1. What is your name?
Carson
2. What is your quest?
When I find out, you'll be the first to know.
3. What is your favorite color?
Blue. Dark blue.
4. How did you discover Everything, and how did you become a noder?
I followed a link from Slashdot to E1. Played there a while, and hung around #everything on Slashnet--was eventually told I was an idiot to still be playing with E1 and that I should come join the cool kids at E2. So I did. I always did give in to peer pressure easy.
5. What do you see as the most significant changes that have happened to Everything over the past decade?
Probably the addition of the general ability to add non-E2 hyperlinks. It was the last step from changing E2 from an enclave to just another website.
6. What are your favorite writeups -- both your own and from other noders?
In terms of votes, The haunting awkwardness of ex-girlfriends is by far my most popular, and it's probably one of my better ones; although I definitely think it shows my youth at the time of its writing. Probably my personal favorite of mine is I opened a fortune cookie for you yesterday, although both Shimmer over bridges like the river was a dream and We flow on the mournful wind in a dream of dying are worth mentioning--the former because I had the wonderful experience of receiving a msg saying that I had exactly captured a place I had never actually visited, and the latter simply because the memory which spawned it is--still!--so very vivid in my mind.
Of others' writeups, I have to mention Butterfinger McFlurry. And more or less everything written by stand/alone/bitch and aphexious. Nathan, This Is Unacceptable is one I reread periodically.
I'm somewhat ashamed to say that I can't really think of many more off the top of my head--no reflection on others' writing, just on my memory. It's a copout, but: look at what I've C!'d.
7. What are your favorite and least favorite memories from E2's history?
A definite favorite is celebrating the New Year in New York with thefez and Frankie and too many others to count. I also had a very good conversation with yossarian about lambics at DBA in New Orleans (and he also made me aware of Ben Harper, whose music I now enjoy very much).
As for least favorite, I don't feel like I was ever involved enough in the politics to have real "bad" memories of E2 itself. There is at least one person, however, to whom E2 introduced me and to whom I behaved extremely poorly. I still feel very guilty about that and probably always will.
8. What keeps you coming back?
The denizens of E2 are people who care about words and who realize that words actually do matter (which is only another way of saying "writers"). And then there's the absurdity and (admittedly sometimes childish) wit of the Chatterbox.
9. What do you hope for E2's future?
I'm not sure it has one. Oh, I'm sure the site could continue to exist as long as clampe's university suffers it to, but E2 reminds me of nothing else at this point so much as FidoNet in the mid- to late-90's: reduced to its core participants, a group which can only shrink--the only question is how quickly. I remember a time when "New Writeups" moved so fast that I couldn't keep up. This is--to say the least--no longer the case.
10. What does E2 mean to you?
Thomas Merton wrote in his autobiography about reading D.H. Lawrence and talking with his advisor at Columbia about appreciating it as art without thinking of it as any reflection on the way a man should live his life. In many ways, this is E2 in a nutshell.
11. Is E2 a writing site, a community site, an online encyclopedia, or something else? What should it be?
I'm a descriptivist. I don't think it's my place to tell anyone what a group of words should be.
12. Who are your favorite noders? Which ones do you miss the most?
I've already mentioned some writers, but I'd also like to mention dannye, etouffee, jessicapierce, and Chras4. I honestly haven't read much of her writing, but I think androjen is a talented visual artist (and I'm still willing to buy that portrait with the goggles for my office).
As I said earlier, in some ways I've never been as involved as some others, so there's not really anyone I truly miss.
13. Who would play you in the Everything2 movie?
Hopefully, Colin Firth. My wife thinks he's hot.
Everything2 Decaversary Interviews
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