Woohoo!
First, a *very* warm welcome to all the new folks to this thread! We are very glad to see you join us and hope that you continue to come back here all the time. With this thread, the more the merrier. So definitley come hang out with us!
Also, I'd like to thank
Lord Garth for hosting it this time 'round. I guess he's right...with this thread, it seems that the most current two have been started by non-regulars to this forum!

And personally, I think that's a good thing because it's always nice to really get to know other top-shelf people around the board! And I wouldn't let anyone run this thing unless I felt they were top shelf!
Although I will say that I sincerely hope that both
Lord Garth and
SB continue to be very much regulars in this thread! And in the forum as well (
SB being exempted from participation in everything but the
Duet threads, of course).
Lord Garth did a fine job as Admin-Watching-the-Shop while I was in Japan as well, and I hope he will stick around DS9 in general. It was great being in Japan and knowing that
JudasAscendant's 'Caption This' threads and
cylkoth's 'Episodes of the Week' threads were getting swapped out on time! It was a tough job, but someone had to do it! :thumbsup:
Although I hear a highly suspect rumor that he actually had to give out a warning while I was gone!
Doesn't he know we don't DO warnings in here?
No...seriously...I'm quite sure it was deserved. Even in DS9 we have the occasional mod-related actual 'work' that has to be done. Although most of it involves stickying and un-stickying theads, to be sure!

And it was nice being able to go to Japan with the peace of mind that comes with knowing that such a reliable person was around!
Okay...moving on!
As for the 'subject' of this thread (so the newbies to the thread will know), basically what
Lord Garth said is pretty accurate. It's sorta the
Seinfeld thread of the DS9 forum: A thread about NOTHING.
In here, we discuss everything, pretty much. Our lives, our jobs, movies and TV shows we are watching, etc. We have also been know to organize group avatar themes in here...although we've not done that in a while.
Basically, we use it as place to discuss what we are into lately in a more personal environment. As a personal example, I've been working my way through
The X-Files on DVD over the last several months. I wouldn't want to start a thread in SFF about it because a) the show is LONG over and the thread wouldn't last 10 minutes on the front page, let alone all the months it will take for me to finish the series, and b)I don't want the opinions of a bunch of strangers - I really only want to discuss it with some good friends whose opinions I trust. So....I talk about it here.
In this thread, we do that with TV shows (I think the last thread had discussions about
The X-Files, Babylon 5, and
Firefly at minimum...although I'm sure there were others discussed at least briefly), movies, and pretty much anything. Want to talk about something but don't want a huge crowd of strangers offering up opinions? Talk about it here! Want to watch a TV show from scratch and give periodic updates on your progress, but don't think the thread will last 10 minutes, let alone 10 months, elsewhere? Do it here! Want to discuss real life with a smaller group of people that you can really get to know, instead of a bunch of semi-strangers? This is the place!
Got it?
Now, what this thread is NOT is what I call a 'pure' spam thread. Sure, we post the occasional one-liners as we joke and play around with each other and such - this is a running conversation among friends, and friends do that IRL. So that is perfectly cool. However, this thread is NOT meant to be an extension of the lounge, where posting goes on for pages and nothing ever gets discussed. We are not building post-count here, folks, so don't use it for that. We are here to *genuinely* hang out with each other and have some fun in a more personal setting. As someone said....we are here to hang out with a few friends over a few beers.
Okay...taking off the mod hat now!
Most of the folks around here know my story, but I'll go over it again for the new folks.
I am old enough to have grown up on TOS reruns, and went to
Star Trek: The Montion Picture in the theatre.
I watched TNG during it's first run (actually saw a few TOS episodes during first run, but was too young to really understand them as I was a toddler), and was thrilled when DS9 came out.
I tuned in to DS9 from day one, and liked it from the beginning. I couldn't really explain it...but I was attracted to this 'new' kind of Trek, set on this (at first) remote outpost with main characters who were NOT all Starfleet. To me, it was just neat...and I watched it all the way until I left Anchorage, Alaska (where I used to live) and moved to Russia for a year to work.
During the year in Russia, I of course couldn't see DS9. TNG was over by this time...but I sure missed DS9...and I missed the first bit of VOY as well, I'm pretty sure.
Anyway, when I came back to the U.S., I made the mistake of moving to Atlanta instead of back to Alaska. There were a ton of reasons why this was a bad decision...but the one relevant here is that DS9 was shown on a station that showed it very irregularly. They moved it around their schedule, they pre-empted it for sports all the time, and many times they would join the show 'in progress' for the last 10-15 minutes, when it is almost pointless to jump in.
As a result, my DS9 watching was sporatic until the end of the series...and I had to keep watching the re-runs for years afterwards in order to see most of the episodes. And even then, I ended up seeing many episodes out of order. By the time the DVDs came out, I'd seen all of the episodes except
Time's Orphan...but I was really looking forward to the DVDs so that I could watch the whole show in order, and not so disjoined as I had been watching it.
The DVDs started coming out in January of 2003 - the same month, incidentally, that I became the mod of this forum. 2003 was a great year to be a Niner, that's for sure...and even this thread has it's roots in this time period.
This thread really started as an outgrowth of the countdown threads we had for each of the seasons as they came out. When one season came out, we'd start the countdown thread for the next season of DVDs...and we ended up having a wide variety of discussions in these threads.
So after the DVD release was completed, I at first left the season 7 thread open until it reached 1,000 posts (
AdmiralElectron was the threadstarter of this thread) and after that,
kevsthaman and the Klingon Chef picked it up and ran the next thread to 1,000 (
kev - you ran one thread to 1,000 or two? I can't remember!). After that,
SB picked up the challenge and that thread ran to 1,000.
And here we are. A long history of blabbing with each other.

And a fine tradition, IMO!
Anyway...welcome again to all the new folks - we are pleased to see you join our merry little group!
And thanks again to
Lord Garth for agreeing to do this for 1,000!
Have fun everyone!