Longtime ILXors - how has this board changed over time?

wait, what..

I was here from the (almost) very beginning. A month or two after it was erected, I guess. It was just very vibrant. But I can understand how it was so intimidating. Thing is, you just had to throw yourself in the pit. The nastiness was all in good fun. But now it is much more cosy, I guess.

Is Ned still around? I don't see his posts anymore.

Ned will be posting until they turn off the internet.

I was a random Googler in the early days. I'd say there were about four periods:

1. 2000-2002 Tiny group of people, few posts but longform and in depth. Very much linked to Freaky Trigger, Usenet etc...

2. 2002-2004 Quite a few more join - probably from Sinister. Plenty of FAPs. Tweeness is accepted, encouraged in places even. Generally a very nice accepting place to be (especially if you're an indiekid), but maybe a bit TOO nice for some people's tastes.

3. 2005-2007 Noize Board/Zing era. Huge influx of posters, many from the US. Much faster and snarkier posting style. Image bombing. Multiple boards. Multiple usernames, sockpuppets etc. Hugely meta. Took me a while to adjust and I remember getting upset and leaving on more than one occasion.

4. 2008-2012 Plateau era. A slight mellowing off. Not as volatile as before, but not exactly a return to the second era either. Posters are more comfortable with each other's steez and so it's more apparent when somebody's trolling or whether it's just a bit of banter. Not as many new posters joining and generally a little easier to keep up with.

heh im not sure about indiekid acceptance in 2002. Mostly because former indiekids were here and had lots of guilt. If you were a former indiekid but hated indie by then you were accepted.
Though in 2001 it was worse!

imagebombing was the worst thing to happen to ilx.

dog latin for ilx board historian

The early days of ILX - especially ILM - were very much "reformed indie kids discovering that there was life beyond indie" in a refreshing and polymorphous way - and it wasn't nearly as polarised and tribal as it is today, with Metal vs Goon Crew or whatever. I wouldn't dare post on a "rolling Genre X thread" these days - in a way that I did feel much more comfortable posting on an individual artist thread 10 years ago, saying "hey, what's all this, then" and someone very clever would explain.

i wonder if mark s misses categorising threads?

I miss categorising threads. That was one of my favourite pastimes, and a great way to reacquaint oneself with the history of the board.

there is no metal vs goon crew. Some even post on both.

Of course you were going to take that literally. But the rolling genre threads and tribalism is hugely offputting and intimidating to me. That's my observation. I'm allowed to feel that way, you're allowed to feel differently. Now I'm going to stop the meta because it invariably makes me feel worse, and not better. Good day to you.

thing is, i don't think i was as close/aware of the various posters and their nuances until about 2004 anyway. to me ILX was just this one big voice/hivemind up until about 2004 when I started going on FAPs. Plus I was never a part of any of the Freaky Trigger / Usenet / Sinister / Noize crowd and even after 2004 I still considered ILX to be largely a single person rather than a lot of people with many different attitudes and tastes, so when it entered the Noize/Zing era it often felt like my best mate had turned into a total wanker.

In general three are less chickenbears and tarts andore and more IA.

I think the Rolling Threads thing is very much indicative of Plateau era ILX. It's not ideal, but a necessary evil in some ways as it's an easy way to deal with snarkiness/elitism. Whereas before it was difficult for a dilettante to speak up on a thread about, say, a hip hop or dance artist for fear of being beat down, now a lot of people don't bother and just let the experts get on with it. I don't know which I prefer.

im pretty sure there was balkanisation long before rolling metal/rap/bobbins etc threads

I dealt with all that (and the endless lists and polls) by giving up on ILM, tbh. xpost

There's as many polls on ile!

Newbies wouldn't always be shot down, though. I stumbled into a lot of dance threads in the very early days saying stupid things like "I know nothing about dance but this sounds great to me" and Matt DC or TIm F or The Lex would patiently make suggestions until I slowly started to learn. Now maybe that was because DC and Tim and Lex were people I had actually gone dancing with by that point. It's entirely possible that was more down to Poptimism / Freaky Trigger / that very early pop-oriented club that Tom used to do back in Oxford whose name I have forgotten. I have had the opposite experience to you in many ways, DL - that in the early days, ILX was a gang of individuals I met up with in the pub all the time, and knew their foibles, it's only in the post-2005 time that it has become more faceless and there are some people that I recognise regularly, but mostly it's a mass of unindividuated screennames.

Are there any FAPs thesedays? They seem to be a thing of the past now, apart from one FTrig one last 'between Christmas/NY' that I nearly went to..

I have been posting here for almost 11 years and...

Oh god.

the sprawling morass of endlessly changing usernames doesn't help this of course. I find it nigh impossible to keep up with who's who. I only found out yesterday who the late great was, and i've been chatting on the same threads as him for months and months now.

also what doesn't help is that it would not be obvious to a newcomer what is being discussed in a thread called "Rolling Fruity Goon Swag" or "Partisans" or "Bobbins" (I actually label my mp3 folders this way now). ILX is a mess of jargon, completely intimidating to those who don't know it. Reminds me of the book I'm reading at the moment - The Pale King by David Foster Wallace - which is peppered throughout with bureaucratese and office slang that gets reeled off by the characters like a mother tongue but makes no sense (and indeed is not supposed to make sense) to the uninitiated reader.

we're not running some kind of public service here y'know.

re: FAPs - there was a London FAP just before Christmas that I went to. Weirdly it felt like I was the only one there who hadn't already met everyone, but I'm sure it was the same for a lot of people. Lots of faces from people who'd stopped posting years ago too, so it partly felt like a reunion. Def would like more FAPs though. Def worth doing, especially before end of summer.

maybe ilx just isnt as london-centric as it once was. (No bad thing)

What is a FAP?

"Fancy A Pint"

It's the sound ilxors make when they all meet up for drinks.

usually a get-together after work amongst colleagues, but as far as ILX was concerned was usually semi-booked about a week ahead..

xpost

And you go along, and you know everybody's name but you recognise no faces...

Yeah, I don't know the difference between "Partisans" and "Bobbins" (apart from that the latter was Anna's long-running joke) but then I tend to think that that kind of jargon is used specifically with aim of keeping dilettantes (like me) out.

Which is fair enough, but y'know, not like it used to be. I'll just go over in a corner and quietly rust to death. Wait, no, sorry, that was on the wrong thread, that was for the passive-aggressive thread.

Partisans v Bobbins is one thing I've never seen explained. It also took me a couple of years to realise the "mongrels" threads weren't full of people posting about their dogs.

Partisans = bass music / dubstep / what's left of d'n'b etc
Bobbins = house and techno

strangely there isn't as much crossover between the two when it comes to posters. Partisans is mostly Vahid, Jordan, Jimi and a few others whereas Bobbins is Tim, Matt DC et al.

took me ages to find out fruity swag / goon crew = hip hop as well.

Partisans is mostly american posters right?
xpz

i think "bobbins" is a british word for nonsense or something. i originally thought it was in reference to a sewing machine, which intimidated me from checking out the thread.

Reminds me of the book I'm reading at the moment - The Pale King by David Foster Wallace - which is peppered throughout with bureaucratese and office slang that gets reeled off by the characters like a mother tongue but makes no sense (and indeed is not supposed to make sense) to the uninitiated reader.

Rolling with the book analogies, ILX sometimes reminds me (as a relative newcomer) of Lord of the Rings in that there is this historical substratum of epic historical characters events (shaded with "Golden Age" nostalgia) that only gets mentioned in passing but makes the reading experience much richer even for those that weren't around and haven't made the effort to go and read the 11-volume "Tales of Noize" spinoff series.

I Love TMI = 50 Shades Of Grey?

No, I know exactly why one is called the Bobbins thread. It was Anna who called it that - she was writing for a dance music mag at the time, so was very aware of the controversy that could be generated if you called House Techno or Techno House, but she wanted a thread where she could discuss House and Techno, etc. without getting into those pedantic arguments, so she just used the word "Bobbins" as a cover-all. And it stuck.

No idea where "Partisans" came from, though.

took me ages to find out fruity swag / goon crew = hip hop as well.

Those terms are at least somewhat descriptive as those are not all-encompassing Rolling Hip Hop threads really.

no? what are they then?

i guess avoiding traditional genre tags stops people going round saying "you can't talk about that in here, it's not techno" &c. &c.

Partisans = bass music / dubstep / what's left of d'n'b etc
Bobbins = house and techno

This is it.

ILX feels more stable than it has done in a very long while, I suppose it's into comfortable and slightly boring but basically enjoyable middle age now.

basically enjoyable middle age now

this

On the whole I think we spend a lot less time chasing laughs and a lot more time ~being nice~

No, I know exactly why one is called the Bobbins thread. It was Anna who called it that - she was writing for a dance music mag at the time, so was very aware of the controversy that could be generated if you called House Techno or Techno House, but she wanted a thread where she could discuss House and Techno, etc. without getting into those pedantic arguments, so she just used the word "Bobbins" as a cover-all. And it stuck.

the first one was "ELECTROHOUSE bobbins", i fought in that war, don't tell the metal plate in my head it wasn't pedantic and bloody!

Whatevs, chief pedant! I just searched for it, because we were both very drunk when she explained to me why it was called that. This is one of the foibles of ILX, that Anna made reference to it being a sequel to a previous thread, but of course I cannot find the original thread now, because it was called something other than "bobbins" no doubt.

Same as it ever was.

the sprawling morass of endlessly changing usernames doesn't help this of course. I find it nigh impossible to keep up with who's who. I only found out yesterday who the late great was, and i've been chatting on the same threads as him for months and months now.

― Quickly, take hold of my hand, asshole! (dog latin), Thursday, August 9, 2012 5:11 AM (46 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This. The only people I know who they really are are Ned and Jaymc.

no? what are they then?

for the most part they're about the Gucci Mane/Maybach mixtape strain of hip hop. I wouldn't expect to find a lot of discussion about a new Roots album or whatever.