Rav' el, v. - To undo the intricacies of; to disentangle.

Un rav' el, v. [1st pref. un- (intensive) + ravel.] - to unfold; to solve;

Rav' ell er, n. [Also raveler.] One who ravels.

To explain the origins of “raveller.com”, I must explain the origins of my Raveller moniker. To explain the origins of my Raveller moniker, I must explain the origins of Ravel.

I was driving to Texas from Oklahoma late one Sunday night in a rain storm with very little sleep and an need to be at work the following morning in Fort Worth. I kept nodding in and out of sleep and I began to force myself to think to prevent myself from running off the road. At this point I was two hours from my destination.

So I began formulating a science fiction story as I meandered down I-35 across the Red River. My story was tied up in two ideas: a shape shifting tattoo and Pandora's Box. What if in future the primeval demons we no longer fear were released upon a star faring society and had to be contained on one world? And what if all the people on this quarantine world had to wear a body covering tattoo as a stigma of the quarantine?

This kept me more than awake for the rest of the trip, and the next day I began jotting down ideas and character names. Ravel emerged as my protaganist and I began using “Raveller” as an Internet handle when chatting or gaming.

So nearly two years later I began searching for free web space, got fed up with all the advertising, and paid Geocities for an ad-free “Virtual URL” and registered the name “raveller.com”. Then Geocities began branding all pages on their site, even the ad-free ones, Geocities wouldn't let me have the “raveller” member name even though the punk that had it never put up a single page, and the links to “raveller.com” ended up showing Geocities in the browser address box. This had to be corrected.

I contacted EasySpace and transferred “raveller.com” to them. Then I switched to O.L.M. in December of 1999 because they had cheap server-side scripting capabilities. So now we see how this great Internet presence was born from one night of sleep deprivation and highway driving.

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