Hero or Antichrist? Or just a voice from the past? Opinions are polarised when it comes to Shoggot, admin of skinz and skinnables.org. Doreen had a four hour conversation with the man. What follows is what remained after the feds were done with it.

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Tek: Okay well to boot with there may jusss be a few people on the face of the earth that may not know who Shoggot is nor have they ever read Tek's first interview with you sooo lets hear it, who is Shoggot?

Shoggot: I'm just this guy, y'know? No seriously —

Tek: oh boy don't you do me like that, you better have a better answer then that! hehe

Shoggot: I was just in the right place at the right time, and later in the wrong place at the right time, etc, etc, and all variations in-between & outside… ie, I was a regular back on old (1st gen) custo & skinz (1st gen skinz wasn't brown)… and through continually being there, being involved, etc, eventually some of the admins “made me a copy of the keys” like, when I first got my first bartending job I didn't apply — I was just a (non-drinking) regular, who they started to ask to close up the bar, etc, on occasion as for the nutty nitty-gritty specs, I'm 32, 6'1", ±235b, I live in Washington, dc, usa, and work a job where what I do most of the day is write shell scripts on a unix box… and learn how to do things which I can't already do =) I think my love of shell scripting actually came from skinning, btw ie, writing a reveal .ini isn't all that far separated from BASH =) and listestep, now that it basically is a scripted language, all the moreso

Tek: So you even tended bar?

Shoggot: yeh, I bartended for a few years (was only sober for ±1 year when I started…)

Tek: hmm interesting shog… so you're not at the bank anymore?

Shoggot: oh yeah, I forgot; I'm an alkie/drug addict, clean for 10 years & a tad. no, I'm at the bank it's just now, instead of being a glorified tape monkey, I'm a glorified bash monkey =) also, now I work days well, in theory for this month, I'm covering the night shift because the night guy's wife is having a kid

Tek: Now let us slide back in time to your earlier dayz on skinz.org, what was your labor on that site & how did you feel being apart of that site as admin?

Shoggot: loaded question, really and it evolved over time my initial labor was simply to delete icq photoskins but, since mian was lazy, or maybe the table didn't have a setup for lower level admins, to do so he gave me full level access so, when I had news, I'd hand it to toasty/mian but eventually they said, “y'know, you could post it yourself” so, I did

Tek: Nice invitation at that =)

Shoggot: then, a few months after we started accepting wallpapers, things got out of hand you have to realize, at the time, custo was down (Glenn's first “vacation”, IIRC), and there was no DA/DM/WC… so we got flooded and ±90% of what we got flooded with wouldn't pass a 3rd grade art class at a school for the specially enabled so, I suggested moderating the section and they said fine, you do it… so, I did.

Tek: Hmm yet another fine invitation?

Shoggot: now, after a while, toasty/mian got less associated w/ skinz, they had other projects, I didn't… and they started paying me, a nominal sum, but it was the principal of the thing… so I became more hands on in effect, I started running it fully…. hired on l0c & dspayre, and things were going smoothly until… efront bought the shop well, efront offered us (me, l0c, dspayre) a fair chunk of bucks to keep working on the site, so we stayed on… we had certain understandings about how that would be handled, but anyway, I'm getting ahead of you… that's a different question =) anyway, short answer: started as a peon (btw, I was doing the same at custo, heh — I was an admin at both sites for a while), and eventually became the defacto lead admin, and then… we'll get to that, I'm sure

Tek: How did it make you feel when people complained about your style of moderation back then?

Shoggot: hahaha we got right to that one =) depends how they complained, and what about. there were legitimate complaints, and there were non-legitimate complaints… “everyone I've shown this to liked it, so you're an idiot for rejecting it” = non-legitimate your friends, who are kind to you by definition, are not useful as critics of your work. I've always tried to be as impartial on moderating as humanly possible; when I set up a moderating interface at old skinz, it didn't show author or title if I was on the fence, I'd show the image to a few other people whose opinions I respected, and sorta poll for feeling.

Tek: yes not always easy to make the final decision…

Shoggot: and I think one thing which was missed was that it was meant to be a select grouping, the catchphrase I usually used was “best of the best” — what they produced may have been good — it just wasn't what I considered best. now, there was one decidedly legitimate complaint: that it hinged on one human's opinions

Tek: and does most things in life not?

Shoggot: and that's a definite negative, but until they can instill the concept of good taste into an AI, it's a necessary one for judgments of artistic quality. so that argument/complaint, I didn't have a good answer for, I could mention my bona fides

Tek: please do

Shoggot: ie, that I majored in fine arts, and have been doing cg since 1984, etc that I've done design work on a professional level, etc… but when it comes down to it, it's a hollow excuse.

Tek: no it's not

Shoggot: It's still a single human's opinion, a single human's tastes, and people's tastes differ.

Tek: yes but I'd rather have a trained doctor do my surgery then my neighbor

Shoggot: I once said that I'd kill for a wallpaper of a fat guy sitting on a toilet, or anything involving violent nun rape — because all I was seeing in human-representational wallpapers was poser figures, and usually chromed no facial expressions, no differences, a world of mirror-surfaced automatons well, turns out, the majority doesn't want a wallpaper of nun rape or fat guys shitting, they'd prefer chrome expressionless people, preferably nude. I assume that's because actual clothes would require some actual 3d modeling… I took the complaints in stride. I paid a lot more attention to the few who wrote in asking for clarification of what they could've done better… and the sad part to that is, I that giving any advice of that nature, they're the artist, it should be up to them… I just saw the 12 sins as pitfalls to avoid, that by sidestepping 'em, chances are you'd be forcing yourself to actually “create” rather than collage…

Tek: Did you find it impossible to respond to the complaints or was it doable? since none of us knows the amount of walls you've had to moderate back then?

Shoggot: depends. I responded if it seemed a response was called for… if it was just “fuck you asshole”, my guess was that they didn't intend to get a response in the first place…

Tek: Did it seem most EVERYONE wanted to have a written response as to why the wall got moderated?

Shoggot: nah and got at most 10-15 queries per day about walls

Tek: hmm well that is enough to stare at and think in the eve after a long day at work?

Shoggot: and maybe 2 of 15 would be “fuck you asshole”, 5 would be “what does moderated mean” (to assuage that, we put a link to moderated.txt in the default email), and the rest were actual questions about the artwork

Shoggot: oh yeah also the best ones, were the complaints which acted like I had violated their human rights by not putting up their walls, and were mad enough that they were going to destroy skinz by making their own websites, which would be better, and kill our traffic…. well, at least 3 sites that I'm aware of started that way of 'em, I'll say that two are better coded than skinz and no, no names. they didn't kill our traffic, though… they're all still fairly niche, although I think los might have slow growth…

Tek: What really happened shog that took down such a great and mighty “Real” skinning site?

Shoggot: well, what actually took it down was their colo pulling the plug on their servers, because they hadn't been paid for bandwidth but, the site wasn't a “real” site by that point.

Tek: no?

Shoggot: what killed it was, obviously, efront or maybe, me.

Tek: you? what exactly do you mean by that?

Shoggot: see, they had a contract with us to pay us XXX$/month and for the first few months, they did and then, they stopped… they kept saying there was problem x or y with the payment system, that it would all be ironed out soon, and we'd get our pay & backpay after 3 months, I said fuggit, and left. with a post on the front page suggesting to visitors to go to deskmod & devart, since if the parent company of skinz couldn't pay their admins, they probably couldn't pay for bandwidth… which turned out to be true. but, when I left, it left the site in a kinda questionable state l0c picked up the reigns a bit but then he couldn't take it anymore either, and left… then cyberpuke gave it a shot… kinda. that lasted maybe a week and then, it was “admin” whoever that was =)

Tek: (oh boy taking my little walk down memory lane here) carry on… sorry

Shoggot: and then the site went dead and that was that. actually there was one event which could have killed it before all of that

Tek: yes?

Shoggot: It was when Sam at efront told us to put on a 3rd sidebar full of ads but, we'll get to that in a later question (advertising & skinz)

Tek: and what effect did that have?

Shoggot: well, we never put up that bar I kept stalling on it hated the idea of it. I'm actually pretty proud of that

Tek: so the sidebar never got put up shog? I cannot remember

Shoggot: not to my knowledge

Tek: I seem to recall another person trying to save the day with good intentions by hurrily putting together another skinning site called Wincustomize that was suppose to try to rescue the original cast of people that used skinz.org such as the skinnerz, msg board junkies and developers that hung there? (you may recall this site though?)

Shoggot: frogboy/draginol/brad wardell approached us (me, l0c) about “saving” skinz, by creating a new site, we couldn't name it skinz because efront owned the name & domain, but wincusto. my only worry was that since stardock would be paying for it, that we'd end up becoming a stardock site…. which I wanted no part of. both skinz & custo, the models for later sites, were both independent of any software authors; they could honestly review, editorialize, conflicts of interest well… he assured us that stardock would be completely hands off that just having a skin repository up & running helped them enough as is. we could run it as we saw fit, if we wanted to hype competitors products, that was fine, etc…. the servers & bandwidth and ad sales would be through stardock, the content would be through us but… when things finally started getting rolling on their end, turns out he'd had different ideas in the meantime he'd hired on some coders for the site, who would code it on a windows platform…. and there were stardock employees making policy decisions (like that whole sir/journeyman/skinner crap, how elitist can a system get?)… we weren't consulted, but were still listed on all papers as “lead admins” I assume to try & pull in people from our sites well, I left at that point, said no thank you, I can't take part in this (I said it politely)… l0c stuck around a while longer, but you could see it was getting to him, as evidenced later by the nazi blowup…

Tek: Shortly thereafter you seemed to disappear off the face of the net, where did you go? A trip to Egypt? work on some gimp related projects or maybe some yoga classes?

Shoggot: heh

Tek: hehe sorry, if you don't want to answer that is fine… "or" let me add, didya get married, have 7 kids, what???

Shoggot: well, basically, one day my dsl from home stopped working after a blackout, and then I had to go to my folks for a few weeks to take care of mom, and then when I got back, my work schedule (took a brief hiatus from the bank to manage an anime shop) was hellish enough that I didn't have time to troubleshoot the dsl…. when I got back to the bank and my schedule evened out, I got dsl back up and running, and… when I came back, I came back to find l0c under attack by all of wincusto., which was a great thing to come back to. made my week. if I'd been smart, I'd have yanked the plug for another month… oh well. so no, didn't get married, still no kids that I know of, no Egypt, no fun, just work.

Tek: May I ask your POV on how this Hero of a site has turned out? are you pleased with it's outcome?

Shoggot: well obviously, no, I'm not pleased…. It's become (or started as) a mouthpiece for stardock…. they claim to list apps based on popularity, to be fair…. but gah, tell me pocketblinds is as popular or more so than sonique? and then, the ways they do site links they left out deskmod, or maybe it was devart, one month because they weren't getting enough hits from 'em… ie, if you link to us, and send us enough hits, well link you back…. but only if you do so first, and send us plenty of traffic…. when did the concept of reciprocal, or simple community politeness linking, get thrown out of the window? that, I think, illustrates that it's being run by marketdroids. of course, linking to other sites & skinz has a peculiar history ie, skinz used to be a tabula rasa, in that we didn't link anyone. which, I think, is shitty, but still more fair than wc's methodology it always makes me feel guilty when I see other sites linking to skinz… ah well. anyway. that's actually something I changed under my tenure, I linked most of the sites, I think…

Tek: Speaking from your experienced side as Admin now is there stuff you would recommend to make that site a better place to hang and upload at?

Shoggot: sure, but they'd never do it. turn the site over, lock stock & barrel, to paxx, craeonics, and, hrm, dunno who else. let 'em run it as they see fit. stardock will still benefit from publicity, and by providing the servers/bandwidth, they can have free ads, obviously =) ie, make it independent anyway, there's really no point skinning webiste set is already flooded there's too many sites as is, none can really support themselves, except perhaps devart maybe deskmod, gorman's smart if anyone can make a site turn a profit, it's him… but custo, skinz, los, etc… ferget it. they're all just slowly dying, or at least are money drains on their owners.

Tek: Who's idea was it to bring it back from the grave? as people finally got over it being gone and BAM! here it came again?

Shoggot: hrm honestly, I think it was… hrm. not sure if I should talk about that, actually — might be legal problems there. anyway, wasn't any of us (me, toasty, mian) — it kinda fell into our lap as an option, and mian said with, why not… so it came back.

Tek: What were some of the coming back details, there certainly had to be some hardships trying to obtain the Domain name right? Can you share some of that info?

Shoggot: It's hard to talk about that w/o getting someone cool in trouble potentially well, again the domain is what kinda fell into our lap =) and you'll notice, the name of the site isn't skinz.org it's skinz or desktoys =)

Tek: yeah that's right… seems most of us overlook that?

Shoggot: personally, I liked it best as the 34i logo w/ no text the site w/ no name =)

Tek: okay prince

Shoggot: we're squiggle! we're beatrice. oki, next…

Tek: Were you a part of the coming back phase or were you contacted after it resurrected?

Shoggot: I was aware that it was coming back, I was asked before plans were final if I would come back as a moderator/admin however, I'm far less a part of it now than I was at the old site I do none of the current coding, financial plans, ads, etc… I pretty much just moderate walls now, and pay out of my pocket for contests when I can afford it =)

Tek: ahh what a nice guy let me know when the next contest is for 1 grand

Tek: Do you enjoy admining now as much as before???

Shoggot: hrm. no, I don't. I actually enjoy it only rarely now. probably due to my sole involvement being in wallpapers… when I see something great come through (check out “red purple”, just got that one up), that's a good feeling… but for every one of those, there's 15 others which I have to come up with some constructive criticism on why it didn't get in… dealing with a majority which has to be rejected can be trying, imagine working at an AIDS clinic, and being in charge of giving out the positive result to testee's… that's how it makes me feel, I think. anyway. it can be depressing. but it's a really good feeling when a good piece comes through, something original, carefully crafted… like back when I'd see a new ist wallpaper =) or darknegative, or cough…. the list goes on… but for every one of those talented, practiced artists, there are hundreds of (possibly talented, but not practiced) other artists out there, submitting work….

Tek: Shog do you now send out letters as to why it was moderated? I'm just curious here, I mean as a standard practice on all moderated walls? cuz that in itself would be a job shog?

Shoggot: Yes I actually have made it harder on myself than most other sites' handling of moderation — when skinz restarted, I swore to myself (& possibly publicly, not sure) that I'd never send a blank, or just “moderated”, as a reason — that I'd always give some feedback to the people whose work was rejected ie, a critique, limited by time constraints well, that's the really depressing part I'd say that one day out of 4 can I get in the proper frame of mind to write responses to each rejectee, without it driving me completely nuts like, today, I got through maybe 15 before I couldn't take it anymore one more, and I'd have written “for god's sake, burn your house down, live in a cave away from electricity so you cannot willfully commit this atrocity in the name of cg again”…

Tek: This sounds like it could become troublesome in time… or you may lean towards some kind of fixed letters for the most part?

Shoggot: no each one, I have to think about it's usually only a sentence or two comments on composition, things which could be improved, things which could be avoided but what do you tell someone who sends in a basic Photoshop swirlie?

Tek: hehe hello china, doreen?

Shoggot: it's probably the first one they've seen, and they probably think they're the first to have had the unique though of applying this default filter to some smears on paper…

Tek: Probably you say? haven't we all been there???

Tek: Can you spill some info on what if any new features will be coming up on that site?

Shoggot: nah I don't do the coding and not aware of upcoming stuff at this point.

Tek: Traffic wise how is the site doing compared to before?

Shoggot: not good. we're probably at lower levels than we were at during skinz mk 2's initial launch… but then, back then, there was only custo. now, there's deskmod, devart, wc, los, velocityart, and a few others… oh, & custo =)

Tek: Okay we must get to this question that keeps popping up in my mind??? What is going on with the pop ups on that site? are you guys trying to win a competition for the skinning site with the most pop ups or what?

Shoggot: well, it's a funding issue…. skinz is hemorrhaging, badly., it's costing 34i a good chunk of change to keep alive, the subscriptions weren't covering costs, nor were traditional ads…. hence the popups. whether the income they generate will offset the loss of users it pisses off remains to be seen. well, I've expressed my opinions on funding possibilities, and assume they're under consideration =) basically, not up to me, not what I would've done, and spointz isn't quite implemented the way I would think would be optimal… but I should stop bad mouthing my friends, 34i's great people, dammit =) I don't want to give the wrong impression…. but these are basically desperate times, hence the desperate measures. however I do find the pop up's less annoying than the damn hi server load screen at custo =) at least the popups I can close, and view the content.

Tek: Any relief in site/sight regarding these pop ups?

Shoggot: well depends =) if they produce the expected revenue, then they'd probably stay, since they'd've proved themselves viable as a solution… if the don't, then either some alternative funding method will be explored (my suggestion of getting people to contribute by hanging out in alleys with a baseball bat was mercifully ignored) which would mean an end to the popups, or eventually, it will have hemorrhaged enough money that it'll have to shut down, like any company when they run out of capital…

Tek: Now what about this dark and sexy site called Skinnables.org? what is your role there Mr. Shog?

Shoggot: hrm unless I remember wrong, my role is… hang on actually, lemme check. according to http://skinnables.org/staff.php, I'm “Cephalopod Wrangler & Undersea Matchmaker — Shoggot”

Tek: say what? okay explain please this should be good stuff

Shoggot: seriously, basically I'm a cheerleader, currently doing a poor job with time constraints…. hope to be more active asap =)

Tek: undersea Matchmaker?

Shoggot: well, a wrangler is a person who maintains animals for a production, and handles them on set

Tek: okay and the other?

Shoggot: and the matchmaker bit refers to animal husbandry of cephalopods

Tek: oh nevermind, your mind is just a tad too deep for me right now hehe

Shoggot: anyway, again, it was a right place/right time situation

Tek: anything else you do there shog? mod the dev's?

Shoggot: integer asked me if I could post news about skinnables.org on skinz at it's launch, so I did, probably a bit more than he expected, so he offered me the staff position =) go figure… actually, he had discussed the idea with me a bit previously, and it's a concept which i like a lot. also, I had a good memory of a lot of skinnable apps which would otherwise be forgotten, most of 'em open source… plus I'm partly responsible for the site being readable =) the first beta he showed me had the same color background, and much darker text basically no contrast… it's phpnuke, which gets badmouthed a bit, but it's actually a very respectable site template…. has a lot more power than the old skinz skeleton did, for example.

Tek: hehe Very nice site btw

Shoggot: yes, it's very clean

Tek: How is this site currently doing?

Shoggot: skinnables? well, it's not destined to be a big draw site… not a heavy traffic concept =) it's a resource for devs, mainly… and there's a fair qty of projects listed =) I'm pretty impressed by how it's done so far.

Tek: What do you foresee with this site, considering it has a different mission then the others you admin on, anything you'd like to see implemented on it?

Shoggot: well, I'd like to see a local library of all past & present open source skinnable apps… f'r'instance, I think skinnables should mirror the ls source code, including a few stable versions going back… yes, other sites already do this, but it's a completeness/safety net issue. I'd like to see illumination source up there, f'r'instance — the site it's currently on is hosted by geocities, which doesn't have a phenomenal record. also, local hosting for some of the older freeware-but-not-open-source binaries which have been abandoned by their authors… this is already done to an extent, sysmeter's on there, as well as kdeNT… I guess a skinnable-oriented sourceforge would be my eventual goal =) but that'd be up to integer, plastic, viro, etc

Tek: Before I forget, will you ever finish that cursorXP theme you started but never finished? And have you been working on any other skinning related projects yourself lately? if so what?

Shoggot: ahh well, on cursorxp, it's a stardock product now, and I've sworn to not touch 'em again… as for skinning projects. yes, there's a few, currently working on a skinnables.org-themed reveal design =) and it's by its nature, that also involves skinning a few other apps, banshee screamer, xxscroll… this one will have an installer, will ask a few questions, go looking for appropriate apps & paths, and set itself up =) hopefully.

Tek: what year shall we expect it's release?

Shoggot: heh.

Shoggot: I'd say, realistically, 4-8 months from now… I originally planned 2 months, but that was a month ago or so, so… other projects? there's a wallpaper/poster I've been working on parts of for ±6 months or so no title, no good way to describe it, and I'm kinda banking on being able to do somethings which I can't do yet — ie, it's a learning process for me.

Tek: sooooo is there anything you can do in lets say… one week???

Shoggot: in one week? sure. but that wouldn't be fun or challenging. a windowblinds skin, or efx, or winamp, is basically trivial to do…. yes, effort & time taken will show in the final product, but you're limited by various constraints; in winamp, by the shape, in efx/WB, by the fact that's it's only a border, etc…. my dreams are grandiose, I want all-encompassing; reveal allows that in a shell, i think more so than ls allows (although pika would debate that, and possibly correctly). I can churn out a 1600x1200 3 mill or so pixels, actually less; the models I'm working on have detail which will only be visible in the final render if the size is somewhere in the 4'x3' range @ 600dpi. I don't have the hardware to render this; that's oki, time will fix that issue as better hardware comes out. produces works of scale that's a challenge =)

Tek: of course doing shell themes is where there is really no limit to your creativity

Shoggot: well, there usually is a limit like, ls is basically based on shortcuts.

Tek: yes, but out of most skinnable stuff shell theming is most creative

Shoggot: yes, they can move around, collapse, be arranged in bars, and control winamp etc, but it's still just shortcuts.

Tek: me still thinks shell theming is where you can let your mind be most creative, wb and winamp are not to be compared

Shoggot: more can be done =) intuitive gui's which change themselves based on what you're doing, spawn copies purpose made for the task at hand… reveal can do that. as a test, I ran 48 copies of reveal at once, for a week, with no stability/speed issues… and since I can make it write to a file, and make that file be the .ini for another reveal instance, I can have it run new reveal designs within itself for specific tasks, then kill the instances so yeh, reveal was my choice because I think it truly does free me from limits as much as possible

Tek: so you only use reveal or do you go liteSteppin on occasion?

Shoggot: heh I use litestep more or less all the time, reveal isn't useable until it's finished, really.

Tek: Last but most important question of them all! I think you were already asked Boxers or Briefs “BUT” what color is what I wanna know (love my job! pay stinks on Tek, but these are the real perks) hehe

Shoggot: hunter green. or black occasionally maroon and sometimes commando.

Tek: hehe okay Shog thank you so much for your time =)

Shoggot: no prob =)

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— Doreen, March 2002