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| Q: | Who are the Jackasses? |
| A: |
Well, we're a tight knit group of guys here. Ok, actually that's a lie. I've never even met half of these people.
I am Matt Fuerst, your humble narrator as I break all the rules and Mrs. Kinnunen's (10th grade honors english thank you very little) heart write this FAQ in the first person. I went to high school with: Tom Blain, but he was all fancy and whatnot and went to college not at a land grant institution, no, he went out of state and private and helped Tulane go undefeated and still not win a National Championship. Post-College myself and Tom oft talked of movies, what we saw over the weekend and what we thought of it. We threw around the idea of actually building a bit of a soap box out there on the Internet to shout our opinions out to the world. I had been accused of being prolix, so that along with a 2 day education in PHP and MySQL I set out to make the movie review web site to end all movie review web sites. Along the way I picked up a Laserdisc player and a kickin' eBay habit, and through an eBay purchase met the Grim Ringler. I knew Grim had some serious good taste from the Disc selection I bought from him (Bottle Rocket and Once Upon a Time in America? Yikes!), through e-mail found out Grim was a published writer, and invited him onboard. The Grady Tripp of the group is John who posts infrequently and irratically. I have been friends with John since high school as well, and unlike Tom he didn't need to compensate for his feelings on inferiority by running down south to a private college. Nope, he stayed up here and went to my University's little bitch college. He doesn't have a complex about it either. And the newest member of the rag-tag operation is Mike Long who is the only member of the group who I haven't met, in spite of the romantic take I spun above. Mr. Long has written reviews on several web sites, such as an illustrious member of the "gets-so-much-traffic-it-makes-jackasscritics-look-silly" DVDTalk.com. For some reason he liked what we had going on here, so we welcome him. We've had other members whose reviews you will see here in our hallowed halls, Jackass Jon, Da Bonghit, crosshairs and even the infamous one-timer Yoosuf. Like Princess Di and A Candle in the Wind, they are all like butterfly kisses and moved on. Or just got really lazy. Or forgot their login ID and forgot my e-mail address to ask for it. Whatever. |
| Q: | How long have you been around? |
| A: |
I registered the JackassCritics.com domain on January 17, 2002. The site was ugly as all hell then, and many would argue still is now, but it was at least worse then. The first review on the site was done by me, late at night all pissed on Jack Daniels to Highlander II: The Quickening. Tom's first review was of Blow (Say what you want Tom, at least Ted Demme lived his dream!), but Tom's most famous entry has been another early entry, Dude, Where's My Car? which in typical Tom fashion he got out of the local library for free, and then bitched about the gas to drive it back to return it.
 Site history for posterity: January 17, 2002 - Register domain name. May 2002 - Finally give in to Tom and allow him to post reviews of movies other than on DVD. Review New Movies in theatres and VHS/Laserdiscs. August 2002 - I somehow manage to snooker The Grim Ringler, a professional writer, into joining the ensemble. November 2002 - Created the interface to allow a mini-discussion board under each review. December 2002 - Matt Fuerst and Tom Blain's regular columns debut. December 2002 - Pass 100 reviews on the site. (100 reviews in 11 months) December 2002 - Pass 100 visitor comments on movies and our reviews on our discussion board. February 2003 - Debut of news.jackasscritics.com. March 2003 - Pass 300 visitor comments on movies and our reviews on our discussion board. April 2003 - Debut new (current) look of JackassCritics.com. May 2003 - Pass 200 reviews on the site. (100 reviews in 6 months) May 2003 - JackassCritics.com debuts it's interview section with an interview with Writer/Director Ron Ford October 2003 - Pass 300 reviews on the site. 13 interviews on the site. (100 reviews in 6 months) January 2005 - JackassCritics passed 600 reviews on the site. Hits still going up and we start to get a bit of buzz on the 'Net! |
| Q: | What is an RSS Feed? Why do you have one? How can I use it? Who uses it? |
| A: |
RSS Feeds are the way of the new generation. Or not. The idea is that sites that provide new content, should provide a little capsule of the content out there onto the internet, so other sites can easily and freely grab it and integrate it into their sites, along with a generous link to the original copyrighted material on your site. This pretty much evolved out of sites like Slashdot that were providing "headlines" from other sites on their main page, with links to the full articles.
From this idea sparked the RSS specification. RSS is based on XML, which is a cool technology that is taking off and becoming more important in your life. From the rise of RSS, has risen a group of sites called News Aggregators. These sites constantly comb the RSS feeds of sites that provide their RSS stream. Thus, a user out there on the Internet could swing over to the News Aggregator web site and check out the very latest news and content headlines, and visit the content on any of thousands of sites. Pretty neat, eh? JackassCritics.com is currently featured on: Amongst others. You also have another choice with RSS Feeds, instead of visiting News Aggregators, like the ones listed above, you yourself can be a News Aggregator and subscribe to the RSS streams directly. There is a variety of software available for every platform to do this, but ones I have used include:
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| Q: | Why does your site suck so bad? |
| A: |
Because I am permanently stuck in 1998 when it comes to web site development. I have never progressed beyond the HTML 3 specs or whenever the TABLE tag was first introduced. Well I do use CSS, but I pretty much just stole that from someone out there on the Internet. This combined with the fact that I am like a freshly nutered dog when it comes to graphic arts means you get a pretty damn ugly web site.
And to think me and Tom once made web sites for money. |
| Q: | What kind of pompous asshole writes his own F.A.Q. Like anybody cares enough to read it assclown! |
| A: | It's the next logical step for an ego hound that registers and creates a site like JackassCritics.com. |
| Q: | How do I make a super-successful web site like yours? |
| A: |
Alright, I'm kidding myself there again. The site sucks. We're on google, IMDB and the MRQE. All great places to get leads. We just want to be heard and share our opinions and occasionally foster a somewhat intelligent discussion amongst film fans.
Our shining moment of glory happened in early 2003. My boss at my 9-5'er watched Mulholland Drive over the weekend. He came in and we waxed about it for a while, and I encouraged him to check out Tom's genuinely well thought out review of it. Bossman, being the forgetful type didn't hit the site. The next day, Bossman's brother whom he watched the movie with, gives Bossman a call. "Bossman, I've got a great link for you to read about Mulholland Drive. Go to J-A-C-K-A-S-S-C-R-I-T-C-S-D-O-T-C-O-M." While this is a small, tiny example, it just goes to show that a couple of guys that have opinions can get together, write 'em down, publish them on the web, and every corner of the earth then has access to your opinions, your point of view, and a venue to call you a bloody American asshole idiot. The Internet is chaning the world. This never could have happened before. We could have gotten together and published a 'Zine pre-Internet, but it would last an issue or two, no one would read it other than our families, and we would have gone home with our tail between our legs. We exist on the Internet, we'll never go away, and some people even respond positively to our thoughts and opinions. |
| Q: | Golly Matt, you must be a sys admin from the gods. What kind of setup does JackassCritics.com run on? |
| A: |
Yes, I am quite stellar in my Sys Admin skills. And to prove this to you, I will tell a little amusing anectode. I have yet to tell this during a job interview, you will know why soon enough. During college, I left a really nice job because I was kind of tired of it, but as luck would have it, I saw a posting on the local university newsgroup for a Unix Sys Admin Internship with a big-time software company. I eagerly applied and began on the wrong foot. The person I sent my resume too, and interviewed with, had a name very similar to an actor, let's pretend it is Rod Lowe. So of course, I address all of my correspondence and chatter his way refering to him as, Rob Lowe. Of course. I spent the entire interview answering questions "No, but I would like to learn!" like the eager little nerd I am. "Do you know NIS?" "Do you know NFS?" "Do you know Apache?" "Have you worked with Sun Servers before?" At the end of the interview my soon-to-be boss summed up my interview by saying "Well Matt, you don't know a lot, but you're sure eager. I'll take attitude over intelligence any day! Welcome aboard buddy."
Oh no, that's not the amusing anecdote. I am just warming you up. See about 7 or 8 months later, Headquarters decides to do cut backs, and they close our remote office. Being the Sys Admin, it's my job to wipe machines clean and decommision them. The rules state to wipe all the users machines, but leave the servers since we are shipping them back to HQ. So I catch the job or tearing apart the machines... All was going well, I was doing everything by the numbers decommisioning the machines when I get to some of our oldest machines. We had user machines that were Sun Sparx IPX's.... 25 MHz or so, real dogs by todays standards. They included onboard ethernet per se, but it was a generic port that you had to buy an external adaptor for. So this machine had it's 10BaseT adaptor installed. So I sit down at the machine and issue my command: rm -rf / which while not the textbook way to clean a machine sure renders it unbootable and good enough to satisfy the needs. I sit back and watch the magic happen. Hmm.. thats funny. I notice the traffic indicator on the Ethernet adaptor going nuts. Weird. Sit back. Eat a sandwich. Hmmm.. then the moment of panic descends upon me. The servers were all mounted (via NFS) on this machine. Instead of deleting the local drive, I was deleting the contents of the servers. For those junior hackers out there, I am quite l33t. JAC runs on a lowly Pentium server with quite pathetic specs. The base OS is a vanilla RedHat install, on which I compiled Apache, MySQL and PHP. This is a great setup for anyone interested in designing web sites that go beyond just the usual static mish-mash. |
| Q: | Stupid weiner contest rules. |
| A: |
Giving away free stuff is cool. People being stupid isn't. I would define being stupid as:
Past Giveaways:
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