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.

Inspired by this thread, I've updated and expanded my personal information. (Yay!)

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My MetaFilter name is a derivative of my old IM name, sloganboy. I changed it to slogger when I signed up here because I wanted to be anonymous to my IRL friends who were also on the blue. Now I just don't give a shit.

I first heard about MetaFilter during the salad days of 2003, when I frequently visited a college friend living in Baltimore. He would tell me about all these cool things he'd found online, and when I'd ask how he came across them, he'd always reply, "MetaFilter." I finally got on, but it took two years of lurking to lay down my five bucks. Judging by my first few posts, perhaps I should've waited longer.


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My first notion of computers talking to each other came from the movie War Games. Around the same time a kid from school named Brian had a 300 baud modem at home. One day he showed me how to connect to a BBS, but it was nothing but words and thus, boring.

Despite getting an Apple ][+ when I was 8 (without a modem, no matter how much I begged for one), I never saw a GUI interface until I worked on the high school newspaper in the late 80's. A few years later, when I started college, I talked my dad into buying me a Mac Classic (which cost a little north of $2500--nearly the same price as the Apple ][+ from a decade prior, which, incidentally, is nearly the same price as my current Mac Book Pro). There, I was amazed at having a computer in a networked environment. It wasn't until a year later a friend showed me Gopher, Telnet and WAIS, all the while I was consistently getting Ds in my comp-sci courses.

I didn't really "get" the Internet until 1993, when a former roommate was studying abroad in Singapore. We emailed each other a lot, then finally figured out how to ping, finger and chat via emulation software and Vax terminals.

My first unfettered access to the World Wide Web came with an AOL account and a Netscape browser the year after I graduated college, c. 1995. I discovered newsgroups, mainly as a vehicle to read news, get baseball scores and surf porn. I didn't really care about the Internet until a year or two later when I got a job as a writer and content developer at (the long-defunct) Magnet Interactive. I've since moved onto a much more meaningful line of work.

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