(Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the June 1, 2006 issue of GameCola, back when GameCola was published in a bi-monthly online magazine format.)
GameCola Headquarters
College Park, MD 20740
June 1, 2006
Dear Readers,
You can thank me, if you want. I did something ages ago that bettered your life, and I’m not talking about the time I figured out how to put on both socks using only my feet. (You think it sounds easy? Try it sometime.) I’m not even talking about GameCola, though goodness knows many lives has been bettered by that.
I’m talking, of course, about l33t. I invented it.
Let’s go back several years, back to the dawn of the Internet. It was 1993. I was eight at the time, and I started logging on to a little thing called Prodigy. Now, Prodigy had some chat rooms I wanted to check out, but I needed a username, and my Prodigy-assigned moniker of “PXVQ2C” just wasn’t gonna cut it. The one I came up with was “Cornholio,” but somehow, that name was already taken.
So I went with an alternative.
I went with cornholi0. Note the zero.
Not long after that, people started swapping letters for numbers as though the letters were plagued with a deadly disease, and the only way to get rid of it was to swap them for numbers. You could call me a revolutionary, but I’ll settle for “King of Metaphors.”
Now that our history lesson’s over, I’ve got some present-day news to attend to: We’ve got new comment boxes! Expertly programmed by GameCola’s own Kevin Leacock! Now when you post a comment on one of our fair articles, your comment gets posted directly to the article, rather than just being sent to my e-mail box. It works just like the comments system for LiveJournal, Xanga and basically every blog ever, and you will love it. You will. If you don’t believe me, play around with the one at the bottom of this page and discover the joy that is our new comment boxes.
Also in the news is “Planet GameCola,” which, too, was expertly programmed by GameCola’s own Kevin Leacock. Planet GameCola is YOUR aggregate of all things GC, be it staff blogs, posts in our forums, posts in our LiveJournal, or even posts in your own personal blogs —yes, for those of you who crave more readers, you can add your own blogs to Planet GameCola. So check that out.
And speaking of our forums! Over the last several weeks we’ve been running a tournament there creatively called the “Best Staff Member EVER Tournament.” I’ve matched up all the staff members we’ve ever had, and it’s up to you, the Reader, to decide who’s the best of them all.
Every few days I post a new matchup, and you get to vote on which staff member you like better. Right now we’re on our 9th matchup, pitting Aaron Waters against Shawn Sackenheim, but it’s never too early to join in on the fun! So check that out, too.
And with that, it is now time for our intrepid hero to take his leave and get back to his internship with an interior design magazine, where he’ll be editing stories about sofas for upwards of seven hours. But before he goes, he’s got one final thought, and it is this:
G4m3C0l4 0wnz j00.
Love,
Paul Franzen
editor in chief
e-mail: pfranzen@gamecola.net
