Aran

Looking at the folder, I see that about 150 MB of 176 are graphics. Compared to that, Avernum 4 had only 60MB worth of grahics. Quality and diversity is part of it, but the most significant increase probably comes from adding more frame animations. Once upon a time only the death sequence was animated; now each character has attacks for each weapon facing each direction.

(I guess what you refer to is on page four there. Yeah, Overwhelming wasn't a nice person.)

I'm fairly certain the big issue there was scripts and articles rather than the scenarios themselves. Well, Kel was pretty clear about wanting all his works down; in particular, after Overwhelming had grudgingly taken down the scripts and articles but insisted on keeping the scenarios.

By ETSD do you mean ET/SD? (Also: Remember, remember, the first of September...)

I think Stughalf did most of his posting when Sturg was still ben4808, actually. (Even if he didn't, Stughalf never went by Stug as a PDN.)

Quote: Slarty: What's the matter, Jewels? I once watched you take in the Karma Sutra whole without even blinking. WildKarrdeSmuggler didn't stand a chance. Jewels: You're right, you're right... gotta suck it up. Sorry. I... I think I know what it is. Aran is visibly nauseated by the double entendres, indicating that he too is suffering an excess of sanity. After contributing his share to the fuel tanks, he takes his seat again, slightly frothing and gibbering about something called a "chessboard of bestow great honor".

I remember Overwhelming had a scenario repository as well, but that caused some sort of fallout (with Kelandon?) when he hosted scenarios without asking the authors. (Fun annotation: That kerfuffle gave me the idea of a central repository that would allow authors to upload them on their own; giving authors control while avoiding the dissipation into a thousand Geocities pages. This later - much later - became the Blades Forge.) The testing forum is here. The site itself was at http://overwhelming.squarespace.com/ with a splash portal at http://boa-center.uni.cc/ . Both are gone, but on Wayback. Edit: And here is the kerfuffle aforementioned. It's far earlier than I thought. BoAC was alive well through the end of 2005; so it would be incorrect to say this issue ended it. However, the site is gone now.

"Active" of course is kind of fluid, because almost all of the satellites back then had a nucleus of about 5 members, and their chief traffic were posting games. If they became places like Shadow Vale or CalRef, then you'd later date their birth to that time; for others you'd see in hindsight they never were alive at all. I don't think CSM was more active than Chance, but I'm not sure if Chance was closer to Bladester or TCoA. I notice that you clearly distinguish the Abyss and Dark Fire, and have found an archive link for the Abyss. That's more than I have... Maybe it's possible to search the giant graveyard of InvisionFree for relevant stuff. I'm not sure of the other prominent free forum hosts at the time. ProBoards and ezboards were among them. ezboards hosted the Lyceum, naturally. It also hosted ADoS' site. http://pub42.ezboard.com/btheplacewhereyoudostuff/ (The URL doesn't work; it might help on the internet archive, though. I've also tried theplacewhereyoudostuff.yuku.com, matching the new URL of the Lyceum, but I guess it was closed without being transferred.) Heh; I just came across a UBB.classic forum (unrelated to Spiderweb) and felt a wave of nostalgia at the words "This topic comprises N pages:". Man, I need to put that in the PPP theme just for the retrioactivity.

It vegetated a bit until OM went on some kind of racist rampage on it, which eventually caused me to shut it down. If you're going to catalogue early satellites of 2003-2005, you'll have your hands full. They were a fad, and proliferated like RPs did in 2003 or Aimhack campaigns in 2011. I remember the "Bladester" forum by Zephyr, "The Club of All" by Order Mage, "Chance" by RealityCorp, "The Place where you do Stuff" by ADoS. This thread is informative. It mentions "CSM" by JadeWolf(?) as a currently active one, and also others that were already dead: Chance, TPwydS and something called "Dark Fire/The Abyss"; not sure who made that one. Edit: this post reminded me of something I'd forgotten: While OM did indeed start the early TCoA, it was pretty much taken over by TGM and WiseMan, likely for the larger part of its lifetime. Join my forum...please - this thread is representative of a lot of topics in 2004. In that topic (March 2004) RealityCorp quotes a list of what existed at that time: Indicating that Abyss and Dark Fire might not be one and the same as it appeared, but the list is not very reliable. I strongly suspect TCoB = TCoA and ADoS Revolution = TPwydS. I'm done trawling for now, so I'll close with Thuryl's final comment on the above thread about the orbits of satellite fora:

I'm not that fond of the third one either; not enough melody. I could listen to the "Rage rage polar bear, rage rage polar bear" for hours though.

But with Santorum gone, who is left with the task of making Mitt Romney look sane?

Arancaytar wanders off to explore Usenet at the end of its halcyon days for a while. This is difficult in part because the internet memes are alien to him. A nearby wall has been graffitied with the words "fnord" and "Hail Eris", which he vaguely recognizes; other scribbles are entirely incomprehensible. At the same time, he recognizes common themes and realizes how incredibly old some of the internet memes are that are continually reinvented. A cat strolls by, carrying a humorous caption around its neck. The most striking difference, however, is how empty everything is. The tall arching halls of Usenet are lively but sparsely populated. Aran is disoriented by a strange smell until he realizes that the odor of spam, a permanent fixture of the modern web like the faint whiff of urine in the subway, is completely absent. The very term Spam, he reads in his Guide, was only invented a few months ago. Incidents of mass messages so far can be counted on one hand, and the first major advertisement flood on Usenet is still a few months away. He takes several deep breaths of the clean air, and admires the magnificent architecture. The walls predate the need to attract attention among a billion other sites, and have something of an unassuming, timeless quality. They're not even made of marble or elegantly designed; they're just there. If Usenet was sparse, once he steps outside onto the recently invented web, he is on his own. The feeling of unsettled wildness hangs over everything; this was before the .com bubble began. The very concept of a personal homepage is new; Geocities and Lycos are not due for another year. Aran checks his Guide, which cites an MIT survey counting just over six hundred websites. Most of them are unrecognizable, but once again he is surprised: The Internet Movie Database, a widely popular but hardly earthshaking reference resource in 2012, has already been operational for years and predates the web itself. He pays it and several less known sites a visit, but is put off by the now outdated interfaces prevailing at the dawn of the web. The same low-tech appearance that graced Usenet with an ancient dignity appears glaring and inconvenient on the web. Even the HTML specification still has draft status. On the plus side, however, Flash has not yet been invented either. Content with his first foray outside, Aran returns again to the Bus.

I have those on my playlist too. Listen to them fairly regularly too; though my favorite is the fourth movement. Mind you, the second has a fairly catchy part that I always have to resist singing along with, because I strongly suspect loudly singing "I will appear with a knife by your bed toniiiight and kiiiill you" would be misinterpreted. Edit: Apparently I still have them online; the URL suggests Alo uploaded them, but I'm not sure.

Originally Posted By: Sylae Sylae looks around at Sept 1993 in interest Sylae: Half of me wishes I could've been around for this, the other half thanks Mosla that I was a December child. Aran: You were born in 93? This forum constantly manages to make me feel old...

Originally Posted By: Beer and Motor Oil I referred the girl with the dragon tattoo to my parents and got them to buy it. Both of whom are conservative christians. Oh, now I get it. Heh, my parents actually gave me The Life of Brian as a christmas present, and we watched it together. They're not even particularly religious (to the point where I'm not actually sure what they believe, because we never really talked about it, but they still sent me to Sunday school and baptism and confirmation etc.) and yet I felt awkward at the deliciously blasphemous final scene.

Originally Posted By: Sylae So she rents The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. That was quite possibly the most awkward two hours of my life. I've not seen that, so I'm probably missing the context on why that would be awkward... Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Well, today I found out that I misgraded several students' lab exam submissions by testing with an outdated version of Python, thus failing them when they should have passed. But that's less "feeling awkward" and more "feeling terrible because I gave a bunch of people a horrible, stress-filled weekend full of self-doubt before I could fix the problem". :-( Ooh, yeah; been there done that. Though in my case, I was standing in a lab room on the first day without ever having used Python 3 before, trying to catch up to the changes on the fly without telling the students too much outdated BS. It was all like "huh, I'm not sure that'll work... oooh, okay, yeah" or "here, you just use map() on this list... whoops, that returns an iterator now? okay... " (The same thing happened to me when I was grading Java homework in 2005, only they were using Java 5 and I saw generics for the first time in my life. I'd interpreted them as really weird syntax errors in 2 submissions before realizing I should probably ask someone.)

Quote: CORRECTIONS: Welcome. SUGGESTIONS: Welcome. IDEAS FOR SPLITTING UP THE HUGE GREY CATEGORY: Very welcome. I read this in a modulated progenitor voice from Alpha Centauri. Quote: Zakharov: place in Progenitor plans: none visble. Regrets: some. Destruction of Zakharov: imminent.

"Well, yeah", Aran replies, "the history of the universe is an elaborate and infinitely improbable sequence of events somehow leading up to this moment. The same is true, of course, of every single moment there ever was. On the whole, it is indeed satisfying how things have turned out, though."

Aran reminisces half to himself. "September 1993! Wow, I had just started school then. Jeff was contemplating editors back then already? Also: Jeff was a dungeon master? I suppose that shouldn't be surprising, really. He foresaw the greatest difficulty with custom scenarios (special code) right away. As we now know, his first approach, a simplistic system of GOTO-like nodes editable only via complex dialogs, was difficult to master and yet resulted in stunning works of genius despite the confining medium."

It depends on what's at the other end, but realistically I wouldn't want to walk more than 2-3 kilometers on foot. I commute about 9 kilometers by bicycle daily; the longest trip I've ever made was probably 50-60 kilometers.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Dintiradan shrugs at Dikiyoba. Dintiradan: Eh, what can you do? You need people to interact with for each post, and it's not like we're gonna bother PMing and waiting for a go-ahead with an RP like this. I mean, I got Aran to do a BigNo without knowing why. Speaking of which... Dintiradan pulls out a hyperlink and holds it aloft. It's all a bit metaphysical and you probably shouldn't think about it too much. Dintiradan: I'd feel about about dredging up ancient history, but Aran, you are the Archivist after all, and besides, there's a decent chance Slarty doesn't know about this yet. Behold! "Holy Cave Cow", exclaims Arancaytar. "I didn't even think that still existed."

Quote: Thus, the only way for us to advance the plot is to- A strangled cry is raised from further back in the bus. Arancaytar: NOOOOOOOOO! OOC: I don't get it...

Yeah. If we class everyone who posted on Polaris as Polaran, we'd have to include TGM, Thuryl and Alec.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S I think Zeeqon was in the Revere Brigade, right? Zeeqon = ADoS.

(This two column format is kind of hard to read.) Wise Man, ef, Undine, Enraged Slith, Rowen, NaCN and (later on) MSW were all on Polaris. All but the last two were in on Teh Conspiracey. I remember NaCN as part of a posse on Polaris that also included TGM and a member going by Uncle Curio (who had another name that escapes me). I'm not sure whether he (Curio) posted on SW as well though. TGM did custom graphics; many other Blades artists are listed on the Louvre. Frahhamn (of Frahhamn's Dungeon) was part of the Blades of Exile webring. (Oh man, webrings.) His site is stored in Jewels' archive along with other early BoE sites. Misc Staple sounds like an alias. Can't remember who it is, though.