MethoD steps out of the shadows of lore
Out of nowhere someone pings our Twitter account tonight. Just signed up for it a few months ago in April.
Stop the presses. The MethoD?
As his tweet says, this utter myth whipped up Icrontic 3.0 back in 2001, the version that greeted many of our oldest old-timers until the day it all came down in 2003. There was an abrupt transition of a week or two during which there was no main page to the site at all, only a forum, and in that moment is when I got Internet-angry enough ("hey! where'd my news page go!?") to register for my very first forum.
He was some nameless, self-described Internet script kiddie that crossed paths with Mortin back then. The only contact info we had was an AIM screen name, and he was never online. Seeing him in the "Who's Online" section of Icrontic was like watching a spectre drift thru the site - no one would believe you, and no trace was ever left. I think he made 5 posts ever, and only in the staff forum.
It's possible I was mildly obsessed with the mystery. I didn't know a damn thing about the web, was DYING to learn about it, and here was this person spitting out this incredible website and then disappearing like it was nothing. I just couldn't believe it.
And then one day my freshman year of college, MethoD was suddenly on AIM.
I pounced. I pumped him for information for at least an hour and he humored me, describing some of the architecture of the site and dropping knowledge bombs (this was the first time I ever heard of object-oriented programming) like it was nothing. My mind was blown. And then he was gone, and I never heard from him again.
Until today. And he was two years younger than me the whole time. Dammit.
I won't say our brief encounter changed my life per se, but if the definitive moment of the direction of my life was choosing to move to Michigan a become a web developer in 2007, then this guy was largely responsible for steps 2 & 3 of 15 or so along the way.
And the real clincher is: The most mysterious person I ever ran into on the Internet, the last true enigma of our lore, signed up to Twitter with a username of first name + last name + birth year and then casually waved.
The Internet, how does it work.
Comments
In 2001:
And bam. Icrontic, created by teenagers younger than me. What I'd give to impress anyone half as much as I was impressed that day.
I once managed to speak with him. I felt like I was being schooled by a god. Revered!
You young whippersnappers are so lucky these days
WOW...
I'm happy to have helped all those years ago. I wish I could have been around to help salvage the site after the hackening! What a huge loss
Icrontic was a huge part of my Junior High years. Mortin, my little brother, and I played EverQuest (I went by the worst name ever, Poklemius!; he went by the much cooler, Maugrib) after we got bored of that custom UO server we ran. Good times!
I'm stoked that I was able to leave such a mark on ya'll. Especially keebs! When I made the site all those years ago, I remember the first piece of feedback Kieth gave me on the site before the iteration I posted on Twitter: "bro, I could wipe my ass down a wall and make a better website than this."
He had a way with words
Made me really jump into design and development, crack open the MySQL manuals, and scour Kevin Yank's tutorials on SitePoint.
Maybe I'll drop in for a TF2 session sometime. I played the hell out of that back in the day. I'm probably a bit rusty, but I'll bet my Demo skills are still serviceable.