Primer Lounge
From Wiki Gonzalez
The Primer Lounge is a daily thread in the Forums section of Baseball Think Factory. It is designated for all topics non-baseball-related. This includes music, entertainment, TDiH, music, television, literature, music, porn, poker, football, music, rigorous scientific studies, and other things.
The Lounge is open to all registered Primates, and is located under "Primate Soapbox" in the Forums.
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History
Old Primer Era
The Primer Lounge was originally known as "Cheers" and was created in 2003 as a Baseball Primer thread where people could discuss baseball news not linked as its own Primer thread. The idea that Primates could talk about anything they wanted, like at the bar in the famous NBC sitcom, inspired the name "Cheers."
The original Cheers threads were initiated by TangoTiger. His original conception was that the first person to post in a Cheers thread would set the topic for the entire thread. As Cheers threads evolved, however, everyone eventually felt free to chip in with their own topic whenever they wanted.
(Some suggest that the Cheers thread was created so that Primates could discuss material that appeared on for-pay sites like Baseball Prospectus, working around a Primer policy not to link to pay sites. However, this suggestion has not been confirmed, and if true, it is likely only one factor.
(Another common misconception is that the Cheers thread was originally created for non-baseball discussion, as in the early days of Old Primer, it was common for off-topic discussions to randomly dominate a given baseball thread. However, Cheers threads were created to talk about baseball, and for months after their creation, they discussed little else.)
The first Cheers thread (http://web.archive.org/web/20030623072526/www.baseballprimer.com/clutch/archives/00006280.shtml) is dated March 6, 2003, but it is not until the second Cheers thread (http://web.archive.org/web/20030623073821/www.baseballprimer.com/clutch/archives/00006285.shtml) (March 7) that the "Cheers" name was used.
The name was changed to "Primer Lounge" at the suggestion of sjohnny. The first Primer Lounge (http://web.archive.org/web/20031222212829/www.baseballprimer.com/clutch/archives/00009085.shtml) was posted on October 10, about seven months after the Cheers thread debuted.
When the Lounge first appeared under that name, Hugh Hefner popped in wearing a velvet smoking jacket, but, alas, failed in his bid to become a recurring character.
As time passed, the popularity of the Lounge grew to the point where non-baseball discussion began to crowd out baseball discussion. To aid the Primates who wanted to actually talk baseball, a companion Primer Dugout thread was created to accompany each new Primer Lounge thread.
After this change, both the Lounge and Dugout made daily appearances on the hot topics bar alongside regular Primer links, and their threads were archived along with the rest of the Primer threads. This tradition continued after the early-2004 migration from Old Primer to Baseball Think Factory.
Community Blog Era
In fall 2005, complaints about the topics being discussed in the Lounge -- typically blue ones, covering explicit sexual talk or links to nude pictures -- began to reach site founder Jim Furtado in such numbers that several Lounges were closed or had posts deleted from them. Eventually, this led Furtado to make the Lounge archives unavailable, to the consternation of many Loungers who saw the old Lounges as a resource or just a fun diversion. (For more information on the October 2005 Lounge purge, see TOS Enforcement.)
The Lounge and the Dugout also were moved out of Baseball Think Factory to a new area -- or ghetto, according to some critics -- called the Community Blog, which was also designated as the place for posting meetup threads. The Lounge and Dugout threads were now posted as "open," rather than "primer," meaning that they did not appear on the Hot topics bar. While committed Loungers made the effort to continue Lounging, this move is widely blamed for killing the Dugout, which rarely received more than 25 posts a day after the move.
Furtado's concerns about the Lounge weren't limited to complaints about adult content. The chatty nature of the Lounge led to a lot of rapid posting and page refreshing that neither Grey Matter (the software powering Old Primer) nor Expression Engine (powering Baseball Think Factory) were designed for, putting excess strain on the site servers.
Forums Era
On April 22, 2006, Jim Furtado unveiled a Forum section that used software specially designed to handle the typical use in the Lounge. The forums encompassed both Lounge and non-Lounge (i.e. actual baseball) sections; the Lounge section was sealed off from random BBTF visitors, requiring them to register in order to read it.
During the following week, Lounge threads were posted on both the Community Blog and the forums. (J Lεεds (oi!) posted the first forum Lounge on April 22.) This continued until late on the evening of April 27, when Furtado posted a message to the Community Blog saying that the Lounge was permanently moved to the forums. The final Lounge was posted by Vince Galloro and featured lyrics from Nada Surf's "Inside of Love." The last discussion in the Community Blog Lounge was started by Jeff K. complaining that the menu test at Chili's (during his fantastically brief employment there) was insanely and unnecessarily complex. The very last post in the Old Lounge before it was shut off to comments was from Handle's Messiah, quoting lyrics from U2's "Like a Song":
- Handle's Messiah Posted: April 28, 2006 at 12:03 AM (#1993744)
- And we love to wear a badge, a uniform
- And we love to fly a flag
- But I won't let others live in hell
- As we divide against each other
- And we fight amongst ourselves
- Too set in our ways to try to rearrange
- Too right to be wrong, in this rebel song
In the year-plus since the shift, Loungers have continued their regular Lounging, and the Primer Lounge forums are virtually the only forums in active use on BBTF.
Customs
Lounges are posted around midnight, Eastern time every day except Sunday. The Saturday Lounge is dubbed the "Weekend Lounge" and is used for both Saturday and Sunday.
The Lounge thread title should include the date of the Lounge, or (for a Weekend Lounge) the two dates covered by the Lounge.
Discussions that diverge from the original topic inside a baseball thread are often told to "take it to the Lounge," though this has dropped off as Primates have gotten used to the Lounge's existence.
The One Hour Rule, although rarely invoked, is always in effect in a Lounge. Lesser seen customs include First! and Catorce.
For certain newsworthy events, a Special Primer Lounge is created to divert traffic from the regular Lounge. Among these events are Election 2004 and the unmasking of Deep Throat. (This practice has become much less prevalent in the Forums Era.)
A posting practice known as Dialing the Lounge was once controversial but is now acceptable.
The haunting Primer Lounge theme song "Turn the Page" is occasionally heard in quickly moving Lounge threads. In the Community Blog era, the page length (messages/page) was 100, so it was obvious when the page was about to turn. Nowadays, the page length is set to 25 and there's much less of a payoff.
In the Forums Era, any Primate can post a Lounge. The posters who are active at the end of the Lounge day -- typically, just before midnight Eastern time -- are expected to nominate a Primate to post the next Lounge. However, some tend to ignore this custom and post a new Lounge unilaterally, risking the possible shame and embarrassment of duplicate ("dueling") Lounges.
There are varying opinions about avatars and their meaning, and they often serve as a meta-topic within the Lounge.
Loungers often refer to the non-Forums part of Baseball Think Factory as "the mainland" and the Forums section as "the island," a not-so-subtle commentary on the Primer Lounge's estrangement from the rest of BBTF.
Population and traffic patterns
Now that Hugh has left us, the Lounge is populated by lesser primates incapable of substantive discussion beyond the hating of raccoons and the creation of a group (think) diary that chronicles our pathetic lives at the bottom of the food chain.
The Lounge population is generally separated into "Night Shift" and "Day Shift," although some Primates move easily between the two shifts (watch out for the shiftless, though).
The Night Shift starts around midnight Eastern, shortly after the new Lounge has been created. It consists of various insomniacs, night owls, and non-North American Primates. Depending on what's on their minds, traffic can be extremely high or extremely low.
Around 9 AM Eastern, the Day Shift takes over and continues the daily frivolity. Traffic is generally high. For some reason, the latter (afternoon) part of the Day Shift is dominated by the Chicagoland Mafia.
Around 7 PM Eastern, as the day winds down and baseball and prime-time television approach, Lounge traffic slows down and eventually stops.
Also see
- Tips on how to do their jobs from the Lounge
- Helpful life lessons, learned directly from the Lounge
- Archived Lounges
References
- Some research (http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/primer/blogpen_discussion/primer_lounge_weekend_edition_february_12_13_2005/P1600/) from Unfrozen Caveman Cubs Fan on the history of the Lounge. (mirrored here (http://digamma.net/~mark/mirrors/web/btf/64.233.179.104/lounge20050212P1600.html))
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