Unknown: Hole in the Sky - The Origin & History
There has always been some kind of online journal I've written to, even before there was a term to describe it. Since the mid 90's I had some kind of online presence that I could talk about what interests me, or what's going on in my life. First with The Demon's Pentagram on AOL hometown from 1995-1999, then to Snake People: NES Masters from 1999 to 2009, and now here at The Hole until present day.
I (Major) created the blog in December of 2009 after talking with friends at work all the time about nerdy stuff, we agreed all these things we talk about are gold. Let's write them down at least, even if it's just for us. I was playing an AD&D campaign with some friends from High school at the time, and that was wrapping up- I was the DM. I frequented local game shops and used campaign supplements from $1 issues of 20 year old copies of Dragon Magazine to come up with ideas.. lack of funds and creativity to be honest. Our little group had just finished "The Unknown Hole in the Sky", a floating prison scenario by Ed Greenwood, and I really liked the ring of it. "Hole in the Sky" was stuck in my head, but that site name was already taken. I tried different versions of it until I came up with "Uknownhole.blogspot.com". I thought it sounded funny, on top of being something I thought was cool at the moment; I may have had a few beers that night while the floors were being cleaned. This blog was made in the backroom of a liquor store, on a computer that was being used for camera surveillance with an unregistered copy of Windows 95. That's not satire, I mean it, that's the basis of how this was created. The art and background initially was taken from D&D 3.5 books; I scanned the art on the fax machine in the office, which required me cutting up my only good copy at the time. Everything else was a template, long before I cared enough to tweak anything. I had no vision or plan for what this was going to be, or what it would become, and in the best hour of my life before I closed the liquor store that night, we had a blog.
I knew I could not write enough to keep it going, so I popped a post on Myspace and asked some friends to write for it. A few people answered the call: Dustin Onash, Morgan Hallett, Gary Esposito, Chris Donlin and Shawntel Clark. Most of us worked together which made it easy to think of things and run to the back and make a post real quick on the computer. Dustin was a Magic the Gathering friend from high school, and wrote some really great articles for the blog that punched above the pay grade. Morgan posted about tits and liquor, I talked about shitty movies, everyone kind of had their thing; and for about a year and half, we had a lot of fun with it. Gary was my muse: A real wild card who said the most random and inappropriate things at any time. The blog made a total of $80 in revenue from Adsense, but was cancelled for exposed breasts, and links to pirate bay movies and games. Most of those articles are gone now, so don't bother looking. Going forward, all the movie links are to youtube and other sites that seem to be mostly harmless. For the record, this blog is not monetized, and I decided to keep it that way.
Things change, and as everyone evolves, so did this blog. Once in a great while I would want to talk about something, just get it out of my head. Personal issues, things that make me laugh or cry.. whatever. I made a post here and there, maybe once a year or less. Reads declined and I didn't care, and I honestly never checked it very often. Right at the 10th anniversary of the blog, I made a post just writing about nothing and posted a few pictures.. and this happened:
People were reading again. A few of my articles got picked up on Reddit, and some of the dumb things I made in photoshop years ago were mentioned by a semi-popular youtuber. I decided to try to do it again, this time all me, and delete the previous posts that would detract from potential readers (and Google itself) and keep it at least PG-13; and just like that we were off to the races. There was something to be said about old posts that I was not proud of, but I kept it alive, to preserve the wild nature of this place back then. I would consider bringing some friends on to write for the blog if they have something to say, I'm not against some outside influence. I like the feeling and the vibe of the blogs.. blogs they way they use to look and feel. Wild-west, shitty opinions, lack of facts, too much text, links to bullshit. Small posts of nonsense intermixed with some tech-jargon bullshit that needs to escape my head before it pops. There will be times where I will drone on for what seems like forever, and others where I'm in-and-out.
- No plan at all
- Write whatever I'm interested in at that moment
- Attempt at humor seems to be tolerated by most
- Upset fan bases or groups with my ignorance or lack of intelligence
- Ask questions, get unwanted answers
- Review tech (old and new), watch anime
- Who fucking cares about views/hits/comments/money
I guess that's it. I like to have a few beers and write what's on my mind late at night. Sub if you like it and comment and tell me what you think.
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