After a year in San Francisco, in 1999 I picked up a shovel and went to work for a start-up webzine (remember webzines?) hoping to find gold. I had just finished up an internship at Mother Jones, and scored an editing gig at this as yet unnamed dot-com (remember dot-coms?) that was aiming to be a sort of a Mondo 2000 meets Nerve meets Punk Planet meets something stupid. But edgier. It was a lot of fun, but ultimately kind of a disaster.
My boss was an O.G. cyberpunk hero named R.U. Sirius. Super nice guy. He gave me some ketamine. We didn't have any ads, but it was funded by a porn magnate. There was a second, smaller, workspace with a separate entrance that was semi-attached to our office. A guy named Steve worked there, and he spent hours every day (well, nights, typically) tagging porn movies in this windowless little 8x10-foot hole.
These were my business cards, which I came across while cleaning up yesterday. I remember there was a big stink over the titles on the card--senior editors were made señor editors. This was especially an issue for the lone female senior editor. But whatever; it was that kind of place. I think my favorite thing about these is the address bar. If you look closely, you can see it points to file://Macintosh%20HD/Desktop%20Folder/strawberry/straw.html. (Oh, %20. You are so spaced out.) The Netscape logo is also a professional touch.
