A quarter century ago Jason Kottke linked to this site that I built in 1999.

Time Magazine (!) called out its “handsome, slick design” that eclipsed “other content sites” in a list of the Best of the Web in 2001.

Ironminds was solidly Midwestern, and I think what little has been written about this minor tragicomedy of the early Web from places like New York is biased by omission and sometimes outright false.

There’s nothing to be done about it, and it just isn’t important, and this is really all there is: I sure would like my side just to be heard.

I did the design, code, production, static generator made of Word VBA, .bat script, FTP and heathen prayers, almost all the story illustrations, pretty much everything except the words though I did a fair bit of unnoticed vigilante copy editing as well.

I was paid $10 per hour throughout, spending about 1-3 hours each issue.

If you’re at all interested here’s the story from my point of view, including:

• The ghetto hardware and software that made Ironminds.
• Design theft from Omni Magazine. (Great artists steal, someone once said.)
• Cameos by Barry Sonnenfeld, Billy Baldwin and Hunter S. Thompson.

Ironminds The Website was born by my hands in 1999 at the Missouri School of Journalism, halfway between Kansas City and St. Louis. It carried the text of Ironminds The Internet Magazine made by Andy Wang¹ and a team of writers.

At some point Andy moved to New York to run editorial for a prospective web venture called Novix Media. Men in Black filmmaker Barry Sonnenfeld was to be “Creative God.” Billy The Lesser Baldwin was to lead politics. Novix head Michael Berman had previously co-founded George Magazine with John F. Kennedy, Jr.

Ironminds officially became a production of Novix Media, but nothing at all changed with how the site was hosted or designed and produced or by whom. I continued over dial-up internet from my $345/month apartment in Flatland Missouri at $10 per hour, 1-3 hours each issue.

Meanwhile, as I learned only by reading about it years later, Novix somehow flash-burned through four million dollars during its brief existence without ever producing anything of its own. A couple of the Ironminds writers went on a cross-country road trip to visit Hunter S. Thompson² (and deliver explosives) (this is true) for a political effort called “Issue Paper,” but I’m not sure Novix should get credit for that. I guess they paid for it.

Then a lot of people with a lot of money in dotcoms, many of whom surely knew for years that the time was coming to pull out of that nonsense, just decided that the time had come.

I can’t say that I suffered missing out on $10 per hour a couple hours per issue, but ironminds.com was a thing that I’d birthed. I dressed it and gave it manners, taught it to walk then run and fly, knew more of its secrets than anyone in the world would ever know.

Time Magazine (!) (etc.)

Then before it could ever escape from adolescence into a life of its own, New York City goons took baseball bats to its knees. They dragged it off, and they buried it.

For no comprehensible reason, at least none comprehensible from Podunk Missouri, it just didn’t exist anymore.

Ironminds was made late summer 1999 on my 1994 Compaq Presario CDS 520: 66 Mhz, 20 MB, 450 MB drive, 14.4 modem. I used Notepad and shareware Paint Shop Pro upgraded with an illegitimate license key.

Not really meaning to at first, I leaned hard on the blurry memory of my mother’s Omni Magazine in the 1980s: metallic background ink, ribbed graphic textures, 70s techno-future font. I constrained the line length so much because that’s how it was in magazines.

One of the founding writers has over the years proudly described Ironminds as having been a successful new editorial innovation. The problem with that claim is that this person knows firsthand that Ironminds was a rebrand of something you’re less likely to have heard of called “Impression.”

Same writers, same editors, same comic. The differences were a new name, daily tempo vs. twice monthly, and a totally new design.

When they realized that Novix money was rapidly evaporating, Ironminds writers went to small claims court in New York and won summary judgments for payments they’d been repeatedly promised were coming any day now. I learned only by reading about it years later that the highest of these judgments was a fraction of what I was owed. I remember hearing those same promises.

I didn’t want or expect handsome payment for Ironminds. I did want people to see it, and I wanted them to know my part in it. I hoped it might lead to cool new work and connections with cool new people.

A few years into the aftermath I sent out a little flurry of messages from Podunk to the diaspora in New York/LA/Chicago/etc. Awkward silence followed.

A second attempt by alternate angles got one or two tentative responses. I gamely reiterated my charm, my bits of underbelly trivia, my ask that if the occasion arises could they, y’know, mention me, and never heard anything from Ironmindland again.

It wasn’t my most urgent or consequential problem at the time, but it was the most difficult to understand.

Interstitial montage — guided by the delicate voice of young Dionne Warwick on a feathery Bacharach song — of scrappy campus contract jobs followed by many little projects from Craigslist and then the lowest-level subcontracted monkey work on big brand sites before eventually settling into sleepy extended employment at the very same university doing increasingly mediocre work I don’t much care about.

In the old days everyone in the tribe had a place. We’d hunt, or build, or cook, or fight, or nurse, or sing. And we’d know immediately — the tribe would let us know — if we were the right person doing the right thing at the right time.

Now that we’re each marooned in a cubicle of one kind or another it’s so much more difficult to know: Am I doing the right thing? Is this useful to you at all? Will it ever amount to anything?

I have an 18-month-old child. Both of my parents were gone just before he was born. I never really got to know them for Reasons™, and of course now that it’s too late I understand the self-inflicted damage this caused, a permanent aching emptiness.

I was 50 when he was born. I’ll be pushing 70 when he moves out. I’ll likely be unavailable when he finally develops an interest in me years later after having children of his own, and I will have forced the same damage onto him.

If I have anything to say to him, something by which he could come to know me, I’ll have to try to set it down now.

“Ghoiren” is a contraction of “Ghost of Ironminds” and a mashup with the pinyin of 郭人 (guō rén). Probably I have the world’s most complete archive of Ironminds (including Impression, Issue Paper, and a delightful Flash game starring Charlton Heston), and there was a time I was motivated to try to put it back up at ghostofironminds.com.

I hope it isn’t too presumptuous of me but because you’ve somehow improbably read all the way down to here, I have to ask:

Please do *not* share any of this on one of your platforms. I can demonstrate if needed that what I’ve said is true and that I am who I say I am, but there are good, strong reasons both obvious and non-obvious that I do not want this.

I want to write, and I want to write for the child to read when he’s 30/50/70. It’s nearly impossible for me to do that when no one in the world expects it. He doesn’t expect it, I don’t expect it.

If you’ve somehow — incredibly, improbably, ill-advisedly — read All The Way Down To Here then you might develop some expectation that something new will eventually appear at ghoiren.net, and at least in principle this possibility might be enough.

I apologize for the sneakiness though, arranging for you to give me something unwittingly, your expectation. I think you’ll agree that it’s low effort however. Your participation, or awareness really, is not required.

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^{1 Nothing I say here is a criticism of Andy Wang. It may be that he once stomped on your cat’s newborn kittens and you have a case to make against him. All I can say is that he was never anything but respectful, trusting and in good cheer with me. He brought me in and is the reason I had anything to do with Ironminds, and I am grateful. For my part I was unpleasant to him toward the end, being perhaps a somewhat lesser person at the time than I hope I am now. I’m not saying he isn’t a horrible super villain somehow so go ahead and make your case. He is not a villain in my story.}

^{2 The stated purpose was to travel to a political party convention by road from one end of the country to the other, but their actual motivation seems obvious.}