Ten years ago I was a sophomore in college at Penn State and I was bored out of my mind. I had spent most of my freshman year dating a girl who lived 5 hours away from me and I would go home every chance I could to see her and I spent a lot of my time hanging out in my room talking to her and sort of hating life. At some point that year I started a very primitive party photo blog of pictures taken on the drunk bus that circled the campus every Friday and Saturday nights making sure people didn’t drunk drive and got home safely. The bus was total madness and it was fun to document but I didn’t make a lot of friends. I had a lot of great 10 minute conversations but I never became part of any social scene. By my sophomore year I had broken up with the girl and grown tired of riding the bus. I had absolutely nothing to do and I was as bored as I had ever been in my life.
I was always someone with a project. When I was 15 my friend and I started a record label and a punk rock zine that we did all throughout high school. I always was doing something, making something, taking photos, collecting things and just having all sorts of random hobbies. All of a sudden I was bored out of my fucking mind. I would spend most of my free time online talking to my friends from home and coming up with stupid projects to keep me from going insane. I was making terrible music using the programs ACID and Fruity Loops. I was making videos of me lip syncing 80′s pop songs way before YouTube existed. I was selling random things on ebay as a joke. And as always I was taking photos. Oh and I had a web cam. I was doing so many things that I came up with this motto that I was driven by boredom. I had the idea to get a tattoo of the phrase on me and that tattoo eventually became the logo of the website for about 5 years.
So I had all these projects I was doing and I wanted a place to put them all so in February of 2001 I began to build a website that was mostly just links to my photography and the ebay pranks and the lip sync videos and all the dumb things I was doing at the time. My brother at the time was running a “E/N” site which stood for Everything/Nothing and there was a community of people that were making these sites where they just talked about their lives and linked things in what we now know as a blog format. I started talking to these people on a chat program called IRC and I started getting ideas for the site and I decided to adopt the E/N or blog format. I coded the whole thing myself using a combination of Front Page and hand written HTML and on March 1st 2001 Drivenbyboredom.com was launched to the public.
Here is the entirety of that first post. And yeah, you really should take a look at that “information page”
Today is the first day of Driven By Boredom. How exciting. Look around read the information page. Let me know what you think. You have any suggestions please let me know. Buy my ebay stuff cause I think its funny. Um check out my movies my music and the web cams. I have no idea what to say. I am bored as hell and I’m trying my best to entertain myself. I’d like to entertain you kids as well, so please, check everything out. Um… I am going on my spring break today so I won’t be editing the page for a week or so, but come on, I just spent the last month working on this thing… I know you have enough to do for the next week. Rock most on and tell your friends!
Anyway I had three major things planned for today. I was going to have an art show, but it got canceled. I was going to have a full site redesign but it got postponed and I was going to throw a big party but it never came together. All and all it was a huge fucking disappointment. But that’s okay. Driven By Boredom is 10 years old today and there aren’t many people on earth who can say they have been running the same website for more than a decade. And it took me about 8 years but I finally do thing full time now so I am pretty fucking proud of that too.
So wish DBB happy birthday. Send me some presents and take a look at DBB 1.0. It’s pretty fucking embarrassing at times but it’s my life. And lastly I am going to leave you with the orignal DBB logo. I wish I knew who made it but I have no idea. It’s pretty fucking amazingly ugly. Enjoy.
