1. What is your name?
Greg. Hi.
2. Tell us something about you, your background, and what you've been up to lately?
Middle-aged married Melburnian with an abandoned physics degree, a diploma in photography and a job reading newspapers. I like Greg Egan, sumo, nineteenth-century pornography and movies with submarines in them. I prefer short-leg boxer briefs and I put the toilet seat down.
3. How did you discover Everything, and how did you become a noder?
Possibly uniquely: dead trees. e2 got a column-inch in the what's-cool-in-the-World-Wide-Web sidebar on the weekend tech page of the West Australian. Sufficiently intriguing was said inch to poke a hole in one evening's drunk-on-Usenet time. The whole "sumbitting" thing was kinda stupid fun for a little bit, but then there was "Ack!" and dannye (hisself, with paternal restraint) entreating me to (I paraphrase) stop posting fucking garbage, and I realized there were people in this thing. Like Usenet! Once I started wanting to make them like me, I was stuck.
I wonder if that Westie journo is still around.
4. What are your favorite writeups -- both your own and from other noders?
My own output is too scant to plot bell-curves. I'm quietly fond of Lone Pine, but Trees was funnest to write.
Within the greater not-by-me portion of the site, there's no shortage of stuff I can revisit to giggle or goggle at. Final tape recording in the cockpit of the space-ship or The Lardyboy Colonator 5000 or How to defend yourself against a coconut or Torturing your Sims or When you're a quarterback, you should not screw with the minds of your linemen or Woof! Bonk. are a few that qualify among the former; then there are meisterwerke like For a boat of white bone, and we three or You love these machines. These machines are dead: a love story. or Why the willow weeps or spider camp or sea red sound that make my brainparts a little good-melty inside. Oh, and I miss Revelation of the Lamb in Four Parts, dammit.
Oh, and also The Custodian: please get on with New York Magician.
Oh, oh, and also as well, everything by heppigirl or she may strike me again.
5. What are your favorite and least favorite memories from E2's history?
My least favourite e2 memories are when people have said mean things to me or said they're right when I'm right and they're wrong. This is how e2 is like life.
e2's Summer Holiday (when the site was deprecated in favour of a nifty picture of a Honda) was horrible. But it did break my XP habit and I've barely noded since, so that's nice.
Which brings us to good memories. Strangely enough, all the best are away from the site and in the fleshy company of the folks behind the usernames. It'd be tough to split the nodermeeting pack but for my wedding being one too. WIN right there.
6. What keeps you coming back?
What I should have put under "favorite writeups", which is "The ones over there→". That perpetual scroll of new material: unpredictable, never boring, more often than should really be feasible amazing. Beats the fuck out of Boing Boing.
7. What do you hope for E2's future?
What I hope for, and what I expect, is more of the same. I'm of the unfashionable view that e2 really hasn't changed all that much. It's always fundamentally been a big toybox: kids come and go, different kids have made some different things in some different ways, but it's still just kids sharing toys and making friends. Whatever e2 has been "for" or "about" at any one time, most of the really good, memorable content left behind has been largely in spite of, not because of it. And much of that by people who never noticed or cared what the place really is.
So yeah: to keep being a kickarse playset.
8. What does E2 mean to you?
It's this huge magnetic machine thing, like imagine in space or something, that magnets in all these people who, on whatever level, love to play with words, and it becomes this forum-trashdump-playground-whorehouse-battledome of wordplaying that is somehow so fascinating that people love it so much that they all agree they love each other too, except for the ones they hate, which doesn't matter because it all keeps the machine GOING and GOING...
Playset, see above.
9. Who are your favorite noders? Which ones do you miss the most?
For reading, I've amassed quite a never-tire-of rollcall: etouffee, jp, doyle, iceowl, sam512, ToasterLeavings, evaline, izubachi, Aerobe, Dimview... so many more I could add if I had the attention span. ChristineWinter is a wondrous recent addition.
Anyone on that roll who's fled, consider missed. Add some shortlived names whose nodeuvres (node, oeuvre, like it? ehh, fuckya) are a joy to have around, like backstage and Interstellar Scrotum. Missed too is Servo5678's obsessive, kaleidoscopic factnoding. And I'm sad know_no_bounds's "node your jazz matter" project went moribund.
That covers noders as er-ers of nodes. While leaving it at that might be unforgivably dry, I'll refrain from taxing the question's scope with a gratuitous list of noder friends. There are many who I rate for just being here and being lovely - if you're one, fair chance I've told you, and if it was over a beer, know I feel blessed.
I really, really miss sneff, though.
10. Who would play you in the Everything2 movie?
Danny Trejo standing behind a stack of cardboard boxes.
11. Please fill in the blank: "E2 is to the Internet as ___ is to the world."
e2. Isn't it the same thing? IT'S THE FUTURE.
12. Any questions that I didn't ask that I should've?
You should have started some of them with What's the deal with...?. That's way funny.
Everything2 Decaversary Interviews
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