News News & More News!

Hey Folks! What’s up!!!!!! Greetings & Salutations, First off I know we have some HatchetRadio Listeners out there who have been frequenting the website since the last post, I can see the number increase as folks are starting to want to see what the station is doing after such a long radio silence. So I wanted to come forward and be the one who told you guys the skivvy. First off we want to thank all you listeners for the decades of support you guys have given us. But with times changing, things going on and of course keeping you guys up to date with what’s going on with the station, we’ve kinda grown silent. Imma put this out there because we’ve been called “Defunct” in the past, or a clone. I can assure you that Trazor, Arthane, and myself have owned HatchetRadio since 2003. I can also assure you that we 3 still own it today. I can also assure you that JuggaloIRC is also owned by DeadBilly, a network we founded in 2000 together. So with that being said, the term defunct would mean that it is inoperable. We have had nearly 100% uptime since 2011 as far as our services have gone. Nearly 100% Uptime, 5 different layouts, and were producing multiple shows working with multiple talent and were syndicating across 7 other stations. Our Podcast Section & Selection says otherwise. So to call us defunct during the posts that were made by the SodaKids was kind of a joke to  us that we’ve tossed around but with all due intention shots were fired in our direction by multiple people from multiple directions, and the facts still stand that we are the Original HatchetRadio website, with the Original HatchetRadio owners at the helm. So what happened?

So when we started the station I was 24 years old. I’m now nearly 44 years old, so life happens. We lost family, friends, people we were in the trenches with due to illnesses, and other private matters. A lot of folks don’t know or don’t remember, but all of our functions ran through the IRC Chat. If you wanted to talk to the staff members, you just went into the chat and talked to us. Most people remember ICPDad108, or jIRCDad. He was actually my real father. Dad got sick in 2011 when he was diagnosed with a form of mesothelioma from over 4 decades of being in the auto industry. Working around super harsh chemicals, brake dust and all that other good stuff from 1977-2011 when he retired, allowed for a rapid and aggressive form of cancer to take his life after 3 years of fighting the good fight. Often times he would sit in the chatrooms or get on air with one of the DJ’s as a special guest co-host just to mess around with people and he gave advice to so many people in the chat when they were having the worst time. He did that up until the day he passed on, and it really left a very large void in operations and a blow to the network.

A few years later, I was approached by Jinxii, Poltageist, and a few others about running it back in 2017 in honor of Dad. After much consideration I threw my hat in after Indie Republic retired its service and we started working on the dry runs and early episodes of their show together. When we got to around the 7th/10 Dry Run Episodes, we realized that the project wasn’t working out between them just due to the differences in Chemistry between the 3 of us, we decided to part ways with the idea, and just have them start up Solo Shows with them being special guests on each others shows from time to time, and to squash any rumors before anything is said, no, they didn’t have beef, Jinxii & Polta were universally loved by everyone at HatchetRadio, and it wasn’t anything to do with me, we just listened to the play back and was like “Ya, there’s something missing and we can’t put our fingers on it”, and with limited time before launch, we just decided it would be better to test it out with just 2 shows and the swap first to see if the fans loved the idea or not because in Jinxii’s own words she stated “I felt very dry compared to working with a Legend like Poltageist, he was so animated and just had so much great energy, it was hard for me to keep up.” During one of our conversations. DeadBilly & Ninjer108(Woody), were working on the IRC Network. By October of 2017, 2 months before we were set to launch, Jinxii & Ninjer passed away due to health complications leaving behind a large amount of loved ones who cared deeply about them in real life & around the world. I personally want to thank everyone who reached out during these tough times for everyone.

Personally Speaking, I questioned my own confidence at that point. I lost contact with so many good people, Polta included, as did others, and we just took it to another direction of just automating everything, and going back to our normal lives while just making sure everything stayed functional. Over the years, I’d make a few posts here and there, and it was just to let you fans know that we were still going. We worked out some streaming deals with larger app services like Tune-In, Shoutcast, & others. So we still have people who are loyal to us who listen to us on the drive to work and home, or who pop us in when they are mowing the lawn or throwing a party. However our Live Service was discontinued after that point and I mean lets be honest, when you lose two really good, really close people who have been with you since the beginning, it’s hard to come back from that, and so in 2019 we came up with the beta version of this layout currently, and we just sat on it playing around with it here and there, because honestly, we’ve been established for over 2 decades now so we could just kind of sit on our hands and just keep the radio going so we added a little flavor to everyones life.

The next phase is going to be a little bit more gritty. In January of this year, HatchetRadio turned 20 years old. After talking to Trazor, & Arthane we honestly didn’t plan on doing anything for our 20th other than making an announcement, until we had a surefire plan moving forward for you folks out there who still come to the website and tune in and read some of the articles or listen to the podcasts. So about a year ago, I met up with a group of folks called “Gaslit Gaming” while playing Diablo: Immortal. Our relationship grew a community of gamers over night, and we had a lot of talks about merging talents, and working on some projects together. They are a group of older gamers from different parts of the world who run their own streaming partnerships, and we will be teaming up with them over the next few months to get their website up so we can integrate a lot to their community. In doing so you will see and hear some new changes and integrations into the HatchetRadio website as we will be integrating their discord server & some of their live feeds into a section of our website as well since we”ll be on the same network. I felt with all the talent & opportunity we would be able to cover two different sides of the coin without having to sacrifice too much. What I personally mean by that is that, Trazor, Arthane, & Myself have always some how wanted to integrate HatchetRadio into the gaming community, and we’re talking about back in the days when Warcraft 3 & EverQuest were still being polished and patched. The issue was there wasn’t any streaming platforms that weren’t outrageously expensive, and shifty at best, because Dial-up was still in a lot of areas including where some of us lived. So it made it impossible for us to be able to stream without consuming up so much bandwidth from some of our ISP’s when capped services were the only thing available at the time.

So what this means for HatchetRadio is that GaslitGaming.Com will be hosting all of the gaming side of the coin. Arthane, Myself, Trazor, TheVisionTM, Kahlibah, Reaper, Surreal, SomeGamer, Sinista1, StormVoid and many others will be working on getting this set up over the next few months. What we will be looking into is the tremendous task of streaming integration for some of their Twitch/Kick Streams to be live for you guys and available through both websites. This means that we will just have our gaming section integrated with their news feeds, & our radio service will be available on their website for their Discord & Gaming Community. So this is a tremendous thing we have going on and we’re going to have something big coming everyones way as far as the Gaslit Gaming/HatchetRadio Network goes.

The last thing I want to leave you with and I know this is a lofty announcement, but there’s a lot of information we want to publicly convey to everyone with what limited information we can give out at the time. I’ve been the voice of HatchetRadio for over 20 years writing countless articles, so you guys can deal with me for a minute while I type this all out for you. So the last update we talked about Shows and putting together some things. Now I want to point out something, and I don’t think you guys understand how tremendous this is. We do have an exclusive show on FaceBook, called The Booth. It has ran episodically nearly every week and has been hosted by Keith “Sinista1” Hayes for longer than we have been around out of Brockton Mass. He has a ton of special guests on, and talks about everything from movies to politics, and its a very good show. I’m on it from time to time when I casper into his lab for an hour or 5 each year. I wanna honestly personally thank him for all his hard work on the network, and on TheBooth as well as Whoobazoo.Com. He’s been doing this for over 6 years and he’s been a very integral part of keeping our numbers up on social media. Right now in my personal life, I have had to make a lot of decisions, and I am currently moving, but once I get settled in from the move which shouldn’t take too long, I will be working with Keith on The Booth for a few shows so I can get my feet wet, and knock out the ring rust before I return to “The Rick O Show Live & Uncut”. I have a Twitch & Kick Feed and I’ll be working on getting all of that set up as soon as I get settled in and the studio back up and running which again won’t be too far ahead in the near future. I’ve also confirmed that DeadBilly, SashaDoll, and many new & Old guests alike will be joining us for future shows together as my special guest hosts. We will be testing out some new broadcast methods for you guys and we’ll be honest we’re looking forward to having you guys join us. There will be concrete dates for everything and we’ll keep you guys up to date as things progress. I know some of you folks are like “Holy Shit, we got a couple updates on the website within a few weeks of each other” but that’s the serious note. Now I would like to take the time to address one last thing, and it’s a bit personal, so if you know, you know.

To All the Haters, Critics, & pissed off people. Normally at this part you would think that I’m going to verbally eviscerate you, but that’s not the point about this. I’m at a point in my life where constructive criticism, does nothing more than give me insight. I know some people I have pissed off in the past for various reason, and I can gladly have a private conversation with the many of you at any time when I decide to actually care, but it will be more than a long time before we have that conversation, because people change, and things change. I can tell you that for the 4 decades I’ve roamed this rock that I thank you enough for caring about what was going on around here at the time you were here, I enjoyed a lot of our private conversations. Now some of you are going to think this is directed at you, and it’s directed at a lot of people, but honestly, the haters are what used to drive me to do better, and some times you gotta thank them too. So many people told us in the beginning we would shut down within the year. Each year that went by, the voices got less and less, & the support grew. We watched others fall apart around us, and we kept going, and as I’ve said before folks, we keep going because we enjoy the music, we enjoy the times we spent together, and HatchetRadio for the last years has been a tribute to everyone who was every involved, and to the people like HollieLynn, NinjaTab, CarniDoll,  Juggz, KidCrusher, BloodSkin, JD, Jake-Jeckel, Shaws, the people we haven’t spoken to in years we say thank you for everything you did in the background. It truly meant a lot to us at the time  you were with us, and even though you folks buttheads with myself and some of the other admins & leaders, a lot of your ideas and idealisms didn’t fall on deaf ears.

When I lost my parents I made a ton of mistakes, pushed at on of people out of my life, said a lot of mean and spiteful things to people who didn’t deserve them. I hid from myself and the rest of the world for a time and needed to take time away from everything. I didn’t want all the hardwork to not be recognized from what everyone what they built, Credit is due where it is due, and man. I can’t thank people enough for all the insights. You guys motivated me and gave me a lot of direction and I want to thank you. I know some of you will probably run across this, and that’s ok. I’m cool with that. The next chapter of HatchetRadio is going to be a fun one. I aim to enjoy it with everyone. So thanks again, and much love. -Rick O The Terrible.