perrinOG 2004

Michael Vernon Stultz — and yes, Vernon was the dreaded middle name, a family heirloom from his great-grandfather that his dad originally wanted as his first name before his mom mercifully intervened — arrived on eZabel in February 2004 and proceeded to post 2,195 comments in that single calendar year. He wrote 2,310 total across his entire career. That means roughly 95% of everything he ever said on this site, he said in his first eleven months, like someone who walked into a party already mid-sentence and simply never stopped talking until the lights came on. He was studying to become a paralegal, had just quit a 2 AM FedEx Ground package handler job after two and a quarter years ("there is just only so long you can do a job like that for before you have to quit"), and had recently found a new group of friends who actually understood him. He was also, by his own cheerful admission, the king of "your mom" jokes: "you should see my friends and me sometimes it's hilarious because noone will say anything because they know if they do it will be repeated with YOUR MOM at the end of it."

Hockey was the organizing principle of his existence. He played defense — had always played defense, would always play defense — and described the satisfaction of stripping the puck from someone who thought they had him beat with more genuine enthusiasm than he ever described scoring a goal. He played roller hockey at outdoor rinks across New Jersey with a regular crew, and his signature move was throwing himself full-speed into the boards for absolutely no reason. "What's wrong with throwing yourself at the boards for no reason. How is that not normal?" he asked, apparently sincerely. His friend Aaron reportedly died laughing every time he did it, which only encouraged him. He once intimidated a group of new players so badly by repeatedly slamming himself into the boards and bouncing off at full speed that they started packing up their gear to leave. He threw himself over the bench onto the ground. He hit himself in the stomach with his own stick. He went end over end down ski slopes and considered it the ideal way to stop. His dream job, revealingly, was either video game tester or professional crash dummy — "it's hard to explain why on that one but anyone who knows me will understand."

His top interaction partners were socalgal, fivezero, modestjesse, thatdarngirl, and forrestina, and he found them fast. With socalgal he bonded over Devils hockey — she sent him playoff schedules, they debated Elias and Gomez and the "egg line," and early on he introduced himself with the full childhood nickname: "Michael michael motorcycle turn the key and watch him pee. Does that finally solve the mystery for you." With rocksupastar he dove into Kingdom of Loathing, building a meat-accumulation strategy for their clan's defenses and once accidentally listing twelve Hell Ramens at 9,999 meat instead of 99,999, then watching in horror as someone snapped them all up at the corrected price of 99,999 each — 1,199,988 meat total — and sent him a profanity-laced message demanding a refund. He agonized publicly about whether the buyer deserved their money back after being so rude about it.

He had read most of the Star Wars expanded universe novels and some of them multiple times — the Zahn trilogy three times. He remembered dragging his mom to the bookstore as a kid, begging her to buy them on sight. He knew who Jacen Solo was ("He's totally my favorite star wars character") and could explain in granular detail how Mara Jade's training differed from other Force users, why Jaina became an X-wing pilot, and what it meant to be Force-sensitive without knowing it. He approached these books with the same precision he brought to hockey analysis: the Rangers had no chemistry and were too old, Elias had five points in that 8-2 demolition of the Sabres, Rafalski was +3, and teams that bought their way to championships were an offense against the sport. He once tracked the Super Bowl via play-by-play on superbowl.com because he was at someone's house and they never turned on the game — "had fun and all but still would have liked to have caught the game" — and accepted this with the good-natured resignation of someone who was always slightly more invested in the outcome than the people around him.

Beneath the sports stats and Star Wars lore was someone genuinely thoughtful and oddly self-aware. He knew he had OCD tendencies — "I obsess about things and just want to do it all the time" — and that cracking book spines bothered him only when he did it himself, never when others did it to his books, and he couldn't explain why. He believed love started as infatuation but could grow into something real if you didn't mistake the early part for the whole thing: "the heart is more treacherous than anything else... your heart is like the horses and your reasoning is like the reigns." He had a deep, specific hatred of being lied to — "I can forgive a lot of things from people but for some reason forgiving someone who has lied to my face I have a lot of trouble forgiving" — and offered advice to younger members struggling with loneliness or doubt with a warmth that was entirely unperformative. He was learning ASL through a deaf community connected to his congregation, working through the challenge of signing prayers and conducting scripture readings, and described the progress with methodical good humor: Jehovah seemed to be blessing the effort, he needed to work on his facial expressions. By August 2004 he'd stepped back from ASL, a little sad about it, but trusting that "all that effort and time is not wasted because who knows how Jehovah might be able to use those later on." His cat, he noted, had started matching his personality — antisocial most of the time, then suddenly following him around the house demanding attention.

eZabel Personality Type: ISTJ — "The Defenseman." Reliable, precise, and considerably warmer than the type typically gets credit for, he was the one in the thread who had actually looked up the rule, who could tell you why speeding tickets get reduced in court, who would correct your Star Wars lore gently but firmly with a "lol" at the end so nobody felt bad. He posted with the intensity of a full hockey season crammed into one year, then appeared intermittently in 2005, 2006, 2007, and briefly in 2009 to announce he'd lost forty pounds and been accepted to MTS. He went all in, and then he went home, and what he left behind is remarkably complete.