Ten Years ov Toilet ov Hell
Today marks ten years to the day since the very first post ever published to the Toilet ov Hell. Don’t believe me? Check the timestamp:
A decade speeds by faster than the speed of sound. Only when it’s gone can you begin to process what the hell just happened. I’m not a sentimental man but it’s hard to avoid getting swept up in a little emotion when reflecting your youth, your work, and your friends.
This whole thing started when I was in my mid-20s, stuck in a Kafka-esque nightmare of an office job. Somehow I was the last person to survive a half-dozen rounds of layoffs. Effectively, I was the last employee. My boss would show up only occasionally and at extremely odd hours. I was strapped to a cubicle just in case.
I got sucked into wasting my ample free time with Metal Nerd Internet, eventually becoming a regular chucklehead in the MetalSucks comment section. MetalSucks, likely to avoid paying for premium Disqus service, nerfed the comment section, and I, mostly out of extreme boredom and isolation, decided to start a blog specifically for the Very Online Metal Nerds that had become my friends.
Younger readers may not fully understand how different things were a mere decade ago. In 2014, the Internet had not yet become a dead shopping mall. There were still websites. Lots of them. They used to make money, even. Thankfully, venture capital put an end to all of that nonsense. Metal, though clearly well past the Big Money glory days of the 80s, was somehow still a better business ten years ago than it was today. Fairly recent innovations like deathcore, djent, and synthwave seemed to signify future genre amalgams that, to this day, have yet to materialize. Further, there used to be a neoliberal consensus that, collectively, we all agreed we lived under, more or less. Within these rapidly shifting circumstances, the Toilet ov Hell began.
TovH v2. The original purple version isn’t on Wayback Machine 🙁
To my great fortune, a surprising number of people (more than one) were interested and wanted to participate. To my great fortune, many of those people are smarter, harder working, and more knowledgeable of extreme metal than I will ever be. To our great fortune, people like W., Masterlord, Jordan, Spear, and Rolderathis have shouldered heavy loads to keep this thing going. To our great fortune, a staggering number of people have contributed a variety of exceptional pieces to this shit fetish site over the last decade. To our great fortune, a surprising number of people have become lifelong friends due to this silly project. Tomorrow night I’ll be seeing Horrendous, a band I was introduced to through this site, with a great friend I was introduced to through this site. The next day I’ll be recording a podcast with another great friend I met through the site. I am a lucky guy.
Somehow, a little blog intended for self-aware underground heavy metal enthusiast – an audience of at best, a hundred – is still here well past a reasonable expiration date. There is no financial reason to do this. There is no artistic reason to do this. There is no logical reason to do this. Thousands and thousands of hours spent creating things solely to amuse ourselves. This is the spirit of underground heavy metal. This is the Toilet ov Hell.
Here’s to another ten years.
