Not very frequently asked questions
Here are some questions that approximately no-one has ever asked. Hey, if you've got a question, maybe I have an answer. Ask, if you like. Or don't. Your call. I'm not pushy.
What's the point of this website?
Good question! I'll let you know when I have an answer. Don't wait around, it could take a while. (Over a decade and counting, now.)
If you really want an answer, colonpipe.com is my personal journal of opinions and articles, interspersed with a portfolio of semi-serious art photography and various cool projects I've been a part of, or taken on. Your mileage may vary as to your perception of said coolness.
I suppose it’s also a kind of spiritual successor to Urine Soaked Man On A Park Bench News, now that Herr Scumpleton is no longer with us. (That link will take you to the Wayback Machine and some hideously outdated back catalogue of Scump’s mind-dumps.)
What the heck is "colonpipe?" It sounds rude.
It's not. Really. The colon and the pipe are punctuation marks, which combine to form an emoticon that illustrates disinterest, apathy, sarcasm and stoicism. The colonpipe, :|, is a useful and versatile part of the internet vernacular. No one has used that particular emoticon since about 2005. I think iPhones and the new emoji system are to blame. I mean, there’s still a colonpipe emoji buried in there somewhere, but who needs an apathetic smiley face when you have eggplants and levitating men in business suits to choose from? Thank you, emoji consortium. If it weren’t for you, people might still have a vague awareness that the obscure punctuation mark known as the “pipe” is still a thing. Aside from mathematics, anyway. And physics. And unix. Okay, so maybe it’s still a thing.
There are a few other things named "colonpipe". Are they related to you?
Things colonpipe.com is not affiliated with:
Colon Pipe Krew, a chip music band from the USA. If you search for them on YouTube, you'll find a blurry video of someone hurling obscenities. I'm not sure what this says about the band. Come to think of it, I'm not sure if it is the band. Or, if, y'know, they're actually a band. Yeah.
colonpipe.org, a website currently containing a textual colonpipe and a MIDI version of the theme music from Star Trek: Enterprise, which thankfully does not play audibly on a modern web browser. It's so non sequitur, it's almost sequitur again.
UrbanDictionary's definition of colonpipe, both tuneful AND uncomfortable.
colonpipe.blogspot.com is also not me, but is a dude called Ryan who hasn't updated his blog in geological time. It would appear this link is now broken, because either Ryan has locked his blog up or blogspot has finally shuffled off the mortal coil.
Mangotree Orchard by Virtus:| (or :|Virtus) features the line "Come on down its the place to be/We'll turn your colon pipe into a colon D", which is awesome and adorable at the same time. Plus, as an added bonus, their Bandcamp URL is colonpipe.bandcamp.com -- not affiliated with me, but cool regardless. (And also assuring I can't pollute Bandcamp with my own musical tootlings -- at least under that username. Bugger.)
colonpipe.com is not in any way affiliated with the actual colon -- that is, the one you're currently sitting on. The one that's digesting your lunch. The one that's 1.5 meters long and is prone to cancer. The one that you can stick coffee up. (I've read that site half a dozen times now, and I can't for the life of me determine if it's meant to be serious. The internet scares me. It scares me deeply, and often.)
colonpipe.com is also not affiliated with the punctuation mark, ":", which has no bearing on colonpipery unless it's appropriately united with its absent brother, the pipe. Sorry, a colon is just a colon. Pipe required. Apply within.
On a related note, if you're one of the people I've mentioned above, or you're doing something that involves the colonpipe, or something similar to the colonpipe, or something that looks like a colonpipe, let me know and I'll promote you shamelessly in a mocking fashion, as above. It's all in good fun. No harm intended. No holds barred. No refunds. No exchanges. No entry. No way.
2020 updated: I haven’t checked the validity of any of the above links, and I don’t really want to. So if they’re broken, I’m sorry. You’ll get over it, I promise.
2023 update: I have checked the validity of the above links, and shockingly most of them still work.
Who are you, anyway?
Hi. I'm a human being from Australia.
I've been polluting the internet with my thoughts and opinions for the past decade, mostly in the form of bizarre go-nowhere projects and badly worded movie reviews.
Occasionally I take photos, sometimes I design things. I want to be a filmmaker and am working lethargically toward this goal.
I have some capacity to make music, which I begrudgingly force upon the world at the rate of about four Soundcloud listens per annum.
I have a YouTube channel called Curiosity Mine, on which I fail to understand a thing, then learn about it and explain it to you as best I can. These videos also feature some awesome people from the Australian Opal Centre in Lightning Ridge, the Lightning Ridge Historical Society, and heaps of other amazing people who know more than I do about a lot of cool things.
What happened to all of the original content of colonpipe.com?
Some of it's still here. Anything on this site dated 2005 or earlier can be considered as part of the "original" colonpipe. I still have a few articles to back-date and post back up again, but you'll have to be patient. Otherwise, most of it has gone bye-bye. Why? Bunch of reasons.
Most of it was rubbish. This is a pretty big reason, actually. I'm a harsh critic of myself, and the bellcurve doesn't favour anything I made, wrote or contributed to more than five years ago. Sorry, past self. You sucked.
Technical difficulties. The internet is fickle, and it was even fickler a decade ago.
Copyright is a bitch.
Personal choice. (Related to "most of it was rubbish".)
Times change, people move on. Some things I did ten years ago embarrass me, now. Some don't.
Changing internet hosting providers has meant that some of the more ambitiously complex stupid ideas on this website have not survived the transitions. It’s no great loss, I promise.
Most of it was rubbish. Sorry. Just trying to hammer that one home.
Where did Rafters go?
It went bye-bye. See above.
Background, for those who care -- paragraph of drivel for those who don't: Rafters was a forum set up for the Science Fiction & Fantasy community from Yahoo! Chat. Yahoo! Chat, the chatroom, and the community have largely dissipated. It's closed because it's a bear to maintain a forum when nobody visits it. And nobody would visit it because social networking has moved the internet away from community forums and into a new world where everything revolves around Facebook and Twitter. If you're a member of the old Y! Chat community and you're looking to hook up (metaphorically speaking) with the rest of the old community, there are at least two reunion "groups" or "pages" or whatnot that I'm aware of on Facebook, I'm sure you can hunt them down.
2020 update: The above paragraph used to mention that “The data (i.e. content) of the old forum is still preserved, but the forum is closed and not publicly accessible”, however this is no longer true. I resurrected the thing, briefly, only to have it become instantaneously infested by eleventy squillion bots and pornography huckers, at which point it self destructed. phpBB is a house of cards, it seems. I also no longer own the webspace under which the thing was hosted. So any online semblance of Rafters is now gone. I probably still have the phpBB data files somewhere, so it’s probably accurate to say something like “Rafters lives on”, but lets face it, it doesn’t. It’s gone, and we’re all better for it.
Having said that, though, someone has resurrected the Yahoo! Sci-fi & Fantasy Chat community in the form of a Discord server. 2023 update: It’s gone, too.
Is there any old content that you're sorry to see go?
colonpipe.com had its moments. A few that I can recall:
The Dominos Pizza Conspiracy™
The Colonpipes procedurally generated comic was kinda cool, in a stupidly meta Internet of 2003 kind of way
Sting and Glenn, Jeffy's Phorum, and various cats before the internet realised cats were funny. Oh, yeah. I'm going there. We had cats all over.
Nightdress Gunderson, Private Detective, refer image at right.
Probably the Yahoo! Chat Classics, but those should be filed firmly under “in-jokes no one will get and are no longer funny”
The Jelly Bean Generator was also once a thing, and now isn't a thing anymore. It was a randomly generated image/text combination that would give you a colourful jelly bean with an (often horrific) flavour attached. Harry Potter? What's that?
Pretty much all of these other things are lost to the ether, though. Sorry. The internet's a fleeting thing -- unless you know how to search properly. In that case, it's like carving things into stone. Granite, even. Seriously. Don't post crap on the internet that you wouldn't want preserved for all eternity. There's a lesson, here. Read between the lines, or something. We've all been there; some of us have learned from it. Some…not so much.
Is there any way I can still see the original website?
Oh, lordy. Not if I had a choice. You could, probably, go to archive.org and type "colonpipe.com" into the Wayback Machine's search box. I mean, that could work. You'd be foolish to try, though. Foolish, and disappointed. Mostly disappointed. You've been warned. (Most of it was rubbish. And all the best parts seem to have vanished. It's kind of like how no-one remembers all the cool things you did in school, but you can be guaranteed everyone will remember the time you peed yourself on the school bus. That's an example, by the by. I didn't pee myself on the school bus. Not in this quantum reality, anyway.)