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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.

The nickname? Well, I'm a big anime fan, and Cowboy Bebop is my favorite series of all time. My friends are well aware of this. As you may know, the main protagonist's name is Spike, and at some point or another just about everyone I knew started calling me that.

As for the internet, I pretty much grew up on it, in one form or another. Our first computer, which we got when I was probably 3 or 4, was a big hulking beast called a CenturyNet, which I believe was made custom for the Century 21 real estate agency, where my aunt worked at the time. I'm really not sure how it found its way into our house. It was among the first personal computers to feature a fancy new internal modem, clocking in at a whopping 900 baud. 'Course, there was no "web" yet, but there was e-mail, usenet, and BBSes. I figured out e-mail, but no one ever told me about the other two. Shame, I would have been all the geekier for it.

Fast-forward to 3rd grade, when we got our first new computer, a Packard Bell of some sort (I forget the model number, but I believe I remember it having a CD-ROM drive, which were fairly new at the time), and my first encounter with the web, via a floppy disk found in our mailbox offering a 5-hour free trial of a new service called "America Online". It didn't take 5 hours to realize it sucked, and before long we'd switched to a local ISP called Zebra Net. Since then, they've gone through a series of acquisitions, the end result of which is that you can now blame Earthlink for my continued presence.

Having grown up online, there was never really a defining moment for me. I've always used it, and I've always loved it. That said, one of the earliest "whoa, cool" moments I remember was in middle school, when I first learned I could play chess against real people online at Yahoo. Since then, there've been IMs, my first website, the bursting of the first bubble, the swelling of the second, MMORPGs, broadband, and BitTorrent, and the internet has become such an integral part of my life that I can't fathom ever going without it.

And now, other things!

Other things coming soon.* In the meantime, play MarioKart with me! 184743 141919

*"Soon" is a relative term.