jeremias' profile (website)

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Name: Jeremy Osborn
Joined: September 8, 2001
Also On: Mastodon

Contributions

MeFi: 59 posts , 1426 comments
MetaTalk: 4 posts , 124 comments
Ask MeFi: 150 questions , 923 answers
Music: 0 posts , 0 comments, 0 playlists
Music Talk: 0 posts, 0 comments
Projects: 0 posts, 0 comments, 1 vote
Jobs: 3 posts
IRL: 0 posts, 1 comment
FanFare: 0 posts, 26 comments
FanFare Talk: 0 posts, 0 comments

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Favorites: 1479
Favorited by others: 8296

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MeFi tags: music (6) brokenlink (4) Flash (4) photography (4) technology (4) adobe (3) art (3) game (3) games (3) arcade (2)
Ask MeFi tags: music (14) design (7) OSX (6) travel (6) education (5) video (5) apple (4) audio (4) books (4) business (4)

About

What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

In the 1990s, I lived in El Salvador and Central America for over a year. When I came back to the states, the internet had happened and I started using the Spanish version of my first name for all my handles.

For example, I had jeremias@aol.com for a while and I'm still hanging onto jeremias@yahoo.com for some perverse reason. That account hasn't been usable for over 20 years for all the spam that it gets.

Speaking of Yahoo, I used it when it looked like this.

"My" Internet was a haven for fringe dwellers and I felt right at home, whether it was learning how to play the didgeridoo, browsing the Pynchon Usenet group, dissecting Stanley Kubrick's screenplays, scanning Salvadoran election results, or sourcing suppliers of cereal magnets from the 1970s: a little bit of digging in Usenet or gopher would eventually lead me to my people.

My family was very concerned with my interest in the web. It's hard to blame them, mainstream media portrayed "cyberspace" as a hangout for perverts and pedophiles.

MEFI SPECIFIC
I have been a member of this unique community almost as long as it has been around. I can't imagine the Web without it. I love the intelligent folk who populate these pages and when the "filter" works there's no better place online to be surprised and inspired.

Some contributions I've made over the years stick out:

The Ask-Mefi "Life-altering experiences" thread.
Back in February 2005 I posted this question to the still young Ask-Metafilter: Life-altering experiences. Can you point to a single experience in your life, as a child, which you can define as having contributed to the person you are today?

The response was epic and inspiring and way beyond my modest expectations. The thread took on a life of its own, and eventually escaped the orbit of MeFi when people began linking to it outside of mefi. Andy Baio of Waxy.org nailed it succinctly IMO as a "fascinating thread tapping into the soul of Metafilter". The theme was picked up and somewhat bastardized by lifehacker almost a year after the thread was closed.

Lifehacker diluted the original question by changing the singular "experience" to the plural "experiences". My original point was very specific and perhaps why it has so much resonance, I was looking for one experience, not several. It's fascinating to see the thread get "rediscovered": in December 2007 a metatalk thread introduced it to a new group of people almost two years later. It has been favorited over 352 400 450 500 548 times and years later is still high on the AskMefi list of popular favorites . Mefi user philosophistry even turned it into a book.

(I'm not sure if the question would spark the same response today, AskMefi was a much different place back then, questions stayed on the front page for a while, so readers could find it on the front page for the entire day and throughout the evening.)

Other AskMefi threads I've started that I enjoy going back to:
Simple pleasures in life?
Help me find an annoying player name for a point-and-shoot computer game.

IN THE BLUE
My contributions "in the blue" haven't nearly matched the AskMefi thread. However I can still remember instigating a notorious thread on web comics and particularly whether or not the strip Achewood was funny or not. Still an entertaining read after all these years.