Back in the early days of the Internet, when newsgroups were still in vogue, I used to frequent alt.fan.elvis-costello where I conversed with a group of smart, literate music fans/computer nerds who shared my fondness for Elvis Costello.

The Web has become so much about images and sounds that it’s hard to believe there was a time when people engaged each other on the Internet primarily through words.

It reminds me of the Infocom video games I loved in the 80s, which consisted of text descriptions of your adventure and simple prompts where the player would type things like “Walk west” and “Pick up the key.” Compared to today’s cinema-quality games, those things are like cave paintings.

And yet they stirred the imagination the way only words on paper (or a screen) can. Along the same lines, I wonder if young people today have heard of Dungeons and Dragons and exactly what they’d make of a game played with dice, paper and imagination.

But I digress.

The year Painted From Memory came out, the members of alt.fan.elvis-costello conducted a poll of the year’s best music. I discovered a lot of great artists through that list, the most noteworthy being Ben Folds, Rufus Wainwright and Lucinda Williams, so I was quick to pay attention to their picks.

The top ten that year, compiled by combining the weighted individual lists of each member, was provocative as always but one thing stuck out to me as odd. The number one album of the year, by far, was Costello’s Painted From Memory. Now maybe that’s obvious, considering this was an Elvis Costello fan group, but it annoyed me that they were such “homers” that they’d elevate an average Costello album over so many far superior records.

That’s like a Dolphins fan giving a Pro Bowl vote to Chad Henne just because he wears the aqua and orange.

Other albums released in 1998: Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels On a Gravel Road, Elliott Smith’s XO, Beck’s Mutations, Belle and Sebastian’s The Boy With the Arab Strap, Garbage’s Version 2.0 and Bob Dylan’s Royal Albert Hall Bootleg. And those are just the ones that leap out at me after a quick Google search.

But hey, fandom means devotion, I guess, even when it defies common sense. And to bind up this rambling post with some connective tissue, I suppose if I were to rank Infocom’s Zork II over Call of Duty: Black Ops, people would call me crazy, too.