* Sandwich reserves the right to bump this thread since he's been sick for weeks and weeks...
Mmmm... 
You rang?
Anyway, some highlights of the past 13 years for me...
Steakie-poo invited me to join HLP back when, well... just look at my member ID.
I'd been a hesitant forumite on the VBB at the time... in fact, I still have a printout somewhere of a thread from the VBB about FRED2 tips which featured ZylonBane quite heavily... I run across it occasionally and get all nostalgic...
Then there's the day Shrike surprised the heck out of me by "inviting" me to become an admin here... he actually just changed my membergroup and bothered to inform me of such, but anyway... I felt quite humbled, as well as proud that my intentional maturity on the forums came across enough to have a real benefit.
Then (in no particular order) there's the days of the an0n/Stryke9 shenanigans... DaveB's occasional visits... Derek S freaking the community out for a good few months... Kazan and his short temper... the source code being released... leaving GameSpy behind... VolitionWatch shutting its doors... switching forum software multiple times till we arrived at SMF... the list goes on.
And what does David Copperfield mean to HLP and FreespaceTM?
Stryke 9 once broke the forums by posting the complete text of David Copperfield. He even had to type the last few chapters by hand for some reason (IIRC because the clipboard buffer wasn't large enough to paste the entire book, but that would just raise the question of why he didn't paste the rest of it separately). That remains my second favorite instance of trolling in HLP's history.
...How did I never know that?
Has something to do with the "hard light" effect (as opposed to "soft light") in renders.
That meaning may have been retconned in the past couple of years, but as I recall it was actually a reference to the British TV series Red Dwarf (remember, Thunder/Kal/Fineus is from the UK). Hard light projectors were holograms that could be physically touched (hence they were literally "hard" light). They symbolised the idea of taking something imaginary and making it real. And that's what modding is all about: starting from a concept and then working until you create something that you could experience in the game. Every mod and campaign made by a fan is, in a sense, a "hard light production".
Well, that's what I remember anyhow. It's been a while.
...double how did I never know that??!?
