You know this phenomenon where you’re heading into middle age and all of a sudden all the ballplayers are younger than you are? There’s something similar that happens on the SDMB, where all of a sudden, half the posters you see and recognize have fewer posts than you do.
So what’s “middle age” in this context? I make it as about a thousand posts. (I realize there are people who hit a thousand posts in three weeks, but those people, like victims of premature aging, typically don’t last long.) Or maybe you could express it as the number of years you’ve been a member. Or maybe “middle-aged” means anybody who remembers the days before P2P.
I don’t think he meant age, I think he meant amount of time on the board or number of posts.
Sal Ammoniac: As a post happy newbie, I am sure it is not post count but time on the board with content that should count more.
I like your idea: If you were a member before Pay to Play, your a 'Vet or middle-aged in dope terms".
If you go make to AOL days you are a Senior or I have seen the phrase, “Damn 99er”.
I guess you’re middle-aged here if you look at people talking about events in the distant past and you realize that they really weren’t all that long ago.
I’d guess “middle-age” here to refer to people that came around after we left AOL and after we left our temporary digs where we had the Smashie icon.
Old-timers will remember pushpin backgrounds and the days when we’d be drowning in idiots who got their very first computer and an AOL account for Christmas and they’d pop in looking for information on grow lights, pipes, rolling papers and that sort of thing.
Hot damn! I remember back when we had smashy. That little guy cracked me up. For those of you that weren’t around then, the board once went down for an entire winter. Evn though it was freezing outside, we didn’t give up. We built ourselves a temporary board bigger and better than ever. Someone was good enough to build moving smillies there. Little smashy was one tough little guy with a sledghammer that pretended to hit whatever was beside it over and over. Oh man, we just watched that thing for hours because we had never seen moving smillies before.
Of course, when the old board was repaired, we just packed up and went back to business like nothing had ever happen. I don’t think these new users would be able to cope with something like that. They would probably just sulk off to their “X-Box” and never come back. We were a tough bunch.
To answer the question thoug, Idon’t know when middle-age sets in on this board and I never hope to find out.
I would like to add an extra dimension into this discussion by introducing the Hertzberg-Russell Diagram for stellar age. You have your main sequence posters, giant posters, supergiant posters, and white dwarfs posters. The x-axis should be labeled quality of posts (in place of temperature) and the y-axis is quantity of posts (in place of luminosity). Many posters can be easily grouped into the main sequence, the ones teetering on being banned are the supergiants, the giants are the ones being warned or suspended, and the white dwarfs are the lurkers. Color also comes into play here as well…Blue is a hot poster (good quantity and quality), Red is just the opposite (infrequent, crap quality), but most of us are like our own Sun…with periods of high and low solar activity…and Yellow.
Some posters are long timers…they start as cold lurking dust clouds then coalesce into reddish protostars until they get the hang of the SD, and then move and stay in the main sequence for a long time until they burn out of hydrogen (money or interest) and then quietly shed their username and slip into white dwarf status and slowly fade from white to red to brown and away from memory.
Others start heavy and hot with lots to post and can be arrogant/ignorant and burn their fuel quite rapidly until they collapse and go Nova…if it’s a very prominent poster…Supernova! The poster explodes and nothing is left of them except a hot, spinning core of memories that other posters can see and reference for years to come…I’m sure all of us can think of a few Supernovas that occured here in the last few years that nobody will forget for a while.
Of course, there are the exotic posters…the Cephids, TTauri’s, pulsars, the black holes, (heh…even binaries) that are scattered throughout the SD Diagram.
So, where does everyone fit?
I would put myself as your average yellow, main-sequence poster.
I like this exercise. Please help me out. I feel like there should be a 3rd axis for time. I am very high output, Short time and hopefully average quality.
This would seem to result in a young hot bright yellow to blue.
Actually, time is incorporated into the HR diagram…as time progresses, the stars evolve from one group to another group (check this site out) , and there are many subgroups that are not listed…If you are a youngin’, then you are a protostar, probably with more than a couple solar masses, moving from the middle right towards the main sequence, probably a white F star, IMHO. Look at the third graph on this site. Just stay away from the instability strip!
Time doesn’t need to be a third axis for stars because stellar evolution is a fairly straightforward process, at least as compared to a person’s development as a poster. I think we need it here.
I think I’m a neutron but I think there might be a troll spilling excess … stuff on to me as I keep fading then brightening in a cycle. Eww.
How about a time scale? Hmm, now that I’ve done this, it might touch some raw nerves for some people. My apologies if it is so.
P2P = 2001 - the end of the good times
Winter of our missed content = Reagan years - I don’t recall
Sept 11th = 70s - sadness, anger, frustration
Wally = 1963 - Obvious
1999 = 1950s - Times the old timers like to talk about. Back when things were simple.
AOL = WWII - Time of big important threads like Who’s Ruda Duda (hope I got that right) which blew away our puny “a” thread
The Books = Roaring 20s - Imagine! Cecil on sale at any old corner bookstore but only if you know what section to look in.
The column = The turn of the century. The freewheeling energy of Chicago begins a spark destined to set the nation’s heart on fire.
