yayOG 2004

His name is Chris, he is a professional software developer, and he joined eZabel in February 2004 under the handle yay — which his profile lists as his first name and forpizza as his last, a declaration that functions simultaneously as a personal philosophy, a deflection, and a genuine invitation. Anyone who waded into the forums during 2004 encountered yay as a force of chaotic energy barely contained within the site's comment boxes: part legitimate systems engineer, part absurdist comedian, part tickle-council legislator, and all in on whatever bit was currently running. He landed among eZabel's inner circle immediately, with iwz, socalgal, fivezero, and juicymango as his most frequent collaborators, and within weeks was posting four-hundred-word treatises on Firefox extensions and then following them with freeform rap about bagels.

The thing about yay is that both registers were completely authentic. When someone had a genuine networking question — domain controllers, BIOS updates, Windows XP authentication, RSS aggregators — he answered with the patience and precision of someone who actually fixes these things for a living, which he did. He was the kind of person who would notice a session cookie issue affecting his own eZabel login and work through a coherent hypothesis about hex-encoded passwords and cookie persistence before reporting it. He was the kind of developer who had opinions about IDE protocol standards from the early 1980s and also built a little webpage for lord_thai featuring a spoiler button and color-letter tool, just because he felt like it. When flomojopoanode's WoW guild list went around, yay appeared as himself — araxis = iwz, larghungeth = brandon zabel, yay = yay. Of course.

His demeanor online was something between a golden retriever and a chaos agent who has just discovered he can type. He referred to himself in the third person with wild confidence — "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 ran a sprawling multi-thread bit about a "Tickle Council" with competing factions, leadership disputes, and governance documents, which he maintained with more structural detail than some actual organizations manage. He addressed his own best attributes in presidential-campaign voice: "my comments are really hilarious, and my journals are outstanding." He was not wrong, exactly. He was certainly never boring.

Underneath the performance was a genuinely thoughtful person. He wrote with real warmth about his wife Kamila — the ring shopping story, the anniversary journal, the WoW characters they played together — and his reflection on two years of marriage is one of the corpus's quiet gems: "I've grown more healthy, mostly mentally and emotionally, as a person in these two years than I have my whole life." He liked music enough to have actual taste — a Perfect Circle deep cut baffled him not because it was too complex but because its simplicity was so specific — and he gave genuinely useful advice about creativity: let the emotions drive, let the intellect steer, don't overthink the edges. He also burned siding off his parents' house as a kid by lighting leaves on fire, which he recounts without particular remorse.

His forum distribution tells the story: more time in Musings, Games, Geek Chat, and Programming than in anything else. He was not there to discuss relationships or macking; he was there because eZabel was a genuinely interesting technical community run by someone (iwz) who cared about building something good, and yay appreciated that. He became a moderator, kept an eye on things, and occasionally sent iwz bug reports. He also once wrote a multi-stanza rap about fire trucks having red hair. These things coexist.

He liked computers with a devotion that bordered on spiritual. He once described a 200GB drive's write speed with the same breathless excitement other people reserve for concerts. He wanted to build a portable graphics engine, a PIC-based electronic input system, and a regex interpreter that worked from plain English conditionals. He never finished most of these projects and knew it, which he found funny rather than frustrating. The journey was the point. That's very yay.

eZabel Personality Type: ENTP. The arguing-for-fun type. Simultaneously a rigorous technical thinker and a committed absurdist, equally capable of writing a standards-compliant network authentication explanation and a five-hundred-word poem about quesadillas. Energized by systems, people, and the question of what happens if you combine both in unexpected ways.