This mixtape is called 20

So according to my calculations I purchased itscalledlove.com on March 11th 2005 making this website 20 years old. At that time I’d been making websites for about 10 years and was even working professionally on websites. I’d built personal websites before but back in the day you would just post your site on wherever you could get web space.

Fun fact: My first website was hosted on ‘deepthought’ which was part of a Santa Cruz ‘geek house’.

When I started working for NHS I needed to learn several things fairly quickly. One of those things was how to run a server that hosted many different web domains. This was new territory for me and really seemed like something that ought be handled by IT but that’s a story for another day.

After this baptism by fire I felt like perhaps I should set up my own server and custom domain. Do you know that thing where when you have a cat and you can think up 1000 cat names and then when you need to name a cat you can’t think of anything? Well that was me and this website.

I’d long loved the song ‘Thieves Like Us’ by New Order and thieveslikeus.com eventually became my top choice. However, somebody seemed to already own it (and seemingly has done nothing with it). At that point I was committed to the New Order song so I examined other lyrics in the song and eventually chose “It’s Called Love”.

Website-wise I did little more than provide some links on a splash page and for the life of me I cannot tell you why I chose this gun imagery...
Oh wait! I know why... I was 25 working for a skateboard company and I was edgy and cool!

Eventually this site would host multiple iterations of blogs as well as pages devoted to both our wedding, honeymoon and all manner of nonsense. Plus, it eventually became whatever this thing your on now is.

To celebrate this 20th anniversary I decided to try to make a mixtape that I might have put out had I made this version of the site in 2005. I've wondered what 2005 me might would think of what 2025 me had created. My guess is I would think "wow, you're really doing the same shit you started out doing in your bedroom in the 90s"... which is to say I think my past self would appreciate the consistency.

So here are songs from 2005* or before. At this time I'd stopped working at a bar and gotten a dream job in the skateboard industry. In two years I would be married and in four years I'd be a dad. However, at this time I was just a 25 year old with imposter syndrome being edgy and cool.