So long, peasants!

On September 7th of 2010, Fake Dan Ellis was born. One year and around 800 tweets later, it's time to call it quits.

I started Fake Dan Ellis in the midst of the #DanEllisProblems controversy. In the finest Internet tradition I stole a joke invented by someone else and rode it to stardom. I continued beating the corpse of the dead joke horse relentlessly for months, the steady flow of new followers feeding my twisted perseverance.

The highlight of the whole experience was probably the news article in Canada's National Post in which the real Dan Ellis was asked about Fake Dan Ellis. As Rudy pointed out at the time, I got a major media outlet to ask a professional athlete about a Twitter account that complains about the inflated price of top hats. I can now die happy.

I won't be tweeting as Fake Dan Ellis anymore, but I will still be writing here at Battle of California and on my associated Twitter account, @MegalodonBOC. If you've never visited our site before, welcome! If you thought Fake Dan Ellis was funny then you'll probably like what we do here. You don't need to be a fan of any California hockey team to enjoy stuff like our reviews of bad hockey movies, horrible hockey eBay stuff, and our Patrick Marleau Facts. Stick around - it's fun! 

Finally, I'd like to thank the following people for helping to make the Fake Dan Ellis experience fun for the past 365 days:

1. Whoever originally came up with the #DanEllisProblems meme. I've tried my best to figure out exactly who this was, but since I keep finding conflicting information I'll just leave it open here - if you know the answer please let me know in the comments. For now I'll just say: thanks for the inspiration, mysterious stranger!

(Update: @ryanclassic has been named as the possible source of #DanEllisProblems. If that is correct then thank you, sir.)

2. Grey Wyshynski. Intentionally or not, Puck Daddy's stories on the Dan Ellis Twitter controversy served to fan the flames and spread awareness of what was going on. Additionally, when I finally had a tweet re-tweeted by @wyshynski it resulted in an explosion of followers, which in turn inspired me to keep going long beyond the point of reason.

3. The fans. Thanks to everybody who said nice things about @FakeDanEllis on Twitter. I read everything you said, and it made it a lot easier to ignore the people who kept saying that I had jumped the shark every couple of months.

4. The three people who bought shirts from the Fake Dan Ellis T-shirt Emporium. You people are the greatest heroes of all. I hope you like your shirts.

5. The engineers of the trade that sent Dan Ellis to the Ducks. Six months into making fun of Dan Ellis and then he gets traded to one of my least favorite teams, which plays practically in my backyard? The hockey gods must love me, and hate the Ducks. This was seriously the best thing that could have happened to @FakeDanEllis short of the real Dan Ellis running over a homeless man with his Segway.

6. Most importantly, I'd like to thank Dan Ellis. He seems like a really nice guy, and I think most rational people can understand the frustration he was trying to express originally. And now that he's had some time to think about things, I'll bet he can see why some people got a bit annoyed by his comments.

Come back to Twitter, Real Dan Ellis. We miss you.