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Welcome to the Edge of the Universe, and thank you for visiting.
Everything on this site I made myself, in Photoshop or in Notepad, unless otherwise specified. I take a deep pride in the fact that ever since 1998 I have been hand-writing (so to speak) all of my web design projects. In other words: Bite me, FrontPage! :) Read on if you'd like some history about Me and the Web.
In The Beginning...
When I was 15, I finally took one of the AOL 3.0 disks that kept getting mailed to the house ("40 Free Hours!") and I said, "Dad, we need to be online. I'm installing this." He said, "okay, as long as you pay for it." And so, in 1996, I became yet another lost soul wandering on the internet. My AOL screenname was Etoile1999, and I decided that I needed a webpage. That page was http://members.aol.com/Etoile1999. Really, it was an incredible mess. I knew not one grain of HTML, so I let AOL's Personal Publisher 3, an abominable little program, do all of the coding for me. It was an homage to all things I loved, mostly various forms of geek fandom, but it had nothing of me in it. Overall, a soulless, amateurish attempt--but everyone needs humble beginnings, right?
The Edge mk. II
In the early months of 1998, I changed my screenname (to EtoilePaix, with which I stuck as long as I had AOL, and under which you may still find me on AIM), and so the old website was deleted. *poof*. I can't say that anyone cared much at the time, except maybe me--and I'm not even sure I did. I was determined to build a new, improved website under my new screenname, though. I'd spent a long time learning HTML, and getting pretty darned good at it, to maintain the Zealot Hall of Fame (don't ask). Under the name ZealotPage, I was learning (by experimentation) a whole lot about web design. I was thrilled to be able to present myself to the world with my newfound skills...
The Edge mk. II never got farther than a white page with black Times New Roman text on it, saying, "The Edge of the Universe mark II: Coming Soon!" It stayed that way for about three years.
Mark III, or, "Etty learns something."
When my parents moved in 2002 to a place that offered cable modem service, I cancelled the AOL account (I'd been at college since 1999 and no longer needed it). I had no real home on the web for a few months... and I also didn't much care. I had Nova posted on my UMass webspace, essentially so I could show it off when I really had to. I maintained a web site for my section in the marching band (yeah, I know, queen geek).
But then, in the summer of 2002, I worked full-time at an extremely, EXTREMELY boring job. I never had a thing to do, but I had to sit at a computer and look productive nearly all of the time. So I realized that I had a username at yahoo already--EtoilePB--and that yahoo now owned geocities. So why not start another webpage? I got myself all set up at http://www.geocities.com/etoilepb because its ads were the least annoying (although they still drove me crazy). That was a nice little frames site, all colorblocked in blue, purple, and yellow. The organization was nice, but the site was lacking... something. Any graphics, for example. But I thought that was okay, because really, all I had to showcase was writing.
Version 4: My Very Own Dot-Com.
I had the same very boring job over wintersession (essentially, the month of January, 2003) as I had had the previous summer. Things might have gone the same except for two small changes. The first was that I had joined several LiveJournal communities (mostly Lord of the Rings based, though not all), and was starting to see people posting user icons all of the time. The second was a discovery that the computers I was using for wintersession had Photoshop 7.0 on them. I was doomed. I started making icons, and spending lots of time teaching myself the Photoshop basics. I began my last semester at collece in February of 2003 obsessed with Photoshop, and I used it at work every day I could. In the middle of March, and old friend managed to give me a copy of my very own. I was spending mad amounts of time updaating my website to have a viable icons archive. And then, in late March, it hit me: it was time to redesign the website, this time with *dramatic chord* graphics! When I realized how seriously I was taking my new web design ideas, I finally decided just to cave in and pay Geocities the $9/monthly to get the bandwidth and server space I needed to make this happen. Plus, I got to upgrade to be EtoilePB.com.
Version 4.5: "Wow, that's blue!"
The Edge v4.0 had a black background, off-white text, and a starry sort of border. The Edge 4.5 is blue on blue with blue writing. As you might notice. Most people agree it's a vast improvement. Yay. :)
But why "EtoilePB?" That's not your real name!
No, it's not. Here's a little piece of foolish trivia for you: in that game mentioned earlier, Zealot, I was Etoile. Etoile Penwielder. And in that same story where Etoile's last name was revealed to be Penwielder, she also became engaged to, and eventually married, another character, one Fub Buffub (only in the game, of course; although I did happen to meet the player behind him in 2002). That made her Etoile Penwielder-Buffub, or in shorter form, EtoilePB, the ubiquitous username underwhich I can be found on virtually anything that requires an online registration. Ta-da. :)
