Introducing: Teh One

[Neo]

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The Matrix has you...
Follow the white rabbit.


Knock Knock, Neo.

Thomas Anderson? Yeah, that's me - at least that's the pseudonym of my alias online.

I'm the creator of this site, and its predecessors before it. This is now the 6th version of the site, and I've become exceedingly efficient at it.

My aliases are many: Neo, [[Neo]], neotsn, or symbolized as [[\]]. I have never used my real name on the public internet, for privacy concerns - however, my entire online persona is accurate to my real life persona and I take as much responsibility in what I post as Neo as if it were my real name.

I started this site with UraniumPoppySeed, IBJay, Bethnangel, and SonsOfWisdom back in college at ETBU, where it was run from my dorm-room computer under the name "etbustudents.cc".

I wanted a way to connect people with others who shared their interests but didn't necessarily run in the same social circles, as sort of a way to break the ice globally and give people a clean place to hang out in what was then a brave new world called The Internet.

Taking the name from a local hangout in my high school town, I expanded the site to include more than just students of ETBU when my time there was over, and you have before you the result: The Spot.

I hope you enjoy your stay, and find it worth mentioning to your friends so they can come hang out with us too.

[DMoney]

So...what keeps you here? What keeps you rebuilding tsn and reviving it? And what are your goals with tsn this time around?

[Neo]

To be honest, from about 2006 until last December, nothing kept me here. I stopped visiting and considered bringing everything offline. I redirected the splash page to a blog for the last year or so, following the path of www.splatt.org.

The need to rebuild was just the poor state the site had reached, and how embarrassed I was to explain my alias “neotsn” is “Neo and tsn for the-spot.net”, and risk people going to the site and seeing crap - crap that was ok for its time, but not ok for 8 years later.

So I decided to rebuild it last March, which I documented in the tsnBlog for this release, to just bring it up to date. Then in updating, I broke everything and had to rebuild it. Then I got a job doing web design, so I started using some of the stuff I’ve learned there as I rebuilt the site to gain a better understanding (like the “easier to learn when it’s applicable in the real world” advice I put in your welcome thread).

My goal this time - it’s really just to have a place where people can actually have discussions, and I don’t have to scroll through dozens of photos of people’s kids - kids I’ve never met, and parents I’ve never met. The crap that gets posted to social media sites these days is nothing more than pleas for imaginary metrics of likes and comments, shares and faves. And then there’s the clickbait articles and misinformation that gets spread around virally. At least here, there can be actual discussion without it getting pushed to the bottom of a news feed and lost, with the last word winning. It will always show up for someone’s “Since you’ve been gone” section.

And then I want to bring in everyone’s new friends that they’ve made in the last 10 years - just like we did 10 years ago when it was mostly Nacogdoches High School and some off-shoot family friends here. Everyone has grown and branched out, and it’d be nice to bring in the people everyone actually enjoys talking with to share in their discussions.

[Vanyl]

Honestly, I see this as an opportunity to re-connect with people from over 10 years ago. This place was a big part of my life for a while and now I barely know anyone here and have so few from that time that I still talk to. Neo and I have already reconnected over the last 24 hours more so than FB ever facilitated.

[Neo]

Now I am re-reintroducing myself...

I'm still the creator of the site, and now the creator of [[Oracle]] and an AI-counterpart I'm building, as well as a technical component called [[Seryph]].

Neo and I have already reconnected over the last 24 hours more so than FB ever facilitated.

This is still the case over the last couple months via Discord and Twitch, where Vanyl and I were sharing out stories from the early days of tsn live on her twitch stream. It brought back many memories of various feelings for both of us, and while pulling up relevant threads in real-time I got to reading somethings and realized how much I enjoyed posting here back when people wanted to talk with each other, instead of posting to facebook where everyone is speaking and no one is listening.

So...what keeps you here? What keeps you rebuilding tsn and reviving it? And what are your goals with tsn this time around?

I gotta say that this time is much like the last time. During a job search, I obviously can't give out a gmail account that has my alias on it, and instead have to give out an email that has my real name. But in doing so, it also couples my name to this domain, so I can't have the site looking (once again) 8 years out of date.

Plus I've been working a lot on [[Oracle]] as a virtual assistant over the last 2 years, and learning more about Machine Learning to take it further. So I have in mind an experiment I want to run with the forums to connect it to [[Oracle]] for notifications and other stuff. Then I want to use that project to learn some new things like RabbitMQ, new PHP frameworks, and more NodeJS stuff.

This site was the reason I went to college for Database Administration (because I already learned so much doing it here) and have focused my jobs on Web Development (because, again, I already learned so much doing it here). Now I have to find more things to use to spur my education that are "applicable" because just learning stuff doesn't stick unless I have something I can build with it.

So I'm back around more now in 2022, while I work on the tsn9 extension + style combo effort, and the [[Oracle]] integration.