Friday, October 30, 2015

Happy Anniversary part 1: The Beginning


In 2005, I was using the GI Bill to study Psychology, while working security at a call center for GM. I had plans to earn a PHD. My dream was to explore the potential of the human mental faculties. I was partially inspired by the concepts of the Mentats and the Bene Gessserit of Frank Herbert's Dune series, as well as the Buddhist monks and Yogi mystics in real life. I was intrigued by the idea that there was more to human consciousness than we were living up to.

Working security, I spent a lot of time listening to the radio. I was a younger and more macho acting me, who liked to listen to hard rock. So I gravitated between the stations, 94.7 NRK, and 101 KUFO. It didn't matter that I was in the lobby of a business; I didn't really have any sense of a civilian professional mentality at that time. As soon as I sat down, I would change the lobby radio from the family friendly K103 to one of these two rock stations. Somehow, I got away with this. It probably helped that I worked swing shift.

 Feel free to laugh at how serious I look amidst everyone else.

There was a DJ on KUFO who had a show called, "The Tim Savage Experience", which I loved listening to. So, I began listening exclusively to KUFO, so that I could catch Tim Savage. I enjoyed his snarky persona. I began listening to the entire KUFO lineup.  I would catch the end of the "Cort and Boomer Show", which later became, "The Cort and Fatboy Show." And a new show was added to the main timeslot, pushing Tim Savage later into the evening: the "Marconi Show." Marconi was an immature, wannabe shock-jock, with a frat-boy mentality, and I enjoyed it. Like I said: younger me.

On OCT. 11 2005, I logged on to Blogger, and started this very blog, which I titled...   "J-Dubb's Blog". "J-Dubb" was one of my nicknames in the Air Force. By 2005, I had been using it as a screen name for a forum that I frequented as well as a login name for different sites. So "J-Dubb" had pretty much become my online moniker. My first post was titled, Happy Anniversary. So, if you click that link, you will see the first thing ever done in the history of J-Dubb's Theatre. I couldn't decide what to focus on, so I just  made it a blog about everything.


I tried to emulate the blunt, snarky tone of Tim Savage in my blog. As I wrote, I heard his voice in my head. I linked my blog to the KUFO website. I liked to think of myself as an unofficial affiliate of KUFO.

A few days later, I decided to retitle my blog, "J-Dubb's Theatre." It was basically an ironic thing. As the style of my blog, at the time, was "anti-sophistication," I named it, J-Dubb's Theatre as a play off the title, "Masterpiece Theatre."

At the end of the year, I quit my security job so that I could concentrate on school full time. I lived off of the GI Bill, and learned what it was to be a broke college student. At this point, the blogging began to dwindle. For the first half of 2006, I blogged about once a month. I've mentioned in some of my "Fall-lamenting" videos about how J-Dubb's Theatre tends to dwindle towards the end of the year and pick back up during the Summer. This was the beginning of that trend.

In the Summer, I began blogging again, full-swing. I kicked things off by designing a new banner for my blog. I took the Masterpiece Theatre logo, and Photoshopped it to say "J-Dubb's Theatre". I took a picture of myself, smoking a pipe and reading a leatherbound copy of "The Illyad and the Odyssey", and Photoshopped that picture into a den. This was the beginning of the J-Dubb's Theatre pipe. I had no idea that this pipe would one day be famous, and even appear in an episode of "Leverage". Later on, I changed the little arrow thingies on the titles of my blog posts, into a pipe logo. This logo became the "Nike Swoosh" of J-Dubb's Theatre, and can be seen on the title card of all my videos.


At the end of the Summer, I switched my major to Graphic Design. I had a couple of reasons for doing this. First off, I had been dealing with some anxiety issues, which caused me to have to drop my Summer classes when it was too late to officially drop them. They were requirements for the course, and the GI Bill wouldn't finance me to take them again, so I had to do something different. The other thing, was, I noticed that a lot of my time was being devoted to designing things on the computer: for J-Dubb's Theatre, and otherwise. In fact, I had a lot of fun designing this whole elaborate thing for my final project in my Algebra class. So I decided to make this my pursuit.

Then, for Christmas that year, I got a digital camera...

Continued...



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