Julie asked that we do this a while ago, and Kee kind of demanded that I do it. In my effort to catch up and clear out some tabs in QuickNote, here we go. I'm nothing if not thorough, so I'll start at the very beginning (which, I hear, is a very good place to start).

1983-ish: Our First Computer
Our first computer at home was an Apple II-C that mom had so she could work from home. It was a precurser to the laptop -- the teeny-tiny monitor on a stand (which, incidentally, looks an awful lot like the new iMac's) stayed put, but the processor/keyboard had a handle so you could carry it back and forth. I first used it to send my infamous complaint letter to Fisher Price. Anyway, it was a brilliant machine, and we ended up playing Chivalry and Oregon Trail and, my favorite, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? for hours on end.

We upgraded to a PC when I was in high school (a snazzy 386), and I got to take that to college second-semester freshman year when they got a fancy new Pentium at home. I used it exclusively for papers, because, well, computer games pretty much bored me. I had more important things to do with my time.

Spring 1996: Hello, E-mail!
At the end of my first semester in college, I returned home for the first time and got yelled at by all my friends from high school because I hadn't bothered to set up an e-mail account. It really didn't seem all that important to me, but there was yelling, so I agreed. Back at school in January, I convinced my friend Helga to give me a crash course. It was the first and only time I set foot in COBA (College of Business Administration), but from the computer lab in the basement, I set up my first e-mail address and used some search tool to find addresses for high school friends. It was perfect. With letters, I had a tendency to write epic tomes that would go on for dozens of pages spanning months and never get mailed. With e-mail, my time was limited. I had to just write as much as I could and hit send (that's why I like postcards, too). Lo and behold, it worked! People wrote back! The messages were random and funny, with subject titles like, "Small woodland animals" or taunting, like a page filled with the word "LOVE" ending with "Ronald Reagan." Seema's were chatty and gossipy (she was at school in MA, so she actually got to see people I knew from time to time. No one I knew went to school anywhere within a 12 hour drive of me.) Whee, e-mail! I was totally hooked.

1996-99: College: Labs to Cafes to Ethernet
I replied to each message I received, and started carrying on lengthy and regular correspondence with people I never expected to talk to again. Seema and I would probably have drifted apart, too, if it weren't for e-mail. At some point, I realized that I was just writing my day, my stories, and my thoughts, without much regard to who I was writing to. Essentially, I was blogging/journalling without a site. Of course, when I'd go home for the summer, it was back to paper and pen. (Only, I'd never get around to mailing stuff, so I'd get back to school and hand my friends a stack of pages addressed to them.)

I thought the regular, www internet was cool, but I usually didn't know where to go or how to look for something. Search engines were limited and scarce; web pages were aesthetic nightmares. Besides, saving bookmarks was awkward on lab computers. One night, at a party sophomore year, (I think it was the "When Kristy Got Drunk for the First Time" party), Kris dragged me over to her computer to tell me about how she had learned html, and it was the cooooooolest thing ever. She tried to demonstrate it for me, but my eyes glazed over. I wanted something I could work with visually, like PageMaker. All this coding garbage was no fun at all.

Mostly, I kept e-mailing. In London, the classroom building didn't have Internet access, so I actually shelled out several pounds at a time to use the cyber cafe in Whiteley's. But, at the same time, two people I'd gone to high school with were studying in London at the same time. Because I'd been in touch with them through e-mail, we hung out quite a bit, and some of the most fun I had all semester was with them. Ahhh, good times.

Senior year, they installed ethernet in the dorms, and I got my first laptop. I was in heaven. I also discovered freeware fonts that year and went nuts. Oh, it was so much fun. I didn't keep in touch with people via e-mail as much anymore, however. They didn't write back regularly. In our yearbook, I got a pull-quote from the "Senior Survey": responding to the question, "What will you miss most about ND?" I had written, "Free, unlimited, high-speed internet access." So true.

1999-2001: Bored at Work: Finding TV on the Internet
I started working at a large nonprofit in the Fall of 1999. For the first month or so, they didn't have Internet at all, the horror! I volunteered to help set things up, to do anything to speed the process, and I ended up teaching the staff how to use it. Part of my job was afternoon reception, and because there were too many distractions to do real work out there, I found myself surfing around a lot.

I was living with Seema and her friend Allie. I hadn't watched TV at all in college (except for a few Friends and ER study breaks), but Seema forced us to sit down and watch the season premiere of Dawson's Creek. I thought it was hilariously bad, so I stuck around for the really bad teen drama series premiere that followed it. Wait a sec, a Behr and a Fehr in the same show? The way they backlit that guy's ears? Tobasco sauce? No way this was serious. Was it? I did like the song in the opening credits, so I kept getting sucked into watching it and making fun of it. Out loud. By myself.

Bored one afternoon at work, I decided to check Yahoo! and see if there were any websites for that show so I could find out who sang the theme song. Horrified, I discovered there were several fansites. But there was also this big, sponsored link to a different kind of site, MightyBigTV. I loved it; the recaps were hysterical and pointed out all the things I'd been giggling about. I caught up on the episode or two I'd missed. I was hooked. The Dawson's Creek recaps were great, too. Occasionally, I'd try to click the link at the end of a recap encouraging people to "talk back in the forums," but it would always time-out, and I was afraid of getting caught -- at least the recaps kinda looked like news articles.

Eventually, I spent more time in my own office, and one day on the main page I clicked the link to a "Roswell Survivor" thread and it actually worked. Once I figured out what was going on and how things worked, I decided it was one of the funniest things I'd ever read. I began reading more of the forums, and loved it; people wrote in complete sentences and cared about grammar! There were rules! People were intelligent! I lurked like it was my job.

A few weeks later, I was at a party at my friend SarahGo's house. She told me that when her friend Deb arrived, we should talk TV. Deb was a WB Ho, too, so I told her about the site and the forums and insisted she check it out. She tried to convince me to watch some show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer because it was sooooooo good. I turned my nose up at that. (a) I didn't think a show with that name could be good, and (b) I didn't want to watch "good" TV, I wanted cheese I could make fun of. From then on, whenever we'd hang out, Deb and I would talk TV and MBTV. She told me I should post in the forums, but I couldn't come up with a screenname. (Yes, really.) I told her she should post since she had a screenname (babyhansm), but she claimed she had nothing to say. Things went on like that for a while. At work, I had befriended the IT manager and expressed concern over the pathetic state of the agency's websites. Nobody had the time or inclination to do anything about them, so she offered me the task. They bought me a copy of Dreamweaver/Fireworks and I taught myself what needed to be done for a few hours each week.

Mostly, it was great because I had a legitimate reason to be poking about on the Internet all day. My cousin Brian got himself a LiveJournal in early 2001, and I looked forward to checking for updates. It was great. I had finally registered at MBTV as norakid (Dillon's nickname for me), but rarely posted. At the end of the summer, I was talking to SarahGo in her office one day and she handed me a stack of postcards she'd picked up at bars the night before. I giggled about what a total junkie I was for the things, and suddenly it came to me: postcardjunkie!

2001: Changes Afoot (But not both)
By late 2001, when my roommates all decided to move out of state. I was sick of what my job had become (database development, blech) and thought I'd join the Peace Corps in January. I worked out a deal with my boss to continue maintaining the websites from home part-time but with full benefits. I moved back to NH with my parents and convinced them to get a better computer.

At my going away party, Deb and Allie ganged up on me and demanded that I at least watch a few episodes of Buffy, which was about to start airing in syndication on FX. I agreed. That Fall, I felt like I should have gotten credit for my crash course in Buffy studies. I dutifully watched the new syndicated episodes each morning and then tried to keep up with the enormous discussion boards at MBTV, which really, really wasn't easy. After reading all the new posts each morning, I was exhausted. How did anyone find the time and energy to actually post? I still don't get it.

Then, of course, September 11th. I was all alone, at home. I watched the television news for a while until it became apparent that they had run out of new information and were just regurgitating the same stuff over and over. After trying to call all my friends who lived or worked in Manhattan (and not getting through), I wandered to the computer and followed the thread on the MBTV boards for the rest of the day. Why watch one news station hoping for some little drop of new info when you can skim the reports from thousands of other people watching thousands of other stations? The rest of the week involved more of the same, and somewhere in there, Fox1013 linked to her first LJ post. I was already familiar with the LJ through Brian, so I hopped over and read. I browsed around and found other people, too. I wanted a LiveJournal!

Unfortunately, Brian had already used his invite code, but he promised to track one down for me. By early December, I got sick of waiting and just bought myself a paid account. The features were worth it anyway. Deb and I had been IMing back and forth incessantly since I'd started watching Buffy, so she started reading my LJ, too. It took very little convincing to get her to start a LJ of her own: babyhansm. I just had to set it all up myself, of course.

2001-present: The Age of LiveJournal
Eventually, I friended a bunch of people I recognized from the Buffy boards. I begged various friends and family members to get LiveJournals, but most turned their noses up or claimed not to have time. Occasionally, I'd just set one up for them anyway, like I did for sarahgo, my friend Dana (daenale), my friend Tara (loopybubble), and my brother (hakuna_budi). (Seema desigirl actually uses her journal on rare occasion.)

I continued to follow the TWoP boards and tried to post more often, though I think I only got up to about 40, mostly from a silly little manip I did. In the Spring, folks were planning a big Boston Buffy Con for people from the forums. I convinced Deb that we *had* to go, just to see what these people were like in real life. It was an anthropological experiment. So. . . yeah, it was kind of my doing that SarahGo's going away party (which happened to be the same night) was at the Barking Crab. So Deb and I could sit at the window and watch people arrive and have a few drinks before deciding whether we wanted to actually join that party. We did. Because the "Cool Kids" table (featuring caltrask55 and dreago and rocknrollgidget (then kellygirl) and several others) was full, we got stuck at the, um, scary/reject-lurkers table. I sat next to the most normal-looking person, who turned out to be Liz, (wrayburn). She was there with her roommate, Carrie-Anne (Carrie-Anne on the boards and evilbluemnm in these parts) for pretty much the same reasons as Deb and I were. We also befriended Adria (thepowerofcheese or something). The rest of the weekend was a big fiasco and very bizarre and slightly traumatic. Honestly, when Deb and Liz are reminded of it, they still end up rocking back and forth and hiding their faces, they were so traumatized. Nonetheless, the five of us decided we should get together again. Liz and Carrie-Anne and I realized that we're freakishly alike -- as in, we would have been best friends in grade school or junior high. Just as long as C-A and I wouldn't be in the same class, because if we were competing for grades, we'd kill each other.

For the rest of that season, we all (except Deb who often had to work) got together to watch episodes. Occasionally Kelly or Rachel (raebird) would join us. It was fun. TWoP by that time really started to suck. LJ was really taking off. I like getting to know whole people better, rather than brief opinions scattered throughout diverse topical threads. Then there was that whole Meta banning fiasco. Even though most of the people at meta scared the living daylights out of me, with a final eyeroll, I vowed never to go back to TWOP. Except maybe to read a recap now and then.

That's about it. In Fall 2002, I bought postcardjunkie.org and set up my own website, which, right now, is in pathetic shape. I got into making icons, but as I seem to be the only person on the planet who uses Fireworks, it was a lot of experimentation and workarounds. By surfing around friendsfriends and following comments and stuff, I found some fantastic people. kstyler who is now devi_pavarti and I bonded over international politics in early 2002. saava and I bonded over our cats and lack of patience for stupidity. Through Angie, I found Saff (crushw_eyeliner) who, on occasion, shares my brain. Somewhere along the line, keenai friended me and I remembered her from the Rosboards way back when. Through her I met jasminelily, and we all (including Deb and Carrie-Anne and Liz) had a blast on the Cape last 4th of July.

In September 2003, my nonprofit suffered a huuuge budget cut and decided they couldn't maintain the website anymore. Left to juggle two part-time jobs in law firms, I didn't get to play as much anymore. This summer, C-A and Liz decided they wanted to move into a nicer apartment, and they asked me to join them. So I moved back to the Boston area around Halloween and have been struggling to find a decent job ever since. That's about it.

Apologies if I forgot to mention anyone really important. You're all fabulous, of course. Now that we've pretty much all graduated and moved on from TWoP, I think the Boston folks should get together again. Cal keeps teasing me with lunch promises, but so far we haven't gotten around to it. Maybe in a couple weeks. . .