So... I guess I'm back.
I first found E2 over Christmas break, my senior year in high school, and I was enthralled by the concept -- the same sort of inspiration you get when you fly in an airplane for the first time or when you decide at 2 AM one freezing night what you're going to do for the rest of your life. I've always been the kind of person who tried to learn as much as I could, and (although I was just beginning to find this out back then) I've always had a fascination with networks, how they link such disparate objects together and change the world in such an abstract, yet visible, way. Everything2 pretty much hooked me instantly.
I hung around, reading a lot, writing the occasional mediocre writeup or quest entry, filled in some nodeshells. It was the the last semester before college, and I guess my newfound free time (I was/am the extremely studious type) met up with my idealism, that sense of now-contribute-something you get once you get pushed out into the real world. Plus, I mean, y'all had a 5-line node on Robert Frost. And that just bugged me.
Then college swallowed me up, and I'm just now getting back to the surface.
I still have a year to go, but this is the first summer I've had where I haven't been taking summer school or studying abroad or something like that since... dang, 2002. I've checked in on this place from time to time, and seen the monthly "blast, the server's down again" posts on the LJ group, but I think I'm really going to try and get my feet wet here, once again. I've been around a lot of the Internet since I was 17, and I still haven't found anywhere that's quite like E2.
So, what's new? There's the ads--not the prettiest things ever, but obviously necessary. Have y'all looked into Project Wonderful? I hear they do some pretty nifty work over there. There's a bunch of new names I don't recognize, a podcast, who knows what else. There're even a bunch of new tags down at the bottom of this writeup--when I was here there used to be what, like, 3? 4? Clearly I have some exploring to do. But (unsurprisingly) Butterfinger McFlurry's still there; somewhat more surprisingly, none of my work's been deleted. And there still isn't a writeup for Robert Frost! Dangit!
Anyway, I guess this is my sortof-unnecessary "I'm back" post; I'm going to try writing (re-writing?) for E2 soon, hopefully with more fiction and less of that pedantic style I had 4 years ago. I might do that new quest, though, so it may not show up for a while. But yeah, if there's anything that I absolutely must know about E2 now, feel free to let me know. I'd hate to miss something important.