WEELP this just killed my day.
I too have made a lot of friends here. Fortunately, I still talk to just about all of them.
Pic is the very first digital pic I made and used, and the very first pic I used on this site, and conveniently its date of creation still preserves the first post and the moment I first entered Ponychan.
Saturday, September 10, 2011, 22:26:52
My OC, Taiga, originally some souped-up cyborg alicorn, starting off in the long-gone NLR. This is also my OG tripcode.
I would like to share my entire history with Ponychan.
I've gone to great lengths to ensure nothing of mine has been deleted, so far I've been successful. I still have Skype messages from Jan 2013, and if I can recover one of my hard drives, possibly as early as August 2012. I also have a number of threads from 2012 or thereabouts from here that I'll try to put up on the Wayback Machine. I *highly encourage* everyone to do the same with thier own saved threads, unless there is a better resource for it.
My friend who once played as Pinkius Piakus, loved the show and adored Pinkie the most. I met him during my freshman year of high school (2009) around a table of other similar nerds (as I was) playing Magic the Gathering. When the show dropped, he and another friend of mine Zachary, DM'd me over Skype to watch the first EP of MLP:Fim. I didn't care at first, but then when they inquired back and prodded, I tried it out. Turned out I loved it too and we began watching it together. A little while later I noticed him writing on his computer, and he told me about the site. Wanting to do more with him, as he was someone I enjoyed, I looked into it. This was in my junior year of high school.
I was never a good writer. Every English class I had was almost a guaranteed fail. Its hard to explain it - my mind just didn't want to put my thoughts down in a cohesive manner in the form of words. I would stare at a page for ages before the first word was written. It was evidently very rare, too, and I recall being the last person to leave the class on many different occasions, left behind so I can finish. It killed me inside every time. Fortunately, RPing on this site back for a year then actually helped me with that and ultimately made it so I could pass my senior year's English classes. I could feel words coming to me and in better order. Ten years on, I still take a bit longer than most, but its finally near par to my colleagues. I cannot stress enough how much writing was my bane, so thank you for curing me of it.
The NLR was a little rough. My poor writing skills meant I wasn't able to interact with the others in interesting ways. The learning curve was very steep, and I recall a few times were I was brought to tears by the sheer fact that I could not come up with a post anyone would want to interact with. Like I could *feel* the weight of my own writing immaturity. It slowly wanned - back then I was RPing every single day - we all were. The moment school was out, I and many of my friends were on our computers. In the NLR, and perhaps in the old days of Pchan in general, there was everpresent drama. The rules were thin, and so raunchy things happened there on the regular, though in hindsight, it was that chaotic fun that drew me in. Eventually, around late 2012, (which was apparently a terrible year for a number of people I know, including myself) I finally decided I wasn't gonna take the drama from a particular member anymore and biked to my friend Pinkie's house, where we started a thread in the old OOC channel to call him out on it. Words flew, but the next day most of the members left. Me and my friend ended up finding MLPchan and started our own thread there, called Open Equestria. That lasted for longer than I expected, and met a few new people there too. There was a liiitle bit of drama, but it was handled pretty quickly. I hung around there for most of that year of 2013, until I entered the Air Force on September 17th, 2013.
I maintained the avionics on F-16's. During my short time in the Air Force, I hardly RP'd at all, which I kick myself for even still. Early 2014 seemed to be some of the liveliest times for a lot of treads and I wasn't part of it. It was only after my departure on December 16th, 2015 that I poked my head in again. Two years of dead silence from me, even though I did have the free time to post a bit. When I came back, there did seem to be a bit of life left, but as I would now see, a lot of the biggest things were over and done. There was one place I remembered before the fall of the NLR, a place that was utterly caked in horny on main and shenanigans that may have shaped how the rules of this site evolved over time: the Donut Bar.
I poked in a few times, and chuckled at a few silly interactions, but never really stuck around. Being the most interesting thread at the time, I decided to really take it for a spin. In a lot of ways, I came to the Donut Bar in exactly the same way as I did my table of friends in high school. I peeked in, looked at the fun everyone was having, and bravely introduced myself and took a seat. Best decision of my writing life.Now the majority of my close friends I found there. Dom and DimVitrarius, especially, were the guys that made things spin there. For a while I'd be really... nervous to RP with them since it was obvious that their writing skills were far above mine, but I eventually built it up to play with them more regularly. I still do now C:
A good couple more years of the DB... and well we all seemed to run out of things to do. Last post was in 2018, still available here, and that was basically the end of my regular visits, over 5 years ago today...
Naturally... I wish I did more. There were more than a few times I was interested in the BLN threads, as those lasted all the way up until now, and is the only one to have survived everything that Pchan went through. It kills me that there wasn't a good save of the threads before the damned thread spam forced everything out. I wish we took better care of saving things to the Wayback machine or some other archive. But if there is some archive I don't know about *please* tell me.
Thank you all for those great years, and for saving my ass in school. I just wish there was something I could do to prevent this place from going down.
I will always enjoy our cute little horsies.
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