g.f.s.rocksOG 2001

The former number four on Ian's rankings — a title he introduced himself with to strangers as late as 2003 — Giacomo Matteo arrived on eZabel in September 2001 from Paramus, New Jersey, under the handle "Heat-Wave," and proceeded to post 2,909 comments across nine years with the energy of someone who had been given access to a microphone and no one had yet thought to take it away. He logged 127 comments in a single day in February 2002, which either means the front desk at his hotel job was spectacularly understaffed or that Giacomo had perfected the art of looking busy while doing absolutely nothing productive. He was studying for a bachelor's in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing and a minor in Italian, which made him, by his own estimation, triply qualified to hold forth on any subject — and he did, across Musings, Macking, Movies and Television, Geek Chat, Sports, and Food, with a comment style that ran long, ran confident, and almost never ran spell-check.

His Italianness was structural. It held up the walls. He could explain that "di Giacomo" means son of James, not son of Jacob, and he would explain it, at length, with etymological citations and a detour through the Matteo surname's first appearance in Abruzzi. His last name meant "gift of God," which he had also researched. When tesoro posted about Italian hospitality, he wrote a small essay about how every Italian family in his congregation treated guests like royalty — "you can just stop by any of those families, invited or uninvited, and each of all the Italian families will treat you like you are the most important guest" — and then added, with the grin of a man who knows exactly what he's doing, "that and that we are all sooo good looking." He wrote entire comments in Italian to tesoro just to annoy everyone else who couldn't read them, once signing off with "Io e te Jahanna ;)" in a move that was either flirtatious, nationalistic, or both. Martha Stewart, he noted, was not Italian, and this was relevant context when evaluating her cooking.

He was the guy who had already looked it up. When rocksupastar needed a cell phone recommendation, Giacomo materialized with model numbers, feature breakdowns, and carrier-specific warnings about the Verizon RAZR's gutted software. He volunteered to moderate the Geek Chat cell phone section by 2004, signing his pitch "Giacomo 'The Cell Phone Guy'" — and by 2006 he was dispensing verdicts on the Samsung SCH-a990, the LG "V," the forthcoming Chocolate, and the KRZR K1m with the patience of someone who genuinely loved the subject and had explained it before. When his family's house burned down in 2006, he had already researched replacement TVs by brand, contrast ratio, display resolution, and the precise reason why 1080p was marketing fiction on a 768-pixel panel. He posted the specs for a Panasonic plasma, a Samsung LCD, and a Toshiba bedroom set — complete with Consumer Reports ratings and HDMI port counts — in a single comment that read like a product review column for a magazine nobody had asked him to write.

His social footprint was enormous. He coordinated Halo sessions with bozo, driving an hour and a half for gaming nights and sending follow-up messages about TV logistics. He organized a group outing to The Phantom of the Opera, invited punkprincess and tesoro months in advance, attended Taking Back Sunday and Brand New at the Tweeter Center, and once watched a kid's shoe get launched onto the lighting rig during crowd surfing at a festival where he also bumped into Jahanna "in the big bubble." He told a vivid story about meeting Jesse Camp at his hotel — "He came in looking for where he was going to paint, and we were like, umm what are you talking about" — and another about cornering Melissa from Real World New Orleans in a Detroit airport and telling her she was short, which went over about as well as you'd expect until she warmed up and started sharing tips on how to avoid being filmed on reality TV. He recited an entire SNL Celebrity Jeopardy transcript from memory in a single comment. He offered detailed screenplay notes on a short film someone was writing in 2001, pitching a hospital-set ending with a suicidal girl and a miraculous catch that he could "visually see" but the five-minute time constraint was "killing my vision."

He ran "Wiffle Ball season at Matteo Park," complete with a new rule book and stat sheets. He broke his fourth metacarpal playing football and described the X-ray as "twisted like a pretzel." He drove through a snowstorm to Vermont, rode Whistler's glacier bowls, dispensed relationship advice in the Macking forum with the authority of a man who had thought seriously about the difference between dating and friendship, and delivered what might be the site's most thorough field report from unassigned territory in Kentucky: "Old tires make great flower pots in the front lawn... You will eventually begin your presentation with 'How Y'All doin round here??' and then say to yourself, did I just speak like a southerner??" His crew — iwz, nine9star, socalgal, brotherman, fivezero — spanned the NJ congregation scene's original generation, and he was still logging in as late as 2010, marveling at how Facebook and Twitter seemed like "off shoots of this site" and suggesting Ian could have retired if he'd just patented eZabel.

What made Giacomo magnetic was not just his volume — though 1,182 comments in his peak year of 2002 was staggering — but his absolute refusal to let a subject pass without contributing everything he knew about it, which was usually more than anyone expected. He was a Mets fan who tracked A-Rod's salary with contempt. He was a Star Wars evangelist who walked into the midnight showing of Episode II carrying a lit lightsaber to cheers from the audience. He was the guy who once responded to a poll with nothing but the word "HAHAHA" repeated for what appeared to be an entire page, because someone had claimed to be male and this was, apparently, the funniest thing that had ever happened. In 2007 he announced he was seeing a girl named Heather from upstate New York, and described it as "like I'm living a dream right now." He signed off as Giacomo, he showed up as g.f.s.rocks, and in every thread he entered, the room got louder.

eZabel Personality Type: ESTP — "The Connector." High-energy, high-detail, socially tireless, and constitutionally incapable of reading a thread without adding six paragraphs to it — he was the guy who had already looked it up, already formed an opinion, and was absolutely going to tell you about both.