My Answer... -- The Shack Forums

[ Show ]

Support VoyForums

[ Shrink ]

VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 19:36:11 08/24/26 Mon
Author:

JeffsFort (Kinda Sad, Kinda Proud)
Subject: My Answer...
In reply to: JeffsFort 's message, "IMAGINE Magazine Question for 8/15 - "So Little Time" (The last one, let's make it count!)" on 00:25:54 05/14/26 Thu

(Yeah, I withheld my answer until the article was being assembled 😉)

It's funny, because I had an answer in mind when I wrote the question. A couple, actually. Do either of them feel like they need to be mentioned? No. It's been 15 years of so much random "stuff" being posted that, in some form or another, I think we did what we set out to do. We made a lot of noise when we needed to, drove a lot of traffic toward quite a few young artists who really deserved to be seen, and pointed at people doing something interesting until somebody else noticed too. Every once in a while, we even got confirmation that it worked. There were artists who noticed the attention, people who saw their traffic jump, and people who reached out because suddenly a bunch of weirdos from this little corner of the internet had shown up to watch a video, read something, listen to a song, or tell them that what they were doing mattered. Those were some of my favorite moments, because underneath all the jokes, fake office chaos, mascots, ridiculous headlines, and random detours, there was always something very real about that part of IMAGINE. If we found somebody doing something worth seeing, we wanted other people to see it too.

Me answering this question is weird because for more than two years now I've scratched my head every month trying to figure out who would be "next." Who had we not already talked about? Who had I stumbled across recently? Who was doing something that made me sit up and go, "Oooooohhhh...yeah. HIM!" Even this month, I had to dig around in my own memory to remember the kid I had found by accident and immediately thought deserved another set of eyes on him. So I guess I don't really feel like we missed one specific artist or some glaring talent that absolutely should have been here. Although, knowing me, I may still wake up six months from now, slap myself in the forehead, and yell, "HOW DID WE NEVER FEATURE THEM?!" What I do think is that we missed thousands of people. Maybe millions. Not because we weren't paying attention, but because there was never going to be enough IMAGINE Magazine to find all of them.

There are talented kids right now sitting in bedrooms learning instruments until their fingers hurt. There are young actors doing community theater who haven't met the person who's eventually going to give them their first real break. There are writers posting stories that only twelve people have read so far, and one of those twelve people may remember their name forever. There are artists drawing on tablets, kids making films with their phones, musicians playing tiny clubs, dancers practicing in garages, people helping their communities without anybody filming it, and people doing something kind for somebody else who may never know how much that moment mattered. Tomorrow there will be more. We could have made another hundred IMAGINE Magazines. We could have published forever. We could have somehow convinced Comicality that sleep was optional—which, actually, I think he already believed—and we'd still eventually stumble across somebody amazing and wonder how we hadn't found them sooner.

That's probably the best possible answer to this question: we didn't cover it all because there is no "all." There is always going to be another song somebody needs to hear, another story somebody needs to read, another artist who needs a first audience, another kid nervously uploading something they've worked on for months and wondering whether anybody is going to care. And I hope somebody does. That may actually be the one thing I wish we could keep covering—not a particular person, but the next person. The one none of us knows about yet. The one somebody is going to accidentally find at two in the morning and immediately start sending links around because, "Dude, you HAVE to see this!"

Comicality was really good at that. He didn't wait for somebody to be famous enough to justify talking about them. Sometimes the whole reason he wanted them in IMAGINE was because they weren't famous enough yet. If he thought somebody had something special, that was enough reason to shine whatever little bit of light we had in their direction. I always loved that about him, and I'm incredibly proud that we kept doing it. Did IMAGINE turn somebody into a superstar? Probably not. Did we help? Sometimes, yeah. We know we did. Even if it was only another hundred views, another few listeners, another handful of readers, or one person sending a message saying, "I found you because of this article," then for that moment the magazine did exactly what it was supposed to do. It connected people. For a site that started largely because so many of us felt disconnected from everybody else, I think that's a pretty damn good legacy.

So if you're asking me what IMAGINE should have covered and didn't, my answer is everybody who's still coming. The musicians we haven't heard yet. The actors who haven't gotten their chance. The artists nobody has stumbled across. The writers still afraid to hit "publish." The people quietly doing incredible things who don't think anybody notices. I wish we could cover them. I wish Comsie was still here to go find them. I wish we had another fifteen years to argue over which one gets the next Featured Young Talent banner made just for them. But we don't, so I guess that job belongs to everybody else now. When you find somebody talented, tell people. When somebody creates something that moves you, share it. When you find a kid doing something amazing and wondering whether anybody cares, let them know somebody does. Make some noise for them. You don't need a magazine to do that. Apparently we just needed one for fifteen years to remind ourselves how.

And if somewhere down the road somebody discovers some incredible new artist and thinks, "Man, Comicality would have loved this kid..." yeah. He probably would have.

So tell somebody.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Forum timezone: GMT-5
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums^(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.