SpacemanSpiff
Rational Spiritualist
TL;DR - If you want to read what we were saying, right here on CFC, as 9-11 was occurring, click through to this thread:
9-11-2001 on CFC, AS IT HAPPENED
You don't know me -- based on the fact that almost every CFCer I used to Follow have not signed on in years -- but I happened to start that thread. I want to here thank user "Alcibiaties of Athenae" (also not seen here for years) for splitting off the original thread from the 1-year anniversary posts that started to extend it, in order to "preserve this one as it was."
===============================================================
EDIT: My thread review found this additional thread, written by the same "Alcibiaties of Athenae" just mentioned, by the real person behind that name who was actually right there when & where it happened.
A-of-A's Day-Of Reports From Ground Zero
(I had linked this in my 15-year thread, but that link is no longer working. I just re-found it.)
===============================================================
My real name is Steve, and I still live and work in the Baltimore area.
I wasn't "there."
I lost no one I knew personally on that day.
I'm just a guy who was around at the time to tell an observer's story.
Back then, I was a 31-year-old father of two very young children, an office worker, and a gamer of the times... and Civ2 was my hands-down favorite (I even installed it on my PC at work to play during downtimes). Today, I'm the father of two additional pre-teen boys with my second wife, we just got our first dog (a 10-week-old, black-lab-looking, rescued female puppy), I work from home full-time since COVID-19, and gaming-wise I only have time to play the likes of Fortnite with my young sons (though I would still love to have time to get back into an extended just-one-more-turn Civ game).
2021 is the year that the oldest preteen wanted to know what actually happened on 9-11, like "for real," and he's been willing to watch some documentaries with me, including the one by the French brothers "as it happened." That one opened his eyes quite literally, and he says he didn't really get how big this was until then. I've collected 9-11 videos from various anniversaries (including from VHS from the 1st anniversary) and I try to pick "the best" to show him.
It is time for the next generation to begin to learn this history well enough to be able to pass it on themselves.
But rewinding 20 years, there was no social media yet, so when I wanted to participate in online opinion-style discussions -- and I did so quite often for a time -- I did so right here in the Off-Topic forum of CFC. I did this often enough to kind of get to know some of the other very active users I often argued with. And this site was not even 1 year old yet.
This Civ Fanatics Off-Topic forum was my Facebook and my Twitter.
While 9-11 was unfolding, I was in my cubicle. My city is/was situated between planes-as-missiles hitting to my north and to my south. I had no radio or TV in the office. Cell phones were not yet "smart" and could not take or watch videos. The internet available from my office, via my desktop PC, very quickly became clogged-up to the point where no videos would play from any news website ... in fact, most of them were 100% unreachable. YouTube also did not yet exist. I largely could not find out WTH was going on from where I was.
In fact, I am just today seeing some of the day-of 9-11-2001 coverage for the first time.
Just before my 9AM meeting, a co-worker called out that a plane had hit the twin towers. The Excite News (AP/UPI/Reuters consolidation) site only had 2 lines of text stating as much. After my 10-15 minute 9AM meeting, I returned to my cube, hit F5 (refresh), and Excite had added just one more sentence ... but the one sentence that changed my world forever: That a 2nd plane had hit the 2nd tower. Universally, that's when absolutely everyone knew this was on purpose, it was an attack, and anything could happen next.
In an effort to reach out into the world to both get more information and to share my own thoughts, I turned to my only "social media" outlet (before that was even a term). No one else had done so yet, so I created the thread linked above. Between myself, other active users of the time, moderators, and Thunderfall himself in upstate NY, we exchanged about what we knew, what we thought, what we were worried would happen next. We didn't feel an in-forum hierarchy in those moments; we were all just humans exchanging.
NOTABLY: On Page 9 of that thread, Thunderfall copy/pasted some text found in another online forum that threatened something bad would happen on 9-11, a few days before it happened. That forum no longer exists, and no one ever talks about it. No one knows who wrote it, perhaps one of the hijackers. But it happened, and the evidence is in Thunderfall's post there.
That thread was my 9-11. That's why I return here every few anniversaries to commemorate it. I feel a responsibility, as the thread-starter, to make you aware of what happened here, which gets lost in the intervening years. Today, I almost simply "bumped" my 17th anniversary post, thinking I had nothing to say -- and I probably did just rehash some previously-stated things here -- but bumping did not seem right for the 20th anniversary (maybe I'll just bump this one in the future).
The first time I could see video of what actually happened was later that afternoon, when the internet started to clear up. I have been something of a collector/viewer of 9-11-related videos ever since.
To close, in order to keep all this together, if you want to see other 9-11 anniversary threads that I know of (with my and others' thoughts & recollections of what happened at those times), here are those links:
The One-Year 9-11 Anniversary Thread
The Fifteen-Year 9-11 Anniversary Thread
The Seventeen-Year 9-11 Anniversary Thread
Always Remember / Never Forget
Spiff![scan :scan: :scan:](/images/smilies/icon26.gif)
9-11-2001 on CFC, AS IT HAPPENED
You don't know me -- based on the fact that almost every CFCer I used to Follow have not signed on in years -- but I happened to start that thread. I want to here thank user "Alcibiaties of Athenae" (also not seen here for years) for splitting off the original thread from the 1-year anniversary posts that started to extend it, in order to "preserve this one as it was."
===============================================================
EDIT: My thread review found this additional thread, written by the same "Alcibiaties of Athenae" just mentioned, by the real person behind that name who was actually right there when & where it happened.
A-of-A's Day-Of Reports From Ground Zero
(I had linked this in my 15-year thread, but that link is no longer working. I just re-found it.)
===============================================================
My real name is Steve, and I still live and work in the Baltimore area.
I wasn't "there."
I lost no one I knew personally on that day.
I'm just a guy who was around at the time to tell an observer's story.
Back then, I was a 31-year-old father of two very young children, an office worker, and a gamer of the times... and Civ2 was my hands-down favorite (I even installed it on my PC at work to play during downtimes). Today, I'm the father of two additional pre-teen boys with my second wife, we just got our first dog (a 10-week-old, black-lab-looking, rescued female puppy), I work from home full-time since COVID-19, and gaming-wise I only have time to play the likes of Fortnite with my young sons (though I would still love to have time to get back into an extended just-one-more-turn Civ game).
2021 is the year that the oldest preteen wanted to know what actually happened on 9-11, like "for real," and he's been willing to watch some documentaries with me, including the one by the French brothers "as it happened." That one opened his eyes quite literally, and he says he didn't really get how big this was until then. I've collected 9-11 videos from various anniversaries (including from VHS from the 1st anniversary) and I try to pick "the best" to show him.
It is time for the next generation to begin to learn this history well enough to be able to pass it on themselves.
But rewinding 20 years, there was no social media yet, so when I wanted to participate in online opinion-style discussions -- and I did so quite often for a time -- I did so right here in the Off-Topic forum of CFC. I did this often enough to kind of get to know some of the other very active users I often argued with. And this site was not even 1 year old yet.
This Civ Fanatics Off-Topic forum was my Facebook and my Twitter.
While 9-11 was unfolding, I was in my cubicle. My city is/was situated between planes-as-missiles hitting to my north and to my south. I had no radio or TV in the office. Cell phones were not yet "smart" and could not take or watch videos. The internet available from my office, via my desktop PC, very quickly became clogged-up to the point where no videos would play from any news website ... in fact, most of them were 100% unreachable. YouTube also did not yet exist. I largely could not find out WTH was going on from where I was.
In fact, I am just today seeing some of the day-of 9-11-2001 coverage for the first time.
Just before my 9AM meeting, a co-worker called out that a plane had hit the twin towers. The Excite News (AP/UPI/Reuters consolidation) site only had 2 lines of text stating as much. After my 10-15 minute 9AM meeting, I returned to my cube, hit F5 (refresh), and Excite had added just one more sentence ... but the one sentence that changed my world forever: That a 2nd plane had hit the 2nd tower. Universally, that's when absolutely everyone knew this was on purpose, it was an attack, and anything could happen next.
In an effort to reach out into the world to both get more information and to share my own thoughts, I turned to my only "social media" outlet (before that was even a term). No one else had done so yet, so I created the thread linked above. Between myself, other active users of the time, moderators, and Thunderfall himself in upstate NY, we exchanged about what we knew, what we thought, what we were worried would happen next. We didn't feel an in-forum hierarchy in those moments; we were all just humans exchanging.
NOTABLY: On Page 9 of that thread, Thunderfall copy/pasted some text found in another online forum that threatened something bad would happen on 9-11, a few days before it happened. That forum no longer exists, and no one ever talks about it. No one knows who wrote it, perhaps one of the hijackers. But it happened, and the evidence is in Thunderfall's post there.
That thread was my 9-11. That's why I return here every few anniversaries to commemorate it. I feel a responsibility, as the thread-starter, to make you aware of what happened here, which gets lost in the intervening years. Today, I almost simply "bumped" my 17th anniversary post, thinking I had nothing to say -- and I probably did just rehash some previously-stated things here -- but bumping did not seem right for the 20th anniversary (maybe I'll just bump this one in the future).
The first time I could see video of what actually happened was later that afternoon, when the internet started to clear up. I have been something of a collector/viewer of 9-11-related videos ever since.
To close, in order to keep all this together, if you want to see other 9-11 anniversary threads that I know of (with my and others' thoughts & recollections of what happened at those times), here are those links:
The One-Year 9-11 Anniversary Thread
The Fifteen-Year 9-11 Anniversary Thread
The Seventeen-Year 9-11 Anniversary Thread
Always Remember / Never Forget
Spiff
![scan :scan: :scan:](/images/smilies/icon26.gif)
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