Friends Of Teh Intertubes
by Ian Birnbaum

Update from last week: I did not get kicked in the nuts. In fact, I emailed THREE magazines instead of the two required for the safety of my jewels.

Thanks to this work, and the drive it lit under me, I am able to turn my attention to Faster Than The World’s First Birthday with my balls in relative safety. I say relative, of course, because I have a cat who will attack anything dangly, and it’s only a matter of time before her hunting habits and my showering habits undergo an epic collision.

I’ve been very happily involved in FTTW since December 2006. I was (and still am) an avid visitor of Fark.com, and was happily clicking through the profiles of those elite and oh-so-cool TotalFarkers. One poster, a nice lady named woodpecker from mars mentioned in her profile that she ran an online daily online magazine.

I started reading around and, eventually, made a post about my favorite charity and signed the post with my Fark name. It was some 7 hours later that I had an email waiting for me, asking me if I might be interested in contributing a column to the magazine. I promptly shit myself in surprise and accepted, and have now been chronicling my efforts to become a published freelancer since December 19th of last year.

And so, with this birthday approaching, I was reflecting on the nature of friendship. For the longest time in our society, friends were the people with whom you physically surrounded yourself. The advent of the internet, and the ability to surround yourself with mental personalities instead of physical ones, has given our social boundaries a shove way beyond where our physical boundaries still lie. I’ve now made friends – good, smart, honest, interesting people – who live in cities that I’ve never visited and lead lives that I’m not familiar with. But that doesn’t make these friends any less real – we have a magazine office that’s as concrete as any business building, the things that we hope our publication will achieve are just as ambitious.

The writers of FTTW are, indeed, a select bunch. Our email threads last into the hundreds of messages as inappropriate confessions collide with intellectual conversations. Why, just last week we had a grown man take a picture of his hairy man-nipple and email it to the rest of us.

But everything we do would devolve into a useless circle-jerk if it wasn’t for you, the readers. Without you, the things we do here, the stories we tell, would be just as lonely as when they sat in the bottom of our notebooks.

So thank you, readers. And thanks to Michele and Turtle and the editors, as well. I can’t wait to help FTTW plow into its second year, and I hope you’ll all join me in holding on for the ride.

This has not been a paid annoucement

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Comments

Amen Ian. I've made some great friends over the internet, through both Fark and this site. It's really exciting to be in a world where this kind of shit is possible. Well, maybe not that nipple. That wasn't exciting at all.

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Hear hear! er--

Read read!

Doesn't have quite the same impact but yeah, I know what you mean. I feel closer to and know more about some folks online than I do about some of the people I work with.

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Well said.

I've made some great friends (and met a turtle) through the internet.

I feel closer to and know more about some folks online than I do about some of the people I work with.

I hear you on that. I mean, this place has become my extended, dysfunctional family.

-wfm

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