Month: November 2001

I’ve just re-watched Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace. It actually stands up to rewatching alot better than I thought it would. I would like to see the “Phantom Edit” someday, as from watching it now removing alot of the original scenes on Naboo would not be a great loss at all. Still I have to say I enjoyed watching it.

Right, armed with Buffy, Angel, Enterprise and 24 I’m off to Bristol for the weekend. One of my laptop batterries is almost dead though, I forgot to charge it so I am kinda annoyed with myself over that. Anyways…

Noteable comment from a debate about digital copyright laws

“[The RIAA is] so trapped in the industrial paradigm, they can’t see it,” he said. “On the other hand, there is an entire younger generation of people who do get it, all those people who find nothing morally repugnant about lifting software from one another. There is no ethical dilemma for a 21-year-old college kid when they go get some piece of information or entertainment”

Ok the third Star Wars Ep 2 Trailer is up and it’s surprisingly good. Much portents of what’s to come, so the romance stuff is always happening but young Anakin is also starting to show his dark side. The trailer starts off with the romance and continues through the forbidden love theme but then moves into some darker areas. I could get excited about this…..but that could have been said for the first one.

“Someday I will be the most powerful Jedi ever”

Requiem

When I first came online in the mid 90’s, like most people the first thing I did was go looking around for details of some of my interests. This took me pretty quickly to Babylon5.com. I went into the chat room there and well there is a few years history from that. I chatted in there on and off for a while and I heard about this place called “The Link”. I found this to be thestation.com the home of the B5 Fan Club and well the chat was far nicer there (from the people to the technical side of the chat).

So I chatted, and I hung out and I had a good time, it was my home page and I would chat there for a few hours a day and then some. I made some friends and became part of the community. All was good. After a while I started using The Cultural Centre (CC), the message board on the same site which was essentially the same people posting messages and I joined in there. It was all really good fun with some really good people.

Every now and then there would of course be the wars, they were not all that regular but they could get kinda fun. They could on occasion be pretty vicious and sometimes quite petty. There was always what could be thought of as battlelines drawn, and battlecamps set up. It was not really a case of good guys and bad guys, although it could have been seen as that. There were some people who were the “trouble makers” they had strong opinions, were not prepared to go along with the herd and would post replies to posts they disagreed with. I was one of them (if your surprised, you don’t know me very well if at all).

Eventually it got really serious and there was for lack of a better word, a war. The basics with lots of details left out obviously. One of the site admins was accused of reading the logs of private messages and using / commenting on the information it contained. I saw enough that I believed it. There was a large number of postings about it, it went on for quite a while, but it was the beginning of the end. The message board was closed down, chat was boycotted by quite a few people and a yahoo club was set up. This was to follow the same part shortly later and some more clubs were set up.

So that’s obviously not even a 10th of the story, and it’s from a while ago and a trouble maker, and my point has kinda gone off somewhere to lie down.

But anyway and while I know that I am considered one of the people responsible for the closing down of CC and the Link, I really miss it sometimes.