coreyfeldmanOG 2003

Jeff Copus showed up to eZabel in July 2003 for one reason, and he was refreshingly honest about it: "i just did it to get invited to the next geekfest it looked too fun to miss." A Pittsburgh kid finishing up art school and freshly baptized, he chose the screen name coreyfeldman -- a reference that, like Jeff himself, managed to be funny and slightly offbeat without trying too hard. He posted sporadically at first, dropping band recommendations from Warped Tour in Cleveland (Vaux, Yellowcard, Vendetta Red) and finding scriptural parallels in George Orwell's 1984 with the casual enthusiasm of someone who genuinely couldn't separate the things he loved from the things he believed. Then life carried him away for nearly two years. When he resurfaced in late 2005, it was from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he'd moved with his wife Liam, found a townhouse downtown a block from the farmers market, and landed a job as a marketing and development specialist at the Highmark Caring Place, a non-profit supporting grieving children. The guy who vanished as a student reappeared as a young professional -- still funny, still curious, but now with a mortgage on his mind and opinions about 401(k) management.

His 2006 explosion onto the site -- 271 comments in a single year, more than half his lifetime total -- turned coreyfeldman into one of Musings' most reliable voices. He was the guy who described returning to a redesigned eZabel as "gone home after moving away to find that your parents have rearranged your room. While it is still your room, with your stuff, it feels akward, but comfortable at the same time." He justified his eZabel habit to his IT department with a three-point defense: professional networking, free tech support, and "it keeps me from going mental." He was a Mac devotee who worried that Boot Camp would kill OS X software development, a Weezer obsessive who credited the Blue Album with helping him get girls in junior high, choosing art school, picking his college roommates, and meeting his wife -- "I could go on for days about how weezer totally parellels my life, but I won't" -- and then a Wii evangelist who rented Red Steel because "it had a sword and a gun, it was impossible to pass up." He bought a 42-inch Samsung plasma on clearance at Best Buy and spent weeks debating LCD versus plasma picture quality in Geek Chat. When someone stole his patio table, chairs, and matching umbrella from his back porch -- but left the grill, gardening tools, and a tiki torch sitting in the middle of where the table had been -- he marveled that the thieves "really wanted a place to sit eat and socialize."

Jeff's greatest gift was making the practical feel personal. He walked tesoro and Austin through the benefits of living on your own before marriage with hard-won wisdom: "Your bond of friendship has to be just as strong as your bond of love." He coached people through iPod syncing issues with patient step-by-step instructions, advised socalgal on event planning for his non-profit (she hooked him up with signed Bam Margera decks and Elementality DVDs for a charity event), agonized publicly about what to say to a coworker who was about to lose her job, and gave web-toedchloe a detailed Pittsburgh tourism guide -- the Incline, the Warhol Museum, the Mattress Factory, the Cathedral of Learning -- because the musings thread where he'd originally posted it got killed. He debated Warped Tour's corporate decline with fivezero and rocksupastar, insisting that "seeing live music is the only TRUE way to experience it" and that the festival's consolidation was strangling local scenes. He posted from Coachella in real time -- "Have seen amy winehouse, rufus wainright, tilly and the wall, the noisettes, silversun pickups" -- and once described a dream where Pete Wentz hit on his wife in the back of an Escalade and almost kissed her, which he recounted with zero embarrassment and total delight.

His orbit on eZabel centered on iwz, who hosted jeffcopus.com and patiently walked him through SMTP server configurations across a dozen increasingly confused messages; socalgal, who became both a professional contact and a friend (their Coachella trip aligned with a visit to her warehouse store); fivezero, with whom he sparred about Star Wars TV shows and soccer substitution rules; and juicymango, who couldn't believe he and his friends couldn't survive two weeks without alcohol on a cleanse diet. He attended twelve events and read voraciously across every forum, but Musings was his home -- 261 of his 476 comments landed there. He was a Steelers fan who trash-talked the Giants' Plaxico Buress ("Buress doesn't really have hands of glue, as a matter of fact he is a bum"), a Heroes superfan who discovered the Primatech Paper website easter eggs before anyone else, and a guy who could quote Coach McGuirk, Sean Connery's SNL Celebrity Jeopardy, and the Konami code in the same month without breaking a sweat.

eZabel Personality Type: ENFP -- "The Connector." Jeff was the art school kid who grew into a young nonprofit professional without losing any of his warmth or his slightly scattered energy. He bounced between music criticism, tech enthusiasm, career advice, homeownership anxiety, and spiritual reflection with the ease of someone who found everything genuinely interesting and assumed you would too. He was self-deprecating about his laziness ("do you ever get soo busy that you just want to sit there and not do anything at all because you know that there is no way you are going to get everything done anyways") but generous with his time, his connections, and his willingness to share what he'd learned. An OG member from 2003 who peaked brilliantly in 2006-2007 before quietly drifting away in 2008, he left behind 476 comments and the distinct impression that wherever Jeff Copus ended up, he was probably recommending a band you hadn't heard of, buying a gadget he didn't need, and making whoever was next to him feel like the most interesting person in the room.