I'm not the most active user on this site anymore, but I think this special occasion was worth observing! There are very few things that you are part of for 10 years straight, and Smogon happens to be the only online community that I've been involved with for that long.
I first found out about Smogon in April 2012. At the time, I was part of the StarCraft II community, and subscribed to a channel called CyberSportsNetwork. They most often covered StarCraft II tournaments, but one day, I came across a video of theirs that was an interview with a VGC player.
I grew up with Pokemon, but quit around the time of Black and White (the current generation of that year), as I was on the bandwagon that saw that generation as finally jumping the shark completely (Nowadays, I'm on the opposite-but-equal bandwagon that Gen 5 was the last "great" generation of Pokemon). Competitive Pokemon sounded really interesting though, and the player in the video mentioned SkarmBliss and Smogon as the two main websites that people used to discuss the game (from my understanding, SkarmBliss was eventually replaced by Nugget Bridge, though I don't have all the details). So that's how I found out about Smogon the site.
(Those who follow Pokemon Unite might recognize Rachel aka Seltzer as the host of the official Pokemon Unite tournament broadcasts starting last year, so things have kind of come full circle in a way)
In May 2012, I left the StarCraft II community because of what I saw as the toxic and self-destructive nature of the community sabotaging its own efforts of keeping it the biggest eSport, at a time when League of Legends was rising up to push it out of relevance. I dabbled in Yu-Gi-Oh! a bit, since I had always played that when I was younger, but I did find the actual competitive meta to be a bit frustrating. Eventually, I get back into Pokemon in July 2012 with SoulSilver, and while reading about Pokemon stuff on Bulbapedia, actually became excited for the upcoming BW2 release that October.
As some know, at the time, I was a homeschool student doing all my classes online. I didn't get much social interaction in person, so I did look online for most of my interactions. I lurked in #pokemon on IRC and on the forums often. I found everyone very smart and interesting, and loved reading and looking at people's adventures in the Photo Album thread.
At the same time, I didn't really want to join the forums because (and this seems silly, especially 10 years later!) I didn't want to have the reputation as "the new guy". That wasn't really something I was familiar with. I was on the internet from a pretty young age, and so my accounts on most websites were registered in the pretty early days of those sites. For example, my YouTube account is from 2008, 3 years into the lifespan of the site. My Twitch.TV account actually is a month older than the site's official launch date, due to it carrying over Justin.TV accounts. Smogon had already been around for 8 years, and I didn't want to be known as the new guy who just joined and doesn't fit in. But, I figured that the longer I waited to make an account, the newer and newer I would be, so I might as well make an account now even if I don't plan to use it yet.
So, during the nighttime hours of September 24th, 2012, I officially registered my Smogon account, and announced that I joined on #pokemon on IRC. The first Smogon user that I interacted with was Theorymon! Unfortunately, our hard drives containing the logs from that time are not necessarily readable any longer, so I don't have the exact logs (if anyone has the logs from that time, that would be really cool!). But I do remember that he said that Smogon hadn't really had any new users in a while, so that was cool. And it is also cool that we are still friends 10 years later (though we didn't really get to know each other until like 2016). I remember being, in the immediate aftermath, really happy about it and dancing in the kitchen, much to the confusion of my mom and brother.
I remember thinking that because it was a Pokemon site, it would be full of weebs. So my first avatar was this, which I still use on Discord some Halloweens.
However, the avatar I changed to a few weeks later and was mostly known for was a screenshot from the Looney Tunes 1943 short "Daffy the Commando". Unfortunately, like the IRC logs, I don't have the exact image I used anymore, but it was during the scene where he parachutes down. Here is a new screenshot I took, closest that I could get.
My first signature was a quote from Nicholas D. Wolfwood from the anime Trigun, which I was watching at the time:
"I'm actually surprised you can smile like that. You had me kinda worried. I noticed that you smile, and seem really friendly, but the way you would smile was so empty that it hurt to watch you. You're hurting like crazy on the inside, and yet you grin and bear it. At least that's this man's opinion anyway. ...That's why I HAVE THIS CONFESSIONAL!!!"
Very cringe!
Anyhow, my first actual post (with the original avatar and signature) wasn't on October 3rd, and not even in a competitive Pokemon thread. Instead, it was in the forum called "a forum" (a combination of Cong and the then-Firebot) in the thread called "favorite spongebob moment/quote/scene POST HERE ITT" made by our very own faint. THANKFULLY, I said "My first post on Smogon" in it, so I know it's the real deal!
It's not too awfully embarrassing aside from the unironic "XD" (which wasn't the worst thing in the world, for the time).
The first two links still work, and they're the Moar Krabs montage, and the Does this look unsure to you? bit. The last link no longer works, but it's the robot Krabs dance. Re-upload here.
I did find the forums hard to get into, so I, like many people of the time, spent a lot of time in these member-run subforums called "Social Groups" instead. Shoutouts to all of my other buddies from BABA - Bald Accountant's Battle Arena! It's funny to look back at all the stupid teenage drama we argued about back then. The three still-active users that I have known the longest would be Theorymon, the first user I interacted with, Don Honchkrorleone, someone who basically made friends with every new user and was really active in BABA, and Jio, whom I legitimately only first talked to because I thought his Elesa avatar was hot.
Anyhow, I'm going to stop here before this becomes a recap of the next 9 years as well. In summation, Smogon has been a big part of my life since I was 16, and I have learned a lot of great lessons and skills and made a lot of close friends here. Though I'm not as active as I was (on the forums at least, I'm still pretty active on Discord!) I wanted to commemorate something that definitely had a big impact on my growth as a person, and take a little trip down memory lane to ten years ago and see how much of it I could remember.
It would seem somewhat self-serving to ask people to share their memories of me in this thread, so if you don't wanna do that, I also invite you to post your favorite SpongeBob moments below! I need to do some thinking about my favorite SpongeBob moments, and if they've changed over ten years, too. I guess I personally have until October 3rd to do that.
I first found out about Smogon in April 2012. At the time, I was part of the StarCraft II community, and subscribed to a channel called CyberSportsNetwork. They most often covered StarCraft II tournaments, but one day, I came across a video of theirs that was an interview with a VGC player.
I grew up with Pokemon, but quit around the time of Black and White (the current generation of that year), as I was on the bandwagon that saw that generation as finally jumping the shark completely (Nowadays, I'm on the opposite-but-equal bandwagon that Gen 5 was the last "great" generation of Pokemon). Competitive Pokemon sounded really interesting though, and the player in the video mentioned SkarmBliss and Smogon as the two main websites that people used to discuss the game (from my understanding, SkarmBliss was eventually replaced by Nugget Bridge, though I don't have all the details). So that's how I found out about Smogon the site.
(Those who follow Pokemon Unite might recognize Rachel aka Seltzer as the host of the official Pokemon Unite tournament broadcasts starting last year, so things have kind of come full circle in a way)
In May 2012, I left the StarCraft II community because of what I saw as the toxic and self-destructive nature of the community sabotaging its own efforts of keeping it the biggest eSport, at a time when League of Legends was rising up to push it out of relevance. I dabbled in Yu-Gi-Oh! a bit, since I had always played that when I was younger, but I did find the actual competitive meta to be a bit frustrating. Eventually, I get back into Pokemon in July 2012 with SoulSilver, and while reading about Pokemon stuff on Bulbapedia, actually became excited for the upcoming BW2 release that October.
As some know, at the time, I was a homeschool student doing all my classes online. I didn't get much social interaction in person, so I did look online for most of my interactions. I lurked in #pokemon on IRC and on the forums often. I found everyone very smart and interesting, and loved reading and looking at people's adventures in the Photo Album thread.
At the same time, I didn't really want to join the forums because (and this seems silly, especially 10 years later!) I didn't want to have the reputation as "the new guy". That wasn't really something I was familiar with. I was on the internet from a pretty young age, and so my accounts on most websites were registered in the pretty early days of those sites. For example, my YouTube account is from 2008, 3 years into the lifespan of the site. My Twitch.TV account actually is a month older than the site's official launch date, due to it carrying over Justin.TV accounts. Smogon had already been around for 8 years, and I didn't want to be known as the new guy who just joined and doesn't fit in. But, I figured that the longer I waited to make an account, the newer and newer I would be, so I might as well make an account now even if I don't plan to use it yet.
So, during the nighttime hours of September 24th, 2012, I officially registered my Smogon account, and announced that I joined on #pokemon on IRC. The first Smogon user that I interacted with was Theorymon! Unfortunately, our hard drives containing the logs from that time are not necessarily readable any longer, so I don't have the exact logs (if anyone has the logs from that time, that would be really cool!). But I do remember that he said that Smogon hadn't really had any new users in a while, so that was cool. And it is also cool that we are still friends 10 years later (though we didn't really get to know each other until like 2016). I remember being, in the immediate aftermath, really happy about it and dancing in the kitchen, much to the confusion of my mom and brother.
I remember thinking that because it was a Pokemon site, it would be full of weebs. So my first avatar was this, which I still use on Discord some Halloweens.
However, the avatar I changed to a few weeks later and was mostly known for was a screenshot from the Looney Tunes 1943 short "Daffy the Commando". Unfortunately, like the IRC logs, I don't have the exact image I used anymore, but it was during the scene where he parachutes down. Here is a new screenshot I took, closest that I could get.
My first signature was a quote from Nicholas D. Wolfwood from the anime Trigun, which I was watching at the time:
"I'm actually surprised you can smile like that. You had me kinda worried. I noticed that you smile, and seem really friendly, but the way you would smile was so empty that it hurt to watch you. You're hurting like crazy on the inside, and yet you grin and bear it. At least that's this man's opinion anyway. ...That's why I HAVE THIS CONFESSIONAL!!!"
Very cringe!
Anyhow, my first actual post (with the original avatar and signature) wasn't on October 3rd, and not even in a competitive Pokemon thread. Instead, it was in the forum called "a forum" (a combination of Cong and the then-Firebot) in the thread called "favorite spongebob moment/quote/scene POST HERE ITT" made by our very own faint. THANKFULLY, I said "My first post on Smogon" in it, so I know it's the real deal!
It's not too awfully embarrassing aside from the unironic "XD" (which wasn't the worst thing in the world, for the time).
The first two links still work, and they're the Moar Krabs montage, and the Does this look unsure to you? bit. The last link no longer works, but it's the robot Krabs dance. Re-upload here.
I did find the forums hard to get into, so I, like many people of the time, spent a lot of time in these member-run subforums called "Social Groups" instead. Shoutouts to all of my other buddies from BABA - Bald Accountant's Battle Arena! It's funny to look back at all the stupid teenage drama we argued about back then. The three still-active users that I have known the longest would be Theorymon, the first user I interacted with, Don Honchkrorleone, someone who basically made friends with every new user and was really active in BABA, and Jio, whom I legitimately only first talked to because I thought his Elesa avatar was hot.
Anyhow, I'm going to stop here before this becomes a recap of the next 9 years as well. In summation, Smogon has been a big part of my life since I was 16, and I have learned a lot of great lessons and skills and made a lot of close friends here. Though I'm not as active as I was (on the forums at least, I'm still pretty active on Discord!) I wanted to commemorate something that definitely had a big impact on my growth as a person, and take a little trip down memory lane to ten years ago and see how much of it I could remember.
It would seem somewhat self-serving to ask people to share their memories of me in this thread, so if you don't wanna do that, I also invite you to post your favorite SpongeBob moments below! I need to do some thinking about my favorite SpongeBob moments, and if they've changed over ten years, too. I guess I personally have until October 3rd to do that.
