An expanded history of teh Monkey Lair

[McNevin]

The enderzero.net forum was created back in 2003 as a way to bridge the gap between a group of (mostly) Pacific NW-based pals and a group of (mostly) Japan-based pals. Not long after I moved from Tokyo to Santa Barbara and relaunched the forum with an eye to bringing my (mostly) SoCal based pals to the party as well. What follows is an expanded history from my admittedly sometimes foggy recollection of the events leading up to the creation and the heyday of this forum (and perhaps a bit of what has happened since). Feel free to add in your corrections and reminiscences.

The PNW group had (mostly) gone to high school together and found ourselves sharing a house as either a home or frequent hang out in Redmond, WA. When the downstairs den turned into a shrine to networked PCs (mmm, 144Kbps IDSL) and games, it first took on the moniker of teh Lab which eventually morphed into teh Lair. During that time, McNevin started a public Exchange folder which was kind of like a BB/listserv thing that we used for constant tomfoolery back before we could text each other jokes or whatever we would eventually come to call memes. That server was called the MonkeyLair.net (I imagine McNevin or R3C can probably explain more about where that name came from even further back). We battled sigma team, we shot paintballs at Beeeph, we gorged ourselves on turkey sandwich rolls, jalapeno Tim's, and nerds rope, we watched adult swim episodes over and over, and we played lots of video games. Then came a wild camping trip to the Olympic Peninsula and an enormous fort we named, you guessed it, the Monkey Lair. So it only made sense that the birth of the original forum here would assume that mantle.

Sigma team mostly defeated, I moved from Redmond to Japan at the end of 2002, originally spending three months in Nagano before making my way to Tokyo. The original impetus for the move was a 2-week trip spidermonkey, R3C, and I took where even though I was on crutches (thanks again fellas), I completely fell in love with the country. At the time, the only thing I cared about more was snowboarding and so when we returned, I hatched a plan to move to Japan and snowboard. It seemed like a completely wild idea until I discovered what was then called skijapanguide and would soon become the SnowJapan forums.

SnowJapan was a wonderfully diverse group of English language speakers who were all obsessed with skiing and snowboarding in Japan's incredible powder. There were English teachers checking in on conditions during their lunch breaks, expats in the big cities planning their weekend escapes, people all over the world doing research for an exotic ski vacation, Japanese powderhounds practicing their English, and, like me, a few people who were trying to learn whatever they could about how they could move to the country and dive in. At SnowJapan I found an extremely welcoming community that encouraged me to make the move. I even found a shredder from Wisconsin that went by barok that promised me that if I could make it to Nagano, I had a place to live for a mere 3-man yen (or like $300) a month.

So I sold my car and pretty much everything I had, got a plane, and sure enough, barok was waiting for me in his Corolla wagon outside the Nagano-shi shinkansen station when I arrived. We spent the next few months pretty much the same way everyday. We'd get up, drive to one of the awesome hills within an hour or so, mostly in Hakuba Valley, and snowboard for 3 or so hours. Then we'd come home and he would go to work teaching English and I would spend the rest of the day exploring Nagano or (mostly) reading SnowJapan. On the weekends we would often take overnight trips to Hakuba or further afield locations like Nozawa Onsen. Inevitably we would meet up with our SnowJapan friends on the mountain or at vending machine beer-filled nights at the local ski hostel.

Week by week, online friends turned into IRL friends and day to day SnowJapan forum activity took on same inside jokes and tales of escapades that had made teh monkey lair so fun. Strong bonds were formed with characters such as danz, Goemon, mistasparkle*, db (ahem ....) and many others, so it was a no brainer that when season one was in the books, I'd move to Tokyo and let the good times/mayhem continue.

It was right around this time, March of 2003, that I launched the forum. Strangely enough, in those weeks, stories of a new respiratory illness were just starting to leak out of China (putting my intended trip to Hong Kong in jeopardy -- but's a story for another time). As teh monkey lair crew began to intermingle with SnowJapan gang, this site became a place for us to chat about video games, internet speeds news of the day and typical nonsense. There were the wild musings of l2icks0r (Bill Drayton Jr.), plenty of Chapelle Show quotes, and some early writing on movies made well before writing on movies would become such a big part of my life. Generally conversation was allowed to just flow here and while it perhaps took a little while to get going, over the next year this forum became a daily hang out for a pretty great group of people.

In the summer of 2004 I said peeecu to Tokyo and moved to Santa Barbara, CA to finish off school. It was that summer I relaunched the forum with the style that this here style is made to replicate (at least to some extent). A few of my college friends would join on but by this time forums were already starting to seem like a bit of a dated method of interaction as myspace was catching on with facebook soon behind. But teh monkey lair continued to be a place where tomfoolery could be had and topics could be discussed. The two streams started to cross in person when danz moved to Seattle and became a frequent fixture of spidermonkey hangs with the likes of ed9k and Megatron.

I would of course meet my future wife in Santa Barbara (who actually has a user account here though she never posted). We moved to LA in 2006, split up for a bit, then got back together in late 2011, got engaged in Summer 2012, bought a house in Spring 2013, and got married in June of 2014. Somewhere in that the forum kinda died out.

Best I can tell, the last conversational post was in December of 2012 though all the posts after mid may 2012 were marked as unread when I logged in. R3C posted this now unknown image in March of 2013 and then not long after something broke on the site and it went down for good.

That is, until teh monkey lair was revived in March of 2020.

[R3C]

Fromst the digital ashes, coalesced upon the bottom surface of a good man's loafer. Arise!

[Bill Drayton Jr.]

Chicken arise! Arise chicken! Arise!

[Megatron]

I'm pleased to see that my Avatar is still Burglekutt.