Raven was to post many more "scries", and many more flames were to be traded. Raven's joke was to use the computer as her "magical" instrument, as the preceding 'spell post' indicated. This lead to the conspiracy theory that Raven was backdating her posts, instead of merely making them so vague that they were almost certain to come true. "Texas, something bad will happen to you this month". Well, no kidding. Texas is a big chunk of the country, and something bad WILL happen to Texas this month, somewhere, especially if "this month" is during tornado season.
And that's the joke, the bit of satire that Raven is getting at. The making of vague predictions is how phonies convince people that they are psychic. Raven is satirising the psychic community, right down to the standard angrily defensive response when someone points out what she is doing. But, as the post from Michael Smith to come will beautifully illustrate, Raven continued this joke so long, as to be encountering people who had no idea that she wasn't serious.
In this, Raven is not unique - beating the joke to death is standard operating procedure on Usenet. Just go over to rec.nude in the archives, and count the posts in which Tim Keene talks about showing photos of his 14 year old female dog, to the people who want to see nude pictures of teenagers. What is different, is that Raven persisted in doing so in a hostile environment where the other regulars declined to give the full context of what Raven was doing, and merely described her as a standard model troll. This was made more effective by the continuation of the pattern we've seen in the preceding exchanges, where Raven gets increasingly bizarre in her responses, as she is flamed, apparently in defiance. Take a look at her comments in her "read my fingers" post again, and see what she said she was going to do. And the more she got flamed for being bizarre, given that spirit, the more bizarre she felt like being.
(Warning : there is an obscene gesture in the post linked to below. It is, however, part of the history of this incident, so the link is included for documentation purposes).
Ironically, she was to encounter a string of credulous people who, not being in on the joke, and not being skeptical enough to let themselves see what she was doing, actually ended up being scared of her. Leading us to Mike Smith's post, in which, hoping to put an end to this, he challenges her to do, what she had been jokingly claiming to be able to do - the joy having long since gone out of the jest. From this point on, hostilities escalate in a tediously repetitious fashion, which those who are interested can follow in Dejanews, using the link below. Having given the background to the fight, now, let us move on to the actual conflict which is the subject of this page.