One Year Later
Exactly one year ago today we started up this weblog. I wrote about Gameboy Advance and Nerf guns, and Don and Jeff wrote about their respective online personas, Edward Split and Furious Tiger. Like I said a couple of weeks ago, I mainly made it just as a way to keep in touch with the band. It started out as just a small part of the Okay Samurai site, but when it was switched over to dave2n.com in December, things started to pick up. Now it's updated at least once a week and has become a fun side-project / hobby of mine. We only get about 200 visitors a day, but unlike a lot of website designers, I'm not really concerned with how many people visit; it's more about who visits. Old college friends, TFA teachers and staff, family, roommates - for some reason, you keep on checking in with the extended Okay Samurai family and the very different directions our lives are taking us.
I didn't have a computer when I went to college in the fall of 1998, and didn't know much at all about the internet. We actually already had a website - when the band made CDs during our senior year of high school, we got a free webpage with our package where people could download these crazy things called mp3s and actually listen to our music through IUMA! I remember going to the Robinson Media Center, checking out this internet stuff and bringing up the site to show to people. But when I finally got a computer in February '99, I started to look into webpage design a little more, and the band and comic strip gave me a good excuse to do so. I immediately became interested in VRML, which I played around with a heck of a lot in that tiny first year college dorm room. But "computers are for nerds" was always sticking in the front of my mind, so I stayed away from programming and dealt mainly with creation and design. It was like designing the TV Guides or books or neighborhood newsletters or video game magazines I made as a kid, but now it was taken to a global level. And now dave2n really serves as a creative extension, a world to write, draw, and sing in that a couple hundred people take notice of daily.
This website has let people listen to our music, play a video game, or read archives of the comic strip and our journal posts. It has hosted an island adventure for a group of sixth graders and shown some artwork that helped me get into grad school. I wrote an unpublished blog for about three months during college, simply because I wanted to write a daily journal for myself and liked the convenience of typing and the weblog format. It was a lot more personal than this one because I knew that I was the only one reading it, but today it's great for me to look back on and remember everything I was going through. I think the same is true here; down the road, I'll want to remember my time at Northeast Middle School and everything that went along with this year. I'm already nostalgic about things like our Animal Crossing marathon, which was probably one of my favorite days this year. That story and the band stories everyone has told - from Eugene's "Okay Samurai Factoids" to Eric's take on the Espiritu Sessions - are going to be great to look back on one day. I have no aspirations of dave2n becoming anything more than it is, a simple personal website that just lets me keep in touch with my closest friends. That's it, nothing more, nothing less. I'll probably update the site even more next year since Hotlanta is the farthest I've been from home. And maybe I'll keep it for a few more years, until Eugene gets married, Jeff loses his brown warmup pants, Don goes sober for a year, Andrew saves the universe, Eric and Russ become music superstars or Mike stops trying to get in fights with people in taxicabs...who knows? Regardless, thanks for reading and staying in touch with us.
By the way, I'm at a loss for the appeal of the stereotypical fat kid who sings a grown-up love song during talent search contests. You know the type; he sort of puffs around the stage and does a little growl thing with his voice while pointing at the audience and singing about his "baby" or "honey" or "woman" or what have you. I haven't even seen American Juniors but I swear that there has got to be a contestant like this on the show. The immediate reaction is always "Aw, he's so cute." Um, no, he's just a fat kid singing lyrics he doesn't understand. The reason I bring this up is that my sister was telling me about some girl at her school who performed an original song at the middle school talent show and how God-awful the experience was. The lyrics were something like "Hey boy, I kind of like you," or something creative-writing-class like that. Now, I don't want to be labeled as the skinny guy raining on the fat people's parade, but for the love of all things sacred, if you're under 12, don't sing "Honey, I'm gonna get 'cha!" or "I need a woman to make a man out of me" at a talent show. You may fool the elderly and the soccer moms, but I'm on to your game.
So...why do you keep visiting this site again?
Tuesday, June 10 at 9:07 PM
Okay Samurai Multimedia is Dave Werner's personal site. I'm currently working at Minor Studios in San Francisco. Thanks for visiting! (more...)
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