I talked with our friends at the Hard Rock Online Rock Shop and we’re going to keep the pre-order up for the second edition of our AP.net commemorative logo pin for another week. Thanks so much to everyone that’s picked one up so far, we’ve sold way more than I think anyone was expecting, and it’s pretty damn amazing. If you’d like one of the gold versions of the pins — make sure to get your order in.
Last week we teamed up with Hard Rock’s Online Rock Shop to debut a special commemorative pin for the AP.net logo. We sold out of that limited run in just a few hours. After talking with our friends at Hard Rock, we’ve decided to do a second edition run of the pin. This version is bordered in a really cool antique gold color and is now available for pre-order. These won’t ship as fast as the last version as they haven’t gone into production yet, but we are aiming to have them sent out by the end of the month. I’ve been seeing a bunch of you post pictures of your pins on Instagram and Twitter and I can’t explain how cool it is to see that logo out “in the wild” like that. They really do look fantastic. I hope everyone that wasn’t able to grab the first run can get in on this pre-order, and I look forward to seeing even more photos in the near future.
If you missed last week’s post, I included a little history about how that logo even came to be. Now we just have to come up with something for Chorus so that in 20 years we can do another pin.
Read More “Second Edition Commemorative AbsolutePunk Logo Pin”
I wanted to title this, “It’s been one week …,” but the moment I even think that sentence I’ve got Barenaked Ladies stuck in my head the rest of the day. You’re welcome for that. However, now that it’s the weekend, it means we have officially gone through our first week on the new website. I wanted to take a moment and thank everyone for the incredible response we’ve seen over the past seven or so days. I’ve been blown away by the outpouring of support, kind words, and all the amazing write-ups and tweets I’ve read remembering AbsolutePunk. I’ve compiled some of the articles from current and former staffers alike into a little round-up below, and put together some first week stats on the site as well.
I wanted to quickly draw your attention to our review section. Over the next few weeks we’ll be slowly adding in some of our favorite reviews from the past, and, of course, expanding it outward with new reviews as well. Yes, I even brought back some of my old reviews.
Please don’t hold those against me too much!↩
We’ve teamed up with our friends over at the Hard Rock Online Rock Shop to put together an exclusive and limited edition pin as a way of commemorating and kind of saying goodbye to the AbsolutePunk.net logo. There are only going to be 200 of these made and once they’re gone, they’re gone. So, if you’d like one, definitely grab it. I wrote more about the history of the logo and its creation after the jump.
I started writing online by uploading HTML files to some free server in 1996. Angelfire? Geocities? Something like that. I was playing around with this relatively new thing called “the internet” and had no idea what I was doing. I created a little “about me” page that talked about how much I loved Blink-182, MxPx, and the comic Foxtrot. I’ve been doing some variation of this for over 20 years. When I first picked the name “AbsolutePunk.net,” it was because I saw a vodka magazine ad, I thought it would show up first in an alphabetized Yahoo! directory, and my adolescent brain thought I was a little punker. At the time I had no idea that this would end up being my career or that I’d gradually shift the website into an online alternative music publication that would cover thousands of artists, have hundreds of contributors, and be read by millions. The growing pains were tough. The servers couldn’t handle the traffic we were seeing, the overhead cost of running this website from my parents’ basement or my dorm room became almost unsustainable, and a little band called Fall Out Boy exploded into the mainstream and brought millions more searching for the exact kind of music we were talking about in our little corner of the internet. Searching for answers and help, I ended up selling the business I had created in my teens.
I think it’s safe to say that didn’t quite play out as I thought it would. However, the love for the music outweighed it all. In many ways running the website became the very job I had tried to avoid. Stress. Anger. Depression. A frustration brought on by the feeling of a constant cycle of defeat. But, so many of you still read my quirky sarcasm in the news. People still talked with the staff about music, life, and pop-culture. You’ve still read our features, read our incredible reviewers, pored over our articles, and listened to Drew, and Thomas, and I talk on podcasts. People still wanted to know what Jesse Lacey had for dinner. I had started my first business, AbsolutePunk, LLC, as a teenager with cargo shorts and puka shells. I started my second, Chorus, LLC, in my early thirties — an online consulting business that included running that very same website I had started when we all wanted to look like Kenny Vasoli. Today I’m writing to announce that my second company is buying back my first.