Post Something You Remember About Your Early Days On DU

Me, I mostly lurked. Too many scary-smart people here, plus I had very thin skin. I've toughened up a bit since then.

I remember my very first post....

It was to Nostamj's cartoon thread....

And he spotted my post, and spoke to me!

I was so thrilled....

It was heartbreaking when he died...:cry:

talking baseball with him ...

I was pissed because I didn't understand the rules, but the message contained some useful information about thyroid replacement.

I have pretty much kept all of my INBOX messages.

Thanks to everyone who sent them to me.

*pours some out for my dead homie forum*

:rofl:

on ATA.

Did it also involve underwear?

It was so bloody long ago, the memory doesn't work so well.

How do I start a thread?

All classics.

And, I completely overreacted. I've learned a lot since then. ;-)

I also remember the first few people who were kind to me: mutley_r_us, ZombieNixon, and California Peggy.

It makes me sad to look back, though...because so much has changed.

The place has changed indeed......

But I still love it here...:hug:

and no one's sent me porn.

Hmmmph.

:cry:

You've got it backwards. I sent it to you. Or did you forget? Did I?

They do say the memory's the first thing to go; guess I'd better get to work on being more memorable.

Nah... I think I'd remember that.

Well...maybe if you sent me some -- purely for educational purposes, of course -- I could do better next time.

:P

O8)

I do.

Hey...that halo needs a little polish.

And the threads need to be re-tapped.

:yoiks:

So that's what they're calling it these days?

I've gotta get out more...

:eyes:

how would you recognize it?

RL

maybe that's the problem. Maybe I only recognize fights and tantrums and stupid baserunning.

Hmmmmm....

:P

:hi:

:loveya:

I feel so...so....excluded!

:cry:

I have this image of all the other DUers sifting through tons of IMs, liberally laced of course, with porn! :rofl:

I feel so out of the loop...so unloved.

Well...unlusted, anyway.

:cry:





:rofl:

I was really intimidated by the flamey crap and the primary wars and stuff, but then I saw that there were people who shared my values, and it as like *whew!* there's like three people there who probably won't hate me! So I signed up.

and being scared to death:scared:

..and the hilarity when CatWoman was more active than she is now.

they were um...interesting to say the least.

Oh and I can't forget the primary flame wars of 04. I suspect they should be heating up again really soon

By Bob Boudelang, Angry American Patriot

Jeez louise, that was some of the best, and funniest satire I ever read. Sad to see he, and the author havce a parting of the way with DU.

Cracks me up every time somebody posts it.

My searching skills are failing me of late. :shrug:

Benchley or Starr?

That is all.

If GD isn't hot enough, I can always find some heat there.

And then I go to the Environment/Energy dungeon of fiery doom and gloom to cool down.

(mostly lurked, impressed by the scarey-smart folks. :wow: )

Golden booty races in the lounge.

hehe, I'm still new.

I didnt lurk much. I did read many group forums. I was like a kid in toyland. GD scared me and I saw a lot of cool things happening in the Lounge. By cool I mean places where you could just answer a question withough fearing the wrath of 1000 others coming down on you.

I posted to Lionesspryankas(sp) Daily questions, and from there I do not remember much. You see... I'm hooked :)

:hi:

Edit: forgot a word in a sentence :)

they were really exceptionally funny; they're how I found DU in the first place. Whatever happened to them?

I lurked for a couple of years before joining DU, and from the beginning of lurkdom, I was drawn to his posts. I always read them. Damn, but I still miss him.

kephra said just the right thing to sooth a concerned six year old and made the world better. We all miss him.

That sounds exactly like something he would do.

:(

Miss him.

I'll serve you your own special cup. :hangover: :loveya:

:)

:banghead:

then I discovered the lounge and people were very kind to me here.

I remember crim son, rev acts, reidie sweetie, NWC, seattle girl, retro, gopsux, nicole, Kitchen Witch, Kajsa, AZDem, and so many others.... also a few people from GD that I was familiar with hang here sometimes. Evoman from the R/T forum hangs here sometimes too.

There are so many people now that I know here, and many are true friends that i talk to daily or nearly daily.

Sometimes lately I feel like I've spent more time on IM with DU'ers or sending pm's than I do "DU'ing" which is really cool because I've gotten to know some really cool people here.

I think the thing I remember from before I signed up was the whole Andy Stephenson saga, first with the black box voting drama, them finding all kinds of things, and then andy and blackbox bev parting ways. Then Andy got really sick and was needing surgery and the whole Johns Hopkins saga, the money, the freeper attacks, the whole dark ugly episode and finally Andy's death from Pancreatic cancer. I signed up not long after all of that but that was one of my first recollections of really paying attention to what was happening at DU, prior to that I came here to see what was "hot" on the GD and GD-P, which wasn't called that at first, it was all about the 2004 elections. Anyway, sad, and amazing times.

All in all the experience here has been good. I've had some experiences that really surprised me. But I won't talk about those here :P

It seems like decades ago, but what can you do?

n/t

As DU.com was also the place where my disillusionment with Bev Harris began.

Or was that just yesterday (and the day before, and the day before)? :shrug:

I dunno, I just don't post much.

Here are the articles from when I first signed up.

Boy, it did look different then.

and i was at <100 posts. My god, I still have the scars.

I had that account and this account both back in 2001. (I registered again because I forgot one of the names.) Back in those dark, early days of the bush administration I was living in a very conservative state and working for a conservative company (although my department was the most liberal in the company), and so it was nice to be able to be a part of an online community that was as distrustful of our sob-in-chief as I was ...

who pretended to be my friend, and it turned out they were close friends of people I'd fought with, and they were trying to "gather information". It made me much more cautious about who I befriended here.

That's weird...

It's why I don't participate in the "post your pic" or "share personal information" threads, although I'd like to. Most people are great, but there are segments that treat DU like a gossip mafia.

"Oh, thank God. Kerry supporters."

I was exiled in a suburb filled with people who (despite being Democrats) didn't like him too much. I had been the only passionate Kerry fan here during the whole campaign cycle, except for the actual campaign members we finally met in September of '04, and I was at my wit's end. The site's Kerry-love was one thing that convinced me to stick around. Well, that and all the excellent election fraud discussion.

Some of the intriguing but horrifying thread titles I recall from my "early" days included gems like:

"No more Mr. Nice Democrat: Lefty black ops." (Which seemed like a good idea until I read some of the shit people were suggesting our party openly support...don't ask.)

"John Kerry Mid-East trip prayer thread." (Which I happily participated in; mentally, anyway I didn't have an account yet.)

"John Kerry campaigned for three f-ing years..." ('...took out massive loans, survived cancer and took on W. and *this* is the thanks he gets??' That was a fun one.)

I also recall the white-knuckled terror with which I watched the Terri Schiavo nightmare unfold on these pages. I had to get an account and eventually start using it around that time because the fear of how far the right was willing to go was getting to be too much for me to deal with alone, with maybe one sympathetic blogger friend and a bunch of pseudo-progressive acquaintances locally. Oh, and some of the Schiavo threads actually had decent comments in them at first, especially re: how Reid and Pelosi should handle the Republicans' creepy Schiavo-fixation:

"Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake."

:rofl:

I was the originator of the "If you could fight any Republican who would it be?" threads. But mine were funny and they didn't get locked either.

Nader Nader Nader. :)

I posted on a thread you started about the McVeigh execution and I managed to get into a little tiff with Crewleader. Almost intirely my fault in all honesty. But after a couple of posts back and forth we made up and had an interesting discussion. Crewleader is a wonderful person. :)

and she was as nice as pie while kicking all of my ass.

Like clockwork.

The wounds from 2000 were still bleeding, and hell...ain't no Nader thread worth a damn without jacinto. ;)

Emperor Buddha.

In the 2003, DU was expected to be more pure. Heresies and the heretics who espoused them were battled with a crusader's zeal. The exception being the heretic Carlos who had an amazingly long life here. Weren't personal battles and locks more common?

His flip-out quitting DU post was fucking classic, too.

Woodstock was the first person to talk to me here on DU. We were posting in a Bush=Hitler thread and I was warning people against doing that kind of thing. Woodstock disagreed, but we were friendly about it.

even anonymously.

I got over it.

:rofl:

and the view never changes

yes i'LL ignore everything you just said, but you must teLL me what's up with you L's.

I lurked and posted rarely and when I did it wasn't in the Lounge because I wasn't part of the clique. I got over that pretty quick.

see my post below... and, I also didn't post in the Lounge in the beginning because I figured it would be clique-ish.

Those were hilarious.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=105&topic_id=3874776&mesg_id=3874776

:rofl:

Too bad the DUzies are a pretty new tradition around here! ;-)

I miss them :cry:

They were one of the first things I found here, in 2004. I remember reading those and thinking "yes! thats what I've been looking for!"

You had to ask to be included and I was rejected the first time but got in on the second request (I had just donated $10).

It was cool until we found out that someone who had access was posting our stuff over on FR. The underground was basically the pre-cursor to the modern day lounge

So, a year and a few weeks before the 2004 elections. Al Franken's "Lying Liars" book - and Bill O'Reilly's attempted lawsuit against it - led me here eventually.

The first thread I had started was me asking for help to try to debunk some RW lies on Bill Clinton. That was the first - and only - time I ever got accused of being a Freeper because somebody had misread my original post and thought I was posting the RW BS on Clinton.

I remember being relieved to find a sight where so many people seemed to be well-informed progressives. Other than the occasional op-ed in the local newspaper, I had basically given up on ever finding a progressive voice in the media.

And, believe it or not, I never really went into the Lounge for months. I'm guessing if I could make my posting history by forum, the first several months would be all GD.

were.

were? :evilgrin:

....oh...wait a minute....that was just a dream I had.

Oops.

I have said too much. :blush:

I knew I'd fit right in.

I also remember smiling widely the day Skinner finally tombstoned his ass.

A cyber cookie to the first person who knows which DUer that comes from.

**cybercrunch, cybercrunch, cybercrunch**

:hi:

hi sigpics were great!

At that time, I remember the sense here that the Bush regime was already faltering big time. I also remember a lot of us were preparing to attend what would probably have been a huge demonstration slated for the end of September.

:evilfrown:

DU was my only way of getting to hang out with him while I was at work...

Plus his brawls with LoZoccolo were quite amusing....

:hide:

But I really liked reading the serial articles that were running at the time about the Supreme Court and Antonin "Fat Tony" Scalia. They were fun.

to remember Khephra. Was he tombstoned for something?

I can't remember for sure.

Super nice guy, well-spoken, thoughtful, and frickin' hilarious.

My sigline is a tribute to him - the little eye icon was his icon.

:cry:

Always on top of the latest news.

He was quick!!

I remember because I had just moved to Chicago *spit* and couldn't afford to make it to Indy for the funeral.

and short bus president. And coffee and donuts the next morning in the wreckage with Aristus. :)

For a long time, I was a little afraid of the Lounge, because some posters in GD kind of "looked down" on it.

They were soooo wrong. The Lounge is a lot of fun and filled with really nice, caring people.

:grouphug:

Discuss.

:rofl:

YEAH... like I'm going to post that word again!!! ;-)

I remember the rain of insults tho.

all people saw was my username, not my interest in connecting with other progressives.

And would only post piece of my body in pic threads much to the frustration of GoPsUx.

Hehehehehe. I think I've gotten over that. :)

which I think stood for "Old School Democrat". OSD was always tussling with some of the more liberal posters and was eventually tombstoned, perhaps the first DUer to get the marble slab by his name.

here anymore for many reasons. :(

I stumbled upon a thread about odds for the 2002 midterm, on individual races. They were absurd odds but no one was pointing that out. I checked 5 or 6 times and finally couldn't take it any more so I registered, and my first post was, "Ignore those laughable odds." Some guy replied, "Dude, I didn't even understand half of what you wrote, but post more often!" LOL. Yeah, I threw in some betting terms without clarifying them.

Otherwise I remember:

* TruthIsAll and jiacinto battling in a thread about the JFK assassination. TIA was applying math to assert conspiracy and jiacinto was telling him the numbers were irrelevant in a case like that. I got to like and respect jiacinto immediately at that point. I see he's still mocked here but he contributed plenty. He would start threads on obscure races and astutely point out voting trends in specific counties or regions. Plus, whenever I posted a math-oriented thread with one of my theories on voting trends, jiacinto would respond with sharp questions and comments.

* The day Paul Wellstone died in the plane crash. I stayed out of the conspiracy threads, which shocked me. There were more threads asserting the GOP was responsible, than mourning Wellstone's death.

* Everyone was very confident approaching the 2002 midterm. On election night as the senate races fell apart, some freeper hacked the place to the point one thread after another opened with, "All your senators are belong to us." That was the lowest night on DU, even worse than election night 2004.

We had about 15-20 forums and 15,000 DUers back then.

LBN, E&OA, GD, Lounge, Politics/Campaigns, The Meeting Room (actually I think that came later), and issue forums regarding healthcare, the economy, the environment, terrorism, the media, etc. Oh, and ATA. DU Groups didn't come until after the 2004 election.

Back then, moderators would take turns posting daily threads filled with factoids (i.e. birthdays, anniversaries, etc.) in the Lounge. One of my faves was Mondays 'In' the Ungerground Railroad.

I joined in 2002, but it wasn't until 2005 before anybody really got to know me.

It was amazing in 2002, when I met Crewleader, orangepeel, and another DUer whose screen name escapes me at the Florida Democratic conference. My husband, another DUer, was running for office, and that weekend was one of the best in my life.

:scared: I found the Lounge a couple of months later. :D I've been here ever since.

My husband will be forever grateful. ;)

I used to get up promptly at 5am every day and I would immediately come to DU and start the Good Morning thread of the day! It was perfect timing too because the "NightHawks" were just finishing up and the morning crew was just coming on! I miss those days. :cry:

I remember the days when we really thought that Enron, Colleen Rowley's testimony etc. would sail us into 2002 mid-term victory. Every thread had a post that said "drip, drip, drip".

The I'm more patriotic than you thread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/cgi-bin/duforum/duboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=30171&forum=DCForumID35&archive=

When Will Pitt & Matcom, DS1, mclam and MarshallPlan handed out flyers in Boston with facts about the Bush Administration. This inspired me to get active instead of wallowing in my Chianti.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/cgi-bin/duforum/duboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=25050&forum=DCForumID35&archive=

and NSMA's DU's survival guide circa 2003. :rofl:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/cgi-bin/duforum/duboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=1393&forum=DCForumID69&archive=

My favorite thread of all time: Oscar the mixed animal.

On edit: I remember how incredibly supportive everyone was to us MN Duer's when Senator Wellstone died.

i LOVED re-reading it just now :applause:

of Bush Worship. :applause: to you and the Boston Five.

The flame wars used to be downright silly!!

Duh.

Everyone attacking everyone, it seemed. I did a lot of lurking, reading, posted a very occasional comment in support of my then-favorite (Dean). Resolved to stay out of the fray.

They thought it was something a freeper would make up.

Beloved oldtimers Zenlefty and Crewleader came to my defense and cheered me up.

If for some reason he notices this post, Patrick Wahhhh is still a dick.

I felt sooo intimidated! I had always considered myself well-informed until I found DU and spent an hour reading at the GD forum. Boy oh boy. That was enough to make me a lurker for quite a while before I felt comfortable enough to post something. :hi:

One of the other DUers called him "my favorite chew toy."

Better since DU sold these the first year
Oh, and the "big change" whenever that was.

being amazed at how huge this site is. And it's wonderful to have a place I can go where people actually understand how I feel about * and his war. :)

I was still probably just lurking then, as I still do most of the time. He answered all questions and got TS'd shortly after that.

n/t

the 12 or 13 DU-ers who were here when I started lurking. I remember a thread that was the first place I ever saw the word "kewl". I thought it was, well, kewl.

All the planning that went into it, the festivities, and the amazingly good blackmail pictures that got posted afterwards. Still one of the best times I've ever had in my life. :)

Got a post deleted for it...

Can't resist a brawl sometimes, even a stupid one.

:woohoo:

80's Music Trivia God (and subsequently pulling out my old Crowded House stuff)

Amaya!

How a few really cool people, like nothingshocksmeanymore reached out to me during a very hard time.

Boston gatherings and that assorted mayhem.

Belladonna's site.

Mkregel and AbsyntheN'Sugar

The odd experience with the Zemeckis character.

Probably about a dozen or so people pouring their guts out to me at various times about stuff (of which, I always keep in confidence- not a part of the gossip brigade).

Marty McFly?


:P

This guy:



Minus the "toon in again" thing I suppose.

He says he had a ball with you.....


*rimshot* (or maybe not)

I was impressed with the breaking news forum and hanged out there for about a year. I always had to be first to post breaking news. Now I rarely go to LBN and hang out mostly in the lounge. GD in a pinch.

:patriot:

It was one of the early guaranteed flame-feasts.

Then catching a Tool concert a year later where people were smoking cheap weed so I didn't even get a contact buzz.

The "Counterproductive Infighting Forum."

jiacinto's flamebait posts and emo drama.

texasleo's twenty-finger salute (using the now-removed flip-off smiley).

The DU Lounge party when the forum first opened.

I first discovered DU almost right after it came online in January 2001. I was at first a little nervous about posting on a public board. However I finally registered in April 2002, and made my first post on May 1, 2002. I realized that I had some things to contribute, and decided to take advantage of the opportunity to do so. And I am glad I did.:)

I remember Newyawker99 welcomed me a number of times when I made some of my early posts. Thanks very much Newyawker99.:)

DU went from its old board to its present board in July 2003. I made 276 posts that first year (or actually a little over a year), and then posted at a slower rate. It was not until 2006, 3 years later, that I finally had made 500, and then 600 posts. (I am obviously not one of the most frequent posters.)

I remember I actually made some pretty good posts that first year; I can see some of them by doing a google search of my screen name at this site. Too bad I can't put them in my journal.

It is interesting seeing some people who have come and gone, and some people from when I first posted who are still here. It is also interesting seeing all the feature and format changes.

I remember my first DU gathering in October 2002 at Laguna Beach, which was arranged by Teena (aka nothingshocksmeanymore). It is too bad what happened with her.

I still haven't forgotten. :)

...for awhile, signed up didn't come back for a while, forgot my screen name, had to sign up again, lurked some more. Finally started posting, avoided the Lounge because I heard horror stories about it.

Best parts, the people in the Lounge turned out to very nice, I found an old friend I had lost touch with in the Illinois forum (hi coffenap!) and I still miss reading Old Lefty Lawyer's posts.

Oh yeah, and the few people I thought were assholes, got tombstoned.

Cheers