About Us
Remembering GettingIt
Published August 22, 2002

I got the Editor-in-Chief gig at GettingIt by showing Jeff Diehl my disgusting web site, REVOLTING! which—at that time—featured an interview with Charles Manson's webmaster, an audio file of Trent Reznor recalling strange toilet incidents, and a story by someone who subjected a cute little alien boy to a painful anal probe, among other delights. I believe I wore a dress shirt and a sports coat for the interview.

See also...
Start Up, Shut Down, Drop Out, Mat Honan's great article about the rise and fall of GettingIt
The original design, very green
Why we redesigned, three years too late

WebPower, a company out of Florida known for its interactive porn business, started GettingIt. The owner, Al Hadhazy, wanted to go public during the big boom and this was his way of going semi-legit. The idea was to create a kind of quality tabloid—news of the weird expanded out into real journalism. Throw in some sex and some crazy-like-a-fox opinions and we had a recipe for big fun. We got lots of links from the best blogs and lots of hits, but Al would never allow us to publicize the site.

I have no complaints. I got to pay my friends reasonably high freelance fees. And after GettingIt was shut down at the end of 1999, I was kept on salary for an entire year just to come into the office every day and forward the mail to Florida. If I hadn't let Robles throw a stupid fucking birthday party there one night in which some fuckface little pseudo-anarchist decided to vandalize the corporate dot-com office upstairs, I'd probably still be there, picking up 50k a year for nothing.

Really, GettingIt was an awesome achievement. We posted between five and nine articles every weekday with a staff of about ten, and we all went home for dinner except the Art Director, Andy, who still had to do all the work just to keep the archives from dying.

Someday Andy will be ushered up to heaven. The rest of us will braise in eternal torment for producing the content of this fine sick subversive publication that you now can browse at your leisure before reporting us to Attorney General Ashcroft.

Yours in Vigilance,
RU Sirius