This all started with me getting a takedown demand letter from their lawyer. So I resolved to comply and put a banner on Digitalfire about having to shut down by June 26 and hoped for support. I initially did not name Plainsman. The support flooded in. If I posted the letter from the lawyer, which I know I should not do, you would well understand my alarm. Nothing like that has ever happened to me. It seemed like a clear threat to Digitalfire and my ownership over my own information. And they are calling me "a bully"?

I am heartened by some of the things in the post. But dismayed by others, because it appears Plainsman staff have been given misleading information that has alienated them. I don't have time to answer every point. But I am hoping that people will judge me by my history. Do I charge a lot of money for Insight-live? Did I ever paywall even a single page on Digitalfire? Did I ever accept when you offered to pay me for solving a problem? Even thousands of dollars? Did I ever ask for money in a monthly tech-tip email? Did I go above and beyond in helping you with every problem? Did you see the times my emails were most often sent (e.g. midnight, 10 pm). I worked for you night and day, and I still regard that as having been a privilege. Yesterday I helped two Plainsman customers who contacted me at tony@digitalfire.com. So far today, three or four. I handled these in the usual way. Two of them gave me content to build digitalfire.com further (one especially has info Plainsman users need to know). Yesterday, I offered Plainsman an inside track on importing clays from China, at a fraction of the current cost (an associate is going there this month to set up a pipeline). I have not done this with other suppliers.

Did I try to sell Digitalfire to Plainsman? You have all known me for 40 years; I deserve to be heard on this. Of course, I did seek acknowledgement for my contribution to the company through Digitalfire. I even told them of the advantage of having a sign on the building for tourists that pass, because it is so much better known than Plainsman. However, the claim about trying to sell it to them: That never took place. It is software. Only a coder, or a team of them, could even hope to take it over. The current manager has not offered to purchase; that idea is outrageous. How could I consider that if I have never even met him? Is he a coder? Our communication has been very limited (only by email). There is no way to even begin to set a price for Digitalfire. By its very nature, it demands being non-profit. It has to be turned over to a responsible entity at no cost. I don't need support, just need not to be threatened. This being said, I am an optimist; I am always expressing aspirations that a local entity might be interested in Digitalfire. I even tell my grandson he should take it over. But he is not a coder either.

I did not leave of my own accord; I could not agree to move the lab to the new building, so the manager wanted my key and gave me 5 minutes to get out. I could not even imagine how to move the lab, my heart was there, I did I want to separate it from production (of course, one's demeanour when put into such a situation cannot be expected to be perfect; mine wasn't, but neither was his). I used this event to voice my firm conviction that the company should focus on its own quarries and new grinding equipment rather than relentlessly importing more and more American clays for making the bodies.

I have never prevented the company from getting access to its own platforms and data, I enable that. I hosted and coded its website free, free or a nominal cost, from the 1990s until they took over the .com URL about ten years ago. Since then, a nominal charge has been paid at times, even though I had to hire programmers to help with the coding at time (in one case about 3 years ago, a full-time guy for months). I did the live backup site for free. Yesterday, I helped them recover passwords (that they should have known by checking their password manager, which I am guessing they lost the password for) and discovered that the two accounts in discussion were there's all along. The third account, plainsmanclays.ca was always mine from 2021, at no time did they own anything related to it, I bought the name as a development/backup for the main site (when you code, people don't take excuses for things not working, a functional backup is thus essential). There was nothing to "return". I developed the Plainsman site (and backup) as an information source, in the style of Digitalfire, but focused on Plainsman products.

Plainsman has paid Insight-live, for the past two years, for a managed account (although I see the billing did not itemize it correctly; that can be fixed). At no time have my efforts been against Plainsman; I support them and any customer that emails me directly. I have been messaging people all day telling them this is not about bashing Plainsman, but about removing impediments to Digitalfire. I even texted them the prepared response I was sending to the hundreds of emails I was getting yesterday (so they would know what I was saying). And I am telling people that I will try to restore the reference information that has been lost with the shutdown of PlainsmanClays.ca (that happened during the URL transfer yesterday). They offered to pay $1000 for it, I gave it free. The Facebook Plainsman account they claim rights to turns out NOT TO BE an account; it was a page on my personal account. I simply duplicated posts there from my Insight-live and personal pages. There is no way to turn that over; why didn't they just make their own? Or was one created, and are its credentials in their Bitwarden?

I was terrified by the letter from the lawyer last week; I would not dream of launching a campaign against them. I simply put a compliance notice on Digitalfire and informed people of the shutdown date. Since then I have been telling customers to focus on why they need Digitalfire, not bashing Plainsman. I told the Plainsman PR person that I would create a "survival guide" site, the best name I could think of at the time, to continue helping customers deal with the idiosyncracies of the products in Digitalfire style (that is basically what PlainsmanClays.com and more recently PlainsmanClays.ca have been, it is now gone but needs to continue).

I did not work at Plainsman. I was not an employee. Digitalfire billed them for $1500/mth (the recent billing itemization error traces back to that). I incurred higher costs than that to be there, so I viewed the arrangement as simply what was necessary to have a studio to work in. So they classify that as "supporting me for 35 years"? How much did other staff get paid? I now realize I was a resident artist/tech. My wife and I were the janitors, that generated some extra cash. I cleaned the plant. I cleaned the manager's toilet, it was something I did there that actually made a little money for us. I was there at nights, weekends, on holidays. Alone. When he started mounting cameras watching me and I objected, he fired my wife as the janitor after a confrontation over it. I reached out to him to have a meeting in the time leading up to the 5 minute dismissal, he said "why do we need that?". If he would have just listened rather than being in his office all the time behind closed doors, this could have been avoided. I even made web pages to try to get him to listen. And set up a Slack and Discord. I had 12 other managers and never felt threatened.

Communication has been the issue, for sure. Misunderstandings. Plenty. But I was the one who got the threatening letter from the lawyer, not them. They have to get it through their heads that PlainsmanClays.ca was never theirs; I voluntarily ran it as a backup on my servers. PlainsmanPotterySupply.com was always there's, it is managed at GoDaddy (I don't use GoDaddy). Plainsman staff simply did not know how to get into either of these accounts and thus assumed I owned them. I created a Bitwarden account 3 year ago and religiously put credentials there; I was always pushing its use to them. But I don't have its password, so I don't think they are in to this day. They also did not know how to get into their Gmail account, which was needed for 2-factor. I don't use that either. But I worked the whole morning yesterday helping them, it was like a Sherlock Holmes story and we got into everything. It was luck, an old browser that auto-filled a password and an old phone that still had a Plainsman account on it (for the 2Factor logins Google needed).

So let's make a test. I will remove the banner on Digitalfire.com right now. Let's see if Plainsman responds by having the lawyer withdraw that letter? If that happens, although I cannot control what everyone is doing, I will ask people to stop and take a breather. And I will put out some of the Plainsman promotional posts I have ready to go. There is no denying that no company in North America is better positioned to be able to supply large quantities of pottery clay at reasonable prices to weather the coming storm of skyrocketing costs. But they have to focus on their key strength: The quarries, their raw materials. "Branding" can wait. To the manager I have never met: Please look at my post about the loss of plainsmanclays.ca, that shows the projects that could disappear. The engobe ones, especially, are just so valuable for Plainsman clay bodies.

I cannot even begin to summarize the feedback, encouragement and advice I have gotten in the past three days. Overwhelming is an understatement. Do lawyers have time on their hands? They are offering to help. Wow!

I am going to try to produce a summary of the amazing comments people are making, especially those that go beyond my narrow existence to address the larger issues of humanity (as MLK used to say). They are not just about pottery, but about open information vs proprietary info and paywalls. Being free and open with information is such an enabler. We can buy all kinds of fancy equipment and prepared supplies, but nothing substitutes for knowing the base science of this. The one type of comment that touched me the most came from people in Asian countries having giant factories making all manner of ceramics, yet technical information is highly guarded, preventing ordinary people from taking up pottery. Many from Africa are also expressing the value of having an open organized technical reference.

The lawyer's current threat: "Remove any documentation or data of DigitalFire from Plainsman’s premises" (this may differ from what Plainsman itself is saying, not sure why). I am too traumatized to go there. Without the data, the tests are useless.

There were hundreds of projects in the pipeline producing data. Promising ones were DIY dipping glazes, base coat dipping glazes, an Alberta slip calcination pilot, casting Coffee clay (without raw manganese or umber), casting M390, M340 and even H440, a new 440-on-steroids, 200 mesh MNP PR3D work, the beer bottle demo casting, better and new engobes, DIY underglaze, an amazing iron red glaze, and so much more. I was learning the power of CAD, donating 3D printers. There were countless projects to help customers navigate the idiosyncratic clays. And for companies/people from around the world. The physical assets could have been the basis for a one-of-a-kind Digitalfire field school for DIY clay-gathering and testing. Luke Lindoe worked there. His books and the personal records, and those of past techs in the local ceramic industry are there. I knew every square inch, and resisting the demand to dismantle it two years ago got me fired the first time. It was the place I discovered smectite as a catalyst for translucency, Crystal Ice, 3D case molding, the amazing G2934 base matte (and gunmetal black), drop and hold firing, how to calculate Alberta slip, flow GLFL testing, SHAB test procedures, so many glaze chemistry success stories. Perhaps most important, records of testing and recent trips I did to Flintoft, the Blue Hills, Claybank and other sites having much better clay than the current mine in Saskatchewan (no lab has ever documented these amazing clays like I did).

Digitalfire is facing a takedown order from Plainsman Clays. They are revoking permission to "use any Plainsman content" "on any platform". This is broad and vague enough, and the site large enough, that I am unable to comply or even interpret it in the short timeframe (June 27). This notice arrived with a threat to turn over the plainsmanclays.ca URL, which I rightfully own (and use to voluntarily fund and maintain a live site backup) and plainsmanpotterysupply.com (which I don't have). I had to shut down Digitalfire for part of today because so many people were taking backups of the site. We just need to get them to relent on this demand, call off the lawyer and agree that digitalfire.com is just commentary and I have the right to share research that I compiled. There are lots of backup sites (many people have the API endpoints); don't start downloading or scraping again and overload the server.

Insight-live.com is not affected by this issue.

I bought the URL PlainsmanClays.ca in 2021 and maintained it on my own server, at my own expense, as an active backup and prototyping site for the main dot-com site. Plainsman has demanded it, using accusatory language, under threat of legal action. I transferred it to them today, for free, as a sign of good faith. I have also been hosting the DNS records and have removed them. This means that body usage information and problem mitigation, testing data, example pieces, glaze recipe suggestions, casting instructions, the Celebration project, etc. that took decades to carefully compile (based on and built from many, many hundreds of customer support issues), is gone. Information on the use of Alberta Slip, Ravenscrag Slip, bodies like Polar Ice, M370, M340 and many others, recommended base glaze recipes to fit the bodies, engobe information, firing schedules, and much more. Important terms on all of the pages linked automatically into Digitalfire. A lot has been lost. I am sorry for this; please forgive me. There is an impact to Digitalfire: Thousands of links to the Plainsman website will stop working because they depended on the existence of an API there. Perhaps Plainsman can be convinced to restore this valuable resource.

As a further sign of goodwill today, I helped them recover from losing their Bitwarden password. This enabled login to their own GoDaddy account to get the URL plainsmanpotterysupply.com (which they accused me of harbouring). This was made possible by helping them login to their own Gmail account (GoDaddy needed it for login). This was possible because I discovered that one of the browsers on a computer I supplied for use there, which I still have, autofilled the Google password. And an Android phone I supplied for 2-factor logins, which I still have, was able to scan the 2-factor challenge code for the Google login.

$10k in hours. Incredible. Thank you so much to everyone. I am humbled. Actually, it is not stopping. Unbelievable!

Legitimate GoFundMe campaigns will be listed here. If you know of one being set up, please let me know.

At https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-save-digitalfire. I am beyond grateful to Dominic Legault for doing this, I would never have otherwise considered it.

Thank you to the hundreds of messages I am getting every day for support. Yikes. I can assure everyone I am not retiring; I am just getting started. I cannot believe the offers of help I am getting from coder/potters, there are so many of them. And how many countries. This is amazing. One message from a country where information is kept highly secretive really moved me. And an offer from a Google engineer to help. Or even a suggestion to move the dark web!

I have never been really emotional, but this is pushing me. Plus, my wife and I spent the first night with a family whose son drowned in the local lake two days ago. It was the most horrible thing we have ever endured, even worse than this. I really needed all this side-channel support in the last two days of their sorrow, it helped so much.

The old logo is from the late 1980s and was used to promote Desktop Insight at trade shows and to advertise it in magazines and later on the early internet. It was done in Aldus Freehand, an early competitor to Adobe Illustrator. Vector graphic illustration was revolutionary at the time. Amazingly, many artists even today do not know what vector graphics is, they are still working with "pixel pusher" apps like Photoshop.

I asked Gemini how it made this, and it said: "I started with a blank canvas of random digital noise (a chaotic grid of pixels) and gradually refined that noise over multiple steps based on your prompt and the layout of your original image. There was not need for a vector stage; the smooth transitions, glowing embers, and soft gradients are baked right into the generation process from the very beginning."

Glazing black clay bodies stained with manganese is just about impossible with typical transparent glazes. The glaze over-fluxes the clay surface and ruins the color. Worse, if it accelerates surface maturity, the body can blister or generate LOI gases that blister the glaze. How about transparent glazes over a black engobe instead? At least the body color is not lost. But the wrong transparent glaze can do what you see here (inside left).

These mugs are a buff stoneware, Plainsman M340. A black engobe was applied by pouring the inside and dipping the outside two-thirds of the way down.

Left: A L3954F black engobe was applied inside and upper exterior at leather hard. After firing to cone 6 using the PLC6DS schedule, G2926B—which is crystal clear on M340 itself—became completely clouded over the engobe because bubbles generated during firing remained trapped in the melt.

Right: The entire mug was dipped in GA6-B. The Alberta Slip particles and the melt characteristics of GA6-B promote bubble coalescence and escape, producing an exceptionally glossy jet-black surface over the same engobe.

When you learn to make and use engobes correctly, they make magic possible. Here I am turning a dark rustic body into a smooth white one (rear mugs) and a white body into a dark one (front). The engobes have been applied at the leather-hard stage. That is the perfect time, the engobe and body are clay bodies, designed to fit each other; they dry together and fire together creating an inseparable bond.

Handles have been applied, and they have dried to stiff leather hard. Engobe was poured in, poured out, then the mugs were pressed, lip down, into it and extracted. No dwell time was needed. This dipping engobe is DIY thixotropic (not available commercially anywhere). That means I tuned it just before use, to just the right degree of gel (enough for it to drain to the right thickness, then gel just as the last few drops fall from the rim). Honestly, these are a beauty to behold at this stage, the silky, drip-free surface is just so perfect.