http://targ.tomatoland.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=16

WHERE/WHEN TOMATOLAND


Everything begins from my America - trip at the beginning of the June 2009.
We – Chef and I – had been planning this trip ever since my mother had promised me a plane ticket to any country I want as a high school graduation gift. Our plan was to hang around in New York and DC for two weeks and check out a lot of museums and restaurants and hopefully meet some folks from GW. The trip was a success (america rules) and we had a 5-man GW-NY meet with Psyburn, Soap and Steel.

Additionally, it turned out that we could arrange a meeting with a Hundley at the end of my trip, to check out a REAL (!) baseball game! As you probably know, Hundley wasn’t around in GW actively at that point as he was busy with his projects and private life. Little was known who he was or what he was really like but the common unspoken consensus was that He Rules so naturally, we wanted to meet the mysterious detective in person. So we agreed to meet up. It turned out that he’s a cool guy (big, burly woodcutter, huge hearty laughs) and we three had a memorable night! We exchanged lot of thoughts that night and I think it was my first real contact with Hundley: I had discussed with him couple of times before this trip but this was the first time I got some sort of good feel of what kind of person he is and what is his view on things. I guess I felt AFFINITY to him on some level.

--

Anyways, I returned back to Finland soon after. Not long after my return a change in adminship happened in Gaming World and the forum was rearranged, which was a welcome change. However, things were going steadily to worse at those times: a lot of members had stopped posting somewhere in mid-July or August and for the first time I felt that GW was “dying” for real. Perhaps people would gradually stop posting and abandon it for whatever lives or other internet forums they had. I became more and more anxious about this each passing week and I started playing with the thought of a completely new forum.

Around these times Hundley had rejoined the forums with a newfound interest to the community, apparently due to our visit. We started exchanging news and thoughts through forum private messages, doing this for some time. It soon became apparent that we shared mutual thoughts regarding to the current state of GW and what it lacked in general.

This is where I took the initiative and asked his opinion about making a new forum with a completely different focus and concept – roughly, all the GW’s good sides. He liked the idea so we started outlining and sketching the concept, refining it through several forum private messages until we felt it could work out.

Then we proceeded to the execution in practise to which Dada was a key figure: Somewhere at the end of September I asked Dada if he could lend some of his webspace for this cause and I explained the same details I had went through with Hundley a month before. Not only did the fine Dutch baronnaise give us the required webspace but he also installed the wiki software we needed for the front site!

And so… here we are!!!!


WHY TOMATOLAND?! THE PREMISE

The idea was to start over with an inherently creative community by focusing solely on the social and the creative side our [GW] community and forget the focus on any specific subject altogether.

Because let’s face it, the reason we like to be in GW is because of the community and the neat posts and not for some clique hobby. Things like 9/11, American Magic, GW Troubadours, Breakfast Club and ugh even Crap Shack was why we came back and checked in every day. To have some good and/or fun times! There’s lot of neat, interesting people in GW and the community is good – or do you think a complete strangers would have done the steel cancer fund raise?

To this purpose, we settled on Hundley’s targ – era creation “tomatoland” – not only it had been a source of inspiration in the past, tomatoland is a GW phenomena. I proposed this myself.

All this would have been impossible to pull out in GW as every time something major was proposed it gained but cynism and resistance, mostly from the vocal minority of the forum. Notice that I said mostly: I don’t think anybody really believed any change in focus would work, considering that everybody identifies the community to the very name of GAMING WORLD. Whatever we would have done wouldn’t have mattered much as we would still be called Gaming World. With this it’s hard to promote or punctuate e.g. forum member’s custom created music - another surprisingly vibrant part of GW - when the members that the forum draws in are mostly people who are drawn in for games and who are not interested into music for the most part at all! Any genuinely good ideas or promise GW could have developed was restricted and wasted of this fact alone.

There’s probably more issues but enough of accusation, it is never prolific. The Wiki and forum combination should be a neat outlet for doing creative stuff collaboratively. Hopefully this forum will be a good way for everyone to stay in touch - which seems to get harder the older we all get.
Perhaps nothing will come out of this but both Hundley and I feel that it’s worth the shot.


WHOA!!! TOMATOLAND

We wanted this project to be something like a sandbox where we can be creative and have fun so we decided that the whole tomatoland, like most sites, is divided into two parts: to forum and to the frontsite – our frontsite being the Wiki.

Yes, you heard us. Our frontsite will be a Wiki. I’m not joking. We are not going to have any neat, shiny frontpage (web2.0).
There’s not much on it as of yet but what we had planned is that we’ll give an access to our forum members and then allow them do whatever they want, be it making joke articles, serious articles, blogpost jokepost musicpost spampost targpost post-post basically ANYTHING. Everything in chaotic merry harmony, both the serious and joke articles. It will be interesting how far we can stretch the Wiki’s both definition and limits in practise! We’ll see how we will do this in practise.

socialistic pride, nietschze pride. viva la vida!! marx!! anarchy!!!


--

And then there is the forum. If you have wondered the little amount of boards so far: we want to keep it at the beginning as redundant and as expandable as possible. To this purpose we have stripped down the number of forums to the minimum of three: General, Media/Arts/Hobby and Main. Everything else, both serious and humorous boards, revolve around this core. We may want to separate the Media/Arts/Hobby forum into single, focused boards but that is the issue only if the board grows and we see the need for it (which is irrelevant for now).

I don’t think I need to explain these that much so shortly & in practise:
Most of the topics go the General. tell us about the newest death of a celebrity!!!!
Music; Movies; Graphic Arts; Literature; Comics; Video Games; Sports; Etc; etc goes to the Hobbies, Media and Arts. if you are a squash palyer to the heart and bone by all means lure us to the arts(dangers) of sports(broken bones)!! we LOVE noisecore, we LOVE vidcons!!!!!!!!
If there something specific you want to talk and ask about and/or it doesn’t really fit to the other two forums, you post it to Main.

That’s it! I think we can agree that these should serve as a good minimum – However, we want to underline that boards other than these can be as significant. So if you have any good ideas for new boards or ideas in general that require admin/mod work, then by god’s all means give us a word!! and It Will Happen.

If you have problems feedback suggestions envelopebomb etc etc send it through forum pm or mail.