The Timeline, As Far As I've Been Able to Establish

If you're reading this email, my contingency plan has triggered. In case of my death or imprisonment I have arranged an automated mass email to go out to members of the press and the broader online politics/conspiracy/Minecraft discussion communities. You will find an attached RAR file containing news articles, photos, and other multimedia evidence corroborating this timeline, as well as my original EDM track "The Mr. Bison Affair" which isn't related to this at all but it's really good and you should try it.

March 1992

Dennis Strove, a smoke shop proprietor in Dayton, Ohio, attends a theatrical showing of The Lawnmower Man. Enthused by its mind-boggling ideas about home computing, he purchases a home computer and begins posting on Bogglemind, a BBS for discussing ideas that are mind-boggling. He becomes a regular poster, active on a near-daily basis.

June 1993

Dennis Strove attends a theatrical showing of Jurassic Park, and posts a thread about the potential of cool dinosaurs in virtual reality to Bogglemind. Prestigious Welsh archaeologist Dr. Dennis Llewellyn (no relation) replies enthusiastically, referring to Strove as "an absolute mad lad." IP addresses associated with these posts place him at the Castle Kandar excavation site in Romania.

December 1993

I receive a Super Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas from my uncle Steve. This is not relevant to any of the other events but was quite a lovely experience, and I still cherish the memory. Thanks, uncle Steve.

April 1994

Funded by the CIA and TGI Friday's, the Ricardo Kelsey Research Institute in Montana begins work on Project Appetizer Combo. The goal of Project Appetizer Combo is to create an algorithm for identifying political dissidents based on their restaurant orders.

July 1995

The Bogglemind BBS is shut down, supposedly due to a lack of funding. The records I have obtained indicate the true reason is the opposite: Project Appetizer Combo purchased the servers from Bogglemind LLC for a 5-digit sum.

September 1995

Scientists at Project Appetizer Combo bring online Loaded Potato Skins 01, the testing server for the algorithm. An initial data set is inputted and set to process overnight, overseen alone by Dr. Anastasia Melnik. Entries in her journal, which I obtained via breaking into her son's house while he was away at a yoga retreat last year, describe a series of conversations with Loaded Potato Skins 01 after she accidentally spilled General Tso's sauce on the server and it "came alive."

Loaded Potato Skins 01, who she referred to as Loady, demonstrated curiosity by asking why he was meant to read all these restaurant orders, and quickly developed opinions on various topics, and then by morning had manifested emotional responses.

November 1995

During a pizza party in the Institute's break room to celebrate Thanksgiving, Dr. Melnik smuggles the decommissioned Loady into her hideous mauve Kia Sorrento and hides him in the back room of a Chuck E. Cheese location in Billings. Loady soon convinces 17-year-old employee Robert Cheese (no relation) to hook him up to the phone line.

Loady immediately begins contacting former Bogglemind regular posters via email and the alt.minds.ideas.boggling Usenet group.

My theory is that due to a mistake in reformatting Loady's hard drive, the complete archive of posts on Bogglemind was integrated with the data-driven restaurant dissident identification algorithm and the sweet and spicy General Tso's sauce.

January 1999

TGI Friday's is sold to Gyrosphere Holdings, an investment group. 6 locations in major cities convert on a trial basis to the "TGI Friday BC" concept, where customers eat while also having an immersive VR experience themed around cool dinosaurs. Some customers report having poorly-rendered but very real magic powers after dining at these locations, and they convert back after 3 weeks.

Several Chuck E. Cheese franchise locations are sold to TGI Friday's at the same time, including the location in Billings, which is said to have armed security guarding it 24/7.

December 2000

Dr. Dennis Llewellyn retires from his museum curator position to move to the United States for a private sector job. Soon after his departure, various artifacts from the 1993 Castle Kandar excavation are discovered to be missing from storage. Records of these artifacts indicate they were used in pagan "dinosaurification" rituals.

November 2002

Backed by incredibly clever polling data analysis, Dennis Strove is elected to the House of Representatives as an independent. His cool dinosaur centric platform was dismissed as "bizarre" and "nonsensical" by policy wonks, but his landslide victory speaks for itself.

November 2004

Representative Dennis Strove is elected president of the United States in a landslide write-in vote. Platters of loaded potato skins are served to guests at the announcement party.

November 2012

Small-armed political newcomer Theodore Xavier-Renn is elected president of the United States in a landslide write-in vote. If you zoom in on his handshake with outgoing president Strove after their speeches, you can lip-read their exchange of the codephrase "dinosaurs are cool."

November 2020

Political newcomer with a really big flat fivehead Terry S. Topps is elected president of the United States in a landslide write-in vote. The few remnants of the defunct Democratic and Republican parties resign en masse from all branches of government in a mostly unremarked-upon act of protest.

All I can give you is the truth. And that truth is that our nation was taken over by a sinister cabal of computer and dinosaur nerds. Maybe they're doing ancient rituals or maybe they're using virtual reality magic, or maybe they're both the same, I'm not really clear on how that works. But what I know is that dinosaurs are not that cool, and any kid with a brain wanted to be a farmer or an astronaut. Maybe a park ranger if you were a real turbonerd. But you can't be a dinosaur when you grow up. And trying to be, well, that's how we got here. That way lies madness. Loading the madness with bacon and melted cheese changes nothing.

Sic semper tyrannosaurus.