Back to the Original Rum

Well, as of tonight, the Rum roster has shrunk back down to the same members we had before we went on our recruiting spree in December. That is, with the exception of Pepsi and Arius who joined in January and March. All the new members, except for those two, are gone along with one long time member, Phobia.

Rum has always been more a group of buds than it has a Quake clan. Rum was formed back in April, 1997 by three friends (Blessed, Papa and me). We weren't much of a clan back then, we were just three guys who had just discovered how cool Quake and Zoid's CTF mod was. I invited some of my other friends, mostly Doom buddies, to join (Warped, Viper, Twat). Blessed invited some of his (Bigworm). Two people landed on the Rum server the first day they bought Quake (Twinsen, Dumb). We liked them immediately, so we asked them to join. I met Phobia one night last spring on a server I can't even remember. We hit it off and continued to play together until he finally joined up with us about a month later. I met my buddy Redneck while playing with him on CLT Online. Asked him to come back to the Rum server with me and we wound up asking him to join. Met LagOmatic late one night while playing with a friend of his. Next thing I knew, I was hanging with his old clan about as much as I was mine. When he quit a couple months later, we asked him to join up with us. We knew Hulk because he played on our server frequently. Same with Shamby. Viper and I met Shank on the Indigo server. We would play together on the Rum server late into the night until it was just the three of us. We had to ask him to join since he was almost one of us by default. Then there are the friends of friends... Vazon is an old bud of Warped's, Soji a friend of Phobia's, Pepsi a friend of Hulk's. Dark played on the Rum server and approached me one day about joining. I didn't really know him so I told him he needed to play with us on a daily basis for a while. I said that if we liked him, after a month or so we'd talk about letting him in. Man, for an entire month he stuck to me like glue... By the end of that time, we had all fallen in love with him.

Anyway, the point of that little story is we've always been more about friendship than skillz. If we didn't know and like you, you did not get in. We didn't really care about your playing ability. We started deviating from that policy in December as we tried to become more active. Some of the old members weren't playing as much as they used to and some we hadn't seen for months. We needed some new players. We wanted them to be good and we wanted them in quick. We took in a lot of new people and we didn't make them go through the lenghty process of getting to know them. Some of them had behavior problems. Some clashed with each other. Some clashed with all the rest of us. Others were just clan hoppers who stayed for a few weeks and moved on. All clashed with the Rum culture. The notible exceptions were Pepsi and Arius who we did ask to spend a few weeks getting to know us. Funny, those were the only two new people that felt right from the very beginning. And they are the only ones still here. Everything kinda works itself out in the end...