[Sifter]

I've always wondered what everyone's been up to since the heyday of this community. I'm friends with a few of you on Facebook, it's always nice to see posts from you guys.

It's such a trip, I always use this scene as a major reference point in my life.
For example, a couple years ago I took a Visual Basic class at my local community college. The whole course was a refresher to me because we were always fucking around with that stuff back in the day. I mean I really have this forum to thank for the bulk of my professional skill set. Not that I'm much better than when I was 12, 13...

I'm 27 now , I have an AA in Microcomputer Applications which of course sounds fancier than it is. Just a degree focused on the Office and Creative Cloud suites, with a touch of programming (Visual Basic, very entry level Java), networking, and Linux. Basically I got a degree that would allow me to do something along the lines of tech support, marketing, basic graphic design, office work.

Currently jobless because I got tired of retail, and COVID-19 gave me the perfect excuse to quit working at Target lmfao. Now I've got time on my hands and I'm working toward being able to work from home, mostly trying to stick with graphic work - and I've got time on my hands to practice. My girlfriend of the last 5 years works doing freelance writing on sites like Verblio. She only works like 3 hours a day and makes more than twice what I fucking did working retail, even when I was management, so she's paying all the bills and I'm just out here lookin' like a SIMP.

So I took the long route to sticking with those skills we all developed as kids. But I want back in it, so thanks Chris for bringing this back. I think it helps me focus on hat I should've done for years.

What've you all been up to?


EDIT:

I never really found another community anything like this after ThyElite and BlackBay were gone. Ran a few Minecraft servers, had some cross-game clans on Minecraft and SWTOR, among a few others. Hell m3th and I ran a Minecraft server for a while haha. Nothing was ever as tight-knit as this though.

[Erik]

Since then, I went through many phases. I don't even consider myself the same person as back then. Same soul, but entirely different mindset. I have Vis and X0G to thank for some of that.

I'm 30 now, I have 2 kids, both boys 3 & 6. I'm married and my wife and I both work for law firms, working with home insurance claims.

No degree, planning on returning to school soon so I can finally pursue IT like I always wanted. I wish I had more motivation to have pursued it back then when we were younger, I'd be a master by now. But life goes how life wants to go and so I'm here - literally, I'm here on thyelite which is a trip.

[Erik]

Also just wanna wag my e-dick a little, I've been around since literally the beginning of Coke Music in 2002, I was only 12. I remember stealing my moms change from her change jar to obsessively buy 20oz cokes from the vending machine downstairs from where we lived, just to get the codes. Of course my fat ass drank them, but it was mostly for the codes from the caps for that glorious furni. At some point I realized it wasn't enough and that's when I started looking for cheats and eventually met all of you. I absued the sumo gong filter, and figured out how to recreate the fake furni filter after it was pulled from public eye - shortly after it was patched out anyway. One of my favorites was the invisble filter where you could go into the room and still interact and chat, but you were simply invisible.

ONE thing I never got that I always wanted and I missed the mark by literally a fucking hair was the god damn pinball machine. It was like a badge of honor, at least in my eyes, to have one. I know most of you got your hands on one, or ten, but I was never so lucky. Maybe one day.

[Sifter]

Damn, what a throwback with those codes. I joined up in probably 2004, 2005. I would buy 20oz Cokes soooo often.

Eventually I found an exploit on here or BlackBay. Really all it was was the default password for the debug menu on old Coke vending machines. If you numbered the drink buttons starting at 1 going down, you would press 4 2 3 1 and it would allow you to access the debug menu. By default you usually can only do things like check the price, check the stock of certain items, see how much money was in the machine, etc. But if enabled, and it was rare, you could vend free drinks to "test" the machine, or you could change the price to any increments that the machine could accept (i.e. no pennies).

I used that exploit to change the price at a machine near me that sold Coke bottles and I would spend a dollar to get 20 drinks, mostly for the code but of course I drank 'em all. Did that a few times before they changed the machine out lol.

By the way, debug menu of course still is an option on many older Coke vending machines. I got into the debug menu in the breakroom at my last job and fucked shit up hahaha.

[m3th]

After ThyElite I moved to BlackBay like most of the others. Then me and a few other users stole the website for like a week and created a clone called Woned.org which was kind of popular for a little while, but warez forums were on the decline at that point and it eventually fizzled out.

I went to college for Graphic Design and dropped out after a year, it was a really shit college but it was the only one I could afford and I just couldn't justify paying tuition and renting an apartment when I wasn't learning fuck all and my "certificate" was basically going to be useless on a resume. I bounced around a few minimum wage jobs, eventually got a job doing tech support for a local ISP and moved up the ladder into doing backend admin/analytic work. Oh, and I came out of the closet when I was like 22ish.

I'm 31 this summer, I work at a bank now doing fraud analysis and I live with my Fiance. We were supposed to get married in September but Covid happened and we didn't want to risk paying deposits and never getting them back.

I have a little project that I've been working on mostly for shits and giggles. It's a text based RPG based on those old mafia style sites but with a hacker/cyberpunk theme. Nothing I can really show off just yet but I think it has a few cool concepts.

Edit: Oh a forgot to mention I actually owned blackbay.org legally for like a month after buying it from James for $150 or something. I remember something happened before that though and the database was lost so it was basically a ghost town at that point. I didn't do anything with it and then James recovered it and sold it to Nerd lol.

[Digitalicious]

Can't remember how, but I hooked up with Vis and designed the logo for ThyElite. Helped him skin the forum into something presentable. By the time it shut down, I was a senior in High School I think.

Graduated High School by a hair. I was terrible at school, and websites were all I could ever do. Skipped college, started freelancing right away. Spent some time roughing it financially because my first year freelancing, I didn't set aside taxes and got royally screwed when the IRS came knocking.

Paid off my debts to the man, which looking back were really just pennies compared to student loans these days, but $10,000 was an impossible amount of money to me back then.

Worked at a few odd companies doing web work and marketing strategy when I had an opportunity to start my own company with some guys. Sold my share after a few years for a couple of reasons, but they're still carrying the torch out in Nevada. I ended up with a shit-load of business experience and a big network and was able to parley that into some neat web and digital marketing positions.

Working at a pretty neat agency right now. I teach kids how to code on my Saturdays. Finally felt like I had my feet under me, so I bought a house. Not a total fixer-upper, but it needed a lot of work and all I pretty much talk about now is some random dad project I'm working on.

A year after I buy the house, boom. Global pandemic and recession. Fuck me, right? Luckily, I can work from home, so... Things could be a lot worse for sure.

All in all, 7/10. Not bad.

[Vis]

Ok... this is literally pretty much everything i've done since then.. wall of text ahead..a lot of you know this already im sure

Back in 2007/2008, I was barely around on the internet just because I was so busy with doing a bunch of academic and extracurricular stuff. I was a star cross country runner looking to have a breakout year my senior year. I was looking at top 10 in state easy. I ended up tearing a hip flexor by overtraining. I went to an intensive running camp and I was running with guys from the university of arkansas that could do a 5k in under 15mins. I overtraining and seriously fucked myself up. It fucked me up mentally too. I went from getting As to Cs, I quit a bunch of my clubs, quit the wrestling team, and just worked all the time. I recovered enough to place like 20th in regionals and that was it. I didn't run track that spring.

I went from getting e-mails from DIV I university recruiters to random schools I've never heard of in Montana. Honestly, I didn't give a shit about anything after my injury. I ended up pulling a full ride scholarship at OU with the NROTC program - how could you turn that down? It was my only prospect, even though I really didn't give a shit. I went to OU for a year, got a bunch of Cs and Ds. My GPA was 1.67 lmao. My entire life trajectory had changed. I went from being a boss to getting bossed around all the time by a bunch of bitchy ROTC fucks. It wasn't what I wanted to do and I really couldn't get over that.
Of course, I lost my scholarship. So I was 19 years old and didn't have any idea what I wanted to do. Then I watched the movie Hurt Locker. I decided I wanted to be a Navy EOD and defuse underwater bombs while diving for a living. EOD is spec ops. I trained with SEAL and SWCC prospects. We went through an extra intensive bootcamp (look up 800 division) designed to weed out the weak. Then I went to dive prep, which was incredibly difficult, and dropped out. I wasn't a strong enough swimmer. You have to be SUCH a good swimmer to make it in spec ops. That is never stressed enough. Imagine treading water for an hour with a m16 rifle over your head. If you can't make it the entire hour, you are dropped from the program. There are like 100 tests like this. I wasn't cut out for it and wasn't prepared enough as a swimmer.

So the navy is like aiight, you're kicked out of the EOD program, but you get to choose your next rate. I decided on.... IT. Imagine that - the field that 90% of you guys are in. I went to IT "A" school and became an IT. I was stationed on a destroyer that was out to see ~280 days a year. My job included a multitude of things - IT, help desk technician, sysadmin, and a ton of technical training on all of our different communication suites for internet and voice comms. We worked in a room called RADIO and it's just a room full of like 300 racks of different comms shit. We were in charge of the internet, all the IT shit. A team of 8 serving ~270 personnel. It wasn't too bad. We were out to sea a lot and I went to a shitton of countries. We had a 10 month deployment and hung out around syria a lot in 2013. it was fucked.

I got out of the navy after 4 years to use my GI Bill and go to college. I majored in Geology and Environmental Science. I graduated 1 year ago. Now I am an environmental specialist for a city. also i got married a couple years ago.

Dan - My wife and I were househunting when the whole quarantine shit happened. We decided to stop looking after the DOW dropped a shitton. With a recession expected, we didn't want to end up upside down on our loan. So we're renting for another year -____-. I want a fucking house. I just dont want to pay $250,000 for 1800 sqft and .2 acres. It's stupid expensive here right now.

m3th - sorry i made a gay joke when you came out. dick move prolly


Erik - man i cant wait to have kids. i can agree that you are a lot different than you were back then. i mean, we all are. i think it's mostly a maturity thing, same person, but knows how to act right lol. As far as coke, I was rich there for a while with pinballs, but I was never really in it to make cool studios or collect furni. For some reason, just socializing and fucking with coke was really cathartic for me. In the end, I exploited a ton of accounts and stole their furni. And one day coke shut down my account with everything on it.

Sifter - FUCK TARGET

[Erik]

Originally Posted by Vis

man i cant wait to have kids.

They're honestly a blessing, angels in the flesh, but also demons lol. I wouldn't trade them for anything and they're literally the reason I wake up in the morning and keep going.

And dude, there's no time like the present. I see a lot of people get trapped in that mindset, "I'm just waiting for-", etc. and they end up not doing what they really want to do. I definitely wasn't ready, I don't think anyone ever is, we just think we are and we just find these things that give us a false sense of comfort where we finally say "yeah I'm ready" and in reality you find out it's nothing of what you expected and you were never ready. In other words, just do it bro, have them kids. It's not easy but I swear you will never love anything else the way you love your kid, especially when they call you whatever name you assign yourself for them and they give you a kiss. I would literally die for them. ANGELS.

[Digitalicious]

Congrats on your marriage, Chris. Not married yet, but SO of ten+ years.

I will say, it's nice having projects to work on during COVID. I used to come home after work and sit in my apartment all depressed because it never felt like I was working toward anything. Always wanted to be a homeowner.

I do think it's improved my mental health. I had zero DIY skills and for sure bit off more than I can chew, but you learn quick, and it's a great feeling when you measurably improve part of it.

I feel like I've been given this neat thing that; y'know, now I've got to take care of it, and I have to preserve it and improve it for future generations.

Should be interesting after COVID. Low interest rates, lots of people holding off on selling and buying. Might be a good market to buy in—get more for your money. Who knows?

[Randy]

Gentlemen, definitely take advantage of these low interest rates during these times if you can. Some of the lowest mortgage rates in the last ten years thanks to this virus. I was able to cut an entire percent off my mortgage and refinance my current home loan.

With that being said.. I would definitely say a lot has change since I last posted on here back in 2006. I was a thirteen year old little runt who was extremely over the top and very annoying. It's super embarrassing but funny as hell to go through all these posts I had made back then. With that being said though I did learn a lot at a very young age about coding and HTML/CSS, as well as photoshop/dreamweaver skills that gave me an edge during high school.

I fucked off a lot in high school. Never really gave a shit my first two years and pretty much shit the bed in every class I didn't have a vested interest in. The classes I did excel at were extracurriculars like PE classes, comp tech, web design, and math. Everything else I'd pretty much walk in and put my head down on the desk and take a nap lmao, until my junior year. By then I realized if I wanted a shot at anything after high school that I needed to actually apply myself. It wasn't that I couldn't do it, I just lacked the motivation. Come junior/senior year, I was an honor roll student. Even got decent enough grades to play sports for the school and played varsity tennis my senior year. Graduated in 2012.

My junior year, funny enough, to get out of classes for 4 hours, I went and took the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), which is the test that military recruiters review to see what skills you are qualified for, and ended up scoring very high on it. After graduating though I pretty much knew that college was out of the question for me at the time, just because I didn't make good enough grades to rate any scholarships, and I didn't want to rack up meaningless student loan debt. I pretty much decided I wanted to join the military. I knew I wanted to work in aviation because that was the best bang for my buck, and I enjoyed working with electronics. Not being thoroughly educated on the different branches, I opted for the Air Force, because Air Force obviously has aviation right? Well I put together my package, but if you know anything about the military, it's that the Air Force is pretty much the easiest branch to join, and benefits are pretty much the same across the military, so essentially Air Force recruiters don't even have to try to meet their monthly quota. That was the case with my recruiter, which meant he was never in his office. Next door though, was the Marine Corps recruiting office, and of course they took that I couldn't get my package through to them, and brought me in to discuss my options. Ended up learning about Marine Corps aviation and unhesitatingly opted to enlist with the Marine Corps instead. I was pretty tired of my hometown and wanted to get out and start my life. I ended up leaving for boot camp in Parris Island, SC in November 2012. Became a Marine in February 2013. Went to Marine Combat Training in Jacksonville, NC, then to Pensacola, FL for Marine Avionics Training, then from there to Biloxi, MS to train to become a calibration technician. I was responsible for testing, calibrating, and reparing all aviation test measurement/diagnostic equipment that takes quantitative measurements. Once I graduated I was stationed at a base in New York from 2014 to 2018. It was a reserve base but I was the active duty compartment of it, with my primary duty being to train the reservists that come in once a month. I ended up getting married in late 2014. Rented a small one bedroom apartment in upstate NY but it was perfect for her and I. I got to do a lot of traveling while I was there. I visited Niagara Falls, AirBNB'd in Montreal for a week, got to fly in a helicopter across Rhode Island with the wife, and a lot more. Did a few detachments, mainly to Arizona to support simulated deployment opeations. I performed military funeral details as well. I saw the execution over 60 funerals across the tri-state area in New York, and was the Marine who passed the flag to the next-of-kin. Truly a humbling experience that I'll never forget.

Fast forward to today, and I am still in the Marine Corps as a Sergeant, getting promoted to Staff Sergeant soon. I am proud to be a Marine, and genuinely enjoy mentoring, training and molding Marines to be successful, influential leaders. I couldn't see myself in any other military cloth and am thankful every day that I didn't join the Air Force (no offense to any of you currently in). I plan on going the Warrant Officer route and retiring from the service around 25-30 years. I've been stationed in SC since the middle of 2018. The wife and I bought a home when we came down and couldn't be happier with the choice. No kids, but I do have one adorable golden retriever puppy (which pretty much doubles as a toddler). I am currently on a deployment in Japan, which sounds awesome but considering the coronavirus is a thing now, I haven't been able to go outside of base and truly appreciate Japan at all since I've gotten here. Hopefully things let up soon.