There are two things called "Really Deep Thoughts" (or "RDT" for short). Both are inspired by Tori's line from the song "Silent All These Years" off of Little Earthquakes:
So you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts
What's so amazing about really deep thoughts
Boy you best pray that I bleed real soon
How's that thought for you
Really Deep Thoughts Right Now is a digest mailing list, which means that if you subscribe, every day you'll receive an issue that contains the day's posts from Tori fans around the world. While a lot of the digest is actually about Tori, people do like to talk about other things from time to time.
You can read a history of this famous mailing list below.
RDT is worth reading: it comes as a single daily (or mostly daily) e-mail digest, and some posts are Tori-related and others are not, but the people are interesting and things are nice and spirited and quirky.
(I rarely post there myself, probably only ten times altogether.)
Send mail to rdtrn-request@torithoughts.org with either "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" in the body of the message.
Send your post to rdtrn@torithoughts.org.
Violet's Really Deep Thoughts Right Now Archives are available.
Anthony Kosky (kosky@saul.cis.upenn.edu) founded the mailing list RDT back in 1992.
The early years can be read at the MIT Really Deep Thoughts archive (first issues) but bear in mind that the archive doesn't begin until 1993, and back then, it wasn't a digest.
The digest began on February 14th, 1994. The period here, from article 2291 to somewhere around 3034, constitutes the "classic" years of RDT, when Anthony ran the list as a digest and some memorable people (who I would only insult by listing here since I'd probably accidentally leave out someone important) made their first apperances.
On June 20, 1995, Anthony announced that he was retiring as list administrator. At the same time, the list moved from upenn.edu to novia.net, and Chris Meyers graciously took over.
In July of 1995, some bizarre stuff started to happen and there were all kinds of strange repeating mail loops. (Right about here.) There were a couple of months of downtime, and RDT appeared in fits and starts and spiral recursive disasters. Some of those weird digests-inside-digests were larger than a megabyte.
Later on, in August, 1995, Chris Meyers started running RDT by hand. After a brief shutdown in early September 1995 (memorialized here), Chris renumbered the digests and everything was back to normal, for quite a long time.
Violet took over the list in September 1997 when Chris disappeared out of the blue. (The archive records the story in issues around that period.)
As a stop-gap (since we didn't know if Chris was coming back or not), Violet decided (in October 1997) to create a substitute list of her own. Her subscription list came from the RDT list.
Violet called her list "Thoughts Right Now." Later, when we heard that Chris was all right but couldn't manage the list anymore, Violet officially became the administrator. Some of the digests around that time were called "Really Deep Thoughts" and some were called "Thoughts Right Now." Some people wanted to keep Violet's new name, but others wanted to preserve the history of Really Deep Thoughts, which was a well-known list and one of the (if not the) longest-running single artist mailing lists. So, in true Internet fashion, a vote was held.
The results of the vote to rename the list were announced in October 1997 and you can read the results in the archive. Really Deep Thoughts Right Now became the official name (which helped keep a separation from the fanzine).
Ever since, the mailing list has worked like clockwork, thanks to Violet's hard work. Violet moved the list from earthling.net to torithoughts.org in February 1998.
Violet runs the mailing list by hand (which is a lot of work). She takes care of adding subs before sending out each digest.
You can read the latest issue if you like.
Unassociated with the mailing list is the fanzine. This is a black-and-white production of varying numbers of pages and frequency of publication, full of interviews, news, articles, illustrations and photos.
They named themselves after the mailing list (causing some amount of confusion) but are unassociated with the mailing list.
I think they do really nice work.
There is an RDT Home Page which will give you information about how to subscribe.
E. Stephen Mack
(estephen@emf.net)