starshiptrooperOG 2003

Every community needs a mom, and on eZabel, that role belonged — unapologetically and sometimes controversially — to Linda Balzano. A Long Island native from Levittown who joined in April 2003, starshiptrooper arrived as something the site had never quite seen before: a woman in her mid-forties, married 27 years to her husband Nick, raising two daughters (Rachel and Nicole), and absolutely unwilling to pretend she was anything other than exactly who she was. Her AIM handle was CVSslave56, a nod to the Bellmore CVS where she worked as head cashier and loved every customer who walked through the door — even if her boss told her she was "too friendly" and to just ring them up and get them out. She'd help little old ladies find their hemorrhoid cream, tease teenagers buying condoms, and try to talk smokers into quitting. That was Linda in a nutshell: warm, blunt, completely without filter.

Music was her lifeblood. She'd seen Led Zeppelin at Nassau Coliseum in 1972 for $3.50, caught Yes, Genesis, the Allman Brothers, the Grateful Dead, Elton John, Peter Frampton, and many others she couldn't fully remember thanks to what she candidly called "various chemical excursions." She posted full song lyrics — Rod Stewart's "Forever Young," Eagles' "Get Over It," Bob Dylan's born-again material, Don Henley's "Boys of Summer" — with the enthusiasm of someone who genuinely believed these songs could change your life if you'd just listen. She championed classic rock with missionary zeal, argued that Kurt Cobain couldn't touch Carlos Santana, insisted today's bands were recycling older music, and got into spirited debates with skaorsk8 about whether the '60s had more to say than modern punk. When ophelia gently pointed out the generation gap, she didn't back down — she just posted the entire Animaniacs "Who's on First" Woodstock sketch to prove her point about the Who, Yes, and The Band. She started threads about Yes DVDs, country music, and Dream Theatre, and her username itself was a love letter to prog rock.

But Linda's time on eZabel wasn't all concert memories and song lyrics. She wore her heart on her sleeve in ways that made people uncomfortable — and she knew it. She talked openly about her struggles with manic depression, her history with alcoholism ("I can drink a pint of Absolute vodka and I dont get drunk. Do I have a problem? YES"), and the heartbreak of watching her older daughter Nicole get removed. She once wrote that if she could do it over, she wouldn't have had kids — not because she didn't love them, but because the pain of watching them struggle was more than she could bear. That raw honesty earned her both fierce defenders and frequent critics. fivezero publicly backed her up when the younger crowd piled on, telling everyone to "be like Fonzy" and cool down. forrestina and beachbum pushed back when Linda told rocksupastar (Mike) he should spend less time on eZabel and more time with his new wife Katie — a comment that became one of her most replied-to posts and sparked a genuine community argument about boundaries and unsolicited advice. thatdarngirl clashed with her repeatedly but eventually became her friend, a reconciliation Linda cherished.

She was fiercely protective of people she cared about, and she knew people everywhere — she recognized tesoro at a circuit assembly and hoped to connect their families. She attended seventeen eZabel events — manhunt games, LAN parties, go-karting, band shows, the legendary snowman party — and even showed up at a district convention where she bumped into Mike's then-girlfriend Katie in the bathroom and reported back that the best conversations happen while waiting in line for the facilities.

Linda also had a flair for the dramatic. She operated three alt accounts — gollum, laila, and lastweek — and the gollum era in early 2003 was its own chapter, tangling with magnum over a cat video, defending David Elliott's honor, and posting Linda Ronstadt lyrics in Spanish. As laila, she wrote to iwz begging him to delete everything she'd ever posted, comparing herself to the apostle Peter who spoke before he thought. She posted the entire SNL "Happy Fun Ball" sketch, copy-pasted Spam history trivia, shared a journal called "36 Christian Ways to Reduce Stress" from her friend Janie, and mourned her cat Scouty's death from suspected feline spongiform encephalopathy with a vulnerability that was unmistakably hers. Her peak year was 2003 with 616 comments, and across all her accounts she left 1,168 comments total — a 32-day streak at her most active. She kept popping back through 2008 to post cat pictures, and her final comment in September 2011 was nothing but a YouTube link, a quiet wave from someone who'd long since said everything she needed to say.

eZabel Personality Type: ESFP — "The Entertainer." Outgoing, emotional, generous with her stories and her opinions, and utterly incapable of keeping anything to herself. She lived loud in a community of teenagers and twenty-somethings, and if they didn't always appreciate it, she kept showing up anyway — because that's what moms do.