Okay, lets try this again!
Recently I was browsing aged domains that were for sale, and one caught my eye: MJIFC dot com. To most this would like like total junk, but to me it was a rare lost treasure.
When the internet was newish in the late 90s and early 00's, most of us created our own personal and fan websites. Social media didn't exist, so we had to. I was a big fan of Michael Jackson as a child, so of course I made many fan sites dedicated to Michael Jackson starting in around 1998. I used free hosts because having your own server and all that seemed impossible, and I was a young teenager so I had no money for a domain. Fast forward to 2003 I was an adult and had some money. I wanted to give all my websites real domains, so for the Michael Jackson website i first had Mijac dot net, then i moved to MJHQ dot com, mostly due to being available. I really wanted MJIFC dot com, which was the original Michael Jackson Internet Fan Club domain since 1998, and site since like years before that. By then though the side was offline for years since i think early 2000, but the owner kept it as a blank page or parked ever since.
My MJ site and forum were somewhat active. I would always get annoyed with everyone and close, and reopen, and eventually sold and rebought domains back. At one time I actually owned the MJONE dot com domain, which is an official Michael Jackson domain now for their Cirque dus oleil show or whatever the hell. I had actually had the MJ sites all closed down by the time he died in 2009. I made a few attempts at reviving the site as a music site sometime in early 2010s, renaming Michael Jackson Headquarters to Music Junkie Headquarters, but meh. Sold the domains for good and moved on.
I did attempt to merge all my old forums and restore them a few times, this current merge you're seeing now was made in around 2019-20 which free speech was heavily under attack, so i merged all my old forums into one to have a starting point, but i quickly became bored of that.
Anyways, decades pass and fast forward to a couple weeks ago. I was randomly browsing domain auctions and saw the MJIFC dot com domain which instantly caught my eye. It was the cherished domain from my first years on the internet. I bid on it and won, it was finally mine.
I spent the next week building up a new Michael Jackson site, had a nice logo and everything ready to go. Figured i might as well restore the old forums too, not the merged forum though, i wanted the original MJ only forum, so i found a back up from 2008-09, and spent nearly an entire week trying to get it to upgrade to the latest versions of Invision Community. Made several attempts and finally got it working. Renewed my Invision license, and bought a $40 skin.
It was looking nice, but by then all the nostalgia wore off. I remember how I hated running the Michael Jackson site back in the day, how i didn't get along with man, but in their defense i was a mentally unstable weirdo (was before i discovered alcohol and my hormones settled down, or something, ha), and in reality, i didn't listen to Michael much before he died, and haven't listened to him all that much since.
Once the excitement wore off, I realized i didn't want to make another Michael Jackson site, at least not a community, and i don't see much of a point really. He's been dead for a while now, hype from the latest movie is going to wear off and I just don't know. I do want to make an archive of all my sites, and history with MJ and such, so maybe i'll still use the domain for that I don't know.
Anywho, I spent all this time and money on renewing the license, buying a skin, and so on, i might as well use it. Grunch is one of my most cherished domains, and it worked as my non-personal blog. I just don't write that much anymore, and it was barely ever updated, so I figure why not just move the old merged and restored forum from 2020 to it (combined almost all of my previous attempts at forums into one: MJ forum, damnidunno forum), and we'll just see how it goes.
Invision Community 5 has a site cms built in now, so I'll see if i can update the main page to look like a blog. We'll see what happens, and I'll just restore the wordpress site if it doesn't work out. no big deal.
So if you're into these old forums, want less moderation, this will be the place for you!
I am using our current logo, but going to try to work on something new.
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