It seems that every few years, some tangled shards of inescapable destiny cohere well enough to force me back onto a certain path. Not a path I've abandoned, but one I've neglected. And so, with little fanfare, I present to you a relic of my past, resurrected for the modern age: Sliced Board.
In high school, I ran a website, Sliced Water, that included a message board in which I encouraged all of my acquaintances to participate, sometimes extremely aggressively. It was copied in format from the inestimable Funky Board formerly located at http://funkyorange.com, but its actual daily function was warped severely by my disproportionate influence and control over it.
I will tell you a poorly kept secret about myself: I have a partially obsessive personality. When I find something that excites me, I pursue it doggedly, fixedly, implacably until I have completely worn out my interest in it and something more exciting comes along. That whole process, depending on the obsession, can range in period from two weeks to two years. I don't forever abandon things once I've "gotten over" them, but my passion for them definitely cools from all-consuming to merely warm and fuzzy.
So it was with the original Sliced Board; I was a tremendously social creature by that time in high school (this would have been my sophomore into my junior year), and I jumped at the chance to socialize with all my school friends in an off-the-wall, hugely self-important on-line setting.
I was beyond happy to communicate that way, and I soon overran discussion on the board, sitting and watching constantly for people to post so that I could respond to them instantly (on any subject, regardless of my understanding of it or my place in the conversation). I was addicted, stricken with the need to make myself heard without regard for context or consequence. It was common in conversation threads, dozens of pages long, to see my name at the top of every other post.
I was a tremendous windbag, but that wasn't the worst of it. The foul hubris that brought me down wasn't my profligacy, but my tyranny. I wielded the powers of the forum administrator indiscriminately, sometimes going as far as to edit other people's posts in secret to turn innocent questions into cruel jokes. But most of the time, I just acted the bully, threatening to ban or otherwise limit peoples' ability to use the forum and arbitrarily imposing my own bizarre censorship rules (for a few weeks, I randomly censored a different word every day, just to mess with people).
I shouldn't have been surprised when, in the end, people simply lost interest in being harassed by a ultra-histrionic fascist. So Sliced Board went away. I tried my hardest to get people to come back, but I never really grasped that I had been at fault, and we saw each other every day, anyway! I finally grew tired of maintaining a ghost town and shut it down for good.
Why's it back, then? Well, it was requested, for one, and it took me less than an hour to put it together (thank goodness for free, premade forum software). Due to the prevalence of spam bots, you will need to wait for me to confirm your account if you decide to make one, but I promise that will be the last approval from me you will ever need to participate in the board.
I look back on the way I was then, and the thing that jumps out at me most is how happy I was. For years, I believed that running Sliced Board had been the happiest time in my life.
I've been suspicious of my own happiness ever since.
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