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.

Update 3/5/2024: I don't have access to the email associated with this account anymore and am not yet ready to attach an email address that clearly identifies me by name. So if you need to reach me, good luck, I guess.

-

Huh. I've been here 21 years, on and off. My profile is an artifact of my past. I'm divorced now and on to different things.

--

Note to the mods: If I die and you post a "she's dead" note to metatalk, please say that I died and don't use euphemisms such as "passed away." Thanks.


Questions I want to ask metafilter:
* What is this thing? (looks like Arabic keychain calendar, must upload image)
* What 10 or 20 books should I read to get a good overview of global history in the 20th century?
* What 10 or 20 books about each continent should I read to get an overview of that continent's history through all time?
* What can I do with a master's degree in economics, a decade of journalism experience, and some low-level skills developing content (blogs, podcasts, video, etc) for the web?


(July 2, 2005):
It's Crouton Supafreak. Because I was in college more than five years ago (dear lord), eating croutons, crushing on a guy who liked to say "supafreak" and "supafly" and trying to come up with a new yahoo account name. I used it for a while, then pretty much dropped it in exchange for my real name. By then, though, the yahoo e-mail address and the metafilter account were firmly entrenched. So it goes.

I met the future Mr. Supafreak online in January 2002, and by then the stigma of the internet was almost gone. Now I think it's the only way anybody meets anymore.

Damn. I've been online for more than a decade. That's freaky.




(below was updated Nov. 25, 2002)

On PBS the other night these two old news guys were sitting around talking, and reminiscing about the internet craze in the mid-1990s and how everyone said the internet would change the world. And these two crinkled old white guys laughed, dismissing the craze, saying the Internet hadn't changed anything. But in only a few years, the way I live my life has been transformed. If the internet disappeared tomorrow, I'd be lost and I'd have to set up struggle to find a new way to live my life.

So, I had modem BBS access in 1994, web and email access in 1995, and I started making web sites in 1996. I've been online in one form or another for eight years now. It worked its way into my life a bit at a time, and I barely noticed. It's only now that I don't know how to live anyother way that I finally got my "wow" moment.