TBT #36: The Evolution of Me

I’m not going to write much this week. Some rather weird news from home is weighing on me so much that I feel that anything I write would allude to it and, you know, I don’t think I want to do that. So I’m not going to! Plus last night an hour of time was STOLEN from me. Time was simply WASTED like a wino on a street corner or a mafia snitch after being found out. I wasn’t just annoyed when it happened; I was angry. And yet there’s nothing I can do as far as revenge goes! What am I supposed to do? Beat up time? Impossible! It is terrible to think that neither time nor farmers are on my side.

Arizona and Saskatchewan are The Best Things Ever for April 4, 2005.

GraphicMatt (né V): A visual history

In honour of my slightly tweaking my layout again, I though it would be interesting to use the beautiful and talented Archive.org to go way-way-back and find out what my site USED to look like! Back when it was mostly just a bunch of crazy letters to videogame websites. I’ve maintained a “web presence” (whatever that means!) for over five years now, which is both a testament to the endless well that is my creativity and, also, a testament to my inability to get a social life so busy that I have no time for the internet. It is a testament to two things.

Back when I started, I knew very little about HTML and web design. I mostly threw the site together based on what I had picked up through creating Geocities sites with my friend Rob when we were thirteen. We were convinced that, provided the site had just the right number of pictures of Pamela “Lee” Anderson, it could become very popular and make us gobs and gobs of money. That never happened and, perhaps thankfully, those sites have been lost to the ravages of time. The same cannot be said for some of my wrestling fansites, many of which still exist, but are thankfully really difficult to find, even with the help of google.

Regardless, the site as you know it began in late 1999. At the height of that whole dot-com boom that saw a bunch of twenty-one-year-olds become millionaires based entirely on the fact that they knew how to work an FTP (An acronym that stands for either “File Transfer Protocol” or “Fuck Tha Police”, depending on context) client, a company called Namezero emerged. They intended to make money through offering people free domain names. (like yourname.com!) They had no business model nor any idea how exactly giving people free domain names (which usually cost $10-$20 a year) would generate revenue. So, of course, the founders became millionaires in a matter of weeks. That’s how crazy the world was back then.

It was through NameZero that my first real website, graphicv.com, came about. I had been writing weird letters to various internet people for a few months, an idea which I had stolen from the wonderful Ted L. Nancy (who may, in fact, be Jerry Seinfeld writing under a pseudonym). My friends on ICQ all loved them! “You are original and hilarious!” they’d say. And I’d agree, hoping they wouldn’t realize I had stolen most of the writing style directly from a successful comedian. In any case, I decided to take the free domain name opportunity and use the site as a place to dump all these letters. Later, it would obviously become much much more than that. But that’s how it started.

GraphicMatt.com: Version 1 (GraphicV.com)!

This was pretty boring. The whole “Graphic_V Sold Out” theme didn’t make a whole lot of sense. And the “I hate that guy” part? Who knows! Totally inaccurate! People LOVE me! Or at least that’s what I tell myself in order to combat the cold at night. This site was notable for containing a variety of weird articles about the day-to-day events that somehow turned into overlong parables about life’s inherent value. It was pretty weird but still, oddly enough, generated a fair amount of visitors. So many, in fact, that my ego ballooned to the size of a double decker bus and I created a “Fan Art” page where people could create images about how great I am (and some people did!) along with the “Cam Portal” which allowed people to see grainy pictures of me alongside Vertical Horizon lyrics.

A weird time in my life. But one that lasted almost two years as I didn’t ditch the layout or the site name until June 29, 2002 (after an ‘official’ opening on November 18, 2000), when I declared that I wanted to start a site that was more ‘personal’ and last concerned with turning every update into an epiphany. Of that, came GraphicMatt.

GraphicMatt, version 2 (GraphicMatt.com)

This version of the site, which began on the same day GraphicV.com closed down, really wasn’t all that successful. I think a lot of that was due to the fact that it was green and, honestly, I just can’t relate to green. There was some sort of logo image in the design, too, but clearly it’s been lost to the ages. I bet it said “GraphicMatt” or something!

My first year of university was when I went through some substantial life changes. Not only did I finally hit puberty, I also became better aware of the world and my place in it. I think I wrote some good stuff during this time period, but it was ultimately a format that just didn’t work for me. It should be noted, of course, that it was during this period that I started the /kings subdirectory, which was made up of a zillion pictures. It eventually became a site all its own and was then, to some protest, folded into this mainsite, where its updates currently generate too many damn hits.

This site was tabled sometime in April of 2003, with Something Vague being the last update published there.

GraphicMatt Version 3 (GraphicV.com)

Wow, was this layout ever dark and emo! I still think the splash page image is pretty cool-looking but, seriously, a splash page? Lame Lame Lame. This layout was created during a time in my life when I was rather downtrodden, and was never all that functional. It was yet another attempt by me to create a site that I could update with shorter, less-thoughtful pieces. And for about a month I managed to do that. In the end, however, it too needed to go.

It was around this time that my original host, ClickHost starting giving me all sorts of shit for having too much stuff on my server. All those aforementioned pictures at /kings were really weighing down the server. My choices were either to A) Delete some of them or B) Change hosting providers. So, being the eternal packrat and not wanting to lose scores of blurry and out-of-focus pictures of drunk people, I changed hosts again. Leading to…

GraphicMatt, Version 3 (graphicmatt.com, graphicmatt.net)

I got a free domain name when I changed hosting providers, so graphicmatt.net was born. Of course, the domain name was only free for a year, so now I’m stuck paying to renew two domain names every summer but whatever. At least I know some guy won’t be able to start graphicmatt.net and try to cop my style!

This site lasted a very long time despite being very unwieldy and breaking in several browsers. It was still black, but less so, which was a nice change. Beginning in July of 2003, it lasted all the way until sometime this past summer, when I changed it slightly to increase browser compatibility.

The Now

The current layout was developed this past fall, as I switched the site over to a different news posting back-end in order to combat the zillions of spam postings I was getting in my comments boxes. It’s probably the most livejournal-esque the site has ever looked, leading some to say “Why don’t you just use your livejournal, goober!” I have several answers to that question, but none of them are very good or convincing, so I won’t bore you with them!

What’s next for graphicmatt? Probably more stories about guys who are unhappy with their love-lives, honestly. The next time I’m in a nostalgic mood, I’ll detail the exact moment when my writing went from “sweetly sappy” to “subtly misogynistic and cynical.” It was a rather striking change!

Again, sorry for the lack of substance this week. I feel like I have been hit in the face with an anvil! An anvil called LIFE. But, hey, feel free to leave comments wherein you reminisce about how you found graphicmatt and your initial reactions and how you feel it is probably the best site on the internet. Because, dude, it probably is.

Punctuated Equilibrium,
Matt