I'll keep this nice and short because my story is as tl'dr as @Planidium and would probably take up an entire thread
I joined NF back in 2006 when I was 13 looking for Nardos cause my oldest brother was into it and he said NF had teh mango early. I had JUST gotten into mango and that's all that I read in class (fuck textbooks yo). My first introductory post was probably in the blender or something cause I got shitted on and negged so badly even though I didn't know what rep was at the time. People also shitted on my art because I was still a noob and I gave up on that quickly and started running my own forums. Blind City (yes, it was inspired by the blind one himself and I dunno why I even created it to begin with) was my first ever forum that I started and it had Dave and the bunch who I was cool with until they disappeared years later. Then I went on to meet amazing friends like @Trinity and @Bump.
Got my first very own PC at the start of 2006 so I could finally join forums properly, I was already part of many communities since 2001 or 2002 by spending way too much time and spare change on internet clubs and the such so owning a PC sure made it easier.
By 2006 I was browsing deviantart daily for bug art only to stumble upon some cool looking guy covered in bugs, I kept running into art of him so eventually I googled Shino Aburame and discovered Naruto. Anime was not a foreign concept to me at all, I've been watching Pokemon since I was 7 and I was seriously hooked on YGO later on (ironically my first ep was the one with Weevil and his beauties), I also watched Ghost in The Shell back in 05 and fell completely in love with that old school anime style. Moving to Naruto however proved rather hard at first, it all seemed way too childish and even weird at first but with time I got into it. By early 2007 we got a new classmate who saw me drawing Shino one day and got me into a local anime club, apparently anime was a huge deal in my city, the capital and the neighbouring one too. She introduced me to the gang and before I knew it I was an anime fan apparently...
By the end of 2007 I developed the need to discuss Naruto online but every forum I was part on was either movie, game or sci-fi centered so by chance I found NF and joined up as CyberSwarmKing in 2007. My first threads were ofc about Shino, ranging from how he can hold so many insects inside his body to other more geeky stuff about the bugs he uses specifically. With time I gathered friends, I got more and more into the social aspect of the place, I widened my scope to actual bug news with my first bug news thread being about the ant megacolony which was rather well received until someone started making racist jokes which was expected for the internet back then, now and forever. With time I had several relationships with one lasting almost 3 years. By 2010 due to real life complications as well as the internet not being a haven of fun, positivity or even inspiration for me I went off for an year. I eventually came back but decided to abandon my original account thus Swarmy was born in 2011. Althout my "rebirth" was nothing like the name suggests as I remained pretty much dormant until around 2017 with my activity increasing slowly. I got engaged to a NFer before that, someone who's been by my side since my early days. Unfortunately it all fell apart which greatly impacted my desire to even try and form more personal relations over the net seeing how despite us meeting in person and even meeting her mom as well it was eventually doomed to fail.
Which brings me to now. NF is objectively in a tough spot, will it actually fall this time? I can't tell, no one can. I came to this forum not for a fresh start as I'm not sure if that's even possible, I'm not even sure that's the intention of this place seeing how the main purpose is preserving and maybe even restoring the past we all miss, the past we were part of and is part of ourselves no matter how we feel about it. I believe as melodramatic as it sounds that a fresh start is impossible because NF was not the forum itself, it's the people in it, the people who formed connections, some good some bad but all real and all meaningful. We brought NF here and that's not a bad thing, the real challenge is what we do from now on. Repeat the mistakes that made us "flee" that forum in search of something different or build the impossible utopia we dreamt of back when we were kids and the net seemed like a place of endless opportunities and self expression.
In the end it's up to us.
Anyway I should go back to watching beetles humping glass bottles 20 times their size simply cause they happen to shine like the females of their species. And no this is not a joke this is the reality of being so successfull you don't even need the brain capacity to distinguish wife material from glass material...
Swarmy is that you?Got my first very own PC at the start of 2006 so I could finally join forums properly, I was already part of many communities since 2001 or 2002 by spending way too much time and spare change on internet clubs and the such so owning a PC sure made it easier.
By 2006 I was browsing deviantart daily for bug art only to stumble upon some cool looking guy covered in bugs, I kept running into art of him so eventually I googled Shino Aburame and discovered Naruto. Anime was not a foreign concept to me at all, I've been watching Pokemon since I was 7 and I was seriously hooked on YGO later on (ironically my first ep was the one with Weevil and his beauties), I also watched Ghost in The Shell back in 05 and fell completely in love with that old school anime style. Moving to Naruto however proved rather hard at first, it all seemed way too childish and even weird at first but with time I got into it. By early 2007 we got a new classmate who saw me drawing Shino one day and got me into a local anime club, apparently anime was a huge deal in my city, the capital and the neighbouring one too. She introduced me to the gang and before I knew it I was an anime fan apparently...
By the end of 2007 I developed the need to discuss Naruto online but every forum I was part on was either movie, game or sci-fi centered so by chance I found NF and joined up as CyberSwarmKing in 2007. My first threads were ofc about Shino, ranging from how he can hold so many insects inside his body to other more geeky stuff about the bugs he uses specifically. With time I gathered friends, I got more and more into the social aspect of the place, I widened my scope to actual bug news with my first bug news thread being about the ant megacolony which was rather well received until someone started making racist jokes which was expected for the internet back then, now and forever. With time I had several relationships with one lasting almost 3 years. By 2010 due to real life complications as well as the internet not being a haven of fun, positivity or even inspiration for me I went off for an year. I eventually came back but decided to abandon my original account thus Swarmy was born in 2011. Althout my "rebirth" was nothing like the name suggests as I remained pretty much dormant until around 2017 with my activity increasing slowly. I got engaged to a NFer before that, someone who's been by my side since my early days. Unfortunately it all fell apart which greatly impacted my desire to even try and form more personal relations over the net seeing how despite us meeting in person and even meeting her mom as well it was eventually doomed to fail.
Which brings me to now. NF is objectively in a tough spot, will it actually fall this time? I can't tell, no one can. I came to this forum not for a fresh start as I'm not sure if that's even possible, I'm not even sure that's the intention of this place seeing how the main purpose is preserving and maybe even restoring the past we all miss, the past we were part of and is part of ourselves no matter how we feel about it. I believe as melodramatic as it sounds that a fresh start is impossible because NF was not the forum itself, it's the people in it, the people who formed connections, some good some bad but all real and all meaningful. We brought NF here and that's not a bad thing, the real challenge is what we do from now on. Repeat the mistakes that made us "flee" that forum in search of something different or build the impossible utopia we dreamt of back when we were kids and the net seemed like a place of endless opportunities and self expression.
In the end it's up to us.
Anyway I should go back to watching beetles humping glass bottles 20 times their size simply cause they happen to shine like the females of their species. And no this is not a joke this is the reality of being so successfull you don't even need the brain capacity to distinguish wife material from glass material...
