[Tyred]

It has been a long time.

Sure, I've lurked here periodically, posting randomly in the shoutbox on occasion, but I haven't actually posted anything in a long time. Zippy's E-mail changed that. If nothing else, I can contribute a summary of my life from nearly the last decade.

To catch everyone up:

• I graduated college, got a job working full time at the mouth of hell.
• I moved to a small Midwestern city where I continue to make my home.
• I had two kids, who combined to immediately take up all my time, and thus my forays onto the internet grew fewer and fewer.

I have quickly become a dinosaur. Games, memes, internet sites of great renown all flew past without even a hint of recognition. For those of you who have not had the privilege of growing old... it sucks.

Well, not all of it.

Anyway, it was good to see this place still running. I expect that I will not contribute much, as I have more affinity for fora than I do chat programs. Still, it's nice to see some very old handles popping up again.

I updated my signature with the new anniversary counter, but nearly everything else remains an accurate reflection of me.

Tyred

[Trerro]

Welcome back!

I wouldn't worry about a preference for fora over chats, as CC's been a mix of both for most of its history. Even in our KoC glory days, where we got something insane like 150k posts in 2 years, we had a decently active IRC room, and after our IRC server croaked, we were running an XFire room for years after that. Discord's simply new, better tech, for something we've pretty much always done. MMOs also usually have in-game chat rooms, so there's that as well - even most of our browser games have/had a chat interface. So... our 2019 collective post count probably isn't going to look like our 2005 one, but this site should still be active and running, and with several of us planning on doing things like thread games and play-by-post RPs, there should be a good number of people checking in regularly (which in turn means anyone starting a thread should find people posting in it). It's true that the internet collectively has shifted less in a forum and more in a chat direction (primarily because using forum software on a cell phone is a royal pain), but it's not as large a shift as you might think - they're two different communication media, and they both excel at different kinds of conversations. New tech doesn't really change that fact.

Lack of time affects all of us to at least some extent - I doubt any of us have the free time we did in high school or college (though we'll find new people who do). The thing is, we don't need to.. CC's always been run democratically, with people dropping in and out as time permits, and our list of games has always included a couple of quick browser things that require minimal time (Forge of Empires currently, we could probably get KoL going again as well if people are interested, and certain cell phone games wouldn't be bad choices as well), as well as several people not actually playing any of our stuff and simply hanging out. This won't be any less true in the new generation of the group.

The community is one big, happy chaotic mess by design, and the idea is that there's always something for everyone to do, with whatever time they're willing and able to commit, and everyone is always welcome.