ABOUT TORGO'S SHACK

I got Internet access in May of 1998, the week Seinfeld went off the air, and was too scared to really do anything with it. I was afraid to post on messageboards for the most part, afraid to go to chatrooms, afraid to download games, certainly afraid to look for porn (I still lived with my parents and was somehow convinced that I was being watched). Part of this came about because of my dad's vague but loud paranoia about all sorts of child predators and identity theft issues and the fact that the computer would suck your credit cards out of your wallet and go have a field day with them. It was damned lucky that I even had Net access with him around, but anyway, eventually I just learned not to ask permission to do anything with the computer (which was in my room), because if I told him anything I was doing, even if it was just reading facts about owls on Yahoo!, he freaked. I kept to myself as a child, so it wasn't a problem.

Even if I had known it was possible for me to have a website, I probably would have been afraid to get one at first, for the above reasons. But once I saw an offer on GeoCities for free web space, I contemplated the matter for a good long while before finally breaking down and signing up in June. The only problem was, once I had the space, I didn't really know what to do with it.

I figured it out eventually, and the result was an award-winning page that left me happily consumed, it was a project everyone loved, and people from all over the world dropped me notes to tell me how much my work had enriched their lives.

Actually, everything in that paragraph is a lie, and thank goodness, because if the work in question really did grow to attain some sort of unprecedented popularity I think I would lose my faith in the human race. But I did put up a webpage, a modest and strange mysterious P.O.S., and needless to say (have you ever noticed that "needless" and "needles" are almost the same word?), I was too lazy to keep updating it and it soon fell into obscurity. And to be honest, the site had no point whatsoever. The page, online on June 18, 1998, was called Torgo's Shack and it was built around a character from the classic film Manos: The Hands of Fate. The most popular (haha) features were the question of the week (still alive!), the complaints department (ditto!), and the legendary Blinking Page, which reached new heights in idiocy. I more or less had an audience of three people, so the page you're reading now is actually not particularly dissimilar.

I did all this for pretty much no reason. A couple of years later it became the source for several clever "parodies," the only one that actually made it online being Wheeler's Shack, Torgo's home taken over by an egotistical comic book geek. This is the kind of satire that is truly on the cutting edge; I was making fun of something practically no one remembered if they'd even seen it. It was a STAR WARS kind of situation -- the innocuous piffle being forced by its creator into a state of imagined importance. I was planning to manipulate Torgo's into the SAFETY SHACK, which would really fucking stick it to those stupid school safety programs, a hot topic just begging to be satirized. There was also THE LOVELINE SHACK, which would have been the same content oriented to a "cutting edge" sex-advice theme employed by the people at MTV who were "buying out" the website. I planned THE SCARY PEDOPHILE STALKER'S SHACK but somehow was plagued by doubts about the reception it would get. The question of the week was going to be "WHAT'S YOUR BEDTIME???"

But such is life, and now you can join in the fun! Torgo's Shack is back online, in all its glory. I have restored its various incarnations... nothing new so far. But we'll see what happens to that rule. Wink, wink. I was planning to finish the "Torgo's Music Club" section after all these years, and maybe the Loveline version of the shack... God, I'm pathetic. Some things just don't change.

On the site you'll notice that I blast stuff like frames, MS Internet Explorer, and Jews. All I can do is apologize for my obnoxious youthful attitudes. I don't think I understood how unattractive hate is. Anyway, I'm not changing that stuff, nor am I changing the information about my age and the broken guestbook and inaccurate email addresses and such... at least for the time being.

[Actually, I was right the first time about frames, but whatever.]

A lot of the features of Torgo's Shack -- the complaints page and the question of the week, most notably -- managed to find their way here on the old version of Dusty Books & Pictures, but they didn't stir up much heat, so I cut them off, bringing a couple of traditions I rather liked to an unsatisfying end. Now I will go and cut my arms and dream of bank holidays in Brighton.