Everything2 Decaversary Interviews: Milen

1. What is your name?

John Harris, username Milen.

2. Tell us something about you, your background, and what you've been up to lately?

I write the @Play column for GameSetWatch and occasional Game Design Essentials articles for Gamasutra, I know rather a lot about roguelike games, I maintain the blog Roasted Peanuts about the comic strip Peanuts, and I'm working on a computer game called In Profundis.

3. How did you discover Everything, and how did you become a noder?

That was a while back. I discovered Everything through Slashdot, and became a noder for writing practice.

4. What are your favorite writeups -- both your own and from other noders?

My own, I'm not sure, it's been a long time since I reviewed most of them. My style in those seems a lot more "out there" than I'd be comfortable with writing now. What Would Cthulhu Do? and Gauntlet are favorites. Spinach Rule I like, even though it had a negative reputation the last time I looked at it, just for how weird it is while still hanging together reasonably well.

Well there is one I remember, and keep trying to come back to, but I can't find it anymore. It was a hilarious writeup about brushing away spiders, but given as if it were a description of a dance with that spider. The fact that I can't find it now suggests to me that it has been deleted, which would be a great shame.

It's been too long since I read the site in any way to remember favorites, unfortunately.

5. What are your favorite and least favorite memories from E2's history?

I had a difficult time not taking writeup deletions personally. Favorite moments included chilling with Pseudo_Intellectual and TheBooBooKitty in the chatterbox.

I had a lot of fun once soft-linking every node with "versus" or "vs" in the title that I could find to the writeup for "XTC vs Adam Ant." Yeah, I'm kind of a geek.

6. What keeps you coming back?

Mostly idle curiosity. Sometimes I find good things, but it's very hard to find those things if they're not actually on the front page when I visit. A lot of E2's content feels buried to me.

7. What do you hope for E2's future?

I hope it survives and prospers. I'd love to write here some more in the future, but I rarely find the time, unfortunately.

8. What does E2 mean to you?

It's a fun place to learn new things and, sometimes laugh, and it's still home to some of the cleverest writing on the internet.

9. Who are your favorite noders? Which ones do you miss the most?

Pseudo_Intellectual I miss. There are others, but I never really learned many user names.

10. Who would play you in the Everything2 movie?

I really have no idea.

11. Please fill in the blank: "E2 is to the Internet as ___ is to the world."

I dunno, a good four-year liberal arts college?

12. Any questions that I didn't ask that I should've?

Probably, but I'm not sure I'm a good authority to ask concerning what those are.

Everything2 Decaversary Interviews

If you have questions or comments, please contact Milen or Jet-Poop.

I just found this interview, which I had forgotten I'd even done. It's now longer between when it went up and now than when E2 started and it went up. It is the year 2023 now.

My E2 username, Milen, is a name I haven't used online for decades, a handle on the ancient virtual world WorldsAway Dreamscape, which is only a couple of years younger than the World Wide Web itself. I still remember a handful of people from back then: Ivanova, Kethery, Aule, Gib, NoNoBadKitty, Spellbinder, Zippy, Indigo, Fawn, Ravenwhyte, Rosaleah, MarianneG, Brynne, MarvL (that rascal), and especially Gillian. I haven't been there in a long while, but I hear that an old member is still keeping it up, although he charges a lot to join.

I greatly miss Gillian these days. We used to talk on the phone fairly often. I don't think I have ever had a greater friend. I've tried finding them online since then, but with the demise of AIM my last means of contact (which I hadn't even used for many years) failed. I don't even know if she's still alive. If these words carry forward into the future, beyond the range of my life, I hope this memory of a past time touches them.

I'm not sure why Jet-Poop thought I was a good subject to interview. Even back then I was rarely on Everything2. But I was pleased to see the message still resting at the top of my catbox list.

In the time since then my @Play columns have been collected in the book Exploring Roguelike Games from CRC Press. I now have a gaming blog called Set Side B that I work very hard at putting new things on daily.

The used car I bought off a friend a few months ago has decided it won't shift up out of third gear and I'm very worried about that.

I am fifty years old now. I have never had a decent job in my life. I have little income, and no savings. I am desperately worried about both the present and the future. I have always been unsure how I was going to make my way through life, and if anything I'm even more unsure now.

Yay?