Daily Archives: December 10, 2007

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Darren Hoyt is getting famous on the internet, and I have insider info with which to capitalize on his fame

December 10, 2007 12:52 am , 4 Comments ,

Tonight I found this website, which informed me that Darren Hoyt is “a name we all should know!” I totally agree, and that is why I have decided to publish my highly-anticipated interview with Darren Hoyt, captain of the web design blogosphere and my own buttered bun.

THE Q&A:

W- How did you get interested in web design?

D – I used to visit my Dad’s house in 1995 and play around with his Compuserve account. At the time there was a buzz about “alien autopsy” photos from Roswell that someone claimed to have published online. I was on Christmas break from college with nothing else to do, so I made a point of tracking down these photos. I finally met someone in a chat room who said he’d send me copies using whatever transfer protocol was around at the time. All I know is that it killed my dad’s 14.4 modem connection for the better part of a day. I finally found an actual web domain that promised the photos. This time it took three hours to load in the browser, and it was obvious no thinking person would mistake them for authentic. But I still stayed up til 3:00am anyway, watching a black-and-white JPG load one fragment at a time.

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Spoiler alert!

December 10, 2007 12:21 am , 1 Comment ,

(I’ve always wanted to say that.)

On Friday night Darren and I chose to see The Mist without reading a single review of the movie. I thought the preview looked scary and I have liked Stephen King since I was a fifth grader trading his horror novels with my teacher Mrs. Connor. Years later I expanded my literary canon from Stephen King to Jim Morrison’s bad poetry (and for some reason Mrs. Connor then deemed me mature enough to babysit her child), but I still have a soft spot for the creepy books that used to keep me up at night. So imagine my surprise when I walked into the downtown movie theater with my hands full of expensive popcorn and saw octopus tentacles slithering into a grocery store and devouring a teenage stock boy. That sounds kind of cool when it’s written out, but believe me, it wasn’t.

I forget about Stephen King books for long periods of time and then all of a sudden he’s there on my radar writing about evil talking cars or giant carnivorous insects coming out of the mist and I’m like, “Stephen? What happened to the good old days? Have you run out of ideas? Are you just messing with us at this point? Why can’t you smack my primal emotions around like you used to?” King seems like a smart, self-reflecting guy, judging from his Entertainment Weekly Pop of King column, so there must be a reason for these nefarious tentacles that are vaguely linked to some secret military industrial complex in a small town in Maine. Maybe King is working on a much larger, meta horror story, where unsuspecting King readers and movie-goers are sucked into a nightmare of bad dialogue and outlandish visions. We pay $9 for a movie ticket and $14 for snacks and then we are haunted for the rest of our lives by the one time we failed to skim the New York Times movie reviews before date night. At the same time, I know that the director of The Mist probably butchered King’s story. And I know what it’s like to be out of ideas. And one time I was shopping for groceries and a sparrow whizzed right by my head and almost ate me.

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