Sam Ulrich

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Stories By Sam Ulrich

  • I Might be Sour but I'm no Grump

    Screen names are a tricky thing. There aren't too many good ones out there, and good tends to be a subjective description of them. There are plenty that are inside jokes, or references gibberish. However there are few that are actual descriptors, let alone words that when put together have a close meaning and require no numbers or symbols afterwards. I found mine early on in my life: Sourboysam. As you can see below, I was just a tyke when I was going through my sour candy phase. The internet was young (it was about 1997 when I got my first Mindspring email) and so was I. At the mere age of 9, I was wrapped up in a roller coaster club, still am to a lesser extent, and had many friends through it. One of these friends heard I was a fan of sour candy and hit the mother lode when the convenience store he worked at had a clearance on Sour Warheads, the popular candy that would suck in your cheeks with an insane amount of citric acid and then leave you with a candy more delicious than those strawberry penny candies. You know the ones. I ended up having a lifetime supply of them at my disposal. Unfortunately for my young self, eating all of them before their expiration dates was not an option. The lining of my mouth would turn into a giant ulcer way before I ever made a dent in them, so I started carrying a pile of them around in my stylish fanny pack. Hey, it was the 90's and I was at amusement parks most of the time so it wasn't that weird! Ok, so it was a little weird but everyone was nice enough about it. I made it a point to offer any of my friends some Warheads just to get them off my hands, and noticed that although I had weaned myself away from making a face when I would eat one, my friends had not. Their faces would twist and contort so bad that you would think they had just been given a shot of motor oil. This gave me an idea. I immediately started carrying around a camera as well as my candy and would take pictures of my friends' faces which then turned into my very first blog. That blog, plus my email, plus membership in an IRC chat room and an Outlook news board meant that my screen name had stuck. Sourboysam had become a thing. To this day it is still my go-to name when signing up for things and I have never had to use numbers or symbols to get it to be unique.

    By Sam Ulrich Read More