So who are we and what is this site, anyway?
This blog was intended to be a group effort to provide a public thoughtspace to complement our forum. It is impossible to explain who I am or what this site is without going back to the origins of the forum. I've lost track of how long ago we started the forum, but it must have been between two and three years ago. Most of us grew up together in the Silver Valley of North Idaho, a narrow space in the mineral rich ranges of the Idaho panhandle. As the leaded themes indicate, we are products of commercial pollution that makes us retarded and delinquent.
I was one of the first to move away, leaving Idaho in high school. I kept in touch with my closest friends during high school but hadn't known some of the others well or at all before leaving and didn't have any contact with most people from childhood school. Then came New Year's Eve in 1994. I ushered in the illustrious year of 1995 virtually passed out in the hottub at the cabin condo Gusalmighty had rented for the occasion. It was a grand party and I reconnected with Gusalmighty as well as many others I hadn't seen in about 6 years at that point.
It just so happened that my youngest sister was born 4 days later, an event that came to play a big role in the development of Gusalmighty.com as we know it today. Up until her birth, I had spent my summers working in Minnesota, only coming home to visit for short periods. After she was born though, I came back as much and for as long as possible, living in Idaho from June '96 to January '97. Over that period, Gus and I (and others) forged some strong
I eventually moved back to Minnesota to finish my B.A. in Anthropology. The Internet™ had become a big thing by now (I had only used it for email and some telnet chat sessions thus far, and remember WastedPotential holding my hand and introducing me to a "browser"), but we didn't take advantage of it right away. I kept in touch with phone calls and some email as well as visits during the school year and summers back in Idaho. Eventually I was emailing enough to try to start a mailing list, back when before egroups.com had been absorbed by Yahoo. That list didn't generate much interest at all, but it was the seed for something bigger.
By now I had graduated from the University of Minnesota and GusAlmighty had a domain. I think it was at a New Years' party (or maybe an infamous Halloween) that we decided that Gus was going to try his hand at coding a forum for us. WastedPotential had introduced me and a few others to the AsylumWhores (now a more palatable Nation rather than Whores) and I was keen on the power of forums. Yeah, yeah, I know that everyone else has been using newsgroups and BBSes since they got their 2400 baud modems. I guess you are just cooler than me.
So Gus did it, our own gusboard coded from scratch direct from the hand of the creator himself. By and by we had our own little breeding ground of inside jokes and drunken reminiscences. It wasn't extremely complex or feature rich, but it worked pretty fucking good and it was homegrown to boot. We admired Gus so much we didn't give him much shit when we lost access for a few weeks when he forgot to renew the domain name.
The board grew in popularity with a core membership of 10 or so of us and even started to attract visitors outside the inner circle. Once family members started showing up, Gus unveiled Gusboard 2.0, a secret password protected forum for all the shenanigans and tales of chaos that were still within the statute of limitations. We were evolving. Eventually we decided to take advantage of the efforts of others and switched to phpBB, briefly running the 1.0 before installing the current phpBB you see today.
We ran just as the forum for about a year or so until I started blogging here, originally hoping that it would be a collective effort but it kind of fell flat in that regard. The forum is a great place for us to keep in touch as we moved apart and the blog was a place for me to express myself. Turned out blogging was a lot harder than I expected, but I'm keeping at it. Eventually I'll build a readership, probably as soon as WastedPotential and GusAlmighty (among others) begin posting their views and experiences alongside me and keep it fresh (and worth reading).
So that's our history, but where are we today? This introduction is actually one of the first things I intended to write for the front page blog but I was holding out until we had more contributors. No one else seemed interested in posting here so it's kind of ended up being my own little soapbox by default. I moved to Japan after getting my M.A. in Anthropology and just finished my PhD. Call me Dr. Nute. The blog came out of my desire for a place to vent my notions about the world today. I was making lots of notes in book margins and scratch paper rants about modern technology and society and politics. The real impetus came after reading a thread about blogging at ArsTechnica and then seeing what psh had done to his site. Blogging can be a lot harder than it looks. I didn't get a whole lot done while I was finishing my dissertation, and since my daughter was born at about the same time, I haven't been able to get much done since then. I thought I was in a good place to be more consistent a few months ago when I announced that we had gone gold, but that too proved premature.
Now I have a tenure-track teaching job at a women's college here in Japan. It's a good job with great students. I get to teach classes all in English, most of which are topic based content focused classes where I can teach about world history, cross-cultural communication, political science, and whatnot. It's not all paradise, as I do have to teach writing and discussion classes and some classes have pretty low English skills. But it pays enough to cover my bills for now.
I'm interested in humans and have conversation knowledge in our evolutionary history as well as our psychological and cultural tendencies. I like beer and pizza and watching Mixed Martial Arts. I'm an armchair philosopher (as we all are, surely) and becoming more politically interested if not involved. I'm a parent and loving it. I play the bass and dig music. Charlie Hunter is my current favorite groovemeister. Check his site for free and paid downloads. Bad ass mutherscratcher, he. There is plenty more about me, I suppose, but thats sufficient for an intro.
As for everyone else, the only one that I can really talk with any relevance about is the man, Our Namesake, Gusalmighty. He runs a hosting company in Seattle and graciously hosts this space for
We're a pretty good group of people here. Among us, we range from high school dropouts to PhDs, tall fat fuckers with long hair to scrawny midgets, crank junkies to teetotalers (well, not quite teetotalers, but pretty close by Idaho standards), jazz funk to speed metal, Jeopardy qualifiers to geologists, hippies to Marines (some of which served in Afghanistan following 9/11), computer geeks to electrical journeymen to volunteer firefighters. We've had our necks broken, flipped trucks at highway speeds (with members riding in the back who get thrown out on the tarmac but still ship off to Marine boot camp a few days later), been nearly electrocuted by TVs, arrested, stabbed, strung out, beat up, broke down, tripped out, and pissed on. We've got skills ranging from utility pole inspection certification to culture analysis, from Marine certified marksmanship with weapons and cameras to forum coding. We'll sell you vitamins, rewire your home, install your cabinets, clean up the cocaine you spilled in the bedroom, put out the pallet fires you got in the backyard, host your website, and build you a geodesic dome on the fifth floor of your mobile home. We play guitars, basses, drums, and weiner whistles. We've lived through burning airplanes and bottles of Permafrost. And all in spite of (or because of?) every single one of us having a lead count 4 or 5 times the EPA standards for "healthy."
So who are we? We be disciples of Gusalmighty, yo. Come on in and introduce yourself. We have a lot of history together, but you are welcome to make yourself comfortable.
Posted by Nutrimentia at April 28, 2004 06:49 PM | TrackBack