So I was going through some old old email from 2005

And found this...

This is my third oldest personal email left in existence. The first told me I won a contest.

What I find interesting about this, isn't the TFP bit, thats just kinda funny to me in long long retrospect, but soon, we will have an entire new branch of archeology, digital archeology. While the oldest stuff right now will go back to the late 80's at best, soon pretty much our entire society will be embedded out there on various servers. No generation in the past will be better known than ours will be.

And that unfortunately includes the Youtube comments.

 

I know that was then, this is now, etc., but do regular users still get banned from TFP?

 

This forum now doesn't seem to be like it was then. We had a lot of very diverse personalities all brought here by the titty board, which at that point on the internet was listed as the best boobies on the net on fark . Unfortunately over time, forums tend to become homogenized and with the loss of the titties (and so many more titties out there for that matter) people drifted off, even before I left.

I recall once where I posted something about "easy hippie chicks" (which was directed at absolutely no one) as a harmless joke and then got a mail from a mod saying he wish I wouldn't step in it because now he had to deal with a bunch of pissed off hippie chicks mad at me.

Hell hath no fury like a Wiccan scorned, they cast "report post" apparently very well

 

@Herculite, who were you?

 

He was our favorite dentist in Chicago, UsTwo.

I was the one who sent him that email in his OP.

 

Pissing in the cornflakes! Ah, the good old days, when I was barely participating.

 

The only users that have been banned in the past year or so are spammers, they aren't even close to being "regular users".

Things have changed in our user base as well as our mod team. Back in 2004/05 there were some real dicks on the mod team.

 

That's good.

 

We live in the information age.

Unfortunately much of that information is disposable.

I had a friend who lamented the lost art of pen & paper letter writing. At the time I didn't completely understand her concerns. Now I do.

 

This doesn't bother me much, or more I should say I wouldn't trade one for another. There was something poignantand beautiful about letter writing, but I'd rather stay in constant text message with my wife, then have to write her a long letter every fortnight while traveling.

 

All the more reason to drop in a real letter from time to time.

 

I agree that many communications would make for boring letters.

Historically speaking, letters have played a large role in our studies of the past. Of obvious importance are the letters from the major players who shaped history. I'm thinking also of the "mundane" letters that show everyday life.
War letters between the soldiers doing the actual fighting and their spouses, parents, siblings, etc. are priceless.
Reports from a cattledrive.
How people manage to survive day to day.

I used to be quite a jazz fan, and letters from many jazz musicians have been published. Lester Young was an accomplished and well-known saxophonist, but in person he was a private man, and he never made much money. Some of the letters he wrote to his sister gave tremendous insight into who he was away from music and his struggles. His spelling & puncuation showed his lack of formal education, but his writing was poignant.

 

I still write letters. I decided last year I was going to hand-write a letter twice a month. I'm not writing quite that often anymore, but I still manage one to my mom every other month or so.

Just checked my first email address, and looks like the oldest email I have saved is from 1999. It was one of those, "here's a bunch of pointless questions about me, answer and send back" things. Heh. I also have a huuuuge list of lame/silly/ridiculous pick up lines that ZS and I collected and emailed back and forth.

One thing I've noticed, I use faceyspace and livejournal if I need to remember something specific from years ago. When I started a particular job, when I moved, when I took a vacation, etc. I'm extremely glad that facebook wasn't around when I was a teenager. "Angst, angst, boys, angst, volleyball, angst, angst, Thespians, even more angst." I did keep diaries and journals for years, but thankfully, those aren't available to the public

 

Thats the awesome part about now though. You won't have just the poignant, you will have the mundane, and to me, the mundane is far more interesting historically than the prose. For example, not that long ago, they found in a dried out well in Egypt a cash of documents that were just thrown out in there in the Greek period. This was just every day stuff. One of them was a contract for a man to work in a womans vineyard (that alone tells you something about the people) and one of the stipulations was she would get to examine his shit for grape seeds to make sure he wasn't eating what he picked. See those sort of documents don't get saved because they are not poignant but just the day to day, and are useless after a time. Now that tells us about a people, their attitudes, and their culture far more than the main figures whos works have been saved can.

For us ALL of our mundane shit is being saved, the only risk is that being digital it may be lost due to the medium (which is a major concern). Odds are in some not to distant future, you could even analyze forum posts and track an individual despite differences in log on names.

 

I have been active in the online world since 1983 or 1984. I probably have some very old emails on a diskette or a Zip disk somewhere.