Spitemag.com: 1996-2006
by Will
First and less important point: I received in the mail yesterday a CD with the original version of “I Got My Mind Set On You” — which is “I Got My Mind Set On You (Parts 1 and 2) by James Ray. It’s a slower, funkier version that ends with a gospel choir chanting “It’s gonna take money, a whole lot of spending money.” It’s pretty cool. Come to my house and I’ll play it for you.
Also, I closed spitemag.com the website today. I was gonna do it January 1st, but I put it off because I had a lot of email stored up there. Then today the domain was suspended because I had to pay $200 for another year — and I just cancelled it. That’s just the website — my email will still work (I have whines|AT|spitemag.com redirecting to whines|AT|gmail.com).
I started spitemag.com in 1996 as a way to learn HTML and to get my writing jones out of my system. I re-read my old stuff and most of it seems embarrasingly clunky, especially considering I was 26. And even though I’m officially closing it now, we haven’t written anything since the Red Sox won the world series, and nothing on a regular basis for years before that.
But I loved it while I was doing it! Although in a way I could blame spitemag.com as the motivation for me to learn how to set up web sites, which is the skill that has caused me to work until midnight 3 days running (soon to be 4). So maybe I should have closed it ten years EARLIER.
It’s all archived here, for what it’s worth.
Comments
I had fun writing stuff and making it look somewhat professional. People who were much less funny than my brothers and I always thought we should do it for our jobs, or work for the Onion. I would then tell them we would need to provide incredibly hysterical material on a weekly basis, as opposed to mediocre inside-joke material on a seasonal basis.
It’s a sad day whenever a side project collapses. As a project over-stretcher with 6 website side-projects,(hand at attention) I salute you sir.
Some of the stuff I think is genuinely funny. The Strokes article reads really funny to me. So did the Ray Allen one. I always liked Kevin’s Flash Does Not Fly.
Most embarrasing are that first crop of articles, like the one on Alanis Morissette. To be angry over the success of a pop star is not all that much cooler, and probably way LESS cool than getting super excited about one. Although that one did get quoted in the Washington Post.
It’s weird to think that when I first started it, I really thought it was gonna become a real magazine. I think the web must have sucked IN GENERAL for me to think that site was gonna stand out. I even was using my now-hated typeface Copperplate Gothic Bold.
I love Kevin’s flash one too.
Ooo! Will’s hatred of Copperplate Gothic Bold gains some context: you used to love it. I like to think it was like a girlfriend you loved, she was crazy, you guys broke up, and now you HATE her, but in like a year you’ll run into her and be like “Oh, she’s not so bad.”
But she will still be bad, ’cause Copperplate Gothic Bold fucking sucks.
I saw a t-shirt the other day that “Drop Shadows, Not Bombs.” It took me a minute to realize it was a font joke.
Yeah, thanks for the community. I had a lot of fun on the Spite forums, and even wrote a couple of articles.
I would say that I’ll miss it…but it’s been gone for some time now. Kind of like the uncle on life support that finally experienced a power outage.
Happy thoughts.
writing our annual predicition that the Red Sox would win the the World Series was a lot of fun. Although started by Will’s friend Greg, it became something I would be so excited about. It was a consolation that when the Sox lost again it made out articles funnier.
Particularly the way they were written with the utmost confidence, and yet linked to all the years we were wrong.
And then the final year we wrote “We Called It!”. If the Sox had not won the World Series I would still be writing those.
The Flash article was read by Geoff Johns – one of the better Flash writers I have ever read – and he found it very funny and I felt very flattered.
The tour of my home was always a hit.
The man-breast quiz was good time, I suppose.
I also liked how, since the site was just manually-created HTML, we had to be creative to get fun effects. Well, we also had to be creative since none of us have any design training or ability. There’s an article by Kevin and I (posing as Samuel Barks) about Daylight Savings Time which has a fun layout.
I should be linking all this stuff but spitemag is linked in the margin of this blog, and there’s a decent HTML archive.
Goodbye, Spitemag.
Bye SpiteMag! BTW, you know what drew me here? I suspect Kevin posted a comment or two on the Marvel Comics blog regarding their editorial simulation, and they were answered. I saw the name and matched it.