In two days ROX will launch as the first TV show on the Internet. Historical? Hysterical??? How did we get here anyway? It hain't been easy. The process has been long and complex.

our friend Eric O__ first put the idea into our heads back in '93 or so

then we saw WAX or the discovery of television among the bees, the first movie on the MBONE or something like that, and J came up with a great title for our first episode on the net: "ROX or the discovery of television by B"

my ego was naturally inflated by the prominent presence of my initial, B, in this title, but later J thought of a better title: "Global Village Idiots"

Eric O__ sat down with me and we posted a summary of the "J&B Get Baked" debacle to some drug-related newsgroups (MTV had just played a clip on their Straight Dope news special) -- I was very confused by the whole experience, and I spent a lot of time back home on J's Mac trying to read the newsgroups to which we had posted, or ANY newsgroups for that matter, but I just couldn't figure the 'Net out

Eric, who worked at CICA, also reserved our domain name for us (rox.com) and established a homepage for us on the World Wide Web (we used Christy's account at IU for this)

J & I sat down one day to plan out the rest of the 3rd season (why we bother planning I don't know), and we wanted to end the season with a kicker, and it seemed like GVI was the best idea, so we set a date for it: April 18th of 1995, the coming year

then we started kicking around ideas for the episode, informally, J & TB & XY & me, just exchanging ideas every now and then

eventually we got together and had an extended "production meeting," so-called becuz we supposedly decided what the episode would be like

(but later on, when I assumed the mantle of "production manager" from J, I changed everything around and shot it to my liking, which caused some tension, especially between J & I)

money of course was always an issue

we shot stuff together as a foursome and in smaller groups

meanwhile Mike B___ stumbled across a link to our homepage on something Murple, and before we knew it we had a new cyberfriend; soon Mike took over maintenance of the ROX homepage for us

we moved the homepage to InterSource, a local internet access provider

I started editing GVI at the Daisybrain Media Center, which had finally opened its doors in downtown Bloomington

I also started taking VHS dubs of my work-in-progress to TLTL, where I digitized segments of the show

I discovered that compressing these segments was a long, slow process that could only be accomplished overnight

after compressing and "flattening" the segments, our biggest hurdle proved to be getting machines to talk to each other: we couldn't get the video off the mac at TLTL and onto the linux system at InterSource

finally Mike found a program that would allow us to transfer the info via DAT

it took a few tries to get that working

then I redigitized some segments and added some new stuff, including audio files, stills and text

some twenty-odd video files are undergoing compression tonite, as I write this, and I hope it works -- last night the drive ran out of memory after crunching only three files

meanwhile:

• Mike has been diligently linking stuff up to the homepage.
• J has been faxing out press releases and getting us set up to sell tapes of the show.
• Hamlin's been trying to scare up some sponsorship money.
• XY and I are being kicked out of our apartment.
• our car just died for good -- we felt lucky getting $200 for scrap.

Success hasn't spoiled us one bit.