'In the Beginning' by Rutabaga

[Camy]

WOW! This blew me away. It's quite the best thing I've read, in a while. Thanks, @Rutabaga and @Alien Son.

It's amazing what you forget... or misremember. I don't remember any of the 'news and views' posts - but I'm so glad they'e been found! 

'JJ and the Boys' was the first story I ever wrote. It was for a 2006 collection of stories on 'Day of Silence' at GayAuthors. Mike wrote me a very kind email, and so I arrived at AwesomeDude, which soon became home.

Mike was always inordinately kind. He once asked what I'd like to call a site, if I had one. 'Camy's Gaff,' I said. A short time later he got the domain! That blew me away, too.

Then, I attempted to write a novel. Mike cheered me on from the side-lines and posted the chapters as I wrote them - which proved to be a big mistake. It was never finished and quietly pulled off the main page after a six month wait for chapter 14! (note to self: outlines are good).

So many memories... Too many great people gone. Hey ho.

I Miss you, Dude.

 

[Altimexis]

I miss you, Dude, too.

[Rutabaga]

Thanks for the kind words.  It was eye-opening for me in a number of ways.  Journeying through all the archived pages is a tedious task, because the Wayback Machine interface can be pretty confusing.  Each screen shot was taken with the Microsoft Snipping Tool, and in eight cases two shots (top and bottom) had to be taken and then stitched together to capture the complete post,  I collected all the screen shots over a number of days.

John (@Alien Son) was tremendously helpful at the end:  Taking all my screen shot images and optimizing them for web display, and more importantly taking my ad hoc file names and creating a consistent form that was much easier to wrangle.  

One thing that I decided not to pursue in this pass is the extensive author information that Mike was presenting in his early story listing pages.  That may well be a good subject for another historical review.  

R

[Bruin Fisher]

This is an invaluable historical record. I see that as early as 2005 some of the great names of the site were on board. Camy has been with us since 2006, I didn't come through the door until 2008 after dipping my toes in two other sites that didn't work so well for me. Awesomedude has been my online home as a writer and reader ever since and I can't imagine settling anywhere else. Mike built a superb community which lives on. Long may it continue to do so as a fitting memorial to a great man.