Never heard of it before. Some link, somewhere, led me to a SD column. Then I read ALL of the archives.
And then one bored night I asked myself the question, ‘what is a message board’?
Cow-orker was a loon. Her friends were loons. Showed me pages in early 1999 about aspartame>cancer. I had just bought a computer, found a snopes column, told her she was full of shit and why.
Played on the snopes message boards(Hi, Bonnie), and found something at SDMB that wasn’t covered on snopes. Realized you were some impressively smart people(well, some were), stuck around.
Fark.com used to frequently link to the articles. I’m not sure what got me checking out the boards or what got me signed up for them. I do remember the pan-fried semen thread from my early days. Maybe that’s what sold it for me.
I had just discovered message boards and was hanging out on Snopes. I happened to notice a dismissive comment about the SDMB that got me to think it might be worth looking at.
After lurking for eight or nine months, I had to register so I could call Bud Selig a jerk. And here I am, still. (And so is that jerk, Bud Selig. :mad: )
A fellow cow-orker once submitted a question to Cecil and got an answer, and he sent everyone a link. I no longer remember what the question was, however.
I was reading a thread about waterboarding in the off topic section of a mixed martial arts website and I stumbled across this thread;
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=448717&highlight=waterboard
by Scylla and I was hooked
They should seriously give Scylla a percentage from membership revenue.
Bored.com for me as well. For a few months, I worked a late night shift in a call center in 2000. Hours between calls, so I spent a lot of time surfing the internet. The wonderful days with no blocked sites!
I was making bacon wrapped shrimp and started wondering ‘how’ they made toothpicks and so I did an internet search. One of the pages that I came across was the SDMB.
For those curious–the flat toothpicks are punched out of thin veneer sheet of birch wood, the round ones are made via an oversize blank then fed into a machine which rounds them.
Oddly enough, a link from Penny Arcade to the article about Tycho Brahe’s silver nose was my first exposure to The Straight Dope.
Friend of mine got me hooked on Cecil’s columns, and then onto the boards.
Started reading the column in the early 90’s in college. Bought the first book used and all the rest as they came out. Found MB in '99, lurked for a bit, then joined up.
Sadly, I’m fairly sure it was through the, y’know… the gerbil article.
Through a humor website which would link Threadspotting frequently.
I would regularly read it in the Chicago Reader in the early-mid 90s. My usual routine with the Chicago Reader was to read the Straight Dope column, then News of the Weird and the Red Meat comic, then see what music’s in town for the week, before going back to the cover story.
I found the message board in 2000 and joined shortly thereafter.
One of the first things I was interested in when I got Internet access was urban legends. That led me to Usenet, and alt.folklore.urban. I’m pretty sure someone there somehow made me aware of alt.fan.cecil-adams (maybe just through a passing mention), which I found to be similarly interesting and somewhat more civil (usually). Eventually, my use of Usenet waned (I haven’t read regularly or posted in YEARS – it seems to be mostly a cesspool of spam these days), and at some point the SDMB on the web came onto my radar (I don’t remember exactly when, and I’m not clear on when the web board actually came into being). To be honest, I’ve never really been a religious reader of the Straight Dope columns. I get the weekly email, but I usually just skim it. Every once in a while if I’m really bored, I’ll go through the archives. But I’ve always been more interested in the conversations than the actual “Cecil” material.
ETA (jeez, I don’t know why I always think of something I want to say after I post – I should just pretend to post and come back in 5 minutes so I don’t have to edit every dang post I make!!!): This account says I joined in 2003, but I THINK I had another account under a different name before that. Or I had one and it got wiped out, or something like that. I’m pretty sure I posted before 2003. But my use has always been pretty intermittent. I’ll read regularly and post occasionally for a few weeks or months at a time, then not come back for months or longer.
Took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.
I used to read the column in the Baltimore City Paper. I guess this was in the late 70s or early 80s. I bought the original book whenever that came out. When I moved to Ohio in 2000, there wasn’t a local paper that carried the column, so I looked online and found the website. Threadspotting led me to the message board, where I lurked for a few years before joining.
Actually linked into the website from somewhere in cyberspace after AOL but before Google. I believe it may have been back in my Mindspring and Altavista days. Should have made notes!
Turn left at Greenland.