Hey y'all. It's been a year since I've been online and this seems like an appropriate thread to post in to inaugurate my return, since I've been dipping heavily into a bottle of honey whiskey tonight. Let me unload some nostalgia on all of you.
I joined this forum approximately nine years ago. I was... fourteen, maybe?
Dwarf Fortress had a huge impact on my appreciation of games. My first Minecraft experiences were on a Bay12 server. A guy named Shoruke ran the first game of Dungeons and Dragons I ever played in. I first tried DMing here - I was very bad at it, as I recall. I first started digital painting purely for the sake of running illustrated suggestion adventures, following in the tradition of
Elves of Amanereli (congrats, DarkerDark, your excellent storytelling inspired me to spend thousands of dollars and many, many hours on that). I posted many of my (terrible, highly amateur) coding projects on the Creative Projects board. I distinctly remember celebrating the first time I got a web server running by posting here (I didn't even realize it was only local and that nobody else could see it).
In short, this community had a huge impact on my development as a youth. Now I'm twenty-three. I work as a front-end web developer at a startup in LA - which wouldn't have happened without the encouragement from posting my work here. My friends love when I DM games - which wouldn't have happened if all of you hadn't humored my (initially) terrible DMing. I have a whole spectrum of fulfilling hobbies that can all be traced back to this forum.
It's interesting coming back and looking at who's still online, because I recognize more names than I expected. Yoink, Powder Miner, Zansetkuken the Great, HugoLuman, LoudWhispers, itsnotlogical, Wierd, PTTG, NRDL, Haspen, IamanElfCollaborator... the list goes on and on, which is strange, because I'm used to forums being fairly transitory. I suppose it's something of a testament to the Bay12 forum in particular that it has such an established community, decades in the making.
Thanks for everything.
More on-topic, I recently took up homebrewing as a hobby. My first batch of mead was passable, but weak. The next should be much better, much stronger, and taste of strawberries.