Ladies and gentlemen of Everything 2,
Link and Link.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future,
Linking would be it.
The long-term benefits of linking have been proven by Pseudo_Intellectual,
whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliabfile than my own (limited) experience.
I will dispense this advice now.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your votes.
Oh, never mind.
You will not understand the power and beauty of your votes
until you've used your daily quota.
But trust me.
This afternoon you'll think back to this morning
and recall in a way you can't grasp now
how much possibility lay in those C!s and votes
and how you wish you had some more
You are not as much of an XP whore as you imagine
Don't worry about your XP to Node ratio.
Or worry, and know that worrying is as effective
as trying to explain Everything to your non-Everythingite friends.
The real troubles in your life
are apt to be the things that never crossed your worried mind.
The kind that you'd never think of noding in your day log.
Node one thing every day that scares you.
Research
Don't be reckless with your downvotes
Don't bitch in the chatterbox about people who are reckless with theirs
Node
Don't waste your votes on trolls.
Sometimes you're at the top of the other users list,
sometimes you're kind of in the middle.
The race for XP is long
and in the end it's only with yourself.
Remember /msgs you receive.
Forget the softlinks.
If you succeed in doing this,
tell me how
Keep your old Everything Daily Reports.
Don't make nuke requests for your writeups with negative reputations.
Vote
Don't feel guilty if you don't have a 'mission drive within everything'.
The most interesting newbies I know didn't know what theirs was.
Some of the most interesting M-Noders I know still don't
Check your spellings
Be kind to DMan.
You'll miss him when he's gone
Maybe you'll be cooled, Maybe you won't.
Maybe you'll reach Level 9, Maybe you won't.
Maybe you'll still be noding at 4am.
Maybe you'll only stay here for two days and then bugger off back to your real life.
Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either.
Your XP is half chance. So is everybody elses.
Enjoy your homenode.
Use it anyway you can.
Don't be afraid of it or what other noders think of it.
They can't vote on it anyway.
Assimilate your ass into Everything.
Even if you have nowhere to do it but in work or college.
Read Everything University
and do exactly what it says.
Do not read getting to know you nodes
they will only make you feel angry.
Get to know your fellow noders. You never know when they'll be gone for good.
Be nice to the Everything Editors. They might help you edit your sloppily typed writeup one day.
Understand that users come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on.
Work hard to node your geography and lifestyle,
because the older you get, the more you'll use everything as a reminder of what life was like
when you were a non-Everythingite.
Read the daylogs, because one day one might make you cry.
Change the colour scheme once, but put it back to the default before it makes you sick.
C!
Accept certain inalienable truths:
Idiots will troll.
Stupid nodes will prosper. Your best nodes will get downvoted.
And when they do, you'll feel just a little bit hurt.
Node for the ages.
Don't expect anyone else to support your noding.
Maybe you'll node at work.
Maybe you'll node to avoid work.
You never know when you will get fired for noding in front of the boss.
Enjoy yourself. This is utmost in importance.
Be careful how much you talk about Everything in the Real World.
Noding is a form way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off,
painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.
But trust me on the linking.
A humble parody of Everybody's Free (To wear sunscreen). (Written before DMan left)