PinkPearl

Hmm, this place isn't quite as active as I hoped either. Maybe I'll stick around, maybe I won't, but I'll try it anyways! My activity here may or may not be less frequent, depending on others' activity and my personal life, and how much time I want to spend on Spongebob at my age...who knows, maybe a lot. I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to join, so we'll see how things go. 

I've been quite busy during the time wasn't participating in Spongebob forums. I wrote a novel (it's not very good, but I'm trying again this year), got a new job, ran a book blog (on hiatus until I can figure out where the heck the traffic went), took classes in marketing and copywriting, and more. Let's see what the rest of the year has in store. 

A Brief History of My Forum Life (snipped from my SBM post)

I still remember May 28, 2007. It was a dark, wet day, perfect for staying inside and surfing the Internet. It was also the day where I discovered SpongeBuddy Mania. I was so excited at the prospect of having a profile to decorate. Soon after I set up my account, though, I took a break to go garden shopping with my mom. Of course, all I could think about was the new website experience about to unfold in front of me. My profile says that I found out about the site from “another Spongebob fansite,” but I don’t remember what it was. I do remember, though, a time before joining the forums where I’d go on SBM and listen to the songs from the show. Good times. All I do know is that this is one of the SB sites still out there, including a forum at that! In 2017! I guess some things don’t change.

Most of you probably don’t remember the days when Spongey34 was arguably the more prominent admin. The days when abney and PhilipB were regular members. DMAP only appeared on the scene as a member towards the end of my time as a “golden era” member. You also may not remember when the Dump was great, or remember Stinko’s fanfics starring Stevie the Jellyfish, when arcade tournaments were going strong, Dear Vikings being the most hated episode, online-speak like “n00b,” “pwned!”, and more.

Back then I was a noobish seventh grader who often acted as such. I had only recently met the guy I would try to hang onto to the next six years. I often typed in tiny pink text to reflect my personality (or so I’d hoped). I also watched Spongebob, which at the time was a family favorite. As many did, I also tried starting a Spongebob fan fiction website of my own, which didn’t really take off. But that was okay, because SBM was always awesome. Now I am a mature (?) adult who’s graduated college and working. I even won the Most Mature award...take THAT, naysayers. Interest wise, I now love the Red Sox just as much as RSF, and am enjoying my first job. Those are new. But I'm still the same pink loving, field hockey fan, and writer I was before. And I’m still here, which is mind blowing.


SBM would also be a good companion when I entered high school. I went to two schools and didn’t enjoy either experience. The first half of freshman year (I was only at that school for 4 months), during break times, I would often hang out in the lounge with other students, iMac in hand, browsing the latest SBM topics. I Can Haz Cheezburger was THE meme source at the time, and it would often crop up on SBM as well as real life. It was a great time waster. At least I got to know members like boonose, bookgirl, bookworm, SquidwardLover (Webkinz friends forever and ever!), and others.

Not to say that SBM was perfect. Bullying and snide remarks still had their place, and I wasn’t immune. Just because someone acts like a noob or is annoying doesn’t mean they should be viciously attacked, and that's why to this day I am against all forms of verbal sparring no matter what the member in question did to provoke it, possibly because of my earlier days here. I am always in favor of a good, well thought out debate or argument, though. Just ask my popular posts. SBM has been a great place for me to really think about my thoughts before expressing them. And now that we don’t have a feature that lets you quote a string of posts, discussions are less likely to spew off topic. Sometimes, evolving is good.

I evolved too by eventually making real friends, so SBM went to the wayside for a few years. I never expected the people to change, but they did. When I started poking around again in college, very few original members were left and it looked like the site had truly been passed down to a new generation. But my timing was good: around the same time in the Dump, an “Old Member Nostalgia Regathering Topic” (or whatever) had been created. It was like all the older members had a similar idea: to come back and say hello. Was there a secret SBM communication signal I didn’t know we had? Strange…I hung around, though, and eventually made a great blog, won some awards, won a trophy, got likes from staff (still waiting on you, SBRox and DMAP...), made some thought-provoking posts, and had a whole lot of fun while doing it.

Sadly, very few of these members actually wanted to hang around; many explicitly stated that their lives were moving on and they had new interests now. Still, I was amused that many still wanted to pop in from time to time. Sometimes I still saw Stinkoman and Mothra around, but as it is, they’re no longer regular members.

Today, though, proves that new generations can be great too. Members like Katniss, RSF, and illini prove that you don’t have to be kids to enjoy a SB community. And the rest of you are just the awesome variety of people who I can talk to even if I wouldn’t have done so in real life. The concept of knowing people online only is awesome.

It seems silly I’m writing this all over a website (seriously, this filled HOW many Word docs??), but it’s true. I never would have expected myself to believe that I would have been here for ten years, and only with over 3k posts to show for it. Whatever. I’m still the slow poster I used to be…some things never change.