randomly literring other message boards, deep down in the replies.

Accessing the board, if you even believed it existed, required your account having passed the digital equivalent of indoctrination into a secret society - the requirements for which were, again, unacknowledged by any official party and unverifiable except by community rumor.

You knew you were in, although you might know why, when you manually smashed URL for /boards/42 into your address bar and, lo!, a page loaded without error.

Lue42 was random, it was anonymous, it was alternatively funny or thoughtful or shocking, and it was by today’s Overton Window generally safe and respectful. It was Reddit before Reddit existed. It was the organically manifested product from one small internet community which inhabited an earlier, less mature manifestation of the internet.

Lue42 was wonderful. There, for the first time in my young life, I explored a world larger than the one I could access immediately around me using my eyes and my hands. There I spoke to strangers on the internet, which of course I shouldn’t have done, and learned about things I shouldn’t have yet known existed.

Lue42 was free, and it was the beginning of my journey into a world which continues to show me how little I know, how much I don’t even know that I don’t know, and how much I have yet to learn and continue to adopt into my method of life.

There I stepped out of my biological childhood and transitioned to adolescence. Only now, with the benefit of hindsight and a dose of gratitude, do I realize I was stepping out of naive ignorance and into a lifetime of forever learning.