Reminiscing on Years Past

[Uaithne 543]

This thread is for reminiscing. The good and bad. Not limited to any aspect of roleplaying. Whatever you wish.

 

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I remember times long ago before doHTML when everybody had these weird rainbow, multicolored plotters in which each line was a line in a song. Somehow every line corresponded to an available relationship you could have with the character. . . . And you pretty much had to choose the relationship in advance since many folks did not do "identify relationship through roleplaying" sort of thing. There was some pretty strange, detailed stuff if I remember correctly.

 

Oh, and avatars all used to be 100 px squares. You could have galleries of them people could choose from, which became much harder once there was more variability in avatar size.

 

Also, there were a trillion high school roleplays. I remember there was a massive one with thousands of accounts but you had to be registered to read everything. 

 

Rude, elitist rules were quite common.

 

Tons of California-based roleplays that didn't bother to do research on the geography of California. Like they'd say that Los Angeles and Sacramento were two house away from each other and both on the beautiful, sunny beaches. (They're like 7 hours away from each other and are ugly cities and whatnot.) Once I tried to tell an admin that there were no "chavs" in California because it was strictly a European concept, only to be told off by the European admin who didn't care about accuracy.

[Jacob 58]

I miss the encouragement of long applications, plot pages, and posts.  Many people condemn those like me for upholding that standard.

 

Much of my youth was spent at animated film-canon sites.  I have/had a plethora of moderating positions throughout, Prince Florian (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) (1937) being the staple character.

 

I'm a faint presence in the ani-manga community.  My twin sister, April, doesn't role-play, but is obsessed even as we near the end of young adulthood.  Me being historically minded, I get misunderstood.

 

Negatively, I have become permanently disabled.  My activity levels fluctuate, I cannot staff anymore, and I am unable to portray multiple roles.  One lady has found/found that funny, albeit I've let go.

 

As well, personified games continually dominate.  They always rub me the wrong way.  Even now, I do not feel writers should be driven towards compromise.  This especially goes for non-human characters.

Edited May 7, 2018 by Jacob

[the torture artist 21]

Those lyric relationships! Damn, those were the days! Haha.

 

I also seem to remember a phase of "emo" playbys/faceclaims? Which may not so coincidentally aligned with the height of MySpace at the time.

[Sara 34]

I remember when speech in a post was coloured with individual colours per character rather than just in bold, or in a post template. Weird thing to remember but that sticks out for me. 

 

I also remember when sidebars were fuuuuull of different things - MotM, cboxes (both IC and OOC), most viewed and highest 'rated' threads, spotlights, staff contacts etc. How on earth did we fit it all in?! 

 

 

[kjSage 81]

Oh, the lyric plotters. I don't miss those though I do admit that some of they were pretty great.

 

On the other side of the California-based RPs, the ones in NY/NYC were even worse. Living in Manhattan definitely ain't super-cheap and no way are you getting up late, taking public transportation and getting everywhere early. Bwahah. Poor souls, thinking that our trains are perfectly reliable and that our streets are beautiful and clean. -cackles-

 

The million and one warrior cats RPs. Usually on proboards iirc. And the equally numerous wolf pack ones. Also the Twilight rps. Fun times.

 

And while this is more coding and there are boards that still have the typical table-based sidebars with no fancy tabs or toggles or fixed sidebars, they certainly aren't as widespread. Also when chat boxes were confined to being at the bottom or at the top of a board and you had to keep scrolling any time you wanted to talk.

[Uaithne 543]

Emo face claims! I remember all the scene kids and how prominent they were. Some sites embraced them while others banned them.

 

There were also some sites that banned any PB from Disney.

[CovertSphinx 710]

On 5/7/2018 at 6:23 PM, Sara said:

I remember when speech in a post was coloured with individual colours per character rather than just in bold, or in a post template. Weird thing to remember but that sticks out for me. 

I still use colors most of the time for my characters' speech. Because I can lol. 

 

 

Remember the Music Player that would autoplay (mostly on fandom sites like KH where they would play like the main theme) when the site loaded? Just like a myspace page?

[Scout 26]

Band / Tour RPs! These were my JAM when I was younger, and they were so much fun and the communities were always so engaged and involved. I miss those!

[SHIMMERSHISSY 6]

I totally miss the days of simple posts and no templates.  I come from a time when it was in chat rooms and was one liners. I do enjoy 100-400 word play, but sometimes hunting for a photo/gif and all the effort in templates can be exhausting. 

 

I also miss some of the friends I've made over the years and how we have all moved on. I really hope to reconnect someday 🙂

[StormWolfe 557]

On 5/7/2018 at 12:55 PM, Jacob said:

I miss the encouragement of long applications, plot pages, and posts.  Many people condemn those like me for upholding that standard.

 

Yes! Yes! Yes!  It brings tears to my eyes when a newbie at my site actually writes a fairly long, detailed bio for their character. It shows that they know him / her and want to present them well. Everything seems so rushed nowadays! Of course, I am retired and have more time to devote to such things so I do understand.

 

I miss having a group of RPers that are more interested in story progression and character development rather than instant relationships and small one-off threads that go nowhere. I am gradually building that type of player base again at my western and it is awesome. Most of them are less about the rush and more about build the story and develop the characters.

 

Sometimes, I think I'm way too old for today's world! 😉

 

10 hours ago, SHIMMERSHISSY said:

I totally miss the days of simple posts and no templates.  I come from a time when it was in chat rooms and was one liners. I do enjoy 100-400 word play, but sometimes hunting for a photo/gif and all the effort in templates can be exhausting. 

 

There are no words that aptly describe my hatred of templates! We do need header info (who, where, what, when) in our scenes, but IPS has a template system add-on that makes it almost seamless. Our bios are reasonably straight-up (no templates) and will get even easier to manage as I lean how to modify them in our site's Pages application.

 

Now for the reminiscing part!

 

It was all AOL chat play or Yahoo Groups, maybe SMS websites (forerunner to the Nova RPG management system which I sill love and have 2 sites on). The days when stories went nowhere, you played entirely via email groups - no edits to correct typos or incorrect info in your post, no avatars/faceclaims (whatever they're called nowadays) and just a mishmash of posts landing in your inbox. Stories rarely ended, plots were relatively non-existent. There were rarely bios/applications to complete.

 

Do I miss it. Uh...NO! LOL

[Bishop 172]

Violet eyes that sparkled or twinkled, glittered under the moon.

 

 

I feel like every tom, dick, harry, betty sue, mary sue, celestia, luna, amber, rose, iris, nix, nyx, rain, rayne, raine had freaking purple eyes.

 

 

This is a happy trend I have noticed that has died along as we have aged.