The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent
vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums
here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules
document is now in effect.
hey you wanna talk about forums like in general
Posts
For the sake of my career in public education, I hope it is buried 100 miles deep in the Earth.
Aren't you the defeater of the chinese
Neopets and Gaiaonline to start, drifted through a few small game forums for Falling Sand, and Newgrounds before finding the first true home on the Dwarf Fortress forums. First interactions with queer and trans people that my extremely conservative upbringing struggled to process. Thankfully the drive to be polite and kind to people was much stronger at that age than the dogma.
One particular weirdo pervert made a few posts one day that I as a young teen read as them having a bad day and lashing out. I was just mature enough to figure this person was going through some emotional strain and not yet jaded to figure it’s none of my business. Directly messaged them to express they seemed frayed recently and even though I don’t know their situation or have answers, if venting to a stranger on the web could help I was willing to listen. This would start a friend group of four of us who deeply cared for this weirdo pervert and consider eachother essentially family to this day.
Penny Arcade was joined entirely for the Minecraft thread/community. Similarly to SomethingAwful around the same time. My weirdo pervert friend come from a rough upbringing and had health complications they said would likely take them out before they were 30. The idea of them dying and leaving me socially alone and without community terrified me. Getting mixed up with that group was dumb luck and I’m not terribly sociable so I needed… maybe backup is the wrong term. Multiple homes so I’m not stricken socially homeless. PA I saw as an option to build up friendships in. I personally failed that plan, but my friend’s health complications eased off and lived a lot longer than expected.
The deep relationships I formed would start on forums and solidify around regular gaming time in our 20’s. The transition to larger community discords and less reliable gaming together time in our 30’s should terrify me, that the door to only social success I found has closed. After losing my job in the pandemic and my weirdo pervert friend dying I don’t feel much anything anymore. More a jellyfish going with the flow than a man nowadays.
That lyric? Written and sang by another current-day teacher!!
oh so YOU are whats wrong with the youth today
EDIT: I just noticed you have a signature now and I... guess I will allow it
Overqualified and underemployed, same as ever
Here it is. July of 2000, jfc. We never did get that sequel to the movie.
He also replied to one other thread I made, but I don't count that one because he was addressing someone else's comment about an actor's strike and (mercifully) not my terrible terrible suggestion of deciding the cast of the Hitch-Hiker's movie via online poll.
borrowed shame mild embarrasment
A month later I found this place, like a year after they opened the doors.
These days I think the most forum like place i see is the community pages for tech/software stuff I use at work. Or Reddit.
Turns out I was not as good at writing as I thought I was. Also when your opponent is actually creative and smart that makes things harder!
I tolerate Reddit because there's no alternative that I know of. I bounced off Twitter early on.
It's kinda blowing my mind now how frequent I read the forums the last decade and how much of an influence this place is to me, and I don't even post much.
Warseer, and then the Ammobunker where the whole Inq28 business started/got serious, including John Blanche posting or having his stuff get posted by aquaintances there.
I mostly lurk here as there is an echo of those heady days here, for good or for ill. It's comforting.
I'm doing so similar and cyclical to how I was back then that it sort of freaks me out but I'm good! I'm still RPG-brained, and still doing shit in the exact same setting that I'd been dabbling in on Augmentos (and PA itself beforehand, of course). Actually trying to do a comic in that setting but that's a mad project that's a way off but yeah, Augmentos was good times and we're indebted to you for getting it started
I guess I kind of used writing ""skills"" too but in the sense I wrote the world's worst fanfic in my bout against Bedlam, and then made a dramatic reading of it. And I never did apologise to anyone who had to hear it
Forums never change
Or they always change
I forget how it goes.
Game faqs
Planet half life
A mod for half life 1 called the opera, it was meant to be a Hong Kong blood opera John Woo thing with a lot of acrobatics and such, it was a very big deal for like a month, Gabe and Tycho did a comic book for it
Which is how I ended up at
Penny Arcade
When that game failed to make if out of the first public beta
Rest well, hopes and dreams.
It's all still in my sig. That said, linkrot is a thing and it's been well over 10 years...
Edit: 14 years?!?
I think before here I was on a few forums that were....mainly run by my friends and quickly became ghost towns. I have a clinical inability to shut the fuck up, but also extremely socially awkward. That led me to here, specifically to the Artists Corner back when I really wanted to be a writer. I still do but I'm mainly thinking of ideas instead of writing them down.