perrinOG 2004

Michael Stultz — known to almost no one as Michael, called perrin on eZabel, addressed by any number of nicknames that he once listed as a defining feature of his existence — arrived in February 2004 and immediately began posting at a rate that suggested he had a lot saved up. He wrote 2,195 comments in 2004 alone. His total career count was 2,310. The math on that is stark: nearly everything he ever said on eZabel, he said in his first year. He wasn't burning out; he was just exceptionally present for a single window of time, and then intermittently there afterward, appearing in 2005, 2006, 2007, and briefly in 2009, like someone who came back occasionally to check if the conversation was still going.

Hockey was the organizing fact of his life. He played defense — had always played defense, would always play defense — and described the satisfaction of taking the puck from someone who thought they had him beat with more enthusiasm than he ever described scoring. He played roller hockey at outdoor rinks in NJ with a regular crew, threw himself into the boards recreationally and with enough commitment that the person he called Aaron died laughing every time, and had opinions about the Devils roster that ran to specific player statistics and line chemistry analysis. He hated when teams bought their way to championships. He loved Elias and Rafalski. He once tracked a game via play-by-play on superbowl.com because he was somewhere he couldn't watch it and this was apparently the best available option and he was fine with it.

He had read most of the Star Wars expanded universe novels, some of them multiple times. The Zahn trilogy three times. He got excited enough at the bookstore as a kid that he dragged his mom over and begged her to buy them on sight. He knew who Jacen Solo was and why he mattered and was happy to explain, at length, the difference between how Mara Jade was trained versus how other characters were trained, and why this distinction was meaningful. He approached these books the way he approached hockey: with genuine expertise, a preference for defense (in conversation he liked to correct misconceptions gently but firmly), and very little interest in impressing anyone who hadn't already bought in.

He was studying to be a paralegal when he joined eZabel, having recently quit a 2 AM FedEx Ground package handler job after two and a quarter years, which he said had reached the natural limit of how long any human being can do that kind of work. He knew things about civil vs. criminal evidentiary standards, about why speeding tickets get reduced in court, about why officers' radar calibration records matter. He noted these things in threads not to perform expertise but because he had just learned them in class and found them interesting and thought other people might too. He was that kind of person: genuinely curious about information, willing to share it, not particularly interested in being the smartest person in the room so long as the information was useful.

His top interaction partners — socalgal, fivezero, modestjesse, thatdarngirl, forrestina — suggest he found his people quickly and stayed with them. He was learning ASL, partially because of a deaf community he was connected to through the congregation, and was working through the challenges of signing prayers and conducting Scripture readings in a different language. He described the progress with the same methodical good humor he brought to everything: it was hard, Jehovah seemed to be blessing the effort, he needed to work on his facial expressions. He also played Kingdom of Loathing with enough dedication to have a meat-accumulation strategy for his clan's defenses.

eZabel Personality Type: ISTJ. 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 what the data said, who would tell you if your reasoning had a hole in it — but gently, with a "lol" at the end to make sure nobody felt bad about it. He had strong loyalties, a deep dislike of people who lied to his face, and a way of showing up fully for whatever he had decided to show up for. The hockey rink. The Kingdom of Loathing clan. The Star Wars discussion thread. His first year on eZabel. He went all in, and then he went home, and the record of that year is remarkably complete.