I don't like this place anymore, and here's why.

[pinback]

We've been here so long, and there's so few of us left, that we basically have to act like we actually are in real life.

I'm not "Pinback" here anymore, I'm Ben Parrish, and who the hell wants that? Pinback is sharp-tongued, not afraid of hurting feelings, lives to rip you apart in the funniest way possible, and generally wants to STIR UP SOME SHIT whenever he can!

But Ben is a pretty quiet, nice guy in real life. Boring. Like all of us! In real life we're all nice, boring guys. What fun is that?

You all share a lot of interests, which makes it fun for you, but since I don't have any interests, I don't share any of those interests, so I'm left out of the fun.

Ah well. I suppose you can't live in the past. (Or some of us, in the future.)

Anyway, this has been:

BEN EXPLAINS WHY HE DON'T LIKE THIS PLACE ANYMORE, BUT I GUESS THERE'S NOTHING TO DO ABOUT IT, SO WHATEVER I GUESS

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I haven't started a thread in a while. So I put this on me. I have just really been in "survival" mode. Well, not true survival mode, but I guess just messed up in the head. So many things came AT me so quickly.

[pinback]

So I put this on me.

Reasonable. Unless anyone else speaks up, I'll go ahead and place all of the blame for this on you, thank you.

So many things came AT me so quickly.

That's what she said.

[Casual Observer]

So I put this on me.

Reasonable. Unless anyone else speaks up, I'll go ahead and place all of the blame for this on you, thank you.

So many things came AT me so quickly.

That's what she said.

When I was in college I went to a music festival. I did some acid and rode my mountain bike a lot but at night there was a drum circle. I brought my djembe drum and consistently fucked up the beat for everyone until I left the circle.

I think that's what I've done here, fucked up the beat.

[Da King]

We've been here so long, and there's so few of us left, that we basically have to act like we actually are in real life.

I mean, I'm nowhere near the dick that CO thinks I am.

I'm pretty sure thats a HIM problem though, and not a ME problem.

[Casual Observer]

We've been here so long, and there's so few of us left, that we basically have to act like we actually are in real life.

I mean, I'm nowhere near the dick that CO thinks I am.

I'm pretty sure thats a HIM problem though, and not a ME problem.

HIM sure has lotsa problems.

Seriously though Pinner has a point, how do we get back to the magic that once was JC? Maybe import some Caltrops characters?

[pinback]

Caltrops has declined to the point of unreadability. So I still like this place better than that place.

[AArdvark]

Maybe if we do a DDS on every social media platform people will migrate back to forums and BBSs. Other than that....I dunno. It seems people aren't interested in interactive fiction, mostly text threads, bacon grease and the reasonably boring lives of a handful of middle aged men.

THE
CHECKERS IN AN
XBOX WORLD
AARDVARK

[Flack]

It's a bummer that forums are dying everywhere. Mine's dying, and at its peak it only got as much traffic as JC does today. Everything is relative. It's hard for me to comprehend that the format that replaced BBSes has itself become old and rickety. My wife is currently working with a nonprofit group and when she said the group needed a way to communicate, I suggested setting up a forum. No one in the group was interested. I think they went with WhatsApp.

I wrote my infamous "Full Circle" textfile back in 1996, I think. By 1994, my BBS had become so popular that I had installed a second phone line and modem just to keep up with users. I was the first guy in town with an ENTIRE GIGABYTE of drive space, and had even added a loud-ass external 6-disc CD-ROM changer to the board that clanged and sputtered louder than the engine in my old Buick Regal every time someone switched drives. People would set their modems on autodial just to get on my board... and then in 1994, things began to slow down. By 1995 I was losing the war to free AOL CDs. By 1996, it was a ghost town. I was so mad at the internet that I sat down and wrote a textfile about it. It was a pretty big "you'll rue the day!" rant about how everyone had stopped calling BBSes, but based on a slight surge I saw in the summer of '96, I predicted that soon people would tire of the anonymity of the internet and would soon be right back to calling BBSes, where I would be smugly waiting for them.

I took my BBS down when I moved to Washington later that year. When I returned to Oklahoma in 1998 I put it back online, much to the excitement of literally no one. I made a deal with myself that if the BBS went for an entire week without a caller, I would shut it down. After a week, I extended it to a month. When you unplug a BBS in the middle of a forest, does anyone hear the dial tone? Everybody, including me, was spending all their time on IRC, and downloading from FTP sites. Who wants to release textfiles when you can just post them on LiveJournal? I hate change and I so wanted to be right about people returning to BBSes.

You're right in the sense that JC has become more than just a place full of people portraying characters and hiding behind aliases. Ice Cream Jonsey isn't some pretend frozen treat employee. He's Robb, a guy whose wedding I attended. We've met in person multiple times, slept at each other's houses, and randomly text each other. Tdarcos isn't really a commander; he's a paraplegics who I once visited and mail annual Christmas packages to. And, Pinback's not that snarky sergeant from Dark Star. He's Ben, a guy I've spoken to on the phone and shed tears for because he's dying.

There's a part of me that feels responsible for all of this. (Not the cancer part.) I'm the "new" guy, having arrived here in 2008 after (sort of) meeting ICJ at the Classic Gaming Expo in 2007. I've always been the odd man out here, the guy who didn't always "get" the bits. I didn't fully understand Don Rogers until it was too late, despite contributing to it. I didn't want to call into a fake show and be a fake person. I wanted to be on a show and make my friends laugh. Before I arrived there was an aardvark and a commander and a whatever a jizaboz is. I do feel a bit responsible for fucking the vibe up.

My co-conspirator in all this is "time". I don't know about the rest of you, but I got old. In 2008, I owned 30 arcade games and had just written Commodork. I couldn't have cared less who was the president. I didn't care about politics or how my 401k was doing. In 2008 I was seriously considering picking up skateboarding again. Today I take multiple gabapentins a day to suppress back pain, and sure wish I'd lost all this weight in my 30s rather than trying to do it in my (Jesus H) early 50s.

The technology has changed, but so have the people. None of us are the same people we were 10, 20, or 30 years ago. I've enjoyed figuratively hanging out with you guys in the common room, but if nobody wants to show up for dominos anymore and everyone wants to go back to their rooms, I get it.

There's never a finite pin to stick in the end of things. There's no official date that marks the end of BBSes or the end of forums. Instead, there's a gentle fading of the light -- the sun setting, so to speak. I've spent a lot of time chasing the sun but I'm too tired to keep running. I'll still be here on the porch in a rocking chair, watching the sun set and sitting at the dominos table. If anyone still wants to play I'm always ready, but if it's bedtime, well, I won't keep you awake.

And you run, and you run
To catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
And racing around
To come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way
But you're older
Shorter of breath
And one day closer to death.

[Roody_Yogurt]

I pretty much never post so I've never been much of a contributor to the content of this place, but, in general, I do like people being real, nice, and boring over many alternatives. I'm sorry to hear that it makes things less enjoyable for you, Pinback. I do find a lot of commiseration with the kind of things being written these days, and in general, I do really like decency in these digital places where it doesn't even matter. Decency in real life sometimes almost feels passive aggressive because it's just a matter of time before life is going to punch you across the face with the next thing.

[AArdvark]

I like it here because it's an outlet for my stories and doodles. Which would have been never seen by anyone but me and unceremoniously formatted and deleted after the fatal heart attack does me in

[Jizaboz]

It's all good bro!