www.jasondangerblock.com

So, I have been talking for months and months and months (also, technically known as "years") about creating a website for myself and my many mediocre works. I thought I should probably have a piece of internet real-estate (virtual estate?) all my own, and as I push toward my goal of being an honest-to-goodness professional artist/writer/bon vivant, it has become increasingly more necessary.

I am not a technologically adept person. Not really. I have a faculty for technology when I can do something useful with it. I quickly learned the value of even a rudimentary word processor, like the old school green screen Appleworks, and how it crushed the electric typewriter like a grape. I figured out early on that databases were marvelous ways to keep track of Dungeons & Dragons spell lists and monster statistics. I was at the forefront of the mp3 revolution because the idea of fitting 175 songs onto a single CD appealed to me. But I've never been into technology for technology's sake. I like my computer, but I'm pretty much wholly disinterested in how it actually works. As far as I'm concerned, it works no differently than a car, the human digestive system or a toaster: magic. So, even in this era, fully immersed in the internet as I am, I have very little practical skill with making a website.

Actually, that's not entirely true. While in college, when I should have either been attending classes or playing Microprose's "Civilization 2," I spent some of my valuable time using Microsoft Frontpage to make a website for the greatest fake band in all of human history: The Ho-Chi-Minhs. It wasn't a difficult program, really, but it did require a bit of manipulation to get the site to do what I wanted it to do. I spent untold hours laboring over it, making it far more detailed and realistic than any fake band's (best known for a song about a fish mask that smelled like beer) website should be. It was modeled on ridiculously minutiae-obsessed music fan sites of the late 90's, especially ones dedicated to Radiohead and the Smashing Pumpkins. For my fake band, I created a crazily intricate and fabricated discography, full of ep's, promotional singles and import only vinyl records showing that our fake songs were remixed by our turntable alter egos DJ Marky M-Bop and DJ Danger B. I gave each release a catalog number and a kick-ass cover made with Image Composer. Every song was hyperlinked to its lyrics. It was colossal and it was bizarre and it was, in my opinion, wicked awesome. It never made it to the internet, however. Before it could be completed and uploaded, it fell victim to the aptly named Chernobyl virus and it was lost forever.

That was over a decade ago, now. I hadn't tried again, instead getting sucked into the pre-fab worlds of Myspace and Facebook, and ready-made blogs like this one here. Still, none of those options quite match the niftiness of having an honest-to-goodness website of my own. So I mucked around with Godaddy, got bucketloads of helpful advice from my cousin-in-law Erika, and FINALLY began to work with Firefox's Kompozer program to create the skeleton of www.jasondangerblock.com. And it's looking ok, I think. There's no flash animation or dancing hamsters or anything, but for a guy who doesn't really know what the heck he's doing, I think it could be worse.

It's not even close to complete, yet, but I'd still like to hear what people think of it (if they think anything of it at all). My one goal for Jason "Danger" Block Dot Com? To have it not suck rancid goat butt. I think it's a goal I can meet.