Brian T on 22/6/2010 at 15:08

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Back off man, we're not OLD. But yeah, let's party! fett can bring his Barry Manilow CDs and I'll dig out the slides of the holiday in Greece in 1999. Who's gonna bring the pineapple and cheese on a stick?

V. Equinox on 22/6/2010 at 22:45

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See, now, dammit, I missed out on those parties. :mad:

Oh...um, hi! 10 years for me. I am poking around TTLG lately. Hello there, old friends and new!

Scots Taffer on 23/6/2010 at 02:28

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Not much of a story really. I think I came here after playing TDP and lurked around Thief Gen until the launch of the Thief 2 demo (which, if I recall correctly, was around New Year time) - I was only just becoming a PC gamer at this point. I had no permanent net connection, even what I did have was terrible laggy/droppy 56kbps. I remember using GetRight to dl the demo and the joy of actually installing and playing. I even recall doing some utterly shitty Thief fanfictions!

I remember my first thread in CommChat was about what I was intending to do in life (at that point, actuary after finishing my degree) and if anyone knew much about the job or whatever. It got barely any responses and sunk down into obscurity, as should I have - lurked and listened and learned, but instead I made the mistake of many a newbie and ploughed in there. I came from a fairly conservative Catholic background and lived a somewhat sheltered existence, so I remember fervently battling in the huge flaming megathreads on things like gays and abortion and so on. I had such strong opinions without any real idea of why I had them or where they came from. I got my ass handed to me so many times and didn't realise how utterly hopeless my counterarguments were that for a time, I think people started to ignore me rather than engage with me in any meaningful context.

I also was writing a lot at the time, pulpy crap short fiction and an attempt at a box novel, which I lovingly thought was pretty decent. I put up a thread with some writing and it got utterly decimated by the then IRC kru of Para?noid et al. Again, I reacted first and thought about it all second, beginners mistakes in How To Internet showing through again.

After that, I kind of sunk into a petty despair about how I was viewed as a idiotic bigot who can't write worth shit and can't hack opinions/discussions/debate. I contemplated leaving TTLG, created a new nick which was about as obvious as you could get, left that, forgot about the place for a while - because FUCK THEM, that's why - and wandered around the internet in a daze. I remember reading tons of posts across a whole range of issues and finding my views on things changing, developing my first real independent decisions and rationalisations. Baby's First Internet.

Then in some later semester of Uni I remember being bored witless in a study lab and logging into IRC. This would maybe have been around late 2001. I became a bit of a regular fixture on #thief and #vasquez, and really enjoyed the effortlessly quirky and witty stream of banter, regular characters and all the inhouse gossip you could muster. Oh, the stories and the scandals and petty intrigues.

This went on for a year or two, and I changed a lot as a person in that timeframe as well. I finished my degree, got engaged, went travellling, started a PhD, quit it, struggled to find work, found it, moved away to Oxford for a year, away from home, away from friends, most difficult: away from my fiancée. I spent a lot of time outside of work with my housemates, chatting on IRC, playing whatever game was hot at the time and generally wasting vast amounts of time.

I went to my first TTLG meet in Bristol and caught up with a bunch of fun people, that's when I realised (for real) that TTLG was a very important part of my life and that I was making "real" friends. I remember these times between '02 and '05 as something of a personal heyday for TTLG, though it remains pretty much the first page I load whenever I hit the internet every day.

In those days stuff had a way of snowballing at an extreme speed, there'd be cross-pollination of ideas in IRC and TTLG that would spawn these hilarious megathreads and confusion and ridiculousness. Some poor helpless bastard would post something clueless somewhere, it'd get linked in IRC and a plague of #thiefers would descend with their brand of acerbic wit and putdowns. There was a lot of fun in those times, a lot of camraderie, and I got to know a lot of people - many of whom, I sadly say, I do not really keep in contact with at all anymore.

At the time I didn't realise how insular the IRC/CommChat community was becoming back then, and it probably wasn't until after Noid upped and left that I saw how much of that energy was half good-natured and half destructive. There was a real downturn in the forum mood at some point, snark and GET OUT was rife, friendly and chatty surrealism spiralling off for fun went down. I wasn't on IRC much after I moved back to Scotland and started my Masters, but I was on TTLG constantly, CommChat and GenGaming in particular. This would maybe have been around 2005/2006. My memory is bad when it comes to specifics of when things happened, cloudy, I just remember the stuff and how I felt.

The forums energy ebbed and flowed, but CommChat was always my home and my place to air a ton of thoughts. I got married and did a big thread about it. I moved to Aus and did a big thread about that. I had a kid and, you guessed it, big thread about that too. I got immense pleasure from those threads, the spirit of community, the injokes, the friendliness. Along the way I found friendships forming outside of the forums, IM chats and e-mail conversations, common interests, shared goals, ideas and opinions, adult discussions that weren't constrained by the forum framework or due to being publicly broadcast.

And that's about it. I could talk about the big TTLG meets in the US, but we've talked about those enough in the past and they are memorable events that will stay with me. And there will be more in the future too, but first and foremost this place is familiar territory, a friendly place, a safe place, and still populated by a mix of characters that would get drowned out in other parts of the net.

Here's to 10 more years til Kolya's grumblings about us all being old married parents muttering about kids on our lawn is actually true.

Ko0K on 23/6/2010 at 04:35

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Yer all newbs.

theBlackman on 23/6/2010 at 08:30

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Everybody is a virgin at one time or another. Even you were. :ebil: