I'm alive! And so is the Nexus!

Neishai · Post by **Neishai** » Sun Jan 01, 2012 6:51 pm

I just wanted to say hello and that I'm very happy to see there are still clutches going on. Frankly, I had no idea the Nexus was still around. I haven't posted since 2007, so it's unlikely that anyone remembers me. But I did have dragons (with eventual plans to host my own clutches one day), but back then, any inspiration I had disappeared with Geocities. I tried to recover some of my pages with Jimdo, which had this account recovery where you could move all your pages over to their servers. But it was not a direct transfer and frankly, though I believe everything is still online, it's a mess. (In hindsight, I should have tried to find a site that supports FTP!) So needless to say, I don't know if I'm prepared to get back into dragoning or not.

So, um, know any good free sites that support FTP? What's going on in the Nexus nowadays? Which worlds still exist? Who's still around? I'd love to hear from you!

Post by **StarFyre** » Sun Jan 01, 2012 7:05 pm

I, quite clearly, still exist, as the Nexus is now hosted on my server and I just reactivated your account =P

o/ Welcome back! I vaguely recall you, though 2007 wasn't one of my better years, I do believe. (I can barely recall what I was doing at that point, so I suppose that's saying something.)

Starburst · Post by **Starburst** » Sun Jan 01, 2012 7:16 pm

I kind of remember you! Hi!

The nexus is... kind of alive? Not a lot to be said about activity. I'm still around, for one, and I've got a new species out and am hoping that I'll finally get the first clutch of 'em finished within the next few months. XD And there's a few other people still alive and kickin', too. Hooray!

Neishai · Post by **Neishai** » Sun Jan 01, 2012 7:21 pm

Vague recollection is also more than I expected, so I must have left some impression.

I saw that, StarFyre! Thank you very much, I wasn't expecting help until later on in the week at the earliest.

The board does not seem overly active but manageable (plus I assume there is activity at the specific dragonry pages).

06-07 were also bad for me. I tried to take on too much with the Nexus, trying to write profiles and stories for dragons I couldn't keep up with. Personal life went from bad to worse until this past year so I just kind of imploded. Since then I've tried to teach myself some temperance with mixed success. So for now I'm not going to make any plans, see what happens.

JKatkina · Post by **JKatkina** » Sun Jan 01, 2012 11:41 pm

Heeey, Neishai! Welcome back! I do recall you. (Particularly your avatar. XD)

Things've picked up since we recently moved forums, anyways. Not a ton of clutches going on, but I imagine with enough interest that could be rectified as people open up new clutches to cater to any desire. I'm sort of sticking on the sidelines myself for now -- I really have to get my personal shit up and running before I can devote hobby time to the Nexus again -- but I suspect for the moment, too few clutches going on is better than too many!

Post by **Dray** » Sun Jan 01, 2012 11:43 pm

Neishai, hi!

I'm happy to see that you're peeking around! There's a frenzy out for pernese and pernese-ish dragons right now, here that's accepting candidates!

I've been hosting the Winter Gather this year, too, since Shard's fallen on some hard times and doesn't have internet connection abilities right now. It's too late to submit art, but if you'd like some winter-themed dragons, you can sign up here!

I think there may be a few other low-key things going on (I have a Nidus Corona Clutches thread from which I'll hold small clutches involving different games or writing requirements from time to time; the first post has the current clutches available! There's also my christmas giveaway that's still open.) I don't have any worlds specifically -- Nidus Corona is the closest thing right now and I haven't had a chance to define what that setting is like! But that is a pretty good spread.

And I know what you mean about things being a mess... I've been trying to consolidate my dragons to one new site from three old ones and it's such a pain in the butt... but perseverance is a magical thing. I've found that only taking on what I know I'm going to page has helped, and setting goals and doing my damnedest to stick to them has helped quite a lot, too. >.> I don't know if I'll ever get every single back-dated dragon paged that I have in my 'to page file'... but not wracking up the guilt for it has helped.

It's just nice to see folks trickling back and saying hello, more than anything, I think! This community's been around through a lot of hard times and good times, so hearing back from old friends and acquaintances is a good thing!

Post by **StarFyre** » Mon Jan 02, 2012 10:20 am

As my husband has pointed out to me more than once - the Nexus is a rather large, if a bit dysfunctional, family. Hence why so many of us keep coming back even though we don't have much time to do our old activities any more. Thus the reason he had absolutely no issue with me putting his webspace to use (not that it was really being used for anything).

Neishai - I'm on practically every day, and my email is open all the time. Especially these days, when people from the college are emailing me about things I need to do/papers I need to turn in/etc.

Starburst - I'm writing for your clutch, I swear! Just ask Dray, she found the story-bits I'd written amusing! =P I'd only meant to write a small amount, but my muse has taken the idea and run for the hills with it, cackling all the way. I'm just pleased its finally found something to interest it again.

Post by **Dray** » Mon Jan 02, 2012 11:17 am

There are times when I fall into the facebook trap of wanting to 'like' a post even if I don't leave a comment on it. The Nexus frequently triggers that reaction... but since it's not available, that might be why my post count is over the moon. X3

Post by **StarFyre** » Mon Jan 02, 2012 12:14 pm

Aww, but you make such an adorable semi-skeletal, glowy-eyed dead dragon! =P

delyar · Post by **delyar** » Mon Jan 02, 2012 3:23 pm

Appropriate because Dray drew him.

Hi Neishai! I don't think we got a chance to interact much, but I do recognize your name (I phased out around 2005). Welcome back!

Post by **Dray** » Mon Jan 02, 2012 3:37 pm

You have no idea how much "D:<"-face that image brings back. I think that was one of the most challenging ones EVAR. And it looks pretty bad now that I've gone through school... the wings make me cringe!

Neishai · Post by **Neishai** » Mon Jan 02, 2012 3:44 pm

JKat! I always loved Avengaea, got one of my favorite dragons from there. He had many heads and bonded with a hyena-man. x3 That avatar was a placeholder for the time when I had some of my own art to put up there. I'm notoriously bad at finishing any art. xD

I don't know what all I will do. I wasn't planning to do any clutch stuff anytime soon. For one thing I don't have an organized website to put everything on. But it might be nice to put out some random bonders to assign somewhere in the future, if for no other reason than to get me back into the game.

Incidentally I prodded my sister (Omniwite, if anyone remembers her) about possibly getting back into the Nexus. She's actually been keeping up her characters for all this time, though she hasn't submitted any bonders since we both disappeared. We're both in web design and need a hobby to keep our skills honed. So we'll see how things go.

It's nice to know that even the regulars are having a bit of trouble organizing their hordes. Is there any way I can find out which dragons have been rehomed? I definitely had plans for all of them (at least collectively) and I wouldn't want to page any by mistake.

My very disorganized jimdo pages, as mentioned, are here:

http://neishai.jimdo.com/
http://taikea.jimdo.com/
(and one or two others I'm trying to find)

No pictures. That makes me very sad. But I have (most? of) them saved to disk somewhere (along with intact html files, lol).

Delyar! (Almost missed your reply) I remember your username and the fact that you're one of the few male Nexus-regulars I can think of. :) It was so hard to keep track of everyone on the board, other than by art style. xD

delyar · Post by **delyar** » Tue Jan 03, 2012 12:25 am

Dray: For all the grarr the image may bring to you, know he's still one of my favourites.

Neishai: Totally agreed! We were really numerous there for a while. Now it's a bit easier to remember who's who because there's only about 5-10 of us lurking.

JKatkina · Post by **JKatkina** » Tue Jan 03, 2012 2:42 pm

Brirer! Wasn't that that guy's name? He was one of my favorites -- I guess hence getting one of the two four-headers from that clutch.

For that matter, in regards to links, anything you got of mine (any variation on http://artdragon.mine.nu/~kat/ , usually /~kat/aven/) has changed to http://avengaea.com/characters/ being the root directory. The character-name suffix, such as talitha.html just gets smacked right onto the /characters/ and it should work. If it doesn't, ask me, I'll see if I've got it somewhere! Actually for that matter, the records for the Dark's Night clutch are here: http://avengaea.com/characters/talhedclutch.html . Bereran was never rehomed -- I rarely rehome dragons, honestly, so he's still yours if you want him.

Aw man, it is so cool to have you back.

Say hi to Omniwite! It'd be rad to have another couple of regulars, or even semi-regulars around.

Post by **Dray** » Tue Jan 03, 2012 2:42 pm

Omniwite had a few dragons from me, too! I'm pretty sure I haven't actually re-homed anyone... or if I did, then their new owners also disappeared as well. XD

I always quite enjoyed your guys' pages, they were so very detailed! Seeing web designers' pages is always handy, too. >.> I can draw, but it takes me a really long time to figure out how to put a half-decent looking page together!

Neishai · Post by **Neishai** » Tue Jan 03, 2012 9:43 pm

I've been spending today researching webhosting. Ideally I'd want something free, but I'm also looking into paid for domains. This might take a while, haha.

JKat~ That's right, it was Brirer. I found Bereran's page on Jimdo but no images. I have no idea why. Once I get things re-paged I'll fix links to the clutch.

Dray~ Omniwite has one of the most extensive databases for characters I have ever seen (and she keeps them updated as far as I know). I'll have to see if I can get a link to her pages. Currently we both know some basics about web design, enough to make a page look good but it's nothing fancy. My problem is that I've always coded by hand (using notepad), that was why it always took me so long to page a dragon. xD

I want all my dragons. I want to page all my dragons, give them profiles and write stories about them. But I'm not going to complain if any were rehomed, it's not fair to expect anyone to wait so long for me to get my act together. :)
(So yes, I would very much love to keep Bereran. He and Brirer were so much fun for me to write about! )

Post by **Dray** » Tue Jan 03, 2012 9:56 pm

Oof, I know what you mean about wanting to write and stuff for them! We had a bit of time where we RP'd once a week with some of our old Nexus characters; that might be a thing that we could work on starting up again! As for writing, I guess just setting aside a bit of time each week can be nice for that. XD

Neishai · Post by **Neishai** » Tue Jan 03, 2012 10:42 pm

I don't think I ever roleplayed for the Nexus before, though I think it would be a lot of fun. I've also had the pleasure in other places. I think the only problem I've had with that is a general lack of plot direction, though perhaps it was because the people weren't writers, or perhaps the set-up (for lack of a better word) just didn't demand one. Did that ever seem to be the problem here?

Post by **Dray** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 12:04 am

Usually we'd have a campaign setting wherein the person in charge provided at least a seed from which to work on, but since one person was in charge and the rest generally followed that person's cues, much like a D&D game (sometimes, at least!) the events tended to be pretty harrowing on the event-runners, so they didn't last too long!

Post by **StarFyre** » Wed Jan 04, 2012 1:10 am

We played for several hours, though for us non-event-runners there was a lot of downtime and OOC chat unless it was a gather-esque event. I really had fun during that time... if we start heading back towards that direction, maybe I'll finally finish the rp assistant that I was building!

Neishai · Post by **Neishai** » Thu Jan 05, 2012 7:24 pm

Here's the other link:

http://dusanaisland.jimdo.com/

This was my Alskyr-based site. I had the beginnings of cove, caer, castle, and a wolfden here. Taikea had the Tarati (shifters) and the Voivode (the dark group, hosted by the vampire) sponsor/bonding group. Neishai I believe had random/general nidus and Pernese-type candidates.

So sometime late 05 - early 06, my laptop's HD died. I was pretty active on the boards at that time. I was in the practice of backing up my data whenever I could. However, two disks from that time are unreadable/destroyed. I've gone through all my back-up disks and jump drives. The best I've got from them are the full html up to sometime in 2004. Obviously there's a large gap. I also have the jimdo pages, which though disorganized are the most up-to-date written content wise, but have no images.

My only other options are perhaps a really old laptop (which I will try to find in storage and access this weekend), and my desktop, which probably doesn't have it (it needs to be set up). Fortunately some of the images from giveways hosted on this forum are still hosted being hosted on the original sites, but others were on geocities... (To those of you whom did this, every time I see that dragon I think, "I remember you!" Every single one. )

What a nightmare. I'm reading my old posts stating that dragons were paged, but now, where are they? It's so disheartening. Bittersweet. But I'll keep trying, and let you know if they really are lost, as far as I know.

I set up an account with Zymic last night. So after all that, I plan to start re-paging everyone and set up a database with all their links for everyone's reference. I haven't decided how I will organize everything in the end, but I'm thinking for now I'll do a straight FTP transfer and work on restructuring at a later time.

So, yup, that's my update.

Post by **Dray** » Thu Jan 05, 2012 8:17 pm

Guuuugh, that sounds awful. I've had a small portion of my dragons implode due to mis-communication with the server host (I told them I couldn't access the FTP, they thought I couldn't access the pages and didn't need them, and deleted everything. D:) but that's a heck of a lot of dragons to go down.

Try googlecache and reocities if you can... I've found that's been incredibly helpful in figuring out who was lost from specific sites! If not, let me know if you are missing any from me. No guarantees; I don't have many images left from my adoption sites of that era... if nothing else, disappeared images can be redrawn, or you could say that the dragons had died and have some UBER PLOT DRAMA. >:D

Post by **StarFyre** » Thu Jan 05, 2012 8:32 pm

Honest to dog, I have considered taking all the dragons that are not recent and are not currently uploaded and shooting them in the head to put them out of their misery. Then I realize that I have a few examples of 'dead' species and that would be unkind of me.

Then I wonder what universe I'm from, if I'm still believing that I'll ever get around to uploading everything I own.

BTW, drawing 11 people in one image is hard (7 down, 4 to go). Also. Metallic Dragons have some of the WEIRDEST wing designs in the UNIVERSE. Wtf D&D. WTF.

Neishai · Post by **Neishai** » Fri Jan 06, 2012 12:45 pm

Checked the desktop, nothing there (as I figured). That leaves the laptop, which we'll be going for tomorrow. And as Omniwite pointed out, at the time I was working on things in my freetime at school so they might be on floppy... or zip (ZIP, WUT!? lol! )...disk. None of my current computers even HAVE those kind of drives/drivers, though I do have external drives. I'll have to figure out how to access them. xD

Dray, Oh lovely. I have heard horror stories about people whose entire sites were deleted for "no apparent reason," whether it was or not. But whole sections? Not cool.

StarFyre, I've tried drawing group pictures, but the people always end up looking funny. Kind of like they do in real family portraits. xD

The last couple of days Omniwite (such an awesome sister) and I have been going through, trying to find everyone. Every whorling Mirror ever gave out is still up on Photobucket, near as I can tell. I am so happy about that. Random giveway dragons may not have fared so well. A lot of those dragons came with stats and/or profiles, so remaking their images in homage to the character seems feasible. I've killed off characters before but I would rather do that if necessary only. It's something I hadn't considered though so I appreciate that as a means to ease my mind a little. Black-White-Red dragons amazingly are still online. I remember them! I remember putting them up! I don't know if I have the pages but I'm sure they are online somewhere (or I will give them new pages). Deviant Uprising (biosynth?) dragons, many of those I do not have anymore I found preview images for... that's definitely better than nothing.

I've been looking for one dragon in particular... she was a birthday gift that I named Spatula. xD There was also a Fall-colored daemon from Avengaea (also a birthday gift) that I don't know if I ever named. I wish I knew what I'd actually done with them (if anything), I had plans!

So we're making progress.

Oh yes and I was thinking of future projects! I want to do a glossary in the future for general dragoning terms. Some of them confuse me, so maybe it would be a useful tool. I was also looking through old stories and the old characters started talking to me again. It definitely made me feel like things will turn out all right in the end.

Post by **Dray** » Fri Jan 06, 2012 12:56 pm

That's kind of a good feeling -- the sense of everything turning out okay! I poked Kat about the Avengaean Daemon, but she isn't on the Nexus often when we're not on holiday. Hopefully she still has it somewhere.

Myrror's pretty impeccable about keeping her things on hand. The search function in this forum is far and away better from what it used to be in the deviant-uprising version, so that can be a handy tool, now, too.

Neishai · Post by **Neishai** » Fri Jan 06, 2012 1:11 pm

XD Omniwite found Spatula! Yay!

Yes, this search feature is really helping me out. I remember keeping a folder with just giveway dragons, but if that was lost than what's left on this forum may be one of my few sources to get all of them back. Don't worry too much about him (or anyone else). If I can't find them, then I can't. It's disappointing and it makes me feel guilty, but I'm just going to keep moving forward. :)

Post by **StarFyre** » Fri Jan 06, 2012 3:55 pm

It took about... maybe 1-2 hours to build the search table up from scratch. Oh phpbb3, I love you, for thou art the shining light in the darkness.

Butsrsly, everything went so much easier as soon as it all got moved over to phpbb3 from 2. SO. MUCH. EASIER.

Neishai, you and Omni will be happy to hear that you've actually be included in the image, since you both recently came back =P I hope to have the sketch to show off in the next day or so.

delyar · Post by **delyar** » Fri Jan 06, 2012 4:22 pm

Reocities has been a godsend. I have to admit I had to jettison some dragons just because I couldn't find their information/pictures again, including my only pureblood Geperna.

It's heartbreaking but so much better than obsessively scouring the internet for the hint of that dragon.

Neishai · Post by **Neishai** » Sat Jan 07, 2012 1:05 pm

I'm looking forward to learning about PHP in the future. It'd be nice to be able to set up searches for my own website someday. :3

We'll be included in the image? What is it about? I'm totally clueless on this, but equally curious. xD

We've discovered Reocities (and Oocities?) were very helpful but it seems that when they recover web pages they don't always take a whole directory. So it can be deceptive. However I found some I sent to the Wyld Whirl that I thought were lost. I am so happy I found them. ><

But like you delyar, once I hit a certain point, I might just have to let some go. :(

Post by **Dray** » Sat Jan 07, 2012 1:31 pm

Only pure blood geperna, eh? *peers at the old blood frenzy* Well, time to make some matches!

reocities also only seems to snag certain people's pages, leaving others. Very sad!

The Nexus

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