Month: April 2026

What is a Star Chamber? Here’s one explanation I had lying around on my hard drive.

But I know of another definition.

It involves John, Rob, Pax, and Ned. We were four friends, originally from the same workplace, who would meet for drinks and conversation every week or so at Casablanca in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was always a good time. Somebody, a girlfriend maybe, started referring to our gatherings as meetings of the “Star Chamber.” It wasn’t a very apt name – we had no veiled royal authority and we made no secret decrees – but it had a good ring to it, and it caught on. So that was it: the four of us were the Star Chamber. This was a long time ago, late in the last century, when the web was young and people were still getting used to saying “dot com.” As an entertaining exercise, we decided to make a website where we would take turns posting things that we wrote. Stories, commentary, artwork. The kind of thing you might find on a blog, only there was no such thing as a blog yet. Just jellyfish, trilobites, and FTP servers.

And that’s how starchamber.com came about. It was, at the time, novel and nontrivial to secure the domain and work with an internet hosting service to upload files written in the new “Hypertext Markup Language.” HTML. Maybe you’ve heard of it.

I had the honor of making the first post. It appeared on April 16th, 1996. Thirty years ago this week! And my first post was a little story, Bobo, about what we would now call a “digital content creator.” It was speculative fiction at the time, but today it feels tame, almost realistic. A world where the thing you create becomes your co-creator. Imagine that! Anyway, Bobo is still there, right where I left him 30 years ago. Have a look. See how it reads in a world with intelligent Large Language Models.

Bobo.

Over time, I was the only one of the four who stuck with the website, and starchamber.com became the location for my personal blog (now that blogs are a thing). But John, Rob, Pax and Ned are still friends. Rob moved to Seattle somewhere in the intervening years, but three of us still meet for drinks every week or so at the same location. It’s not called Casablanca anymore, but it’s still good. Every week it’s good, and every week I’m grateful for the friendships kindled there.

Happy 30th birthday, Star Chamber! Thank you John, Rob, and Pax!