Do you all think it's possible to be good friends with someone you only know on the internet? I think the jury is still out. I've never experienced it myself, but I have friends who swear that some of their best friends are strangers.

That's just a bit creepy, for my tastes.

Names seemed to be a running theme for the first intros... so let me ask the lot of you: Do you think my name (the actual one, Melisande Agatha Decker-Williston, not my nickname) is too pretentious-sounding? I don't think it is, but it kind of makes folks seem to think that I'm... standoffish. Melisande was my mother's favorite aunt's name, and Agatha was my father's grandmother's name. Decker is my mother's maiden name, and Williston is my father's name. The hyphenation wasn't my idea, by the way. My mother is totally one of those "society" ladies. Always going on about how wonderful her debut was and how great it was to be a debutante. Fat cow.

So, what kind of things do we really want to discuss here, folks?

We really have a sanctioned email list with no restrictions, other than that we all participate. No filters, no censors, we get to say what we really think of things to people we're really never going to get to meet. Or have to meet, depending on your point of view.

Well, for now... I'll just talk about what comes to mind. How about how I came to be called Stormy? You might think it was some kind of commentary on my teenage years or something, and while I was certainly more unpredictable than my contemporaries, the name came to be in much more... embarrassing a manner.

I decided one day when I was 16 that I didn't NEED any help to handle the school's sailboat by myself, despite the weather report warning of "rough" before the day was through. I was never really in any danger because it wasn't a GALE or anything, and my father had a chase-craft following me without me knowing in case something went wrong (which it did). But there wasn't a soul in the girls' dorm that wasn't calling me Stormy by lights out that night and in the entire Academy by the next night. So, while it was earned in embarrassment, it could have been much worse, and I adopted the name as sort of a badge that I'd accomplished my teenage idiocy and could put it behind me.