With my memory, there’s no way I could know without cheating.
proceeds to cheat
I’m not particularly shy about looking like a dumbass, so I dove right into Great Debates with a post that did not advance anything other than a link to what I considered to be a highly questionable practice (even though I didn’t say as much) described in a slashdot article about CAPSII.
It got all of 2 responses, the first from Bricker saying;
But I dusted myself off and did better with my 2nd try, a Cafe Society thread about Raymond Feist’s Riftwar Saga that ended up with 23 replies (6 of which were me).
My first thread, the title of which escapes me, was in GQ, asking about the healthiness of drinking my own urine (as I had some friends pooling money to see if I would do so).
Some folks let me know that as long as I was healthy, it was harmless.
Someone else jumped in and said that maybe if the guys were doing this, they weren’t great friends, and I should maybe rethink hanging out with them…
It was about a birthday present for my husband. (We were just dating then). It was his fiftieth birthday and I had bought a little blank book and was trying to come up with fifty nice things to say about him. I was stumped after about twelve, but thanks to you guys, I got the job done.
It would be really embarrassing to re-read the finished product…I hope he lost it!
My recollection was correct. It was a question in GQ about why one might choose to build a bridge rather than a tunnel, or vice versa. I actually submitted it to Cecil first, but whichever staff member read it wrote back that bridges are for crossing water and tunnels are for crossing mountains. :rolleyes:
I didn’t feel like clarifying the question, and so I registered and asked it here. Huge mistake, many hours wasted since then that could have been spent studying, working, or masturbating.
I don’t know. I remember wondering about trains, about how rolling stock was built and then transported to a railroad. By truck? By boat? By – and here’s the kicker – rail? I posted it in GQ and got some very informative answers. I think the title was “Another question about trains.”
First thread created on the Dope was titled “God is a CAT! A Proof”, and it was a weird satirical post making fun of the concurrent threads “God Does Not Exist, a Proof” and “PROOF! God Exists!” and so on.
First thread on the current, non-AOL incarnation of SDMB I’m less sure about and they archived lots of those… oh wait a moment…
Ha! I actually looked this up once before! And astonishingly enough it’s still extant. Posts from this era were created in an old version of ubb (which we used before vBulletin); when we converted to vBulletin, the newer ubb threads converted OK but the older ones lost the name of the person who posted. I’m the first “guest” at top of thread.
As I recall, it was called “Legality vs. Rightness”, and was an attempt to highlight the difference between discussing the morality of a situation and the various legalities involved.
Of course, that was in my younger days (:D), and I was trying to remain neutral to make a good impression. These days, I’d probably just start a Pit thread called “Stop pretending that whatever bullshit someone wrote down and managed to get a few other people to endorse even though they probably didn’t read it, constitutes a valid logical argument.”
Then again, that’s a bit long for a thread title, so perhaps my first instinct was the right choice after all.
I wanted to know what smart people thought about crop-circles… not a lot, was my answer. I wasn’t entirely convinced, but I didn’t want to have a fight in my first thread!
Yes - I joined as a guest to ask what to do with mouldy ink. And how to stop it becoming mouldy. (Can’t find the thread now, as when I try to search, I get a message saying ‘A security token is missing’. What’s that about?)
Got a couple of responses, together with links to a previous thread (which I hadn’t been able to find as a guest) on the same topic.
I figured if there were people who could not only give advice on mouldy ink, but also belonged to a bunch of people who had previously discussed it, I should sign up.
I think my first question was “What is it like to be in the Witness Protection Program?” At the time, I was under the impression that Cecil might actually pick topics from the board and he might answer. I thought it would make a good article. I didn’t get a really satisfactory answer. I only got a link to a NYT article that I couldn’t access because I don’t subscribe.
I had posted earlier in a response to Cecil’s articles on the memory effect in batteries. I still stand by what I said even though I was a chemistry peon. That’s not saying I was right, just that I qualified my statements properly.
Then of course on the AOL site I asked why beethoven went deaf.
I figured it was probably something about hot dogs and ketchup and search reveals, sure enough, that it appears to be the first thread I started.
My first post, however, was about baseball movies and complaining that Shoeless Joe Jackson was depicted as a right-handed batter in “Field of Dreams.” That post also ended that thread, so my very first post was a threadkiller.
