thoughthead

thoughthead.com was originally created while I (twistedsymphony) was in college in 2000. We had school assigned web space under the school’s domain name. I purchased a real url that would simply mask over the schools host. At this point I don’t remember why I called it thoughthead but like most of the things that I’ve named I like to combine common words that make sense together but you might not often see them together. Also it creates some nice mental imagery and it becomes easy for people to remember and identify.

It also helps when choosing a domain name or user name, with so many names already registered finding a creative name not only helps you stand out but greatly reduces the chances of your chosen name being registered already.

I used thoughthead for personal projects for a couple of months and I started getting into creating photoshop art. I had a few friends who were into that as well so I re-purposed thoughthead.com into an online computer art gallery. I also hosted poetry as well as a few blog like periodicals (though I didn’t know anyone who used the term “blog” back then). This was all being hosted on a different server, I kept my school site separate with my personal projects but I renamed it as a sub-domain off of thoughthead called “projectweb”. In a short 8 months the new thoughthead had skyrocketed in popularity, with only a handful of content creators the site was just drawing massive amounts of traffic. It came to a point where my host cut me off and I couldn’t afford to upgrade. I put the site on hold planning on make it more efficient and a bit more automated, but school work got in the way and the site was offline long enough that it wasn’t even worth resurrecting.

I had done freelance web design in my spare time for extra cash since I was in high school, but I never really had a business name or anything. I decided to re-purpose thoughthead.com as my business name. It was a bare bones site with little more then links to sites I had worked on, a price guide and contact information. From there I added a sub-domain titled “headhead” as my personal blog and I also added “projecthead” as a new site for my projects and I left the old projectweb on the schools servers as little more then storage. At that point I was getting into more complex web designs and a simple HTML server wasn’t cutting it. Finally another sub-domain titled “solid” was created for a group my friends and I had created for entering industrial design competitions as well as providing photoshop 3D graphics and other instructional classes on campus (just for fun).

About a year went by and I happened upon a new host that was offering free service for 3 years to build up their customer base. I jumped at the chance, particularly because they offered even more features with their service and a whole lot more bandwidth. I decided to create a new site wrapping headhead and projecthead up into one on this new server. At this point SOLID had become an official school club and I had broken it off onto a school hosted server. Also having found more rewarding work repairing arcade machines I rarely did web design anymore. This left thoughthead pretty much empty. I created a blogger account and served it out of thoughthead.com creating user names and passwords for my friends to post links to interesting sites, videos or other things they found online (similar to fark). It was never really that popular and it ended up just collecting dust. When I graduated I dumped all the files I was storing on the schools web space on to thoughthead and it sat there for several years, with an plain looking blogger page full of broken links.

Part of why it collected dust is because I became an admin on the console modding site hardmods.net it was doing well but the site owner couldn’t afford to keep hosting it so he turned ownership of the domain over to me. Unfortunately I never received the site content nor a backup of the databases, despite the fact that I had loyal supporters willing to donate web space and I was more then willing to support the site myself I decided to just let it die as it would have been quite painful rebuilding it from scratch without original site content. At this point I started spending more time on Xbox-Scene (which I had already been a member of for years at this point). I started writing tutorials FAQs and other guides. When the Xbox 360 was announced I noticed a vast mis-organization of the information coming out so I kicked it into high gear and wrote a whole series of guides based on what information was released. My contributions were noticed and I was invited to be a Moderator in that section, my work as a moderator was noticed as well and I was soon invited to be a Head Moderator for the site, though I still spend most of my time in the Xbox 360 section.

I still spend most of my internet browsing time patrolling Xbox-Scene but as the 360 section grew from a relatively small section of interested fanatics into what is probably the section with the most traffic I started to get a little exhausted repeating myself. Where I was happy to voice my opinions, lend insight etc before, not it felt like an uphill battle. I decided to dust off and re-purpose thoughtead.com once again this time making it a blog specifically for my personal opinions on video games, console hardware, the video game industry and the associated politics.

So here is thoughthead, essentially my 10th personal website, I hope you enjoy it.