Field Trip Behind the Scenes at Yalestar.com
A Field Trip Through The Yalestar Factory In Which I Interview Myself
Ahem!
This has been one of the more exciting weeks in my thirty years on this earth, but I can't be going into rich and cathartic detail. This isn't Penthouse Forum here. So instead of wheezing on about license plates or absolute vs. relative rewind technology, I thought it'd be fetching to take you on a field trip behind the scenes here at the Yalestar HQ. And what better and more self-aggrandizing format to utilize than the ever-popular self-interview?
What is a 'Yalestar,' anyway?
Back in the 1990-93 epoch, I was quite the little stoner. In fact, I once had four police officers come over to my apartment at 4am with a search warrant, but that's neither here nor there.
I don't recall the reason, but somehow I started calling myself Yalestar Lovechild. I'd like to think that it was my cynical reaction to the prevailing stinkfoot hippie zeitgeist that was rampant in Missoula, MT at the time, but like I said, I couldn't be sure about that.
[laughter]
But the Yalestar part of it stuck, and I kind of like it, don't you? In fact, the ice cream store where I worked from ages 13-19 has (or at least had) a flavor called 'Yalestar Chocolate Heath Bar' to honor my memory after I got fired.
And it has a nice ring to it, so I thought it would make a good name for the site. It's easy to remember if you know me personally, and it's kind of a nifty random word if you don't.
What inspired you to start this site?
When I moved to Denver, I found myself doing a hell of a lot of writing. At the time I didn't really know anyone in town, didn't have a girlfriend or any of that, and didn't like hanging out at home too much because I'm too restless. So I set out to write my —ahem!— memoirs last November, but quickly realized I was party to a big roiling crock of bullshit that probably noboby but a select few people would ever read. I wanted to turn my efforts toward something that I could get out to the public. I had originally wanted to start doing a magazine, but that's a hell of a lot more work than doing a website, as far as I'm concerned, and more expensive too.
Also, I had been stumbling across a lot of websites that were nothing more than people spewing whatever rolled through their brain at the time (yes, the phenomenon known as "blogging," which is a word that makes me cringe). That type of thing can get real annoying real fast, but there are a few people that can pull it off very well. I was also a little bit inspired by this guy Jon Sullivan's website. I've never met him, but he used to work at the Italian restaurant in Missoula that I did (although about three years before me). He updates that thing every single day, and I noticed that voyeuristically reading about even the most mundane parts of his life was good entertainment. Except he doesn't spell very well.
And, of course, I want to get the site listed on Rolling Stone's "What's Hot" page.
[riotous laughter by all]
What were your parameters when you set out to do Yalestar.com? What did you have in mind?
When I set out to do this site in February of this year, I had a little pep talk with myself on the john one night. "Yale," I said, "this 'yalestar.com' sounds like a fine idea, but I can't have you pouring yourself into this effort only to have it sit there on the shelf for months on end like non-alcoholic beer. You have to promise me that you'll make every effort to update it at least once a week." Also at the time, I was getting into more advanced web technologies, so I added, "Yale, you're more than welcome to utilize these technologies for your site, but not for their own sake." In other words, just because you can do it doesn't mean you should, in this case. My emphasis should be on the content, not the bells 'n' whistles, and yes, I too am tired of that word 'content.'
So to my surprise, I have been faithfully updating the site almost once a week, although the tendency nowadays is toward a ten-day lapse. I even get a little guilt pang when I've let it sit for too long, mostly because I'm worried that people will lose interest, and all the work will have been for naught.
Yeah, I was gonna ask you: is it a lot of work?
It really is! Usually a six-hour affair to write the shit, get some photos together, make miniatures out of them, think up some more bullshit, and then upload the whole thing, not to mention leading a daring and adventuresome lifestyle so as to have interesting shit to talk about week in and week out.
Where does all of this take place?
You mean where do I update it from?
Yes.
Until recently, I did it after hours at my workplace. That worked out very well because it was quiet there and the connection was faster than frozen snot. And free soft drinks.
But since I was laid off, I've been doing it from home, which I don't like as much. If I'm at home, I'm constantly listening to music, and this distracts me quite a bit. Also, I have to get into what many shitheads refer to as "the zone" to do the writing part of it, and this entails mainlining 300mg of caffeine via cola or coffee ingestion, which means going three blocks to the 7-11.
And as for the photos, I don't go anywhere without my trusty digital camera. And of course I'm very lucky to have such a talented stuntman in Mr. Scout Moore, whose elastic visage has graced these pages more often than I care to recall.
How many visitors do you get?
It's gotten to be about 40 a day on the average. Mondays and Wednesdays are usually the highest, Fridays and Sundays the lowest. The highest has been something like 128 in one day.
This is beyond flattering, because 40 people a day = 280 people a week, and I sure don't know 280 people. So this leads me to believe one of the following outcomes are true: either a) lots of strangers are checking it out, or b) the same 25 or so people are checking it out repeatedly. I'm happy either way.
Now, I don't know whether these are unique visits, nor can I track who it is that's visiting. Not for free, anyway.
What are the benefits of doing this site?
Of course the comments I get from people is the most rewarding thing. It's weird; the times when I think I've churned out a total fucking masterpiece, nobody seems to get too excited about it. But the times when I just kind of barf out a bunch of words seem to get the most favorable comments. The episodes involving travel seem to be the most popular; the essays on shit like tape head cleaner are the least.
Another benny is when I get messages from people that I've lost contact with over the years. Or like this mom of a kid I hung out with in like 2nd grade wrote to me this past spring; who knows how she stumbled upon it? And some girl from Australia wrote and told me that the site reminded her of some guy she once dated.
Another benefit is that it encourages me to do more out-of-the-ordinary shit than I would ordinarily. And it makes it more fun when I'm hanging out by myself getting into adventures to know that hopefully it'll be interesting to someone else.
What does this new ladyfriend of yours think about it?
Uh... she doesn't know about it. There just never seemed to be a right time to bring it up, and now it seems too awkward to just mention it out of the blue. So I don't know how I'll worm my way out of this one.
Do you manually code the page or do you use a WYSIWYG editor?
I was hand-coding it at first because when you're into web development, you're supposed to look down your nose at people who use visual editors. But I gave up hand-coding on account of, for one thing, it's too much work, and it's so nitpicky. As I mentioned, I want to focus on the content and not be fucking around with HTML tags all day long. For another, I like to see how the page looks as I go, so I use a freeware editor called First Page by Evrsoft.
Hopefully in the near future, I will be porting this site over to a different host so I can use ColdFusion to have the updated content show up automagically into a template.
Who hosts it at the present?
They're called DrakNet, and I'm perfectly happy with them so far, aside from the fact that you can't use any ColdFusion or any of that shit. It's like ten bucks a month, and I've never had a problem with them. Plus, I'm sure I'm way over the 50MB space limit by now, but nobody's ever said anything to me.
What's in store for the future of Yalestar.com?
I'd like to do some interviews, like maybe one with the Filthy Critic, since he lives around here. Or maybe Mike Watt or John Lennon or someone like that. I'd also really like to have a streaming RealVideo broadcast of Scout's movie, Kitt Kourage, but I don't know of any free way to encode RealVideo. Does anyone?
I also had the wild hots to make up some t-shirts a while back, and I still may do that, but it seems kind of expensive.
And I've been trying to get Scout to do a guest episode...
Okay, well, I'm done with all my questions; is there anything else you'd like to say to your readers?
[Yale yawns, lights a $20 cigar]
Yes, thank you. I'd like them to know that, in its nine-month existence, I have spelled only one word wrong that I'm aware of, and that's "abattoir". I'd like them to know that Gatorade's new tagline is: "Is IT in you?" And I'd like them to know that there is a Danzig Drive in Lakewood, Colorado. And I'd like them to know that there is a biography of Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys that is called "Dumb Angel."
Artist Showcase: Greg Twigg, Media Artist
Greg Twigg is a tight bro from way back when whose wedding I was privileged enough to attend this past August. He yanked some photos I took from that week and worked his media artistly magic on them, with most disturbing results, as you can see:
You know, I was laughing my fat ass off looking at these, but for some reason, today they're really freaking me out, especially that bottom one.
Greg's got a site with all (or a lot of) his work on it, and you'll find it at: TwiggArts.com
Oh, and here's his wedding photo:
Hot Beef Insurrection
Hortense Prebel and The Tater Tot Tittie Trio
Derek Dentata's Droll Dulcimer Duo
When Gloves Die
Rip Triptych and the Sikhs (sic)
ARCHIVE OF ROYALTY-FREE BAND NAMES
SEND IN YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS HERE
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Hello. Do your everyday conversations lack vigor and elan? I'm sure they do. Your problem is not uncommon. What 99% of today's conversational dyads lack is the presence of colorful and colloquial similies such as:
"Dang, it's hotter than two rats fucking in a wool sock."
I feel that this would be an invaluable resource for the avid conversationalist and language lover alike. They can be as abstract as you please; in fact the more so, the better. The best ones use alternate meanings of a word, as in, "My dick was harder than a Mexican math test," where two different meanings of the word "hard" are referenced. Also appreciated are non-sensical ones, such as, "Man, I'm hungrier than a goat at a baby shower." See what I'm getting at here?
They can either be expressions you've made up during one of your periodic PCP deliria or ones that already exist, although I think we've all heard just about enough of "colder than a witch's tit."
As per usual, send your submissions to yalestar@yahoo.com and if they get used (and they will), uh... you'll get to feel great about yourself for a couple days.
Sasshole.net
Your favorite hosiery-core band Sasshole has gotten theyselves a web presence, and it's at Sasshole.net. I do believe that the whole thing has been tooled by the sole aboobal member of the band, which would of course be Honest Dave Parsons. Like most folks, I would never have predicted that Dave P. would see the business end of a computer, but that only goes to show you what a complex —nay, enigmatic— young man he is.
Dave raises a good point in the keynote address on that website, namely: don't have links to non-existent pages. This type of thing has of course plagued the web since its humble beginnings back in... whenever it was. But what grouses me even more than that is when bands or people get websites going and go to all the trouble of assembling the content and telling everyone all about it, only to leave it stagnant for months on end. Of course, having a dynamic website entails being active enough in your endeavor to keep it fresh.
Sure, we've all stumbled across websites that obviously have been stagnating there since the mid-90s but are still useful somehow. For instance, I was reading about Melungeons (hmmm, good Interesting Fact of the Week material there) in some book and wanted to find out more about it, so I turned to my old friend, the World Wide Web. Most of the sites with info relating to Melungeons looked like they had been constructed in the epoch 1995-98. It's funny; you can determine the vintage of a web page with this cunning little calculus that I've devised:
1. Does the site utilize the Comic Sans font?
2. Is there flashing text?
3. Is there a MIDI clip that opens and starts playing automagically when the page loads (perhaps the biggest affront to the web since the e- and i- craze)?
4. Does the body text wrap around the photos in an awkward and unseemly fashion?
5. Does the site have a tiled-image background?
Any more than three of these that return "True" can tell you that someone built the site in the mid-90s. A dead giveaway.
So, smart guy, what the fuck characterizes a modern amateur website? Well, the craze nowadays tends to be toward miniscule text in the Verdana font (like this site) or Tahoma (which I'm thinking about switching to); it typically uses tables to control layout (like I do here); and the emphasis is on small, fast-loading graphics.
My apologies for a slight diversion there. Dave reports that his corporate goal is to have the hit counter over at Sasshole.net to crest the 9 mark before Thanksgiving, so I think you, person, had better get cracking.
Go-Nuts: Dunk and Cover
Yes, the album of the week is by the Go-Nuts, and yes, I am thirty years old. There some sort of problem with that, you fucking dick?
Look, I didn't mean to fly off the handle there and call you a dick, but I'm just a little defensive about digging an album by a band dedicated to celebrating snacks. "Snak-rok" is the style of music they purport to offer you. And what's with that cover, you ask? Hey, it's a fucking hologram! Yeah! Let's see your Pink Floyd records or your Eric Clapton records try and pull that off! Dick! Let's see one of your gay bands do a note-for-note cover of "Hot For Teacher" but instead have it be "Hot For Twinkies!" Huh?
I'm telling you, this band is so happening that they are able to attract such luminaries as Rev. Norb AND Dr. Frank to write songs for the album, not that they need the help!
The Dr. Frank-penned song, by the way, is some of the most competent balladry I hope to ever hear in my life. So catchy in fact, that Mr. Jefferson Davis Vanek and I spent the entire hike through Glacier Park coming up with our own lyrics to it. And I'm planning to serenade my new steady betty with that very song, just as soon as I can get a gig set up with the proper lightshow and all that shit.
The runner-up Album of the Week is "Fire"; by the Ohio Players, who, it would appear, place a nekked woman on the cover on each of their albums.
HIDE
