It's been a few years now. Few active posters would fit in to the category of 'pre-novemberist', or would even know what it meant. But it does mean something, as it represents the birth of TMO. Over four years have gone by since the pre-novemberists layed the foundations for the community. We've survived servers going down, a change of name, and the loss of thousands and thousands of posts. Something kept bringing people back though. There was something about Seethru/TMO that worked:
quote: "Ha ha, yes I recall the early days. Kitty, Tav, Bel. The whole ugly saga with Jones...Great days. You see, back then, ben and I were more than mere posters. Why, we were dualing Kings, and I fought for the kingdom of the right, as he valiantly defended the wrong. How we tussled! We chose our armies, yet always lead the attack. I remember when....
[this part of the recording is distorted]
...but, it was all lies. I would never sink so low, especially not 'I.R.L.', lol. Lol.....
You see, for me, it was the smell of pedantry in the morning; the roar of the keyboard as we fought. My victory could only bring the end of the war, and with that, the dism-
[the rest of the recording is lost]
(from 'Board Stiff', R.Joshua)
The yin and the yang were balanced. As bitterly as battles raged across boards, pmail, messenger and RL, there was always an equal measure of love. And how. Seethru and TMO quickly became a hotbed of crazy sex.
More people than you'd think have had a piece of the action. And there's been more action than you think. Take what you know, and double it, and you might be getting close to appreciating the full scale of the love-in that was TMO. If you haven't woken up next to a forumite, then you know somebody who has. Every winkie was a come-on. Every lol was a tug of a skirt, a fly being unzipped. The public display was only the tip of a sweaty mound of pumping bodies.
It worked because it was new. Internet geekjobs had been doing this shit for years, but Seethru represented the day when the internet became cool. Attachments played to a nation that was dreaming of paper millions, and those logging on Seethru were crossing the gap between fiction and reality. This was a real life space that existed within an abstraction. Soph was as hott as anybody wanted her to be. With more secret identities than a split personality superspy, forumites assumed the position as audience, author, critic, and broadcaster of the greatest show on Earth. Rave reviews became circle jerks, which descended into clusterfucks, which were realised at the wrap parties to full physical effect. As the audience demanded, so the audience supplied. Posts extended into lunch hours across the country, and all grew hungry for a .
Heavyweights emerged. A hierachy was formed. Conflict became feud. Wordsmiths upped the quality and dared onlookers to follow. Novellas were a daily occasion. Who can forget "Moider TMO wrote"? The greatest thread of all? Perhaps. Perhaps this was the peak. It was exciting to be a part of this, there was pride at meat attendence. As we tuned into Meat FM, hosted by The Nine Nine Nine, we were transcending the form of the bulletin board. Words really were our slaves. We thought that it would never end, and as the first child was conceived and raised on the forum, as the son of the saviour, it seemed as if the external world was in danger of melting away. We were all lawnmower men that year.
But, history dictates that an empire is a finite thing, and that success is the path to failure. The blazing heat of the Moon began to consume it's unsustainable core. Feuds were now etched in archived pmails. Soldiers, tired of fighting, retreated. The tangle of bodies began to take a rational form, and the threaded relationships became units of two. The loves and losses of the past were becoming scars, and the true world reclaimed virtual couplings. Words were beginning to cut down the strongest of fighters, and new blood no longer knew why the war must continue. Those who willed it, began to find that peace was only a minimised window away. The VSO shows were no longer the grand spectales of yore, and even the entertainers were withdrawing. The war was coming to an end with a whimper. Other lands held promise. Green rolling hills, albeit inhabited by teletubbies, were more attractive than the pitted and scarred surface of the moon. Day trippers spent longer and longer holidays relaxing elsewhere, and soon the Moon was a wasted and fragmented motherland to a nation of ex-pats.
Who would want to return? What was left? Even the Gods had fled for sunnier climes. Alone in cyberspace, the moon carried on turning. Those who stayed found that anarchy had descended. The structures and rules of the past were now ancient memory. Poster Fist and For To Make Smile were cave paintings, shared memories of the retired. The new generation, gorged on chate, viewed each other with suspicion. Threat still hung in the air like so many mexican eggs, and heads were bowed.
It's time for the morlocks to venture above the crust. It's a new land, or it's a ghost filled graveyard. It can't really be both. If there are lurkers, then now is the time.
[ 24.11.2004, 07:00: Message edited by: Dr. Benway ]
Louche
Carved TMO on her clit just to make you feel bad
posted
What the fuck is the point of trying to create a new land, Benway? Why bother? Is there any reward for putting any effort into TMO? If everything is always going to be benchmarked against The Great Days of SeeThru when there were real rows and people got really upset and the quality of the posting was at such a level that it must be remembered and revered always, then why bother putting the tiniest of efforts in now?
Why post when there’s perpetually another State of the Boards Crisis around the corner? Why play with your words and make them do a pretty little dance when the next post after yours is, odds on, going to be a flippant one liner from Misc or a Kovacian put down about how shit things are these days? And why the fuck bother when, as you have just so fucking eloquently shown, nothing is going to live up to the glory days?
You don’t actually have to answer these questions. Most of them can be considered to be utterly rhetorical.
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posted
I think that it could still work if it reached a critical mass. That's all it takes. If there are enough people posting who don't already all know each other, then quality comes automatically. I suppose that as much as 'the boards' are just a set of relationships, they are goverened by rules that are unique, and that forced inertia. I think that maybe now, in a state of anarchy, the rules no longer exist. I don't know. There seems to be few people here. In fact, there's less people here now than there was about a week ago, and that is obviously troubling.
posted
What was it like being dead, Dr B? Do the dead have special spectral connections allowing them access to all The Dead threads ever?
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quote:Originally posted by Louche: And why the fuck bother when, as you have just so fucking eloquently shown, nothing is going to live up to the glory days?
If it makes you feel better this sort of stuff has been going on for at least as long as I've been posting here. I think a lot of it is people posting shit and then whining about how the board shit these days and everyone else posts shit. A high proportion of these posters are 'glory days' posters. Fuck only knows what that must have been like: a bunch of fucking idiots carping on about how things were better before SeeThru when they only ever communicated through Ceefax and that required more effort. Yeah there's chate around these days, but it's not really a reason not to engage in debate as well, or creativity or whatever. When former "glory days" posters like London can only be fucked to link to a terrible article on "pimp"ness and then disappears out of the debate, you can't really take seriously any claims that the flirting and hott forum menz of the old days were so much better. It's more like "fuck you then, fuck off out of here." I don't want this to sound like a rant at Benway, because since his return I've really enjoyed reading his stuff, and I hope on the occasions I've contributed to his threads its been in a manner that they deserve. But christ, I can relate to Louche's ire, the way when someone huffs "not as good as the old days" it feels like they've just spat over anything decent you may have written over the past week. Fuck you! Show us what was so fucking good about the old days.
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posted
Darryn should organize a TMO Recruitment Fair. Current forumites could host seminars about UBB skills and forum etiquette. There would be a four hour lecture about in-jokes and their place on the board. I'd be there, manning my TMOuncovered stall, handing out free biscuits and weak lemon drink, and bribing potential newbies with the promise of free image hosting.
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posted
I don't want to have a go at anybody who is posting. It seems like maybe all the bad vibes have got to something that used to be here, and not that long ago. I'm just trying to understand the changes, really. Maybe it's best not to reflect on these things. Sorry everybody.
Louche
Carved TMO on her clit just to make you feel bad
posted
A gigantic paen to the world of SeeThru basically says 'everything that followed was shite'. If you meant last week, Benway, say last week. As for the State of the Boards conversation we can have again and again and again and it will always but always come down to the following:
Some people are posting elsewhere
Some people are still smarting from a slight/imagined slight
Some people are a bit busy at the moment
Some people aren't posting because Kovacs took the piss out of them obliquely/otherwise
Because not many people are posting, there isn't much to reply to
Because there isn't much to reply to, lots of people aren't posting
posted
I'm not posting because about 90% of the stuff posted on here nowadays doesn't interest me, unlike on the MK Cruise forum which, unsurprisingly, keeps me far more interested.
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posted
I liked your post Benway. It was pretty. But I'm not sure you're right. Could it not be that the veil of involvement is what clouds an individual's reason when it comes to reflecting on the state of the boards? I mean, when one is posting regularly, contributing to the debates, putting their fiction out there, batting one line chate posts over the net, they feel part of something and they view that something through rose tinted wraparounds. There was just as much chate during every period you eloquently refer to in your Post Fist as there is now. The only difference being, back then you were more involved in the chateing.
There's been at least one late night drunken chate thread in the last month. I read it and shook my head. Is this what the boards have come to? The answer is yes but, equally, it's where they've come from and where they'll continue to go. The drunken threads of internet chate I participated in myself were equally banal. I just thought they weren't because I was inside them.
I agree it seems quieter in here. I don't think there are the numbers there once were, and there are individual posters whose contributions I miss, but I don't think 'standards' are any lower or higher than they ever were. That conclusion didn't come easily to me. I've popped in and lurked for an hour here and there, reading threads wondering why they aren't amusing me any more. I've read sprawling 200 post looms which spiderweb in a dozen directions of meandering online thought and wondered "Why am I reading this?" "Why the hell are they writing this?" "Why isn't it like it used to be?" The answer to the last question has to be me, my involvement. I'm the only variable, and I didn't bring that much to the party so I suppose it must come down to a sense of belonging and being involved.
I don't know if it's vanity or perception but if a person isn't involved with the boards on a regular basis then I don't think they 'get it'. I'm not casting aspersions about cliquiness or exclusivity; I just think it's impossible to evaluate the boards from an objective perspective. Right lurkers?
posted
I am the second-best all-round, long-term contributor to these boards and much of what has been suggested following Benway's post is true:
Seethru's standard of posts was not stellar by any means, but it did feel more "exciting", "intense" and "important", perhaps because, as Benway says, the very idea of engaging with people -- attractive, professional, intelligent people a bit like yourself, who turned out to live pretty near you and have the same cultural tastes -- while remaining teasingly, intriguingly anonymous and fluid in your projected identity (if you chose it) was sexy and new per se. Four years later, with every semi-literate schoolkid and mundane mousewife online, the concept of a forum like this is unremarkable. At the time, the very means of communication, and the idea of making connections through it, was fascinating in itself.
Of course Louche is right -- fewer posts means fewer people post, which means fewer posts.
It can't be true that anyone is staying off the boards because they feel I slighted them, though. I radiate positive energy on here, and most of what I get in return is sniping and bad attitude. When I don't post for a while because I am sick of exposing myself to such negativity, the board traffic drops by about 20% and its quality by around 30%. That's why the boards have been particularly shit during Monday and Tuesday of this week.
Neurotic Cat
My fortune cookie's empty... That's also the title of my autobiography.
posted
Just wanted to say I been lurking and reading TMO for quite a while. It is pretty intidmidating but I liked Benways post and felt compelled to show myself.
Perhaps if there are any other fellow lurkers around, they might also reveal themselves therefore bringing some new mysterious identities on the boards for the regs to play with?
I'm open to questions or comments so feel free!
-------------------- You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats Posts: 150
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posted
I remember walking downstairs and saying to my father ‘Dad, I’m bored’ and he said ‘I’m Dad, pleased to meet you Bored’ and I said ‘No Dad, I am reeeeeeally bored’ and he said ‘Well me ol mucker
quote:Originally posted by kovacs: When I don't post for a while because I am sick of exposing myself to such negativity, the board traffic drops by about 20% and its quality by around 30%. That's why the boards have been particularly shit during Monday and Tuesday of this week.
I also didn't post on Monday and Tuesday though, how does that work?
quote:Originally posted by Neurotic Cat: Just wanted to say I been lurking and reading TMO for quite a while. It is pretty intidmidating but I liked Benways post and felt compelled to show myself.
Hello Neurotic Cat. There used to be a neurotic cat who came band visited my girlfriend and I. We called her Pulbrook, and she would tentatively creep up through the patio doors and snoop nervously round the flat. If you made any sudden movements around her, she'd dart away, and run up the garden wall, and then crouch and watch from a distance, until she was sure everything had calmed down. Then she'd do the same thing again. Pulbrook used to enjoy cheese, and she was also partial to chicken. Once she'd been fed, she'd sit on my girlfriend's lap and watch The O.C. Then my girlfriend moved out and the cat stopped coming round. I don't think she liked me that much and anyway she was hit by a car and died.
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posted
Perhaps she died from the shame of having such a stupid name.
Neurotic Cat: do you think there are any styles of posting that are conspicuously absent from the board?
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quote:Originally posted by Uber Trick: I also didn't post on Monday and Tuesday though, how does that work?
Records show that the forum was on 42% during the 22nd and 23rd of November. Your influence on the boards, Uber, has been estimated at an average 6%. It is for you to decide whether TMO would have been on 48% or 36% with your contribution over Monday and Tuesday.
Neurotic Cat
My fortune cookie's empty... That's also the title of my autobiography.
posted
Thats a sad story Thorn!
Knowing most blokes attitude to cats (blokes I've met anyway) I can only imagine you didnt send out the right vibes? Cats are pretty intuitive when they sense a kick up the arse comin!
Hey Benway!
In answer to Vogon: Hey! I dont think its any particular style of posting thats missing? Just new contributers. Like you say once you've met the the majority its harder to come up with Q's that people can really get their teeth into. I also agree with the anonymity (sp?)thing too.
I'd like to turn the Q round if thats ok?
Do you guys think there are any particular posting styles that are missing?
-------------------- You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats Posts: 150
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posted
I would like "Haus" off Barbelith on here. He is one of the only people online more clever than me. NB. it also took me an embarrassingly long time to craft that last sentence.
I'd also like to see big-mouthed, blustering, domineering but dim people like RedBlond and TJM from Handbag on here, just to see how long they last. That would be only temporarily entertaining, but there are a few others I could suggest as replacements.
posted
Yes, somebody with strong yet utterly incorrect views, in order to help maintain a constantly re-enforced collective morality. Also, some kind of butlins red-coat, with unending cheeriness and energy. An enabler.
quote:Originally posted by Dr. Benway: Yes, somebody with strong yet utterly incorrect views, in order to help maintain a constantly re-enforced collective morality.
we had one. he left. remember? he was a nazi?
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Louche
Carved TMO on her clit just to make you feel bad
posted
Jesus, Kovacs, is it neccessary to be quite so self-deprecating?
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turbo
Gold..... What is it good for? You can't eat it, you can't smoke it, yet everybody wants it.
posted
I used to really enjoy reading the threads on TMO and joining in the discussions. Sometimes you'd go away for an hour or two and come back to several new pages of posts. Now I pop my head round the door occasionally and see what the active topics are. When you see there have been a mere handful of posts since the last time you popped in, it's not particularly inspirational and doesn't motivate me to post. I just don't see why it's necessary to analyse the lull each and every time one occurs. I'm sure SeeThru was the bees knees, but things change.
It's as if SeeThru was the amazing ex who left and the new partner is just not quite as great as the memories of the ex. Thing is, it's not necessary to go for relationship counselling each time you're not communicating that well - it's just a different relationship. Get used to it, because SeeThru has long since got married and had kids and isn't coming back.
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quote:Originally posted by Thorn Davis: I don't think she liked me that much and anyway she was hit by a car and died.
Your girlfriend or the cat?
ANYWAY... I have been away from the moon for more than 2 years. I expected it to be very different when I returned a few months ago but was pleasantly surprised to see most of the old faces still around.
After spending a few months reading the threads I have noticed that some of you have really changed (haha) your Online Personaand the way you write. Thorn used to be much nastier (and I thought funnier) than he is today. VP used to post less and Snorton used to post more. Jonesy would reply to everything. I can only assume that this change has come about because you know each other better IRL. Kovacs and Ben havnt changed a bit.
But another thing that hasnt changed is that we are all still spending half the time complaining that the post quality isnt what it used to be and blah blah blah. Then someone starts a thread that goes on for a few pages, becomes drunken chate and fizzles out. A week will go by with nothing. A "Whats Happening to the Board" thread will start and so the cycle continues. TMO wouldnt be TMO without neurotic worry over the State of the Board.
quote:Originally posted by turbo: Get used to it, because SeeThru has long since got married and had kids and isn't coming back.
Actually, if we're using that metaphor, SeeThru died suddenly in a car accident and even though we're in a new and fullfilling relationship sometime we sneak back to SeeThru's graveside and shed a quiet tear, mentally lamenting that nothing will ever be as good again now it's gone. We pull ourselves together though and return home to our current partner, putting a brave face on things and lying about where we've been.
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posted
I think the style that is obviously missing from the boards is that of a middle aged woman pretending that they're still 21, and trying to emulate the style of their sister and failing to do it well at all.
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