I hit a forum milestone I want to crow about. Sure, there are plenty of people here who have been here longer, or posted more posts, or lived through more trips around the sun, but this is mine: exactly ten years ago, I finally activated my account here. I had been lurking for years beforehand, when the “Bananas and Nuts” thread was frequently updated and The Narrator stalked through threads. But eventually I got tired of always reading the forum anonymously. Especially when I was reading it on both my laptop and desktop and forgot which threads I had already read.
My first attempt at joining the forum was in 2006. I still have Tom’s responding email in my Hotmail account where he politely asked me to give an accounting of myself, to make sure that I wasn’t a bot or a jerk or something. But I was too shy and never responded and kept on lurking for three more years. Eventually, there was a change in forum policy. Any schmoe from the internet could waltz on in, no interview required. So I waltzed on in. And now ten years have passed.
I’d like to switch from patting myself on the back and start patting myself on the front; here are some of my own favorite posts in the last ten years:
- One of my favorite things here was a D&D 4th edition thread. xahlt started it as a one-shot, then Rob O’Boston turned it into a weekly/occasional thing where we’d meet on Fantasy Grounds and Skype and run through a fun campaign. It was the longest campaign I’d played in at that point, and I loved having Rob as a DM and playing with those guys. Eventually I started writing up each session as an after-action report. I wrote them from the point of view of my character, which was so heavily biased it sometimes led to lack of readability. In this session, my guy killed a goblin king, which was fun.
- In a P&R thread about absurd bigotry, we got to riffing on the idea of Trump as James Earl Jones’ character in Conan the Barbarian, Thulsa Doom. I imagined that scene where Doom convinces a young woman to jump to her death with Trump speaking instead.
- I enjoy writing up posts for 3x3 entries for Tom, Kelly, and Christien’s podcast feature. Christien had once mentioned that he enjoyed posts where we didn’t just spew out three movie titles but went into why we thought those were such great picks. I thought this was inspiring. Some of my favorites are Worst Dead Pets, Prayers, and Cancer In Movies.
- speaking of movies, I always love chances to defend the Star Wars prequels, and so I relished the chance to Djscmansplain some of George Lucas’s decisions to Jpinard.
Anyway, I like the people here (probably including you, too. Yeah, you!), I like the conversations we have, and I like the topics we have them about. One of these days, when my financial outlook brightens, I really really ought to contribute to that Patreon thing…