The end of SONM is just the begining.... Thank you OrangeRakoon

So I have been online both chatting and creating content for a long time now, and when this is true you will see the death and birth and rebirth of quiet a few things. Some things slip quietly into the night others go out with a loud bang and some of them leave a legacy behind. Some of the time while your seeing these things or involved in them you never know quiet how long they are going to go on or how they will end.

I don't want to give a full online history of myself but to put it bluntly I have been around a long time. When I first got the internet it was a screaming dial up mess, I was on several of these email based message boards where you'd get mailed everything that happened and pick and choose what you wanted to reply to in your own leisure. You would write the replies offline and then log back on to send a whole pile of them because it was too expensive to just sit online. I then remember being there for the birth of things like Screw attack, the very first review by the Angry Video Game nerd, the list just goes on and on.

I would join various forums looking for a sort of online home away from home and one of the places I joined was ONM the official Nintendo Magazines forum, I made friends I discussed my interests and I found that I liked the place. Then there was a place called ONM Haven which I found myself drifting to, I become there podcast provider and also began making youtube videos which promoted them, unfortunately that place died all of a sudden with no warning when the person running it just seemed to decide it was to much effort for too little reward. That was a sad day for me but it would go on to help show just how much effort, time and resources others would be able to put into a project.

For the last few years though one of my biggest online homes has been Super ONM a forum which arose from the ashes of the ONM forum thanks to a man called Orange Rakoon. So many people moved across from ONM that at least for awhile its activity exceeded that which had been seen on ONM, things were also handled much better by OR than they had ever been handled in the ONM days. It was an honour to post there and to run my 150 SNES games thread as well as doing my upmost to try and keep the retro section alive with as many posts as I could manage.

The post count might have dwindled over the last year but OR always did his best to keep the place fun, to arrange competitions, to orange things to help us all celebrate Christmas and well he always did his utmost to provide us all with a place to go and things to get involved in. Even now despite his decision to call time on the forum he has worked hard to make sure that this is not the end that instead it provides all of us who are willing with a new beginning. On Sunday the 11th of February the Super ONM forums will shut down and although I will stop and salute its passing this is not the end, as SONM, will be merging with GRcade, offering a new, larger and more active home for everyone. It is easy to just jump on a forum and talk, to debate to make friends, to make enemies even but often all of the work which is done in the background is forgotten and goes without praise. OR has obviously thrown so much in to starting and maintaining SONM so he deserves everyones up most respect and thanks.

I wanted to do this post  both to try and attract people to GRcade and to thank OrangeRakoon for all of his work and for all of his effort. I have added a link to the side of my blog to promote GRcade and I plan to get my behind across there and do all that I can to help push the new home that OR has helped find for all of us SONM'ers. If it had not been for his tireless work then we wouldn't have had SONM after ONM and we wouldn't have GRcade to go to now at least not in the same way.  Thank you OR and thank you GRcade for your warm welcome to all of us old SONM members.

In closing I also wish to say thank you to every one who has been an admin on SONM, as well as everyone who has produced anything for SONM and just to everyone in general for posting there and for making it the fun place it was. I hope to see everyone on GRcade.

''End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.'' J R R Tolkien