1. What is your name?
izubachi (also Eric)
2. Tell us something about you, your background, and what you've been up to lately?
I started e2 at 14 and became one of the precocious and Very Serious underage noders. A lot of my growing up happened through e2. I learned to write here, I began to understand the experience of true art here, I picked indentities to try on and discard from this site, I met people who are still good friends, I fucked noders, I got fucked by noders, fell in love and out of it -- the whole deal compressed into a somewhat shorter time span than your average decanoder. I couldn't really get into the whole package until I'd been around a few years and could, like, drive and plausibly look of drinking age.
Lately I've been living in the Balkans, and then in San Francisco doing a PhD in linguistics. I don't write very much that is not directly related to grad school anymore. I feel rusty.
3. How did you discover Everything, and how did you become a noder?
I found e2 through slashdot, back when I thought I was going to be a hacker and spend my time in dark rooms coding all night and sleeping all day. As it turns out, I'm not actually that interested in programming. Or linux. Now I use a mac and go to the gym and enjoy sunshine and go to parties making somewhat vacuous smalltalk on a semiregular basis. Younger me would be appalled, though he would find he is actually much better at this than at being a creative programmer.
Anyway, slashdot had these little links from significant terms to e2. I found a site full of stupid in-jokes and political rants and low levels of fact checking and some really fucking spectacular bits of literature strewn occasionally here or there. It was perfect.
4. What are your favorite writeups -- both your own and from other noders?
I'm finding myself more and more embarrassed by my writing these days -- the good parts of it don't stick out at me anymore, while the mistakes are becoming so obvious it makes me flinch. So it's hard to pick a writeup I'd be really proud to share. Maybe August 23, 2003, if only because that happens to fit a huge turning point in my life and because it seems to have inspired people for the good. Whether it's well-written or not, that one was from way deep, someplace fragile and small in my heart that has gotten stronger and bigger with time, able to hold more and stand up to more. Posting that writeup, and getting the response I did -- both made it happen.
Favorite other noders' writeups? I can't even possibly list them all. Best to look at what I have linked on my homepage. If I'm going to pick one at random as something so powerful I still think about it years later: you, the marionette. In picking that one I am unjustly excluding at least two dozen others that have stuck fast with me just as long.
5. What are your favorite and least favorite memories from E2's history?
My favorite memories are jam sessions with virtual friends in the catbox, late at night. IWho and dannye and grundoon and whole other batches of people, occasionally pushing out nodes and otherwise just riffing off of pop culture, current events, and e2 drama. I miss that.
And, duh, nodermeets. Fucking nodermeets. String together all the most intense emotional experiences of my life, the most vivid memories, and a disproportionate chunk of it so far has occurred at nodermeets. I'm not the same person I would have been without them. I still go to those as often as possible, even when they're not called nodermeets anymore (minus the e2 gossip, they still totally are).
My least favorite memories are realizing people disappear and you never really had a connection to them except through brief /msg interchanges and writeups. All they need to do is log off for good and it's like a friend has died. That hurt me enough times that I started realizing I need to invest less emotion in virtual relationships and pick out a smaller subset of them to bring into the real world.
6. What keeps you coming back?
I check my messages, in case people are still trying to reach me here. I don't really come back for the new writeups or the catbox anymore. I can't afford spending that much time on the computer anymore.
It's weird being one of those people who's just checked out, without any big goodbye or anything. I never understood how you could possibly check out of an experience as addictive as e2, until it suddenly happened.
7. What do you hope for E2's future?
Growth, adaption, new generations of crazy broken people with beautiful words to throw around. I want to come back and see a whole new canon I've played no part in, a whole new crew of noder celebrities falling in love and raging at each other. If not on e2, then somewhere else similar.
I want other people to be able to experience their own versions of what I experienced. I hope it wasn't just the stars aligning once in a lifetime.
8. What does E2 mean to you?
Learning to create a person I could love out of what's within my abilities. Realizing being very weird isn't completely incompatible with being very happy. Writing with images.
9. Who are your favorite noders? Which ones do you miss the most?
Too many. I miss jessicapierce and sensei and stand_alone_bitch and ac_hyper. But! But! You know something cool? I found out that some of the noders I miss are real people that you can actually meet in life and establish a somewhat less tenuous relationship with, if you're lucky! That's been a cool discovery.
10. Who would play you in the Everything2 movie?
I don't know actors that well. Someone young and earnest looking. Michael Cera maybe? He looks a bit like me.
11. Please fill in the blank: "E2 is to the Internet as ___ is to the world."
Iceland. Isolated and weird and ugly-beautiful and filled with kind of crazy but frighteningly literate people who all know each other.
Although I'm still waiting for e2 to threaten Europe with ash. And investment banking.
12. Any questions that I didn't ask that I should've?
I'm satisfied!
Everything2 Decaversary Interviews
If you have questions or comments, please contact izubachi or Jet-Poop.