Thank you!

[Scott Warner]

As of May 2008 I will be hanging up my hat on all things Dirty. We're currently in the (slow, thanks to me!) process of getting a new server for the forums, switching over various odds and ends, and transfering ownership of the domains. The net result is that you will likely see an improvement with the performance and administration of these forums!

I started Dirty back in 1996 when I was college student in Santa Barbara. Up until that point the only real way people worldwide could chat about Underworld was through the Usenet, so I followed the trend of various other fans of electronic music and decided to build a community. From there came the Dirtylist, an Underworld mailing list and eventually, Dirty.org. Those days were really fun because we felt part of something bigger, had direct contact with the artists that we loved and found that Underworld fans around the world were great to interact with.

Beyond the community we were fortunate to be involved with some really talented people and do all manner of cool creative things. Two key creative artists, first Wouter Hermans and then Yannick Joubert (with the inbetween Brown site design a product of yours truly), helped us present all things Dirty in the best possible light by creating truly wonderful website designs. In 1999 we were involved with one of the very first high profile free downloads of an Mp3 with the distribution of Underworld's "Kittens" - I believe it was downloaded by 10,000 people that day and ended up crashing our server! I began Dirtyradio in the late 90's with the help of my good friend Michael Beam and we've been broadcasting ever since. In the early part of this decade, Yannick and I worked with Karl to present an online series of abandoned cars. Etc. etc. I am really happy to have been able to be involved in all of these creative endeavors in some way and to have shared ideas with some truly gifted people along the way.

Unfortunately, since the early part of this decade my day job has really limited my capacity to contribute in the ways I would like to online projects like Dirty. For those of you who don't know, I am a Lead Designer at Pandemic Studios in Los Angeles, currently working on a 3+ year project known as Mercenaries 2. Contrary to what you see in commericals for video good "colleges", this can be a crazy and stressful business full of hard problem solving and very long hours, and in particular my project is probably second only to a massively multiplayer online game in terms of its total systemic complexity: open world action games are a son of a bitch, basically (particularly if you're trying to network physics gameplay over the internet!) However, it's never boring, I work with dozens of truly gifted creative people every single day, and at the end of it all get to make a bunch of people happy when they play the end product. So, in some ways it's sad that I have to sacrifice other creative projects in order to be somewhat successful at my day job but the tradeoff isn't too bittersweet.

And, I doubt seriously if I would have ever thought about getting into a creative field if it wasn't for my initial adventures with Underworld. Thanks to Rick, Karl and the rest of their organization being such supportive and inspiring people, it occurred to me that perhaps getting involved with a job you loved wasn't so unreachable after all; shortly after beginning all things Dirty I quit my job working as a real estate assistant and drove down to Interplay productions in Irvine, Ca to demand a job. There are very few days that go by that I don't think about my happiness at what I do now in light of the Dirty projects that came right before it, and how they enabled me to "see the light".

So that's that, really. Nothing much is changing around here really, and in fact things will likely improve a fair bit - I'm sure as far as many people are concerned I haven't really been here in quite some time. I will continue to run Dirtyradio (I can't give that one up...) and Yannick will continue to keep the lights on around here, but for the most part I will be disappearing into the horizon. Thank you all for coming and contributing this community throughout the years. And thank you to Rick and Karl for being such wonderful people.

Scott Warner
March 2nd, 2008