The fact that anyone can care about what was before the Digital Steakhouse totally blows my mind, but hey! You're the one who clicked on it!
When rumors first spread about
the Pierre Junior High becoming a middle school, the place needed a new name, because the initials
wouldn't quite cut it. Along with a few friends, I launched a campaign to name it House of Stuff. The
supporters were few yet dedicated. Although it never floated as a school name, it was a great name
for a new electronic experience.
House of Stuff was not going to be a web site, but an area on AOL for students in Pierre. Well, to make a boring story short, AOL rejected it. (Point proof that AOL is smarter than Geocities.) But I was young and stupid, what did I know?
Take a good look at that logo. It's the main reason I invented the
prehistory page. I love it!
No Fly Zone was to be a homepage for Generation Q. It was going to consist of letters, articles, artwork, and jokes sent in to me.
Well, that was a major task, and it takes a lot more than a cool logo to carry it out. The thing never got off the ground. Epilepsy Awareness exists on the Digital Steakhouse as a reminiscent of No Fly Zone.
Can you create an entire informative homepage based on a dumb inside joke and never once explain what you are talking about? Well, I sure gave it my best try.
It would have been pretty cool, but Bee Politics gets boring after a while. The page never got to presentable stages. So the world remains blind to the political ways of the bee, for now.
It took over a year, but I finally realized that I was going about fulfilling my
aspirations to create virtual entertainment all wrong.
This time, I wasn't doing it "for" anybody. I was doing it for fun. It included (if I remember correctly) Catsmack Legacy, Ode to the Horizontal Line, and Neal G. Lineback Christmas Page. These remain today as three of the best-loved menu items at the Digital Steakhouse. Those were some good times.
On January 1, 1997, the Digital Steakhouse took
flight. It had the stuff listed above, the Digital Jukebox, the GIF Shop, and a much shorter page of
Compressed Links.
