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.

As of early 2016, I've decided to take my first MeFi Hiatus. I'm feeling less sure after 16 years that the old mothership is a community I feel good about or proud to participate in these days. Need to think about it.

Also: dognard rump is a piece of shit.

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In the winter of 1992 (I think), Rick and I had just finished the Mumbles Walk. This is the pub crawl along a seaside stretch of watering holes in Wales, near Swansea, that apparently used to be a regular night out for Dylan Thomas. I'd like to say we were appropriately reverant, but we were just shambolically pissed, basically.

At some point, we stumbled by a phone booth that looked out over the mud flats and dejected-looking rowboats that had been stranded by the outgoing tide, and decided it was a simply great time to give our buddy Derek, back in Vancouver, a collect call. When the operator asked for a name to give for the call (this was back in the last century, before this stuff was automated), the name "Stavros The Wonder Chicken" just bubbled to the top of my brain, with no precedent whatsoever. The operator balked, but we begged, and when we overheard her telling James, his roommate, that she had a collect call from "Stavros the Wonder Chicken", we laughed like the drunken poets we were.

A few minutes after his roommate James accepted the call, we found out that Derek had returned to his hometown because he'd found out that day that his father had died.

We went back to drinking.


Rick was caught in the Bali Bombing in Oct 2002, and he died of his injuries in hospital in Melbourne less than two weeks later. He was a fine man, and a good friend, and I miss him. My weblog of the time was repurposed as an information clearing house for friends and family from the time of the bombing until after we lost him.

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Mefightclub is a Metafilter offshoot Gaming Community Website Thing, home of ROTATO and the mighty Team MeFight. We play games, video and otherwise, and we're 2000-strong (as of Jan 2012) and dedicated to Making Gaming Grownup and also fun and smart and possibly inebriated. We also groupblog at Full Glass Empty Clip if you just want to read some shit and not get all personal-like, and something is going on at Gamefilter, too. CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE!

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In honour of the gates being opened and the new faces all round (November 2004), I dredged this post of mine up from this September 2002 thread (with a few edits):

Waiting for the Newbie Influx
(to the tune of Billy Bragg's Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards)

It may have been Camelot for Matt and JKottke
But on the Information highway thick with micro-celebrities
A kind old Mefite spies a newbie there who's crying
Over a posting's disappointment
So he clicks over and he's trying
To sympathise with her but he thinks that he should warn her
That Metatalk is just around the corner

Submission queue at Plastic, and Carl's vision is blinded
By the trolling of a newbie user and he is reminded
that Metafilter's Matthew Haughey's optimism fell
At the first Double

Sitting at my PC and the only thing I see
Is the blue of #006699
And a post about I/P
And someone playing troll and basking in the light
Of the fifteen fame filled minutes of the weblog writer

Mixing Web and Politics they ask us what the use is
We offer them embarrassment and our usual excuses
While checking the latest Bush thread
Where some angry folks are posting
I'm looking for the Newbie Influx

Ebay sales are organised and rants have all been posted
There isn't any closing time and there's weblogs to be hosted
You can be Meta with the Mefites
Or Fark Off with the Farkers
While you're waiting for the Newbie Influx

One leap forwards two leaps back
Metafilter's more addictive than crack!

Waiting for the Newbie Influx

Called out on MeTa and you can't run from it
Checked your profile but there's no email on it

Waiting for the Newbie Influx

It's a mighty long way down the totem pole
From MeFi at Work to drawing the dole

Waiting for the Newbie Influx

If no one seems to understand
Start your very own weblog, cut out the middleman

Waiting for the Newbie Influx

In a perfect world we'd all sing in tune
We're all in this together, but give me some room!

Waiting for the Newbie Influx

So join Metafilter while you may
Tiresome trolling's just 5 bucks away

Waiting for the Newbie Influx

If I Should Fall From Grace With Jess

(to the tune of the Pogues' If I Should Fall From Grace With God, from Rum, Sodomy and The Lash)

If I should fall from grace with Jess
Where no poster can relieve me
If I'm banned for my excess
And mathowie won't reprieve me

Let me go, boys
Let me go, boys
Let me digg down in the mud
Where the Farkers all say hi

This site was always ours
Was the proud site of our fathers
It belongs to us and them
Not to any of the others

Let them go, boys
Let them go, boys
Let them go to Metachat
Where the bunnies are quite nice

Bury me in blogs
Where no journo's words can sway me
If I comment in the threads
Web 2.0 AJAX will save me

Coldfusion's crashing again, boys
Keeps crashing again, boys
Let them choose some favorites
Let them bitch in Metatalk

If I should fall from grace with Jess
Where no poster can relieve me
If I'm banned for my excess
And mathowie won't reprieve me

Let me go, boys
Let me go, boys
Let me digg down in the mud
Where the Farkers all say hi

The Double Posting

with apologies to WB Yeats


Posting and posting in the lengthening thread
The chicken cannot take the chickenneck;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere horsecockery is loosed upon the world,
The photoshop tide is loosed, and everywhere
The propriety of our thread is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some bannings are at hand;
Surely the Thread Closing is at hand.
The Thread Closing! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of the SA Forums
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with chicken body and the cock of a horse,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant moderators.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That a twentieth century of Metafilter
Was vexed to nightmare by a filthy .gif,
And what rough callout, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Metatalk to be born?

Welcome To The Hotel Gonna Scorn Ya

In a dark Metatalk thread, trolls posting for lolz
Complaints 'bout deletions, arguments 'bout the polls
Down below in the textbox, I typed a clever insight
My mouse grew heavy and my sight grew dim
I had to stop for the night
cortex deleted my post
I heard jessamyn yell
And I was thinking to myself,
’this could be heaven or this could be hell’
Then mathowie stepped in with the banhammer raised
There were comments calling me a troll,
I thought I read them say...

Welcome to the hotel gonna scorn ya
Such a lovely site
Such a lovely fight
Plenty of room at the hotel gonna scorn ya
Any time of year, you can find it here

This thread is tiffany-twisted, it's got the Metatalk bends
There are a lot of snarky, snarky folks, that we call friends
How they post before thread-end, thread ain't closed yet.
Some posts to remember, some posts to forget

So I emailed mathowie,
with my 'WHAT THE FUCK’ whine
He said, ’we haven’t had that spirit here since nineteen ninety nine’
And still those Mefites are posting from far away,
Hit the site in the middle of the night
Just to read them say...

Welcome to the hotel gonna scorn ya
Such a lovely place
Such a lovely face
They're livin’ it up at the hotel gonna scorn ya
What a great big mess, bring your snarkiness

Hurf durf butter eater,
Commenting PUI's not nice
Jess said ’we are all just prisoners here, of our own device’
And on mathowie's website,
Arrange meetups in the park
We drink and we make shoutouts,
But we just can’t kill the snark

Last thing I remember I was
Closing my brows0r
I had to click my history back
To that site I knew before
’Relax,’ said the night mod,
The site's programmed to receive.
You can drop 5 bux any time you like,
But you can never leave!

The following is not true.