1. What is your name?
randombit (or Jack)
2. What is your quest?
My current quest is to figure out what my quest is.
3. What is your favorite color?
Blue? Green? Gray? It varies, I guess.
4. How did you discover Everything, and how did you become a noder?
I discovered it via Slashdot, back when it was relatively common for Slashdot to link to e2 writeups in articles. After reading 2 or 3 interesting things, I signed up for an account, and eventually started writing. Mostly stuff that was crap and was promptly blown away, but, after all, this is how one learns.
5. What do you see as the most significant changes that have happened to Everything over the past decade?
It has, at least perceptually, become much less active. When I signed up, it felt like new writeups were showing up at a rather frantic pace. It feels very quiet now... but, I don't necessarily spend enough time here anymore for my perceptions to be at all accurate.
6. What are your favorite writeups -- both your own and from other noders?
My favorites among my own are MD 20/20, because it's silly and yet somehow factual, and The Rendezvous Lounge, because reading it makes me nostalgic. My favorite writeup as a series is sam512's Fine Structure; I am definitely eager to read his first book. Other writeups that have stayed with me - A moral system based on more and better sex, Mr. Hotel's How to meet the most girls, sensei's Short hair on women, and allseeingeye's Guns don't kill people. Robots kill people. - clearly, despite me being a factnoder, I actually prefer the fiction, essays, and oddities of e2.
7. What are your favorite and least favorite memories from E2's history?
Oh, I don't know. Honestly, I've always been here for the writing (my own and that of others). I'm not sure that I have ever really paid that much attention to the grand historical dramas that have played out.
Getting my first C! was a nice feeling. Though these days I can't even remember what writeup it was on (or if it is still active, for that matter).
8. What keeps you coming back?
Seeing if (9) has come true yet. (And to see if new updates to Fine Structure have been posted)
9. What do you hope for E2's future?
I would like to see sam512's vision of 50,000 regular e2 users become reality. I'm not sure that I'll be one of them, nor am I certain that his ideas are necessarily the best approach, but at least he's trying. (And yes, I could become a +1 to the current set of users by just starting to write stuff again, but so it goes).
10. What does E2 mean to you?
You know, I'm really not sure. Which is perhaps why I've been more or less gone from here for the last few years.
11. Is E2 a writing site, a community site, an online encyclopedia, or something else? What should it be?
I think e2 is not (and should not try to be) an encyclopedia. It's not that Wikipedia has got a lock in the field - for one thing, read any Wikipedia article on a topic you know well, and count the errors. And in fact for topics that are noded, I trust e2 far more than Wikipedia (but this is neither here nor there). My objection to the idea is more that even attempting such an encyclopedia seems to involve sucking every microgram of fun out of the experience for either the writer or the reader. And if writing (and reading) isn't fun, why the #%@$ are you doing it? E2 can (and in many ways already has) far surpass being a mere online encyclopedia - it can be the place where the original ideas come from, the ideas and plans and thoughts and stories that 5 or 15 or 50 years later the encyclopedias write dry and humorless articles about.
I suppose 'writing site' is a reasonable approximation of what I think e2 is/should be. Community is great, and can feed and assist the writing, but, at least for me, community on e2 has always secondary to the writing.
12. Who are your favorite noders? Which ones do you miss the most?
sam512, for his amazingly good fiction, and drive to make e2 a big bustling place. theonomist, for the audacity. ariels for the math (and for his I HAVE NO CAPS LOCK KEY AND I MUST NOT SHOUT). sensei is someone I never interacted with on the site, but his writing often touches me. I like reading Templeton's updates - another person I've never met but still care about in a strange way. IWhoSawTheFace writes a lot of amazing stuff... I met him twice at nodermeets but never had a chance to talk with him as much as I liked. He seemed like a very interesting guy in person as well as on the internets.
13. Who would play you in the Everything2 movie?
Shane Carruth
15. Any questions that I didn't ask that I should've?
Nothing coming to mind.
Everything2 Decaversary Interviews
If you have questions or comments, please contact randombit or Jet-Poop.