my sordid past
dotdorsner just posted this thing, which is somebody trying to put together a comprehensive history of a message board that I used to post to frequently and even moderated for a while. Heck, at times the Sluggy boards were my social life. During the spring semester of my freshman year at Geneseo, I would go days at a time without talking to anybody in person, but I sure had a lot of fun posting in the WGARS forum.
During their heyday, the Sluggy boards seemed to be far more interesting than your standard message boards, the ones where people talk about Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons and other stuff you can discuss anywhere. Instead, there might be a rousing discussion wherein someone would cite Kierkegaard and others were expected to know who the hell Kierkegaard was. Or there might be a thread full of terrible (meaning awesome) puns. The level of discourse was high, the jokes were funny and everyone was expected to be (and usually was) polite. Many of my friends, especially on Livejournal, came from the Sluggy boards. I even met a few of them in person, and they were great fun.
But, things change. Many of the people who made the forums fun left because of boredom, an increased work load or incipient insanity. Other people replaced them who were OK people, all in all, but just slightly lame. The Star Wars threads slowly replaced the Kierkegaard threads and the games that were truly side-splittingly funny the first time were repeated constantly until they stopped being funny at all. By this time I had friends I could hang out with in real life, and my interest in the Sluggy boards waned until I wasn't even logging on anymore. This little personal history oversimplifies things, but it's true in the macro sense.
While I'm certainly not the same person that I was back when all this stuff was going on, it's still fun the reminisce. That said, I'm barely even mentioned in that history thread. Come on man, I did some cool stuff while I was there. I started the original "fake mod-edits" thread, remember? That was hysterical. And the time that I set up a dating game for FTM? Never mind the irony of me finding a date for someone else, that was an awesome idea. It was a fun time, and unlike other dating games it was not at all degrading.
During their heyday, the Sluggy boards seemed to be far more interesting than your standard message boards, the ones where people talk about Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons and other stuff you can discuss anywhere. Instead, there might be a rousing discussion wherein someone would cite Kierkegaard and others were expected to know who the hell Kierkegaard was. Or there might be a thread full of terrible (meaning awesome) puns. The level of discourse was high, the jokes were funny and everyone was expected to be (and usually was) polite. Many of my friends, especially on Livejournal, came from the Sluggy boards. I even met a few of them in person, and they were great fun.
But, things change. Many of the people who made the forums fun left because of boredom, an increased work load or incipient insanity. Other people replaced them who were OK people, all in all, but just slightly lame. The Star Wars threads slowly replaced the Kierkegaard threads and the games that were truly side-splittingly funny the first time were repeated constantly until they stopped being funny at all. By this time I had friends I could hang out with in real life, and my interest in the Sluggy boards waned until I wasn't even logging on anymore. This little personal history oversimplifies things, but it's true in the macro sense.
While I'm certainly not the same person that I was back when all this stuff was going on, it's still fun the reminisce. That said, I'm barely even mentioned in that history thread. Come on man, I did some cool stuff while I was there. I started the original "fake mod-edits" thread, remember? That was hysterical. And the time that I set up a dating game for FTM? Never mind the irony of me finding a date for someone else, that was an awesome idea. It was a fun time, and unlike other dating games it was not at all degrading.