Also the name of the
unofficial geek/
hacker/
weird person coalition and
listserv at
Simon's Rock College from
1994 to
1996. Albania started as a result of an
absurdity propagated by Simon's Rock
student Seth Carney, who stated that he would spend one
week insulting every
nation on
Earth, in
alphabetical order. He sort of got stuck at Albania. As a result, a
listserv was created (as was inevitable at that time), to which most of Carney's friends soon joined.
Kesper North,
Frater 219 and
dmd were all founding members, or close to it.
By coincidence, these people composed the majority of the geeks and hackers in that year's freshman class. Albania became an entity, a social club of sorts; its membership was around fourteen or fifteen people at its height, and the Albania listserv had traffic loads upwards of 900 messages a day. Albania eventually faded away as cliques formed and the vicious social backbiting that was so common at Simon's Rock during those years eroded the friendships that had founded Albania in the beginning. Eventually, Albania lost all its members (some subsumed into the new mailing list Trog, others disappearing and never heard from again), and the listserv was deleted.