History of the name Chrs84.
Here’s a little history of what the name Chrs84 has stood for on the World Wide Web.
The name Chrs84 and what it stands for has been onLine and throughout the World Wide Web for close to 15 years. Does anyone remember Aol and the chatRoom phenomenon? As broad as chat options and related sites are now, there was a time when chatting was a tight unique community on an immense scale. Yes, such communities are even larger now, but in many ways, it’s not the same as those 1990’s, but that’s not to take anything away from today’s faithful wordSmiths and communicators. I still run into legends, skillful and masterful with the spoken word, or should I say dancing fiery keyboards. Anyway, that was where I first made my assault on language and the Web.
Most chat rooms consisted of common dialogs in traditions of friends meeting onLine, strangers talking to strangers, and people who were gradually or quickly becoming friends, or sometimes enemies. There was also a relatively small group of unique chatters who would frequent a chat room and spread fire and energy through words. These groups were mostly made up of shock-types/haters who tended to be very combative, the philosopher/debaters who pushed hot topics and issues that always struck nerves or addressed our conscience and senses, the Zen/gurus who brought peace, calm and wisdom to whatever theme or mood a room was in, and the wordSmith/artists who emphasized the energy in dialog and the arts in general. All of these unique chatters combined and surrounded with friends and strangers who usually fell somewhere between these unique characteristics, friends and strangers who had some combination or a little of all the unique chatter-type natures. Then there was also the gaming and roll-playing rooms, and of course the forever infamous sex, dating, and hook-up rooms.
I was the wordSmith/artist, and what that meant was, even in a room full of friends and people I knew, it was known that I would fire out statements and phrases and fish for anyone who caught on or was game. We would open up a unique conversation and dialog, not consisting of the more traditional hello, how are you, how is the weather, or talk of a specific topic, or the history between people and he said-she said , but rather, conversation and dialog much more in a poetry format, and most importantly, it was always an open format that anyone could chime in on, and plenty of people did. It was easy and it was very magical. Picture it as so: You are in a chat room with a decent or excellent vibe, maybe you go there all the time and a bunch of your friends are there, but there is also a good mix of newbies and strangers, maybe a shock-type is razzing someone, but not enough to get kicked out or put on ignore. You go through the usual hellos, greeting friends, talking about whatever is relevant, the day, yesterday, plans for whatever, or updates from people since last you spoke to them. At the same time, you see these artistic statements popping out, sometimes at a frequent pace, sometimes here and there, and every so often, something pops out and it hits you, it makes you think, or lol, or smile, or feel puzzled, and you chime in, you pop out a version of it or something that could be considered a response, and a few of the people you are talking with do the same. We all feel it; we all smile, lol, or shake our heads, then you go right back to your chat and everything keeps going. After a while, the core of the chat room turns into a microcosm of generating energy, anchors that fuel fire and drive movement, and from time to time, and at any given moment, I end up doing what you just did, but in reverse, and I chime in on a more normal/traditional dialog, or I respond to a more global idea that suddenly floated around the room, born out of one of your more specific conversations. It all made for some very sharp, witty, dynamic times, times when people easily spent all night online talking and typing. This is what I became known as; this is what I stood for. When you saw Chrs84 pop in, you knew everything was about to get a little more artistic and expressive, especially in those rooms that were already wonderfully artistic and expressive. We thrived off of each other, and words developed into elaborate identities that were just as strong as our profile images and interests. Together, we made some amazing hanging-out times.
Of course I didn’t stop there. I went on to post plenty of written word, poems, stories and essays that floated throughout the Web, some of which you just might run into if you looked hard enough, popping up right there on your screen with the date to prove it. I know of a few places and I plan to eventually link them so we can view those blasts from the past. I contributed to online magazines. Remember when those zines started to catch on fire? It seemed like everyone was starting up an online mag. You could still find very early work of mine in the ancient posts of poetry and writing sites, and forums, and Aol communities and homePages. Even right now, I have some old Aol home pages that I will link up soon. Still, lots of my work became lost, as life and shit sometimes happens. I moved, different roommate times, different computers and sharing computers and online accounts, so one thing led to another and I lost my Chrs84 screen name, in the sense that it was created under the master name/account of an old friend/roommate. Remember how limited things were when it came to screen names, how difficult it was to transfer a name back then? So the name became locked up in that old account and I moved on to different screen names, not a significant amount, but a few different ones. For the most part, I would still use Chrs84 anytime there was an external identity request outside the actual root-account, like creating accounts and identities on other sites, so in that sense, it never left me. In fact, if you look up Chrs84 on Aol and its community/hometown(which I used to check from time to time, just for the hell of it, but haven’t in the last few years), you might still see some listings and headings, although, any actual body connected to it is unavailable. The actual Aol Chrs84 screen name may have never been completely deleted from its original account, or properly removed from where it is rooted. Of course we have come a long way with identities and the World Wide Web, and personal websites exploded and became much more accessible to the online user, so I took Chrs84 into the domain world of the Web.
Now, as a special treat, I will give you what so many people over time have inquired, and depending on my mood or how elusive and broad I wanted to be, I answered or usually skirted around their question, which is: What does the 84 stand for? since it wasn’t the last 2 digits of the year of my birth nor a particularly great year for me. Seeing as to how I was only 10 years old at that time(1984), you could say most of my life in that year was big-time or smack in the middle of being a kid. The 84 in Chrs84 stands specifically for the piece of literature George Orwell produced, the landmark book titled 1984. As a teenager, this was one of the single most influential pieces of work I read at that time. Of course it went hand in hand with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World masterpiece, and together, they opened up a whole new relationship between consciousness and the written word. It will always be one of the top books that taught me the fundamentals of conveying massive issues through literature and a story. Then 1984 and a Brave New World went perfect with Animal Farm and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, combine these with the Diary of Anne Frank, The Good Earth, A Clockwork Orange, The Stranger and Naked Lunch and you could say that, literally, I was a changed man and never looked back. Would you believe that every one of these books, minus Naked Lunch, constituted the core of the Board of Education High School English curriculum? Nowadays, based on the younger people I speak with, I’m not even sure if any of these books are required reading. Oh well, the times have changed; what could we expect? Anyway, out of the respect for what that book meant to me, out of all the numerical digits I could have chosen to accompany Chrs, which is my first name minus the “i”, or it’s also the first 3 letters of my first name and the “s” is the first letter of my last name, I chose 84, clicked the link on the Aol create a screen name page to check if it was available, and it was, and the rest became history.
Fun fact:
In one of the earlier online version of the game Mahjong, called Mahjong Towers II (speed oriented), those boards created by the Author: Chrs84, are my boards and that author is none other than me. I can proudly say that at the prime and height of my playing, I was in the top 10 of the greatest Mahjong players in the world, those also playing at that time, and you could safely rank me at least top 50 of All-Time in Mahjong Towers II, world wide! There was a time that you could see my top 10 ranking scores across at least 200 different boards, yeah, I was a monster player. I used to work at home and had the wonderful opportunity to master the game. Secretly, from time to time, I dream of a glorious comeback. I made hundreds of boards, many that were unique and beautiful and downloaded in people’s copy of the game, some boards may still be popularly played today.
My best Wishes
Christopher-
