TL;DR I was once a member of Hip Forums, long, long ago, and I'm glad to be back. Info about interests and cultural identifiers in the last two paragraphs. I first joined Hip Forums over twenty years ago. I've long since lost the email addresses that I would have used back then, and I'm not sure I remember my username, either, only the theme. And doing a cursory search of usernames I would have used didn't turn anything up -- which makes sense as it's been such a long time since I've been on the site. So I rejoined with completely new information. I was a teenager back in my first go-round with this site. I'm pretty sure I remember the site not being restricted to 18 and up back then because I certainly wasn't, I remember talking with other people around my age, and I'm pretty sure our ages weren't a secret and that we talked about things like public school openly. However, it's possible I'm misremembering -- in some ways, the internet was a lot more wild of a place, and I thought nothing of lying about my age back then to join websites and even to not have restrictions on my email address. Anyway, my extremely belated apologies if I lied when I first joined the website. This website got me through quite a lot of my adolescence. I was in and adjacent to various subcultures throughout most of my life, but I also lived in a small town and was an introvert, so I didn't interact with many people in person. So Hip Forums provided a place for me to talk with other people who had similar interests, beliefs, and personalities to me. Somewhere in my late teens, I think, my life got even more chaotic than it already was, and I drifted away. There were two points in my life when I made half-hearted attempts to come back. The first was a few years after I left, when I tried to start posting again. But in that time, a lot had changed, not just with the site, but with me, as well. My life was still chaotic at that point, and I had dial up internet intermittently when most people in my country had switched in the last few years to fiber and cable. It's not an exaggeration to say many webpages took twenty minutes to load, when I even had internet at all. It wasn't sustainable for me to come back then. Then, quite a bit later, when I first started dating my current partner, I grew nostalgic telling them about these forums, and rejoined with a name similar to or the same as the one I had had initially. Unfortunately, in the many intervening years since I had initially become a member, someone else had apparently joined the forums with that name and was a troll. Some people thought I was that person, and gave me a hard time, and because I had no idea what they were talking about, it soured me quite a bit. I was also in the beginning of a new relationship and the early stages of a life-transforming chronic illness (though I didn't realize the latter at the time), so again, I didn't stay. But I've always held a found nostalgia for this place. And as I've gotten older, I've a) gotten progressively less able to socialize reliably in offline spaces due to chronic illness and disability factors and b) realized that I can't stand most forms of social media, and that I vastly prefer the forum format for interacting online (even though forums are getting scarce). This website has always been one of those places on the internet that I was glad still existed, if that makes sense, even though I wasn't here. I would periodically type in the url and see that it was still there, and I would be relieved. There were/are a few other websites like that for me, not all of which were forums, and only a couple of them are still standing. I'd like to support Hip Forums specifically, and the forum format as an alternative or supplementary format to social media in general, and also...I just missed this place. So, I'm back. It's my intention to stay this time, and while things will be in flux for me for a few months, my life is overall far less chaotic than it was during either of the last two times I attempted to come back, so I think it will stick this time. Some of my interests are: writing, reading, music, tabletop rpgs, religions and mythology, tarot and oracle card decks, natural history, social justice (with a particular focus on disability rights and LGBTQ+ rights), environmental justice, knitting, fountain pens, and animals. I like to garden, but can't seem to grow anything outside of the 7a zone, and I like camping and hiking, but they mostly aren't feasible for me anymore. I'm Pagan, a UU, transgender, omnisexual and demiromantic (but cheerfully monogamous), disabled, and with very few exceptions such a radical leftist that I make other radical leftists look downright conservative. That's all I've got for now. It's good to be back.
Good morning comrade and welcome back. I too am disabled, I too am so far 'left' politically, that a few right wingers on here (a) don't like me, (b) won't respond to any of my political posts, so you're amongst friends and comrades.
