your fucking internet timeline

What was the question again?

Now: Just watched a video of a camel drinking a beer on the Great Wall of China. Thoughts of ending it and total crushing despair. Am I really Time's 'Person Of The Year'?

1996 - get job at St. Olaf College and have nowhere enough to do. Check out crazy Web group of Pat Buchanan supporters.

2000 - while being SAHM, I join Epinions.com and write way too many reviews of all kinds of stuff (primarily books) ... And what was written above about cliques and money upthread is OTM, but I do keep in touch with several other writers there, make some money from it, and still write the occasional review

2004 - discover political blogs. I think the first one I ran across was talkingpointsmemo.com, which led me to dailykos.com, which led me to 2 million other ones. Also started reading the Julie/Julia Project online (better late than never; hilarious and enjoyable, and the resulting book was great, too).

2006 - stumble across ILX while idly Googling for friends I had lost touch with (there can't be more than one combination of Dan Perry and John Justen on the planet... hey, J3ff is there, too!) Also spend silly amount of time at myspace.

2007 - check out Second Life, but really don't get the point at all.

In between is a blur.

Myspace fits somewhere on there. Most of my friends were xanga people when i started myspace. They eventually joined myspace, but now they're on facebook.

so much shit in between that no one cares about anyway that I won't bother to rehash

1996 includes a month on AOL, a common noob error for the era.
96-98 were the IRC addiction years.

1985?86? - 1990ish My father gets a modem after telling me I can't have one, nor a notebook computer, for my birthday (I have a subscription to Enter Magazine, and so am constantly coming up with birthday gift ideas to supplement the annual request for robots and those cool sunglasses from The Sharper Image). I use his account on The Source once in a while, and dial in to Dartmouth, which if I remember right didn't have much available to the public except their Dante collection. Therefore, I decide to read Dante and find out he would have been an awesome D&D player. His random encounters rock.

1989ish - 1991 Aware of BBSes but still haven't got my own modem, so don't investigate much.

1991 New computer for 16th birthday, complete with 2400 baud modem. I get an account on America Online for about half the year, and for the next couple years after that exploit free trials and the credit card verification loophole like all the other teenagers did, in order to keep a series of free accounts going. I log onto the local BBSes, but none of them have all the bells and whistles, so I wind up racking up long distance calls to ones that do, mostly for stuff like downloading Phrack.

For about three months, I run my own BBS using Remote Access, and call it Skynet. Yep.

1991-1993 GEnie, Delphi, CompuServe, Prodigy.

1993 College starts. Even in the dorms, you still have to dial in to your VAX account, which is of limited usefulness compared to what the kids a few years later will have. My roommate of the first couple weeks got into MUDs via a friend a year older than him, so I dick around with one for about an hour before deciding I still like Zork better.

An issue of Wired mentions Dr Bombay's Village Voice article "A Rape in Cyberspace" and gives the telnet addresses for FurryMUCK and LambdaMOO in passing; I get accounts on both, and only use the FurryMUCK one once or twice but stay on LambdaMOO for the next three or four years (objnum #73555, the middle five digits, when the wait time for an account was about a week).

I don't remember what my newsreader on the VAX shell was, except that I didn't like it, so it isn't until 1994, when Hampshire switches to unix, that I start reading Usenet (with tin, still the only newsreader I ever liked). One of the signs o' the times is that the message board I used to socialize on on Prodigy migrates to a mailing list, as everyone now has email.

1995ish I briefly get an AOL account again because dial-up access to Hampshire (I've moved off-campus, one of the few, the rare) puts you in your shell account, which means no web except through lynx. After a while I realize the web is very blinky and not worth paying for, even when AOL drops hourly rates.

At some point in here I get a new computer with a 56K modem instead of the 14.4K I'd bought for the 1991 computer.

The local channels on IRC are handy at this point, too, because I'm raising kids, and parents are devoted networkers when it comes to sharing information about whether it's worth driving out to Holyoke for that carnival they advertised on the radio, etc.

1996 Officially spend most of the year on a field study leave on the internet. That's all I have to do for school, log on and do my thing -- a mammoth paper on online communities, just like everybody else is writing about in 1996 thanks to the Voice article; I focus mostly on linguistics and LambdaMOO, and drop out of school at the end of the field study for unrelated reasons. The whole process makes me sick of a lot of the tropes and cycles of online communities, and after 1996 I'm never deeply involved in one again. Concurrently, I decide I really dislike online writing communities -- workshops, support groups, all of it.

I think this was also the last year I got film developed without getting a disk or CD back along with (or instead of) the prints.

1997 Through a weird sequence of events, I'm offered a job teaching a course on the internet at Tufts despite not actually graduating college. The idea of staying in Massachusetts turns my stomach as much as the idea of teaching a class on a subject I spent too much of the last year on, so I drop back into school in another part of the country and get internet access back. Already the internet is first and foremost a way to keep in touch with friends, who are now getting married, having kids, moving to Minnesota, etc.

1999ish? After writing and publishing a roleplaying game, I log my girlfriend onto a MUSH so she can get a better feel for how they work -- she eventually meets the man who's now her husband. I'm into MUSHes for about three months before getting frustrated with the time commitment expected of you and the usual community politics. On Usenet and most mailing lists, I tend to lurk or participate non-socially.

2000 New computer, better sound, more RAM = other than keeping up with friends and looking things up for school, mp3s become my main reason to be online, not just stuff downloaded from Napster but legal stuff too.

2001 Two unrelated online friends point me to their LiveJournals in the same week, so I get an account, and it quickly becomes my way of keeping in touch with years of friends accumulated from college, high school, grad school, etc -- which is why over the next few years I'm weirded out when people talk about LJ as a place for teenagers, since the core group of people I know there are in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.

2002 ILX. I lurk on ILM for a couple months after being linked from a mash-up site to a discussion there; eventually notice the ILE link in the corner and start posting there for a couple years and then intermittently afterwards.

I get a cell phone so my girlfriend (different one from the above) can get hold of me when I'm downloading something or talking about Lysol Douche.

2003 Get high-speed internet for the first time; dial-up was free for the last ten years, which made it seem silly to pay forty bucks to be faster. Obviously, once I get high speed, I'm dependent on it.

2004-2006 Gmail makes mailing lists easy enough to deal with that those become my main online communities. I stick mostly to academic lists and Postcard From Hell. Hang out on a couple post-ILX message boards, rarely for more than a few months. Get Myspace because offline friends keep telling me to so I can read their bulletins or whatever.

By 2007, every couple months some friend from high school or college gets in touch via email/Myspace/etc, and with one exception, there's no ex or person-I've-slept-with-at-least-twice who I don't have an email address for -- most of them have blogs, Vox, or Myspace too. I keep a couple blogs, I download music, I post on Postcard a little, I check in here, but mostly I just talk to friends and do lots and lots of research: armed with academic friends' passwords, I'm able to do 90% of my research for my freelance writing jobs (encyclopedias, textbooks, etc) from the computer, supplemented by the occasional book that arrives in one click and two days courtesy of Amazon Prime.

Hahaha! I joined one community which had a Super Secret Forum too, but I don't think it ever lead to anything quite this dramatic.

1996 includes a month on AOL, a common noob error for the era.

Ah yeah, by the late 90's you sort of heard about AOL's lameness as soon as you spent like two days on the 'net. It was still the default choice if you wanted to troll a chat room, tho.

An issue of Wired mentions Dr Bombay's Village Voice article "A Rape in Cyberspace" and gives the telnet addresses for FurryMUCK and LambdaMOO in passing; I get accounts on both, and only use the FurryMUCK one once or twice but stay on LambdaMOO for the next three or four years (objnum #73555, the middle five digits, when the wait time for an account was about a week).

I have no idea what any of this means, but it all sounds very alarming!

There then followed a number of spin-off boards on the ezboard system, started by ex-askmen posters who had become disillusioned with the way things were being run there. Each of these ezboard spin-offs would lure away a number of regular posters, but within six months or so the new boards would collapse as a result of bitching and backstabbing - several posters had romantic hook-up stuff going on, which led to inevitable nastiness when their cyber-relationships fell apart. I stuck with it for a while but tired of all the constant drama, and once the humour started to dry up I lost interest in it all. Many of the more intelligent and amusing posters drifted away and there was nobody good to banter with anymore, and the friendship I had with my Best Internet Friend faded and died through neglect, which made me very sad.

I found ILX a few years back (I think I found ILM first, actually) and lurked for a while before plucking up the courage to join in a bit - it was all about chickenbears and cockfarmers in those days, and the in-jokes and slang which everyone seemed to know except me was a bit intimidating to begin with, but you turned out to be a warm and welcoming crowd. I'm not around an awful lot, but I enjoy it very much whenever I call in :)

I never know what people remember anymore, so wasn't sure how much to annotate.

"A Rape in Cyberspace" was an article about a sexual harrassment incident on LambdaMOO (MOOs are like MUDs -- Zork with other people, text-only MMORPGs -- but in most cases are just social, without all the dragonslaying and what all); Wired's mention of it pointed out where LambdaMOO was -- I don't remember why FurryMUCK was mentioned, but I logged on because there was no waiting period for account activation (which Lambda had adopted because the place was getting big and crowded).

I like to kid myself that by being so lame, it's kind of came round to being fashionable again in a defiantly ironic way. On its plus side, it does regularly top the tables for reliability (probably not for much longer - the broadband part just been sold to Carphone Warehouse).

Fashion in ISPs is an odd thing: the rise and decline of Demon, zen etc. Wasn't the coolest one dircon at one time? I've actually been mocked by that style arbiter Momus for daring to post on his blog from an aol account. Bizarre.

1993-1997: various local BBSes, wherein I would play L.O.R.D. and other geeky RPGs.

1997-1999: AOL SPIN chatroom and message board. I still have a friend today that I met on the SPIN chatroom!

2000-2003: Sinister list and chatroom.

2001 - Present: ILX

93/94: begin using gopher, veronica etc for univ. research
95: build first website with mosiac
96: my Bronte site becomes a victorian lit standard on the baby web;
start working professionally as web developer
97-99: various embarrasing levels of activity on X-Files IRC and britpop mailing lists.
2000: start blogging off and on
2001: ILX
2005: Bookworm
2007: Still a webmonkey

1992: First email account. I have no recollection whatsoever with whom I used it to converse.

1993: Discovery of Usenet and the horribly impolite nature of Internet conversations. Thus, soon thereafter, I discovered the joy of baiting Usenet cranks. You can still find some of my tomfoolery from a slightly later period on Google Groups, attached to my real name. Thankfully, no employer has ever been canny enough to figure this one out before hiring me.

1994: I discover telnet BBSs when a friend asks me to set him up so's to chat up his out-of-state girlfriend on the Internet. A whole new world of antagonizing naive Internet users opens up. I also discover the WWW: I use Mosaic on the Suns at the computer lab to browse it between thesis-writing sessions. What I browsed, I have absolutely no recollection. My remaining impression is of grey text-filled screens dotted with square, blue-outlined, clickable images.

1995: I get a real office with a WYSE terminal, an account on the department's Suns, and as much time as I like to waste on it, looking at the WWW, Gopher, Usenet, IRC, and so on. One of my favorite unix programs is "talk", the precursor of AIM, MSN, etc.

1996: First web pages created. I discover POV-RAY and create some fab graphics that I tuck into the then-controversial "frames" to impress my colleagues. I discover http://jodi.org, which was, in retrospect, still the coolest web site ever to exist. (It's now a mere shadow of its former self.) A friend of mine releases an album on MP3, in an edition of one: Each song occupies a single floppy disk. (I was counfounded at the time, but it was a beautiful way to deliberately misuse the technology. This was also my introduction to MP3.)

1997: First PC purchased, with intent to run the communist operating system, Linux. That endeavor fails mightily when I learn that the graphics chip on my cheapo Compaq will never be supported by X11. I install Windows and a port of "talk"; nobody else seems terribly interested in using it to chat with me, though. Only the MP3-on-floppy guy bothers to contact me.

1997-1998: I attempt to find folks interested in good music on Usenet, as the WWW seems bereft of 'em. This results in many flames directed at me when I inform people of their bad taste in music, and it results in exactly zero new musical discoveries. I give up on the idea that I can find others with common musical interests on the Internet.

1999: As more and more folks post their inane opinions on the gradually-more-participatory WWW, I'm more and more disgusted by its potential as a medium of two-way communication. BBSes, IRC, and AIM remain more promising to me, in varying degrees.

2000: I move in with a BBS friend in San Jose and take a job in tech.

2001: This year is the zenith of my Internet socialization curve, up until now: I meet and sometimes socialize with (think FAP) a number of my BBS friends. I start a band with two of them. Eventually, I marry one of them, which results in the destruction of the aforementioned band.

2002-2003: I lose my job, but I have a good amount of savings, so I concentrate on the band and strengthening my skills in Flash, PHP, Photoshop, Illustrator, Perl, SQL, and so on. I create (non-participatory) sites for myself, my band, and my future wife, some of which are still standing. I happen upon ILX a few times in this period, but each time, I decide it's too schizophrenic to be a reliable source of musical info, so I don't even make a bookmark.

2004: I get married. My band breaks up (as a result?) The singer for my band writes a NaNoWriMo "novel" with a thinly-disguised me as the arch-villain, who drives my indie-rock tour van over her boyfriend. I decide that the BBS thing has gone too far, and I totally cut off my direct contact with the BBS world.

2005: I decide that perhaps folks with decent musical tastes have figured out how to work the Internet, so I revive my search for decent online musical journals. I happen upon Stylus and Pitchfork, naturally, but I decide that the writing in both is utter tripe. Their reviewers I find to be attention whores whose attempts to emulate the styles of Bangs, Meltzer, Coley, Christgau, and so on, utterly fail to disguise their desperate need to be able to claim that they discovered the next big thing. Nowhere online do I find the candor, humor, and negativity of prime Conflict-era Cosloy.

2006: I decide that maybe ILM is worth following. After much browsing of the archives, I find that I've probably missed ILM's apex. However, it's still a great resource, and I find that after I sift through the dorky sword-fights, Lex's insistence that he's at an evolutionary stage beyond the rest of ILM, the reams of chaff on music I don't give a fuck about, Buttez's amateurish trolling, and infinitely-long goofy-pic threads, that folks who like good music discuss it with candor on ILM.

yesterday, searching for something else) i found this from 99 (was on 4ad-l and indiepop-l well before this):
http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~djt/pure-impure/1999-12/0033.html

earliest one from s1n1ster (day 2 of sinister i believe):
http://www.mail-archive.com/sinister@majordomo.net/1997-month-08/msg00158.html

earlier still from miyasaki mailing list: ('95)
http://www.imasy.or.jp/~fukumoto/n/nshow.cgi?7881

1998 - Discover NME boards, which were good for a brief period.

1999 - Realise they're now shit, group of old-skoolers breaks off en-masse to form various other music and non-music splinter boards.

2000 - Discover Freakytrigger, linked to through one of the other boards. Immediately intrigued by Tom's writing.

2001 - Start posting on ILE and ILM sporadically.

2002 - Have first full-time office job so dive into ILX headfirst. Also attend first FAP and start to get the surrounding culture. Everything else kind of builds up from there.

Delta Force multiplayer was the only thing I used the internet for about this time, and the dial-up connection was proving fatal.

Joined lots of conspiracy theory forums but never stayed in any of them long (was kinda getting wised up to all the bs). Found ilx in around 2002 or 2003 perhaps. It was around this time that I started my own web page and discovered blogs (I found Ilx googling HTML advice).

Got broadband only last year. Can't get me off the thing now. TV doesn't get used anymore. I still own a website, a blogger-run type thing about gaming.

.
.
all sorts of pish
.
.

2005 Pull the same trick in person on a real Glaswegian Pastels fan

2006 Discover, via the photo thread, that this person is on ILX.

When did Sinister really start? I remember joining the digest version in October 97, at which point the digest numbers suggested it had been going for just over a month. But some Sinisterines have said that there was another mailing list before that, which is why the current archives start in the middle of conversations.

(xpost: aha, Keef, *you* will know the answer to that one!)

Fall 1991: College, ergo USENET. Meet donut bitch online. Over the course of the early-to-mid 90s, I meet the following future ILXors:
Ned
Tom E
Ricky T
Ally
Nicole
J McChump (I think...)
Nate P (in passing)
M Matos (also in passing)
Fred S (WHERE ARE YOU NOW????)
Geir
(I know I'm forgetting someone, sorry!)

Summer 1999: A bunch of USENET folks get tired of USENET and start a private mailing list. Tom also launches Freaky Trigger.

Summer 2000: Tom discovers Greenspun and starts up I Love Music. A bunch of us start posting there and a weird intersection of USENET refugees, Sinister listserv members and Tom's real-life friends start an international juggernaut.

There were some dalliances with Blogger, Friendster and Myspace sprinkled in there along the way. Also a lot of porn.

Yeah there was. Probably 6 months to a year before Sinister. Deano's website was the first, though!

1996: NME chat room
Positioned myself as the official music snob of the site, ganging up as a 16 year old girl with a 40-something year old punk rock dude to give imbiciles hell. Made a few friends, despite being incredibly obnoxious, and started a brief record label with someone I met on here.

1998: the Lunch List
Very small mailing list consisting of some music folk I knew from Leicester & some computer geeks from London, talking about lunch and killer marmots from outer space.

1999ish: interim message board as people left NME. I think it was called Wangst.

1999ish: Feel_Flows
Again, a small mailing list dedicated to music. Was quite good for a while but disintegrated into in-fighting regularly. Met my flute player on here. This later changed into See_Feel.

2001: ILx
Never looked back.

I was on Sinister for one day at some point during all of this, but it flooded my inbox and I couldn't be bothered with it. I'm also thinking of creating a Vinyl Vulture account now but I'm afraid it would be disloyal.

1996-1998 - Get own dial-up access, post regularly on alt.music.alternative. Get annoyed at a.m.a. and retreat to email mostly.

1999 - Start Freaky Trigger.

March 2000 - Start blogging - first something called Blue Lines, and then NYLPM, which massively jacks up FT's hits and gets me interested in the social elements of 'online' again.

August 2000 - Start ILM as a message board for Freaky Trigger, based on the "Chatterbox" board linked to music blog Amplified To Rock.

Early 2001 - Ask people whether ILE should be started, go on holiday and come back to find DG has wisely taken the decision for me.

2001-2005 - ILXmania. Gradual decline in the amount of other writing I do. Disillusionment. Misery. Drop out of day-to-day admin of ILX, end NYLPM at end of 2005.

2005-now - More active on LJ, running wholly self-indulgent Poptimists community. Relaunch FT with Wordpress instead of Blogger and rediscover joy of doing it.

2007 - Server switch on ILX brings realisation that I can now lurk happily on it without nagging worry or proprietary feeling. Feel psychically healed and ready for new 'challenges'.

(I srsly hope this is not the reason I feel at peace with ILX, oh dear)

message 00000 (08/27/1997) sheds some light on things, as does this (mentions a freebie Cool List thing)

http://www.mail-archive.com/sinister@majordomo.net/1997-month-08/msg00090.html

but i can't remember it tbh.

I trust not of cocks.

1997: Chainsaw BBS, the lesbionic queerpunk board. Odd.
1998 - 2000: Cat Power, FallNet, Beastie Boys list-srvs. Befriended a pre-Espers Greg Weeks on the Cat Power list.
2001 - 2002: DVDTalk, Criterion forums. Fueled by newfangled DVD player machine ownership.
2003 - 2004: PunkTorrents, EZTree/Dimeadozen. Plus some weird horror film filesharing forum I can't remember the name of - when all the torrent sites starting getting sued it went way underground and I lost touch.
2005 - present: ILXor, motherfuxor

x-post

Emily, was this S4ndy Bl41r? Formerly of this parish as well - wonder where he is now?

(Yes, it was called Wangst in 1999 - I was there as well, being intensely confrontational and Ethanesque as I remember)

93/94: begin using gopher, veronica etc for univ. research
95: build first website with mosiac
96: my Bronte World of Darkness site becomes a victorian lit standard reasonably well-noticed on the baby web;
start working professionally as web developer
97-99: various embarrasing levels of activity on X-Files IRC and britpop RPG mailing lists.
2000: start blogging off and on
2001: ILX
2005: Bookworm
2007: Still a webmonkey

HAHAHAHAHA OH MY GOD

1995 - start investigating this internet thing. Discover the Stereolab BB at Monash University and make a friend called Valerie.

1996 - discover the unforgiving nature of virtual friendships when Valerie misinterprets a completely harmless joke and stops speaking to me.

Persuade my parents to buy a PC and take it over. Join AOL (briefly, painfully, like everyone else) and find myself a regular in their football chatroom.

The next couple of years are a blur until I discovered Sinister, a week before the first picnic in May 1998. Unsurprisingly, it completely dominated my online time, as well as offline - there were loads of social dos and I got together with my first Sinister gf almost immediately.

1999 - became an active poster on the Motley Fool UK sight, predominantly the community boards. Nice people - I managed about 3k posts there, I think.

2001 - ILE. Enough said.

2002 - Livejournal, Blogger and Movable Type journals, as well as spending a LOT of time in #sinister. I joined Friendster whenever it became fashionable, but I didn't get much out of it and I haven't taken advantage of any of these types of sites since.

2005 - Flopturnriver.com forums - I spend almost as much time there as I do here, but there it's mostly poker players talking about poker - their community boards are right wing fratboy heaven. Not for me, though the only blog I do these days is a poker one at FTR.

Beautiful. The legend lives on.

First saw the WWW in 1994 at a summer school I attended. First website was the Louvre, I believe.

Parents got AOL in 1995. Went into chatrooms for first time.

First time I had Internet access at work: a summer internship in 1998, when I discovered Pitchfork (while looking for Gastr del Sol reviews) and Edith Frost's blog (though it wasn't called a blog then), and spent a week teaching myself Esperanto.

Got a Hotmail account that fall, as I was studying in the UK and without access to college e-mail anymore.

The first message board I ever posted on was Salon's Table Talk in 1999. Might have also contributed to a Stereolab board shortly thereafter.

Sites I visited regularly in 2000: Hotmail, Salon, McSweeney's, Plastic, Pitchfork, Ironminds, Modern Humorist, Slate.

I discovered ILX in early 2003 while Googling for "pazz and jop." I faintly recalled having seen it once before, from a link on Joshblog (the first blog I ever read) (no idea how I came across Josh, though).

Sites I visited regularly in 2006: Gmail, ILX, Stylus (wrote for the site 2005-06), Pitchfork, Slate, Sound Opinions (have sporadically posted there since 2005), lots of blogs in my newsfeed.

Yeah, this is the one I found as well. I only posted there two or three times, but I read it a lot circa 1998-99.

Also forgot to mention that I started blogging in 2003, and I had a short-lived LiveJournal in 2005.

I would recommend staying a hobbyist b/c it seems as soon as you start doing something for rent/mortgage it becomes far less interesting. ;)

mid-2000-2003 - Achieve fullblown 'net junkie status, frequenting mp3.com, Prosoundweb, Livejournal, POE-News, and others. Get a little bit weird and commence real-life partying with American message board buddies of varying states of emotional instability.

2004-2006 - Relationship with a woman I met online ends catastrophically and triggers a lengthy personal meltdown. I discover ILM mid-meltdown, meet some nice local people at a FAP, and start choosing quality over quantity. Jettison most of my online affiliations and limit my involvement to ILM/ILX and just one other messageboard.

2007 - Return to ILM after thoroughly enjoying the sandbox.

i still email robin (rjh) on a weekly basis.

and i also remember jel's tweekitten, about 97-99 or so, but not heavily. um.

> arcane historical references (..., Tewkesbury)

uh? (am from Tewkes. town does get a bit surreal from time to time when the re-enactment people are around, people in (woollen) chainmail walking through streets etc. they've just sold the royal hop pole, that was mentioned in dickens. to wetherspoons.)

1990 -- get a 2400 baud modem, my teacher father asks his class for some BBS phone numbers, get connected to first 3-line BBS(real-live chat! wow! still have one friend one that), find first local war3z bbs, would stay up late at night to d/l disks of Space Quest over night, use email for first time, post on BBS mesg boards, attend local BBS FAPs

1991 -- discover pr0n, .gifs, and .gl files, Tradewars, FidoNet, etc

1993 -- discorver gopher operating out of Michigan State, which has a local access number. Get a demo of the shitty Nova/unix account. Links on Gopher to a great amount of Animaniacs sound files and furry porn, oddly enough

1994 -- see WWW on Mosaic at university. Use ftp to d/l 1st ish of Generation X. Discover usenet, make rec.arts.tv.mst3k my new home, begin trading mst3k tapes thru internet

1995 -- self-taught html, make 1st homepage, finally got Trumpet Winsock working on last day of dorm access so I can know dial in from home. Begin learning how to use Photoshop, use RealAudio for first time to hear RadioSonic off of CBC. Sophomore year roommate signs up for dorm ethernet, but I never get access.

1996 -- read lots of Suck, Chank Fonts & the Onion

1997 -- make web graphics during summer job for engineering dept, Slashdot, start reading alt.punk, hear about this cool city called Portland from Larry Livermore, sign up for local punk & geek email lists

1998 -- first summer web job for cash

1999-2001 -- Lots of pro-wrestling sites, Plastic.com, Fark, discover p2p/napster/kazaa/bearshare/limewire, get paid for first time to write reviews at AMG, get job at AMG from july '00 to march '01, send email from cell phone for first time

2002 -- finally give in and start livejournal, discover blogs, begin lurking on SA forums

2003 -- Discover ILM from a link on Simon Reynolds' blog, begin posting on ILE a few months later, get first webgallery and domain name

2004 -- get gmail acct

1995 - someone gives me a job writing webpages; self-taught crash course in html, photoshop, etc.; realize social possibilities of email, educational possibilities of www; continue to use work computers and school mac labs, write writing/essays using brother wordprocessor on bed at home

1998 - get compaq laptop as graduation gift; create yahoo email acct; immediately leave the province, then country for 8 months

1999 - receive b&s tape in mail while still away, return home, get job with highspeed int, get dialup at home, join sinister list (join and leave a bunch of others, quickly), make some good friends :), send A LOT of email; start reading onion, mcsweeney's, online comics, etc.

2000 - do a lot of health research for job, interest; learn a lot about music; use www for its procrastination/boredom-alleviating features

2002 - visit uk, meet sinister types :), start going on #sinister a lot; move to mtl, use internet for school research, academic listservs, learning things, procrastination; downloading begins

2003 - create new blog (ed. have totally forgotten the name of my old blog and when i started it!)

2004 - discover ILX; get new computer; discover $kype; downloading increases 98%; don't leave house enough

2005 - discover noise board; even more about music, people

2006 - making/maintaining friendships :); rss feeds; wasting time; watch a lot of dl-ed tv; "research"; community blogging

2007 - swear it's going to be the year of leaving house more during daytime hrs

Looks like Mike White?