DAMN YOU CHICK

It was a joke. Trust me, there was a place for people who had been banned, but it was called IRC.

What was it about Rimbo that made so many people upset, dare I ask? He always just seemed kind of cheerfully gormless to me.

Tell me more.

(bacon flip!)

It didn't involve me, so it's not my place to discuss it. Suffice it to say that his usual tone-deaf idiocy when it comes to anything involving sex finally boiled over.

Re. Rimbo: NSFW

Holy hell I'd forgotten about that mess.

He never really got under my skin per se, but I'd had him filed in the "idiot, irredeemable" folder from his behavior in a thread about depression (a fun exercise would be a compare-contrast with that thread and similar there, with the depression-support threads here. For certain values of "fun."), where he went on about how depressed people need to just cowboy up and exercise, and how he knew what he was talking about because he was bipolar, so there. Obviously some folks tore him a new one, and when the level of said tearing passed the level of attention he was clearly after from the start, his backpedaling was essentially "Oh, I was exaggerating about that lol" paraphrased.

Then roughly biannually he'd post something or other about how he'd had a personal revelation that being dishonest on the internet was bad and his ways were changing now. I would not be at all surprised to hear he's still doing that.

Jesus, that bipolar thing was amazing. Later on, he told the forum that he was just making it up, but then PM'd me to say that he really was bipolar but just said he was making it up because people kept bringing it up. He used to PM me fair bit, usually to explain how he was totally sure that if I had met him in real life we'd get along over a beer because really he's super-awesome and not at all a raging fuckwit.

Then my brain had to go and remember the thread that was one of the primary drivers of one of my earlier cracks about Rimbo's expertise and deep knowledge of sexual development. So now "site:quartertothree.com rimbo vagina ear" is in the NSA's file of all my internet activity.

I wrote Rimbo off as a moronic douchebag when he started the PVG thread.

I'm pretty sure he admitted to having a mail-order bride at some point as well.

Not "bride" because they aren't married. She's from Asia, and he admitted that they couldn't speak each other's language when they got together. (That came out in a thread where Rimbo was giving marriage advice. Because who needs to be able to communicate with your partner?) So while she probably wasn't technically mail-order, it sounds pretty damn close.

What a soul-searing thread. And in the immortal words of Kitsune:

Our Man in Japan (for certain values of Japan) may only have intended to insult Rimbo, but it turns out he captured the essence of Qt3 rather pithily.

I think Kitsune would've liked it here.

Tom actually helped set up the social groups and figured out how to to set them to private for the women's group. I thought at the time that was his recognition that there were some serious problems. If it was, he certainly chose a solution in the end that I would not have chosen.

The weirdest part was that he didn't tell anyone he was doing it. I just tried to go to the group one day and it was totally locked off to me and empty. I PM'd jerri blank cause I thought maybe it was just me and that I'd been blocked or something but no, no. All of our posts were gone.

Wow, that's pretty horrid. :( So sorry.

I thought Rimbo was the dude with the Chinese wife who was Chinese and did I mention she was Chinese? But maybe I'm mixing him up with somebody else (someone whose wife was definitely Chinese).

I'm pretty sure he called her his wife until people started asking about it and eventually he admitted they weren't married, but they lived together and that's totally the same thing.

It's a shame rimming is already a word because Rimbo totally deserves to be verbed.

She was definitely Chinese. He would also semi-frequently announce posting hiatuses because he was going to be in China to visit his Chinese wife's Chinese family in China because they were Chinese and wouldn't be posting so much because Chinese internet isn't so good in Chinese China.

He also tried to tell me I was a homophobe* because I kept correcting him when he would say he was married. Because if I didn't accept that him and his girlfriend were married (because they never had a ceremony, don't have a marriage license, etc. etc.) then I would never accept that two men or two women could also be married. Yeah, I didn't get it either.

* Which, if you knew me, is hilarious.

Hey, 10 years ago yesterday I registered my QT3 account.

I wonder of the top 50 members how many participate there now.

They were married in the sense that he could ship her back to China without any legal consequences. Is that not the definition of marriage?

I'm pretty sure gay people calling themselves married without having a ceremony or any of the legal benefits is a homophobe's dream.

Actually, most of them.

I registered a couple of months late when we migrated from phpBB to VB in '02 because I was way busy at the time, I was probably pretty early when we moved from Discus to phpBB at the end of '01 since there weren't a ton of people.

Member #38 here, which is all that matters.

[Edit] If you really want to see who's still active, check the Discus blue boards.

Registered in '05. Stopped posting a year ago.

Holy shit. Creepy.

Frames. WOW.

chrome saved the pages i tried to open. because they're .shtml pages.

Same with Safari.

ITS LIKE TOM DOESN'T CARE.

An interesting question. If you look at the current top 50, I'd say about 39 or so are still active. If you look at the all-time top 50, including those who have had their accounts closed and no longer show up on the Members List (you'd need some sort of, ahem, banning registry to check that), there's about 34 still active. If you were able to go back and check the posting stats of all the members a year ago, just before Tom came back and closed all those accounts, I suspect around 25-30 of that top 50 would still be active.

Who were you on QT3?

Look at his title. Think about it.

It makes me feel better about Tom that he actually had the foresight to set up private boards for women on QT3 (and didn't make their existence public).

I'll just ignore what happened at the end I guess...

Did he do that to give them a safe space in which to talk or to make a place to send them so that they would stop getting their damn girl tears all over his nice living room carpet?

Just wondering.

I'm pretty sure Tom was asked to set the group up rather than it being some great idea he had.

And then inexplicably shut down. I'm freaking amazed it was kept a secret the whole time.