Like most people, I have acquired a few nicknames during my time on this planet.  I’ve mentioned before ones like Hotshoe, Heinous, Christafuh, Erty, Channas and Issypher, but I recently came across a completely forgotten forum that fostered a few others.

We hear a lot these days about the permanency of the Internet, you know warnings like, “ONCE IT’S ON THE INTERNET IT’S THERE FOREVER!!!!”  But there’s a flip-side to that.  Some things that are not dangerous and can give you a fun trip down memory lane stay on the Web too.

In the spring of 2002, I saw a music video on TV (remember those days?) from someone I’d never heard of before and went to the Internet to check her out.  It was Vanessa Carlton, whom you surely know from this song:

Her website back then had all the normal info you find from any artist, from the quick bio to tour stops and information about their albums.  Like many others at the time, it also had a message board, and after spending a few minutes browsing through, I felt the need to chime in on something and posted my first message.

In the span of a few years, I would go on to post more than 1,000 messages, though 99.9999 percent of them were far from profound.  During that time, I noticed a group of people who talked about similar interests or just seemed like cool peeps, and through both our board postings and later AIM chatting, I got to know a few of them quite well.  They were the first of what I call my “Internet friends,” which at the time was a weird concept to many, but now I think is much more relatable in our Facebook/Twitter experiences.

That’s where I got those extra nicknames, like Ti.  Ti is short for Tiem, which this girl Kelley started calling me to make fun of the fact that in AIM convos I always made a typo when trying to write “time.”  The original forum no longer exists, but thanks to the cool Wayback Machine, I was reminded that Kelley and I also had a super important running debate about the merits of wearing socks:

That original forum often had issues, and eventually someone made a new message board that we all migrated to.  It’s there that Kelley, who is a few years younger than me, posted about the time she and I met in real life:

She was looking at colleges and where I went happened to be on her list, so we planned to say hi and chat for a minute after her official tour.  Since you know me, you’ll find it funny how SUPER sketched out her mom was about the whole idea of her talking to this random guy.  That meant our meeting took place in an open spot just across the street from a parking lot where Kelley’s mom was watching from the car.  She didn’t end up going to school there, and we eventually lost touch.

The name Erty (the Ert Movement was big at the time) was bestowed by another person whose life is a mystery to me now.  The biggest thing I remember about her is that she for a long time told everyone she was roughly my age, then made this big dramatic post one day admitting that she was in fact like five years younger.  She expected everyone to hate her and never speak to her again…but absolutely zero people cared.  Good times.

I haven’t had an actual conversation in a long time with the girl who started calling me Chewy (a play on chwilbur), but we are Facebook friends and more or less aware of each other’s lives (hey, Jiggy!).

I feel like we need a music break, so enjoy one of my more favorite songs from Carlton’s first album:

The cool thing about having Internet friends is that you aren’t constrained by geography.  My three closest ones from that era are an Australian, a Brazilian who lives in Japan and a Spaniard who lives in Britain.

Nerea, my Spanish friend, wished me happy birthday back in 2004 in a thread that was the equivalent of waking up to your birthday today and seeing a million notifications on Facebook:

She and I haven’t been in the closest contact over the years, but we check in from time to time.  Finding this last week reminded me to do that, and naturally we both lamented how old we feel now that it’s been almost 10 years since she posted that message.

Katie, the Australian, and Juliane, the Brazilian, I talk to all the time, and while our conversations are often about television and ridiculous things, there have also been the kinds of moments you expect with any good friends.  We’ve talked about moving far from home, jitters about starting new jobs, our families, differences in our home towns, dating and counseling each other when we’ve lost people close to us. 

Another thing I gained from that message board was the ability to use Photoshop.  The system allowed you to embed pictures in your posts, and everyone made “signatures” that were sort of personal flags that said something about them or their fandom.  Here’s an example (though not one I made) at the top of this thread in which I gave a British girl grief for how they spell neighbors:

Only certain people had the technical ability to make them, and after teaching myself the basics for my own use, I often took requests and made graphics for others.  So every time you see a picture on here that took me five seconds to prepare for the Web, the root is in those early forum postings.

Of course, there is a downside to knowing somebody only virtually.  Just like with texting, it’s easy to miss context and to create things in your mind when you don’t speak to someone in person.  I found in my messages a note from a girl who somehow decided I hated her:

Don’t worry, I assured her there was no problem, though she is not one of the people I kept in contact with at all.  Oh well.

This post is entirely too long, so I will close with one final anecdote from that era.  My inbox has a number of messages from Kelley talking about the “random PM game.”  PMs are private messages, or the email-like system on the forums.  You can send one to any registered member, and from tiem to tiem Kelley and I would PM each other a random username.  The game was that we had to send a message to that person, say something nice and send a copy back to the other player to see what we wrote.

When I think about the comments you see on YouTube or any news article today, the random PM game might be my favorite memory of the forum era.  Today’s Internet could use more random compliments.