Hello again folks, and welcome to the probe. This one is going to be a little different than the ones so far. In the chair sits JCC, the boss man of this site and also someone who was involved with it from its beginning. Therefore instead of piss farting around this is going to be a serious affair, detailing the history of the morphine nation from its beginning to where it is now. I figure this should be interesting to some of our newer members, as well as some older ones like me who were banned for more than half the time since its inception and is therefore in the dark about a vast percentage of this stuff. So without further ado, lets get into this biatch.

Ok how about we start with how the nation got started

You can’t tell the story of the Nation without starting with the story of the Phorums, so I’ll start there. It was 2003, and a bunch of the old schoolers had been running amok in the Oratory OTT forum for months. The admins there were getting pretty pissed off about it, despite “off the topic” meaning “not wrestling”, not “not silly”. Things were said like that we were clogging the database with stupid posts, and eventually posts started getting deleted. So Jim and Leo decided to create their own forum, which would at that time be both a message board for their comedy group, the Morphine Associates, and a place for people mainly who they met through the Oratory (at the time) to go and post the sort of things that weren’t being allowed over there.

What did the main page look like then? Was it just some excerpts of Jim and Leos stuff?

Well, it actually still exists. http://w3.to/morphineassociates/. It wasn’t Morphine Nation back then, it was a completely separate site, fully dedicated to their comedy group. I think there are a couple of articles on there, but it wasn’t that sort of site for the most part.

Ah i get you, so it was an existing site and they added the forums for the guys who were getting pissed off at the tory. Who were the guys who originally jumped when the Phorums started?

At that point, it wasn’t so much “pissed off”. Most people who posted at the Phorums still posted at the Oratory in the beginning, so there wasn’t a “jump” so much as a sharing of posters. A few of the guys that started the Phorums off besides Jim and Leo, and Xavier who hosted the board, were myself, Bruce, Luke, J, Lauren C., Sparky Van Dam, Puck, Nutty, Samir, Cash, Mick JH.

So Xavier was pretty influencial in getting the nation started?

Very. After the string message board which existed for a couple days, he offered Jim and Leo to host a PHPBB forum for them, first on his personal AngryGerman.com domain, then on SuperPatriot.net’s, and then eventually as part of a collection of forums called SuperPatriot.net’s Monticello.

Didn’t the forums exist in some form for some time before it was part of superpatriot? I seem to remember that when i first started posting there under the “mask” user-name

Yes, that was during the AngryGerman domain days. We were pretty self contained at that point, weren’t really bringing in new people other than by word of mouth by those who had started the place. It was basically a forum about nothing then, which worked really well. But what I mean is, there was no site that the Phorums were in support of back then. They sort of just… existed on their own.

Yeah that was the appeal for me, id never seen anything like it before. It wasnt attached to anything and it wasnt about anything

Nor had I, but mainly in terms of the content for me. I always thought a site would be a cool idea, and since Jim and several others were writing lots for sites like Project Wonderboy and O2 at the time, there would’ve been no shortage of content.

I suppose to describe it to someone who wasnt there, it was basically 4chan but more contained?

More or less, yeah. And not about anime, therefore superior.

Yeah mostly hitler and rape. I remember a lot of rape. Im pretty sure every second word Luke said back then was rape

There was some rape stuff back in the day. I was sort of on a high horse back then on the subject, so I never really got into the stuff concerning that topic. Then when we moved in under Monticello, the rape stuff was of course toned down.

Oh yes it definately was. What led to the move to monticello?

Xavier was putting the Monticello forums together, to sort of bring all the forums under his and Phoebus Apollo’s control under one umbrella. He asked Jim if he wanted the Phorums to be a part of it, and Jim said yes. The thinking was that it would expose the Phorums to a shitload more people, and that we’d get some sweet new posters out of the deal.

So at this time Jim was basically running the phorums with Xavier covering the financials?

By that point I was already an admin as well, so I was doing the same sort of thing as Jim, but he was still the #1 guy. And Xavier hosted the place, and sort of had an “overlord” thing going.

And then when we became part of monticello, we were basically the off topic forum of that site right? With most new posters coming from their old off topic forums

Yes and no. In theory, we were supposed to be a sort of “off topic but not for the faint of heart” forum. Their off topic posters for the most part stayed in their off topic forum, and then some ventured down to the Morphorums from time to time. We got some good posters out of it, and some that really just didn’t get it, would complain, would find things “offensive”, etc. And then somewhere along the line, certain old-schoolers started chasing off new posters before giving them a chance to get acclimated. Of course, this stunted the growth of the Phorums within Monticello from that point forward, since we got a sort of reputation for doing that.

Who do you mean by certain old schoolers?

Well, Fat DJ and Enrique Molinero, for example, used to actually brag about it from time to time. Not to lie, when someone bitched about the Phorums being on SuperPatriot, there was some value in having people firing back. But when someone was just confused about something, or had trouble finding their way around the various forums (we had around a dozen then), it was usually something that could’ve been remedied by explaining shit out to them, rather than flaming them into not coming back.

I suppose thats a theme thats never gone away fully. Our newest phorum Laurie just got flamed a little while ago. Was this about the time that all the morphine people got systematically banned from the tory?

Yes and no. Everyone’s going to have people they don’t get along with, but we, since the split, have tried to discourage the reasonless bashing of people just because they’re new, or because they don’t mirror the ideals of the majority of the site members. The problem is that the stigma of “oh those Morphorums, they bash new people so don’t join” has stuck with us, to the point where in my thread from just yesterday soliciting questions for a FAQ, Honey submitted one asking why we chase off new posters. As for the stuff between us and the Oratory, most of us didn’t get banned, we simply stopped posting there. It was the result of alot of attempts over on the Oratory to shut out “offensive” content, whether or not it was against the stated OTT rules. The whole thing culminated in a thread that Cheap Heat posted in which he wished Hitler a happy birthday. The thread was pretty well done, but some people had some trouble distinguishing between it and actual racism, and a big blowup ensued.

Thats right that was the best thing Cheap heat ever did. When did we decide to start putting main page posts up? Was that after the split with Xavier?

Nah, well before, actually. The Morphine Nation website was something Jim wanted to do for quite some time. Then when he was in the process of getting it done, Fat DJ and I cooked up a scheme to register it before he could, and put up a spoof site for some drug-related morphine thing, so he would think somebody took his domain idea. Then eventually we did the big reveal and presented him with the site, at which point it continued to be hosted by Xavier along with the Phorums until the split.

I see. What was the content of the website originally?

Mainly exclusively feature articles and comics that Jim wrote. DJ and I were given free reign to write, but he did so sparingly and I did so never, so it was pretty much 99% Jim. Then eventually Dziga was brought on to contribute Cane/Hat Man comics every Friday, and Luke and Whatever were brought on for some additional articles.

So basically it was comics and long form comedy articles?

Exactly.

What led up to the split from Xavier and superpatriot?

Some people will claim it was due to one fight, between Jim and Xavier, but that was pretty much the final straw, from what I understand. There had been issues with the direction the Phorums had been moving in for quite some time, as well as with who had jurisdiction over moderating them, and that sort of stuff. But mainly it was the same underlying thing that led to the “chasing away new people” problem. The Phorums as I’ve said started as a place to post things that were TOO SILLY for the Oratory’s OTT. Eventually, they sort of changed into a place to be TOO NASTY for other places. There’s a difference between saying “any TOPIC is allowed”, and trying to strategically target people in hopes of lessening their fun. In the beginning of the Phorums, we’d all been around trying to add to each other’s fun, not get ours at the expense of others’. It was weird, like, a sort of strange “morality” code developed in which you couldn’t really be human, and there was a set of views and characteristics that, if you didn’t have, you’d be trashed for, and it was looked at as almost “immoral” to mind that.

Thats it for this session folks. This one might be a few parts as we try to cover as much ground as we can and leave no stone unturned. Feel free to ask JCC a question in the comment section, and indeed since we havnt finished this interview yet you can even submit your own questions which ill ask unless its gay.

Category: Ano's Public Probe | Tags: Angry German, Cane/Hat man, Jim, Leo, Monticello, Morphine Nation, Oratory, Phoebus Apollo, Public Probe, Super Patriot, Xavier Von Erick // 13 Comments »