17 years ago I purchased the domain bamoon.com. I don’t remember what registrar I bought it from. I’m reasonably sure I paid US$35 for it, a price that has, surprisingly, only gone down from then; my last renewal for this domain was US$15.50. How many things you’ve bought in the past have gone down in price?
At the time of purchase, I felt pretty lucky to have gotten a six-character .com domain. I wanted moon.com, for obvious reasons, but it was already owned by Moon Guides, a travel book publisher. I dreamed for years of being able to snipe the domain from them, but that’s a cheap way to get something. I’m happy with bamoon.com.
For at least the first year and a half, I didn’t do anything with it. I didn’t know what I could do with it. I didn’t understand DNS or hosting, not really. I did already have a blog, of a sort, which was a personal site provided by my ISP at the time, a little company called IO.net, a.k.a., the infamous Illuminati Online, the BBS (kids, ask your parents to ask their grandparents what BBS’s were) that was raided by the Secret Service, a raid that led to the creation of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, a group that to this day fights to internet rights and network neutrality—things we need now more than ever.
My blog, known as Lunar Obverse even back then, was hand-written in HTML with pages I uploaded to the server using FTP, which is a lot like walking through the snow uphill both ways to school, you ungrateful kids with your Tumblrs and your WordPresses and Squarespaces. I think all told I posted less than 20 stories. I still have those somewhere. They may even exist as posts in the archives of this site. Y’know. Somewhere.
But this particular incarnation of Lunar Obverse didn’t begin until November of 2004, over two years after I bought the domain to host it. I had a friend who wrote his own blogging software, and I used it to host the actual files of my blog on his personal server, Small White Cube. I used Blogger to compose my posts, and Blogger, in those days, allowed me to publish to any host I wanted. It was fun, and I learned a lot more about the backend of how the World’s Widest Web works.
The domain bamoon.com is my name: Brian Aaron Moon. But it can also be read as a pun and a directive: be a Moon. I don’t really know what “being a Moon” would be, except that I would hope it meant to be creative, and kind, and skeptical of extraordinary claims, and a wee bit anti-authoritarian. But to you, dear reader, to you it can mean whatever you wish it to mean.
B. A. Moon is a common enough name that I get mistaken emails for other B. A. Moons all the time. I mostly ignore them, but sometimes I will reply to the sender and explain they’ve got the wrong email address. There’s a Barbara A. Moon out there in the midwest who likes gambling at casinos, though, who either doesn’t care that she’s not getting her update emails or doesn’t notice. I’ve long since given up trying to correct her mistake. I just quietly click “unsubscribe” when I get them, which slows down the incoming emails for a time, but never stops them entirely. If anyone knows her, could they let her know she’s putting someone else’s email in the boxes on websites? Thanks.