The Owen Fulrice Project

So, back when people got on the internet using phone lines and dial tones, AOL had a feature called Hecklers Online. It was pretty good. This was the high times of the mid-1990s, when if you wanted to open a web page, you better have a magazine or short novel to read while it loads. If you wanted something that took less than twenty minutes to load, you had to go through AOL's exclusive small content partners. Most of these were forgettable, but Hecklers Online was big and varied The HO Mailbag was always interesting, and some of the games were fun (my personal favorites were the Random Game and especially Three Line Novels, probably because it was the only one I ever won). It is dead now. They tried to offer content with Playboy, but that didn't end up working out, and now they're gone.

The best part of HO was Just Ask Owen, which started in the mid-late 1990s, a question and answer column written by Owen Fulrice (he went out of his way to assert that it was not and advice column). Just Ask Owen was awesome -- insightful, well-read, biting, intellectual, hilarious. It was the highlight of my week when a new Just Ask Owen came out. I don't know if Owen was a real person or not. It was a fake name, but hints of a life story indicated he was in his mid-50s, with a PhD in philosophy.

It appears that much of Owen's work is lost, at least to internet searchers like me. This guy (who is the same as this guy?) used to have some of it, but that seems to be gone. Some of it is available at the Internet Archive, God bless them, but much is missing. Still, it does have an enormous Best of Just Ask Owen.

Hopefully, when this post is added to the single digit number of search responses for "Owen Fulrice," Owen will see it, and come tell us why he left.