Teh Monkey Lair lives on! - Come in here and say hey!
Posted: Sat Mar 21, 2020 7:45 pm
Hello friends old and older (and perhaps new)!
As I imagine many of you know, I started the enderzero.net forum back in 2003 as a way to bridge the gap between a group of (mostly) Pacific NW-based pals and a group of (mostly) Japan-based pals. Not long after I moved from Tokyo to Santa Barbara and relaunched the forum with an eye to bringing my (mostly) SoCal based pals to the party. I've written up a more extensive history of this forum in this post here. I encourage you to check it out and add to it as you see fit.
The idea of reviving this forum came to me in the midst of the current Coronavirus "quarantine." I convinced Emily that a good show for us to sink our teeth into while holed up at home for the foreseeable future was The Sopranos. That made me reminisce on watching seasons 1 and 2 of that show with Goemon in his Tokyo apartment when his then fiance was out of town. It was one of my fondest memories of those days and I immediately wanted to share it not just with him, but our larger friend group. But none of my normal means of communication seemed like the right way to do that. We don't talk enough for the immediacy of a group text message. Email seemed weird. And this certainly wasn't a facebook kind of thing.
Why did forums die? There is a place for the non-invasive bulletin board style of communication that is public amongst a friend group but doesn't take the privacy-fraught form of monetized social networks. I used to love my daily check ins to see what people were yacking about. That form of communication has more or less disappeared from my day.
So I figured, let's give this a try. If you are reading this, I've no doubt reached out to you because you were once a contributor to the original monkey lair or because you are a more recent friend who I thought might enjoy this (or whose thoughts I might enjoy). Come one, come all. Sign up for an account, and dive in. You can start by saying hello in this thread.
There are no real rules except don't be a dick. I've locked the original monkey lair forums down from having new threads created but you are more than welcome to revive old ones by posting anew. But for new topics, let's keep them to this forum.
Any thoughts or suggestions, feature requests or bug fixes, feel free to shout them out here or send me a PM.
Thanks, enjoy, and stay safe!
As I imagine many of you know, I started the enderzero.net forum back in 2003 as a way to bridge the gap between a group of (mostly) Pacific NW-based pals and a group of (mostly) Japan-based pals. Not long after I moved from Tokyo to Santa Barbara and relaunched the forum with an eye to bringing my (mostly) SoCal based pals to the party. I've written up a more extensive history of this forum in this post here. I encourage you to check it out and add to it as you see fit.
The idea of reviving this forum came to me in the midst of the current Coronavirus "quarantine." I convinced Emily that a good show for us to sink our teeth into while holed up at home for the foreseeable future was The Sopranos. That made me reminisce on watching seasons 1 and 2 of that show with Goemon in his Tokyo apartment when his then fiance was out of town. It was one of my fondest memories of those days and I immediately wanted to share it not just with him, but our larger friend group. But none of my normal means of communication seemed like the right way to do that. We don't talk enough for the immediacy of a group text message. Email seemed weird. And this certainly wasn't a facebook kind of thing.
Why did forums die? There is a place for the non-invasive bulletin board style of communication that is public amongst a friend group but doesn't take the privacy-fraught form of monetized social networks. I used to love my daily check ins to see what people were yacking about. That form of communication has more or less disappeared from my day.
So I figured, let's give this a try. If you are reading this, I've no doubt reached out to you because you were once a contributor to the original monkey lair or because you are a more recent friend who I thought might enjoy this (or whose thoughts I might enjoy). Come one, come all. Sign up for an account, and dive in. You can start by saying hello in this thread.
There are no real rules except don't be a dick. I've locked the original monkey lair forums down from having new threads created but you are more than welcome to revive old ones by posting anew. But for new topics, let's keep them to this forum.
Any thoughts or suggestions, feature requests or bug fixes, feel free to shout them out here or send me a PM.
Thanks, enjoy, and stay safe!
