I am not gonna lie. I kinda went into shock when the announcement came that PA was shuttering the online mag and that the forum would go down eventually. When PatB announced it was going down the next day on December 31st it really hit me and hit me hard. That night I could not sleep and was feeling a lot of big emotions. The Forum brought me a community where I felt welcome, challenged, and encouraged. I got better at some things and felt the joy of being able to pass along what I had learned. I made friends. I got my a$$ handed to me a few times when I was wrong and the parties that took me to school out behind the woodshed put it behind us. I know I am a far, far better person today because of the good people that have gently mentored me here.
What I felt On December 30th was grief. I was not just losing someone close to me....I was losing an entire community of people close to me. And not just the people I have corresponded with for years, it's EVERYONE. Everybody's contributions to our community meant so much to me and I was absolutely lost facing the reality that you were now all gone.
Around 2:00 a.m. I got up and opened my laptop. I went back and reviewed my first few years posts and comments. There were some great times, I can tell you. I sent out a lot of private messages to people, a number of whom have not been on the forum in years. It was a Hail Mary play to see if there was any way to maintain those connections. And the next morning when the site was down the grief broke over me like a tidal wave.
When Sleek/Kevin Hawkins called me to tell me that he meant to do everything he could to buy and resurrect this glorious family, I was dumbstruck. Honestly, I didn't think he had a snowball's chance in Rio de Janeiro to pull it off but also understood this was Kevin. He doesn't know better. This was the guy that sent me one of the worst looking bows I have ever seen in a bow trade. Heck, the string was FISHING LINE! To be fair, it shot pretty dang good. The only way I can describe the finish is if you can imagine someone had re-animated Jim Belushi's mouldering corpse and told it to act out a Saturday Nite Live sketch of "SAMURAI BOWYER". And it was just a few years later he got it in his head to compete with the big dogs in the International Flight Bow Competition where he only managed to get off a couple shots and still set a world record! Because he didn't know better. He's like the bumblebee. The bumblebee doesn't know that engineers have studied her intensively and determined that a bumblebee is incapable of flight.
And I, for one, was NOT going to tell that glorious bass turd that there was no way he could buy and resurrect this Forum. So here we are. We are back. Kevin is working on changing some of the features that we all hate, like the popup ads, etc.
He's got one heck of a large job on his shoulders and there is no revenue for him to rely upon to pay for the monthly fixed expenses of keeping us online. He's doing this out of love. But love don't pay the bills. He spent money out of his own pocket to get us here and one way or another I think the will and desire of this community is to make him whole by repaying him. Considering his initial expense, I know we can crowdsource that initial expense (and we will). Not today, but soon.
Stay tuned. Create content. Invite everyone you know to check out the page. And be ready.
