ABOUT FM: the Legend Unravelled


  • the Beginning: A World of Spam

    In the late summer of 2000, a group of people who shared an interest in the Mortal Kombat video game series met on a Gamers.com message board dedicated to the then distant release of the latest installment of the series, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance (back then referred to as Mortal Kombat 5). As they posted back and forth, this group realized it also shared a similar - slightly skewed - sense of humor. Wishing to have discussions of their own and break away from the peasantry that misunderstood them so, they took to creating their own (free) message boards on Gamers.com. One such board was dubbed A World of Spam.

    The board was initially without purpose; the visitors would post nonsensical stuff to either entertain themselves and each other, or relieve frustration. Gamers.com moderators did not always appreciate this, and on more than one occasion would warn the members or remove large amounts of posts. Over time, the select group of regular visitors began to make less meaningless posts and AWOS, as it was lovingly referred to, turned into a haven of disturbing and vile humor. In an attempt at generating more popularity for the board and drawing in hostile visitors to keep things entertaining, the AWOS crew exploited Gamers.com's swiss cheese security measures by massively spamming their link on other boards. Rarely these spam actions had much effect other than a good laugh, and when they did have effect, it was often a kind of friendship with another like-minded message board.

    AWOS would change looks with increasing frequency, changing not just in color schemes but also in hilarious board headers. Coupled with animations, graphics, and other media that the visitors would post to each other, the crew began to realize that they had a great deal of creative energy and ideas here that were going to waste. Gradually, the idea to create a site dedicated to their particular brand of humor surfaced.


  • the Birth of Fragile Minds

    With a vague idea of what the site would be all about, the AWOS crew started brainstorming for a name. "A World of Spam" wouldn't do as a site name. Votes were taken on a wide variety of ideas (including noneedforadotcom.com), when out of nowhere came the suggestion "Fragile Minds". It had a certain ring to it that appealed to everyone, and it was decided to use that as the name for the site. Since the URL fragileminds.com was already taken by some faggy goth poets, a dash was added inbetween.

    The site made a slow start. It moved past several webhosts before one that provided satisfactory service was found, and it alternated between half-finished test designs and dead-end splash screens about every week. Now that the site was there, the crew began to realize two things - that they didn't really know where to start, and that they didn't have nearly enough content to fill a site with yet.

    Weeks, months and eventually years went by. New designs went up and down again, sometimes elaborate, sometimes plain. Yet, this one domain name and server kept the people who had met on AWOS together as they dove into countless side-projects, sub-sites and other creative work. Fragile-Minds.com became the hub to a great deal of projects. Unfortunately, many times such projects would go under due to lack in persistence, dedication and time to work on them.


  • Fragile-Minds.com: the Future

    Though the site itself is now mainly a means of presenting all the projects that those affiliated with Fragile-Minds.com are currently working on, the site's content has been steadily accumulating over the past 2 years. In many places on the web, the site has already made a name for itself through its creative works and the people that produced them. Possibly one great burst of activity and ambition will allow the site to finally grow out to become what its creators first envisioned it to be: one of the biggest entertainment sites on the web.