Blinkinblogs

A while back we had this anti-blog blog going and then dropped off the face of the Earth. We even had this little following of devoted readers who would tune into our mindless dribble daily to see what other outlandish slander we may have produced. Needless to say we became quite gifted at manufacturing content that many people in “real mass media” might consider to be nasty, uneducated and untrained diatribe for the mindless masses. If only they were right, masses wise that is. So the question begs: Where the hell did you guys go? GlazednConfused(GandC at the time) and Thraxxus(yeah, me) ran into a string of luck that Lindsey Lohan would be jealous of. It starts with a small story and ends with a finale that I really can’t make up. So sit back kiddies, strap in, and get ready for Uncle Thraxxus’ Wild Ride.

It starts off with two guys who constantly chat throughout the day on various instant messenger programs. Now these two morons have been friends since the 7th grade, beginning their torrid friendship as enemies, which is another story. In their many forays into the mindless void that is IM chat they concluded that they were both quite funny, and frankly, had something to share to the world. Catch being, of course, that mindless IMing and having to write a series of articles daily are massively different; the first is a series of stupid statements that men make on a regular basis where the second is actual WORK. Either way we decided to give it a shot. At that time I had just finished running a company and GlazednConfused worked in digital print, including everything from high magazines to, you guessed it, porn. No he didn’t produce porn, but as a representative of the digital print market he was forced against his will every year to go to the big porn show in Las Vegas, poor bastard. Turns out neither of us were interested in handling the technical aspect of hosting a blog as frankly we are both lazy turds. I had the answer.

And this kids is where the story actually get interesting. At the company I CEOed we worked with a developer in Romania. He was smart, he was fast, and more importantly, by my standards, cheap as hell. His name was Ciprian. Cip, as we called him, got our blog up lickety split, managed it, admined it, made happy graphics, and even wrote for it. All Glazed and I had to do was come up with content, which I have to admit is harder than it may seem. I am not saying that writing is difficult, but as several people pointed out recently on the Interweb, speaking directly AT BLOGS, writing well is difficult work. What Cip did for us was epic, and we didn’t pay him a dime. Think that through. All he wanted was to be included.

18 months ago I got this wild idea that we could expand what we were doing. I looked at the weblogs that Cip had provided and we had a fairly consistent following, and besides we knew that we were lyrical poets, so it all made sense: We’d expand and be godrillionaires. Cip was all over it. He researched making money on the web, oddly enough he was already making loads of the stuff, and presented a plan of action and a list of advertisers that would make Gates himself drool. We were on our way.

On a Thursday Glazed asked me if I had heard from Cip, turns out that Glazed had contracted him to do real work for him; I had not heard from him in over a week. Thursday became Monday and Monday became the following Friday. Still nothing. 6 weeks went by and not a peep. We became worried. I knew of another developer-designer who had worked with him and thus contacted her asking if she had heard anything; she hadn’t. He was gone. 6 weeks became 3 months.

At this point I suddenly received a message from him, vague but messed up. Apparently, 23 year old Ciprian, who had been so helpful to us, was diagnosed with some strange condition. To put it simply, his spine had crushed itself, and was deteriorating at an alarming rate. He had gone to Greece to receive treatment, which at the time apparently wasn’t very successful. He told me that his business partner would keep in touch with us. I never heard from him again. A month later our server was shut down and all things Ciprian disappeared from the web. From what we can tell, our dear friend Died.

So to this relaunching of BlinkinBlogs I devote to Ciprian, an entrepreneur and friend. Godspeed Ciprian, may we meet again some day.

Thraxxus.