how many years were you on rdii?
From early 2004, when we all moved over from Atease (I always write it like that, though I suppose it really should be At Ease) after one of a number of site crashes, to when the board activity finally wound down, was about 13 years: which is a long time for any internet community! There is a life cycle to these places, I think now; they rely on a mixture of time and goodwill and energy and a minimum number of people who are engaged with posting, and doing so frequently. Our glory days were definitely between 2004 and around 2011, when Facebook began kind of leaching people off, and a few of the central posters spent less time there (one at the behest of her family, I remember). Others got older and began families, or just moved on with their lives. The board kept on going for a few years after its high point, and Natalia finally archived it it around 2017 (I’d have to check, but that sounds right—there was certainly discussion of AMSP that took place before she did so). In the meantime, I was determined to preserve some sense of our community, and created a Facebook group for the regular posters, of which there were around 35 to 50, with some posting every day and others around once a week. The age range went from some younger people in their mid teens to forty-somethings.
mildly unrelated question, i think (quite a while ago, sorry!! i remember weird specific things!) you said that rdi was mainly a jeff buckley board, what did the “rd” stand for on there? how were it and rdii related?
Quick history—Natalia (Tali on Etcetera, Tyger A on Atease) was the founder and owner of RDII. The RD stands for Revolving Doors—so obviously post Amnesiac. I do think that there was an RD1— perhaps by a different name, I’d have to ask—but it was mainly a Jeff Buckley (RIP) fan board, as I understand it.
how did you find this community?
Going way, way back into the mists of history here—I joined Atease in 2003, around October, having seen the band for the first time in August. I was newly in love with the music and I’d had a decade of playing around on Usenet (of blessed memory) and making websites, etc., so going online to find the fan community was an obvious thing to do. I made a username, and resolved that I would only read and not get involved in posting; this lasted maybe two weeks before I responded to a comment made by Natalia (she’s shown up on Etcetera as Tali in the last while; she had been well known in the fandom for her exquisite Thom photographs).
As mentioned, we moved over en masse in early 2004 after Atease crashed. I remember, after Atease went back up, sending out DMs to members of the infamous cheesecake thread (or which more later) and kind of rounding people up to come over to RDII. We all settled in there and great fun ensued, with a sense of relief that we weren’t surrounded by the, how shall we say, different culture of Atease. Which leads us to: the Cheesecake thread.
you mentioned before that you moved to rdii after an atease crash, how different were the two communities?
A bit of what (I hope) isn’t too long a story. From my POV, I found Atease, and after a while began identifying posters who seemed to have interesting things to say (at least to me) or good jokes to tell. Coincidentally—or perhaps not—the overwhelming majority of these posters were women. We started kind of clustering together, commenting on each other’s posts, etc. And then came the fateful day when Sally, then 17, posted the comment that launched a thousand pieces of fanfiction. (Sally registered on Etcetera as Cheesecake Sally a couple of months ago and was received with joy, at least by me.) She made up a really quite stupid story about Thom making a lemon cheesecake while waiting for Michael Stipe to come by, and stressing out about whether or not it was vegan. What followed were a lot of jokes and ridiculous flights of fancy, collaborative bits where we would take turns posting one line of a story, and so on. I was procrastinating on my Master’s thesis at the time and wasn’t working, so I soon had a pretty high post count (the internet: the grave of academic productivity….also undiagnosed ADHD, but that’s a different story). Some of the other folks who posted in the thread, which soon ran into thousands of pages, were members of a previous thread on, I think, Mortigi Tempo entitled “Radiohead eats cookies in bed”. The genesis of this was a kind of disturbing post, which I never saw, where a fan managed somehow to get onto the Radiohead tour bus and supposedly determined that Thom’s bunk had cookie crumbs in it. Reading that back, all I can say is that it was a different time.
Anyway, there was soon a core group of posters on the Cake thread, and it was the fastest moving thing on Atease because so much of it was just all of us talking about our lives, music, the hotness of Jonny and/or Thom (though of course Ed and Colin has their admirers, too). It sounds rather bland described that way but it was so much fun. So many jokes, so many fits of laughter. Some members of Atease complained mightily about it, but Adriaan appreciated us, so he kept the haters at bay. (And there were a lot of members read it on the quiet, as well.)
We all met in person for the first time at Coachella 2004. We stayed at a motel in Palm Springs, along with Ade (incredulous post in Genchat: “Ade’s staying in Palm Springs with twenty-five women?”) and had a wonderful time. The meet-ups were always the best part of our shared internet world: many of us followed the 2006 small venue tour in the UK and Amsterdam, met up in Europe and the States, attended each other’s weddings, and many stayed close friends to this day.
were there any aspects of atease that you missed? any that you were glad to get away from?
We moved our party to our own house, I suppose you could say. We would always check Atease, because that was where the news would be; one of our members made up a rhyme about Atease vs. the official Radiohead board, which went: “We (Atease) have the news; they (the RHMB) have the blues” because the band would occasionally post on the board and their comments were always highlighted in blue lettering. I never quite felt at home there, it was already a tight group with myriad in-jokes, and it was set up so that the conversation would got for about ten pages or so and then automatically delete. For whatever reason; I never quite saw the point.
before et cetera, did you ever go on a different board after rdii went down?
By the time Natalia archived RDII it was a bit of a ghost of its former self. I can understand why she called time, but I was still upset to lose it. But so many conversations had moved over to Facebook, people were having kids or going back to school, and the circumstances that had sort of gathered us all there at that time—which I still marvel at, really— had changed. And then Atease was gone too, around the same time, and Green Plastic, and the internet culture which had produced message boards of all kinds had altered completely. Which is why I’m so grateful for Etcetera, because it replicates that kind of jokey, smart ongoing conversation that I appreciated so much. And it turns out I’m not alone, as many people have come out of the woodwork, from Atease and Mortigi Tempo and the other old-style boards. I began hanging out on Reddit, posting in a bunch of unrelated subreddits, and I slowly began to spend more and more time on r/radiohead, which was a sort of substitute but never a replacement— then Elly reminded me that she had been Twisted Words on RDII, and we bonded, and then Etcetera opened and I never looked back. It’s a pretty exciting time to be a fan right now—I lurk around the old R.E.M. Facebook groups and stuff and it’s like shifting through the ashes at a wake. But not Radiohead— we have things happening. It’s wonderful.
overall, how would you describe the community on rdii?
Besides it being whimsical, creative, and very, very fun, it was also overwhelmingly female— I think we had about three male members, known as the Bravest of the Brave (kid.android, now on Etcetera, was one of them). Supportive, friendly, intelligent, occasionally obscene (in a good way). We made a separate forum for those who wanted to continue writing smut/fanfiction which you had to be registered to see. During the best years, it was very active— we gave our awards for each thousand posts, and I had about 8 of them—and above all safe. I was at first a mod and then an admin. I loved the place.
But even I eventually got pulled away by life— a new job, a new relationship with my now wife, getting involved with choral singing; Radiohead kind of went on hiatus, and the magic just…. faded away. I remember moments of absolute camaraderie, like the posting of setlist where one of our members, a graphic designer, made up funny images of strange facial hair for each member of the band according to the song they were playing… I’d come home from work, open up a Tonight’s Setlist thread, and talk with everyone about our reminiscences of hearing particular songs… I had a running joke going where I’d seen them 10 times and they’d never once played Fake Plastic Trees, and was taking it all very personally. It was, above all, fun and playful. It was a really special place, but as the song says, nothing lasts forever.