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Thoughts |
I tend to get my thoughts out into the world in the form of articles. Way, way back in the mists of time I was involved in the UK fanzine and small press scene. This was a great outlet for someone who likes to get things off his chest :-) Eventually, my involvement in writing led me to buy a computer - a lowly 386 40 DX (Ahhh, how well I remember the battle to get Windows 3.1 running). One thing led to another and I started reading more and more about this "Internet" thing. I saved my pennies and after some effort, I was the proud owner of a 9,600 modem and a Demon Dos based dial-up connection. Without wishing to sound too much like an old fart "Those were the days" :-) Actually, realistically, they weren't the days at all. Dos stank as a net platform and it didn't take me long at all to upgrade to Trumpet Winsock and a brand spanking new copy of Netscape 0.9 - or Mozilla as it was known. There wasn't much on the web in the UK at that time. But having come from BBS's, what was available was quite inspiring. I originally thought that I might be able to earn a crust as a researcher, but when I saw how easy it was to find your way around the information on the web, I quickly droppped the idea. Instead, I fell instantly in love with the idea of producing web pages. Six months later and I had produced 3 websites. Sure, they were extremely basic by today's standards - but they were pretty darn groovy at the time. Especially as they were sites with real information and a commercial bias! The first was Spite! Books an online catalogue for a distro I ran at the time. Another was The Prisoner, which was an online version of a free magazine I wrote for. Finally, I had produced a site for Gosh! Comics, where I worked. One of the few commercial websites in the UK at the time. By this point, the success was beginning to go to my head and I though I should probably change career and become a cool and groovy web-designer. So I gave a couple of months notice at Gosh (thanks Josh :-) and managed to make contact with a lovely bloke called Richard, who had just started a little start-up company called Bluewave. ... the rest, as they say, is history! I worked with Bluewave for 3 years, met my girlfriend in Sweden during this time and ended up moving to lovely Göteborg - never did get to be a cool and groovy web-designer either, waaay too little artistic ability .-) So what (you may be asking) does this have to do with articles. Well, if truth be told, I got a bit carried away with my "web biography" there and forgot all about the articles. However, during all this time, I have written articles for Comics World (where I had a column reviewing small press comics for 2 years), Comics Journal, The Prisoner, Cyberia Magazine a short lived, but pioneering Internet magazine) and more recently, I have started writing articles for evolt.org and I frequently contribute to the discussion on Slashdot. Suffice to say, I will be posting links to my articles on this page and anything I can't get published, will find a forum on these pages. I hope that what you read gets the juices flowing and feel free to let me know how wrong I am at steve@cookstour.org.
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