The purpose of this is only to express the gratitude of we, who called ourselves "quakers" in homage of a great website called Housequake.com.
Since unfortunately we can not post at that website anymore, I thought it could be a good time to post in acknowledgement and gratitude to Aaron, the founder and owner of Housequake. He has made a labour of love during almost 12 years which led to a world class website, as someone called it; a place for interaction, friendship and intelligent discussion. A place where you could speak about your favourite music, and about any other thing, within the respect, and with a quality in the content rarely seen in forums. And also a place with loads of reference information regarding a certain musician and his music.
And all this work was done purely for the love of the music of a certain musician.
Housequake is already being greatly missed. May this humble blog serve to say a huge
THANK YOU AARON!
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
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62 comments:
As a long time quaker, i have to say a big THANK YOU AARON for everything you did for us. I fully respect your decission and support it. I wish you all the best.
kostas a.k.a. glamslam
Well said - thank you Aaron!
Thank you Aaron. When I first discovered HQ some years back, I was excited and also extremely impressed. What a wonderful site and with a vast amount of info/resources. Truly top quality! Although I am VERY sad about all of this - I support and respect your decision. Your hard work and dedication has been amazing and much appreciated.
Of course if HQ were to 'return' I'd be in full support of that too (Ecstatic is more like it)!
Thank you Aaron!
Peace, Maia (username - Mrs.NELSON)
Goku says, "Thank You Aaron! I wish you good health and good fortune. Peace, Stephen.
I would just like to personally thank Aaron for his patience and wonderful Prince orientated website although I would now call it a Community of Friends who like the "MUSIC" of the Purple One.
I do wish Aaron and his family all the best. I fully understand and support the difficult decision he had to make.
Jason a.k.a Ouchie
A big "Thank you" comes from me too!
It's very hard to accept that you closed Housequake, although I did not post too much on the site! It was great to read, to get the best informations any Prince-dedicated website had to offer and to make friends. Always was proud to be a member!
With the biggest respect to your work over the years I would like to wish you the very best for your future.
It would be great to meet you again on an other place!
Take care and much love!
yvonne
well said! thanks for posting it and a big thank you to aaron!
HOUSEQUAKE... what a great experience!!!! thanks so much Aaron for such an amazing and loving work,such and inspired place can only come from someone with an immense love for music and a true fan.All my admiration and all the respect!
best wishes!
Thank you, GRACIAS!!
Paz (pazpeace)
Aaron, I told you not to use that rubbish header!
;)
...seriously though, a big big thank you for all your hard work over the past decade - especially in recent years when you've faced such adversity from the very subject you were helping to promote on the best artist fan & news site on the web.
I hope you're now enjoying a well earned break, safe in the knowledge that you don't have to give a sh!t what P thinks or does ever again.
Once again, thank you for starting a community which will be sadly missed.
I wish you all the best with the new Celine Dion site you're working on.
The Reverend
Yes, THANK you Aaron for all the work and the opportunity for fans to find others around the world who share the fascination!
That was one of the most appealing and I think beneficial feel of Housequake.com - that international feel. The org has a sense of only USA type commentary and humor, but the Quake stood out for me as a bit more classier and sharper. After joining HQ I closed my Org membership and made HQ me home.
Anyway, I wish you much success and keep in touch with us!
And remember to be a modernaire modernaire!
Modernaire
The biggest THANK YOU I could find for your hard work and your friendship all over these years. Thanks mate!
Gom
Just simple and plain thank you.
Thanks Aaron because nobody did or would do what you did.
HQ was the best and best designed site a SERIOUS fan could dream of. NOTHING could ever substitute HQ.
All the pressure and the balltouching you got from MPLS are an indicator of how great your work was.
bigjim99 - so proud to have 0 posts at the org :D
Prince will beg you to put HouseQuake.com back online, be sure of that! Enjoy your well-earned peace and liberty and do not look back over your shoulder, you made the right decision to tell Prince to put it where it fits, now let him handle his own promotion, we all know how well he does that.. NOT!
Talk to you online or over a beer soon my friend!
Erik
Thanx 2 aaron but i'm devasted by the closure of HQ!
PS>Do we know if there is a possibilty to see the return of HQ??? (Message for
those who know a little something about that?)
Love2thenines from HQ!
Thank you Aaron, HQ was tha bomb!
Hope you will be back in a way or another
I join the list of grateful 'quakers' who want to thank Aaron for making us feel like a community.
Laura aka lulirom
What can I say ...
Purple fan's life will never be the same after that.
Thanx a lot for all those years full of incredible experiences !!!
Wish u all the best.
Luv!
Housequake was a wonderful ride!! MANY, MANY thanks for your valuable time, dedication and thought that went into such a super place on the internet.
I shall miss it a great deal, but totally understand your reasons.
My very best wishes to you,
Drew
HQ was, in my little world at least, my most visited, most loved and most valuable website on my favourites' list.
It was more than just a homage to Prince - that was simply a starting point - it became a civilised place to be and chew the fat...
So thank you Aaron for providing a site of such a good quality - and to the moderators (at least most of them ;-) ) for a website of rare quality.
It goes without saying, I hope you change your mind - not just on a personal, selfish basis - but because it drives me mad thinking Prince can do this to such a labour of love.
Your efforts never went unnoticed and your legacy will, I am sure, live on with those of proud to call ourselves 'Quakers...
It was probably too much to expect some miserable people to act like standard people. So I will switch to moderated comments from now on.
Just to explain a bit my previous post: Some people posted crap unrelated to the topic of this page, so I deleted it. Besides I made the comments moderated, which means I have to approve them before publication.
Rest assured, any relevant post to this topic will be published immediately.
Thanks a lot, Aaron. Great job! One of the greatest funkateers around the Prince's universe.
(Sorry for my poor English)
Just wanted to add my gratitude to the long list... Put your feet up and relax now and stick 2 fingers up at the purple mafia.. Who's having the last laugh? I reckon it's Aaron..
Thank you..
Many thanks for HQ and the work you've put into this !
I hope HQ will return though..
Oh man, we enjoyed Housequake for its always up-to-date news and the more serious atmosphere. It was a fun place to hang out.
Now we're sad that the site has gone and we will never give up the hope for it might return!!!
Thank you Aaron!
from chaosanddisor & violetsandy
ever since i accessed the site back in 2002 when the org had crashed and was down for a few days, i have always held housequake in high regard. it was just about everything a fansite dedicated to prince should be: filled with lots of information, a diverse crowd of members from all over the world, and all about the music. it's rather disappointing that prince didn't see the 'quake the same way that most of us did, and it is absolutely understandable why you ended up closing the site. imo, prince does not deserve a site that was as awesome as housequake was. hopefully one day soon he'll look back and be like "whoa, i *really* screwed up here..." and apologize to you and to the fanbase for basically punishing everybody simply for being fans.
thanks for all you've provided the community for the 10+ years the site ran, and thanks to you and my fellow moderators for being such an incredible bunch of people. i'm proud to have helped with the site, even through all the hard times and the bullshit.
cheers,
Dansa :)
Thank you Aaron for all youve done for us over the years.
It was fun while it lasted.
Hope to see you at ......... :)
Aaron,
Thanks for creating a website that was not only *the* place to find anything you wanted to know about Prince (and sometimes more than you wanted to know!), but a community. I have many wonderful memories of "hanging out" at HQ -- waiting for & posting during the Superbowl performance, the Collectibles forum where I learned so much, raising money for Sheila E. (thanks Sbacon) and having her post a message of support for HQ on her website in response, and most recently, winning tickets to see Prince perform at the Hotel Gansevoort. I have also made friendships that extend beyond 'just Prince'. None of those things would have been possible without the wonderful website you created.
Housequake will be sorely missed; but I don't blame you for closing it. You probably put up with more b.s. than any of us will ever know. RIP Housequake. =(
Best wishes to you -- hope you are finally able to relax, enjoy, and party up!
Devoted Puppy (the Party Up! funkateer)
Sincerest thanks Aaron.
HouseQuake was a wonderful place to be a part of and was full of intelligence, humour, passionate sentiments and a whole host of deeply special people.
It is hard to explain how what was, on the face of it, a collection of forum threads, lists, news bits and interviews could transform into a genuine "Community" but HQ was always so much more than the sum of it's parts... this is thanks to the members, the moderators and, of course, it's founder.
"Thanks" seems to small a word.
Peace, Love and Positivity... always... and forever.
Dee (Misty2k)
"In Housequake we Trust"
big thanx aaron for the love, power, and time you invested to keep on running hq for such a long time. you did a great job for the whole prince community over the years
i fully respect the decision to close the site...enough is enough :-(
hq will be forever in my heart
once again thanx aaron and the whole hq team for your work for us....
Aaron, I don't have to say this, because you know how I felt about HQ.
There will never be another like the quake!
Vc61 (the former videomod)
Many thanks indeed mate.......hope a way can be found to bring it back.
Thanks Aaron for having established the best Prince fan site! I miss HQ already and still hope that it'll come back some time. I'd offer help maintaining the site, as a mod, whatever. HQ was sort of my home on the web, it was my browser starting page, I checked it at least daily. I joined only two years ago and have learned a lot about Prince since then, things I would never have known without HQ (and I don't mean those things I wish I didn't know... like this whole story). And I met a lot of really nice and cool people there! Gonna miss you too! It's just sad it had to end this way.
THANK YOU!!!
Thanks Aaron!
Take care!
Hi Aaron
There isn't much I could add to the words of the previous posters or to my email to you. I would just like to say a BIG "thank you" again for creating such a wonderful community and for succeeding in keeping it alive for so long against all the odds (which, as it now appears, must have been a lot harder than most of us have ever been aware of).
Soon after joining HQ in June 2003, I made several new friends and I'm still friends with them today. They are a very important part of my life now. If it hadn't been for HQ, I would have never met them.
In addition, I had the great pleasure of being able to introduce another friend of mine, my only friend in the community I know in "real life", my good friend PiiiJiii, to HQ.
In the beginning, HQ was all about Prince to me but gradually, during the course of time, I found out how much else there was to it and eventually, I got to the point where I realised that HQ was so much more than "just" a Prince fansite. Sometimes the off-topic discussions and About HQ section were even more interesting and important to me than Prince & His Music or Latest Prince News! So many times, I learned the latest news on events in the world or on other artists on HQ first before hearing about them on the news on TV in the evening. Now I miss this regular source of information, my own personal "newspaper", so to speak, in the morning and I'm sure I'm missing out on a lot of news now.
I also miss the wonderful and unique sense of humour, as revealed in so many funny threads and posts, which I found to be special on HQ and which cracked me up so many times.
What I miss most of all, however, is the spirit of community which, despite all the differences of opinions and views and occasional arguments, had brought and held us together, as was shown in the regular birthday threads and all the other threads in which 'quakers shared the joys and sorrows of their personal lives with each other. This, I think, is what made HQ unique on the Internet, more than all the excellent Prince news, facts and discussions. You set up a website - and created a family!
Once a 'quaker, always a 'quaker!
All my best wishes to you and thank you so much for everything.
musiclover
Many thanks Aaron for providing such an excellent resource over the years. HQ was a great site, a great community and THE place for Prince info on the web. Very sad it's over...though I can completely understand why.
Is there no possibility of someone else taking on the job?? Or at least some way of keeping available all the detailed info that HQ brought together(I'm thinking of stuff like the FAQs, gigs list, covers lists, bootleg info etc). It's such a shame that so many people's hard work should be lost!
Here's hoping...
Housequake.com - I miss U !
It was always a great place to be.
A big THANK U to Aaron !
In Funk We Trust
Thanks a lot for all the work put in HQ. Was my fav. site and daily visit for more than 7 years. I still miss it a lot. But respect to the decision made. Not really mad at you or Prince about this. We just didnt pick the easiest artist to be a fan of. Good luck and health in your life!! btw I still got that pic with you and Sheila in Paradiso ;-)
Aaron - Thank You! HQ made a massive and very positive difference to the community and to many of us personally too.
Much respect and gratitude!
Thanks, no, THANK YOU Aaron for creating such a wonderful place. Though I seldomly posted I met some great people there and that's why HQ will always have a special place in my heart.
Take care! annastesia2003
All thanks to Aaron
Jump up on the one ... now you are having FUN
I really really miss Housequake.
My wife is aking me how come I am not so long on the internet anymore !!
Roald Bakker
The Netherlands
xenophobia2002
Thanks Jose and everyone else that already has posted all my thoughts about Aaron and hq.com.
Without HQ and the members I would never have kept my enthusiasm about Prince so high for so long. I think that's what I fear most, that my interrest in Prince will gradually fade away.
I still check houseqauke.com daily to see if there's any light in the HQ tunnel.. :)
I understand and respects Aarons decision, but I hope that someone will pick up where Aaron left it and release housequake.com version 2.0. (the tribute to Aaron edition).. :)
Thank you Aaron!
Best regards, Trond aka Mister T
Thank U Aaron... HouseQuake was a beautiful place... spend many times on there, figuring thinks out, I really learn´t a lot on there!!! A LOT! soo Thank U... And I hope that one day... Housequake will be online again... cuz without it, internet is a cold cold place...
Big THANK U... - rbhuisman -
Richard.
thank you aaron for creating and sharing hq with us. a big thank you also to all the mods who put all their time, effort and love into hq.
aaron, although it is more than unfortunate that you had to shut down hq I more than understand and fully respect your decision. after all, running a website should be fun. although I don't know the details, from the outside it looked like that dealing with prince seemed to be a hassle for quite some time. I am glad that dealing with a difficult situation has come to an end for you.
wishing you all the best and a hassle free time without prince!
frank aka zen42
HQ was at one time a cool place until they started wanting to be accepted by Prince as the "official" fan site. Gav (turnitup) spent so much wasted time dealing with the Prince camp only to make himself feel special to the fans as if he was the only "inside" source between the fans and that the fans should rely on him as the go between between the fans and Prince. HQ (Aaron) let others get in the way of his passion as a fan(site) and instead let others ruin something that once was good. Gav, Cateto, Martika, Dansa and all the other mods, don't waste anymore of your life on a Prince fan site. Move on already and spend the time you've wasted in school or helping out your favorite charity who would need your time, more than Prince. Waste no more time away from your family. Sure, enjoy a concert every once in a while, nothing wrong with that, just take a step away from your computers, take a breather and refocus... on "real" life, not the internet life.
Thanks Aaron for your website. Caeto please quit trying to control everything. I realize you helped HQ, but you ruined the experience for people like me who share different opinions than you. Ultimately you banned me because of this. And also gave yourself and HQ a bad name because of this. Grow up (and remove this post as I know you will because you love to control things, are you going to become a police officer or a prison guard so you can continue to power trip?).
muskiediver.
Its good to see that Aaron and the rest of you who ran the HQ could finally move on with your "real" life. HQ was a great site until they started thinking they could be accepted by Prince as the "official" site. I hope Gav could finally stop wasting his adult life, away from his family on that Prince fan site. Its unhealthy for all of you, really.
Thank you AARON for the superhuman patience and dedication in favor of something that really matters.
For me HQ was evidence of something Prince himself inspires throughout his whole musical and cultural legacy:
A place where we "balance with the one", come together in peace and with a certain degree of unity in the light of something higher. Something in every soul on earth.
And all that in free discussion, accepted individuality of every being, provided her/he behaves respectfully and tolerant to others. Contradiction and paradox included - just like in the man himself and just like the human condition.
This was a nucleus of something capable of growing beautiful fruits of love and companionship the world is in dire need of.
Prince could have been so proud of this!
Thank you CATETO for this wonderful initiative.
with Love from Thomas aka convergence
I for one would say that, when posting critical comments, it would be fair to use your usual nick or name, instead of making anonymous comments.
As for Muskiediver: I approved your post to evidence that you are wrong in most assumptions. Nobody was banned from HQ due to having different opinions than any mod, and you know it well. As for your opinion on my good name, or HQ's name, you are free to have any opinion, but please realize that there are many people who disagree with you. Just have a look at this series of comments and you will see.
Finally, to the anonymous person saying that "HQ was at one time a cool place until they started wanting to be accepted by Prince as the "official" fan site": Please wake up to reality. HQ NEVER intended to become an official Prince fansite. Maybe the opposite was true, at some point. If you don't realize about this, you must live on another world, not on Earth.
Besides, let me say that you are not entitled to suggest me, or the other HQ mods, how we should use our time. Do with your life what you want, and let the others do the same. Or else found a church to give advice to lost souls. But do not count on me to join your church.
Final comment:
As I have said in previous occasions, this page is here to pay homage to the work of Aaron in HQ. If you want to criticize me, or HQ, do it elsewhere. You have my mail to say anything you want:
cateto.catetez@gmail.com
Sincere thanks. I hope you feel how hugely appreciated HQ was, and the gratitude and fond memories of many thousands of people.
john aka 89flowers
Thank you Aaron. I loved to be a quaker. I loved your website.
nickfunk
Housequake was an irreplaceable source of information for me, and I have met a great deal of good people there over the years. I hope the site will be back soon. Thanks.
Rebecca
What else can be said about HQ that hasn't already above? A great site, with (some) great members, who's brains I would love to pick! KNOWLEDGE, and the SHARING of INFORMATION made it THE Prince fan website.
Aaron, it's obvious your hard work was enjoyed by so many diverse people, and I join them in applauding you and wish you all the best for the future.
If anything deserves a 2nd Coming, it's Aaron and Housequake.
regards,
Gianni (Boscho)
THERE IS HOPE,HQ is not DEAD!!!!
www.housequake.com
38:II
....something new my friends is coming > i suspect that the return of HQ is close....HQ Version 2 on 8 of march 2009!!
Love2thenines
PS>Hi 2 my little friend Jose!
So does that mean that HQ is comming out again on March 3,2009?!!! Yippee!!!!! If it is, I am going to be so happy!!!!
^^This was only a supposition from me but i have hopes!
Love2thenines
The actual meaning of 38:II:
http://job3811.com/
"Here you may come, but no further. Here your proud waves shall be stayed?"
So....I am confused :0 ??? Aaron's cryptic message meant that? I wonder what made him put that on there. If you can explain that to me Cateto, that would be cool!! Is he trying to say that there is still a 50/50 chance that HQ could still continue?? I just feel so sorry for Aaron. I hope he is okay :( Much love <3
Hey Quakers!!! I just want to give a shout out to all!! Much love 2 every1 :) I hope that everyone is okay through this stressful time. I want to say 'hey' 2 Aaron!! Thanks Aaron! I hope that u r doing well, and just try to keep in touch with every1. I know that this is a hard time 4 u to do so, but I would hate to not hear from u at all. Love u guys!!! <3 Thanks 2 cateto for making this blog!! It is a great way to hear from the other Quakers, rather than on prince.org. It is a better way 4 us to communicate. <3
Cateto-
I think I remember a time where there was one member who did express their opinions about a certain subject. I guess that it was different than any HQ mods and members, and they were banned from visiting the site. I think it happened in last year or something like that. IDK...Anywayzzz love lots <3 :)
^ Than is plain untrue.
Nobody was ever banned from HQ for having different views. There was clear rules enforced to ensure that the site was civilized and nice, but everybody had full freedom to express his opinion.
Anyway, I repeat this comment is only to say thanks to Aaron, for those interested in doing so. If you want to discuss other topics, this is not the right place.
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