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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.

Hmm...I think I will reserve the obligatory what-does-your-name-mean response for when I'm well slept.

I started using the internet in 1994 or 1995 and thought it was fairly useless. My search results were always littered with thousands of links, and I began to believe that the internet was just a bunch of sites put up by idiots and strung together. Needless to say, it had not caught my interest. For the next year or two, I hid away in my telnet email account where several of my friends and I had started what we called "the Elitist Club" - a group of four or five of us who would send rediculous emails to each other during breaks between classes. These emails often included mini-musicals, genre-mocking screenplays, and the likes... always created to incite some sort of battle between the members. (we even had the annual awards show, which included categories such as "best performance in a musical," "biggest potty mouth" and so on...)

I needed several "in/out" classes to complete my degree (in faculty, out of major), and almost to spite the internet and it's hype, I took a course called "interactive multimedia I", figuring that by the end of this course, I would have had enough exposure to the internet to add validity to my initial disliking of it. The course as it stood was fairly cut and dry. We learned simple html and Director 6 lingo. (what, no flash?) Those students "in the know" constantly complained about the prehistoric content of the class. There was also a component of the class which required us to keep a web log of sorts. We'd be asked a question and have to compose a page answering the question, or find a certain kind of site, such as one that uses frames, and have to write about its use of frames. It wasn't until we were asked to find one "interesting" site and one "strange" site that my passion for the net ignited. I vowed to myself that I would not stop surfing until I found a site that was actually interesting. I surfed for hours until I finally found one. The site had tons of its own content, but also cited other people's web sites within its pages. There was a journal section, a web art section, and a whole bunch of other stuff. The content was fascinating. The sites linked to were fascinating. Each site that I hopped to from the initial site introduced me to a different individual. It had never occurred to me that the web could be used for anything more than research, shopping, or email.

I had come upon a site that included as part of its makeup a community of sorts...and I was stunned. I had bumped into osil8. (which eventually brought me here...)

The next year I took "Interactive Multimedia II."