I'll shed some light on the Nubblies' roots and the Grey Period. I'll post a bit more later on some of the other large events that have shaped her throughout her time on Earth.
The Beginnings
Nubblies' beginnings came about because of Active. He ran a now defunct web hosting company at the time (which was originally called Cobalt Connection, and then turned into Blue Optic). Always looking for a good way to make money, he decided he wanted to start a porn site one night. He IM'd me and asked for a good name, and, through that conversation, "Nubblies.com" was born.
Not long after he began his venture, he decided that porn sort of grossed him out (probably just staring at it for hours at a time), and asked if I wanted the domain name. I took it, installed a pirated version of
Ultimate Bulletin Board (super shitty), and told a few close friends. Nubblies was born.
Nubblies.com Becomes Nubblies.net
Because high schoolers are catty assholes, it didn't take long for Nubblies to flourish. Dickhead A would post shit about Dickhead B (even though Dickhead B wasn't a member). Meanwhile, Dickhead B's friend (Dickhead C, a member), would see it and tell Dickhead B...who would get on, talk shit about Dickhead A and Dickhead D. This snowballed consistently for a few months until Nubblies peaked in popularity. Not soon after its humble beginnings, Nubblies talk could be heard in passing conversations in the halls of the high school.
There's a fair chance this would have held steady had it not been for the great domain loss of 2003. In short, the domain expired a year after it was registered and, since Active was the main contact (he still technically owned the thing), I knew nothing about it. The result was it being poached by some other company that buys domains just to put worthless text advertising on them.
Of course, this was terrible timing. Just as quickly as a group of worthless high schoolers can join a message board, they can type the URL, get a "page doesn't exist" error, and completely forget about it. To try to combat this, Nubblies was setup on a different domain to exist in the interim. I think it was greatoast.com, a random domain that Active had previously purchased. This begins the
Grey Period of Nubblies.
Before too long,
it was decided that we needed a Nubblies domain. We made the jump to Nubblies.net and never looked back.
The effect of the Grey Period were long-lasting, though. Being that only a month and a half was left of most of the members' high school careers at that point, many dropped off completely and, upon entering college, never returned. Nubblies' potential sans the Grey Period will never be fully known.