MetaFilter

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.

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I started lurking on MeFi sometime in early 2001, back when there were only a few thousand members here. Unfortunately, the membership was closed, except for occasional open enrollments, which I somehow seemed to keep missing. So it went for years...

In August of '03, a MeFite (rcade) posted a link to LinkFilter, another link aggregator with open enrollment. Frustrated after years of not being able to contribute to MeFi threads, I joined LF and took the name darkstar from the Paul Theroux novel Dark Star Safari because I was working overseas throughout Africa at the time. My online interactions were rather less orthodoxically conservative than my then-employer would have appreciated, so the implied anonymity of a dark star seemed doubly attractive. As an incidental homage to the Grateful Dead song of the same name, it was also a nice lagniappe.

One of the user names that had made it to the short list before I settled on darkstar was darkhorse. So when it came time to upload an image for my avatar, the Horsehead nebula was an image firmly in mind. It has been my online avatar ever since.

I became a frequent participant at LinkFilter, wrote and chatted and linked a ridiculous amount there, made some awesome friends, and eventually took over as Senior Administrator until the owner (hey potatono!) decided to close the site due to increasingly problematic code maintenance.

Back to MeFi: in late '04, MeFi opened its doors wide to new members once more. I finally caught the open window this time and paid my five bucks, signed up with my LF handle, and gave up the life of a MeFi lurker. When LF went dark sometime around '06, MeFi became my main online home.

It's odd to think how many millions of words of text I've read (and written) here on MeFi since I stumbled into this forum in 2001, or the countless hours I’ve spent here, the innumerable opinions and personal experiences I’ve shared, and how much this site and its members have shaped my online experience and informed my understanding of the world over the past 20 years.

What a long, strange trip it's been.

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