Wednesday, May 16, 2007

It's a small world, after all

I found out that a guy I had met a couple of times was intentionally run over on Tampa Road this past weekend. What really makes the situation unusual is that both of the parites involved in the incident were known entities on a forum I used to post to, www.tampaforums.com. Slade posted an entry about it on her blog as well. As far as anyone seems to know, neither party knew the other prior to the attempted slaying.

Apparently party A, also known as "Skittle", had some sort of confrontation with another male at KD's, a dive bar on the corner of Race Track Rd and Tampa Rd near the Pinellas/Hillsbourough County line. Later that night, he sees party B, also known as "Goopster", crossing Tampa Road on his way out of The Round Up, a popular bar that ranks just above dive, which is situated in a strip mall across the street from KD's.

Skittle mistakes Goopster for the unknown party he had strife with earlier in the evening and proceeds to run him over with his GMC Yukon. The damage done puts Goopster into critical condition at a local hospital, where his situation is reportedly improving after a surgery to remove sections of his colon and reconnect the blood supply to his liver. This Skittle character is out on $7,500 bail and allegedly following the relevant thread as it develops on Tampaforums(TF).

While it was a coincidence that both of the involved parties in this tragic incident were TF members, reading the threads developing there and on www.tamparacing.com, a car-related forum that spawned TF a couple of years ago, has reminded me of the "why" I ceased posting to either site with any regularity.

I originally discovered TampaRacing(TR) through some friends in the Subaru scene back in 2003. A couple of them were founding members of the site and at the time, it was all about cars. Things developed and continued to grow, the site got bigger and bigger, and eventually the founders decided that there was a need for an off-topic, "social networking" site. Tampaforums was born. I have to admit that I got sucked in for a while. A few members I knew before the board existed started organizing gatherings and for a while, things were fun. It didn't last forever, but for a year or so, it was good times.

The elections of 2004 rolled around and I became one of the louder/more persistent voices on TF's political debate threads. The amount of time wasted on the interweb arguing my various political positions was ultimately nothing more than pointless, and I regret not finding something better to do with my time.

And that more or less sums up the forum experience for me. Today, TF still appears to be more or less the same environment with the same personalities posting the same material. Some users use the site as a place to find people with which to exchange STDs, others as a place to pretend they are something they're not, while others simply enjoy the opportunity to be anonymously obnoxious. There are some interesting people on the site, but most of them are older users who rarely post these days. After being on that type of forum for any period of time, you come to realize how utterly useless most of the time you spend there becomes. Needless to say, I am not feeling the itch to start posting again. I'll stick to HDForums, where I avoid anything resembling social networking, politics, and hooking up. :)

What does any of that have to do with the two members mentioned above? Not much, though both had reputations on the board. I only crossed paths with 'Goopster' a couple of times and do not remember talking with him much, if at all. Can't recall ever meeting the assailant, but it sounds like he is probably not the kind of guy I'd like to associate with. Hopefully 'Goopster' recovers and 'Skittle' is punished fairly for what he's done. The fact that he is not up on attempted murder charges is amazing to me, but I'm sure those charges are coming. One does not typically run over another human being with a 5,000 pound vehicle without murderous intent. Two lives changed forever, with a coincidental connection across the internets. Interesting stuff...it's an increasingly small world.

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Posted by Erik @ 5/16/2007 10:09:00 AM