Nocturne Research

A Little History of the Dark Side

Most of the people who would later constitute Nocturne Research all knew each other from a colossal time-wasting fad among college geeks in the 1990s called MUSHing. How remarkable it was, back in those days, to interact in real time with people all over the world.

But college led to marriage, marrige led to real jobs, and real jobs led to no more massive time-wasting online enterprises. But the idea of maintaining a place where people could hang out and chat persisted until Jason purchased a Sun Sparc 1 server, with 32MB of RAM and precious little hard disk space -- and hooked it up to his home dialup connection in February, 1996. A few weeks passed before he emailed his domain name registration to the Inter NIC. It was accepted, and on March 17, nocturne.org was born.

Nocturne would change servers many times - and is about to again - but in each instance, it would live in a closet and be fed through a domestic internet connection.

Jason Newquist

Born in the middle Nixon Years, Jason Newquist would be the first of two Newquists born unto that generation. He would spend all his formative years in the San Francisco Bay Area, rebelling against the liberal establishment by modeling himself after TV's youthful Republican elitist Alex P. Keaton. Later in highschool, Jason would trade in his subscription to the Wall Street Journal for a ticket to ride with the theater crowd.

And there, in December, 1989, at a cast party, he met his future wife. He would be cured of his theatrical obsessions before going to college at UC Davis in 1990. After 2 years, Eon joined him, and 2 years after that, they would marry.

Jason would spend some time during and after graduation working at various campus libraries before, in late 1995, he was hired by Netcom, the "Leading Internet Service Provider", down in San Jose. His connection was someone he knew online through a text-based internet game called a "MUSH". In March of 1996, Nocturne Research was formed.

Jason moved among a few tech companies, and was laid off twice during the collapse of the Internet Economy in 2001. Thus scorned, he had an affair with aeroastro, and participated in Mission Operations for NASA's Gravity Probe-B mission for several years, at which point he returned to tech. He's currently working for an obscure hole-in-the-wall.

But all this, it seems, is something of a sidebar. After using the finest medical technology available to mankind, Jason and Eon became the proud owners of ultrasound pictures of 3 simultaneous feti. Time would reveal them to be male in gender, all three. In June of 2004, the creatures emerged, were named Isaac, Jack, and Henry, and everything changed.

Tanya Klowden

Challenging the conventions of 99.834% of humanity, Tanya Klowden makes her home in Los Angeles (although she was once spotted in London for far longer than a tourist is allowed to be there). She spends much of her time being a wife, mother, and responsible pet owner and occupies the remainder with ancient handcrafts, promotion of the new technological age, and a healthy dollop more activism than she recalls signing up for. Her greatest hopes for the future include a manned mission to Mars and that her children will overcome their fear of her vacuum droid.