[ADMIN] [LAST CALL] So Long, and Thanks for All the Fries

[thorr kan]

ADMIN: It started with a bang and ends with a whimper.

The Dragon’s Inn was founded in May, 1992. Just shy of 32 years is a pretty good run. https://web.archive.org/web/20120918122241/http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/paleo-e-books-altcyberpunkchatsubo-and-altpub/

APDI, as it came to be known, was my first foray into USENET and then the Internet at large. I arrived online in 1991, just before Eternal September. I was there, before the Fall…

Nightstalker, wherever you are…thank you. Creating this little corner of USENET has meant so much to me over the years.

So many have moved on to other interests. So many have been lost to us. Chris Meadows passes away a few years ago. Rumor has it Steve Hutchison and his wife have left us as well. Dennis Nichols died a few years ago. The Australian contingent long ago went silent.

The Kron Questors have long since disbanded. The Dragon Questors are scattered to the winds. The Medallion Quest foundered. So many others have been lost to the mists of time.

The webrings are gone.

The personal archives are lost, save for a few.
http://www.flick.com/~liralen/dragon/dragon.html
https://www.eyrie.org/~robotech/netfic.html

Only scattered remnants remain in the Wayback Machine.
https://web.archive.org/web/20071009110321/http://www.apocalypse.org/~kjc/dragon.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20080511235055/http://www.rdrop.com/~hutch/Stories/Stories.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20010203162900/http://dragon.dzmac.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20070830030500/http://www-personal.une.edu.au/~cgirard/writing.html

But the eyrie.org archives appear to be up!
https://archives.eyrie.org/apdi

Some future adventurer may stumble across our tales and marvel.

I think I may be the last of the original authors still standing. I claim no virtue in this. I, too, have gone silent too many times. My personal archives are gone. They disappeared in some random backup loss over the last two decades. Traveler’s Quest, Roaming, Knight of Ash (I *WAS* going to finish that!) are all gone.

But I could not let APDI fade into The Long Night without one last hurrah. Hence Last Call. I had hoped to inspire others to join in the sendoff. Like so many of my efforts, it was too little, too late. But I managed some small memorial.

I hope to be able to rebuild those archives. Maybe some day I’ll get them up at my blog, thewhiteminotaur.wordpress.com.

For now, I’ll keep ahold of Last Call, as a reminder of great things.

For those of you who come after us, after Google betrayed USENET, look upon our works and be inspired. And if you want to, bring Rowan and the others back to The Dragon’s Inn to enjoy your stories here.

-Matt Cutter, 21 February 2024.
AKA Thorr-kan, the White Minotaur and Horde Father-Confessor.250 characters maximum