Thank you. That seems like a good way to open this, and for those who can't hold attention, I warn you now this is going to be long and quite rambling, so proceed at your own peril.
The Black Iron Prison. The BIP.
I got the email yesterday announcing that the board is going tono the board isn't closing down, wrong way of phrasing it. The inmates are planning one final escape and either be successful or die trying.
Over time I have grown quite fond of you guys, so I don't want to see it go down in gunfire and riots, so on October 30th I hereby decree clemency and am commuting all sentences to time served in full.
On that note, I plan on hanging here that evening ( 7ish PST till whenever )so if anyone cares to join me or spread the word that there will be one last posting session before the doors are welded open, feel free.
After October 30th I am going to lock up all the forums except for the Courtyard, and only leave one thread open for people to drop in and say hi, let us know how your life is going, because I think that is worth doing.
So yeah, for a whole day I have been thinking about this place, and not sure how to sum up what it meant and still means to me. Sure, it's just a message forum, but it is a whole hell of a lot more than that to me and obviously to a lot of other people over the last 6 years. And 6 years in internet history is a long ass time. Shit, 6 years is thus far my entire internet history.
September 30, 2001 quite literally marks my first day on the internet ever. Period. Same day I signed up to ezboard in search of game guides for Silent Hill 2 after clumsily searching via alta vista. How odd, google was barely a blip then and alta vista was the preferred choice by people then, now google literally helps power a city and sells electricity to it. That's a long way to come in 6 years.
I had to sign up for an account to ask questions and had to sign up for an email account to do that, so to hotmail I went, made waynemanor23@hotmail.com and like a newbie I made my user name the same.
And being an artsy type I immediately thought "this board I'm on looks sucky, it says I can make one for free, and fuck I got more to say than these whiny gamer guys so why not".
So I sat and thought about it for a while and checked out other boards and got a feel of it for a month and finished Silent Hill 2 in the meantime and October 30th 2001 I said "alright, some wacky open conspiracy/sci-fi homage to Phillip K Dick, this shit will be simple" and hit submit and then fumbled with laying out forums all day.
I didn't even know how to copy and paste. I'd literally write down all the urls longhand on paper. Good grief lol.
I'd write the hex codes for the colors down on paper to learn them better. I was like a caveman big time. And I proclaimed myself warden of the site and got it all together with the wack spacescape style offered as one of the ten choices from ezboard and began searching for likeminded places to spam. Somehow I learned the concept of spam before cut and paste.
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeah.
And that somehow led to Custer1 showing up and he helped me massively figure out how to set shit up, properly go about getting people here and was just an awesome source of advice and inspiration for the direction and formation of the boards since day one. I've sung your praises a million times a million ways here man, but you have no idea the debt I owe you.
I have a pretty short attention span when it comes to things that I find frustrating and the internet didn't necessarily appeal to me as something I needed to be on, so if I wouldn't have gotten any help on it I probably would have said fuck it, it's not worth the time and done something else, but you helped me stick it out and gave me the right directions to begin looking to figure out how to change the graphics which in my mind was a must do thing.
I hated going around and seeing 100 other boards with the same layout as mine.
While I figured that out people began showing up, and even better yet, staying once they showed up.
An then I put you guys all through animated gif hell for a while I figured it out, but nobody was a dick and everyone who was around gave advice and offered suggestions and the little community that grew here was just cool. So supportive and open minded and just fun.
This board also helped me come a long fucking way, there is no doubt about that in my mind at all.
It helped me get through a nasty point when I had, let us say, developed the art of drinking in excess to a pretty mind blowing level and had to quit for a while to get my shit together. If I didn't have this place and you guys to come to after work, I doubt that would have stuck. And by doubt, I mean I know it wouldn't have.
I still drink from time to time, but not like I did right before I made this place. I partied like a rock star minus the annoying responsibility of a band and the career. In fact I partied with some rock stars here and there who were put to shame by my excessive revelry, and when people like that are saying you need to slow down, well, something's wrong lol.
The times I've gotten really drunk since then have actually led to me posting some hilarious shit on this board. I wouldn't have been around for a month or more and suddenly show up in the sexual deviancy forum asking for advice on how to procure the services of a hooker
"lol i got reallllly drunk a few nights ago" yeaaaaaah more like at the time I posted lol.
Or posts just of pure gibberish. Good times *sigh*
It also got me over my contempt of the concept of digital art. I was a traditional painter snob and thought only bullshit fake art with some magical make cool shit button was the way it was done.
That led me to going to school which pulled me further away from the party lifestyle that I needed to move away from which helped me grow massively as an artist. Just kicked open a whole new door that I didn't know existed, and next thing I know I'm learning poly editing in 3D less than 2 years after saying digital art was for no talent hacks. Now it's all I work in primarily. Go figure.
It helped me through a shitty break up, a couple serious losses within my family, and let me rant about anything and everything I wanted to rant about.
But more than that it led to a lot of fun. You guys have always been just a funny fun bunch of people to shoot the shit with. And god, shit like the board wars with Sister Elsa and Razor88? rofl!! Raise your hand if you remember that. That whole thing is something I still randomly think about to this day and probably always will. Just too damn funny.
And the nights of trolls and spammers and all the horridly huge security loopholes the script kiddies would find to go bomb boards with and staying on the site till dawn for fear that someone was going to come wreck the place if you weren't there to stop it.
I remember telling friends I couldn't go out with them since there were trolls on the loose and they wanted to fuck up my board and them looking at me like I was nuts since it was just the internet. But this wasn't just the internet, it was and still is home in a lot of ways and fuck that shit if I was going to trade going out for food and coffee in exchange for letting some douche bag come spam our home into nothingness.
Plus the prison humor. God, how could you not love that? The whole semi pompous intelligentsia approach I initially envisioned faded quickly as the place just gathered funny characters and the idea of sitting around and being all lofty and intellectual about conspiracy theories faded and gave way to just talking about whatever the hell you wanted to and adding the odd prison element to it.
THE HOLE. RECREATIONAL FACILITIES. THE COURTYARD. All the dropped soap jokes. Sexual favors to get more freedom. Plans of escaping. The bumbling warden. Alligators in the moat and sewers. The awesome initiation threads in RECEIVING AREA.
SEXUAL DEVIANCY, always good clean fun :D Custer's Den of Innocent Endeavourwas never quite sure of that one=p ( Incidentally I now have a cat named Custer which was not intentionally named after you but maybe the subconscious was there. Maybe I'm subconsciously saying I think you are a pussy? lol just kidding man ) Dracul's Dungeon. It all just kicked some ass.
And what old school BIP'er can forget the unholy terror that was trapperjfc and his venom fueled rants! I'm avoiding trying to name too many names otherwise I'll forget people, like bigbrat and nastybeast and warlock and bladerunner and everyone else old and new and in between. Lunaristenebrae, d3vilsadvoc4te, dyerseve, ethanstrass, 1inchpin, azhrialilu, borachio27, car924, catlady477, dalistorm and her fucked up randomness and beautiful insights into life,. Darthanimal, djlicious, dthsmrf, jazzibunny, the new blood justsmith who I never really got to know but obviously kicked some ass here helping run shit, kissofanangel, kiragreystar, magicmanfromfairyland and his odd aussie wit, mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmminxy and her minxy ways, psexypsychic, sahjaneno1, smokeyhaze, staringwolf, swampiebartender, syrinx23, wednesdaymorning and how could I not mention the legendary spammer troll from hell easybios and all his myriad aliases.
Yeah I had to hit up the list, and if you aren't on this list it doesn't mean I didn't like you, just means I wanted to toss an extra thanks to these people for really sticking it out here and for turning the amps up to 11. And for shivving all the prags and making them drop the soap. You guys rule.
I left someone else off this list though, because like Custer, she had an impact on me and my life that I have never and probably will never be able to put into words, and I've taken a couple shots at it before and probably will try a couple more times.
That would be Uma aka Umaeril, aka she of the Gates of Horn and Ivory which in many ways was like a sister board to this one. It existed well before mine and is still going on, but that is the state of the world of dreams.
But early on I met her, her board and her world and a connection was made there. Stylistically the boards were a good pairing. Gates of Horn and Ivory with, implying a white, dreamlike essence, and its weird dark shadow, The Black Iron Prison. The yin and yang in a lot of ways. Much like Custer she was an early mentor in all things online and ezboard and helped me out massively.
But beyond that she said one thing that has shaped my life more than anything else. She said "You should check out deviantART.com and go post your work there". Maybe not word for word since I can't find the actual post, and believe me I've looked for it, but that was the gist.
And it led to my dream job. Not many people can say that let alone pinpoint the exact moment in time that that one crucial thing happened that put them on that course. But I most definitely can and it was here on the BIP.
I checked it out but pretty much decided my work sucked too much at that point ( late 2001 ) to try and post there but she told me that I should and that I was up to par so I joined there in December 2001 under the same good old moniker, waynemanor23 but I didn't really get into it much at first, but kept coming back.
I had this place to come to and besides, uploading art still sort of confused my newbie ass lol. But something stuck and I got more active there once I found some confidence with the digital medium, and well, 2 years of being involved there I ended up on staff as a volunteer, then paid 8 months later, then in 2005 I became the Acting Director of the print department, and end of that year I took over as Director of Community Development.
By this point the site had 4 million members and over 30 million pieces of work submitted to it. I was in charge of a ton of volunteers who had been pretty directionless since the guy before me, well, he's not around and I have his job now and he was a co-founder of the site, so I think that speaks for itself.
But from there I revamped it and now have 3 solid teams under me, manage 6 paid staff, have overseen massive policy changes, met with insane high powered lawyers to make sure shit was being done right for now 5.5 million and counting artists, and am surrounded by art and creativity every single second of my day.
We just hit number 51 rank wise on alexa today. Fifty fucking one. That means on the whole damn internet as of today there are 50 sites who do more traffic and have more clout than we do, and we've We get 45 million pageviews a day. We have more art than anywhere else and crazy ass people. Never advertised anywhere, promoted or whored it out.
For an artist the best fucking thing you can do is make a career out of working in the art world in any way. It's a bitch of an world to get into on any level, be it via being a gallery artist, a curator, a museum janitor or anything at all. And to me this has never once felt like work.
I'm not rolling in cash, but I do okay. Much better than I ever thought I would be when I was a poor ass welfare kid being moved from house to house every year as a kid. Dropping out of highschool and doing some pretty shady shit to turn a buck for many years.
It got me out of Wisconsin which was one dead end after the other and out in LA where a freak like me can breathe easy and not get hassled for being "weird".
And I've gotten to be a big part of that for 4 years now thanks to the BIP and Custer and Uma and all you guys I can honestly say I've found my dream job, the shit I want to do till there's nothing left to do there anymore and move on to my own things and I know exactly how fortunate it is to be able to say that.
So when I say this place changed my life I don't say that lightly and I don't say it to sound overly sentimental, even though I am pretty damn sentimental right now. I say it because it's the absolute truth.
So to Custer1 and Uma and all you guys, from punks to lifers, prags to bad asses, to those of you who joined after I left and kept this place alive, I lift my Guinness and say thank you, don't drop the soap, and I wish you all the best, because the best is what I found here.
Thank You 23 Times Over,
Richard Hartley aka waynemanor23
Warden-BIP
The Black Iron Prison. The BIP.
I got the email yesterday announcing that the board is going tono the board isn't closing down, wrong way of phrasing it. The inmates are planning one final escape and either be successful or die trying.
Over time I have grown quite fond of you guys, so I don't want to see it go down in gunfire and riots, so on October 30th I hereby decree clemency and am commuting all sentences to time served in full.
On that note, I plan on hanging here that evening ( 7ish PST till whenever )so if anyone cares to join me or spread the word that there will be one last posting session before the doors are welded open, feel free.
After October 30th I am going to lock up all the forums except for the Courtyard, and only leave one thread open for people to drop in and say hi, let us know how your life is going, because I think that is worth doing.
So yeah, for a whole day I have been thinking about this place, and not sure how to sum up what it meant and still means to me. Sure, it's just a message forum, but it is a whole hell of a lot more than that to me and obviously to a lot of other people over the last 6 years. And 6 years in internet history is a long ass time. Shit, 6 years is thus far my entire internet history.
September 30, 2001 quite literally marks my first day on the internet ever. Period. Same day I signed up to ezboard in search of game guides for Silent Hill 2 after clumsily searching via alta vista. How odd, google was barely a blip then and alta vista was the preferred choice by people then, now google literally helps power a city and sells electricity to it. That's a long way to come in 6 years.
I had to sign up for an account to ask questions and had to sign up for an email account to do that, so to hotmail I went, made waynemanor23@hotmail.com and like a newbie I made my user name the same.
And being an artsy type I immediately thought "this board I'm on looks sucky, it says I can make one for free, and fuck I got more to say than these whiny gamer guys so why not".
So I sat and thought about it for a while and checked out other boards and got a feel of it for a month and finished Silent Hill 2 in the meantime and October 30th 2001 I said "alright, some wacky open conspiracy/sci-fi homage to Phillip K Dick, this shit will be simple" and hit submit and then fumbled with laying out forums all day.
I didn't even know how to copy and paste. I'd literally write down all the urls longhand on paper. Good grief lol.
I'd write the hex codes for the colors down on paper to learn them better. I was like a caveman big time. And I proclaimed myself warden of the site and got it all together with the wack spacescape style offered as one of the ten choices from ezboard and began searching for likeminded places to spam. Somehow I learned the concept of spam before cut and paste.
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeah.
And that somehow led to Custer1 showing up and he helped me massively figure out how to set shit up, properly go about getting people here and was just an awesome source of advice and inspiration for the direction and formation of the boards since day one. I've sung your praises a million times a million ways here man, but you have no idea the debt I owe you.
I have a pretty short attention span when it comes to things that I find frustrating and the internet didn't necessarily appeal to me as something I needed to be on, so if I wouldn't have gotten any help on it I probably would have said fuck it, it's not worth the time and done something else, but you helped me stick it out and gave me the right directions to begin looking to figure out how to change the graphics which in my mind was a must do thing.
I hated going around and seeing 100 other boards with the same layout as mine.
While I figured that out people began showing up, and even better yet, staying once they showed up.
An then I put you guys all through animated gif hell for a while I figured it out, but nobody was a dick and everyone who was around gave advice and offered suggestions and the little community that grew here was just cool. So supportive and open minded and just fun.
This board also helped me come a long fucking way, there is no doubt about that in my mind at all.
It helped me get through a nasty point when I had, let us say, developed the art of drinking in excess to a pretty mind blowing level and had to quit for a while to get my shit together. If I didn't have this place and you guys to come to after work, I doubt that would have stuck. And by doubt, I mean I know it wouldn't have.
I still drink from time to time, but not like I did right before I made this place. I partied like a rock star minus the annoying responsibility of a band and the career. In fact I partied with some rock stars here and there who were put to shame by my excessive revelry, and when people like that are saying you need to slow down, well, something's wrong lol.
The times I've gotten really drunk since then have actually led to me posting some hilarious shit on this board. I wouldn't have been around for a month or more and suddenly show up in the sexual deviancy forum asking for advice on how to procure the services of a hooker
"lol i got reallllly drunk a few nights ago" yeaaaaaah more like at the time I posted lol.
Or posts just of pure gibberish. Good times *sigh*
It also got me over my contempt of the concept of digital art. I was a traditional painter snob and thought only bullshit fake art with some magical make cool shit button was the way it was done.
That led me to going to school which pulled me further away from the party lifestyle that I needed to move away from which helped me grow massively as an artist. Just kicked open a whole new door that I didn't know existed, and next thing I know I'm learning poly editing in 3D less than 2 years after saying digital art was for no talent hacks. Now it's all I work in primarily. Go figure.
It helped me through a shitty break up, a couple serious losses within my family, and let me rant about anything and everything I wanted to rant about.
But more than that it led to a lot of fun. You guys have always been just a funny fun bunch of people to shoot the shit with. And god, shit like the board wars with Sister Elsa and Razor88? rofl!! Raise your hand if you remember that. That whole thing is something I still randomly think about to this day and probably always will. Just too damn funny.
And the nights of trolls and spammers and all the horridly huge security loopholes the script kiddies would find to go bomb boards with and staying on the site till dawn for fear that someone was going to come wreck the place if you weren't there to stop it.
I remember telling friends I couldn't go out with them since there were trolls on the loose and they wanted to fuck up my board and them looking at me like I was nuts since it was just the internet. But this wasn't just the internet, it was and still is home in a lot of ways and fuck that shit if I was going to trade going out for food and coffee in exchange for letting some douche bag come spam our home into nothingness.
Plus the prison humor. God, how could you not love that? The whole semi pompous intelligentsia approach I initially envisioned faded quickly as the place just gathered funny characters and the idea of sitting around and being all lofty and intellectual about conspiracy theories faded and gave way to just talking about whatever the hell you wanted to and adding the odd prison element to it.
THE HOLE. RECREATIONAL FACILITIES. THE COURTYARD. All the dropped soap jokes. Sexual favors to get more freedom. Plans of escaping. The bumbling warden. Alligators in the moat and sewers. The awesome initiation threads in RECEIVING AREA.
SEXUAL DEVIANCY, always good clean fun :D Custer's Den of Innocent Endeavourwas never quite sure of that one=p ( Incidentally I now have a cat named Custer which was not intentionally named after you but maybe the subconscious was there. Maybe I'm subconsciously saying I think you are a pussy? lol just kidding man ) Dracul's Dungeon. It all just kicked some ass.
And what old school BIP'er can forget the unholy terror that was trapperjfc and his venom fueled rants! I'm avoiding trying to name too many names otherwise I'll forget people, like bigbrat and nastybeast and warlock and bladerunner and everyone else old and new and in between. Lunaristenebrae, d3vilsadvoc4te, dyerseve, ethanstrass, 1inchpin, azhrialilu, borachio27, car924, catlady477, dalistorm and her fucked up randomness and beautiful insights into life,. Darthanimal, djlicious, dthsmrf, jazzibunny, the new blood justsmith who I never really got to know but obviously kicked some ass here helping run shit, kissofanangel, kiragreystar, magicmanfromfairyland and his odd aussie wit, mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmminxy and her minxy ways, psexypsychic, sahjaneno1, smokeyhaze, staringwolf, swampiebartender, syrinx23, wednesdaymorning and how could I not mention the legendary spammer troll from hell easybios and all his myriad aliases.
Yeah I had to hit up the list, and if you aren't on this list it doesn't mean I didn't like you, just means I wanted to toss an extra thanks to these people for really sticking it out here and for turning the amps up to 11. And for shivving all the prags and making them drop the soap. You guys rule.
I left someone else off this list though, because like Custer, she had an impact on me and my life that I have never and probably will never be able to put into words, and I've taken a couple shots at it before and probably will try a couple more times.
That would be Uma aka Umaeril, aka she of the Gates of Horn and Ivory which in many ways was like a sister board to this one. It existed well before mine and is still going on, but that is the state of the world of dreams.
But early on I met her, her board and her world and a connection was made there. Stylistically the boards were a good pairing. Gates of Horn and Ivory with, implying a white, dreamlike essence, and its weird dark shadow, The Black Iron Prison. The yin and yang in a lot of ways. Much like Custer she was an early mentor in all things online and ezboard and helped me out massively.
But beyond that she said one thing that has shaped my life more than anything else. She said "You should check out deviantART.com and go post your work there". Maybe not word for word since I can't find the actual post, and believe me I've looked for it, but that was the gist.
And it led to my dream job. Not many people can say that let alone pinpoint the exact moment in time that that one crucial thing happened that put them on that course. But I most definitely can and it was here on the BIP.
I checked it out but pretty much decided my work sucked too much at that point ( late 2001 ) to try and post there but she told me that I should and that I was up to par so I joined there in December 2001 under the same good old moniker, waynemanor23 but I didn't really get into it much at first, but kept coming back.
I had this place to come to and besides, uploading art still sort of confused my newbie ass lol. But something stuck and I got more active there once I found some confidence with the digital medium, and well, 2 years of being involved there I ended up on staff as a volunteer, then paid 8 months later, then in 2005 I became the Acting Director of the print department, and end of that year I took over as Director of Community Development.
By this point the site had 4 million members and over 30 million pieces of work submitted to it. I was in charge of a ton of volunteers who had been pretty directionless since the guy before me, well, he's not around and I have his job now and he was a co-founder of the site, so I think that speaks for itself.
But from there I revamped it and now have 3 solid teams under me, manage 6 paid staff, have overseen massive policy changes, met with insane high powered lawyers to make sure shit was being done right for now 5.5 million and counting artists, and am surrounded by art and creativity every single second of my day.
We just hit number 51 rank wise on alexa today. Fifty fucking one. That means on the whole damn internet as of today there are 50 sites who do more traffic and have more clout than we do, and we've We get 45 million pageviews a day. We have more art than anywhere else and crazy ass people. Never advertised anywhere, promoted or whored it out.
For an artist the best fucking thing you can do is make a career out of working in the art world in any way. It's a bitch of an world to get into on any level, be it via being a gallery artist, a curator, a museum janitor or anything at all. And to me this has never once felt like work.
I'm not rolling in cash, but I do okay. Much better than I ever thought I would be when I was a poor ass welfare kid being moved from house to house every year as a kid. Dropping out of highschool and doing some pretty shady shit to turn a buck for many years.
It got me out of Wisconsin which was one dead end after the other and out in LA where a freak like me can breathe easy and not get hassled for being "weird".
And I've gotten to be a big part of that for 4 years now thanks to the BIP and Custer and Uma and all you guys I can honestly say I've found my dream job, the shit I want to do till there's nothing left to do there anymore and move on to my own things and I know exactly how fortunate it is to be able to say that.
So when I say this place changed my life I don't say that lightly and I don't say it to sound overly sentimental, even though I am pretty damn sentimental right now. I say it because it's the absolute truth.
So to Custer1 and Uma and all you guys, from punks to lifers, prags to bad asses, to those of you who joined after I left and kept this place alive, I lift my Guinness and say thank you, don't drop the soap, and I wish you all the best, because the best is what I found here.
Thank You 23 Times Over,
Richard Hartley aka waynemanor23
Warden-BIP
. 
