Austin Reaches Advanced Connection Age

Austin, coati, reached his 5,000th connection to SpinDizzy on the 11th of April and was, characteristically, late to the party scheduled to celebrate it. The event, set to be a karaoke-inclusive festival at the fabulous Starlight Ballroom in Edgeworld Park, began shortly after the scheduled 7 pm time.

As inevitable with such connection milestones, comparisons began. A person’s connection count is reported to them promptly on logging in as part of the initial screen of text; it can also be found afterwards by using the command @when me or, along with much more material, examine me. Among those discovering their connection counts that night, Dragoncat found he was “83 away from his first 1,000” (the thousand-connection mark a traditional milestone and worth a party as well); J.P. was at 5435; BunnyHugger at 2,258; Chitter at 124; Ping at 8,370; Suri at 5,730; Royce somewhere about ten thousand; Beltrami at 1,346; and Skyler at something enormous. It should be noted many of the highest-count users are those who have (or have had) unreliable connections prone to dropping counts, and that many of the lower-count persons, Austin included, are simply ones able to keep themselves to one or two connections per day. Chitter’s count reflects on the number of times he had been picked up as he is not properly speaking connected to.

With declarations of relative age done the party moved on to song performances, including “This Doesn’t Feel Like Goodbye” by A Big Yes And A Small No; “Where Did My Spring Go” by The Kinks; “On The NBC Tonight”, a big band-style song performed as the opening to the 1978 Rolling Stones episode of Saturday Night Live; “Landed”, by Ben Folds Five; “In The Mood” by Glenn Miller; “The Werewolves Of London”; “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder (responding to “lots of requests” from the squirrel gallery); “Less Than Three” by Becky; “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” by Marvin Gaye; “The House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals; “Wild Child” by Enya; and Zage and Evans’s “In The Year 2525”.

Asked by Garrison about the very first connection Austin admitted it was not much of anything: simply connecting, setting a non-temporary password, and taking a few other little administrative details into account. For more substantial connection numbers he listed only those which formed some kind of in-joke, such as 1541 or the Dave Barry fan-centric number 2038.

Despite growing gradually older Austin does not yet resent the new and younger kids on the muck, at least in public.