Weekly Member Prizes 2012
agreed. Three cheers for Sir Azzalot! Someone buy that man a beer!
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work—a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the prize part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
Thanking the sponsors, Boardworld, 3CS, Burton, Ashbury Eyewear, Rad, Fyve goes without saying.
Huge shout out to all the Boardworld crew, you make turning the iMac, iPhone, iPad on a pleasure, you know it even makes using a Blackberry or windows based PC great(ish).
Looking forward to catching up with a heaps of the crew tomorrow, meeting lots more for the first time and posting comments and photos for the rest of you to get the stoke and be there next year 
Thanks guys 
Azz well deserved buddy, but you lost me at second line in your post above lol…
yeh, that was way too much for my brain to comprehend on 7am on a Tuesday morning
Chucky has my vote for next week.
but we haven’t even had any of this week yet? lol. I’ve got nothing against chucky winning, I just thought the idea was that the best member from the previous week was the winner.
but we haven’t even had any of this week yet? lol. I’ve got nothing against chucky winning, I just thought the idea was that the best member from the previous week was the winner.
Righ lol I thought it would be overall not just for a week.
Oh and he was very active but his posts got removed. 
Chucky has my vote for next week.
I’ll second that.
I am going to start some threads that I am hoping Chuck comments in 
Congrats Azz, very much deserved!
Hail to Azzalot!!!
I would like nominate antisense because he is so enthusiastic in BW and has traveled a long way to shred from Perth
Wooo hooo Azz!!
I have to agree with Silent on Anti!
Awesome poster and consistent too! (which I think outweighs Cords point about it being for the current week! 
)
lol well I have to agree with anti (been saying that for a few weeks), also Tills and trentradpants are on my list of consistently good contributors!
LOL LOL
Oh yes Tills and Trent are good ones Cords!
If i don’t have “convo” with people they don’t tend to stand out to me!
DRC is also a good one!
I think DRC just won the other week? If not then for sure!...but pretty sure he did.