http://www.MrEtc.net

I just discovered everything2.net. I'm a newbie. And I have an amazingly hard time fitting into new communities/cultures, as well as learning new lingo. So be sure to /msg me and yell when I do something dumb. I have read through much of the material in the Everything FAQ as well as the Everything University nodes, and will use this User's Bio area as my very first node (let me know if I did good).

A little about myself

I am an 18 year old kid with strong religious and socio-political opinions who dropped out of high school a few months into my Junior year (about 2 years ago now). I am completely supported by charity (people love me too much to let me starve :-), and the only way I foresee making any money in my lifetime is through any freelance programming or writing I may do.

I found everything2.net while surfing the web. Obviously. I actually found the link to everything2 on slashdot. I was at slashdot because a website I work for (iDevGames.com; I am the Senior Proofreader there) made the front page (the story was on the uDevGame Macintosh game development contest). Besides proofreading articles, interviews, tutorials, and the like for iDevGames, I also program my computers (I have a Commodore 64, Apple iBook, some computer with a Pentium processor running Windows 95, and a TI-89 graphing calculator. My operating system of choice is Mac OS 9, and though I do have a version of Linux I can install on my Pentium machine, Unix in general scares me -- thus I don't use Mac OS X much either. Windows 2000, despite being Windows, I actually like. somewhat. i think. maybe).

I have had an idea for something like Everything2.net before -- somewhat of a cross between a WikiWikiWeb and an online discussion forum -- though I had no idea somebody was actually writing software to accomplish the same thing! (I would look at the source, but I know nothing about Perl... I do use PHP on occasion, though). My idea was to have a bunch of articles/essays/stories, and then after each one have a list of links to related articles/essays/stories (the equivalent of softlinks here). But I think nodes (a collection of related articles) is a grand idea. As are the hardlinks which allow navigation from within the text of the articl. I'm just glad this place exists. Kudos to all who have helped with the softwar/server and to those who have spent time contributing write-ups.

In fourth grade (or somewhere around there), my teacher introduced the idea of a research paper to the class. We learned how to find books in the library; though 95% of all the "research" done was a simple process of copying material from an encyclopedia word-for-word. I, on the other hand, took the project a little too far. At first I had no idea what to write about, but my teacher helped me out by asking me what I was interested in. It turns out I was interested in military fighter jets. So I chose as my topic: "F-15 Eagle Fighter Jet". And I found quite a bit of interesting info in my elementary school's library... I decided I would write a fictional story about one F-15 stationed on an aircraft carrier somewhere, and then drop in all sorts of facts as the plot developed. Well, I got about as far as saying that the F-15 took off from the aircraft carrier before I diverged into a paper-within-the-paper on aircraft carriers. Wasn't long before I was writing about oceans, marine biology, ecosystems in general, geology and then on to discussions of war and peace, and on. I never did finish that simple fourth grade assignment. The neural networks of my brain require the same type of medium to express thought. I think everything2 may be a good place to do so.

I do not gurantee, however, that I will write any write-ups in any nodes besides my home node. I will check out the site some... maybe go check out the IRC channel... but I may never get into it. If I do become a frequently visiting/contributing member, I do not think I will ever get into the XP/Levels thing (though I appreciate the level of quality such systems are trying to maintain).

In reality, I have been creating my own personal web site (www.MrEtc.net) over the last few months with the intent of creating a place to publish my writings (as well as a few other things which are suited to the multi-media characteristic of the World Wide Web). I plan on publishing my work there, as well as posting to everything2.net, as it offers instant peer critique (with the voting system), as well as a place where people can add rebuttals, additional information, feedback, etc. extremely easily.

Chris@MrEtc.net