What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.
Jeremias was my first username on AOL back in the early 90's. For a while I was jeremias@aol.com. Probably be worth milliions on the open market these days. I'm also jeremias@yahoo.com but don't bother sending e-mail there because I only check it once every 6 months to trash the millions of spam messages I get.
I used yahoo when it felt like a single page of links, something like
this.
What I loved about the web in the early days was the sense that the "your people" were out there. Whether you were interested in didgeridoos, alien abductions, Salvadoran election results or suppliers of cereal magnets from the 1970's, you could find others who were too.
MEFI SPECIFIC
I lurked on Metafilter a few years before joining it (strangely 3 days before 9/11). Like many people I have a love/hate relationship with the site. I love the intelligent folk who populate these pages and when the "filter" works there's no better place to be surprised and inspired by the web. I hate the reflexive snarks and flame wars that take place and make true dialog difficult.
Some contributions I've made over the years stick out:
The Ask-Mefi "Life-altering experiences" thread.
Back in February 2005 I posted this question to the still young Ask-Metafilter:
Life-altering experiences. Can you point to a single experience in your life, as a child, which you can define as having contributed to the person you are today?
The response was epic and inspiring and way beyond my modest expectations. The thread took on a life of it's own, and eventually escaped the orbit of MeFi when people began linking to it outside of mefi. Andy Baio of Waxy.org nailed it succinctly IMO as a
"fascinating thread tapping into the soul of Metafilter". The theme was picked up and somewhat
bastardized by lifehacker almost a year after the thread was closed.
Lifehacker diluted the original question by changing the singular "experience" to the plural "experiences". My original point was very specific and perhaps why it has so much resonance, I was looking for
one experience, not several. It's fascinating to see the thread get "rediscovered": in December 2007 a
metatalk thread introduced it to a new group of people almost two years later. It's now been
favorited over
352 400 times and is apparently the
second most favorited thread in AskMefi history.
It's interesting, in the aforementioned Metatalk thread, someone posits the idea that the same question asked today would be deleted as "chatfilter". I don't know if that's the case, but I do know that I asked the question with sincerest of intentions, and I'd like to think that was somehow intuited by everyone who posted. At the time I was a father of a 4 year old, our family was going through some tough transitions (we had recently moved and both my wife and I were working at new jobs). It was clear that his first memories were beginning to take shape. It was my curiosity of the mystery of these childhood memories and what they might say about a grown adult (and by extension how I might change my behavior with my son) that made me ask the Mefi community.
(I'm not sure if the question would spark the same response today, merely due to the fact that questions don't stay on the front page very long. I think I posted this before AskMefi had it's full public launch and readers could find it on the front page for the entire day and thgrough the evening.)
Other AskMefi threads I've started that I enjoy going back to:
Simple pleasures in life?
Help me find an annoying player name for a point-and-shoot computer game.
IN THE BLUE
My contributions "in the blue" haven't nearly matched the AskMefi thread. However I can still remember instigating a notorious thread on web comics and particularly whether or not the strip Achewood was funny or not. Still an
entertaining read after all these years.
