The Glory of Their Times, Chapter 1
This space is going to indefinitely serve as my personal notepad for reminiscing about all the things I remember about starmen.net going back to the beginning of my time there. For years I had hoped to write a comprehensive history of the site, and even wrote an article about that project once, but it isn't going to happen. I'm getting married and moving south in precisely 54 days as of this writing, and before that happens I wanted to at least write out some of the stuff that's in my memory, partly to help myself sort it out, partly so I'll be able to call it to remembrance years from now when it's faded to the dusty catacombs of my mind. Perhaps it won't be of much interest to most of you, but perhaps it will be worth reading for some.
I don't even know where to begin. The beginning would be a fine place, I guess.
I first discovered that there were websites about EarthBound on the internet -- well, truthfully, first discovered there was this thing called "the internet," and EarthBound was the first thing I looked for on it -- in the computer lab of Hollidaysburg Area Senior High School, where I was a junior (age 17) in the spring of 1999, on one of the school's 133 MHz Pentiums (that was a tad outdated but still a reasonable system, in 1999). You have to understand that in 1999, the internet didn't move at the speed of light. It moved more at the speed of the Department of Motor Vehicles. It took somewhere around 45-60 seconds to load the index page of a fairly small website on the school's computers then, and again, that was slowish but not unacceptably slow.
Anyhow, after poking around a few random sites here and there, I finally settled down at the bustling message forums at Striker164's EarthBound Page, whose membership consisted of exactly four people: Striker164, who maintained links at earthbound.net for awhile and then disappeared from the scene; waffle, now known as waffy, who has been a fixture for as long as eb.net/sm.net has existed; dr. andonut, waffle/waffy's best friend, who later became MooHeimer and, tragically, died in a car wreck last year; and myself.
That board was at least as active back then as the EB/EB0 board at starmen.net is now, despite its low membership. A couple new topics arose each day -- it's funny to think now that we spent months discussing various things about EarthBound -- and we talked about them for awhile and moved on. It went on like that for a couple months. At this point the school library/computer lab was my only access to the internet, as my family didn't even have a computer (I was typing papers on an old-school electric typewriter, which was about as fun as it sounds and partially explains why I was famous for never, ever, handing in a paper on time.)
Anyhow, I had the bad timing to verbally insult the jackass law teacher/baseball coach at precisely the same date and time that the Columbine high school was getting shot up, which you might remember. This resulted in an overreacting school council suspending me for 10 days, which is still a record for an honors student. (Almost makes me wish I'd gone ahead and decked him. Might as well have gotten some bang for my buck.) I remember posting on the Striker164 board some excuse like I'd gotten grounded or somesuch, because I was embarrassed to admit I didn't have a computer at home, like that made me ghetto or something.
Well, anyhow, around that same time I decided I needed an email address if I wanted to be an official citizen of the internet, so I went to hotmail to get one (true story: I was so ignorant at the time that I had to ask somebody what the website address was for hotmail.) [email protected] and [email protected] were, to my shock, already taken, so I had to think of something else. Since EarthBound was my primary occupation on the internet, I decided to go with something that incorporated my self-given title of "EarthBound Guru." I had given myself this title sometime around 1997; back then I used to have lengthy EarthBound trivia battles with my best friend David Kenepp (who is now one of the finest World of Warcraft players in the world; his nickname on WoW is TheNullifier), which proved to be one of the very few things at which I was consistently able to beat him. I joked with him for years that I probably knew more about EarthBound than anyone else in the world, including the programmers, but I didn't really think it was true, and was surprised later on when I discovered that it was in fact true.
So, I went with [email protected]. Then I cruised over to geocities to make my crowning achievement, the EarthBound Guru's Ultimate EarthBound Trivia Page. It actually stayed up for a good five years after I stopped touching it, but it's sadly gone now. What a magnificent page it was! I made it in GeoBuilder™, geocities' poor imitation of an html writing program. Of course, at the time I assumed all websites were made like this. (This was all the way back before the geocities-yahoo! merger.) So I created a website that was truly hideous (ophthamologists believe looking at it for more than ten seconds at a time can cause lasting retina damage,) but it did contain a hundred or so hardcore EarthBound trivia questions.
I submitted my nuclear mutation of a website to earthbound.net's links section and up it went. By this point, I was aware that earthbound.net was the primary EarthBound site on the net (which is why I submitted my link there), but I had avoided it: I thought it was too big, too sprawling to be really enjoyable, and I didn't want to have to try to figure it all out. (Mind you, at this point it had something like 6 sections, still ran whatever the predecessor to EZBoard was for its forums, and had something like 65 registered members, 20 of whom were active. This was right about the time Tomato and reidman combined brains and the site started growing.)
That all changed when Tomato found the ol' EarthBound Guru's Ultimate EB Trivia site, although it would be a few months before I would come to realize it.
This space is going to indefinitely serve as my personal notepad for reminiscing about all the things I remember about starmen.net going back to the beginning of my time there. For years I had hoped to write a comprehensive history of the site, and even wrote an article about that project once, but it isn't going to happen. I'm getting married and moving south in precisely 54 days as of this writing, and before that happens I wanted to at least write out some of the stuff that's in my memory, partly to help myself sort it out, partly so I'll be able to call it to remembrance years from now when it's faded to the dusty catacombs of my mind. Perhaps it won't be of much interest to most of you, but perhaps it will be worth reading for some.
I don't even know where to begin. The beginning would be a fine place, I guess.
I first discovered that there were websites about EarthBound on the internet -- well, truthfully, first discovered there was this thing called "the internet," and EarthBound was the first thing I looked for on it -- in the computer lab of Hollidaysburg Area Senior High School, where I was a junior (age 17) in the spring of 1999, on one of the school's 133 MHz Pentiums (that was a tad outdated but still a reasonable system, in 1999). You have to understand that in 1999, the internet didn't move at the speed of light. It moved more at the speed of the Department of Motor Vehicles. It took somewhere around 45-60 seconds to load the index page of a fairly small website on the school's computers then, and again, that was slowish but not unacceptably slow.
Anyhow, after poking around a few random sites here and there, I finally settled down at the bustling message forums at Striker164's EarthBound Page, whose membership consisted of exactly four people: Striker164, who maintained links at earthbound.net for awhile and then disappeared from the scene; waffle, now known as waffy, who has been a fixture for as long as eb.net/sm.net has existed; dr. andonut, waffle/waffy's best friend, who later became MooHeimer and, tragically, died in a car wreck last year; and myself.
That board was at least as active back then as the EB/EB0 board at starmen.net is now, despite its low membership. A couple new topics arose each day -- it's funny to think now that we spent months discussing various things about EarthBound -- and we talked about them for awhile and moved on. It went on like that for a couple months. At this point the school library/computer lab was my only access to the internet, as my family didn't even have a computer (I was typing papers on an old-school electric typewriter, which was about as fun as it sounds and partially explains why I was famous for never, ever, handing in a paper on time.)
Anyhow, I had the bad timing to verbally insult the jackass law teacher/baseball coach at precisely the same date and time that the Columbine high school was getting shot up, which you might remember. This resulted in an overreacting school council suspending me for 10 days, which is still a record for an honors student. (Almost makes me wish I'd gone ahead and decked him. Might as well have gotten some bang for my buck.) I remember posting on the Striker164 board some excuse like I'd gotten grounded or somesuch, because I was embarrassed to admit I didn't have a computer at home, like that made me ghetto or something.
Well, anyhow, around that same time I decided I needed an email address if I wanted to be an official citizen of the internet, so I went to hotmail to get one (true story: I was so ignorant at the time that I had to ask somebody what the website address was for hotmail.) [email protected] and [email protected] were, to my shock, already taken, so I had to think of something else. Since EarthBound was my primary occupation on the internet, I decided to go with something that incorporated my self-given title of "EarthBound Guru." I had given myself this title sometime around 1997; back then I used to have lengthy EarthBound trivia battles with my best friend David Kenepp (who is now one of the finest World of Warcraft players in the world; his nickname on WoW is TheNullifier), which proved to be one of the very few things at which I was consistently able to beat him. I joked with him for years that I probably knew more about EarthBound than anyone else in the world, including the programmers, but I didn't really think it was true, and was surprised later on when I discovered that it was in fact true.
So, I went with [email protected]. Then I cruised over to geocities to make my crowning achievement, the EarthBound Guru's Ultimate EarthBound Trivia Page. It actually stayed up for a good five years after I stopped touching it, but it's sadly gone now. What a magnificent page it was! I made it in GeoBuilder™, geocities' poor imitation of an html writing program. Of course, at the time I assumed all websites were made like this. (This was all the way back before the geocities-yahoo! merger.) So I created a website that was truly hideous (ophthamologists believe looking at it for more than ten seconds at a time can cause lasting retina damage,) but it did contain a hundred or so hardcore EarthBound trivia questions.
I submitted my nuclear mutation of a website to earthbound.net's links section and up it went. By this point, I was aware that earthbound.net was the primary EarthBound site on the net (which is why I submitted my link there), but I had avoided it: I thought it was too big, too sprawling to be really enjoyable, and I didn't want to have to try to figure it all out. (Mind you, at this point it had something like 6 sections, still ran whatever the predecessor to EZBoard was for its forums, and had something like 65 registered members, 20 of whom were active. This was right about the time Tomato and reidman combined brains and the site started growing.)
That all changed when Tomato found the ol' EarthBound Guru's Ultimate EB Trivia site, although it would be a few months before I would come to realize it.
