This is kind of a miscellaneous catch all section of the site.   When I relaunched the site with a new look in January of 2012, I did a lot of rejiggering of content.  Many bits that were in the last design (which ran from 2000-2011) do not have their own section anymore; their contact was moved into the News area, or into the discography, or somewhere else, depending on what it was.  This would include the old Books & DVD pages, and the Interviews/Articles pages.  They now exist in other parts of the site.

Some are still here though, and are available from the drop down menu under “Other Stuff” above.  But there’s something I wanted to address on this page.  Partially because it doesn’t really need it’s own page, and secondly, I had to have some sort of content on THIS page.  :)

The “Pilgrims of Sabbocracy” Mailing List

Many a moon ago, before I started this website back in the Summer of 1995, there was an email based Black Sabbath Mailing list.  It was one of the first places I met other Sabbath fans online (besides CompuServe), and it survived for a really long time.  It was originally started by a fellow by the name of Leonid Maravosky back in 1992.  Leonid says that myself and Dio fan Tapio Keihänen were two of the first six subscribers back in the day.  Leonid ran it until May 1993 at which point, a fellow named Michael Sullivan took over.  Mike ran it from of all places the Disney servers (that always amused me) until I took over on December 19, 1996.  During Leonid’s era, there were no records of how many issues were sent out, but the Sullivan/Siegler era there was, and I took over at issue #468 (Mike started at #1).  The last issue was #1298, when I sent it out on May 16, 2010 – announcing Ronnie Dio’s death.

Somewhere around Issue #1000, I renamed it to “Pilgrims of Sabbocracy”, a name taken from the 1994 album, “Cross Purposes”.   Always felt the newsletter should have a name.

The last couple of years it was in existence, the traffic was sproadic.  My desire to do it was lessened, mostly because of the time it took to put an issue together, as it was manually done.  The contributions slowed down a lot, and the final straw was when I lost my job in 2009, I left the materials for the list on the hard drive of my company computer.  I thought I had backed ’em up, but apparently not.  Couldn’t access them, so I just decided to let it go.  Even that was after I lost the old list due to a drive crash.  I attempted to get it going again after that, but it was effectively dead.   In this age of text messages, Facebook, Twitter, & Google+, the old text based manually created mailing list was a bit of a dinosaur.  It had a great run, but it was time.

There’s an archive of old Mailing List issues on my site’s forums, if you want to check that out.  You can read them here.   Those long timers of the list, should remember the cross image here.  Given the list is gone, I thought I should keep that cross alive somehow.  :)

Other Random Things

  • Black Sabbath FAQ – I didn’t write this, someone else did.  Plus it’s kind of old now.  Still worth a read, though.

There were originally more things here, but they got used elsewhere in the site.  The FAQ link is kind of the only leftover at this point.  :)