Sage
Staff Emeritus
- 12,533
- United States
- GTP_Sage
Well, Ive been officially registered here for half a decade today thats over a quarter of my life. And boy, what a quarter!
I registered 10 February 2002 under the guise of youth_cycler. I had received a PS2 two months earlier (Christmas present) and bought myself GT3, and like anybody who decides to take a particular video game seriously, I decided to do some internet research on it. I found GTP, lurked for a while, then registered.
My first few threads and posts were pretty embarrassing in retrospect I think that holds true for most people. The first serious post I ever made was this one (although of course, me being me, I had to work in a corny geometry analogy into a life lesson huh?).
This thread holds a dear amount of significance to me, because it led to what was probably one of the most important conversations Ive ever had in my life. No, you wont find that conversation in that thread, and no, you wont even find the person I conversed with in that thread. But you know who you are thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for always being a father figure for me, for listening to my ranting, for always nudging me in the right direction. Thank you a million times over. 👍
A little later, we come to the God in the Pledge thread, which was sort of my first foray into online debate, and a precursor to the kinds of conversations that would eventually lead to the creation of the Opinions forum, which is one of the more important boards on GTP for many of us. And hey, I got to argue with Jordan!
As a kind of extension to that discussion, I created the Atheist perceptions thread, which set the stage for some rather lively future discussions. 
Around this time Doug had created a scrolling news ticker in his signature (forum news, that is), but after marquees were disabled from signatures, he decided to send out the news as a PM. After a while, he stopped it; I decided to pick it up, though that was also rather short-lived. However, this experience would eventually lead to something that Ill be describing shortly.
On 10 February 2003 I celebrated my first-year anniversary here. Three days later I got a PM from Jordan inviting me to the mod team, and of course I gratefully (and ecstatically) accepted. Giles was inducted on the same day, and Duke joined us only two days later.
Several months later wed reached 9,999 members who knew that in under four years wed increase that count by nearly tenfold?
That year everybody seemed to hate Americans for some reason, so I made this thread outlining how horrible of an American I was. I believe that it helped shut up some of the naysayers, but to this day there are still a few few who wish to push that blanket view on us (hmmm, first an Atheist perceptions thread, then an American perceptions thread ).
Deciding to try to inject some fun into things, I decided to make a game where you had to guess members IDs based on the poorly-drawn pictures. I think I stole that idea from sn00pie somehow. Anyway, that was short-lived, but fun.
As people started getting fidgety over the increasingly-late release date of GT4, there was a lot of tension being built up in the GT4 forum, especially regarding searching, and I finally snapped one day and posted this rant. In retrospect, Im quite happy I posted that (usually my rants dont go over well), because it really was quite a serious problem back then and ruining the morale of the forum.
Around the same time I was working on a secret project. Hayden (ALPHA) had approached me with the idea of creating a website that would be a sort of GTP magazine and the old News Ticker in one we decided to call it the GTP Insider, and I went off coding while he went off designing. He designed a gorgeous site, and after confirming the idea with Jordan, I hacked away at it (changing the publishing engine three times in the process), and we finally released it in mid-2004. Unfortunately, like everything I do, it was short-lived (under a year, I believe), but I think it was a very productive endeavor while it was going, and it led to some very interesting articles, such as boomies interview with Jordan.
Of course, I cant delineate my posting history without mentioning my anal-retentive grammar thread. [plug] And hey, if youre still not great at those kinds of things, you might want to give it a read. [/plug]
This will only interest a very small subset of you, but anyway: For a long time, I was a big advocate of using XHTML. However, I eventually made a 180 and advocated using HTML, which is a position that I still take today. If youre into web coding, you might want to give that a glance (oops, another plug!).
Following the Atheist and American threads, I posted a Libertarian thread, wondering aloud why everybody hadnt already become a Libertarian. You can probably figure out exactly what kind of person I am just from scanning my thread titles.
Lastly in this run-through, there was the Tidy Sigs thread, another attempt at fun, but with the side effect of being a bit of a community service project.
So thats my posting history in a nutshell (a long-winded nutshell, but a nutshell nonetheless). GTPlanet has been one of the best things that has ever happened to me, and has affected my life in so many ways. If I could, Id like to list out every single person whos made an impact on my life, but I think that would be unfair, because Im bound to forget to list more than a few people. So, Id just like to give a big heartfelt thanks to Jordan, whose awesome leadership has made this forum what it is, and by extension, that thanks goes out to everybody else who makes this forum a special place.
Heres to many more years at GTP!
I registered 10 February 2002 under the guise of youth_cycler. I had received a PS2 two months earlier (Christmas present) and bought myself GT3, and like anybody who decides to take a particular video game seriously, I decided to do some internet research on it. I found GTP, lurked for a while, then registered.
My first few threads and posts were pretty embarrassing in retrospect I think that holds true for most people. The first serious post I ever made was this one (although of course, me being me, I had to work in a corny geometry analogy into a life lesson huh?).
This thread holds a dear amount of significance to me, because it led to what was probably one of the most important conversations Ive ever had in my life. No, you wont find that conversation in that thread, and no, you wont even find the person I conversed with in that thread. But you know who you are thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for always being a father figure for me, for listening to my ranting, for always nudging me in the right direction. Thank you a million times over. 👍
A little later, we come to the God in the Pledge thread, which was sort of my first foray into online debate, and a precursor to the kinds of conversations that would eventually lead to the creation of the Opinions forum, which is one of the more important boards on GTP for many of us. And hey, I got to argue with Jordan!
As a kind of extension to that discussion, I created the Atheist perceptions thread, which set the stage for some rather lively future discussions. Around this time Doug had created a scrolling news ticker in his signature (forum news, that is), but after marquees were disabled from signatures, he decided to send out the news as a PM. After a while, he stopped it; I decided to pick it up, though that was also rather short-lived. However, this experience would eventually lead to something that Ill be describing shortly.
On 10 February 2003 I celebrated my first-year anniversary here. Three days later I got a PM from Jordan inviting me to the mod team, and of course I gratefully (and ecstatically) accepted. Giles was inducted on the same day, and Duke joined us only two days later.
Several months later wed reached 9,999 members who knew that in under four years wed increase that count by nearly tenfold?
That year everybody seemed to hate Americans for some reason, so I made this thread outlining how horrible of an American I was. I believe that it helped shut up some of the naysayers, but to this day there are still a few few who wish to push that blanket view on us (hmmm, first an Atheist perceptions thread, then an American perceptions thread ).
Deciding to try to inject some fun into things, I decided to make a game where you had to guess members IDs based on the poorly-drawn pictures. I think I stole that idea from sn00pie somehow. Anyway, that was short-lived, but fun.
As people started getting fidgety over the increasingly-late release date of GT4, there was a lot of tension being built up in the GT4 forum, especially regarding searching, and I finally snapped one day and posted this rant. In retrospect, Im quite happy I posted that (usually my rants dont go over well), because it really was quite a serious problem back then and ruining the morale of the forum.
Around the same time I was working on a secret project. Hayden (ALPHA) had approached me with the idea of creating a website that would be a sort of GTP magazine and the old News Ticker in one we decided to call it the GTP Insider, and I went off coding while he went off designing. He designed a gorgeous site, and after confirming the idea with Jordan, I hacked away at it (changing the publishing engine three times in the process), and we finally released it in mid-2004. Unfortunately, like everything I do, it was short-lived (under a year, I believe), but I think it was a very productive endeavor while it was going, and it led to some very interesting articles, such as boomies interview with Jordan.
Of course, I cant delineate my posting history without mentioning my anal-retentive grammar thread. [plug] And hey, if youre still not great at those kinds of things, you might want to give it a read.
[/plug]This will only interest a very small subset of you, but anyway: For a long time, I was a big advocate of using XHTML. However, I eventually made a 180 and advocated using HTML, which is a position that I still take today. If youre into web coding, you might want to give that a glance (oops, another plug!).
Following the Atheist and American threads, I posted a Libertarian thread, wondering aloud why everybody hadnt already become a Libertarian. You can probably figure out exactly what kind of person I am just from scanning my thread titles.
Lastly in this run-through, there was the Tidy Sigs thread, another attempt at fun, but with the side effect of being a bit of a community service project.
So thats my posting history in a nutshell (a long-winded nutshell, but a nutshell nonetheless). GTPlanet has been one of the best things that has ever happened to me, and has affected my life in so many ways. If I could, Id like to list out every single person whos made an impact on my life, but I think that would be unfair, because Im bound to forget to list more than a few people. So, Id just like to give a big heartfelt thanks to Jordan, whose awesome leadership has made this forum what it is, and by extension, that thanks goes out to everybody else who makes this forum a special place.
Heres to many more years at GTP!
