I thought it would be fun to share the many ways that we first found this site and what lead us to want to be here.
I will go first:
As you many know, I had been away from computer art for some years. When I returned last year, I started following the binary newsgroups were 3D artworks are posted. My ISP's news server is not very good for those newsgroups. I saw articles posted as replies to the posting by someone named Tormentor. I did not get to see the picture and only fragments of its description in the form of quoted text. Those fragments got me very curious to see the picture and read the complete description.
Latter I saw some more replies to other artworks by Tormentor, again I didn't see the the inital posts of those threads. The replies and the quoted fragments intriqued me even more. Then I got lucky! I don't remember at the moment if it was from the first initial posting by Tormentor that was did see, or if it was in one of the quoted blocks, but I saw the address for Posetteforever. So, I came here and saw that it was more than a personal gallery website. I looked around a little and registered.
The registeration process did not go smoothly. The account activation email did not arrive. I had read a news posting on the portal page mentioning slowness, so I thought that was the reason. I waited, for about a week I waited for the activation email, but it never came. I have had registeration problems at another rather large site before and so I had not expected much in any help.
One night, I sent an email to Tormentor explaining my situation and provided all the information that I thought was needed to prove my identity in relations to this account. I asked him if he could either have the system send me a new copy of the activiation email, or if he could delete my account so that I could try registering again. I didn't expect aid or a reply for a long while or ever. I went to bed for the night.
Next morning I found Tormentor's reply waiting for me in my mailbox on my workstation's harddrive. In that message he told me that he had activated my account and it was ready for me to log in. This was not what I was expecting at all, I was very happy and quite impressed.
As you can see from my account profile, that was in November of 2004. I sent Tormentor by thanks and began to lurk and leach. For reasons that are not important here, I had been in lurker mode for several years. It was hard to start to again speak in public articles such as this message. With much help from what I found here and for a while at one other site, I found almost found the courage to post a message. But I felt that I would have no credibility until I had something to offer, that being a picture in the gallery.
I had been working on a picture starting at the end of Novemeber beginnig of December. Once I had it ready at the very end of December, I took the foudn the courage to speak up here in a public forum. Actually I believe that first statement I posted was a comment in the gallery. A couple of day latter I uploaded the picture "After the Evening" and started talking here on a regular basis. Now I can't seem to shut up!
Pangor