1999... it felt like a whole 'nother century. Weblogging (they hadn't dropped the 'we' yet) was something new and dangerous and I'd stumbled onto some of the Original Blogstahs and wanted to emulate them. While I was trying to put together the resources to do my own personal blog (in those crazy pre-WordPress days), I noticed a lot of them were giving attention to a "Community Weblog" started by some dude named Matt. I signed up as wendell about the same time I started blogging myself at oneswellfoop.com (a domain no longer mine), earning user number 206, but didn't start actively participating until February 2000, when my first post was a now-long-dead link to Yahoo News with a pun-derous description, getting two comments, one from mathowie saying "ha! good one foopster..." He didn't realize how small a bit of encouragement it took to make me go totally batguano crazy...
It did Wendell
I have had a reputation as one of the site's 'characters' from the beginning, and had worried about being immortalized as one of the site's "InJokes" for something I did wrong. But then, in November 2006, I made a heavily sarcastic MetaTalk post about a current News item that I hoped would NOT be posted to the front page, declaring, in italics, "it will not end well". The first comment, from jessamyn simply stated "end well is an anagram for wendell." Minutes later, the post I did not want to see was posted, followed by comments of "This will not end well" and "I believe you mean This will not wendell." The post was soon deleted with the explanation "wendell did it", and a meme was born. One that I came to be halfway proud of. And when I decided to phase out the wendell identity (even if it meant losing the three-digit user number), I felt like wendell did end well.
