Hey everyone, it’s me, Boots. I have an announcement to make.
As some of you may know, I’ve spent a pretty long time on these forums. For more than a decade, I’ve had the chance to participate behind the scenes in events planning and community moderation, which has led me to so many new, strange, weird, and incredible experiences that I never could have anticipated. After all that time, I feel like now it’s my turn to give back… maybe in my own weird way. There’s been one question, one mystery frankly, that I’ve never been quite able to solve about this place, despite all the time I’ve hung around this space. This question has troubled me more and more as time goes on, and I don’t think I can put it out of mind any longer. Maybe you’ve noticed it too…
Allow me, for a moment, to set the scene:
Have you ever walked into a space… and felt the vibe change? I don’t really believe in the supernatural or paranormal, but sometimes I get this… feeling, like I’m crossing the threshold from somewhere familiar to somewhere unknown. It could be empty office building, abandoned church, or a some forgotten about place that’s new and inscrutable. I think in some way we’re all drawn to exploring places we’re not supposed to be in, and certain spaces seem to give off this vibe that walks the line between curiosity and gravitas, as if the space itself, or some aspect of it, was alive just on the edge of perception.
Around October of 2022, I delved into the depths of the site’s archive to make a video about a piece of lost media that someone was looking for. In the pursuit of this goal, I asked our admin Rhyselinn for help finding a long-lost page referenced at the end of a fangame by a dead link. The path had fallen into disrepair it seems. Finding a detour to get to the promised address turned out to be no simple task, as the code that sustains the very architecture of this website is deprecated, fragile, and in some cases, an Escher-esque maze of dead-ends and recursive paths; URLs that lead you into secret rooms, long lost archives of users that have come and gone. I could go on at length, and only scratch the surface of what I’ve seen back there.
Nevertheless, with Fangamer’s help we grabbed a few flashlights and spelunked our way through the dark-blue of the site’s back rooms; ducking under the wires, duct-tape, and string that holds this forum together. While our search ultimately led only to more dead ends and virtual cave-ins, I thought I felt something strange while I was back there, and the vibe on this forum has definitely been different after I came back from those darkened corridors. I’m not sure if Rhys felt the same, but it’s time I talked about it here.
I think this word has already had its day in the spotlight, but I really do get the appeal of exploring “liminal spaces”; an old stomping ground after dark, the hidden discussion boards and backend rooms of the early internet, the artefacts of an age past, crystalized into this permeating aura of rara avis. I felt like there was something I had missed in that last trek, something that could explain this nagging question that has stayed with me for all this time. Just what exactly, keeps this website alive? By all accounts, internet message boards are a dying breed, so how has this one hung on for so long?
I could have been imagining it, but I swear there were some rooms in the back of the site where I felt a pull, like the answer to my question was just on the other side of a door. In some places this feeling was stronger, more concentrated, and I’ve been considering whether it would be possible to follow this vibe… and triangulate a point of origin. The heart of the site, if you want a colourful metaphor. Or maybe just a reason to explain why I’ve felt so compelled to embark on another journey to the back in the first place. It is weird, when you think about it, how some people have been posting on this site continuously for years on end. There has to be some kind of explanation for this phenomenon that transcends just simple nostalgia. I believe I am ready to find out the truth.
So I leave you now with an open invitation. By the time you’re reading this note, I will likely be too far deep into the archives for you to reach me, but I’ve left some breadcrumbs to help me re-trace my steps in case I get lost. I can’t recommend that you follow me, but if you too are curious about what lies at the core of starmen.net, I’ll leave a gate open. It won’t be easy to find though. After everything that happened in December of 2022… it’s best that I don’t leave the path open for any bot or AI to gain access. There’s no telling what kind of death star carnage one of those beings could wreak if it breached our safeguards and entered the archives…
The site is old and sensitive, and the infrastructure I’m exploring is definitely no longer up to code. If you read this far though, I’m willing to leave you a clue in the most appropriate form I can think of for this site; a riddle. Good luck, be careful, and remember: If you seek, you shall find.
Y ou’ve found this here, a ti M e and place,
a d I gital relic, an old 3rd place.
oceans of text, too D eep to expl O re,
the s U m of the parts is often more.
time goes on, i’ll L eave A clue,
it could come natural L y to s O me of you.
an oversigh T , or maybe n O t,
like a K ey without a lock.
remember well T hese w O rds of mine,
to get there, it may take S ome time.
an ad J unct cipher, A ny can try,
but heed my C lue: point bl U e to sky.
i have s E t out, this I s my quest,
to find the core, comp L ete m Y test.
trac K down where you M ust begin,
re-tra C e the steps, find pow E r withi N .
