Within Earshot: Ask (GA-Slag FAQ 2)

Prijatelj, Rubberducky, Artemis, Llena, Altavoz

It's hard to imagine things would move on so far that the GA-Slag became part of a different decade. At the time we really were living in the present. By sixth year most of Les Enfants Terribles was in the don't-know-what-we'll-do-after-school class while the majority of the year were in the university application classes. We spent most of that class having a laugh; regularly at the teacher's expense, though she would say at our own expense. It is what it is, and this is the tenth anniversary of the night I was bored and got a freeware FTP application to work and uploaded the familiar black and red image of James Dean Bradfield from the NME. The first rant pre-dates that by almost a full month, but at the time it was being hosted on Stephen's GA-Master site, and so this is really the point at which I took the idea and ran with it. Let's take some questions from the audience...

Why did you write those rants rather than, say, do your homework?

I was far more interested in creative writing which was a trait I carried into college and out again. The first time I remember being able to write freely was in first year English when we had an in-class assignment to write a short story of just a few pages length. I ended up writing ten pages before I had to wrap it up. The story was about some hikers up a fictional mountain in the French Alps who become buried in an avalanche after an boiler explosion in a chalet. Gripping stuff if I had a sense of pace when I wrote it - I remember it because there was not only the freedom to write but that the writing seemed to flow freely. Despite not turning up to an English class at the end of sixth year which saw me suspended, my teacher told me to keep writing after leaving on the strength of my in-class writing. I presume she was blissfully unaware of my online portfolio but I've never shaken the feeling that she did know.

Am I pronouncing Prij right?

Almost certainly not. In looking to the East for a pseudonym perhaps the obvious choice was Russian 'друг/drug' as used in A Clockwork Orange, but without making reference to the book or film and mangling it into English post-Great Vowel Shift spelling conventions (droog) it'd just as likely be mispronounced.

I'm interested in a previously mentioned t-shirt, where can I get one?

No-one's actually asking this, though in preparation for our final sponsored walk (Slag 9) myself and Altavoz went out to get some cheap plain black t-shirts and an iron-on kit. I only bought two t-shirts for £2 from Tesco and we couldn't find a printing kit so I bought The Doors début album from Rhythmic instead. We reconsidered the exposure anyway, since the last thing I needed was to reveal myself as the author of a libel case waiting to happen.

Why did you never reveal who The Terrible Children were?

The night before our final day of classes Channel 4 broadcast Battle Royale which has a class photo over the end credits. I had the idea of using the year photo from Slag 9 to mark out who we were, since we'd be beyond caring once the exams were over. It then occurred to me that whether we had finished school or not was irrelevant since we'd still be associated with the work if we revealed our identities. Back in those primitive days the impact of online presence on real life, particularly with respect to employment, was beginning to become apparent and I decided it was more advisable not to make ourselves known publicly - not just for me as author and publisher, but also the friends of the site whose behaviour was documented on the site. That said, the yearbook openly lists my pseudonym.

Why is the GA-Slag copyrighted when you've consistently published under the Creative Commons?

For a time the site was under a Creative Commons licence for ideological reasons. When the site ended, and particularly when a fuck up at NTL led to a duplicate of the site being stranded on their servers with no way for me to remove or amend it, I decided to move to an all rights reserved licence. Yet another score for ageing on the hypocrisy-meter, but the logic behind it was that any derivative works from a copyleft licence would create potential legal problems for me since the site was still a court case waiting to happen. I was only prepared to take responsibility for my own verified and attributed work and not the edits of someone else.

Didn't you just abuse your freedoms to create havoc?

I disagree entirely. If this were a more authoritarian country I and others could have expected more than a letter home and suspension. If you don't cross the line, the difference between free and un-free is indistinguishable. There are really two choices if you stay safely behind the line - internal repression and external repression. If you can't find people willing to challenge the established order in a free society, who are you going to count on to do it in an un-free society under much greater penalty? To pre-emptively invoke Godwin's Law, where was the rest of the Reichstag when the SPD leader denounced Hitler's power grab? Had just a few more voted against the Enabling Act when Germany was still nominally free things might not have progressed to the point where genocide became a state policy. Otherwise, your rights only exist up until the point you actually wish to exercise them. I secretly wish corporal punishment had been in force at the time to really hammer the point home. I also think partial privatisation of schools (PFI, PPP, etc) would have been a great opportunity to create some real mayhem and monetary damage - then they'd have had to bring back the belt.

Is this final instalment ever going to turn up? It's been eight and a half years!

As the fate of the school changed, so too has the parody. If all goes to plan the finalé should be available shortly after you read this.

How many visitors have been to the site over the years?

No idea. If I recall correctly there were one hundred hits in the first month. I figured Jack O made the hundredth view, though I never managed to think of something as a prize. The Bravenet counter was removed once school finished as it was safe to say it didn't matter anymore.

Edit: Found the below image of the stats for the Bravenet counter dated January 13th 2003.