How I became the Crimson Dragon
Before DragonSiblings was a forum with 29,000 posts, it was four friends. April and Diana started it, McKenzie made three, and then they recruited me to build a website and kept me. Our origin story, partly in my own words from back then.
I already wrote about what running DragonSiblings taught me, the databases and the hosting and the moderation. But that post is about the project. This one is about the people, because before DragonSiblings was a message board, it was four friends, and I was the last one in.
That is the four of us up top. From left: McKenzie, me, April, and Diana.
The Dragon Sisters
It did not start with me, and it did not start as “Siblings.” The way Diana tells it, she and April were the original pair, two best friends who had been calling themselves the Dragon Sisters since the eighth grade. April liked to call herself “the missing link,” because she and Diana and McKenzie all turned out to have birthdays three days in a row, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes a group of teenagers decide they are fated to be a unit.
McKenzie made it three, and it was still the Dragon Sisters. Then they decided they wanted me in. And since I am not anybody’s sister, the Dragon Sisters became the Dragon Siblings.
We were each a dragon of a different color. April was Silver, Diana was Gold, McKenzie was White, and I was Crimson. I have been the Crimson Dragon for more than twenty years now, and on the old forum I mostly went by Maury.
The expansion pack
Here is the part I love most, because I can quote it directly. My old “about” page is still sitting in a backup, written by me at fifteen or so, and it is painfully, perfectly honest about how I got recruited:
I’m one of the newest members to our group of friends called the Dragon Siblings. I was first brought in to Dragon Siblings to design the website and make a place where we could talk about things that happen at school and things that happen around us. Little did I know that I would really be joining something that ended up getting bigger than I could possibly imagine. Gold and Silver Dragon, I have always known, but they weren’t my best friends at the time we started Dragon Siblings. When they first asked me to join, I had to think about it. First the name sounded cultish. I accepted thinking that DragonSiblings.com would never really kick off as it has now. A few months later I was a proud member of Dragon Siblings and I would actually defend this website with my life.
That is the whole arc in one paragraph. I came for a web project, thought the name sounded like a cult, figured it would go nowhere, and then fell completely in love with it and these people.
It made sense that I was the one handed the website. I had been building sites since 1999, back when mine was already called Todd55h, so I just folded T5h into the new thing and got to work. I picked the template, dropped in my favorite band and April’s and Diana’s favorites, and started promoting it everywhere I could: forums, game servers, around school. The forum went live on October 26, 2003, and from there it did the thing I described in the other post.
What it actually was
Underneath the website, it was just friendship. Friday nights I would go to Diana’s house and we would play Dungeons and Dragons until late. Diana wrote on her own about page that I had come to be one of her best friends, and reading that back now, all these years later, gets me a little.
Three girls who had been a unit since middle school did not have to make room for the new kid who showed up to build their website. But they did. They handed me a color, changed their whole name so it would include me, and made me a sibling. I have not been part of many things that generous since.