posted
I met Jon Boy, Brinestone, Sarcastimuppet, Nathan Novak, and another poster whose name I can't remember for lunch at BYU once, way back in 2003. Pat was going to be there as well, but had to cancel. It was the only time I've ever met Jatraqueros in real life, and as immersed as I was in the forum at the time, it was a surreal experience.
It is one of the biggest regrets of my Hatrack life that I didn't go to Endercon. I was living in Orem at the time and knew about it, but was too lazy to sign up. Stupid, stupid.
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Dr Strangelove: I can proudly claim to be real. Jon Boy, brinestone, mr_porteirohead, beverly. and I think sarcasticmuppet can affirm to my reality, courtesy of a pizza dinner somewhere near or in Park City, Utah.
She was active on HR about that time, lived in the right area, and I always had trouble matching her real name with her screenname.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
I found out about the forums almost by accident. There was a thread years ago about LDS missionaries and whether or not missionaries were there because they felt they had to or if they truly wanted to help others.
I posted in that thread (under a different name at the time) and received a VERY nice email from OSC's wife who thanked me for sharing.
I've been a Hatracker ever since!
Posts: 1937 | Registered: Nov 2006
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posted
Kristine is pretty much an angel. I don't know how much she reads the forum these days, but I would guess whatever the amount is, it's far above how much she posts.
posted
I met her, and OSC, at a convention in Boston. They were both very nice, and I enjoyed it. Kristine had a little more time to spend, as she wasn't signing books, and we had a really nice conversation.
I also met up with several Hatrackers there, and I got to meet G.R.R. Martin, who told me I should have come earlier and came to his party the previous night.
It was a good day. And to tell you how much I care about this site, this community......it's the only convention I had attended at that point, and one of 2 I have ever attended.
Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Kwea: I met her, and OSC, at a convention in Boston. They were both very nice, and I enjoyed it. Kristine had a little more time to spend, as she wasn't signing books, and we had a really nice conversation.
I also met up with several Hatrackers there, and I got to meet G.R.R. Martin, who told me I should have come earlier and came to his party the previous night.
It was a good day. And to tell you how much I care about this site, this community......it's the only convention I had attended at that point, and one of 2 I have ever attended.
Wow, that sounds like the best convention ever.
Posts: 3580 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
ZachC, there are lots of theories on why posting has fallen off.
My own personal reasons were that the tone of the board had changed, at least in my mind, and several of the posters that I enjoyed interacting with had left for a variety of reasons. Couple that with the advent of Facebook giving another online community option, and I end up only checking back to lurk every few weeks or so.
I'm sure everyone has their own reasons for leaving. But it is a little sad to come back here sometimes and imagine the tumbleweed blowing about.
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
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posted
I do think it has something to do with Facebook, also I know the 2008 election season seemed to lead to more hurt feelings than most other events. Not sure if it actually drove away many posters, but I know it made much of hatrack less fun for a while.
Posts: 2332 | Registered: Jul 2003
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posted
It's late, and I'm home for Thanksgiving, and I can't sleep. So:
I started reading Orson Scott Card's books for two reasons: one, because my brother had read Ender's Game in class and recommended it to me; and two: they were near Tom Clancy's and Michael Crichton's books on the shelf at my high school. I devoured the shadow series as much as I could, and at least one of the books makes mention of Hatrack River. At some point I wandered over here and lurked here for several months. At the time the forum had had a serious spam issue and wasn't accepting new members. Someone - I think Primal Curve? - offered any lurker the use of this handle around Christmastime 2002, and I snatched it up. So the name "James Tiberius Kirk" actually has no significance to me: I didn't make the Star Trek connection until much later.
I guess that means I've been here about a decade. I hadn't thought much about that until now.
When I joined Hatrack was kind of a refuge to me, because I was going through a weird time in my life. Some tough things were happening at home, and I'd always been sort of a news junkie and I was trying to make sense of the world. I was thirteen or fourteen, and at the time there were actually quite a few Jatraqueros about who were within my age range.
I spent most of my early days lurking and trying not to angst all over the forum. I started out on the Other Side because I was intimidated by the types of discussions you all would have over here in what was the Books, Films, Food and American Culture subforum before the switch. I saw it as a community of adults, sharing adult opinions, on important topics. When I finally started reading regularly it began to shape my thinking in a lot of ways. Though I could reliably expect a debate between, say, Dagonee and TomDavidson on any contentious issue, I learned that people don't always fall into neat little "conservative" and "liberal" boxes. (That said: I do think there was a much larger conservative presence on Hatrack at one point, especially before the 2004 election; by 2008 it was gone.)
I remember being impressed by how so many of you were willing to let your "real lives" intersect with your online ones - that was something I always remained cautious about, even to this day. I couldn't imagine sharing as much of my life with you as some of you have in your landmark threads (and I've read a lot of them, believe me.) So you can imagine my surprise when some of you started getting married to each other and having kids The old Hatrack gallery let me attach faces to all of your names, and the mental images I have from some of you are drawn from that photoset. I guess everyone's aged a bit since then.
Hatrack introduced me to a few of early online hangouts. TomDavidson introduced us all to NationStates around the time I arrived, and I played for a little while. I learned about AnsibleMOO and my favorite video game Homeworld here.
I enjoy most everything about Hatrack River. I remember how you all made me laugh on days when I really needed it, even if you all didn't know it. This being Thanksgiving, I think it's appropriate for me to say that I'm thankful for you all.
[ November 23, 2012, 01:12 AM: Message edited by: James Tiberius Kirk ]
Posts: 3617 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
Wow, this thread brings all the mini beasts out of the woodwork.
I remember coming to Hatrack and I remember being worried by Jon Boy when I first visited. I must have been reading OSC at the time but I don't remember what specific book or where my first post was.
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
I read Ender's Game when it first came out in the magazine (Amazing?) in the late 70s. Then met OSC several times when he came to BYU to speak in the early 80s. I lurked at Hatrack for a loooooong time before finally deciding to post. I'll have to make this post to see when it was I finally decided to join up. I'm still not a big poster, but I like to come here and read. Edit: So, I apparently decided to join up in 2005. I know I was lurking in the 90s. I don't know why it took me so dang long. I guess I'm just not a poster. Just a reader.
Posts: 315 | Registered: Dec 2005
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posted
You fool! I almost had her convinced that her fears were unfounded! You've ruined YEARS of careful planning! Now Jon Boy must return to his lair and begin plotting Hatrack's doom all over again.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
Wow, I... think I'm still only half-real, then. I never did get to meet up with Noemon, even though I live in one of the towns he suggested we meet for lunch in. That... surprises me, for some reason. Huh.
Posts: 1591 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
I had read OSC stories including Ender's Game way back when they were first published in that slick glossy magazine that was the first SF magazine like that. What was it called?
So then I stumbled across the old Big Mouth Lion forum while exploring this cool new thing called the internet around 1996 or 1997, I think. Made some of the best friends of my life here. Felt really at home here. Liked everyone. Enjoyed the discussions, and particularly liked how it was possible here to talk about deep, sensitive subjects without anger. It was possible! We managed it sometimes. Those times were great.
Went to the first ever Hatrack picnic (we called it) in SoCal. I believe that's where the concept of being real began. Slash was there, along with six more of us. That was summer of 2000.
I converted to LDS because of the influence of so many great LDS friends I made here at Hatrack. That has transformed my life greatly for the better. So I can definitely say Hatrack has had a huge effect on my life.
Don't hang around here much anymore. I like the bloggernacle more, now, because the discourse is politer and seems to be at mostly a higher intellectual level, too. (I also love Goodreads a lot, and enjoy talking about books with people who love books there.) (And another place I loved for a long while was the kiva friends forum, because it was both polite and we actually did stuff, collaborated on projects that brought good to the world, and stuff.) But they don't understand science fiction as well, in the nacle. And I've never felt at home there as much as I did at one point here. So I check back from time to time to see what's happening. And every now and then I post, too, still. I did two landmark posts way back here,and here. I remember this place fondly.
[ November 25, 2012, 09:43 AM: Message edited by: ak ]
Posts: 2843 | Registered: A Long Time Ago!
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quote:Originally posted by Jon Boy: You fool! I almost had her convinced that her fears were unfounded! You've ruined YEARS of careful planning! Now Jon Boy must return to his lair and begin plotting Hatrack's doom all over again.
*laughing aloud
I first read Songmaster when I was much younger. I had just complained to my childhood best friends that you always knew books would end with a happy ending. Well ... let's just say it was my first mixed ending. Loved it. Remembered the book but not the author at the time.
At university, I had a mentor who was an OSC fan. My mentor brought him to our university through the student lecture series. It was a great dinner, an interesting talk (for multiple reasons), and a prompt to find out more about OSC's work. Wow. Yup, and turns out he had written one of the book I remembered most clearly from my young years.
I had browsed the BML forum back when my mentor first brought up OSC, and I read a lot. Never felt like posting. Came back after dinner with OSC and signed in to join the conversations with other readers. Everything kind of flowed after that.
I learned about being clear from watching others think through and communicate tough ideas. I learned about community and passion. I definitely learned that people who disagree with me -- even at the most fundamental level -- could know more than me, have thought about the issue more than me, or just disagree for their own reasons.
I had the pleasure of attending a signing with Tom and Christy, and I met OSC (briefly) again, as well as the lovely Kristine for the first time. I was absolutely abashed to know that they knew my forum screenname, and I was terribly shy. They were kind, and I went and hid behind the bookshelves quickly, just hyperventilating a little.
I met my adulthood best friends here. I have had a near-daily relationship with people, many of whom I've never met, from all over the world. For years, both here and at sakeriver. And the internet became a different place for me, and the world became a different world, and I became more as a person.
I honestly don't remember precisely; it wasn't for any real tangible reason. When I first visited and read Hatrack for whatever reason I found you too much-- and I didn't make an account until a couple of months later.
I don't deny that it is, in hindsight, crazy.
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
Once, back in 2006, Jon Boy hit me for 3 days. I lost my ability to count accurately pretty quickly, but it could have been around 5000 times.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
This thread is making me nostalgic. I've found other Internet communities in recent years, and I enjoy them a lot, but I'll always miss the days when Hatrack was bustling with activity.
And I'm pretty sure I'm real.
Posts: 650 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
This is a fun nostalgia trip. I always like threads like this, because they bring out the lurkers among us.
Er, yeah. Like me (who is, for the record, still alive - I just completely forgot about maintaining an online presence the past couple months. Whoops. So much for fantasy football. I got a job and moved [about two miles from my previous place...].).
I first found EG in middle school in the mid-'90s. It was for some extra-curricular book-reading competition, which I don't think I won; I did find EG and Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising", so I count myself as a winner anyhow. I didn't really go on that strange thing called the "Internet" until high school, except for the countless hours I spent playing Prodigy's maze game.
I don't remember which book it was, but there was an OSC book that had an ad in the back for the Hatrack website. I poked around the site and found this thing called a "forum", didn't know what it was, and registered anyway. This, for the record, is why I go by my name instead of something clever or identity-concealing. I was 15.
I started my trend of not really posting much all the way back then. I'm still not sure how people actually manage to remember me, though I suspect it has something to do with once being part of the Wisconsin cabal.
Posts: 3932 | Registered: Sep 1999
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quote:I started my trend of not really posting much all the way back then. I'm still not sure how people actually manage to remember me, though I suspect it has something to do with once being part of the Wisconsin cabal.
Your more recent absence has been noted, by me at least, with sadness.
quote:I started my trend of not really posting much all the way back then. I'm still not sure how people actually manage to remember me, though I suspect it has something to do with once being part of the Wisconsin cabal.
Your more recent absence has been noted, by me at least, with sadness.
Post more.
Yes sir!
I am posting in this high-qual.... Posts: 3932 | Registered: Sep 1999
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The old Hatrack gallery let me attach faces to all of your names, and the mental images I have from some of you are drawn from that photoset. I guess everyone's aged a bit since then. 
