Space Ninja History

Space Ninja Cave Painting

I first got online in the early 90s. While some of my friends were goofing around on BBS‘s, I was using my dad’s Compuserve account to post icons I had designed for Windows 3.1. Later on, in 1995, I had dial-up Internet access at home, and a friend had shown me Joe the Circle, one of the first webcomics. This really kick-started my interest in web design, and I had a website on Geocities that year. The idea for Yellow Number Five was born around this time. I graduated high school in 1996, and my early website (which was already coded by hand) moved to Xoom, and then later to my first ISP, SpiritOne, when I started working at Egghead.

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Dude, I Rule

“I’m a strong believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule.”
– Randall in Clerks

That about sums up how I feel right now. When I set up KillingMachines.org, it was the first time I had ever put up a website with a clear goal in mind. And not just a goal, but a list of them. I wanted nothing less than to write the best weblog site available. I had been to livejournal and blogger and was unimpressed. FCS could do most of what they did, and what it couldn’t do was made up for by the fact that it didn’t suck like they did. Who wants to pay to use a weblog site? And haven’t these people ever heard of databases? Why on earth are they ftp’ing the blog entries?

And so I wrote my manifesto. KillingMachines would become, with Steve’s help, and building on the base of FCS, the site I imagined. Users would be able to completely skin their journals. They could set their account to be either a personal journal, or a forum where everyone could post. They would automatically receive a subdomain for their journal. They could turn replies on and off. Most of these features were just pipe dreams at the time, but Steve helped me out a lot, and we got the site up and running, and eventually, only two major features were missing: User-defined skins for journals, and the ability to set an account to be either forum or journal.

I’m pleased to announce that I have finally gotten these features working, and KillingMachines is now FEATURE COMPLETE. I’ve got a few more tricks up my sleeve, but basically the site has everything it needs to be the best weblog site ever. I’m extremely proud of it, and I genuinely believe that given time, word of mouth will turn KMorg into a weblog powerhouse on the web!

And as if that wasn’t cool enough, something else is going my way! Recently, I got the idea in my head that it might be nice to have a Macintosh. The germ behind this idea is osX. This fine operating system is really fun to play with, and the fact that it’s built on a base of BSD makes it hard for me to resist. However, I’m not about to ditch my PC for a mac. I just like the idea of having one around to play with. As a result, I couldn’t justify spending $700 for a new one. Just today, I was mentioning to Annie that if I could find an iMac for around $300, I would probably buy it.

Well, today I may have found one. I’ve been talking with the owner, and she’s been looking to offload her old blueberry G3 iMac 333Mhz. I offered her $250, and things are looking good. Pretty soon, I might have a nice little mac sitting on my desk, waiting for me to grab a copy of osX!

Rusty Killing Machines

As some of you will no doubt have noticed, WWW.killingmachines.org is now a redirect to RUSTY.killingmachines.org. Please change any links or bookmarks to reflect this change. There are a few reasons for the new address. One is that Rusty.KillingMachines sounds really cool. Another is that I’m going to be making some design changes to this weblog very soon. But the major reason is an experiment I will be starting soon.

I’m going to start a ‘zine, which will be hosted on www.killingmachines.org. At the moment, this project is still largely undefined, and is sort of a general interest pop culture webzine. I’m hoping to release it monthly, and I will be performing as editor. I’m currently looking for talent to write for it. If you are interested, send me a sample piece of writing to [email deleted]. Be aware that I will be expecting a new article every month. That being said, it’s wide open. You can write about whatever you like, from humor to news to reviews.

Edit 10/26/2005: Killingmachines is offline, but after www moved to rusty, it moved to rusted, and then ended up here. So you’re already in the right place.