I want to tell you a story. This is a story about a tiny forum that became something entirely else. I have discussed the forum before and discussed the website as well. (here and here) The original website was a place for me to post a movie titled, Shoo Doggie Shoo. To those that were part of Sims Online Stratics, you know the story about that. I created a forum to post some other of my work online. It was just a place to share my writings and other works. I added in some forums and let it go. It started to become an alternative to ‘stratics.com’. A group of us (the lemmings) become like a family and since this ‘war’ had broken out, we took it to the extreme and did just that. We made it a war.
Back in 2004-2008, I took to the air and was a dj online. Those four years were amazing. I had so much fun. I always said I would get back in to it but never actually took the step forward. I was to start a new station with a friend but I started working longer hours, dedicating my life to my blog and late night yahoo chat. I just shoved the online deejaying job aside. Maybe I should get back into it. Who knows. I say that now but next week or even tomorrow, I’ll forget about this and not attempt it at all.
How did you get to be a dj online?
Good question! I mentioned before how I played an online game, “The Sims Online“. Great game. Anyway, I was playing the game one day and there were players shouting out song lyrics and thanking a person in the house for playing a certain song. It took a minute to discover she was streaming music online and the other people were tuning in. I clicked the station. If I recall, I believe the station was called “Fusion Radio”. I filled out an application for the station. It sounded like a fun thing to do. I have tons of music. I have good taste in music. Few days later, I was contacted and a test date was set up. I already had a microphone. I had music. I just needed a certain software to get the streaming going. Everything worked. I was in. I picked a few days I would dj on. The only downside to this station was I had to create a specific online handle (yahoo instant messenger) to dj from. It wasn’t such a big deal. I just had to place “dj” in front of my name. I just they wanted people to know I was a dj and not just a random nobody. This brought me to having two different yahoo handles. It caused issues when trying to read mail or message friends. I had to pick one to make my main name. I picked the dj one.
After months of this, the station changed formats. We were really allowed to play whatever we liked. I played it all. The station quickly dropped those not interested in just doing heavy metal. I was out of a job. The dj’ing bug was still with me. I wanted more. I jumped on the games forums and did a search for “radio stations”. I found one called, “ROFL radio”. Maybe not the best name. Okay, it was a pretty sh***y name. But I went with it. I was allowed to switch back to my old yahoo name. That was awesome. This is where I met Katrina, Chris, and Jendoline. I knew Katrina from game. She was friends with people I eventually became good friends with. Katrina was amazing. She even knew about the movie “Mr. Boogedy“.I met others but these three were good friends. Jendoline and I hit it off pretty well. We clicked. Before her and I arrived at the station, is wasn’t wildly popular. They were just a little station in the corner of the web. Just like my blog. Not wildly popular but I am here. Enjoying the space I have on the world wide web. Jendoline and I brought listeners to the station. I wasn’t really wanting to have a “role” with the station. I forgot what title I was given but I was given a little power at the station. Nice and all, but I really just wanted to play music and have fun. I already had responsibilities at work. Don’t overload me.
Before Jendoline arrived, I had fun with doing what I do best. Drinking. I got some strange idea one day to broadcast on the air and drink as I deejayed. Not the wisest decision I ever made but it made for some good comedy and listeners. One of my highest listener counts. I recorded the show. Not sure how much I drank. According to the file I have saved, I only lasted about 2 hours. Not sure how much I drank before I went on air and not sure how much I drank while on the air. What I do remember is, I called people. I yelled. I swore. I spilled drinks. Even my good friend, G-Rock got in on the action. It was quite the night. I edited the file and broke it down into 14 different files. Below are a few of them. These are probably the cleanest out of them all.
(NOTICE: NOT SAFE FOR WORK. DO NOT PLAY THESE FILES WITH CHILDREN PRESENT. DON’T PLAY THEM AROUND YOUR BOSS.)
While at ROFL, Jendoline and I created a segment we called, “Upcoming Artist”. Jendoline was really the one who found them. I helped with the interview and the recording of the interview. We interviewed a number of people. Our first interviewee, was a teenager out of California. His name is Ronnie Day. A very talented artist. Here a little bit of his interview here. Check out his site. Grab his CD. You can get it at Amazon.com.
Besides interviewing Ronnie Day, we talked with “Milton and the Devil’s Party” and “The Hamptons“. The interviews are saved but due to limited space, I am not posting them. I can send you them if you like. The interviews were always fun to do. The idea started strong but after some time and I am not sure really why, it just stopped.
Jendoline and I had a great time at ROFL. I cannot recall what happened but she was “fired”. Hard to be fired from a job you don’t really get paid for. The ROFL family was worried that with her leaving I was going to leave to. I assured them that I wasn’t. But I did. This was back in 2005. I recorded my last show at that station. The show that night started out like normal. I started with some R&B. I jumped into some rock and roll. Mixed in some country. Then after a few hours, I switched it up a bit and started to play songs that told them basically, “I’m effin’ leaving.”
A pretty good selection I have to say. Jendoline and I bailed on the station and went out to create our own. I will talk about that in the next part of my online deejaying days. Hands
down, the greatest time I had working for an online station. Besides running my own online forums (pitweston.com), this was number 2. Sadly, I shut down my forums. I mentioned in a previous post that I still have the SQL file on my hard drive. I just don’t know if it is even possible to bring it back to life. Not to reopen the forum for posting but just to take a second look at the craziness that went on at the forums. Maybe a whole blog post will be dedicated to the crap we pulled while on the forums. When I quit the station, I had the idea of recording the entire show and playing it with me not on air. I had a file I was going to play at the end of the show but with me not pre-recording the show, I never got to use the file. Here it is.
I eventually felt the need to create yet another movie. It was going to be a sequel to the first, “Shoo Doggie Shoo”. I guess I couldn’t really call it a sequel. I was going to base the movie off of my site and those people who had a place in the hidden forums titles, “Those We Hate”. The movie was titled, “Shoo Doggie Shoo II: Riding the Ban Wagon”. It was going to have a central plot. I was going to take different people, different posts and stories, and mold them into one story. You’d be surprised at how well everything was going to work so smoothly. I mean, take an alien invasion, a superhero, soap, Jesus, and a gang of misfits, toss in a few robots and you have a movie.
I never finished the movie. I never even got very far with it. I do have some of the files saved. I still have documents written out about how I wanted the movie to play out. Below is a trailer to the movie. I wish I got to finish this one. I bet it would have been epic. I mean these people already hated me and everyone else on my site. It’s not like it was going to matter. I mean, what can they really do?
One poster in particular was on a mission to shut my site down. He was hell-bent on getting me in trouble. I believe he said he either contacted the FBI or was going to contact the FBI. Either or, nothing happened. You people across the pond are some crazy mofo’s. Thank you to a friend down under for showing this guy for the liar he really was. You rock, Bundean!
I can honestly go on for hours about everything that went on within my little corner of the web. It was a pretty wyld ride. Eventually, the site had to close. It had a great run. It was well over 30,000 posts. It should be more but I eff’ed up one day and deleted it all. But we took it with a grain of salt and went on hating. I still kick myself over that. With the closing of TSO and the dust settling, I made the hard choice to close my forums. A sad day it was. I have the database file still. Not sure if it will ever work. Would I like to see my site again? Hell yeah, I would! I would love to relive some of those memories. We were a pretty funny bunch.
I should thank everyone. Thank you, April, Tyler, Jackie, Kami, Corp, Natalie, TJ, Heidi, Joey, Brian, The Peterson’s, and everyone else who I forgot to mention. That time of my life will always be cherished.
I had to host the movie somewhere. It was too long to post on Youtube. I ended up buying a domain name and server space. I dropped the movie on Google Video (it’s no longer available) and embedded it on my site. After a month or two of the site sitting empty, I felt like adding a forum to it. My forums were to be a place for me to post videos and stories I wrote and have discussions about life, television, currents events, and even to let off some steam.
The site grew beyond anything I expected. I had no real rules to the forums. I let people speak their minds and say what they wanted, even if they used words not deemed suitable for young viewers. Before long, the official TSO message boards (stratics as it is called) said my forums can no longer be linked from post on their site due to the content on mine. To circumnavigate around this, I hid the forums to any non-member. It was a way also to force people to sign up and see what all the fuss was really about. As I said above, I had no rules to m site. But eventually, people who I didn’t care for began to sign up. They weren’t interested in the site itself, they just wanted to see if they were being talked about. Truth be told, you probably were. I eventually made a mock up of rules.
RULES OF CONDUCT
1. While making old topics will be brought up about the earlier version of Pit.Calm, further discussion about how you miss it, how much cooler or more active it was, is not permitted. Discussing past events that are relevant to the topic on hand, or totally off topic is okay to mention.
2. Each forum on the internet is different in some way. Some talk about sandwiches and some talk about video games. This is an open discussion forum. Anything and everything can be discussed within these walls as long as they don’t conflict with Rule 9.
3. Everyone is welcome to post here. Posters here may not respect your views and some people might not even respect you. If you don’t like that, or feel the idea of being trolled or being called a name is lame or cruel, I suggest you don’t continue on the .calm journey. Please find another forum. I have my rules and other forums have their communistic rule.
4. Discussion of online scamming is never to be discussed. Discussion of the scamming crusade, will be locked and placed in the appropirtae locked forum. Please keep all scamming discussions to PMs or go find a website just for that.
5. Lurking about the forums and not being part of the discussion, gives many people rage. Rage is not something that goes over well here. It is not being said that you post and live on .calm, thought many do, a simple hello or hi, or whatever else people say in greeting would be nice.
6. Lame attempts at trying to disrupt the board or posters, will not get you banned. No one gets banned from .Calm. You get limited. If you don’t know what that means, I suggest you try it out.
7. This is not a site to promote the sales of online goods. I don’t care how much Jesus went in to the making of the soap. The posters at .Calm are more in to body wash. Soap has been proved by scientist to not only wash away dirt but also sins.
8. Your opinions matters slightly.
10. Rule 9 is not mentioned in the RoCs. While, we do our best to not have rules, sometimes you need them. Sometimes a few rules may not be mentioned. This is the safety net to .Calm. If it is felt that your actions are in poor taste or just not found funny, smart, etc…rule 9 will be drawn on you. Respect rule 9. It has been the most broken rule on pit.calm.
11. Drama lies within. Hate lies within. If you don’t want to stress youself out, stay the hell out. If you need to vent or whatever, I suggest you join the poster group and do so. Please be aware that doing this can and probably will conflict with a numbers of the following rules.
12. For good measure, don’t be a fucking dumbass.
You’d be amazed by people. How many times have people said to you, “I don’t care what people say about me.” You know what? People do. To those that said it, I am 100% certain you had a hate thread. Yes, I had hidden forums. Those who had access to it were people I trusted. This group became known as “the lemmings”. We had love threads too. We had post about our plans to infiltrate the stratics network. We found their hidden forums and saw them discussing us, like we were discussing them. Every so often, a fellow Lemming was banned from stratics. But using their savvy internet knowledge, they found their way back on the boards. What was our crowning achievement?
Back in early 00’s, I signed up to play the game, The Sims Online. I have been a fan of the offline game since its’ release. Sadly, the online version never met the expectations the game itself did. For those that did play, we enjoyed it. I’ll admit, towards the end (before the game was cancelled), I grew tired of it. I had my reasons. I am sure many of the players did. The game lacked updates, we were told of future features to come that didn’t, and how repetitive the game became. Once you maxed out your skill level, there was nothing else to do. Sure it was a social game but there is only so many times you can play “skill till you drop” and have “pee parties’.
When I first started playing, I kept to myself. I rarely went out to make friends. But play a game for 5 years, you’re bound to create friendships. I still am friends with some of those players today. Aside from the antics I had within the game, I found enjoyment on the official message boards of The Sims Online (TSO). Again, I posted seldom at first but as time went on, I was a little more vocal. Not much being vocal about what I wanted the game to be but nonsense sort of things.
One post on the board became a legend of sort. A poster by the name of, Kari started it. Late one night, she posted about a man trying to kidnap her. She went on to discuss how he drowned her friend in a lake and that she was next. During this ordeal, she posted about it. She fended him off with a stick. Before long, the thread was locked and she went into hiding. Either she hid or the kidnapper story was real.
Jumping away from TSO, I also am a fan of management games. Games such as, Roller Coaster Tycoon, SimCity, and The Movies. The Movies was a game where the player managed a movie studio. You hired actors, wrote scripts, publicized the movies, and even had the tools to create movies within the game. I like to think of myself as creative, so this tool was perfect. I made a few movies, one which is already published on here. You can watch it here.
I was feeling creative one night and thought, why not create a movie based on the post Kari made. And so I did. I will admit, it was a tedious process. Lots of editing went into the making of this movie. I asked fellow posters to help out with movies. I went as far to add inside jokes to the movie. The movie finished off to about a length of 30 minutes. Was it a success? I like to think so.
start a new station with a friend but I started working longer hours, dedicating my life to my blog and late night yahoo chat. I just shoved the online deejaying job aside. Maybe I should get back into it. Who knows. I say that now but next week or even tomorrow, I’ll forget about this and not attempt it at all.
