Five Years of Jerkcity
Jerkcity is five years old today. In celebration of this event, I offer the Foreward to the, currently out of print, Big Book of Jerkcity.
This is the scene that I’m picturing. You’ve bought this book, read it, laughed a bit, and then tucked it away on some shelf, and forgotten about it. Now, it’s three months later and a potential girlfriend (or boyfriend) is wandering through your stuff. You have no problem with this because they’re getting to know you and, face it, you want to get laid.
Pretty much everything on that shelf is dull; it’s O’Reilly books, it’s a book on Photoshop tips and tricks, it’s the token Hemingway book to show your depth and, wait, what’s this? Dongs? This is the moment I’ve been waiting for, this is the moment that defines Jerkcity. “What the hell is this?”
Folks go two ways with Jerkcity. My assumption is that a majority of folks read one or two strips and end up offended in some manner. End of experience. The minority read a few strips and then a few more andsearc suddenly it’s three hours later and they’re searching Google for a nonexistent Jerkcity FAQ which explains what “t deuce hi” actually means.
Your potential significant other is going to see the cover and will quickly fall into one of the two camps. Depending on that landing, Jerkcity has had a say in whether or not you get laid – and that rules.
All of the regular Jerkcity players hang out online in a private IRC-like chat server. The core group has been there pretty much 24 hours a day since the mid-’90s. We’re there right now: Atandt, Deuce, Pants, Rands, and Spigot. Someone is talking about Togo’s and dongs. It’s a slow night, but not all nights are slow.
Very often, there are random spurts of comedy between one or more of the crowd and that comedy sometimes ends up in the Archives. This is a private database of over 9,000 excerpts of chat logs.
The existence of these archives is pretty much the entire reason that Jerkcity exists. The other two pieces were built on the fact we’d taken the time to save all our dick jokes.
First, I had the Jerkcity domain name. I don’t recollect the instant it showed up in my head, but I do remember thinking, “It’s short, it’s memorable, and pleasantly rude.” I’d no idea what to do with the name. I remember chatting briefly with Spigot about a professional masturbation resource, but, in the end, it’s more fun to jerk it than talk about it, so I dropped that idea.
The second piece of the Jerkcity puzzle was Comic Chat. This has been floating around my head as a potential tool for months not because of any technical ingenuity of the Microsoft product, but because I liked the artwork and I can’t draw at all.
Sometime during the summer of 1998, I was flying down Highway 85 in California and the three pieces fell into place. Three years of rude comedy in archive form + the simplicity of Comic Chat + a domain name looking for a home.
I drafted a few strips in Comic Chat based on the Archives, threw together the original site and tested it with the crowd. Fifteen hundred strips later, Jerkcity gets roughly 5,000 unique hits a day. I don’t really know if that’s a lot or little, but it’s a lot more than I ever thought we’d get.
I’d first like to apologize if Jerkcity prevented you from getting laid. I’d suggest that if you’ve taken the time to actually purchase this book that you probably better off without him/her – they wouldn’t have understood you anyway.
Lastly, I’d like to thank the Jerkcity fans. Considering Jerkcity is an enterprise that loses money and is supported by the free time of folks who have a lot of other stuff to do, it’s gratifying to wander into our usage logs and continue to see the Jerkcity fan base grow.
We’ll get you laid yet, I swear.
Rands,
February, 2003
