A blast from the past ... random shoutouts

A fair bit of it, at the time.

Also, part of the fun was the rapid fire responses from a lot of people. It almost made it seem like a live chat rather than posts on a message board. That started slowing down around that time too and that made it less fun as well.


And now I see there is once again a Random Thoughts topic. Tremendous.

 

I had no idea all the silliness went away. We better work on more silliness.

Has anyone ever written an SportsJournalists.com play?

 

So the schism still exists? I had no idea.

I was invited to join the new board when it was new like three or four years ago, but I never did. The link I was sent doesn't go to anything now. I figured the new board had been shut down and people had wandered back here, even if under new handles.

 

Sportschick

February 01, 2010, 04:00:42 AM

Dear Sam,



Love,

SC, Stan and Maggie

 

I miss the days when posters did things like creating Vin Scully monologues where he discusses murder hookers while doing Dodgers play-by-play or posting photos of their children judging boobies.

 

Johnny_Dangerously's first post imagined what Joe Morgan would say while observing a baseball video game (which someone posted a screen capture of). It was an instant hit with Boom, who thought J_D had potential.

 

I didn't realize until today that the site has a Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportsjournalists.com

 

The board definitely seemed faster-paced and more lively in the mid-2000s, but I always assumed that was because there were more "sports journalists" working in the halcyon days and, thus, more regular members here.

As I left journalism for education in 2007, I also drifted away from spending time here because I got busier and, frankly, felt a little sad to leave the camaraderie of day-to-day journalism -- and that sense of common experience -- behind. This place was part of that for me.

However, I'm learning that a lot more than layoffs have thinned the herd, I guess.

 

These were unearthed last year, and they still make me laugh for no good reason.

 

Wow, I had no idea about that user. Wow.

 

I miss that list of 40 ways to needle Ol' What'sHisName. It was hilarious.

 

Boots doesn't post here anymore, so I don't see the big deal.

40 Reasons Why Boots is Everything Wrong With This Message Board.

1) You're a pathological liar.

2) You're a passive-aggressive boor.

3) You claim firsthand knowledge across a range of sports journalism issues, and yet seem to know almost nothing about either field.

4) You contradict yourself. Constantly. Often within the same post.

5) You're foul-mouthed, and make a point of posting your obscenities in all CAPS.

6) You're a braggart and a blowhard.

7) Your "opinions" are nothing but mealy generalities.

8 ) You make every thread you post on about yourself.

9) You have a terrible persecution complex. This may be because you have a terrible personality in real life, and are persecuted for it. I don't know.

10) You have no demonstrable sense of humor.

11) You are as slow as molasses and as dense as mahogany. At all times.

12) On current events topics, you are utterly obtuse. On sports topics, only slightly less so.

13) You blame others for your own failures and inadequacies.

14) You torture us with your ponderous, monochromatic writing.

15) You often write in the third person, like the Tsar. And yet you are not the Tsar.

16) You claim to have been everywhere, met everyone and done everything. Which would be insufferable even if it were true.

17) You have been directly responsible for the locking of more threads than the inventor of the mechanical loom; than anyone anywhere in the history of the world, in fact. I exaggerate only a little, for effect.

18) You willfully insult other posters, but cannot take the same in return.

19) Which means you're a bully and a coward.

20) You bring nothing to any discussion on any topic. Neither wit, nor color, nor thought, nor invention.

21) You repeat yourself. Endlessly. Especially the phrases "jackass," stirring up shit," and "stay on topic."

22) According to trustworthy folks, you post under more than one handle, just to jack people up. This is juvenile at best. Mendacious at worst.

23) You seem oblivious to the fact that your reputation on the board is broadly horrible. You have succeeded in alienating more members here than virtually anyone else. At least JDV is vivid performance art of a kind.

24) You spend more time backpedaling than a Russian circus bear on a unicycle.

25) You've started more threads with less content than the rest of us combined.

26) You endlessly d_b topics because you post on this board without actually reading it.

27) In fact, you seem never to have actually read anything. How does an American adult of even poor education not know Darwin and his theories on evolution? Even to oppose them?

28) Even Jones - one of the friendliest, most easygoing men I know - can't abide you.

29) You routinely try to ingratiate yourself with us by inflating your own experiences - then rush to randomly condemn newspapers and magazines and the people who make them, as if you had some Olympian insight into that process.

30) You never admit when you're wrong. Which is often indeed.

31) That when guests visit the site, they might take your drivel as being representative of the other minds at work here.

32) That for all the places you claim to have visited - stadiums, locker rooms, press boxes, airports, bars - you seem to have only the most generic knowledge of how things look or sound or feel in those places. Perhaps it's only your poor powers of description that lead me to feel this way.

33) By your own admission, you're the "ultimate ass." Who but a sophomoric, self-loathing idiot would be proud of such a thing?

34) The fictional HR thread.

35) The fictional backdoor lovin' thread.

36) The fictional body odor thread.

37) Your PM fetish.

38) Your recurrent posting of the phrase "WHITE POWER!!!!" in ALL-CAPS.

39) Your inane, unfunny non sequiturs.

40) And finally, what does every locked thread on which you've posted have in common? You.