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.
As a wee lad I was frequently called "carrot top," I suppose because of the color of my hair (rather than the obnoxiousness of my humor -- that particular
carrot top didn't make the scene for quite a while). That never made much sense to me, because the tops of carrots are green, and my hair is an orangy-red. That was better, I suppose, than "carrot bottom," but that thought didn't occur to me at the time. I didn't much like it, but fortunately I grew to be one of the biggest kids in the class and the mocking tapered off rather quickly.
By high school my friends began to call me "Fred," after my middle name, a practice which I supported fully. As all things eventually do, high school came to an end and I departed for college. My roommate continued to call me Fred, and still does, but a new group of friends came up with a new nickname -- OneBallJay, after
a snowboard wax company that one of them had a hat from. That one stuck, and I still hear it to this day.
***Disclaimer: Unlike OneBallLance for USPS Cyclist Lance Armstrong, OneBallJay is not a descriptive name.***
As for the internet, I began my wired journey on BBSs in elementary school, playing TradeWars 2002. My dad eventually got a CompuServe account, which is when I was struck with how powerful this group of interlinked computer people was. I had just purchased
Unlimited Adventures, a make your own role-playing game utility, and couldn't find any adventures on the BBSs to download. So I logged on to my dad's CompuServe account, and found more adventures than I could ever play. I also found so much more *cough, pr0n, cough* that a teenage boy could entertain himself with, and I distinctly remember thinking "what if everybody in the world was hooked up like this?"
When I started college in 1995, we were all assigned an email account that we accessed through pine. One of my computer science friends showed me how you could fire up lynx and scoot around on the web as it was back then. Eventually, I moved on to Netscape, then our dorm rooms were wired with ethernet, I began collecting mp3s and pirated games from Hotline, etc.
This still is just a place for freaks.
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