Farewell Friends
Updated 2006-06-12 by PAC Staff at 12:03 am
Dear Friends,
Six years is far too short a time to get know most of you the way you deserve, but our time here at the Penny Arcade Cult is coming to an end. The administrators have been debating the issue for months and the decision was made; the switch has been flipped. It is not without sadness that we close the doors on the Cult, but that time has come.
Tonight we bid our final farewell to the finest of Penny Arcade fandom. Sim , webjr , Luthien , Princess RedDot , Coan Arcanius and j0no have prepared some parting remarks.
Farewell,
The Penny Arcade Cult Staff
Refugee Forum, Cult Information
Skorpion and Paladin have set up a new forum for the survivors of the PAC shutdown. You can find it here.
The cult forum has been removed from the site, if you need some information from that forum, please contact webjr at webjr@pacult.com. Farewell Note from Sim
To this day I am still amazed that the Penny Arcade Cult has grown from a tiny Geocities fan-site into the enormous community that it is today. It may not rival the size of Something Awful, or even the Penny Arcade forums, but it is my baby and I am proud of what I created. Of course I had plenty of inspiration and help over the years. Along with the skyrocketing popularity of Penny Arcade, Billy, or webjr, or HappyStoner as I'm used to calling him, was the main driving force behind the success of the site. He deserves the lion's share of the credit because honestly, he did most of the work. His dedication to the project continues to astound me. I also give a lot of credit to aln, who did so much grunt work when either one of us became too busy, bored, or lazy to do it ourselves. And if wasn't for the charm and devotion of Kristin, AKA Princess Reddot, I think the community would have fallen apart years ago. I appreciate all the help and time the moderators have given, especially those who were here from practically the beginning (Luthien and Coan Arcanius, I'm looking at you). To everyone who has contributed to the site in one-way or another, I thank you! The size and scope of this community is something that I will always be proud of. The friendships and experiences I gained were an excellent perk as well.
Unfortunately the forum community has grown in a direction that I no longer find joy in. There is an ideal community that we want to create and the current state of PAC is not it. Hopefully closing it down will allow us to work towards that goal and have fun doing so. If you have any intelligent suggestions or opinions, please send them to me. Nothing will change my mind, but I am interested in hearing some voices from the community that are not too nasty .
Farewell Note from webjr
Shutting down the Cult wasn't something I took lightly. There are a lot of people that depend on the Cult for friendship and many lasting friendships have been formed on these boards. Many were also shattered here. Over time the forum slowly degraded into a pissing match between various cliques and regions, and it wasn't something I wanted to be a part of anymore.
I put a lot of work into this place, as did many others and the decision to shut it down was made with a healthy amount of trepidation. Jordan (Sim) and I have never met. We've never spoken to each other over the phone. He is also one of the best friends I have. The same can be said for dozens of other members of this place. Hell, the Cult's first female member (Swivel, member 66) is my wife. I will miss all of you.
That said, on the Internet, nothing ever really ends. You all still no how to find me, and I'm sure that I'll get more than a few emails because of this. I will do my best to answer them all, and keep in touch with any of you that still wishes to keep in touch with me.
I'm sure some of you would like to know “why?” Well, the answer is really the forum, but not the forum. The Cult grew beyond my wildest dreams, but Jordan and I were never really able to take it where we wanted it to go. In the end, it was a PA fan-site with a forum and that forum continually degraded.
We wanted PAC to be open to everybody who was a fan of Penny Arcade, and overtime that meant some unsavory people would reside there. In the end, PAC was impossible for new members, because if they didn't fit the established mold, they were chased away, and the mold was something Jordan and I couldn't swallow anymore.
In the future, we may work for something new. We are still friends, and we still have complimentary talents.
I'd like to say a special farewell to all the junior administrators and moderators. Without you the Cult would have crashed and burned when it was still on Inside3d. We thank you for all your hard work, and invite you to be a part of our lives in the future.
Farewell Note from PrincessRedDot
First off, I want to thank webStoner and Sim for the opportunity to say goodbye to my favourite internet community. Once we realised that the PAC forum was going to be hanging up its hat, the process of "how do we do this?" was a tricky one to determine, and I hope everyone will understand that it was a very difficult and emotional progress for all of us.
Being here for, gosh, how many years now? has been one of the highlights of every day. I've developed relationships at PAC that have brought me great joy, supported me in difficult times and made me so completely proud to be a Penny Arcade geek. Obviously PAC has served me greatly professionally as well, and I'll always be grateful.
I wanted to thank every Cultist who has ever donated to Child's Play, volunteered as an Enforcer or otherwise worked in some way to help the community out. You guys have been the backbone of the whole enchilada for me. Thanks to Sim and webjr for bringing the enchiladas to the table in the first place. Thanks to Psy for always making dinner entertaining. Thanks to Mikey Pain for being the best Alabamian uncle my daughter could ever know. Thanks to Fatrick for that night in Prague.
For those of you who Wear The Black, I'll see you on the Enforcer Boards. For the rest of you, I consider you all to be people I... have met. </reddwarf>
Farewell Note from Luthien
So long and thanks for all the fish.
This subject header is a tried and true quote to mark what is decidedly the end of an era for many of us. This sort of ominous statement is, of course, nothing short of dramatic, because I can't really resist that sort of flare and poise. In short, however, the powers that be, the ones that run stuff and host this site, have decided that it's time to shut down the forum.
This is the part where a lot of you gasp, get upset, become angry, flippant, or compeltely apathetic. I understand where you guys are coming from. For a lot of you, this place is a favorite hang out, a spot on the internet where you can come together and chat and whatnot.
To me, it's just not the same any more. Don't get me wrong: I love a lot of you guys, and if it weren't for PAC, I wouldn't be the person I am today. I wouldn't have met so many goddamn cool people, I never would have gone to Canada, I never would have learned some lessons that were much-needed. I do not regret, in any part, my membership here, nor the times I have shared. I have made many mistakes, as I am far from perfect, but I am honored to be among people who have let those slide and accept me as a friend. I have undergone many transformations since my start here, from a silly game of werewolves, teddy bears, and parties in my stomach, emo poet, fanfiction writer, iron-fisted moderator deleting the forum...the list goes on and on. I've seen dozens upon dozens of members come and go, oldbies and newbies alike, and in some cases, their departure from our community was tragic. Karl Marx, may he rest in peace, was a young man who deeply affected the way I think of myself as a person.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of things that got under my skin, too. I'm not going to bother getting into it, because all it is to me is a difference of opinion, and I don't want anyone to feel personally attacked by this farewell. Suffice to say, I lost the will to be active, and mostly took to lurking. I'm not even sure why I remained an admin for as long as I have, because I honestly did even less of that than posting itself.
So it's time to say goodbye. This is not the last a lot of you will see of me, thanks to all the other mediums of the internet, but this is the last time I will be posting in this particular forum.
Good night and good luck.
Farewell Note from Coan Arcanius
I suppose this is something I've seen coming for a long time to some extent. I just never thought it'd really happen, the cults been around a long time, for me, ive been here at least 6 years. In that time ive seen alot and done alot with the Cult, including to getting out to see alot of you guys. Ive been accross the us, canada and even out to new zealand. I can consider alot of the older Cult friends, and alot of you have helped me out alot with alot of things(like a place to stay in my travels). I suppose i will continue to be there in irc, and I've always been around on aim/msn/yahoo. I also know there will be those of you I'll go see again, go out and visit and hang out.
To those of you who are new, I'm sorry you missed out on what was a great community. I am going to miss it. Thank you for all the good times. I am going to miss the Cult, but all good things must come to an end.
-Coan Arcanius
Farewell Note from j0no
Well, you finally, really did it. You maniacs. You blew it up. Ah, damn you. God damn you all to hell.
Okay, all sci-fi movie quotes aside, I just want to say I don't really blame anyone this. Perhaps it was a lack of time in the admins' busy lives to steer the community in the direction they wanted, or a lack of understanding of how to do that. I don't know if there's such a thing as a professional community leaders, but I know we aren't it. Perhaps it was a significant, and growing number of members with incompatible ideas of what the Cult should be. Again, I don't blame anyone for this. The fact just is, the people who run this community no longer enjoy it, and haven't for a while now.
As many of you may know, I left the Cult almost two years ago for reasons similar to why the Cult is closing now. At that time, I issued a simple apology to all of the admins for abandoning the community. I wish I had extended that apology to the rest of the Cult, and offered some sort of explanation. I'm not sure I can do any better for an explanation now, but wish to extend that apology now, and perhaps another one for not fighting harder for this community. I would like to thank the admin staff for continuing to respect my opinion and include me in their conversations when I did return a little under a year ago.
The reason I returned is I missed talking to my old friends from the Cult. Losing contact with them is the one thing I dearly regret. The Cult has given me a lot over the years; people whom I dearly love, including my current partner, experiences I otherwise never would have had, and even my current job can be attributed to the Cult. I have sometimes played into the idea that these events were somehow lessened due to being virtual, but these are cherished memories, and I would not be the same person I am today without them. To all my friends, even if we do not speak much anymore, I wish to thank you all, and hope that we can maintain our friendship despite the lack of the community through which we met.
I keep treating this like it is the end; I keep wanting to make a list of people to thank. The truth is, I will see a good deal many of you tomorrow on IRC, and will try to keep in contact with those that I do not. Still, because I do not give you thanks enough for the things you have done for me, I will try to make a short list. In no particular order, special thanks goes to Sim, HappyPants aka webjr, aln, [Bryan], LapCat, bekkasaurus, Coan Arcanius, Luthien, Miss Mari Silverfire, omFg, anju, Skorpion, mmmalice, duffey, Risiken, Seraphim, ShadowMouse, gogurt, Jesterboy, Japhro, Fatrick, omoshiroi, generica, PRD, and of course, echobunny.
All of these people have given me something irreplaceable in my life, and I thank you. If I missed you, I'm sorry. It is difficult to sum up important events in my life over eight years, and I thank you anyway. If you don't know who some of these people are, that's okay.
Well, all good things... See you - out there.
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