How things happen such as this Blog

It is sometimes funny how things happen in life and take unexpected turns, trigger a chain reaction you did not expect to happen when you started something for a complete different reason. Exactly this happened when I did the redesign of my families Homepage Cumbrowski.com between Christmas and New Year.

It was only a single page with a family photo, Family Members Names and contact Information plus some text talking a bit about me, my move to the United States and my private business Venture ConsumerMatch.com. I decided to create a separate page for every member of the family including a page just about me. I put on my page the content I already had and started extending it a bit to include more about my past and the time when I was still living in Germany.

My time as ASCII & ANSI Artist with the pseudonym "Roy/SAC", my BBS Closed Society suddenly came back into my mind. It was back then "my life" and not just a "hobby". I was very serious about it and dedicated not only the biggest piece of my spare time for it but also a big chunk of my income as student and later salary. I realized that this was a topic I should create at least one page just for itself. So I started one at www.Cumbrowski.com/RoySAC/ which was moved to its own website in 07/2006 to RoySAC.com (edited 12/2006)

When I started writing the content, talking about people, groups and locations a began to do searching for them on the Net to see if I can find useful related stuff, Screenshots, Dates etc. and also to see what people I knew from back then are doing today. It was all very interesting and exiting. A trip back in time bringing back more and more memories. The dedicated Page became oviously a bit bigger than intended.

Since the Internet and how to make other people that are interested find your stuff was nothing new to me did I start looking for appropriate places to get a link added to my new Page that I did not have to wait that mighty Google will be so kind to add it to its index in 3-6 months, maybe.

I started at Wikipedia because somebody already created an entry there about "my" Group Superior Art Creations.

Heck, I was the founder of it so I had no problem to add a Link to the me, the Founders Homepage there. I also updated the content of the Wikipedia entry with some information that were missing. I also updated Topics like "ASCII Art", "ANSI Art", "Bulletin Board System" and "Computer Art Scene". I was amazed about the Amount of Inforation already collected and provided by Wikipedia. New sites like Wikipedia which are based on "folksonomy*" are a great thing because its a living thing created by millions of people and not a "Algorythm" based or "Business" driven collection of information.

* Folksonomy - "a portmanteau word combining "folk" and "taxonomy," refers to the collaborative but unsophisticated way in which information is being categorized on the web" (from Wikipedia).

I then turned to DMOZ (OPT or Open Directory Project). I made only bad experiences with them in the past when it came to register my commercial website projects because of the general hate of most DMOZ Editors towards anything that smells like commerce and marketing. I felt more confident this time, because my page was as NOT commercial as one can be.

I registered the page at the "ASCII Art" category at DMOZ and got surprisingly fast a response back from the editor responsible for this category with the name "shedragon" and real name Laura. "Where is the ASCII art?" was the question. I only had some thumbs with links to the bigger image of ASCII & ANSI "Screenshots" on my page until then and responded that to Laura (who probably had images turned off when browing my page). I also added some real ASCII's of mine to the email to prove that I know what I am talking about and do know my stuff when it comes to ASCII, something I took great pride in and nothing to fool around with.

We began an email conversation about ASCII in general. She was doing some ASCII herself but was involved in a different area of the Text Art Scene than I was. I was active in the what's called "Underground Art Scene" and she in the more "public" Scene with known Spokespersons like Joan G. Stark and others. Those email conversation made me extending the content of my page to talk also about the "Underground Art Scene" in gerneral and their distinct styles which differ significantly from the styles of the public Text Art Scene due to the different applications of each type of Art. She added my Page eventually to the Artist Category, which is a subcategory at /Arts/Visual Arts/ASCII Art/Artists/

I went of to spread the knowldge about Underground Text Art and created a Lense dedicated to it at Squidoo http://www.squidoo.com/ascii/ which allows people to create "Lenses". Lenses are "one person's (lensmaster's) view on a topic he cares about. More specifically, a lens is a single web page filled with information and links that point to other web pages, to continually updated RSS feeds, or to relevant advertising. It's a place to start, not finish. (from Squidoo.com)"

I also put Art Examples up at Flickr, a great place where you can store pictures for free and make them available to be searched for and looked at by anybody if you want to.

All this activities drove of course some highly targeted traffic from people intersted in ASCII Art and people that where active in that Scene as I was. This was great, because this was the original intention and purpose of the whole thing. I got an email one day from Christian Wirth with subject "so..." and one sentence without introduction or signature "you do realize, that you live like 60 min from me now.".

I was thinking "who is this?" and checked the email header in Outlook. Sender Email: radman@acid.org. Radman, the Founder of the fellow and biggest underground Art Group ever called ACID - Ansi Creators In Demand (ACiD.org). I did not realize that he was living in San Jose (2 hours from where I am living now btw. hehe). We only had brief communication before once, years back on the IRC (Internet Relay Chat). We planned to get personally in touch when I get to go to San Jose or if he passes by Fresno one day. I am already looking forward to this. It's always a good thing to be able to share memories with people who experienced the same thing and treasure those memories as much as you do.

All this eventually made me start this blog and I hope that this blog and my Site will allow me to connect to more and more people from the past who I mostly only got to know by their nick name and never met in person and outside the activities of the "Scene". I also hope this will help me to re-connect with friends in Germany and Europe I actually did meet and got to know personally more or less well.

cu around
Carsten a.k.a. Roy/SAC

Note: Updated 12/22/2006 - Moved Site mentioned and links fixed