> Cool, it's like starting all over again! I should rechristen myself "Nouveau Iss" and start a great big long thread on ethics!

Since people seem inclined to retrospecting, here is some from me. I wasn't here for the opening of the original forum, but I've been here about two years now.

I think I have changed a lot in that time and I hope it's for the better. A lot, if not all, of those changes are due to the Rinkworks community. Since I don't tend to talk about personal matters, most of you probably don't know where I was coming from two years ago, or the reasons for it. For that matter, most of you probably don't know where I'm coming from now. There are still a lot of things I try to deal with, and continue to reflect on. Same as everybody. However, I *would* like to say what I've gained from this place.

I've regained a lot of my capacity to trust people, something I had lost for a while. I'm a lot more open, social and conversational than I *ever* was. Sometimes it still staggers me that I have such good friends here; I'm even approaching the capacity to believe that this isn't a strange mental abberration on your part, but something I deserve. My self-esteem has gone from somewhere around negative several hundred to, oh, 75% or more of whatever is considered normal. Heh.

Also, I have seen a lot of incredibly stupid movies which I would never have rented otherwise.

Seriously, there are so many things I have gained from this place that I can't think of them all right now. I want to thank you all for that, and Sam in particular for making this site in the first place and continuing to be the driving force behind everything that's great about it.

I wrote on the forum, once, that the best thing about friends is how they see the good in you and not the bad. And that knowledge helps you *become* your better self in reality. Some people may use the Internet to hide their real self; I've always used this place to reveal it, the way I really am inside.

This is hard to describe. I guess it might sound strange. But in everyday life, offline, I'm more my real self now than I was before Rinkworks, and I think my real self is better than whatever I was before.

So. Very old obscure forum reference time: I'm still duct tape and I probably always will be, but at least now I'm not stuck so hard to anything icky.

Brunnen-"also, I'm still really bad at analogy"G