I'm only going to bother cooking up a few - maybe this takes off, or maybe it's a massive THUD.
@derekjohnson, aka “Stalin,” the iron-fisted overlord of Hardcore Husky. The only man alive who can write a 4,000-word essay about a 3-yard gain in the second quarter of a Cal game, and somehow make you feel guilty for not reading the whole thing. He didn’t create the forum so much as liberate it—from common sense, short posts, and anyone who questions the purity of Husky football tradition.
He’s the only guy who can ban you for a “tone violation” and then DM you a friendly Bible verse five minutes later. When people say “DJ runs a tight ship,” they mean it literally—like a Soviet submarine. You cross him once, and the next thing you know, you’re vanished to the Gulag (aka read-only status), eating digital cabbage soup and re-reading RaceBannon posts for warmth.
He calls himself “Stalin” as a joke, but let’s be real—we’ve all hesitated before hitting ‘Post’ on Tug, wondering if it’s our turn to get purged for not laughing hard enough at one of his metaphors about Don James and sunrise on Lake Washington.
Derek doesn’t moderate the board—he rules it. This is a man who posts longform stories about the Don James era like he’s transcribing the Dead Sea Scrolls, and if you so much as reply with “tl;dr,” you better start packing your bags for Siberia. You’ll be gone faster than Dennis Erickson at a Husky job interview.
And let’s talk about those game recaps. Derek will write 3,000 words about a 17-9 win over Cal like it was the Allied invasion of Normandy. You’re five paragraphs in and you’re not even to kickoff yet—he’s still describing the clouds that hovered over Husky Stadium and what the air “smelled like—a crisp cocktail of promise, regret, and lingering echoes of 1991.”
Try disagreeing with him on Husky history and suddenly he’s quoting sources like he’s defending a doctoral thesis: “Well actually, in the fall of 1978, Warren Moon once said in a KJR interview that…”
Every time someone new signs up and says “Why do you guys hate Sark so much?”, a siren goes off in DJ’s mod bunker, and a trapdoor opens beneath that user’s account. You can practically hear the KGB music playing in the background.
He calls it “Hardcore Husky,” but let’s be honest—it’s a Derekocracy. And we wouldn’t have it any other way. Sure, he might disappear posters like it’s 1938, but he also keeps the flame of Husky football history alive, one over-moderated thread at a time.
But for all the tyranny, you gotta respect the grind. Derek built the site, keeps the chaos (barely) contained, and makes sure there’s a place for degenerates, football nerds, conspiracy theorists, and meme lords to gather under one unstable roof. He may be Stalin, but at least he’s our Stalin.
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Hence, why I don’t fear SkyNet in the short term, at least.