People on the Internet Were Always Clueless

Just a typical blind stormtrooper at a renfair

Remember usenet boards?  They were the proto-web forums, back when you had to be really nerdy to use the internet.  I recently stumbled across I post I made back in 1995 to that eminent board, rec.arts.sf.starwars.misc.  Here's what I posted:

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After watching Empire and Jedi last night, I finally figured out why the Stormtroopers are so pathetic in battle.  Their helmets don't have eye-holes!  It all makes sense now, why they can't shoot worth a damn, why they're always getting picked off, why the ewoks were able to rock them so thoroughly, they just can't see out of that damn armor! And at the end of Jedi, when Vader says that he want to see his son with his own eyes, it just ties it all together. Vader didn't have eye-holes either, he was navigating all that time by the dark side of the force, but the storm-troopers, who had no hold of the force at all, kept banging their heads into doorways, etc.

So, here was the first response:

Please tell me this was a joke. I'm not going to explain about polarization (move to sunnier climes and buy those "sun glass" things you've heard so much about). And I'm also not going to bother explaining the dramatic/technical reasons for Vader's statement. I'm just going to hope there's a smily missed in there (I've done it and it can lead to serious misunderstandings). Still if it was meant to be funny it made me smile. 

This kicked off a spirited debate about stormtrooper polarized lenses and viewscreens, written by a bunch of folks who showed a genius-level ability for missing the point.  I think that this may have been about the time that I stopped engaging in internet forums.

Though, the last comment in the thread did kind of sum things up nicely:

Compared to some of the serious theories people have come up with the blind stormtrooper idea was tame.

(I have corrected typos in the quotations, because they were just bugging me.  Also, first use of block quotes in the blog, fun!)

The full thread can be found here.  Side-note, apparently the old usenet forums are now owned by Google.  When did that happen?

Hey, do you have a great example of web-based cluelessness?  Post it in the comments.