The History of Funeratic (1996)
Go forward to 1997, or return to the main menu.
Birth
October 27: Bored one weekend while his girlfriend and roommate are out of town, college freshman Scott Hardie – who had only first visited a web site two months earlier – decides to learn HTML. By the end of the two days, he has created a simple page on his student account, uncreatively christened Scott's Home Page. With no idea what to put on it, he adds a information about Street Fighter II and a list of Steven Wright jokes he was forwarded in email. Finished on Sunday night, he happily shows it to his roommate Matthew Preston and emails the URL to a few high school friends including Lori Velàzquez (later Lancaster).
Costumes
November 16: Photos of Scott's friends begin to decorate his site, grainy grayscale thumbnails acquired with a cruddy handheld scanner. Yearbook photos are the first on the site, but it's the addition of large, colorful Halloween Party photos that truly kick it off: Kelly Lee dressed as a wolf, Jason Fedorow dressed as a Star Wars guard, and Scott Hardie dressed as Jason Fedorow. From the beginning, Scott's friends are a big part of his site.
Distortion
December 14: Scott discovers Photoshop, or rather the cheap imitator that came with his scanner, and begins tweaking photos of his friends' faces to humorous effect. One friend is a Pulp Fiction fan and asks to join Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman and Bruce Willis in a photo from the film. Another friend replaces Arnold Schwarzenegger in a shot from Terminator 2. His love of distorting photos would eventually drive the central focus of the site.
