T |
A hundred months off The following is intended to be an inspirational story to motivate myself and others into actually creating the things we love to create. It might get a few smiles out of you but is more intended to just tell the story of why I haven't published anything in almost 2 years. My friends and I had registered spaz.com in the infancy of the internet of the early 90's, back when people registered domain names without having much of a plan of what to do with them, because some IPO rich corporation would come along and pay millions for any .com that was less than six characters long. After a while we figured out that corporate money wasn't really keen on shelling out for SPAZ.COM (go figure) and we decided to start putting our own crap online. Some of us put music, others video game scores... Me, I just wanted a more efficient way to share my stories with friends. IN THE YEAR 2000 we didn't have flying cars so we had to pretend it was the future by talking only in text. Everyone (and their mother) was getting online and I found myself almost constantly on one of the instant messaging applications talking to my friends (and their mother). It got to the point where I went months without even dialing a phone, I'd make movie plans, dinner plans, family plans, business plans, sex plans, all over instant messaging. This in turn got me in the habit of sharing my life stories over these text networks, sometimes to eight people in a row. (You know how it is, you tell a story to one person and 5 seconds later you get a message from someone else down the line asking "ok this I have to hear, YOU did WHAT with a duck??"). Eventually I'd just be cutting and pasting my story instead of re-typing it, and when someone sends you four pages of monologue instantly you can pretty much assume there's no actual story telling going on. I decided to nix the illusion of conversation and just send people a link to a file where the story was contained, it would pretty much have the same effect and save everyone a whole lot of typing... ok save ME a whole lot of typing. Thus, http://spaz.com/teg was born. I found myself having a couple of stories I deemed sharable a month and my little pages did what they were designed to do. I had no intentions of turning it into something that would be read by strangers nor did I have illusions that strangers would want to read it. Over the course of a couple months I had about a dozen stories in my archives but I'd only actively show the last five or so because after having re-read my stories a few weeks after posting them I deemed them to be total crap. Who doesn't? Still, at the time of their posting my friends seemed to enjoy what I was doing. But the most I'd get was a "not bad" or a "you don't suck". No one was telling me how great they were or how much they'd enjoyed something, no one was going out of their way to check if I'd written anything new without me prompting them to do so, no one was sending my stories to their friends. It was what it was. I had such low expectations for the whole thing that I never even bothered to finish the design, it was simply an exercise in asp includes and dynamically sized tables, nothing more. I didn't really have any ideas for what I was going to post or any kind of schedule, all I had was a pretty strict set of guidelines for what I never wanted to do: No pictures of myself (THIS IS ME AND MY CAT MR PAWS!!!) The world had enough of those; I'd only open my mouth if I felt I had something worth saying, which... granted, is pretty much all the time. I'm so high on myself I had to start cutting me with sawdust. The only thing I was positive about in terms of actual content was that everything had to be an upgrade from what was previously accomplished, at least in my own eyes. That there would be no posting of anything if I didn't feel that it was in some way a step forward from what I had done before it; I always wanted to be improving myself, as a storyteller, joketeller, masturbator, whatever. In the fall I found myself working on the first piece for my website that was a little more involved. Instead of just rambling about how I went out to lunch with a girl who didn't know the difference between right wing and left wing, this was an actual skit, something I was putting a LOT of effort into. The story was basically a fake transcript of an internet chat room conversation between all my favorite electronic musicians, centered on The Aphex Twin. The people I had shown it to before it was done had a really positive opinion of it so I decided to go the extra mile and not only preface it with a well researched story of how it came to be, but also present it in a faked version of a popular windows chat client (which I created with an IFRAME tag that would expand and contract as you resized the explorer window, something I spent several nights coding and I'm proud to say is one of the cooler things I've ever seen done with a browser). Based on the feedback from the early versions, I egotistically assumed that it would make it to the browsers of people I didn't actually know, so I decided to add a comments page so I could get some positive feedback from strangers to stroke my ego to. I didn't know much about databases at the time and so rather than figure out how to design the page to display a defined number of records from a limitless database I simply designed the record set and the page to only hold two hundred comments, which felt like a preposterously safe number. At the time even putting up a "safe" number made me feel ashamed for even DREAMING that half that many would enjoy it enough to say something. I posted it to my site on October 23rd 2001 (as I sit here writing this, that's two years ago to the day) and I sent the link to a few of my friends, I also posted the link into #Buzz, the music software chat channel I idle in. The immediate feedback from a few of my close friends was pretty good and it became the topic of conversation as people in the channel read it. I got a couple of comments from people I didn't know, that was about as good a reaction as I had expected, I was happy. A few days later I opened up my chat application to find the entire room discussing my piece, I was totally honoured and flabbergasted. People were discussing what their favorite parts were, saying how they reacted, how many people they sent it to, and how their friends in turn reacted. When I thanked everyone for the nice praise they confessed that they didn't know I was responsible for it, it was completely surreal and I felt a hundred feet tall. A few days later I started getting emails from people I hadn't spoken to in years where they'd send me the link to the chat, saying "dude this is hilarious, I thought of you"... not knowing I had written it in the first place. A few days later my piece was posted to the forums on planet-µ AND warp records' websites. A few days later my comments page crashed from being overloaded. A few days later I got my first ever marriage proposal. The email read "You ROCK! Marry me" attached were pictures of her bearing her breasts, including a hand written note that said "TEG MAKES ME HORNY" for authenticity. (I've decided to believe that the picture was real, eat one if you don't like it, fucko) A few days later someone was banned from a chat room for pasting a link to my page. As he was escorted from the channel he was told "yes, thank you, we've fucking seen it already... 200 times... today." A few days later my friend sent me an instant message "dude... you made MEMEPOOL.COM" A few days later I crunched the logs from spaz.com and saw that my page had received over one hundred thousand unique visitors. A few days later I spent the entire weekend going through the logs referring URLs (when someone clicks on a link to a site, the destination web server will record where the traffic was referred from). I quite literally spent forty-eight hours in front of the computer reading over a hundred people's online diaries on or about the day when they linked to me. They call it "ego surfing"; searching for references to yourself on the world-wide-wank, and let me tell you, my ass was hanging-ten. People would put a link to me in their blog saying, "this is the funniest thing I've ever read"; "I laughed so hard I thought I was going to barf" and "this is comedic GOLD". I genuinely wish I had saved copies of all the pages that I had gone to because I have moments where I wonder if it was all a dream. I cannot begin to describe the experience of going through countless people's journals finding links to your work using words like "brilliant" "genius" or "awe-inspiring". People hadn't talked about anything I'd produced as being brilliant other than my grandparents, and they were so crazy that they'd call me a genius for filling my diaper. (That's a true story; my mother loves to embarrass me with it when she meets my girlfriends.) Back to ego surfing: I was totally frozen, holy-shit-my-dad-just-walked-in-on-my-girlfriend-pegging-me-with-a-strap-on frozen. Our whole life we believe that everyone will get their fifteen minutes of fame and here I was living them. As exciting as that is, I was absolutely terrified that it was probably true.... that this was "it"... What if these 15 minutes... are my 15 minutes? What if this is the opportunity of a lifetime? What if I blew it? What if A HUNDRED THOUSAND people hit my website and it still looked skeletal and unfinished? What if I had NOTHING to follow it up with? What if I was so dead set against egotistical photos on my web site that I actually DIDN'T have a picture of my smiling mug up so I could score with some hot-as-hell Autechre fan who happened to A) be interested, B) be single and C) live up the street? (yeah yeah, laugh it up chucklefuck, stranger things have happened) What a fool I was, I could have kept going, I could have done something funnier, I could have finished the design, made it look all sexy with a LONG ANIMATED INTRO... I could have developed a loyal readership, a fan base, I could have started posting movie spoilers, or naked pictures of my neighbors, something... anything. At the very least I could have totally cashed in and done a sequel. Of course I didn't even START thinking about this until AFTER the huge traffic spike, when it was too late to do anything about it. And of course I realized the futility of such realizations, and despite countless visions of grandeur fighting for bandwidth in my brain I did what most people in my position would have done: Nothing. I was so utterly freaked out by what could have been, what might have been, and what was possibly lost that I had no idea what to do. It happens to everyone really, my music partner Dan won a music competition when he was like fourteen years old and was so completely whacked out by the attention and pressure that he didn't write another song for almost four years. Eventually, two months or so later I tried posting a couple more stories I had kicking around. I tried my best to make them enjoyable stories to read and I attempted to share them without seeming too desperate, emailing everyone who'd sent me a comment about my chat log saying "hey, I put a new story up if you care". Of course my absolute worst fears were realized, people angrily wrote me back for spamming them, people left comments that read "this sucked, your chat log was funnier", no one shared the link with any of their friends, and no one linked to me in their blog or on any forums. My follow up stories were read by like ten people, tops, including my mom and two sisters. There was a time where a search for my chat log would bring up hundreds of linking pages on Google, now it brings up NONE. That's got to be some kind of record somewhere, I mean it can take some artists a good three or four albums to totally piss away a fan base, this was an exodus on a scale that rivaled Trent Reznor's popularity after "the fragile". It's been two years since I posted anything. I never stopped writing but when it would come time to polish them and put them live, I'd choke. I would flash back to that weekend spent ego surfing and the knowledge that I would never achieve that again, and cop-out. I'm actually haunted by the thought that I could have built something special, that I could have kept writing and improved and maybe been famous for something. Kate Beckinsale could have one day read my website and decided, "that man deserves a picture of my nipples". Right? It's taken me two years to learn my lesson from this experience, and that lesson is as follows: I didn't blow a fucking thing. Consider the following: Maddox writes a brand of humour that rivals that of Dennis Miller in my eyes, and the eyes of a few billion internet users. This bitter young man spouting off on his website has a following so insane that ANY article he puts up gets almost half a million different readers. Yet HBO isn't driving a dump truck full of money to his front door asking him to host the next big comedy show. He hasn't made a dime, he hasn't been featured on ABC news, I suspect the only reason his site is still up is that he's hosting it on his employers website. Lowtax has been pumping out the single most consistently brilliant hilarity for as long as I can remember and no-one has offered him a sitcom, but at times the traffic to his site became so huge that the maintenance fees cost a hundred times what he was making from web based advertising companies, despite trying to work with ALL of them. The site was losing money hand over fist and he was working his ass off at a real job to support it out of his own pocket. How fucked is that? In no other media would higher success yield higher losses. (I think now he's almost breaking even by charging people for access to his forums.) Even The Brothers Chap have every single human being with an internet connection hitting their website every Monday hoping for a new strong bad email, yet for some absolutely unfathomable reason the cartoon network haven't turned them into the next South Park. They sell t-shirts off their website that barely makes them enough money to pay for the bandwidth it costs to deliver their flash animations to their legions of fans. The reality is this; that morbidly obese sloth with Down's syndrome Harry Knowles is the closest thing we have to an "internet celebrity". The plateau that every blogger and internet writer is striving for is occupied by a man who's made his fortune publishing spoilers to crappy Hollywood movies. Spoilers, I might add, that he doesn't even write; people mail him their "insider information" (most of which eventually proves to be completely made up) and he simply cuts and pastes them to a 30 point bright yellow font. I think the part that offends me the most about this useless fuck being a millionaire is not the fact that his only contribution to the planet is telling us how great the new starwars movies were when he got to see them early, but that his abortion of a website is so horrifically designed that it could have been created by the great Dr. Victor Beckles. (more info). Harry Knowles, Porn and Spam are the only things that ever made a buck on the internet, how's that for a punch in the vagina? Look around your favorites, spend an hour using google looking for "pictures of my cat" or browse some blogs, the internet is awash with crappy websites that don't do anything and enjoyable websites that don't do anything either. Which begs the question, if I can't really accomplish anything by writing stories on the internet, why should I bother to start again? Why? Because someone emailed me to say that they still have the printout of my log taped to their studio door. Because in some circles, "and cuddle aftar" still gets a giggle. Because I know for a fact at least four of the artists I worship and poked fun at, personally read the whole thing. Because one person HAS emailed me to say they liked my other stuff. Because my goal wasn't fame, it was to become a good writer, and I don't need external validation to accomplish that. Because in the incredibly unlikely event that I ever do manage to write that screenplay or novel that rockets me into international fame, stalked by the paparazzi, it won't be because I sat on my ass and stopped writing, terrified that I'd peaked at my first blip on the talent radar. It will because I kept writing, improved and grew and developed a unique style and unique sense of humour. Because I wrote for myself and showed enough passion and devotion to it that other people felt they could love it too. But mostly because a girl emailed me a blurry pixilated picture of her pinkish areola. leave a comment. |
T E G @ S P A Z .COM |
|
| update list | |||