The Future of the Downs

[the phantom]

Here's an idea for this thread- how about a few people write their posts like an online article from the future? Something like this-

THE BARROW-DOWNS NEWS
Date: 9/17/07

"This has really gotten out of hand!"

Those were the frustrated words of The Barrow-Wight following today's press conference.

"Those two seem to enjoy putting on this sort of circus act."

"Those two", of course, refers to Feanor of the Peredhil and the phantom, two longtime Barrow-Downs members who have, over the years, been both a blessing and a curse to the famous website.

For those of you that did not keep up with the news over the weekend, it was reported on Saturday that Fea had given birth to a baby boy. One of our photographers managed to get a few shots of the child, and that is when the mayhem began.

Everyone who saw the pictures immediately noticed the child's glowing eyes and preference for black cloaks. Then, our lead reporter on the story did some digging and discovered that Fea and the phantom had secretly met face to face for the first time almost exactly nine months before the birth. Understandably, rumors began to circulate throughout the online community, and in response to the rumors Fea and the phantom announced that they would hold a joint press conference the next day in The Barrow-Downs chat room.

The conference was held at 10:00 AM this morning, but it did nothing to answer the questions surrounding the story.

Fea opened up the conference by saying "My baby does indeed look exactly like the phantom, and yes it is true that phantom has obtained joint custody of the child." Then the phantom added "Everything she has told you is correct, and we have decided to name him either Phantom Junior or The Phantom Who Be Short."

But then, perplexingly, the phantom denied any involvement in the child's birth, and to further complicate things, Fea then announced that she was not the mother of the child, and then they both hastily exited the chat room.

There was an immediate outcry of annoyed confusion amongst other Downers. An outraged Saucepan Man proclaimed "Those two should never be allowed in the same conference ever again!"

Another prominent member, Eomer of the Rohirrim, gave his thoughts on the matter. "I'm not sure what to think. I don't know if they're working together or not. Perhaps this is all a clever bluff?"

But mormegil disagreed, saying he thought it was a double bluff.

"Either way," said Evisse, "This is definitely werewolfish behavior."

Fordim Hedgethistle's only response was "+ + Fea & phantom".

We here at Barrow-Downs News will post further updates as the story develops.

[Feanor of the Peredhil]

9/19/07

Rumors abound that the baby belongs to neither famous 'Downer but is actually a hoax. The child, whose eyes shine like fabled crystals, seems to have a purely evil heart, if any of the rumors are actually true. Feanor of the Peredhil was unavailable for comment, but an anonymous 'Downer close to her has given us some new food for thought. "The child could not possibly belong to Fea as she has spent the last 12 months in a Junior Year Abroad program aboard my pirate vessel The Great Warg, conquering the seas and adding benevolance to my dictatorship."

9/20/07

Photos have been deemed to be the work of Adobe Photoshop 9.3. A search has been activated to discover whose sense of humor this could possibly be.

9/21/07

It has been proven by an in depth experiment with the Barrow Downs Name Genercombineator that The Phantom Who Be Short was simply a joke. Conclusive proof can be obtained when one combines the names "the phantom" and "the guy who be short". One hundred rep points are being offered to the first to discover the identity of the joker.

'Downers are outraged that they were taken in and immediately withdraw their blessings and good will. Burrahobbit responds concisely that "this is the most hilarious thing I've ever seen." Fordim creates a poll to find out once and for all whether this joke was tasteless or hilarious. Bethberry and davem respond that it was neither and there should be an option C) for those who were never taken in at all. Esty submits that the child should have been named Falco. Lush's baby names thread is over-run with spoof submissions along the lines of "Wilwaberry" and "Burrobloquy". The Barrow-Wight issues the following statement: "The joke ends now or Inktomi's Phial of Galadriel will be resurrected faster than Gil-Galad (TTM) in Tol-in-Gaurhoth."

[the guy who be short]

Originally Posted by TGWBS

I predict: The phantom edits the above post to stop it looking like a list thread.

Sort of. It half came true, then!

Originally Posted by Lhuna

We'll see page after page of eleven green boxes in the Member List.

We already have one whole page, so half true.

Originally Posted by Lhuna

As for the near future...HI will be back, along with Mrs. Istarion.

One more point for Lhuna.

Originally Posted by TGWBS

I predict people will click the link in my siggy and decide they want to learn Quenya to better understand Tolkien.

And one for me... see a pattern emerging?

Originally Posted by Eomer of the Rohirrim

Over the next four years SamwiseGamgee and myself will slowly drag The Warg and Warg Rider Appreciation Thread onto an 11th page.

New blood.

Originally Posted by TGWBS

Some men will volunteer to learn Quenya.

I'm winning...

Originally Posted by Fea

Eventually, there will come a time that Eomer of the Rohirrim shall live until the end of a game of WW

And he was a wolf... grr...

Originally Posted by Estel

I better add a prediction onto this: Some day I will play in another WW game.

As a cobbler... sigh.

Originally Posted by Lhuna

I predict that in some future Werewolf game, Eomer will no longer be an ordinary villager.

Lhuna catching up!

Originally Posted by TGWBS

Tgwbs's BDer dreams will start coming back...

The werewolf ones are scary...

Originally Posted by spawn

Werewolvers will start using "Werewolf" as a verb.

Strange how most of the predictions that came true are Werewolf-related.

Originally Posted by Lhuna

There would be so much Werewolf games that a BDer unfortunate enough to be a Seer so many times will eventually have real life dreams regarding the players' roles.

You forgot the Mods, though.

Originally Posted by Nilp

the phantom will realise that this:

You will curse the day you did not do
All that the phantom asked of you.

fits him well, and will turn it into his sig.

Perhaps Sight runs in the family?

Originally Posted by TGWBS

Fordim Hedgethistle will create more polls.

Well, alrgiht, that one was obvious. I won't give myself points for that.

Originally Posted by TGWBS

The phantom will take one look at the reps thread and figure it out.

TGWBS - 4.5 predictions.
Lhuna - 3.5 predictions.
Eomer, Fea, Estel, spawn, Nilp - 1 each.

I hereby appoint myself High Seer of the Downs. Lhuna shall be my UnderSeer, the other five shall be our apprentices...

[Nilpaurion Felagund]

mr. short, could I decline the role of apprentice? My "Sight" just came from a really creepy eye technique and its ability to hypnotise.

[Hookbill the Goomba]

I want to be on that list of accurate predictions! ... I predict that this topic will move onto a Fourth page! Hay I did it!

Okay, back to (possible) reality...

I think that eventually people will return to Barrowdowns.com and start asking Lord Wight to add more themes and make new games as well as updating the barrow comics.

[Durelin]

The Barrow Wight will be knighted for creating The Barrow-Downs.

[the guy who be short]

Hmm, mutinous UnderSeer? Rebellious apprentices? The Seer establishment is crumbling around me...

There will be a game of werewolf in which everybody is a werewolf, werebear, werehamster, wereduck or some other werecritter.

[Gil-Galad]

The new game of Werewolf, Village of Werewolves!

there are werewolves tryingto survive the villagers that are hunting them! a total twist that fails... Were-The Barrow Wight

[the guy who be short]

The love lives of the BDers will get so intricately complex that not even the phantom will be able to comprehend it all.

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

2008: The site is sued by the Tolkien Estate when it becomes clear that the entire Tolkien corpus can be compiled from quotations in The Books. The site is defended by a terrifying alliance of members from the legal profession, and as a side effect the Downs comes to own the rights to every word Tolkien ever wrote. Mithadan's ruthless enforcement of these rights leads to most of the English language becoming unusable for commercial purposes. It is replaced in television adverts by an obscure dialect of Swahili.

2010: A new forum is opened in which students may study for a Barrow degree in Tolkien Studies. Eventually this eclipses all of the world's major universities, to the extent that all of the most respected academics are employed by the Barrow-Wight. Oxford and Cambridge vie in a contest of forged documents as each attempts to prove that it set up the site in the first place.

2013: The Downs is awarded nihil obstat status by the Pope.

2015: Owing to a mix-up at the printer's, the fortieth Harry Potter book consists of two days' worth of logs from the chat room. It is nominated for the Booker Prize, but defeated by Green Thoughts in the Heliotropic Spiral by Eustacia Psmyth. The number of Downs members accessing the site in a single hour exceeds the latter's entire readership elevenfold.

2018: The Re-unification of the Entish Bow finally reaches its conclusion. Owing to the philosophical depth of its closing posts, it forms the basis of a new religion, which is the first to exist only on the Internet. The chief prophet of this cult is Vogonwë Brownbark, and the liturgy consists entirely of rambling doggerel, the commission for writing which makes Diamond18 the richest Downer in history. The entire writing team is excommunicated, and nihil obstat revoked. The site's member list exceeds the length of the electoral roll of Greater London within a month.

2019: The canonicity debate spreads beyond the forum and causes an uprising in Derbyshire and civil war in Switzerland. Eventually the entire world puts aside every other difference in favour of either the reader's opinion or the author's intent. The resultant conflict causes the destruction of several major cities, the collapse of the United Nations and a slight lag in the chat room.

2021: The Best Avatar thread is made into a feature film. It breaks all previous records, but is accused of dumbing down the original by many members.

2030: Sharkû is appointed Professor of Comparative Germanic Philology at the Sorbonne. For some reason he begins to write at least thirty posts a day, and rapidly accumulates the largest count of any member.

2033: The Downs declares its independence from the World Wide Web and becomes the world's first virtual state. Citizens of the Barrow-Downs cease to be subject to the laws of their own countries and instead are required only to observe the forum regulations. A dot-matrix print-out of these becomes the basis of a constitution so convoluted and riddled with inherently contradictory amendments that the word 'Byzantine' is supplanted by 'Downsian' in common English usage.

2525: (if Man is still alive), the discovery of some long-lost back-up discs throws new light on the social history of the early twenty-first century. In particular, Middle-earth Mirth is interpreted as a single composition: an extended post-modernist allegory of the chaos of human existence. It becomes a standard text in the study of English literature, but eventually is dropped from the syllabus when twenty-first-century English is deemed too challenging for undergraduates.
By this time, the English of the forum is studied as a foreign language. The official academic standard has become what we term 'chat-speak', with all SMS abbreviations and most of 1337 having been absorbed into everyday speech. The forum records are well known among senior academics, and are hotly debated in philological journals. One of the most contentious issues is the meaning of Estelyn's personal title.

[Orominuialwen]

9/22/07
It was discovered today that The Phantom Who Be Short hoax was entirely perpetrated by one Hookbill the Goomba. Mr. Goomba, aged 19, who resides in an unspecified location in Britain reportedly confessed to a Barrow-Downs Tribune reporter today that he was the one behind the entire hoax.

"It was a natural next step for me," he is quoted as saying. "For years I'd been altering photos with Photoshop as a source of entertainment for myself and others. After such smash hits as Tol-in-Gaurhoth: The Movie and The Barrow-Wight's book for sale on Amaz.co.uk, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to capitalise on the phantom-Fea rumors. I first contacted the pair, to see if they were interested, then when they said they were, I created the image. The scandal created by its release has been immense fun, but right now I think I'm just going to go back to the quiet life coming up with Crazy Captions."

The Barrow-Wight could not be reached for comment on this new development, but a press conference is expected from him before the end of the week. A Barrow-Downs moderator, who spoke on condition of anonymity denied rumors that The Barrow-Wight was contemplating retirement in light of recent events.

"His Wightlyness has no intention of leaving his post as head of The Barrow-Downs. He has not suffered a nervous breakdown from this scandal, and he has not died and been replaced by a body double. Honestly, I don't know where you people get these ideas," the moderator told the Tribune.

[Lhunardawen]

tgwbs is trying to associate himself with me. And since I am obviously innocent, I think he may be a werewolf pretending to be the Seer. Thus, my vote:

++THE GUY WHO BE SHORT

[Hookbill the Goomba]

Oromin, I actually use Microsoft Image Composer!

[Ainaserkewen]

Aina will once again be a fully functioning and active member of this website...

I'm working on it...

Oh, in 10-15 years some young downer will realise the overall error of the Peter Jackson movies and another set of movie adaptations will immerge totally rejuvenating the Movies forum and bringing hoards of freckle-faced ragscallions to the site.

[Bergil]

somebody's going to confuse me with gil-galad. He wil be yelled at by both of us.

[Gil-Galad]

Originally Posted by Bergil

somebody's going to confuse me with gil-galad. He wil be yelled at by both of us.

aba-butta? thats all i got...

[Glirdan]

I predict that I will eventually understnad Gil. The likeliness of that happening is slim to none.