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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.

Donkeymon

My nickname is derived from the name of a one-off joke website that I made several years ago and which has managed to keep going until now. One day while bored I cross-bred pikachu with a common donkey. The outcome was Donkeymon. Then I made a little website about it, and decided I would keep the website and dump all my random crap on it.

I was a web developer for many years, but now I live in Japan and teach English to junior high school students. I moved here in August 2002.

I first started using the Internet in 1992 when I got to college and was automatically signed up for a Sun account. I used it only to read newsgroups. The icon for the news reader used to say: "Man Fired From Job; too much news reading blamed." It was so true too. I would have done considerably worse in all my classes that year if I hadn't figured out how to get into other people's accounts and look at their assignments, thus freeing up all my homework time for newsreading. My reaction to AOL and all that was more like, "Damn, this isn't a place just for freaks after all." I much preferred the internet as a place for freaks. Fortunately, it turned out that pretty much everyone in the world is a freak.