Who are you people?

[Mark Jason Dominus]

I live in Philadelphia with my wife, a cat, and several plush
octopuses.  I was denied admission to Swarthmore in 1986.  My primary
occupation is to write a book about advanced programming techniques.
(http://perl.plover.com/book/) I also do programming training
(http://perl.plover.com/yak/) and sometimes consulting.  I was
inducted to the fictionary list by Jed Hartman.

Elliott Moreton <moreton at vonneumann.cog.jhu.edu>
> I've been on this list forever, but have no idea how I
> got there!  The early years are shrouded in mystery.  How far back do the
> archives go?

The current incarnation as a mailing list, including automatic
archiving, only goes back to 1999.  However, I have saved almost all
of the fictionary messages since 1996.  But since I postdated you, I
don't have any record of your first appearance.

(The archive retrieval feature is not very useful right now; it only
supports retrieval of one message at a time.  (Send a message to
fictionary-get.123 at plover.com to retrieve message #123.)  I could fix
this quickly if there was interest.)

I started hosting fictionary as a mailing list on Plover because:

        While I was managing this round of fictionary, I kept worrying
        that maybe I'd lost someone's name out of the mail header, or
        that I'd removed the wrong name or added the wrong name.  So
        I've set up a `mail alias' for the fictionary people; when I
        send mail to `fictionary at plover.com,' it spreads out to all
        fifteen people.

        I'll try to keep the list of people up to date.  If you want
        to use this address as a convenience when you are in charge,
        please do; if not, you can still do it the old way and just
        list all the recipients in your mail message.

        If anyone objects to my having set this up, please do let me
        know and I'll get rid of it.

In 1999 I got tired of maintaining the list by hand and migrated it to
an automatic mailing-list-management system.  (Mail to
fictionary-help at plover.com for instructions.)  

The list, by the way, has grown from 12 to 28 people.  Most of the 12
members in 1996 are still frequent particpants.