When I started this job almost three years ago, it was a part-time gig.
Omeed Dariani was in the process of leaving StarCityCCG.com to take a job with Wizards*, leaving a mighty big set of sneakers to fill. I applied, thinking what the hey, might as well, and was as surprised as anyone when I actually got the job.
Since then, I’ve been promoted to webmaster, been made a full-time employee, gotten three rather voluminous raises, and been flown all over America to witness various Pro Tours and Grand Prixs. I started off as a pretty terrible and powerless editor, too afraid of hurting people’s feelings reject anybody and too blitheringly unaware of web technology to actually change anything on StarCity; today, I reject about 55% of all articles with a clean”do your homework, bozoboy,” and routinely tweak the core routines of our Apache server to make the PHP run faster.
And now? It’s time for somebody else to fill my shoes.
Like Omeed, I also got another job offer, but I think I got the better end of the deal this time. (Long time readers of mine will know that despite the fact that I like several people at Wizards of the Coast, I think they’re a terribly-run company and I wouldn’t work for them.) Rotten.com has been floundering for the past year or so, with sporadic updates and a pretty Godawful layout despite a large and loyal fan base. When I saw they were looking for a new editor/webmaster, I immediately applied; I used my writings at theferrett.com to prove that I was twisted enough for the job, and my success at StarCityGames.com to prove that I was on the ball enough to really expand their business.**
It’s gonna be quite the leap, going from a site with thousands of daily readers to a site whose weekly unique visitors can be counted in millions – well, half millions, anyway – but I’ll have to get used to it. My fan mail will be different. The lingo will fade.
And I’ll really miss StarCity.
It’s been a learning experience, and I’ll probably write a longer goodbye on my final day here… But that’s not for another month. I’ve agreed to stay on long enough to train my replacement, and I’ll still be editing for the immediate future.
But I wanted to say farewell. Truth be told, I haven’t been playing Magic all that much lately, as it’s really hard to get enthusiastic about a game when you’ve been editing the damn articles on it, eight hours a day, for the past year. That’s one of the reasons I’m leaving; I’m really burned out. However, as someone wise once told me,”You know, you’ve got a job where you get fan mail; not many can say that” – and you know, he’s right. You guys kept me going.
So hey, thanks for all the fish.
As of May first, I will officially step down and give way to my new replacement, who I think will do a fine job; he’s not as well known as I was when I took over (I used to write, remember?), but he has written for several smaller sites, he’s critiqued my work in the past, and I think he’s got the right attitude to carry StarCity into the 21st century. His name is Joseph Kambourakis – thus carrying on the long tradition that anyone who edits StarCity must have at least a faintly silly name – and I hope you give him the same chance that you gave Omeed Dariani.
In the meantime, you’ve been a great audience, and the number of excellent writers I’ve worked with would choke a horse. I don’t have time to thank you all; you know who you are.
So rather than blather on, I’ll just steal a page from Omeed; Adieu.
Signing off,
The Ferrett
[email protected]
The Here Edits This Here Site Here Guy
* – Omeed’s job apparently went poorly, since he was never heard from again; bizarrely enough, he kept claiming he was working for Wizards long after he had stepped down from his editorial position, and nobody quite knows what happened to him. Seriously. I’ve heard about four conflicting stories of exactly where Omeed went.
** – It’s kind of weird, having serious talks about how to expand the business of a site that mainly shows pictures of dead bodies and bizarre sex studies, but I found during the interviews that there’s a lot of money to be made there. And I mean a lot. I have a lot of ideas that are going to revolutionize the Shock Web community, but the other weird thing is how competitive it all is; Consumption Junction and Ogrish have routinely stolen ideas from Rotten.com, and vice versa. Still, the pictures of rotting corpses are, on the whole, a lot prettier to look at than most Magic pros.