I dunno, Alexsem actually came into the forum and stirred up quite a ruckus for quite a while. For better or worse, ElD became a sort of legend to mooks around here, and considering the population of mooks, that seems to have established him in the pantheon forever IMO. Plus I suppose having a forum named after him keeps his name current.

Tattoo doesn't even talk to the coffinworms anymore.

I think he is the guy in the back behind the blonde. Someone care to confirm?

El D is Indian, but not puny. He is pretty ripped actually. Requesting permission to post a topless pic!

James

Lol, I figured that among this crowd this would give me heaps of street cred.

James

My recollection is that this place was created partly to protest the elitism of the El D forum.

The Lounge was created before the EL D forum. After EL D saw how successful the Lounge was going to be, he decided to try and usurp our little forum by starting his own, assuming his would eat up ours.

He was wrong.

I see. But I bet the places were created around the same time. I definitely recall some debate here about the invite-only aspect of the El D forum.

I have been denied permission to post the pic, but rest assured that I am correct The amount of like, long term hate in the forums surprises me. And I mean I fully get it...it's tough not to get wrapped up in the emotion of the arguments sometimes...but I think forum hate is one of the more interesting manifestations of the internet era.

James

We've discussed his forum from time to time, and that was a controversial aspect of it when it started.

Someone else created a separate invite-only forum for 2+2'ers outside the forums for a while. I think it was up for maybe a year. Jeremy, I think. It was pretty good, but it was splitting many of the same members between two boards, and that was hard to sustain unless people made a permanent transfer, which probably few wanted to do.

The Lounge was basically created as a snobby and more boring version of OOT. As a overall sub forum I'd say El D's has been much more informative and successful...but The Lounge is/has much more of a clubhouse/book club of the week type thing going on.

Overall El D's overall point that constantly splitting up forums, esp one's like OOT, over and over again to more detailed subforums was a bad idea rung true imo. The decline in quality posts/posters/threads on 2+2 over the years has been pretty strong.

People liked El D so much because he was a great poster and he reminded people of how cool and interesting 2+2 used to be.

Admittedly, my memory is poor, but I'm pretty sure that was not the goal for creating the Lounge.

Hmmm...seems like such an objective post yet so not...it is quite annoying how people always make such pronouncements about the Lounge. Hey, maybe some of us find OOT and EDF boring and condescendingly clique-y.

And your second paragraph makes absolutely no sense in light of the fact that El D then made his own forum, ergo effectively splitting up the much larger OOT again...

EDF I don't give the time of day. It's like OOT without humor.

OOT has some good, but too much stupid bad.

The Lounge has smart funny good-hearted people wall-to-wall, and it's where I want to be.

That seems wrong in pretty much every way.

Yes, because of course everyone wants things to be more snobby and boring.

The Lounge got created because OOT went through so many pages per day that there was no incentive to put any work into a single thread. It wasn't even easy to see if the same thread had already been done, because OOT could go through hundreds of new threads a day. OOT was getting flatter and more dull the more popular it got. It had almost no chance to be interesting anymore.

That's what happens when the people who were writing the best threads and posts simply stopped doing it. Many of them left and didn't come back. And OOT just got left with the worse and worse dregs.

But it makes no sense to spend even 15 minutes writing a thread or posting a response when some idiot teenagers would spaz out 20 zero content threads in the same period and drive anything else off the front page, or even second page or more, before it would have a chance to be seen. The way OOT was, posts worth reading were all but memory because there was no reason to write them anymore. OOT had become nearly pure lowest common denominator, and what wasn't, was lost almost instantly.

OOT and the 2+2 forums had lost a lot of quality long before the forums started getting split off of it. Without the splits, OOT would have kept chasing away almost every good contributor, leaving the non-strategy sections of 2+2 a cesspool.

It's more popular. It certainly got a stronger push and the hounds were never released on it like they were on the Lounge. There are many ways to measure success, though. If you want a smarter thread on wearing natural denim than you'll find in OOT, then ELDF will satisfy and the Lounge will probably fall short because nobody will care. ELDF has its strengths, but it does not have all strengths, or do everything well.

That was a terrible idea that almost nobody supported in the long run and most did not in the short run. ElD was also very selective and political about it.

Before sports was spun off, you would have a single basketball game sometimes taking up a quarter of a page of OOT or more. Same with all the other sports. It was a gigantic mess and pushed everything else off the page. Before politics was spun off, that mess of craziness combined with bile made OOT even stupider and leached out into other threads there. Videogames and health and fitness also made very strong forums on their own.

Separating forums out from the frenetic mountain of garbage that was OOT made the whole system of forums stronger as a whole.

2+2 is vastly more popular now. Pretty much to be expected as the poker boom drew in more and more people who probably never should have been playing poker in the first place.

He was a good poster when he wanted to be. He brought a heck of a lot of bad to the table too. Like most everyone, he is a mixed bag.

But let's not pretend he wasn't idolized by all the young guys because of his success in both business and poker. Because of that alone, he could do no wrong and command vast armies of the dead. And that's often all he had. At one point ElD was probably what half the guys on the forums wished they were.

I'm not really applying snobby in an entirely bad way just compared to the overall tone/mood of OOT the Lounge is basically a copy of OOT with a slightly different tone/view of things. I'd compare The Lounge way more to BBV4LIFE than ELDF.

I imagine ELDF was kind of created as a f-u to DB and where 2+2 was going in general structure wise...and was in essence kind of throwing in the towel in the overall fight.

Wasn't even aware he was big on poker besides casual play. Course I stayed out of the strat forums in the early years

were you banned and had to create a new account?

lurked for several years

"several years" would have to be like 4+ years from your reg. date...so yeah shenaniganns.

Damn...u caught me!



i probably have like 15-20 different accounts

That's pretty bizarre take on the Lounge. I doubt many would agree with it whether they care for the lounge or not.

I'm not sure why that comparison would be made or made in that way, either. The Lounge never wanted to be what ELDF was, and in fact the lounge came first. For my part, I don't aspire to talk about denim and sunglasses or stereo speakers all that much, nor do I relish the idea of having to be personally approved by one guy or his minions in order to post. I think it's a bit grotesque, to be honest.

I think establishing ELDF was ELD's furious bid to remain what he fancied was top dog in a fight some thought was stupid and not of any interest at all. He was outraged not about forums splitting off, but that he might not be the one calling all the shots and that he hadn't thought of it first. Given that, he couldn't help trying to abort the competition before it was born and try to strangle it in the crib thereafter. The last thing he did was get a forum to run and name after himself because he was losing interesting in 2+2. His interest was at a fever pitch and he made things very ugly. He was losing power as undisputed top dog IMO -- a fight nobody else was even thinking of or cared about -- and he hated that to death.

He made his reputation as "Ulysses" in the strat forums. He kicked a lot of ass there, and Sklansky said he was one of the top poker minds in the world. Combined with his ballin' status in the venture capital world, he was pretty much every other smart aleck young poker geek's wet dream and life fantasy at the time.

Basically the way I see the forum is TLDR has a lot of threads that simply wouldn't survive in OOT because they are too geared to a specific mindset(that only exists in TLDR) or totally random, or that are just copies of threads that already exist in OOT and elsewhere Politics etc but have a slightly different tone given the mindset of the selected posters in this forum. BBV4LIFE is the same way...I generally don't fit in to either per say so I rarely go to those forums because I'll look at the posts and general think 2 things -- saw that thread already in OOT or not interesting.

Now that is nec. not a bad thing...given 2+2 went in the direction of just splitting off forums left n right non stop.

I think ELDF is a bit less narrow in way because it contains general type threads(which are more useful asa whole) that don't seem to crop up as much anymore in OOT or they just don't get the traffic to stay on the top couple of pages. Basically threads on material things or doing stuff or random **** etc...HDTVs, Gadgets, Fashion, Picking up girls, etc.

So that's why I would say the forum of TLDR is much more similar to BBV4LIFE than it is to ELD

heck, I started a long-running gadget thread in EDF