Today marks the 20th anniversary of my Simpsons fansite, rubbercat.net/simpsons 
I announced the site on September 22, 2006. At that time, it had only been 19 years since the characters had debuted on The Tracey Ullman Show, which is kind of mind-blowing to me. The January 1998 date on the about page is a joke. I’ve seen that faked screenshot floating out there being mistaken for a legitimate Geocities era website a couple of times, which makes me chuckle.
I had written a couple Simpsons pages for rubbercat.net, so I thought about making a separate “Simpsons” section, similar to how the rest of the site is organized. That idea quickly morphed into an entire site. It’s perhaps lost to time now, but rubbercat.net/simpsons was generally meant to be an affectionate parody of early 2000s-era Simpsons fansites, at least content-wise. The design isn’t accurate to the era – a lot of fansites had flashy, sharp designs that I could never hope to replicate with my rudimentary skills – though the green-and-black color scheme is an homage to Evergreen Terrace. Over the years, I have softened the green to make it less abrasive on my eyes.
If I had been more forward-thinking back then, I probably would have put it on a subdomain and given it a different name. 20 years later, I still can’t think of a better name. I do like the awkward clumsiness of “rubber cat dot net slash simpsons” and the way it can’t be easily abbreviated, though.
Regularly updated features like the upcoming episodes and the news blog were meant to keep the site from feeling static. The news blog, IN THE NEWS (another awkward name – I’m not good at names, ok?), was sorta meant to be a snarky Gawker-like version of the straight-laced Simpsons Channel. Now, both of those sites are gone.
Somehow, I was invited to the opening of The Simpsons Ride at Universal Studios Hollywood in 2008. At the time, I felt a little anxious about Blog Ethics and the concept of selling out so I never actually wrote about it, aside from dumping the photos on Flickr. Coincidentally, I’ve never gotten anything else like that in the years since.
There used to be a lot of Simpsons fansites – somehow enough to justify a site dedicated to only the top 100 – but that scene had largely already dissipated prior to 2006, so my site was always a bit anachronistic. Many more fansites went offline in the intervening years. The Simpsons doesn’t even have an official website anymore, just social media profiles. It’s kinda bleak. I suppose if I had to define the philosophy behind my web projects, it’s about hearkening back to an earlier era, when the web was fun.
sore 
As a big fan of The Colbert Report and his ice cream flavor, I was happy for Colbert when he was picked to succeed David Letterman as host of The Late Show. I watched his show here and there for the first few months and thought it was alright – “Hungry for Power Games” was a solid recurring segment – but eventually stopped tuning in. Whenever I’d hear about him after that it seemed like he was always crying about the latest national tragedy or doing “Trump and Putin are freaking gay” type jokes.
