yayOG 2004

A professional software developer from New Jersey, Chris joined eZabel in February 2004 under the handle yay — profile name "yay forpizza" — and within weeks had become one of the site's most prolific and genuinely unpredictable voices. With 1,867 comments across five years and a peak of 811 in 2004 alone, he operated at two speeds simultaneously: rigorous technical expert and committed absurdist performance artist. His crew tells the story — iwz, socalgal, fivezero, juicymango, and rocksupastar were his most frequent collaborators, but yay threaded himself through 113 different members' conversations with the energy of someone who had just discovered that the internet was, in fact, a place where you could say anything.

And say anything he did. His signature move was the escalating bit that started plausible and ended somewhere in outer space. He founded and ran the Tickle Council, a sprawling multi-thread governance structure complete with leadership disputes, drafted concerns, pie graphs ("pie graphs taste good and show a lot about pie"), and formal ouster proceedings against ilikebirds for the position of Master Tickler. He referred to himself in the third person with a confidence that bordered on liturgical: "I am a winner. I've worked hard to be a winner. I've had to beat other winners to be the master winner." He listed his leadership qualifications as being tall enough to reach high shelves, doing "a fairly decent robot" that "absolutely kills tension between new friends at a party," and typing fast enough that "if we are on a boat that hit an iceburg and are drowning with access to a keyboard I can type our way out of it." He once wrote a choose-your-own-adventure story starring a three-foot-tall cheeto-addicted dwarf named RedCobby. He composed freeform raps about bagels. He wrote a poem about a handless man named Bob who could not eat corn on the cob and ended up having pillow fights. He posted the word QUESA-DILLA approximately seventy-five consecutive times in a single comment and then did it again in the next one.

But here is the thing that made yay genuinely valuable rather than merely entertaining: the man could actually do things. When someone couldn't log into their laptop on a domain controller, yay walked them through DOMAIN versus workgroup authentication with the patience of a real consultant, because he was one. When deanh77 posted about .NET and Mono, yay dove into a multi-comment technical discussion about ECMA standards, MSIL, marshalling, and the implications of Microsoft submitting to ISO for the first time — and he clearly knew what he was talking about. He debugged his own eZabel login issues by hypothesizing about hex-encoded password hashing and session cookie persistence. He built little web tools for ilikebirds — a spoiler button, a color-letter generator, a tagger — just because he felt like it. At work, he wrote twenty thousand lines of code for a three-tier architecture bridging C++ libraries on AIX/Unix with .NET web services, and then came to eZabel to describe his technical frustrations with QT and X-server printing barriers in the same breath as joking about dragons eating thai. His forum distribution — General Chat and Musings leading, but Geek Chat, Programming, and Games all heavily represented — maps a person who came for the tech talk and stayed because eZabel was genuinely fun.

Underneath the performance was someone more reflective than the bit would suggest. His second wedding anniversary journal is one of the most honest things anyone wrote on eZabel: "I've grown more healthy, mostly mentally and emotionally, as a person in these two years than I have my whole life. Now when a glass is half empty, I look forward to keeping the glass when I'm done drinking the other half." He wrote about his wife Kamila with a warmth that cut through his usual comedic register — the ring shopping story where he deliberately played dumb to maintain the surprise, their Baldur's Gate co-op sessions, cooking together, the way she made Mexican food that he genuinely believed was "from another planet." He had a capacity for quiet wisdom that surfaced when the forum needed it: on creativity, he told aspiring musicians to "spit out your emotions, don't worry about how nice it sounds... just let the emotions drive. Your head will eventually bleed out and steer for you." On past mistakes, he wrote simply: "It's the direction of the mistakes, do they make me a better person then I already am?" He liked computers with a devotion that was essentially spiritual — he once described a 200GB hard drive's write speed with breathless excitement and dreamed of building a portable graphics engine, a PIC-based electronic input system, and a regex interpreter that converted plain English conditionals. He never finished most of these side projects and found that funny rather than frustrating.

He also burned the siding off his parents' house as a kid by lighting a pile of leaves on fire, yanked a three-inch splinter from his leg after flipping over a picket fence in sixth grade, and described his 1990 Pontiac LE's "ice blue color" as "so hot" it made him "feel like twisting up on a swing to spin in circles after eating a big dinner." He owned four t-shirts that he rotated weekly, meaning one day was always a re-wear, and he was entirely at peace with this. He played World of Warcraft as both a mage and a priest, created a Horde alt guild called "In the Fridge" where everyone had food names (his was Catsup), and once described the elf quest zones as "Goto Adrishenal in WadawadaNener land and get the Scesanchi Helm of Lipitus the flying Goat Fish." He thought cell phones were pointless, Ticketmaster was the worst monopoly on earth, and that all top soil should be replaced by bottom soil while the originals were frozen in Alaska. These were not his strangest positions.

eZabel Personality Type: ENTP — "The Brilliant Distraction." A genuine software engineer who could debug your network authentication and then immediately pivot to a five-hundred-word treatise on why fire trucks should have red hair. He brought real technical depth, real emotional warmth, and an absolutely unhinged comedic sensibility to everything he touched, and eZabel was measurably more alive for every one of his 1,867 comments. The kind of person who would write "dear future chris, it is 2006, I hope by the time you read this you have grown a mustache" while listening to his favorite band, and mean every word of it.