9/11 on ILX, ten years on

First, a linking to the key threads, though there were other related threads on the day as well:

WORLD TRADE CENTER [Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 1]

NEWSFLASH World Trade Centre NYC is on fire [Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 2]

Terrorist action 11/9/2001 - Thread 3

Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 4

Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 5

Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 6

Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 7

Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 8

Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 9

Terrorist Action 11/9/2001 - Thread 10

Plus the still running reaction/remember thread started soon afterward:

What were you doing when you found out about the WTC?

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For a variety of reasons, I always associate the day with ILX, specifically because it's how I was getting most of my news. After I initially learned about it via the first threads, I caught some of the news on TV shortly before I had to leave for work. I saw a bit of TV footage from a monitor set up in the student center here at UCI on the day, but otherwise I steered clear of radio and TV in favor of cold white backgrounds and black text, very intentionally. I still think of the day this way above all else.

Given how new the overall boards were -- ILM was barely over a year old, ILE only three months -- it may be why everything was felt so intensely as I sensed it, though in the way that certain friendships were already long established outside the boards as opposed to the still being-created community with its own identity. I don't think of it as a galvanizing moment per se but it's kind of a clear step too in my head. Many of us there then are still here, not all.

Nobody had passed on yet who had been regularly on the boards, nobody would for some time. More wrenching losses on that front came later. We were all wondering and venturing our guesses and expressing our fears and waiting.

Every so often I read through these threads, others have mentioned it as well. It's a kind of fixed point of memory that is always available, and now ten years on it feels very very distant to me, for all that it's right there to read. I think I'm glad of that.

i remember it as a day where i was very grateful to have ilx as a release-valve and where i was extremely disheartened by the people around me's reaction to it as it was happening.

of course i had no idea about the several thousand disheartening days to come.

been reading this for the past couple of days http://nymag.com/news/articles/wtc/

Yeah I'm about 1/4 of the way through that NY Mag issue. It's actually quite good.

On the day, I was 4 years from setting eyes on ILX. I was in Gainesville FL and... yeah, all I could do for about a month was consume news, voraciously, insatiably.

(something suddenly o_0 abt all the timecodes: every single post on all threads says 12.00AM)

I just read Thread 3 and was reminded of Ben checking in for the old NYC #sini cru; Mattie writing about the view from his stoop in Jersey City where I smoked so many cigarettes and where I used to live, too; being really drunk on the WTC PATH platform at 2 or 3am that morning coming home from Julie's birthday, so drunk that we might have been smoking cigarettes right there and it seemed like a good idea. Seven hours later, it was no more.

Bless all of them, and you.

I still can't believe that I started the first thread about this.

definitely the most surreal part was pulling off the road with other cars and just standing there with strangers watching the towers burn. it was like there is no standard social or emotional response to follow but this needs to be seen.

mainly what i remember from the day that isn't rediscoverable in these threads is that -- as someone with a good deal of dead-time in my dayjob, time spent on the net -- i knew what was happening a couple of hours before anyone else in my own office (because of ilx), but found myself paralysed when it came to passing the information on: when i did, i mumbled something about "i think there's been some attack in new york" -- but actually i knew a lot more by then

I didn't realize ILX was in its "infancy" at the time. It always feels as though ILX has always been here somehow. I can't remember checking or rather posting to ILX much at that exact time. But I do of course remember 9/11. How can you forget? :-( I remember turning on the telly and feeling guilty for watching it, knowing so many were dying. I remember shouting to my mum "the towers are falling the towers are falling!" :-(

I associate the day/event with ILX too because although I had posted tentatively a few times (on ILM mostly) by then, I was basically just lurking but a massive addict. Subsequently it all went quiet on here for a fair few days (IIRC), and I missed it all so much, that when it came back I started taking part a lot more.

completely forgot about that moment when i knew about the first tower going down before Peter Jennings did. So weird.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6f9Jpfz1Vo

talked to my kids tonight about 9/11. and showed them some video from the time. they had no idea what happened. they knew buildings came down and they had no idea how.

nufucius Is that Gallagher?

ha oops wrong thread