SpinnWebe

SpinnWebe was the personal website of Greg Galcik, also known as "spinn." It gathered the most fame as the home of the Dysfunctional Family Circus, which ran in the late 1990s. Additionally, the site was the showcase for a number of Galcik's other projects, which generally had interactive humor as the unifying theme; in this respect, it anticipated the development of later sites such as Fark and Something Awful. The name SpinnWebe comes from an infamously bad machine translation of the German word for "spider web."

"Spinn" redirects here. For the coffee business, see Spinn Inc.
SpinnWebe

Origin

In March 1993, Galcik started an FTP site on a machine called "spider," named after the song Spider by They Might Be Giants. This site began as a way to serve files for various personal projects, including audio samples from TMBG songs. As the site continued to grow and as Web technology began to emerge, he began to phase out the FTP site in June 1994 and created "The Spider WWW Site."

Galcik later shortened the name to "SpiderWeb", but after receiving a letter from a company called Spiderweb Communications warning they carried a trademark on the name "Spiderweb", he changed the name of the site to "SpinnWebe" in April 1995. Galcik also derived his Internet alias, "spinn", from this word.

Dysfunctional Family Circus

In 1995, Galcik started the SpinnWebe version of Dysfunctional Family Circus (DFC), an interactive parody of the comic strip The Family Circus where visitors were invited to submit alternative captions for the widely syndicated Bil Keane comic strip. Galcik and a group of editors hand-picked the best captions for publication on the site. This curated approach is unusual, especially for a website with as much traffic as the DFC: the pool of submissions often exceeded a thousand captions per comic, and were generally edited down to around sixty. Fans of the DFC claim that this editing process helped maintain a higher standard of humor that other Family Circus parodies could not reach.

Bil Keane has stated that he was initially unbothered by the parody, but he began to become uncomfortable with it due to the prevalence of blue humor in the published captions, and because readers were complaining to him.[1] In September 1999, King Features Syndicate, the distributor of Family Circus, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Galcik. While the case could certainly have been contested on the basis of fair use, Galcik elected to honor the request out of courtesy toward Keane.[2]

Other highlights

SpinnWebe was home to many different features, some of which had their own domain names. Projects included:

Other notable projects included the Nipple Server (in which users rated pictures of Galcik's left nipple based on a rubric of panache, color, perkiness, and overall impression), and 1-900-ZWEBLÖ (an advice column in which web-submitted questions were answered by members of a fictitious secret cabal or shadow government).

gollark: The current version uses a bunch of `defer`s to deallocate stuff as needed (I don't *think* it has any horrible memory leaks!). This works fine given that that stuff is all within one function, but I need similar logic in another one.
gollark: I just want to know how to idiomatically make GCable wrappers for the various C objects.
gollark: No, I have that stuff done.
gollark: I want a *different* set of "OPERATIONS ON RELEVANT NODE THING" and no HTML generation at the end, and it would be bees to just copy-paste the function here.
gollark: As of now, my code does```nimproc renderToHtml*(input: string): string = let wlRegex = re"\[\[([^:\]]+):?([^\]]+)?\]\]" let opt = CMARK_OPT_UNSAFE or CMARK_OPT_FOOTNOTES or CMARK_OPT_STRIKETHROUGH_DOUBLE_TILDE or CMARK_OPT_TABLE_PREFER_STYLE_ATTRIBUTES # create parser instance let str: cstring = input len: csize_t = len(input).csize_t parser: ParserPtr = cmark_parser_new(opt.cint) if parser == nil: raise newException(CatchableError, "failed to initialize parser") defer: cmark_parser_free(parser) [further initialization stuff] # parse document, get AST cmark_parser_feed(parser, str, len) let doc = cmark_parser_finish(parser) defer: cmark_node_free(doc) if doc == nil: raise newException(CatchableError, "parsing failed - should not occur") # iterate over AST using built-in cmark-gfm AST iteration thing for (evType, node) in cmarkTree(doc): # if it is a text node [OPERATIONS ON RELEVANT NODE THING] let html: cstring = cmark_render_html(doc, opt.cint, cmark_parser_get_syntax_extensions(parser)) defer: free(html) result = $html```

References
  1. Tobin, Suzanne, The Washington Post "Comics: Meet the Artist"
  2. Glave, James, Wired "Family Circus Parody Folds Tent"

Further reading

Dysfunctional Family Circus controversy
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