This is part 1 of a 3-part story. When you're done here, go read Part 2: The Twilight of Web 1.0. When you're done with that, read Part 3: The Stanley Street Hooligans.
When I got into the Web it was because of photography. The logic of it is mundane, really. As a student majoring in Photography and Creative writing at The Ohio State University I was exposed to some pretty creative people. In one of my mid-level classes we learned Photoshop. It was 10 glorious weeks of nerd heaven. I came for the art, but I stayed for the Macs.
Within weeks of my first Photoshop lesson, I'd purchased a mac of my own. 6800. 14" monitor. Beige. Desktop. Old Skool. Then I purchased Lynda Weinman's "Designing Web Graphics" which was a first edition. This must have been 1997. The web was just starting to get interesting at that point. Ross would find raves on the web and send me joke emails from god@heaven.com. We were learning a skill, it turns out. But mainly we were having fun. By the end of my years atOSU I chose a senior thesis so I could graduate with impressive stature in an otherwise useless degree. The thesis was to create a student arts magazine on the web. Easy. I called it "Spoke and Axle." I solicited art work, writing and photos from people I knew in both the Art and English departments. I got my degree and the honors that came with it. The thesis was anexercise in practicality. It afforded me books on the web that would later become a bad habit for me. To this day, I can't go to borders and not check up on the latest version ofO'Reilly classics like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I can't even begin to tell you how much money I've wasted over the years on dead or dying technologies. Remember PERL? How aboutActionScript 1.0? JSP - now there's one for the record books.
My first job out of college was with a fledgling Web development firm based in Eugene, Oregon called "245 Media." It later became "Prentiss, Bernstein and Jones Digital" (aka "PBJ Digital") at which point some of us got moved down to LA. Things quickly turned sour with B so P&J were forced out of the company. That's when I bolted for San Diego myself after having gotten the nod from Reid. We helped start 245 together, but he'd since found more stability in at a new agency. What's more is that this was the very beginning of the dot-com bust of 2000, the elections were in full-swing, and I was spending a lot of time on the road between LA and San Diego, commuting to my new job. The times were chaotic.
Driving is bliss. I love the road. You get on the road and you can get immersed entirely in your thoughts. The road is an abstraction. If I had my way, I'd driver everywhere. Even Iceland.
One of the things on my mind during those long drives between LA and San Diego was something that I had said during my interviews for my new job. I was the new Digital Media Director for a PR-Marketing firm. They had strong PR, Print and Broadcast work in their past, but they wanted Reid and me to help them cash in on Web development. Naturally. So what I said in my interview at the time was toward that goal.
"What do I want to be when I grow up?" I asked. It was a response to the 5-year plan. Five years from now, what did I want to have accomplished. I thought about it for a second and then blurted out.
"Praystation."
Blank looks from everyone in the room.
"You see. There's this guy. His name is Joshuah Davis. He's an Internet Wunderkind. He's got this site called Praystation.com. You should check it out. Anyway, Josh has made a name for himself as a premiere Web developer. He does graphics. He does code. He does creative direction and thinks up magical concepts that get the rest of us developers all agog with jealousy. He's very talented. And he's very generous with sharing his talent. He shares his code. He shares his stories. And, well, that's what I want to be. I want to be a guy who people turn to for inspiration - even outside these walls."
I guess that clinched the deal. I got the job and as a result a huge lift in my living wages. It was time to start celebrating.
Or not. I came away from that interview thinking that somehow I'd cannibalized creativity and the creative spirit for people who simply would never get it. Because,c'mon , the people who hired me and Reid would simply never get it. They came from a different world - they weren't so much old as 'old thinking.' We all want to be inspired - and that's what Reid and I were in essence promising them - even if it meant selling out oldPraystation to make the point. It felt dirty. And untrue.
In those car rides between LA and San Diego I was spending a lot of time working on my own ideas in my head. And when I'd get back to LA for the weekend, I'd work on these ideas in the bedroom. Any hour I could free up was spent on washing the stink of work off me.
That's the autumn I came up with Spamtucky.com. Talk about stink, Spamtucky was a steaming turd. It was supposed to be a humor site that took the stupid stuff that you get forwarded to you by your aunt in Tennessee or your Uncle in Idaho and lampoon it for the world to see. I had Ben and Donald writing for me on regular rotation - they were great. The site was slightly funny and it was getting some attention. My heart wasn't into it, however. It was an idle distraction. Funny, but not great. My enthusiasm for it waxed and waned, but eventuallypetered out entirely after six months.
Spamtucky was eclipsed by bigger matters though. The lack of good-will online was palpable. Otherwise fun sites we getting caustic. Flame wars were everywhere it seemed. No matter where I turned people were embattled and bitter. They were losing their jobs and their dreams of cashing out with millions in options were also vanishing with their good nature. People were pissed.Fuckedcompany.com was one of the most popular sites online. Suck.com was lampooning dot-com nose-dives and day-trader crazies. I was boarding with a day-trader who was also a huge Republican and when Bush 'won' the 2000 election, the daily rhetoric I was surrounded with just kept getting worse. I had decided that I'd had enough of all this negative bullshit.
Hence, spoke-and-axle.com. Well, actually, before spoke-and-axle.com there was nosepilot.com and Al Sacui. Al was an animator who had created this amazing 15-minute flash piece by hand that had all of these amazing characters, sounds, and animations. It turns out that his story was as legit and heartbreaking as they come (by Web standards).
Al Sacui got popular overnight. He had a web site that was just this one flash movie and when he got slash-dotted and k10k'd and linked to from every one's sites on the net it seemed, his hosting provider decided to take advantage of this guy for as much as they could. In two months he'd racked up a $15,000 bill for bandwidth, or so they claimed. He took his case to the 'net and many of us began to send him as much money as we could. $5 here. $25 dollars there. Only, that's when I contacted him and asked him if there wasn't a better solution. Why pay those assholes? I reasoned. They were in effect extorting money from him. They deserved nothing. I worked out a better system for Al. He could keep his home page where he wanted it -nosepilot.com - but then have people like me who were doing diddly with their own bandwidth to host the real stuff for him.
Well the idea worked. And it worked so well that he sent me tons of his drawings for his next project (which sadly, never got produced). What you see below are some of those drawings. I scanned 5 of the 53 that he sent.
What comes next is the era of good will. It's a post-bubble no-mans-land, where I was in it for the love. Read on. . .
When I got into the Web it was because of photography. The logic of it is mundane, really. As a student majoring in Photography and Creative writing at The Ohio State University I was exposed to some pretty creative people. In one of my mid-level classes we learned Photoshop. It was 10 glorious weeks of nerd heaven. I came for the art, but I stayed for the Macs.
Within weeks of my first Photoshop lesson, I'd purchased a mac of my own. 6800. 14" monitor. Beige. Desktop. Old Skool. Then I purchased Lynda Weinman's "Designing Web Graphics" which was a first edition. This must have been 1997. The web was just starting to get interesting at that point. Ross would find raves on the web and send me joke emails from god@heaven.com. We were learning a skill, it turns out. But mainly we were having fun. By the end of my years atOSU I chose a senior thesis so I could graduate with impressive stature in an otherwise useless degree. The thesis was to create a student arts magazine on the web. Easy. I called it "Spoke and Axle." I solicited art work, writing and photos from people I knew in both the Art and English departments. I got my degree and the honors that came with it. The thesis was anexercise in practicality. It afforded me books on the web that would later become a bad habit for me. To this day, I can't go to borders and not check up on the latest version ofO'Reilly classics like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I can't even begin to tell you how much money I've wasted over the years on dead or dying technologies. Remember PERL? How aboutActionScript 1.0? JSP - now there's one for the record books.
My first job out of college was with a fledgling Web development firm based in Eugene, Oregon called "245 Media." It later became "Prentiss, Bernstein and Jones Digital" (aka "PBJ Digital") at which point some of us got moved down to LA. Things quickly turned sour with B so P&J were forced out of the company. That's when I bolted for San Diego myself after having gotten the nod from Reid. We helped start 245 together, but he'd since found more stability in at a new agency. What's more is that this was the very beginning of the dot-com bust of 2000, the elections were in full-swing, and I was spending a lot of time on the road between LA and San Diego, commuting to my new job. The times were chaotic.
Driving is bliss. I love the road. You get on the road and you can get immersed entirely in your thoughts. The road is an abstraction. If I had my way, I'd driver everywhere. Even Iceland.
One of the things on my mind during those long drives between LA and San Diego was something that I had said during my interviews for my new job. I was the new Digital Media Director for a PR-Marketing firm. They had strong PR, Print and Broadcast work in their past, but they wanted Reid and me to help them cash in on Web development. Naturally. So what I said in my interview at the time was toward that goal.
"What do I want to be when I grow up?" I asked. It was a response to the 5-year plan. Five years from now, what did I want to have accomplished. I thought about it for a second and then blurted out.
"Praystation."
Blank looks from everyone in the room.
"You see. There's this guy. His name is Joshuah Davis. He's an Internet Wunderkind. He's got this site called Praystation.com. You should check it out. Anyway, Josh has made a name for himself as a premiere Web developer. He does graphics. He does code. He does creative direction and thinks up magical concepts that get the rest of us developers all agog with jealousy. He's very talented. And he's very generous with sharing his talent. He shares his code. He shares his stories. And, well, that's what I want to be. I want to be a guy who people turn to for inspiration - even outside these walls."
I guess that clinched the deal. I got the job and as a result a huge lift in my living wages. It was time to start celebrating.
Or not. I came away from that interview thinking that somehow I'd cannibalized creativity and the creative spirit for people who simply would never get it. Because,c'mon , the people who hired me and Reid would simply never get it. They came from a different world - they weren't so much old as 'old thinking.' We all want to be inspired - and that's what Reid and I were in essence promising them - even if it meant selling out oldPraystation to make the point. It felt dirty. And untrue.
In those car rides between LA and San Diego I was spending a lot of time working on my own ideas in my head. And when I'd get back to LA for the weekend, I'd work on these ideas in the bedroom. Any hour I could free up was spent on washing the stink of work off me.
That's the autumn I came up with Spamtucky.com. Talk about stink, Spamtucky was a steaming turd. It was supposed to be a humor site that took the stupid stuff that you get forwarded to you by your aunt in Tennessee or your Uncle in Idaho and lampoon it for the world to see. I had Ben and Donald writing for me on regular rotation - they were great. The site was slightly funny and it was getting some attention. My heart wasn't into it, however. It was an idle distraction. Funny, but not great. My enthusiasm for it waxed and waned, but eventuallypetered out entirely after six months.
Spamtucky was eclipsed by bigger matters though. The lack of good-will online was palpable. Otherwise fun sites we getting caustic. Flame wars were everywhere it seemed. No matter where I turned people were embattled and bitter. They were losing their jobs and their dreams of cashing out with millions in options were also vanishing with their good nature. People were pissed.Fuckedcompany.com was one of the most popular sites online. Suck.com was lampooning dot-com nose-dives and day-trader crazies. I was boarding with a day-trader who was also a huge Republican and when Bush 'won' the 2000 election, the daily rhetoric I was surrounded with just kept getting worse. I had decided that I'd had enough of all this negative bullshit.
Hence, spoke-and-axle.com. Well, actually, before spoke-and-axle.com there was nosepilot.com and Al Sacui. Al was an animator who had created this amazing 15-minute flash piece by hand that had all of these amazing characters, sounds, and animations. It turns out that his story was as legit and heartbreaking as they come (by Web standards).
Al Sacui got popular overnight. He had a web site that was just this one flash movie and when he got slash-dotted and k10k'd and linked to from every one's sites on the net it seemed, his hosting provider decided to take advantage of this guy for as much as they could. In two months he'd racked up a $15,000 bill for bandwidth, or so they claimed. He took his case to the 'net and many of us began to send him as much money as we could. $5 here. $25 dollars there. Only, that's when I contacted him and asked him if there wasn't a better solution. Why pay those assholes? I reasoned. They were in effect extorting money from him. They deserved nothing. I worked out a better system for Al. He could keep his home page where he wanted it -nosepilot.com - but then have people like me who were doing diddly with their own bandwidth to host the real stuff for him.
Well the idea worked. And it worked so well that he sent me tons of his drawings for his next project (which sadly, never got produced). What you see below are some of those drawings. I scanned 5 of the 53 that he sent.
What comes next is the era of good will. It's a post-bubble no-mans-land, where I was in it for the love. Read on. . .
Al Sacui Sketch
Al Sacui Sketch
Al Sacui Sketch
Al Sacui Sketch
Al Sacui Sketch
Al Sacui Sketch
spoke and axle banners
spoke and axle
