Twenty Years Beneath the Masthead

[mdlbear]

Twenty years ago today I made myself a LiveJournal account and wrote "Testing..."

The Mandelbear taps the microphone a couple of times. "Is this thing on?"
[Imported to DW as "https://mdlbear.dreamwidth.org/613.html.]

A few hours later I made another post that said, in part, "Some day I'm going to have to improve the colors in that picture... The program that generated it was a quick hack over a decade ago...". If you've been reading this blog for a long time, you may have noticed that the colors haven't changed. I have, however, added the words "since 2002" today.

I started my Dreamwidth account on April 27th, 2010, with a post appropriately entitled Signal boost: more LJ crap. At first they were mostly separate; the exact history is difficult to pinpoint because imports aren't tagged as such on either platform. Automatic crossposts are, starting on August 4th, 2011, with Is this thing on? A good day for transitions. The day also marked another transition of sorts: Ame's 21st birthday. There have been more transitions since then, many of them losses.

Today I edited my sticky meta post to add a few new tags and external links, and added the words "since 2002" to the default (blue fractal bear) icon.

The title of this post is of course a literary reference, which led inevitably to a Wikipedia dive that made its way from (American) publishing terminology to the Bristol Channel pilot cutter by way of the obvious second definition of masthead.

Statistics:

1. Created on 2010-04-27 15:17:34
2. 21,174 comments received, 8,514 comments posted
3. 7,105 Journal Entries (avg. 355/year), 1,350 Tags, 107 Icons Uploaded