Why The Cellar?

[Galadriel]

dhamsaic- sorry, australian

sycamore- yes, when I was about 11 or 12 (something like that) Edwards and Duke ran against one another. At the time my family was going to a local Baptist church (because my parents were going through a faze were they thought God = church, poor misguided children) and you think that wasn't fun. Here we are the lone liberals in a southern baptist church, I actually remember hearing the remark, "well, I would rather elect someone who was in the Klan, than someone who doesn't believe in God." What imbeciles, but that is a whole other thread.

And my husband reminded me of this little tidbit last night, our current sheriff is "allegedly" married to his half-sister. His mom was catting around with her dad, whom he just happens to look just like. So anyway, they found out eventually (like when they decided to get married) broke up, married other people, divorced and then married each other.

[Undertoad]

I miss some of those old-school users too. Blu is alive and well and living in Jersey; he showed up here early on but didn't stick around, and that really bugs me, I think he is one cool dude. Back in the day he was the very worst speller ever, much worse than Jag's hurried typos. Somehow he spelled "exhaust" with a Z.

I miss Jerry "Chronos" Winner who swore he'd always be a Cellar user. I tried to find him online anywhere, but old email addresses I found didn't seem to get anywhere... or he decided to move on, you never know.

I miss editor. I thnk he's still posting to phl.* groups and so I'm not sure what his beef is with us.

I miss kml. That dude could really write, had enormous style, smart, witty...

I miss darling. We had a falling out a year ago that I still can't figure out completely. I would be happy to take the blame for what was probably stupidity on my part, but he seems to have written me off for the duration.

I miss richh. He was a Cellarite before he was the talk of talk.bizarre, and his body of work was incredible. He too had immense style. He sweated cool.

I miss turtle. He actually works at a skate shop near me, and I bought skates from him about a year ago. The perfect father who could be counted on to stick in an interesting two cents. He was a fine mix of enthusiasm, grit, subtle wit.

I miss mason and omi/cerebus and there must be about 20 others who were just as awesome whom I'm forgetting. (If you happen to be reading this and you're one of them, please excuse my omission...)

I think esr had a cellar account, but he wasn't a contributor so to hell with him. No, I don't mean that. He helped to set up a Cellar-esque public internet access system in the county next to me. He also indulged in some of the same sort of political activity that I did, back in the day. I feel an enormous affinity to esr for these reasons, but it is ... unrequited.

The nice thing is that we can think back on all these cool people, but we have an equally cool group now.

As far as donations go, I think posting and sticking around and stuff is how everyone "gives back". Right now it doesn't lack for equipment or connectivity or anything, which is the only reason why donations of any kind would be needed.

[alphageek31337]

I had no idea he was an old-school dwellar. Strange. I remember he posted here a while ago, but I haven't seen him in a while.

pinging adamzion
pinging adamzion
do you echo, adamzion?

Steve

[tw]

Originally posted by Undertoad
I miss ...

Barak? I did enjoy watching him outrightly get under the skin if it was a different color.

[Undertoad]

I don't miss miss barak at all. He was a smart guy, but he wasn't interested in conversation so much as baiting everyone. And he felt that, if he told everyone that he was baiting them, that made it okay. He wasn't talking to people, he was playing a little game of his own.

The subtext, if you take that approach, is that you don't respect the people you're talking to. That is, I think, the very worst thing one can do here.

Originally posted by Undertoad
The subtext, if you take that approach, is that you don't respect the people you're talking to. That is, I think, the very worst thing one can do here.

Word. Like how I respect jaguar (and even think he's a smart guy!), but his misinformation about America is sometimes frustrating.

That's one thing I love about this place. Most people make an attempt to see the other's point of view, and you don't have shit like "No, you fucking moron", etc. Intelligent conversation, not namecalling. Except I've seen a pretty interesting conversation between tw and adamzion... that was rather colorful

[Hubris Boy]

Originally posted by dhamsaic
Word. Like how I respect jaguar (and even think he's a smart guy!), but his misinformation about America is sometimes frustrating.

Yes, but the Jaguar Conversion Project is proceeding nicely. Phase I (Basic Spelling) is nearly complete... regression testing will begin shortly. Phase II (Political and Social Re-education) is scheduled to begin 1st quarter of 2002.

Artist's conception of the finished product:



April, 2006- Shortly after graduating from the Royal
Military College at Duntroon, young Lieutenant Jaguar
leads his platoon on a routine training exercise.

[elSicomoro]

Actually, I was going to ask you something similar to that last night Tony. How do you feel about how the Cellar has progressed in the time that it has existed. Truth be told, it's even changed some since I've been here...and that's only shy of 9 months. When I first came here, there was more of a local feel, but it has grown to be more global in recent months. (Very cool, of course.)

[Undertoad]

It's been awesome. Truth be told, the weakest time for the whole system was just before the software switchover, which happened just before you arrived. After the switch, I realized that vBulletin was gonna get the job done, and I started to promote it more. "Promote" is the wrong word, but whatever.

The state it got to before the summer slowdown was great. And what's happened in the last three weeks has been just awesome. I'm pretty sure that WTC doesn't have as much to do with the boom in posts, as much as the end of summer. This summer slowdown phenomenon preceded the internet, we've always had it.

The wildest thing that happened was when I posted the "skinning" image of the day, and along comes the girl's MOM who discusses the whole thing with us. Now, I posted in their guestbook, so it wasn't unthinkable that they'd come around and check it out. But still. Then I have a Brazilian image and along comes Count Zero who announces he's from there, and offers another perspective. Excellent!

This sort of thing couldn't happen in the old days. I'm not shocked, this is the net, the IotD is in my Slashdot sig, people post the address and it gets out, and search engines are finding us more and more because we have, obviously, a ton of text available to them. But in the olden days, we had these discussions and they were pretty much guaranteed to be local, since they were always a local call.

The collision of society and technology is my favorite topic, needless to say. A recent news story noted that email is 30 years old. 30. Amongst the educated, at least, email is almost as common as the telephone. But it took a long way to get there, didn't it? Took damn near the whole 30 years.

That's partly because in the olden days, computers simply weren't networked. When I think back to the fact that my college ran off of four PDP-11 systems, 2 for office use and two academic, and the fact that they weren't EVER networked... it boggles the mind. This was 1981-1985. Today we see that an un-networked computer is very dumb indeed; it can hardly do anything. Back in the day, that wasn't understood.

Erm... what was the question again, sonny boy?

well, I do a *lot* of browsing... and I keep hitting the Cellar... it's won my "best new site of 2001" award, "new" meaning "new to me"...

[jaguar]

Word. Like how I respect jaguar (and even think he's a smart guy!), but his misinformation about America is sometimes frustrating

Thanks =)
Misinformation, probably. What I see/hear apart from cellar is entirely media, I haven't been there since I was 6 or something so apart from a few American friends (one who holidayed with the Bushes) it probably gets a bit warped. Tough in recent times the combined stupidity of the DMCA, SSSCA, Antiterrorism act etc has kind put me off the place as a living destination. Also recent events have put me off living in New York somewhat..

Cellar is generally the second site I visit now, after Slashdot and apart of the elite *visit every day* groups of sites along with salon and the not too intellectually taxing Ask a Dick.

Phase 2 sounds interesting Q12002? Ill have read Das Kapital by then :p

It does seem to move so fast, even *I* remember when SneakerNet(a highly advanced intelligent packet switching network consisting of people putting stuff on disk, moving to another computer and putting the disk) in was a regularly used term!

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by mbpark
I've been calling here for at least 9 years, somewhere around 10 I think.

I started out calling when Undertoad had this on a 386 running waffle on some UNIX variant.

T'was SCO, as I recall

I called here when he had one of the FIRST Linux distros for download, which was sometime in 1992.

Funny you should mention that--the Cellar is where I downloaded my first copy of the original Netscape beta. I got used to navigating with UNIX commands here too. And learns *piles* of Internet and especially Usenet lore; the Cellar was one of th efew lplaces with a genuine Usenet feed in those days, although the volume ultimately overwhelmed it.

I miss having the ultimate troll, Barak, around, to annoy all white people especially any sense.

Perhaps we can program a Barak emulation. I seem to recall suggesting at thet time that he *was* an AI.

And where's Major Matt Mason and the Arms Locker?

...kml...

Now *there* was a character. I think I know who he was IRL, although said person denies it steadfastly. Don't forget bronwyn and rouge. Knew them IRL for sure.

Especially bronwyn.

I think I'm sneaking up on the ten year mark, although my appearances have been *very* sporadic.

As for the story about how I first found the place...Starry Sky...don't ask. You'd never belive it. I still don't believe it, and it happend to *me*...

[jaguar]

I aint gonna work....on maggies farm no more.....
(any RATM fans will know what i'm on about) Apologies to the rest =)

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by jaguar
I aint gonna work....on maggies farm no more.....

Well, as knee-jerk musical refernces based on my name go, that's marginally better than that dreary Rod Stuart tune people keep dredging up. :-)

But you'll have to save it for another thread, becuae "back in the day", I was known as "janicel" here. Or "there", with this here being where "there" ended up.

Never thought I'd see people embedding images in Cellar postings, though. And "Maggie's Farm" makes me grateful some of the other MIME types aren't supported. :-)

Appropos such nostalgia:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CBBS VER 3.0
07/22/79 11:57:15
#7 TERMINAL NEED NULLS? TYPE CONTROL-N WHILE THIS TYPES:

*** WELCOME TO WARD AND RANDY'S ***
*** COMPUTERIZED BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEM***
(IN OPERATION SICE 2/16/78)

CONTROL CHARACHTERS ACCEPTED BY THIS SYSTEM:

DEL/BS/_ BACKSPACE AND ECHO DELETED CHARS
CTL-C CANCEL CURRENT PRINTING
CTL-K FUNCTION ABORT
CTL-M START SENDING 5 NULLS
CTL-R RETYPES CURRENT INPUT LINE
CTL-S SUSPENDS OUTPUT UNTIL NEXT CHAR RECEIVED
CTL-U CANCELS CURRENT INPUT LINE

IF YOU GET STUCK, TRY: CTL-K THEN C/R UNTIL YOU
BAIL OUT BACK TO THE MAIN MENU

WHENEVER WE REFER TO "C/R", WE MEAN YOUR "RETURN" KEY!!

----> BULLETINS: 44 LINES, LAST ENTRY 7/14, NEWEST ENTRIES FIRST...

[wolf]

I wandered onto the cellar shortly after the GTG attended by Dinty Moore (yes, his real name) ... and got to attend the booksigning GTG at Gene's Books (oh how I miss it!) in King of Prussia Mall ...

How did I find the Cellar? By accident, which is of course the best way. I had just gotten my first computer, had a copy of PC-ANYWHERE, and a list of BBS numbers that I grabbed from the back of Delaware Valley Computer User ... I called up a bunch of boards and just started playing around. The Cellar is where I stayed, cause the people were so cool!

I too miss many of the "old" Cellar Dwellars mentioned, including editor (hey bruce, are you still out there??), adamzion, mmm, Keymaster and Gatekeeper (Keymaster showed up at my house out of the blue, recently), ruthie (TITS! sorry ruthie!), vsp (yes, I know you're still here, buddy), and a whole host of others whom I remember.

What I really miss are the Cellar GTGs ... getting to actually meet the people I was hanging out online with ... any excuse to go to Michael's Deli, right?