By Ken Gardener

There’s a fancy new front page, all coded and gussied up to draw new posters to the forum. To that end, my first thought about contributing was to write something to tell the latest crop of random visitors to the site why they should stick around. Well, that led me to think about my own reasons for sticking around for such a long time.

I am a bit taken aback at how long I have been posting in the NPP community. I don’t know exactly when I joined the forum back at Scotsmanality, the website where the majority of the posters here first met up. I know it’s been at least six years – six years of conversations and arguments and serious discussions and “dramabombs” with roughly the same group of people. It really blows my mind that it’s been that long. I started posting before I could legally drive a car, before my first summer job, before I could legally see R-rated movies. In the interim between then and now I have graduated from high school, left my parents’ house, graduated from college, had real serious relationships, and, I’d like to think, grown up quite a bit. I have changed significantly over the last six years, and I’m not entirely certain what prompts me to keep this place as a constant amidst all that change.

I started out on the board with a different screen name, in the days when we still had an influx of new posters pretty regularly, and I received the usual baptism by fire that veterans of the site would give recent additions. Whether it was a test or just an online version of hazing, new posters had to deal with a fair amount of abuse before they were embraced by the regulars. Most of my activity on the board consisted of getting flamed out of the weekly RAW threads and being too nervous to make a post, let alone start a thread. In the interim, I’ve run the gamut on this forum.

Over time, that hard initiation softened into general indifference and eventually, into whatever constitutes acceptance within this collection of maladjusted miscreants. In the midst of the first game of the Scotsmanaliy Survivor, I had what could be considered my coming out party. People liked and enjoyed me for my musical comedy stylings and humorous, if haphazard, photoshops. I’ve also been the hated board pariah, not unlike juices_world or Hole now or Guapo and king_hansen before me. I was despised and reviled and couldn’t post two innocuous sentences without Tron or shanon or Osiris leading a chorus of responses about how I was terrible and should quit the board, kill myself, or both. I’ve been a gimmick poster, defined by my faux-obsession with a long since irrelevant “Internet Wrestling Celebrity” and the corresponding avatars and catchphrases that went with the gimmick. I’ve been respected and appreciated for my organization and fairness in moderating the first Bible (i.e. wiki) for this community and decried and lambasted for my inaction and effort with respect to the second. Without any care for the truth or falsity of such labels, I’ve been characterized as whiny, elitist, smug, naïve, waffling, spoiled, or worse. I’ve been “Texas Jew ranked” and criticized both for being the typical East Coast impressionable college liberal and the evil Southern conservative apologist. I’ve been The Simpsons Guy and the eighties-hating guy and “that fucking Jew” and any number of other names I’ve answered to here over the years. So through all that, why am I still here? What keeps me logging into NPP time and time again? More importantly, why should anyone else want to come here?

Well, with a few exceptions of unfailingly kind people like WT, the people here are by and large capable of being gigantic assholes, and they use this skill on a regular basis. I know that feature doesn’t sound like a big draw right off the bat, but hear me out. I can count on one hand the number of posters who haven’t been absolute pricks to me at some point. The silver lining of that fact is that the denizens of NPP are equal opportunity pricks, and you learn to take it all in stride, on and off the board. People here will make fun of your height, weight, age, religion, nation of origin, political leanings, hairline, wife, children, habits, sports affiliations, outfit, job, and any other conceivable thing about you. I don’t mean just once; I mean every time somebody takes the slightest bit of offense or thinks it’s worth a laugh. Once you go through that on a regular basis, criticisms about the quality of your TPS reports or when you forget to take out the garbage seem trifling by comparison. You learn to develop a thick skin, you learn to trust your own opinion despite the static sea of disapproval, and when something breaks through that wall of distaste to reach some modicum of acclaim, you realize it’s genuine and not the hollow platitudes of friends being nice because they have to.

What’s more, we’re an entertaining bunch of mutants by and large. Pricks though they may be, the posters here tend to be fairly interesting characters. The aforementioned WT should write a book about his wacky misadventures like his girlfriend cheating on him guys, girls, and a snake and medical procedures performed via a Northern Lights suplex. Stixx has been an open book about his life from the beginning, including his forays into “unprofessional wrestling” his time as a scooter-riding pizza delivery boy in Hawaii, and how he’d instruct his daughter’s dates on how to get her into bed. We’ve had posters talk about their ill-advised run-ins with celebrities, about their life and times working for the WWE, about stealing food as fast food restaurant managers and sleeping with their employees. We’ve even had one member talk about getting arrested for drunk driving and then invite the board to seek out his police record. Yes, we’re a rather motley group as a whole, but also a compelling one in our own, twisted way.

Even further, as much as people bitch about the forum and pretend not to give a damn about what happens there, people care about NPP, or at least about what they get out of it, and it shows in the effort that people put back into the site. There are competitions and contests from everything to pick ‘em to mafia to video game to the casino and the arcade. There are lists of the board’s top movies, wrestlers, Simpsons episodes, Christmas specials, with more getting started up on a regular basis. There are reviews of movies, music, television, and almost anything under the sun. There are videos, songs, photoshops, comics, and all other manner of creative media from and about NPP. There’s even the official No Pants Provided pastime of insults and cutting remarks to fill in the gaps. All of this is done with the board’s usual cynicism, vitriol, and dark humor. Yes some of these things only end up half-finished or even half-started, and some of them even descend into squabbling and whines, but when they’re taken to fruition, they’re worth your time and even when they’re not, there’s plenty of fun to be had in the breakdown and ensuing chaos.

Part of that same interest manifests itself in the form of the occasional “dramabomb” eruption between two or more posters over something as mundane as the number of lines in a signature. When it happens, you have the option of sitting back with your popcorn and watching the trainwreck, or jumping in yourself to throw fuel onto the fire. Either way, the outcome is usually pretty amusing. People like to throw temper tantrums or mock others for overreacting for “ruining their internet experience.” Sometimes, people like to start trouble just for the hell of it. Sometimes, that’s half the fun. It’s also part of what makes NPP worthwhile – the fact that within a few limitations, anything goes.

That’s one of the biggest attractions about this place. The NPP community’s political leanings fall all over the spectrum, but on average we’re all pretty libertarian about what’s permissible on the board. Yes, the group has mellowed to a certain extent since we started. Some of the more ridiculous or outlandish business is quarantined in its own forum and maybe, just maybe, we’re a little more civil to each other than we used to be. Still, the general sentiment is that if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. The people here pull no punches and those who do get hit twice as hard. Sure, you can lurk or even stay above the fray, but when you do decide to say something that crosses the line, you won’t be censored, only challenged or ridiculed.

The truth is that for better or for worse, over the last six years the cast of characters from NPP have been there, not for me necessarily, but there and doing what they do best day in and day out. They’re there whether I’m excited to share a picture that I think is funny but most of the board will hate, whether I have some question or opinion I know is liable to start some discussion, or whether I’m just bored and need something to pique my interest. I have been conversing with these guys during some of the most formative years of my life, and as a whole, they have influenced me to a certain extent. Often that influence takes the form of something closer to an extreme warning than a good example, but it’s a persistent influence nonetheless. As much as we may hesitate to admit it, this board means something to most of the people who have stuck around since the beginning and even those who joined with the shitshow already in progress. Maybe it’s just a place to vent or blow off steam in way that people can’t manage at work or at home or in “real life.” Maybe it’s a place where people who clearly all walk a little ways off from the beaten path can be themselves without a filter or a pretense. Maybe it’s a place where such people can be accepted rather than rejected out of hand, or at least where the insults are mutual and they can be mocked on equal terms.

For me, it’s probably a bit of all three. After coming here for six of those most formative years, even though it’s just a message board, I’m simply a bit tied to this place. Despite all the dickery and dramabombs and whining, and maybe even because of them, I keep coming back here, week after week, month after month, year after year. I’ve seen what this board and the people who populate it have to offer, from their most caring and concerned to the more frequent mean-spirited ridicule to the downright obscene and offensive, and god help me, I enjoy almost all of it. The dynamic at this forum may not be typical, it may not always be friendly, but ninety-nine percent of the time it’s fun, and that’s why I’m still here. That’s my NPP.