I feel kind of bad about it. Although I had a rocky time here sometimes, it also helped my writing a whole lot and had a lot of fun feds, and inspired my current major fed character.

Now it's like a graveyard. Just the original Hellfire members writing stuff every couple of months or so, if that. And although I haven't helped in that aspect, I confess that I haven't written because I feel like I don't belong. I feel like an interloper on the storyline here and that I don't have much to provide anyway.

What I WOULD have loved to provide is more members...but I just couldn't interest anyone.

I don't know if this place will ever revive or stay the way it is, or if I'll come by again, but I wanted to say a few things.

Sorry if I was a jerk in the past. I found out that at points, you guys REALLY hated me and thought of me as annoying, and I truly regret giving you that impression. I suppose that's part of the reason why I posted in the first place, since I couldn't just up and ditch this place without apologizing for my past transgressions.

If any of you left are still interested in e-fedding, there's always a spot over at EPW on Wrestlingforums for you. The format is a bit different, but hey, it's some place to write.

Either way, take care and thanks for the memories.

-Kam

No one ever hated you, Kam - I won't deny that there were times you made us scratch our heads or roll our eyes a little, but it was always with a certain affection. You were certainly never an interloper in the storyline either. A late addition, perhaps, and not always someone who quite got exactly what we were going for, but you were involved in and responsible for a number of major feuds. You pushed what we were doing forward more than most, and you gave us the rare advantage of fresh eyes. Sometimes it's important to have someone around who isn't totally established in the inner circle. Maybe if we'd had more Kams around early on, we wouldn't have lost all our Highones. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

All good things come to an end though. I still feel like I have stories left to tell about this place and the people in it, but there's only so much time I can give to just throwing words out into the abyss. With no one to post back, and maybe no one to even read, the story might as well just live in my head. It's still there: complete now, more or less, but without the context of a fed it loses much of what made it important or interesting.

I'm sad too, in some ways, but it's not like we didn't all get what we wanted out of this. Years of enjoyment, the benefit of experience in the craft of writing, friends and enemies. It had to end sometime. And it may have gone out with a fizzle rather than a bang in the very end, but I think we had some of the strongest content ever - both here and in FWRFed - in the final year or two. The final Endgame was probably our best show ever, and I think that the real decline began after that.

These things happen. It was never going to last forever. I hope that we've all gone on to do the things we wanted to do, and taken something from the fed(s). I'm still slowly bashing out my novel, and I've done a little professional writing work in the last couple of months. And if I am any good at what I do, it's the fed that honed whatever raw talent I had into something usable.

Life goes on, people grow up, and the online fashions change. I don't know if the internet is a place for things like TCW any more, but I'm glad I was around when it was.

Ditto to everything Thommy said.

For the record, it costs me almost nothing to keep this place running, so barring some unavoidable catastrophe, this place will at least exist for as long as I do.

I can't remember Matt's password, so Lance will have to do. I am/was the old guy from this fed. So with that history, I can easily say that the last roster TCW had was probably the most talented on average. There were no weak posters, and anyone could win any match if they put in the time. I got a bit lost with the Hellfire stuff, but it made for a nice foil for Matt.

Over the past decade I was able to create three characters that I really enjoyed. It strengthened my writing ability and increased my vocabulary. It also gives me a well to draw from when I make characters in Smackdown. (Thommy, you come out to "Girls just want to have fun").

So everyone who reads this and those that won't, thanks for good times and challenges.

My wife got into wrestling recently, which led me to explaining e-fedding to her -- which led me to realize how much time and effort I and a lot of other really great writers put into 411/ECF/TCW/FWR. As reading wrestling message boards will prove, most wrestling fans on the internet are morons, so it was great to stumble onto a group of smart fans who were creating something unique with an e-fed that wasn't fanfic or a collection of boring promos. It was collaborative, and also genuinely competitive based on the quality of the fedders' work.

That's what made it so appealing to me, reading and reacting to well-crafted or sometimes just bizarre characters, in an environment where it was OK to travel through time or interact with supernatural forces -- or just ambush your opponent in the hotel lobby. And for the most part, the most committed people were also welcoming and pretty easy to get along with (by the time I got involved, in the late Acid Jackrabbit era at 411), like Acid and Lance. Through all my time with the fed, there was hardly anyone I genuinely disliked even when I felt competitive about winning a match, which I admit I did. The more I participated, the more it seemed like a group working together to tell a larger story than a competition.

I'm glad it lasted as long as it did, and sad that not everything was preserved. Sure, some of it was shitty and juvenile, but as it continued it seemed to me that less and less of it was. In the later era of the fed, the die-hards who kept it going were also the strongest and most creative writers -- of course I have to single out Thommy, whose sheer volume of creative output actually makes me a little depressed, because it's also so dense and well-written and just plain good. When I open one of my books on magic, mythology or mysticism I still think "That would be a great character to add to the War in Hell." I'm sure I have pages and pages of notes (and crudely drawn sketches) related to the Abysmal Ones, the War in Hell and related cosmology.

If only my time and commitment were equal to all the ideas I had and still have for the fed. I brushed off Acid Misfit again a few months ago and thought about another revamp of the character, possibly involving the Hellfire Club. But other ideas and the real world keep competing. After starting this, I opened a file from April of new non-player characters for the fed to fill out the card. There are a lot of files with various ideas for the fed on my old hard drive, and a lot of accumulated feuds, some even worth keeping. My regret is not also having the other feuders' work as well.

Thanks, Lance, for keeping the lights on. I'd like to think that it's just on hiatus. Like Thommy said, the story still exists in all our heads, so it's going to continue. I'm glad there's a place for it to continue, and hope that it will. Either way, the fed and the people in it will always be a source of inspiration for me.

This thread reads like a eulogy. Bit depressing.

Also haven't been here in ages, how are you all doing?

Pretty good thanks. I'm getting married on Saturday.

Congratulations to the both of you, Thommy and Emma!

For those who may be interested:

Congratulations!

I just hit the one month mark of this whole marriage thing.

Congratulations! How's it going? So far for us it's been all parties and holidays so I assume that continues indefinitely, yeah?

Geez, is everybody around here married now?

Just a few months shy of two years myself ... still pretty good. It probably helps that we're both boring, cynical, antisocial, comic book-loving nerds. So, you know, common interests and all that.

I got sick the second we got home from our honeymoon... Not sure how to take that.

I'm ill and we're still on honeymoon. Guess I finally relaxed after the wedding and let down my defences. Stupid body.

Damn Shame...
Once upon a time... this place was bustling with so much activity and so many friends that just thinking about ECF and the TX group brings a smile to my face. I couldn't log onto AIM or MSN without getting it blown up by messages... a lot of good peeps - Demolition Man, Nick Diamond, Coren, Kodak, Goob and so many others.

Hard to believe this all started as a rebellion against some blowhards running a fed on a somewhat popular wrestling site. Thank goodness for those assholes -wouldn't know a lot of good people otherwise.

LC: Thanks for keeping this up, I'll admit -giving up ecfwrestling.com for twistedexperience.com was a blow to my ego but in the end it was obviously the right move. You were the right caretaker for our collective history. Thank You.

I'll always check back and if you ever do have to shut it down... lemme know and backup the database.

Marshall

The bigger question is, can it really ever die?

And congrats to all.

LC all this time I thought your GF was imaginary. I pray to GAWD you didn't dress your right hand in a wedding gown. (I kid)

On the serious, I hope everyone is doing well.

Have a Happy Holiday and take care.

B