(Posted in a new thread by popular demand)
Story time!
People on this board used to be goth. Like, 6 years ago. I was one of roughly three non-goths here, and I liked the music, I just wasn't into PVC and facial piercings.
The original Seattle Gothic message board sprang out of a mailing list run by this annoying pothead named Dave, who insisted on being called "Hardrock" because he thought it made him sound less boring ("oh hi, I'm Josh, call me 'Blackmetal'"...wtf). Anyway, being a pothead, he was incapable of keeping his computer running, guessing he fed it some bongwater, so eventually a woman named Josie got really tired of his ineptitude and set up her own vbulletin or somesuch archaic thing which quickly turned into an EZboard. Her co-moderator was a guy named Victor who spent tons of time online. Presumably that's because it sucks to live in Belltown unless you want to play hopscotch for blowjobs with the local crackhead, and Victor was cooler than that.
I joined in October 2001 because the seattle.gothic IRC channel got taken over by these douchebag Republicans with names like dang0r who didn't like me calling George W. Bush a stupid hick.
In April 2002, that moderator named Victor died. Great guy, actually, sucks that he passed away so damn young. Someone thought it would be a smart idea to write his obituary for the Stranger (good) and include the board's URL (not good). The obituary ran between that drug addict from Alice in Chains and Jimi Hendrix' dad (double plus ungood). Within 2 months board membership tripled, because every retard with an AOL account and an armada of idiotic smiley faces showed up, including a *whole* lot of "con" retards who mostly just bellow on about how despite weighing 300 lbs and not showering in 6 months they're still "sexy" in some bizarro universe and wouldn't you like to look at photos of them hitting bongs while naked.
No thanks. Not exactly "gothic", either.
Useful information on music and concerts disappeared within a month. Event roll calls vanished, and nobody went to them anyway. The atmosphere of trust and camaraderie that made this board feel like a community evaporated. It turned into a group hug. A few of us tried to troll the idiots off the boards because welcoming morons with open arms didn't sound fun, and we ended up getting blamed for basically everything that went wrong for the next 4 years. Especially me. Until roughly summer 2006, the board's population became increasingly and irreversibly diluted, and approximately 8 (no exaggeration) splinter message boards formed (that I know about). Very few of these were started by goths; in fact most were the same clique of con going fatties in their endless Star Trek-esque search to validate their poor life choices ("to seek out new life, and new validation...to boldly go where no Con Fatty has gone before"). One splinter board ( http://seattlestfu.yuku.com/ ) was briefly more popular than the goth board itself.
In 2006, this boorish cow named Alexia took over the board because the surviving admin moved to San Francisco. Alexia was basically useless and not nearly as smart as she thought, but she managed to type "man vbulletin" and apparently that made her administrator. Her most noteworthy skill was her ability to belch the entire alphabet in one breath. The Sanskrit alphabet. But she wanted to feel important, so she proclaimed herself "scene queen" and moved the board to some privately hosted site where she could make herself feel important without a reality check. Apparently she was trying to the net.goth "Convergence" to come to Seattle, only that failed because trying is hard so let's go throw rocks at traffic. Also, people who brag about how many times they've been evicted are not the best fucking choice to pay for web hosting.
Needless to say, that board died.
Eventually, in early 2008, this highly unstable ex-junkie named Ivy who perennially accuses us of plotting to kill her (no, really.) moved the board here, and found the only 8 people on Earth who still give a crap, and made them into the moderators. People slowly trickled back in because they remembered how awesome the board was in 2002, and really want to recreate that feeling, but the board has no connection to the "scene" anymore -- everyone has outgrown clubbing, and they don't talk to anyone new, and no one really comes in. The average board members are in their mid 30s, in stable relationships, own single family homes or condominiums, and have careers in the IT sector. It's not that they weren't goth; it's that they *were* 23, living in shoddy Capitol Hill studios, budgeting for PVC clothing, and power drinking at the Mercury...in the 1990s.
THE END
Story time!
People on this board used to be goth. Like, 6 years ago. I was one of roughly three non-goths here, and I liked the music, I just wasn't into PVC and facial piercings.
The original Seattle Gothic message board sprang out of a mailing list run by this annoying pothead named Dave, who insisted on being called "Hardrock" because he thought it made him sound less boring ("oh hi, I'm Josh, call me 'Blackmetal'"...wtf). Anyway, being a pothead, he was incapable of keeping his computer running, guessing he fed it some bongwater, so eventually a woman named Josie got really tired of his ineptitude and set up her own vbulletin or somesuch archaic thing which quickly turned into an EZboard. Her co-moderator was a guy named Victor who spent tons of time online. Presumably that's because it sucks to live in Belltown unless you want to play hopscotch for blowjobs with the local crackhead, and Victor was cooler than that.
I joined in October 2001 because the seattle.gothic IRC channel got taken over by these douchebag Republicans with names like dang0r who didn't like me calling George W. Bush a stupid hick.
In April 2002, that moderator named Victor died. Great guy, actually, sucks that he passed away so damn young. Someone thought it would be a smart idea to write his obituary for the Stranger (good) and include the board's URL (not good). The obituary ran between that drug addict from Alice in Chains and Jimi Hendrix' dad (double plus ungood). Within 2 months board membership tripled, because every retard with an AOL account and an armada of idiotic smiley faces showed up, including a *whole* lot of "con" retards who mostly just bellow on about how despite weighing 300 lbs and not showering in 6 months they're still "sexy" in some bizarro universe and wouldn't you like to look at photos of them hitting bongs while naked.
No thanks. Not exactly "gothic", either.
Useful information on music and concerts disappeared within a month. Event roll calls vanished, and nobody went to them anyway. The atmosphere of trust and camaraderie that made this board feel like a community evaporated. It turned into a group hug. A few of us tried to troll the idiots off the boards because welcoming morons with open arms didn't sound fun, and we ended up getting blamed for basically everything that went wrong for the next 4 years. Especially me. Until roughly summer 2006, the board's population became increasingly and irreversibly diluted, and approximately 8 (no exaggeration) splinter message boards formed (that I know about). Very few of these were started by goths; in fact most were the same clique of con going fatties in their endless Star Trek-esque search to validate their poor life choices ("to seek out new life, and new validation...to boldly go where no Con Fatty has gone before"). One splinter board ( http://seattlestfu.yuku.com/ ) was briefly more popular than the goth board itself.
In 2006, this boorish cow named Alexia took over the board because the surviving admin moved to San Francisco. Alexia was basically useless and not nearly as smart as she thought, but she managed to type "man vbulletin" and apparently that made her administrator. Her most noteworthy skill was her ability to belch the entire alphabet in one breath. The Sanskrit alphabet. But she wanted to feel important, so she proclaimed herself "scene queen" and moved the board to some privately hosted site where she could make herself feel important without a reality check. Apparently she was trying to the net.goth "Convergence" to come to Seattle, only that failed because trying is hard so let's go throw rocks at traffic. Also, people who brag about how many times they've been evicted are not the best fucking choice to pay for web hosting.
Needless to say, that board died.
Eventually, in early 2008, this highly unstable ex-junkie named Ivy who perennially accuses us of plotting to kill her (no, really.) moved the board here, and found the only 8 people on Earth who still give a crap, and made them into the moderators. People slowly trickled back in because they remembered how awesome the board was in 2002, and really want to recreate that feeling, but the board has no connection to the "scene" anymore -- everyone has outgrown clubbing, and they don't talk to anyone new, and no one really comes in. The average board members are in their mid 30s, in stable relationships, own single family homes or condominiums, and have careers in the IT sector. It's not that they weren't goth; it's that they *were* 23, living in shoddy Capitol Hill studios, budgeting for PVC clothing, and power drinking at the Mercury...in the 1990s.
THE END
