About TONMO

Wow, a blog post! It's been ages... But here are some brief TONMO.com updates for end of year 2012:

1) On Sunday, January 27th the Discovery Channel will air Monster Squid: The Giant Is Real, which contains the first-ever recorded video of a living giant squid in situ. By all accounts, from people very close to the event, it should be something worth setting time aside for. Don't miss it!



2) TONMOCON V (the biennial cephalopod ...

A lot has been written about Mark "Monty" Montague since his passing. I am creating this blog post to centralize this input. Rather than reiterate all that has been expressed about this remarkable person and the grief we’ve experienced in his loss, I encourage you to visit the links within this post in order to get the full context of who he was and why he was so important to TONMO.

Mark passed away July 19, 2010 of unknown causes during a scuba diving outing. This came as a tremendous ...

TONMO loves to use smilies; we always have. Good forums make good use of smilies. It's an enhanced way of expressing yourself, akin to gesturing with your hands when you talk. Not everyone does it, but for people who are in a groove, it enhances and deepens the message.

Over the years we cranked out quite a few custom smilies. Most, however, are borrowed, like these:



Et cetera. Some of these borrowed smilies have taken ...

Continued from Part 1

So, by Spring of 2000 I had settled on a title and theme for my site, and I started searching a bit harder for cephalopod resources online in order to better understand the landscape. My objective was to create a destination where people could give and get information about cephalopods – and perhaps just “wonder aloud” (as I often did) about what they do, what they think, and generally what they’re about. I also wanted to share news stories for the community ...

When a Web community has lived as long as we have (TONMO was founded in May 2000), it has a story to tell. Actually, we have a few stories to tell, but I will start here with the story of how TONMO came to be. I get a lot of questions about this, and the Site FAQ just doesn't tell the full story.

Somewhere in the mid-90’s, just a couple years after I graduated from college and early in my career in online services, I decided I wanted to read a book. I wanted to study something that ...