Fair point.
It was wierd. It was (well to me) like a little boy finding his old man's porn stash...and pressing the play button ofcourse. Then in about half an hour it lost its innocence.
I was looking for a new forum, so I googled and found EoFF. I joined and haven't left since. I spent most of my newb days in the FFVII, FFIX, and I think the General FF forums. Now I'm normally in General Chat and General Gaming Discussion. I don't remember much else besides the fact I didn't make an introduction thread.
December, 1999, sometime after 6 in the evening I think. I was sitting at my desk in the dark, halway into my freshman year of college, and my roommate was at his computer behind me. I remember pretty clearly searching for Final Fantasy message boards on EZBoard, looking for one to join. Part of my motivation was a plan to get people to be interested in my new FF1 site, which was a month or two old at that time. Part of it was to find a new message board to join, because joining a new board is always better than joining an older one. You can be more a part of a new one; joining later, you're often just another new member among thousands and most of the guts of the board are already established. In any case, I narrowed the choices down to three or four boards out of hundreds of search results. The description of The Highwind impressed me somehow. "We're a week old and we already have 20+ members!" or something similar. (I believe Sean updated that description a lot over time as we grew. In the beginning there was a lot of competition among FF EZBoards to see which was biggest. We weren't the biggest, for a long while.) In any case, that first day, I opened up a paint program of some sort, I think Paint Shop Pro 5, and drew my avatar, which I am still using. It took me a while to decide whether the black outline on Dr. Unne was part of the sprite, or part of the background of the screenshots I was basing it on. In the end I decided to leave off the outer black outline. Years later I would realize that the black outline was really a part of his sprite, not his background, but I continue to use the avatar without the black outline today. That was the first time I'd ever made an animated gif, so it took a while to make, in any case. I remember registering my EZBoard account afterwards. I still remember pretty clearly what the layout of the registration page looked like. Whitish background, asked you if you wanted to make a "global" account, or a single-board account. I made mine global partly because if I joined any other boards, it would add to my post count, and partly because I was worried people would steal my screen name otherwise. There was never any doubt that I would use the name "Dr. Unne". It would be a good way to spread around some FF1-related joy. And I didn't even have to think of a signature. I had to look in the game to figure out the exact wording and punctuation of my signature though; to this day I can't remember it exactly and I have to look it up in the game each time I quote it (though nowadays I just look at chapter 4 of my walkthrough). I had to give some thought as to the formatting of the signature. In the end I decided to use italics to make it stand out. I tried to make the username "Dr. Unne", but it wouldn't allow periods in the username, so I had to leave out the period. I may have considered Dr_Unne, or DrUnne, I can't remember. The board accepted Dr Unne though which I still feel was better anyways. I made a new thread entitled "Hello." in the general chat forum, asking if anyone liked FF1. I was a bit nervous about it because I'd never used a message board before. I kept hitting Refresh over and over to see if my thread would actually get any replies. But Sean replied that he liked FF1, as did a few other people, so I was excited. The thread got 3 or 4 replies pretty quickly. I replied a few times too. I used a lot of exclamation points. I think in the end my first thread ended up with two pages of replies (though the thread was later resurrected by skanker months later, so it may not have broken 2 pages until that time). It was one of the biggest threads around in the beginning, so I was happy. Everyone at the MB was happy about how many members we were getting in such a short amount of time, and there was lots of enthusiasm all around. I hung around for a couple hours and the time went really fast. I told my roommate about it and he didn't care. Then I went to bed.
After such a wonderful story I, too, will go to bed.
...
Amen.Originally Posted by Acid Raine
Clearly. I remember signing up, logging in, and in desperate need for an avatar and signature. Most of all I remember how I ended up here, looking through Final Fantasy websites, came acrossed this one, needed a new home, and settled into chat. Then after that I was convinced into joining.
this thread is less interesting than I thought it would be. Everyone has the same story: Bored, came for Final Fantasy info, signed up
PH33R teh Rainbow.
Taste the Rainbow
Yes, BoB sent me his nudes and wanted my puppies'. I rejected and he wanked.