misteraven

Fuck off n00b! LOL! Kidding man... No doubt 12oz was legendary for its hazing back in the day! Suppose we can spin this off into a new thread about how soft the younger generation has become, LOL! I believe you get back what you put into something (usually) and if shit comes easy, it most often gets taken for granted. We actually touch on a bit of it in the very first "Weigh In" thread I started here: http://forum.12ozprophet.com/threads/weigh-in-has-political-correctness-amplified-teenage-violence.148218/ In any case, cool to see you back on two days in a row. Keep at it and you'll be bast the newb stage before everyone else wakes up and save yourself some tormenting.

@Tesseract fuck man, so good to see you posting again. Thanks for sharing all that man. Honestly, I wasn't even aware of some of it. Anyhow, I owe you a proper reply, but also wanted to point you to the a new thread I started on the history of 12ozProphet... You definitely need to chime in over there with some of that back story. http://forum.12ozprophet.com/threads/12ozprophet-history.148224/

@6Pennies Definitely some interesting pints and also, really great to see you make your way over here. We've pretty much agreed, when the conversation came up, that the future of the forum is largely hinged on how successful we are attracting new members. I'm more and more confident in my opinion that people are hungry for more in depth, longer format discussion and have come to believe that social and the forum are really two different beasts. On the surface its easy to think they're two different technological generations of the same general thing. Its more convincing to make that mistake since its often agreed that social replaced forums. My thought now is that though social largely supplanted the longer format discussions found often before social platforms were invented, one really is just a superficial stream of daily glimpses where the other is more often deeper explorations and conversations of very specific subjects. Obviously there's a fair bit of overlap, but I think part of the frustration we see is that we've all (consciously or unconsciously) realized that social is such a superficial version of personal relationships and human interaction. As was first expressed by @diggity social really does cheapen relationships. But no doubt, as you've hit on, it does have a place. Perhaps social will evolve to further infringe on the qualities and features once reserved for online communities like forums, but for now what I see is a ton of fatigue and frustration. Facebook having the essential monopoly with their acquisition of Instagram, I suspect they'll continue the heavy handed, walled garden type approach they've always maintained. Not allowing users to actually see the content posted by people they chose to follow or even show feeds in chronological order is evidence of that. They sell it as *curating* feeds, but really they're looking to optimize engagements and more significantly, create revenue opportunities by prioritizing posts. Not sure they'll ever get away from it as it ruins the business model. For me however, I think its also a very dangerous thing to allow them to work themselves to being the middle men between relationships. They literally manipulate the flow of things and also maintain the power to kick you out of their walled garden whenever they chose. I was locked out of Facebook for many years before I finally managed to sneak back in via a sort of back door created through a business profile I'd setup. Requests for assistance to their technical support were mostly brushed off with meaningless canned responses. Meanwhile I lost access to a bunch of people I'd reconnected with, as well as got locked out of accessing business tools that went from help to essentially critical. Recently seeing dickhead Zuckerberg testify before Congress for his fuckup with unlawfully sharing user data with whatever company was working for the Democratic party and looking to give HRC a leg up, and then he suddenly closes access to Instagram's API's that had been in use for years. So next thing you know, all those analytics companies that helped businesses understand their followers stop working and after that a handful shut down. Its crazy to think that you can spend years to establish a successful business that probably earns millions in revenue and employs dozens, if not hundreds of people and next thing you know its wiped out overnight. All because they put themselves at the mercy of someone like Zuckerberg. Anyhow, those experiences left a real sour taste in my mouth and made me realize how precarious a situation is when you leave it in the hands of a third party that has a track record of not really giving a fuck about your best interests. How they sideline small businesses and prioritize the presence of those that pay to play. And how just when you begin to understand the rules of the game, they can come along and change them up completely, leaving you high and dry. Considering I was already over social and then more so when I realized it was never actually nearly as fun as what we had going on here on the forum for so many years, I decided to seriously explore the viability of not just continuing to maintain the forum, but actually allocate serious attention and efforts to evolving it forward and seeing if we could reestablish and grow a successful community. Obviously it'll always exist on the fringe, but that also how it was born and honestly, I'm pretty happy with that.

http://www.12ozprophet.com and the Writers forum through the years... Maybe some of the old crew can chime in, but as I recall the original forum was a single section that was straight graffiti. I'd set it up with the help of @Misk-TheDragon to stay in touch with writers from other cities that I'd met along the way. Among the most notable was @Joker who I'd met at the Tribal booth at an old ASR tradeshow. In those days long distance calls were expensive and most writers that new writers from out of town would send hand written letters via snail mail along with hard copy flix or negatives that you'd go get processed and then return. Anyhow, the internet was still fairly new and most the population still didn't even have a computer at home, ket alone several. You got online via dial up and most online conversation took place on IRC or on various BBS systems and shit like UseNET. IRC was a pain in the ass to use and I figured if I couldn't easily figure it out, most writers probably wouldn't bother. Then I came across the first forum system I'd ever seen, an old CGI based forum system that was browser based and pretty simple to use. I reached out to Joker and a few people and that was the start of the 12ozProphet forums. Very quickly I saw the potential of community and looked to create a sort of virtual writers bench on a global scale. At that time, the few graffiti websites that existed were mainly static photo archives that you couldn't really search and took a monumental amount of work to maintain. I was more interested in the networking and conversations (Still am after all these years) and so 12oz moved in a different direction by always focusing on the community aspect of it. The forum started growing and so we added sub sections for trains, walls and graffiti discussions (tips, news, etc). The core members invited friends, that in turn invited other friends and it grew from a small handful of writers to a pretty big forum. @Misk-TheDragon being the young computer genius that he was knew how to exploit Microsoft Front Page extensions and would hack some other competing sites and setup redirects so their traffic would go to 12ozprophet until the owners could figure out how to fix it, often a few hours later or maybe a day or two if we were lucky. Likewise the zine was really coming into its own by Issue #3, featuring a very early interview with Barry McGee aka Twist which also turned a lot of people onto the website and as the mailorder got bigger, that was another avenue for people to find out about the site and forum since we'd stuff each order with various flyers and other stuff. I believe 12ozProphet was one of the first companies on the East Coast selling spray caps and for a few years, we were by far the largest. Once we connected with Os Gemeos and discovered the crazy skinny caps they were using out there, the game got raised to a whole other level. We'd trade batches of 1000 NY Fat or NY Skinny caps with the twins in exchange for the stock Colorgin caps they were using, which we're thinner than NY Thins by at least half or more. On the plane ride back from the trip that led to the Os Gemeos feature in 12ozProphet Issue #6, I made up the name "micro caps" and it didnt take long for those to be the biggest thing in graffiti for the next while. We struggled to keep them in stock because whereas we had the plug to the factory for NY Thin, Fat and Rustos and literally bought them in batches of a million or more, Os Gemeos were bribing the janitor at the ColorGin factory to swipe caps at night when he mopped the factory floors. In any case, we still got requests for micro caps like half a decade after they were no longer available. Even into the era of all the Euro graffiti0centric paint companies that opened the flood gates with quality paint, in a massive spectrum of colors that were low pressure and had a library of various specialty caps available. If I'm not mistaken it was @beardo was the person to suggest we start a forum for non-graffiti discussions. Up until then members would have to add "NGC" before thread titles so everyone knew that it was "NO GRAFF CONTENT". Worked well until the forum really picked up momentum and then we started breaking the forum down into more granular subsections. Among them were "Channel Zero" inspired by Public Enemies 1988 hit song by the same name and "Static Age" which was inspired by a Misfits album that dropped about the same time (In turn inspired by a much older song title).

Believe this was the second mailorder catalog we did for Straight from the Bottom, the mailorder side of 12ozProphet. Back in the early and mid 1990s we used to print these catalogs up and travel around the country and parts of Europe hitting up graff and B-Boy jams, meeting kids off the board and handing these things out. In fact, UPS was so expensive back in those days that we frequently just hopped flights to deliver suitcases of magazines in person since it cost about the same as UPS. Shop owners, magazine owners and friends would let us crash on their couch for a few days and we'd usually return home with suitcases of foreign graff mags. Deal was that you could take a backpack with your gear, but the two checked bags were solely for the cases of zines in exchange for a free flight to wherever. Pretty crazy how different all that works now, but we had some really great trips and got to see Battle of the Year several times, as well as meet a ton of great people. Likewise in the USA, the B-Boy summit and Rocksteady Jam were milestone annual events that we all anticipated so we could catch up, put faces to names and strengthen friendships that we'd been forming in the early internet days here on the forum. \

I'm going to keep adding to this thread... Have a bunch of CD's, hard drives and photos to dig through. In the meantime, here's a super rare video clip from that era mentioned above. There's not much video from those days, especially of Brazil and Os Gemeos, but we were fortunate enough to video some stuff and somehow those recordings survived (whole long story on that). Anyhow, enjoy... [MEDIA=vimeo]51971026[/MEDIA]

In light of the discussion and some really great memories posted in the Weigh In: Has the social media revolution devolved conversation? thread and because @Grassy Knowles never got around to writing up a 12ozProphet History piece, I thought I'd kick off this thread so that those that were there can share stories and photos from the earliest days. The more I talk to people, the more I hear about how impactful 12ozProphet was to some people. The laughs, the sharing of information, the friendships, etc. Obviously I've personally been on a nostalgic tip with where I'm at with everything, but really does seem to be coming full circle lately. Anyhow, before continuing to build forward, I thought it might be a good idea to start documenting the past in some form. Obviously this forum is packed with history. A lot of images are broken from that era before image storage was essentially free and we leached virtually every image posted, but there's literally discussions going back almost 20 years and its amazing to lurk through that old stuff and see a transcript of a long gone era in time. There's plenty of other threads worth checking out, including the Channel Zero...Is it making a comeback?? thread, The Where Are They Now, prelude to a 12oz Reunion Thread, as well as a recent request from original old school crew members @Europe and @diggity that have reemerged and asked about specific flix from the past. Anyhow, I'll start posting some gems from the archive, but also hoping those of you that were there, will share stories, as well as any images that relate if you have them. This thread is dedicated to Crude Oil who was an important part of all this, but no longer around. Rest In Peace to him and all the other friends and members that are no longer around to swing back through, reminisce and contribute to this next chapter. ------------------------------------- Starting with some of the oldest shots, swiped from another thread and shot by @psm026, here's the original 12ozProphet / Straight From the Bottom offices back around 1997 - 1998. Here's a couple shots of me and @psm026 when we just accepted delivery of 12ozProphet Issue #6 featuring Os Gemeos. A couple of the issues were pretty big milestones, but this one was a real turning point. It was there very first interview and the first time anyone found out about the pixacao scene in Brazil, as well as well as the amazing work of Os Gemeos outside of a very small handful of people. @Sonik3000 and @STRUGGLE INC were pivotal in both that issue and several of the others as well as a huge part of the early 12ozProphet history. Pretty insane to consider that 35,000 copies of 12ozProphet Issue #6 sold globally. It was actually the fastest issue to sell out and tipped things over to such a degree that the remaining inventory of prior issues all sold out along with it due to its popularity.

@Joker yeah man, same here. Its ironic and goes really goes back to what @diggity said about how social networks really cheapen relationships. There's a lot of people I follow on Ig that follow me back and we've largely ignored each other fo so many years minus maybe double tapping whatever latest image was posted... You and I included. But already in the last few days it seems like we've said more stuff than we did in almost a decade of social media which is really crazy. I've also been thinking and come to realize that Facebook or Instagram or whatever else at its absolute peak, wasn't half as fun as 12oz was in its heyday. Man the amount of laughs and fun we had... Really was some pretty incredible times! Lots of great friendships and not sure if I'm romanticizing, but wouldn't doubt if some what we discussed, some of the friendships made, some of the knowledge shared... Wound up changing the course of some peoples' lives. @Europe said something similar in another thread... We literally crossed continents to catch up with each other. Paint together and share laughs as close friends and all of it stems back from what started here on this forum. No doubt that social media supplanted forums, at least for the last decade and a half, but don't think they really successfully replaced what they were. Again, don't think we can necessarily recreate what 12oz once was, but have an even stronger belief today than I did the other day when I started this thread, that we can likely create something new and relevant to this era that's just as significant as what we all started on here nearly 20 years ago.

@diggity I just pinged @Sonik3000 via DM on Instagram, so we'll see if he swings through.

Hey @Europe cant even tell you how psyched I am to see you posting again brother. Truth is that the decision to move out to the woods like I did stems from the same thing that happened to the boards... Too many years of burning it at both ends, take on way too much, stress etc and then coming to realize that what I worked so hard for wasnt even what I really wanted. I got caught up in the beginning, romanced by companies who's products I loved and then over time lost my way. At a certain point I realized that even if it was successful by most standards, I was miserable. Largely not present in the moment, especially in regards to family and friends and having to swallow opinions because of the dynamics of what I was working within. Basically upped and walked away from a successful agency. Gave up a nice big Soho loft that literally took years of climbing the ladder to pull off. No more parties and mostly, no more hookups and steady stream of free sneakers and packages. Traded it all in to give myself peace and quiet. To be able to grow my own food, raise some livestock and focus more on family and the projects that are meaningful to me. There's definitely pros and cons to what I did, but believe in the long run it was the right thing to do. Truth is I live pretty close to an airport that is very easy to fly through, have more room / space than I could have wished for and without all the distractions, have had a lot fo time to think and reconnect with the part of me that first imagined 12ozProphet and started building it. Kind of off topic to your reply, but trying to give those reading along some context. You can see a little bit of what took me away from everything these last years at http://www.12ozcollective.com (though the agency largely operated under a different name). Also, most work was under NDA, so that's some highlights I was able to post online. In any case, its a very healthy and fulfilling lifestyle. It's not entirely easy as there's a lot of basics I had to learn and an endless list of things that always need to be done, but its satisfying. I started this thread because I know a lot of people are burnt our or fed up or just waking up to realize the same thing I did... That the dream that we'd been chasing wasn't what it was made out to be. In regards to mushrooms, I only recently got turned onto this. Was actually the mom of my daughters friend that gave us a big bag of wild mushrooms. And to your point, they were fantastic. Totally unlike anything bought at a store or anything I've tasted at even the best restaurants. Being new to it, I'm waiting to go out with someone more experienced since eating the wrong one can make you sick or kill you, but I was told that the way you get them is you have to find land that burned the year before. For whatever reasons it encourages the growth of specific types of mushrooms and those that grow on on that type of land are safe to eat. They actually sell service forest maps that chart all the areas that had burned the previous years as a guide on where to start looking. Technically you need a permit to pick on regulated lands, but they're cheap and mostly seem to be regulated by the honor system so not even sure many bother with it. I have seen people selling wild picked mushrooms and the prices are pretty crazy. Small bags for like $25, LOL! Seems almost as profitable as selling weed. Anyhow, my wife sauteed them in quality extra virgin olive oil, some garlic, butter and coarse sea salt and it was really, really great. Here's a few camera phone shots from this morning. I built two 12 x 4 x 2.5 ft raised beds last year. Filled them with local organic compost and for the second spring have been growing a lot of stuff. We're super far North and I'm also at a high elevation so our growing season is very short and at the same time the sun is super intense for the few months of spring / summer. Our last frost is actually June 7th and though there's no snow on the ground on my property, you can still see snow in the distance and in some of the shadows when we drive. Its not unusual to see a little snow fall all the way into May and we'll start seeing real snow again by about Halloween. Still have a lot of on my plate and still getting over the hump of moving so havent been able to build a green house yet or even setup some of the hydroponic stuff I was planning to get our plants started early and fully capitalize on the few months of nice weather. But salad type greens always do super well and are easy and we're also doing a lot of types of zucchini since we've been making it with red and white pasta sauce as a healthier alternative to pasta. Almost everyone out this way grows a bunch of stuff or raises various livestock and though the neighbors are pretty far (the minimum property size here is 21 acres, but most have a lot more), people are really cool with each other and often swing by and drop off a box of something they grew that they have a lot of. One neighbor grows a ton of beets, which i like but its not my favorite. However, she taught that you can eat the greens above ground and that part tastes awesome. It also grows fast so you can harvest it multiple times as the beet matures and then finally eat the beet itself in the fall. I love the concept of function stacking like that so now we're raising a bunch of beets as well. Also been really getting into raising free range chickens and ducks. As I posted in the Keto thread the doctor said to eat as many eggs as I wont and that modern science has proven there's no real harm in regards to cholesterol (which seems to be 100% true since I've been eating eggs at least once a day for a year and my cholesterol levels are actually going down according to blood tests) so anyways... We have a bunch of birds. Out this way if you can verify $1200 or more a year in agriculture related revenue, property taxes are reduced 50% the following year. So as a method to get to know neighbors and people in the community we decided to produce more eggs than we need to give away and eventually I was going to teach the kids a little about web design and business by working with them to build a small subscription based website for farm fresh eggs here in the area. My son has a little dirt bike so he can deliver to the immediate area and the rest I can drop off each day when we hit the post office or UPS for 12oz related stuff. Won't make much money, but the intent is just to participate in the community, teach the kids a little something about work and making money and the tax thing is really great. Also posted a flick below of some fresh home made lemon curd my wife made. Fresh lemons and a ton of fresh eggs. Tasted freakin awesome so we made blueberry pancakes topped off with butter, home made lemon curd and powdered sugar. Honestly better than pancakes I've had at any restaurant. She also made a fresh vegetable frittata which was epic. Lastly, posted a video of a close by river that is over flowing from all the snow melt coming down the mountains. The water is just above freezing and actually is the number one danger out here. More people die (usually tourists) falling into fast flowing icy water than anything else. We do have a lot of alpha predators as well (various species of bears, wolves, coyote, etc) but was told that big male Elks (bucks) and Moose are among the most dangerous, especially during mating season. They wont hesitate to charge and stomp you to pieces apparently. Thats the latest for now.

Anyone watch Solo yet? Worth it or nah? That last Jedi move sucked IMO. Princess Leigh floating in space... come on, really?

Not sure there's an answer to this. Its personal to every person. I know people that dont document anything. Its 100% the feeling of doing it. Others might do it for fame or competitiveness. Personally me... Graffiti was the vehicle that kept a group of good friends together. For some of those it meant something different but to me... Could have been sports or anything else, just happened to be graff. If you hung out, you painted. After a while, I got bored by it to be honest. I love the rush and adventure of bombing, but never really enjoyed piecing that much. Of all the art I've created, the spraycan is the absolute most clumsy tool to create with, assuming your goal is creating art. I suppose even that, might be what drives some people... Creating art using the absolute most clumsy tool and still having it come off. Suppose dudes like Os Gemeos built successful careers off exactly that, so who am I to say?

I agree with this 100%. Originally Channel Zero was conceived for this, but then obviously got too big. The threads themselves serve a bit to segment discussions, but it's nice to still be able to group several together. The platform I'm investigating now is definitely not a Reddit clone, but it obviously takes a great queue from Reddit by allowing the forum admin to pass along privileges and allow users to submit requests for sections. These sections can be totally public, read only, private or invisible so that without a direct link and invite, you dont know they exist. The person that submits the request are granted ownership and from there can invite other users, make them mods to their section, approve their membership and moderate their space how they see fit. Something like this would've been epic back in the day when we had Nightowls and also sort of forum only crews starting to pop up. Its obviously been far slower now, so its difficult to imagine segmenting things further, but then again, I believe like @diggity there's a lot of people I talk to in real life that expressed a desire to reconnect with friends from the past or are feeling nostalgic and looking at ways to have highly targeted discussions. I also agree... Much prefer to take my time and use a computer which is liking going to a theater to see a movie, versus the social media mobile discussion which is like watching a trailer for a movie at home during a commercial break. One takes a little planning and effort, but so much more worth it when it comes to something that genuinely interests you. Yeah as I said further up, I do think there is something key in that statement. Somehow on Instagram I've got a steady stream of stuff, but seems like more and more is stuff I'm not really interested in. @Joker also expressed something similar in regards to road bikes. It makes me think that likely social and what 12oz used to be (long format discussion) are actually two entirely different things. Perhaps social supplanted discussions for a bit, but now many of us are seeing its faults and short coming and realizing its not filling that need at all. I don't see it going away entirely as it is super convenient and there's plenty of studies out there regarding some of the addictive qualities of it. But clearly we all feel its lacking and though busy and all grown up, still seem to yearn to stay in touch and on top of specific subjects and people. Your last sentence here nails it 110%. I said something similar about it in my own post. Sometimes I almost wish good friends from deep past werent following me on Instagram. Double tapping photos every so often or dropping comments like, "we should catch up" (yet never do) just cheapens the whole thing. Likewise, I think we're also seeing, especially in regards to how loaded and divided everything has become, that you end up following and being followed by people you really have grown apart from. Social replaced discussion and now realization dawns that you're at this virtual party full of conversational snippets about anything and everything, with most of it being nothing that actually interests you as you go about sharing glimpses of your own live and interests that obviously most your followers don't particularly care about. Sort of reminds me of summer when you're young and you spend a bunch of awesome weeks with a cousin. You both go your own ways at the end of the summer and then by the next summer you've grown in two totally different directions. Instead of the awesome time you had the summer before, it sort of becomes this awkward experience of being polite to each other and completely no longer relating. (Not sure thats the best analogy but you guys get my jist). That last line is the clincher: IT TAKES AND GIVES NOTHING BACK. Exactly how I feel, which is only amplified by the fact that to add insult to injury they also don't show shit in chronological order and instead curate my feed by prioritizing what they *think* I want to see, which rarely works out. Frankly a ton of people I follow, I wish I can unfollow. People that like I said, you were super cool with, send over a follow request only to realize you live in two entirely different worlds. For whatever reason you dont have the heart to unfollow, but you know it would have been better to leave the relationship in the past and just hold on to the memories of what it was instead of get reminded by a steady stream of crap that reminds you what it no longer is. Being able to follow hashtags is a poor solution to this issue and as we all seem to be saying, conversation on that platform pales in comparison to the stuff that used to go on back on the forums. Appreciate you typing all that on a phone. Believe this forum system has auto save so you wouldnt have lost it like way back when on the old forum, but I know what you mean. Mobile just sucks for this sort of thing. Even playing with the dedicated Reddit app to research and test ideas, as well as the mobile optimized browser version, its clear that the mobile versions are condensed to mostly up voting and skimming images. Posting text is possible and is incrementally better than this forum since it's almost a full screen and simplified text editor, but yeah... still sucks. Hard to expect people to trade in the convenience of mobile, but clearly those other forums and Reddit prove that long, targeted discussion is still a thing for a ton of people. I agree. Honestly the only reason I havent ditched my iPhone is because I feel I have to maintain it for 12oz and the work I'm doing. Each day I hate it more and more, especially when I find myself reach for it when I have a moment of idle time. The surveillance stuff (lots on that in other threads) genuinely freaks me out. I also hate how it seems like you simply don't own your time anymore. Not to mention that iPhone and really all Apple shit has been on the decline since Steve Jobs died and how the fuck are they going to expect people to pay $1250 plus a phone plus another $250 in insurance?! Then feel stupid a year later when a newer, shiner version comes out? The phone just tries to do too much shit now and doesnt seem to do a lot of it very well. Fucked up that my phone does a better job taking pictures then actually making calls. In any case, appreciate @diggity taking the time to stop by and type all that out (especially on a phone). As I've said, I think its likely I'll switch to this other platform and it has some great features for having targeted discussions. And as @dekayfa said, hopefully if we build it, they will come. Anyhow, giving it my best shot so hopefully between that and some support from those interested and willing to help put in the legwork to help tip this over... We can evolve this back towards something genuinely worthwhile. Thinking I'll start a new thread about the history fo 12ozProphet if people are interested. Again, feeling nostalgic and there's a lot of stories from a lot of people that really should be recorded somewhere. Likewise a lot of us have a bunch of really great photos of a lot of it that deserve to be seen.

And on that tip, here’s a peep of the old 12ozProphet / Straight From The Bottom offices circa 1998.

Forgot... Was meaning to also link “Halt and Catch Fire” to share back with those reading along. Finished the series last night, which was a bummer in itself but also because of how the story concluded (no spoilers), but so much of that show reminds me of the early days of 12oz. Back in 1998 trying to figure out how to set up a server... Swiping Red Hat cd’s out of books at Barnes and Noble and spending countless ours trying to understand the syntax in the Apache configuration files. Setting up a network so the invoices could be centralized for all the phone and mail orders that @psm026 and me were taking didn’t conflict. Endless trips to radio shack and Computer City (and later CompUSA) to buy cables and old PBX phone system shit. Later buying increasingly faster and bigger Compaq rack servers off eBay to handle all the growth. Amazing times at the bleeding edge of tech back when it was the Wild West. Before all the info was at finger tips. No Google, Amazon literally only sold books, no PayPal and nobody trusted using credit cards online yet. Us all burning the midnight oil, working late nights, drinking beer, sleeping in the office and just grinding away knowing we were on to something big, but too deep and all too new to have a real notion of just how far it might go. Anyhow, definitely check out the show if you lived through that era especially. Also worth a watch even if you didn’t. Link: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/

I feel you man. We’ve been talking this week so even if not already obvious from this thread, you know where my head is at. That field of dreams analogy is interesting since Ivan remember using that one way back in the day before this forum was actually anything. As I type this on an iPad I only started using to watch Netflix, because I’m in bed and didn’t think I could peck out a half decent response on my iPhone, what you just said and what @seeking said earlier certainly comes to mind. This current forum is mobile optimized, but the experience is less than ideal. Likewise, what @Joker said about sharing to a tighter knit group kind of jives as well. I’d really love to see what some old friends have been up to, as well as follow along. No doubt that’s what Instagram is for exactly, but there’s something about the format that just rubs be wrong. I guess maybe the fact that it’s so huge makes it impersonal. Even following each other and dropping brief comments feels wrong. Like we’re barely acquaintances rather than old friends. I suppose it’s the fact that comments are so brief on that platform, that it’s a challenge to write anything meaningful or actually get your point across without condensing it. Likewise, it’s so broad that doing so just seems weird so I find myself DMing instead. Guess it’s ironic cause as @seeking expressed, people don’t seem to have the time or inclination for desktops but we can also all acknowledge that whereas mobile is convenient and always on you these days, the experience often sucks in comparison. Even if we had the time to be on for 10 hours at a time like we once did regularly, nobody would do so on a phone. Guess it makes sense why social has devolved to double taps and emojis. Anyhow, I’m going to take a page out of your book @dekayfa and am exploring what options exist, how viable I feel they are (or aren’t) and seeing where I can find the time and dough to build out something new that might have the potential to evolve things forward so it’s a little more tempting for the new kids and perhaps a little more compelling for any of the OGs that might be interested in reuniting and staying in touch. Have a solid lead to a new platform I’ve already been testing and also been exploring Reddit on desktop, mobile and as a dedicated app to see what I can learn from what is still basically a forum that beat the odds and grew bigger and stronger despite Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and all the others. Guess we’ll see if things can come full circle and maybe if I build it, they will come?

Once again, I'm really blown away by these comments and fact that more original members than I'd have thought are willing to take time out to stop through and leave feedback on the topic as well as share some personal detail and perspective from their end. I've started reaching out to a few more OGs, as well as some other people that played a part in this story. If nothing else, I think its worth something to document all this in a place where people old and new can read it straight from the people that were there. Likewise, I'd like to ask the favor of anyone that happens across this thread that knows anyone else that was around back in the day, key figure or just an everyday member, to swing through. Though I'd love to hear additional perspectives and opinions on what you guys all think about this, I also welcome any questions anyone has about all this. I've tried to be as thorough as possible in my explanations, short of boring everyone to tears (I think), but if you want any extra clarification or detail, just ask your question. Thanks again to @seeking @Joker and @dekayfa for dusting off their usernames and contributing to the story and dialogue. Hopefully we'll see a few others stop by and continue the history lesson.

Bucket of fried chicken and two bottles of old school soda with the sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. (sodas weren't for me).

For those checking in on this thread, you might want to also have a look at Weigh In: Has the social media revolution devolved conversation? http://forum.12ozprophet.com/threads/weigh-in-has-the-social-media-revolution-devolved-conversation.148220/

Yo, I just added you to VIP. Also, hit me up... No idea why your account would be irrecoverable but if you contact me I'll investigate it.

@One Man Banned I agree with a lot of this, especially the bit about people not needing their phone half as much as they think they do. It began as a tool of convenience and became something else. There's addictive qualities that have already been studied and reported, not so much about the phone itself, but rather the apps and more specifically the social platforms. There's a thread somewhere else where we talked about it and posted a Youtube video that literally should have people deleting Facebook. But also, times change and so does content and how its consumed. Look much further back we see how radio replaced newspapers, then TV replaced radio. Later still we see TV being replaced by the internet and then see large parts of the internet falling to the weigh side due to social media. No doubt time marches on and both technology and culture evolve. The platforms that don't evolve with those changes, largely become irrelevant and disappear into obscurity. I really don't think that was the issue with 12oz necessarily. 12oz as a website fell off because of me and some very poor management on my part. I've dropped threads in the past explaining bits and pieces of what happened, but will summarize it for those too lazy to dig it out and for the newer people lurking that wouldn't know where to start. I'm going to go into a long winded story so bear with me or skip it if you arent interested... Kind want to get some of this out there (sort of therapeutic) and also share the official record (at least from my point of view / experience) -------------- Probably the start of the troubles was in the winter of 2009 (I think or maybe 2010). I was pretty exhausted from a few years of building up an agency that sort of dropped into my lap after a successful collaboration with Nike. At the time, we were building to be one of the main agencies doing product photography for Nike, had managed to pull off a real cool space in downtown NYC. I lived right around the corner in a cool Soho loft. I had two young kids and was doing my best to juggle all of it. 12oz was already freakin huge as a forum and was costing me something like $2,000 - $3,000 a month just in bandwidth, software licenses, etc. It occasionally made a little money, but generally that required someone to follow up and invest a bunch of time doing something for it. We had advertising, but at best that would only cover the hard costs of the server and certainly not cover any salaries like the people needed to design, develop, debug and evolve it. It also didn't cover any of the content production, blogging / news or any of that. Meanwhile, the agency was doing very well, but the costs of keeping it growing and competitive in downtown NYC generally grew in lockstep with the growth in revenues. The stakes kept growing along side the opportunities and it was getting harder and harder for me to keep allocating time and effort into the site, which had grown into a behemoth at that point. Anyhow, there was a lot of stuff slipping through the cracks and the core team of moderators that was still the heart of the forum were growing increasingly frustrated with me, my decisions and my lack of support. In hindsight (being 20/20) it makes a lot of sense, but at the time I was just tired and stressed and had been burning it at both ends for a long while. The added stress of being responsible for a family (especially young kids) coupled with the success on the agency side and all the praise I'd get from people at Nike and even from a lot of *important* people locally all led to me handling the situation wrong. Egos got in the way, tempers flared and I essentially turned my back on the forum. I tried my best to explain what was happening without getting too deep into explaining my personal life and at the time felt that it was impossible to understand my end without actually being there and seeing it. At that time we were practically living in the studio. I technically lived around the corner, but it wasn't unusual to pull an all nighter or three back to back to meet some insane Nike deadline. Likewise, we were shooting unreleased product that was subject to extreme confidentiality agreements and often in the middle of closed door meetings with Nike and others to discuss strategies and executions for major hype product releases and trying to keep up with the various dinners and parties where a lot of the work and opportunities actually originate. Literally hardly looked at the forum for a year. In fact, I was going to shut it all down after a big blow out with some of the mods in the mod room and it was a phone call with @Joker that had me hold back. After time away, a lot of the mods had largely drifted off or at least weren't on hard core like they had been and I'd had enough distance to decide to step back in. The blog roll was doing really well, we were managing news by largely injecting stuff I was doing with the agency as content, but collectively it still hardly compared to the forum even then. Hypebeast was getting bigger and bigger, sites like Honeyee were getting a lot of attention and with my focus and future still riding on the agency I felt the only way to keep the site going was to sort of overlap it. I took a huge chunk of money I came up on to hire a developer full time who was tasked with helping me rebuild the framework of the site and to create a unified login / user session to bridge between the site and the forum. The framework effort was a disaster... The technology was really changing fast and we went from DHTML to the start of a massively improved HTML and CSS spec which wasted a lot of time, energy and money when we had to redevelop a site that was outdated before it launched. Meanwhile the kid helping with all the server stuff (a tech at the place I used to colocate my servers before we started cloud computing) talked me into switching setups. Said he could bring costs down while also way improving system resources which was obviously appealing. That move turned out to be a massive mistake. Our previous server at least was super stable and plenty fast, it just cost me a ton. The new server cost me almost as much, was probably more powerful but never ran properly. I can only assume it was a misconfiguration, but this is the era where the forum kept crashing. I begged this kid over and over again to help and off and on he kept making changes, blaming the website and then making more changes. I doubled down on development thinking I'd launch the new site somewhere else once we got it built and especially once we created the user bridge. My focus was also still mostly on the agency and all the client work. Ultimately the kid building the bridge was woefully unqualified to be doing it. I'm sure the server issues didn't help and also the forum at that point was a tangled mess of code from various patches, features and fixes. Between those two things, we managed to break the login so it was nearly impossible to stay logged in. People would be constantly booted out and the hack to clear sessions was so stupid and convoluted, few people bothered or figured it out. Meanwhile the agency work and opportunities grew and the news side was taking over as far as ads because at that time advertisers were worried about placing ads in the middle of user conversations because they feared shit talk next to their logos. So shit dragged out like that for quite a while. The server crashes occasionally corrupted stuff so we'd have to roll back the database or wipe sections of it that obliterated posts and threads. I think it was the destruction of the tattoo thread that was about the time that @seeking and @King Of Hell finally threw in the towel, which I'd guess was also about the time their careers were also starting to hit their stride. Anyhow, shit languished badly. I was still scrambling trying to grow the agency, was doing more and more with Os Gemeos and just trying my best to hold it altogether. After a time, I started really feeling guilty about the forum, was unsure about where the blogs were heading and the news was actually starting to do pretty well, but nowhere near the type of growth as Hypebeast and HighSnobiety. So from there I decided to give another crack at rebuilding everything. I didnt have any extra money and understood it was probably going to be a solo effort. A major release dropped from the developers of the CMS I was using (ExpressionEngine) and after a lot of research and testing and in fact working directly with them, we redeveloped the site AND forum using their new software since it actually allowed for native integration between the site and forum. I was excited, thought I'd learned most of what I needed and had taken my lumps. I literally spent a little over a year on it and dumped another small fortune on it by taking it from the agency. Finally launched it and the shit collapsed. There was some inherent flaw the database queries not being isolated so that the forum traffic, despite being a fraction of what it had been, completely crushed the server. Their CMS was pretty solid, but their forum system was garbage. Since they were excited that I'd be the largest forum using their system, they directly got involved and we worked for a few months to try and patch their forum software to get it working. Meanwhile once again I came off like a dick by announcing a new website and not delivering. Literally like the 4th or 5th time doing that and though it seemed some of you die hards were hopeful, most didn't believe it or trust what I was saying. Took me about another year to redevelop and hand migrate all the data from ExpressionEngine to WordPress and move the forum to yet another system, which is the one we have now. The main site was rushed despite taking so long and a lot of the features were shitty hacks that eventually caused issues with the news and blogs. After some more time I decided to go back and try and fix it and realized it was just such a mess it wasnt worth it. I'd already lost the news / media platform war, assuming I was ever really a contender and the blogs literally required a full time effort to stay in touch and support those guys. Plus there were huge technical hurdles to create a way for so many people to login and separate some people's posts and uploads while allowing others access. Again, it was all shitty hacks since there really wasn't a solid built in way that was any good. Around that time I began to really question all I was doing. The agency was at a point where I was just totally exhausted from having juggled so much and burning it at both ends for years. I wasn't even sure if thats what I wanted to do and it took a breakfast meeting with one of my first employees ever to open my eyes to most of this. Somehow along the way, I'd lost site of what 12oz was and what it was I was good at. I got caught up in the tech / online revolution and was genuinely excited by all of it and thought I could be a player in my little corner of it. Between all of the efforts with the site and agency I'd lost site of it all having begun with the zine (product). That the entire reason all of you guys even had a chance to be on this forum at all or that 12oz was even a conversation this many years after the fact, was because of those early successes with the zine. All of this stems from that and though I'm probably my biggest critic, I'm pretty proud of the vision and accomplishment we pulled together with it. I really enjoy the process of seeing ideas come to life. I get more excited than is reasonable when that shipment of new stuff arrives and still get blown away when I run into people or hear people talk about the products I put out. So after all the drama, I decided to switch focus entirely to 12ozProphet and have maintained that the product should be the priority, which is why the site is mostly just a shop. Its been a little over a year since I started focusing full time (minus some stuff helping out my father and law and a couple people). I have 10 lifetimes worth of ideas and have really enjoyed exploring concepts and testing the waters with these releases. Admittedly, I've hardly scratched the surface and am only barely starting to fall into a rhythm with myself on it, but its already shown plenty of evidence that if I can hold shit together for long enough, that its possible (if not very likely) that I can tip this over into something pretty big. -------------- The forum is sort of that exploration / thought process continuing full circle. I still have faith because I still continuously run into people that are genuinely excited / impressed by 12ozProphet. Young kids that have stepped to me to say its their favorite *brand*. Older, established people that say it encapsulates some of their fondest memories as a kid or is representative of a special era in their life. Meanwhile I've also noted how fed up and / or unsatisfied so many people are with social media. How there seems to be this huge disgruntled and frustrated undertone. How people are bombarded from all angles, have everything at their fingertips but are just bored or unimpressed by it all. I have a lot of theories, mostly what I've been posting in this thread, but thought it made sense to explore it and discuss it with you guys. Its also been sort of like some sort of therapy to put all this out there and to also reach out to a few very old friends (starting with @seeking and @Joker as they were both pivotal in the story of the forum) and get a dialogue going. Anyhow, sorry to run so long. Hopefully those that invest their time to read all this will appreciate the insight or at least be entertained for a few by the story of it all. I'll keep reaching out to a few more old friends and if you know any OG's please do me (and all of us) the solid of sharing this thread. If they happen to want to chime in and can't access their account, please DM me on their behalf of have them email info@12ozprophet.com Thanks for reading.

@seeking Oh wow, I know I DM'ed you to check this out, but honestly wasnt expecting you to login and post the reply. At most I'd hoped for a fairly cohesive DM back. Thank you for making the effort. Made my evening to see a post with your name next to it. That being said, I wasn't clear (or maybe not thinking) if I said or implied that I could or wanted to reproduce what once was. I know that was another era and that each timeframe has its own unique signature to help define it. I also definitely recognize that all of us in our 30s and 40s certainly have had way too much piled on our plates to think anyone will be willing or able to come back and spend significant time on here. At best, I hope maybe a couple posts every now and again to chime in, catch up or drop something relevant is about all I can hope for. I definitely recognize that times have changed and the world, as well as all the people in it, have continued to evolve. To have a chance at making this work, it'll also need to evolve and that the future of it is dependent on entirely new generations of members to engage and interact. I don't think forums are entirely dead, even in the classic sense however. That Kanye forum above is exponentially larger than 12oz ever was even at its peak. Picking through it, it looks like something from the Geocities era with only the most rudimentary consideration towards design and the most basic of features. Yet it has exponentially more users than 12oz had even at its most successful. I've actually got a son old enough to be able to use as a case study. In fact, he registered an account on 12oz today after school. He's online most waking hours that he's allowed. He's hardcore into gaming and constantly in chat rooms or whatever else. His most frequently visited site is Reddit and he has accounts on Imgur to upload photos. Honestly, he's a very close approximation of what you describe us as having been, which is also how I remember it. He has an IG account he barely uses and instead spends all his time in subreddits having to do with old school gaming consoles, game cheats, memes and stuff like that. After posting this thread, I had him read it when he got home from school (which is what compelled him to register) and then we spent a good bit of time discussing the subject. Honestly, I was sort of surprised by how much it all sounded the same as those old days despite all the new tech and evolving approaches to online interactions. Somewhere in some other thread someone said that the future of 12oz is in new fans / followers / members and based on your response, what my son had to say and my own instincts and insights I believe that to be the case. No doubt the forum will need some changes as well. I have no doubt it'll take a lot of commitment and effort, as well as luck, but I definitely think its doable and feel if we have a pretty amazing heritage to start building from. In any case, I really appreciate you going out of your way to swing through and drop your point of view man. Hopefully you wont shove that laptop back under those books and maybe stop back through and say whats up when you have a few minutes and the inclination.

Also for anyone wondering about thriving forums that are true forums and not some VC back behemoth like Reddit, check out: http://www.kanyetothe.com/forum/ Just checked and there were over 2000+ members logged in and 5000+ guests lurking. Insane numbers! I think at out peak we'd see something like 1200 people and at most might have seen a spike barely above 2000 users including logged in users and guests.

A very interesting and relevant discussion on Reddit about the death of the HypeBeast forums. Definitely both sides of the argument and some insights that are similar to my own. Link: Curious of any of you guys were ever on the HypeBeast forum or any other major forum for that matter? Anyone presently a fairly active member of Reddit or Discord?

Going to try and start a new series of posts and see how it goes. I'm going to try and pick timely topics and hot button subjects and pose a question so you guys can weigh in and throw in your opinions. Obviously we won't all agree and likely, there's no easy solution. The goal is to apply logic, reasoning and if possible, objective evidence and study so we can discuss and debate in our small corner of the interwebz and see if we might be able to solve the worlds problems. Current topic... Has the social media revolution devolved conversation? (Previous topic or use the search to search thread titles for "weigh In". Now for specifics... Some of you guys are old enough to remember AOL chat rooms, MySpace, BBS's and when forums dominated. Many of you were around back 5+ years ago when the 12ozProphet forum literally had hundreds of users logged in at a time and popular threads felt more like chats since since by the time you submitted a comment, there were several unread ones before yours. I can even remember when everyone was complaining that 12oz had gotten way too big and there were so many new names that it felt like a crowd at the airport instead of a tight-knit community... The good old days! As many of you guys also know, I've been focusing on 12ozProphet full time for over a year now. We relaunched the forum maybe 1.5 years ago with this new system and finally solved the registration / login issues that all but destroyed the forum for the few years before that. Many people have told me I'm wasting my time and that forums are done. Obviously our community here has taken a massive hit (putting it lightly) and that our numbers hardly scratch the surface of what they were back in the days. Everyone and their mother is on Social Media, used to be solely Facebook, now it seems to be almost entirely Instagram. Seems like the majority are also too young to remember the good old days of literally being at your desktop for hours at a time, chatting with people from around the world well into the wee hours. Sharing photos, creating memes (before that was a term), forming friendships, trading knowledge (and sometimes packages) and always weighing in, discussing and turning each other on to new ideas and content. So now that I've laid some groundwork, on to the specific topic of this thread... I've been noticing, for what I feel a fair while now, that most people don't seem quite as satisfied by social as they once did. Its mature enough as an idea and technology that the novelty has certainly worn off and its just another facet of modern life. Everyone and their mother is on social, but I've noted the behavior is much different... In the chat room / forum days it was long sessions, mostly uninterrupted. Now its checking in constantly for a few minutes at a time like a sort of intermission throughout daily life. Likewise, long detailed comments, conversations / dialogues spanning days / weeks / months (and even years!) are so long in the past, it seems young kids cant even relate. *The few exceptions being 4chan, reddit and gamers. With politics having been center stage for the last few and everyone being an expert these days, I can see a definite desire to converse, but the main platforms for doing so are very poorly conceived to that end. Limits on character count and a model that is built around a steady stream, it seems its all about double tapping, dropping an emoji and keeping shit moving. The big players in the social space might spark thousands of comments, but all of these are super condensed and also built to be double tapped to like more than organized to allow for ongoing discussion. Within moments in some cases or an hour or so at most, comment threads are buried as more photos clog the stream. Hashtags allow you to hunt down topics, but its clearly not developed the way old school online conversations were developed so that a subject can remain active and engaging until collectively all participants move on to a new, more exciting discussion or topic. In fact, even the metric for how successful engagement is measured is far different than the old days. In any case, recently I've been watching that AMC original, Halt and Catch Fire and it reminded me of the old days and also reminded me a lot of what I've been considering or working on with 12oz. I have wrestled with the idea of whether it was worth the time, energy and money to keep this forum going and for one reason or another always qualified keeping at it, even when it was painful to keep paying to keep it alive. Lately my thought is that I feel the world is ripe for a resurgence in forum type systems. 4chan and reddit are powerhouses which shows they havent entirely disappeared, but I can see how longer format discussions can feel like exciting and novel to kids too young to remember when that was mostly the online experience. Likewise, older cats still seem nostalgic about those old days and in general as busy as everyone is, meaningful conversations with other human beings is still an important part of life. There's no doubt that we've lived a number of years where conversations, knowledge and content (and many other aspects of life) have been dumbed down, condensed or abbreviated to 240 character blurbs, a tap, swipe or something equally brief. Seeing such a massive stream of condensed info has turned everyone into an expert on just about everything. Perhaps some people will chose to go on believing that about themselves rather than put it to the test by engaging in the long format, meaningful online discussions that forums allow for but I do believe that we've reached a point where it makes a lot of sense and seems ripe that it might go full circle with forums or something forum-like might start replacing social media platforms. I sort of see it like watching a steady stream of movie trailers, versus committing the time necessary to actually watch the full movie. Anyhow, what are your thoughts on this? Am I crazy for thinking the way I do? Has the endless steady stream of bite sized, easy to consume (and digest) content / thought / opinion totally devolved our ability to engage in real conversation... To explore ideas and topics in detail, contrast and debate, understand new stuff in more meaningful ways, build super solid, long term friendships that often spill into the real world? Side note: Since I am committed to preserving the 12oz forum and due to the views I hold on the subject (that I just spent 6,305 characters above explaining, I've been steadily looking at ways to improve the forum. The current forum is mobile optimized, but admittedly the expectation for the mobile experience is very high considering how mature and capable smart phones have become. Better than 50% of the traffic we get originates from mobile and I'm aware that if I can't get that right, the forum will never really succeed to the levels I aspire to. Likewise, though stable and though performance is solid, I'm not crazy about the feature set. There's a ton of bells and whistles we don't even use and lots of basic shit missing. I'm also not crazy about the development path of this forum system and have a different platform in mind that I'm seriously considering replacing it with. Obviously any changes will only occur if ALL data can be preserved and migrated, but I'm looking at an option now that I think is a better fit. It solves a few stupid issues like the sideways photo orientation when attaching images to comments from a mobile device, has a more modern layout and has some other features that I think make a lot of sense. Its nothing earth shattering that'll turn 12oz into the next Instagram, but is an evolutionary step forward, in my opinion, and hopefully helps facilitate (or at least strengthen the argument) for the return and growth back to prosperity of the 12ozProphet forum.