Denim Blunders, Reflections and General Nonsense.

[MythicSquirrel]

22 minutes ago, rbeck said:

More r/rawdenim drama lmao. Notice the amount of comments being deleted. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/rawdenim/s/sKept6ufiE

 

Edit: thread's deleted, might not open now idk.

This subreddit is just embarrassing.. one time I was organising some of my clothes in storage for listing and snapped a few pics of my denim and indigo items that were down there as well and my post was deleted for... buying and selling... even though I essentially reiterated what I just said here. Another time I offhand said the mods pander to inexperienced users and got banned for 30 days, reached out to the mods and they said i was cyberbullying!! I was a moderator on a fashion forum many times larger than that subreddit for a good few years, never once did I ever think I was being cyberbullied, that was just absurd to me. When the mods delete cool unique items but leave up posts of people showing off their absurd accumulation of items that all fit the same and are perfectly unfaded, well it's just embarrassing! 

[rbeck]

I just caught a 60 day ban for saying "get lost". It's crazy if they spend all their time moderating how are they gonna get any sick fades??

[Maynard Friedman]

I think I might implement some of that moderating style over here…🤔

[Cold Summer]

r/rawdenim has been a trainwreck for years, it's great if you're an overly-sensitive Millennial who's had an IV drip of corporatized Internet from infancy onward and loves endless fit pics of dudes with hairy muffin tops.

But anybody older than that who grew up with forum communities like this where a body of useful knowledge could be accumulated and easily referenced understands just how vapid and useless the platform is. Something about Reddit seems to attract and empower the absolute most useless passive-aggressive goobers, which leads to things like rawdenim's silly moderation.

Superdenim could be comically hostile ~15 years ago, but at least it's an actual community collecting useful reference for the hobby.

[Broark]

I think modern internet communities are missing out by shutting down anything deemed "dissent" immediately. Without it you just become a massive echo chamber.
From my perspective as long as you aren't going over the top and personally attacking someone then it's fine in my book.
But hey if you need to go somewhere and be told that the Onis that you're busting out of look great then sure, whatever floats your boat.
I won't waste my time with it personally. I check that sub out once in a blue moon just to remind myself that I'm not missing out on anything.

[beautiful_FrEaK]

26 minutes ago, Cold Summer said:

fit pics of dudes with hairy muffin tops.

I feel attacked.

I think I have to ban you now

[rbeck]

These mods are out of control here!

[Maynard Friedman]

29 minutes ago, rbeck said:

These mods are out of control here!

Banned! Criticism of moderators will NOT be tolerated. 😆

[Dr_Heech]

On 9/12/2024 at 3:37 PM, Cold Summer said:

Superdenim could be comically hostile ~15 years ago, but at least it's an actual community collecting useful reference for the hobby.

^This 😄

The good not so old days when making a comment without some weight behind it left you feeling vulnerable to the established pack of wolves.

In some way, l think Denimbro helped raise the bar and in turn, made Sufu a better place to come back to, although the other forum let down everyone in the end.

But here we are 'moving forward' (l hate that term) and maybe one day we'll all just be forced to migrate on over to r/rawdenim , whatever that is, and lump it.

In the meantime, l think that we have a solid little community here.

Edited September 16 by Dr_Heech
Sentence construction was poor so..

[AlientoyWorkmachine]

Reddit (like a lot of social media) tends to really sort of reward and incentivize some pretty antisocial behavior. That coupled with it's just mostly not my taste, I think it's fine to leave well enough alone here! 

[youngofthesoonest]

hey some of us here have hairless muffin tops. dont forget about us.

 

[aho]

Almost want to make a thread for this, but reading through the "Most sought after denim" thread, I'm wondering what everyone's favorite pair they've ever worn in looks like? Something like a "Show your personal best/favorite faded jeans". 

For me it'd be my Ooe LHT Contest jeans, which I sorely need to photograph some day. How about everyone else?

Edited September 13 by aho

[julian-wolf]

^ Good thought. For me, probably either the Roy Blackseed R01 Test Lot jeans or the The Flat Head S2004

[beautiful_FrEaK]

1 hour ago, aho said:

Almost want to make a thread for this,

Do it!

[Alec Leamas]

Yes do it!

It would be like an all time faded denim greatest hits!

Edited September 13 by Alec Leamas

[Double 0 Soul]

I've tried to multi-quote this from the vintage thread and failed miserably.. so @AlientoyWorkmachine 

Regarding Denimbro.. I'll try and nutshell this mo-fo

I think the catalyst for the downfall became apparent years earlier when there was a Denimbruin event.

 

To mark the occasion there was going to be a special run of Roy's available for DB members, the anticipation was palpable.. folks couldn't fkin wait.. i think there was going to be 30x pairs or sumat.. Roy only managed to get around 6 pairs made, but instead of distributing them fairly amongst the forum via a raffle or first come first served, they went to friends of the DB hierarchy most of whom having not contributed fk all to the forum for years.. @shredwin_206 called them out over this.. i remember Mr R saying the fallout soured his relationship with Roy and he stepped back for a while, i don't think this was malicious or intentional.. the situation was just very poorly managed... a management style which came back to haunt us years later.

 

A couple of years on and the forum was getting close to maxing out it's allotted server space or some technobollocks.. we all contributed £20 or so to buy a few more boxes to put our pixels in and keep the old ship afloat.. at this time it was still quite buoyant and sufu had slowed to a crawl.. there was zero transparency in the financial transaction, we just trusted the money was going to prolong the life of the forum, i'm in no doubt that it did and i fully expected having to put my hand in my pocket again in 12mths time to buy more space.. Mr R became a bit more active for a short period thereafter which was nice to see..

 

Time passed and most of the OGs had all but disappeared.. i was always trying to push back against what i saw as fake lifestyle BS.. what would become Influencers / denim-bloggers / Instagram culture in the years following .. poor old Doc_H was left as lone mod to keep our outrageous egos in check with next to zero mod-powers... a helluva lot of weird shit happened, which i could write a book about but isn't really relevant to the story so incredible as it is, i won't bore you with it.

 

The end came when the server maxed out again.. the mod-gods had been absent for quite some time but instead of saying "it's that time of year again folks.. we need some $$$s to keep the forum alive" they just started deleting threads.. as @julian-wolf alluded to.. there was never any consideration taken.. it was just blind panic.. the threads which hadn't been updated for the longest period (the sub-forums) were deleted first.. years of denim history and painstaking, academic-esque research gone at the click of a mouse, we'd put a lot of our time and effort into building this and they didn't even give us a heads up if we wanted to back up our own shit.. it was just management meltdown..

 

There was talk of rebuilding, most of us were prepared to contribute but i wanted them to hand over the keys to the forum to someone we could trust.. i always thought @CSL was a safe pair of hands (Hi Carl) but no, they wouldn't hand over the reigns, so we migrated back here and it was left to die.. we did have one last push to save the old place.. i set up a email group chat.. it was me, Ooms, Julian, Flash, Maynard, Bartles, b_F, Duke.. a motley crew if there ever was one.., we contributed more to this group chat over a few short months than we'd contributed to the forums in years .. thanks lads, i'll love you always for that.

 

I've got no hard feelings, i never thought Mr R was a bad guy, he would send me postcards out of the blue from his holiday destinations which i've kept, he annoyed the shit out of me at times and i'm sure as hell i annoyed the shit out of him.. the only sadness i feel is for the loss  of information, the slice of our denim history gone and it could have been so easily saved.. A forum member T-Bone Slim recovered the M-Series thread for me from the upside down, which i posted here, for that i'll always be grateful.. most were not so lucky.

 

The weird shit, of which there was much..

@Duke Mantee .. having single handedly built the Freewheelers thread from the ground up (like the gifted architect he is) got banned from the forum for.. if i remember rightly 'having an agenda' ? Nope, still doesn't make much sense..  @beautiful_FrEaK was comfort eating throughout

 

 

Even years later.. i hadn't contributed to DB for quite some time.. lockdown happened during a denim tour.. it was Foxy's turn with the jeans, but this was 2020, the world had changed, Foxy had left his job in Moscow, he and his wife drove across Europe from Berlin to his house on the Isle of Eigg before the borders closed.. i've stayed at Foxy's house, it's fkin miles from the post office, the post is collected weekly by ferry to take it to the mainland, I doubt the ferry was even running, he'd relocating his entire life, lets cut him some slack, but No! .. the DB hierarchy thought this was somehow my doing..@Maynard Friedman tried to step in as the voice of reasonbut they still thought  Foxy and I were trying to sabotage the tour because i was still grouchy over what happened.. as i say, fkin bizzarre but that's just Denimbro in a nutshell.

 

 

..the jeans turned up sometime later and no apologies were ever made..

 

The End..

[CSL]

To clarify, I was made a moderator but by that time the air had started to go out of the balloon & the end felt inevitable.

[Double 0 Soul]

You was all made moderators .. there was more moderators than contributors

[Maynard Friedman]

Voice-of-Reason is my middle name.

The upside of all the above is that many of the Denimbro crowd migrated back/over to Sufu and here we all are again, a big happy denim family!

[JohnM]

On 9/12/2024 at 9:21 PM, aho said:

Almost want to make a thread for this, but reading through the "Most sought after denim" thread, I'm wondering what everyone's favorite pair they've ever worn in looks like? Something like a "Show your personal best/favorite faded jeans". 

For me it'd be my Ooe LHT Contest jeans, which I sorely need to photograph some day. How about everyone else?

Ooe contest jeans were also my favorite pair aho.

[Double 0 Soul]

1 minute ago, Maynard Friedman said:

Voice-of-Reason is my middle name.

You told me it was Tarquin?

[Maynard Friedman]

That’s one of the others, there are multiple, it’s a family tradition.

[julian-wolf]

I’d forgotten completely about the whole saga of finger-pointing surrounding the tour jeans…The amount of conspiracy-theorizing that surrounded the few months’ radio silence of one person on an already long-dead forum was seriously comical.

Just to tie it all together, the tour jeans (that were so comprehensively theorized to have been stolen by Foxy) were a pair of the 1890s LeRoy’s repros that were meant to have been for the contest mentioned at the very top of 00’s post. I guess it all comes back around?

[julian-wolf]

For what it’s worth, I actually was just talking with Roy about those jeans (& that whole saga) a few months ago, and for his part he claims that it was never communicated to him that there was meant to be a full contest run of the jeans until it was already way too late to up production…given how poor the communication was on the DB end, as well, it’s easy for me to believe that all the miscommunication fell on Sansome (or whomever it was nominally organizing) from the start

Edited September 15 by julian-wolf

[aho]

^Thank you for the recap gents! I'd long fallen out of the denimsphere by that time (watches have been my financial ruin in the time since), so it's so strange for me to read how things turned out. Still, I'm glad to be back on sufu, and anytime I checked in over at DB during that period, I thought it was already long dead 😅

[AlientoyWorkmachine]

Whew! What a bit of history. Sorry to hear how it ended, but glad the crew here has some life. Honestly the sanest tiny corner of the internet I ever did find, though I know it didn’t used to be so. 

[Geeman]

I came late to DB, about 2014. It always felt a little cliquey for me and almost passive aggressive if you weren't in the clique or subscribed to a certain style/POV. I certainly never found it as useful for knowledge as sufficient for those very reasons. It was just another place to log in for denim related browsing. 

Sufu, even 10-13 years ago when it was still a bit volatile was always a better forum in my experience. 

 

[Double 0 Soul]

I've just seen @beautiful_FrEaK baby scan

What brilliant news to wake up to.. congratulations!!

 

 

[Dr_Heech]

1 hour ago, Geeman said:

I came late to DB, about 2014. It always felt a little cliquey for me and almost passive aggressive if you weren't in the clique or subscribed to a certain style/POV. I certainly never found it as useful for knowledge as sufficient for those very reasons. It was just another place to log in for denim related browsing. 

Sufu, even 10-13 years ago when it was still a bit volatile was always a better forum in my experience. 

 

I left Sufu about 13 years ago to migrate to db because of the clique that arose here 😅

Glad that the clique finally died out, and we've all now found a place that suits all our denim nerd needs and can be life long pals. Obviously only on the internet. 

 

[Dr_Heech]

6 minutes ago, Double 0 Soul said:

I've just seen @beautiful_FrEaK baby scan

What brilliant news to wake up to.. congratulations!!

 

 

Are you there in person? jk

Congratulations @beautiful_FrEaK and family, hope all goes well.

 

Edited September 15 by Dr_Heech