The Nano turns 34
Another year…
Today was my birthday. It was a good day as I had the day off. I enjoyed not being in a hurry and not being at work. I was in good spirits all day and my family helped to make everything great. Now the day is at end and I am thinking. I am reflecting on the past year. What did I do? Where did I go? What did I say?
For some reason, I am not feeling all that good right now. In this past year I created “The Nano” and this site. I did it with the help of my partner Chad. We originally set this thing up for reasons that I am not even sure of. It started as a joke. That’s what it was, a joke. This was our outlet and was meant to make fun of a lot of the self-diluted “read about me” blogs that you see so many of. We had fun posting garbage and making fun of serious stuff like Nanotechnology, Heat Advisories, and Batman.
I am a web designer by trade, and I love to use Photoshop. I used it to do some light image hacking to make fun of Chad and myself. This is what led to the development of the other characters, like Capn Nano and the Super pimp Nano. Most all of it was done to test my ability to throw Google rankings out of whack, which I did several times. If you don’t believe me try searching for Heat Advisory, Batman Rumors, or Nanotechnology explained.
I was doing well with the Google Ad Sense program until they decided to drop me, because they thought I was purposely trying to generate click through hits on my pages. I wasn’t. They locked me out and kept all of my money. I was irritated by it to say the least. The letters that I received from Google during the transaction looked like they might have been written by Microsoft.
This whole ordeal really didn’t get started until July 9th, 2005. That was the date that I made my first post to this blog. Capn Nano didn’t appear until sometime in October. I joined StumbleUpon near the end of September. I only joined because Chad was a member and I thought it might provide a way for us to keep up with each other a little better. I really enjoyed it at first. I was finding new sites and having a blast. It wasn’t long until Rebecca decided to dig into it with me.
I carried over all of my The Nano bit into Stumble to see how people would react to it. I was surprised to discover that people seemed to think it was very funny. I made some friends and got really caught up in a popularity contest kind of ordeal. I started getting excited every time I saw that someone new had reviewed my page. I enjoyed seeing my friends list get bigger each passing day. I thought it was great every time I had another 1000 visits to my page.
It wasn’t long until I started putting on a whole 3 ring circus act to draw more attention to myself. I slowly started to become one of those people that I was making fun of when I started this thing. This past week I resorted to having people send emails and fill out web forms to “Help The Nano” prove his worth. I wanted to prove my popularity. Lots of people came to help me. I was thankful. Why did I feel the need to do that? Have I become that self-diluted? It was in my defense, however I think it had been best to just let pass. I am grateful that so many people were willing to give me a hand. I just don’t understand why I felt the need to do it in the first place.
I have relied heavily on my only skill this past year to keep peoples attention. My ability to do stupid crap with Photoshop has helped keep my website going, but to what purpose? I had convinced myself that it was to make people laugh. I’ve spent hours in front of this PC placing my face on different characters. I should be spending more of that time reading, learning and improving skills that would better serve my family.
Something happened; people started to give a damn. I don’t know why exactly, but they do. I can’t help but feel like I’ve taken advantage of that over the past week with all of the popularity contest bullcrap. Something clicked in my brain. Maybe it’s because I am another year older, maybe it’s just another phase of darkness that I go through from time to time, but for many reasons, I just don’t feel good about this past year. Other than The Nano, I don’t know what I did with my time.
Spring is coming and with it warm days filled with sunshine. My daughter will start soccer again soon. I want to sign my son up for baseball. I want to take them camping and do more activities on the weekend. I need to start learning how to write VB and build web applications in the .NET environment. I need to be more loyal to my family and give less of a damn about my made up cult following.
I am not going away, but I will be posting things a lot less and in a different way than before. No more relying on just a stupid picture of myself dressed up like the pope or a circus clown. I am going to try to dig deeper. I still want to make you laugh, but I want to try harder and spend more time making fun of current events and the “really” popular people. I’d like to find more new things to share and have something to say about them, something that actually makes sense. In reality that’s just not going to happen. Unfortunately, I am not someone who is capable of doing that. You are going to be stuck with idiotic crap. Enjoy.
The truth is that I don’t want a following. I want to be the guy against that get in line and follow like sheep society that we live in. It was all meant as a big joke; the t-shirts, the personalities, the stupid “tell the world how much you love The Nano”, all of it. It was meant was a big joke. That’s how I would like it to stay. I’ll keep doing stupid things like THIS, but you have to not take me seriously or to heart. When you come here, I expect you to leave after clicking and reading thru these pages, saying to yourself “what a dumbass”.
Thanks and dont forget to buy a The Nano t-shirt HERE
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Serious. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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March 1st, 2006 at 9:00 pm
Judge Chad says, “Woah that’s too deep for my courtroom.”
Jk. I agree.
March 2nd, 2006 at 3:23 am
Wow Justin… sounds like you had some kind of birthday epiphany or something. Anyway… congratulations on another successful lap around the Sun!
March 2nd, 2006 at 6:49 am
I won’t deny that I love The Nano, but I love Justin even more.