I first came across BoingBoing in 2008 I’d say. I had a friend on Facebook who used to post articles to his facebook page. I signed up for the RSS feed then. It likely wasnt until 2013 that I finally clicked on the comments section, having held off because of the way that comment sections were always full of trolls. I was pleasantly surprised though.
I created my account in 2013. I remember my first post related to a drone video of a field in Ireland being mowed for hay, and I commented on the harm that certain techniques caused to corncrakes.
Looks like I added a few more posts since then. ~15k!
To me, nostalgia goes back to the days of “beep beep beep beep beep beep beep SCREEEwAWRbumpbumpGronchchch” of dialing in to local BBSes or AOL.
Or wandering around the streets of the city after dark, as a young teen finally roaming free with no adult supervision, listening to Metallica’s Master of Puppets tape blasting in my Walkman on a late summer night when the first chill of autumn was in the air.
Or further back to watching the early morning 60s shows like Green Acres on the local syndicated channel and then spending the day lying in the backyard reading Archie comics while covered in calamine lotion because chicken pox was at least a whole free week off from school.
Nostalgia by itself is a pretty broad topic.
Nothing wrong with the current focus though. As for me, I’ve spent more years here than I did at the old place. So my nostalgia about that is not quite on par with others. I do however have nostalgia for the Banestorm RPG game that @Wanderfound started there back in 2016 and which ultimately wound down here. It was a lot of fun and always something to look forward to.
We did have a little discussion about general vs specific threads awhile back in Do Long Threads Unravel Dialog? . I think we pretty much just agreed that both general and specific are welcome.
But our trend has been toward long-running threads that might be daunting to new arrivals, so it’s a reasonable question to consider now that we have a lot of new arrivals.
I knew of BB for years, but only stumbled upon the BBS around 2021. Like so many others, I had a “never get out of the boat” policy for reading the comments section. Mostly I still do. But when I finally clicked “Comments”, the BB BBS was different to say the least. It was mostly like how I had hoped the Internet would turn out.
I started reading BB maybe 2012 or 2011, i purposefully ignored the comments and forum for a long while because i tend to be weary of social media platforms. But at some point i saw how productive the comments and conversations were so i joined in 2013, wish i had done it sooner. But even then it took many years after that for me to really engage with the user-made topics. I’ve probably been more engaged with the community itself within the last year or two and again i really wish i had given the community a chance sooner.
I know for sure i made some posts over the years that pissed people off. I’ve had posts hidden/flagged and honestly i deserved it, so if there’s people here that don’t view me in the best of light just know that you’re right to feel that way and i’ve done a lot of personal growth in the last few years. This community has enabled me to be more introspective and more mindful of the things i say, still got more growing to do but i’m happy to be allowed to be here.
Things to reminisce about that make me chuckle and smile about the BBS. The running joke about:
Person 1: Did you hear about Rob Ford? Is he dead?
Person 2: Should we make a thread about it?
(Proceed not to make a thread about it)
Doesn’t come up a lot but made me lol when it did. And the good ol’ Locked Safe thread is a classic, so one of you will need to get their hands on a locked safe so we can have another go at that.
Lastly, the list of people disappointed at BB. Though i guess i can finally add myself to the list.
I’ve been a member of the BBS for almost 9 years, but I seldom posted because… several reasons: my english is good lexically but not culturally, I needed 6 years of working with americans to understand why things that are not really that important for an european are “Imma gonna eat your head” worthy in a US centric discourse.
The pandemic changed things much, and the forum provided a lot of what I considered “good input”. So of those almost 4 years of days visited… are from the last 4 years
I feel a bit weird that after all my “good work” in the touron thread, my most liked post is a random comment in a trump-bashing post but I’ll take it.
I was not prepared for that image
