• You can contact me here.

• You can check out my résumé here.

• You can check out bookmarks I find to be cool here.

• You can check out my personal essays about growing up in New York City over at Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood.

This site is nothing much to be completely honest. For decades, I’ve had websites on and off since about 1995. What follows is a brief explanation of the history of my web presence… It was written on the weekend of May 10, 2025.

Royal Journal (1996-2001)

The first significant site I had was known as the Royal Journal. That mish-mash of a site initially lived at long defunct ISP, ExecPC. The URL was most likely: http://www.execpc.com/~jackgold, which some will recognize as a classic Apache web server shared system user-space URL. The site was created by me as a “solo” project that allowed me to do web things back in the day that had 100% nothing to do with my day job as the webmaster of the Onion’s germinal web site.

It mainly consisted of what the kids nowadays would call “shit posts” mixed with classic 1990s zine-ish content: Scans and pictures of cool stuff and some projects of mine as well. It would eventually grow into it’s own domain name that resided at this URL: http://www.royaljournal.com/. I pulled it offline and blocked the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine from archiving it because I was simply sick of it and sick of dealing with. The main draw of the site was a gallery of found random things I called the Royal Journal’s Gallery of Found Art. This was the pre-social media days of the internet and the idea of networked pocket computers with cameras on them didn’t exist yet; so the idea of posting pictures of cool/funny found items online was novel at best.

So I was cutting edge in that respect.

Why did I get sick of it? A few reasons but mainly it was the guilt of posting people’s discarded notes and making light of their situations. Take for example, the first piece of “found art” I ever posted: A desperate flyer for a “Lost Ferret” that was shoved under my door on South Hancock Street on a bone freezing day in Madison, WI.

Of course, the flyer was funny. It was desperate, homemade and — most importantly — the ferret was most likely dead. Wisconsin winter’s were brutal so one could imagine the poor ferret escaped his home and simply perished in the cold. This was inherently comedic to me and others.

So the idea was to share supposedly “dumb” stuff online with others. Much like how, in the real world, I would have shared that “Lost Ferret” flyer with a handful of people in real life, I would share these items with others hip to my site via the Royal Journal’s Gallery of Found Art.

And that was cool for a while. But then the realization of “What the heck am I doing?” comes up.

What I started to realize is that all the Royal Journal was, was really a testament to my position as a privileged white man picking up discarded notes left behind by others, scanning them in a posting it for everyone in the world to (potentially) access.

This was hammered home when sometime in 2001 I got an email from the author of one of those discarded notes asking me why I posted it online. I explained that I find random things that seem interesting and then scan them in and post them online. Their only response was, “Weird…”

That’s when I started of thinking of what I was doing. Who the audience was and how I (inadvertently) was placing the authors/creators of those notes at risk.

I realized that what I personally found “entertaining” was potentially hurting people when placed online.

While nothing ever really went “viral” it was in many ways pre-viral the way I was taking things others discarded and created “art” based on their work.

And I hated that idea.

The Onion (1995-2001)

Also, when people started to connect me and the Royal Journal with my day job at the Onion it really started to get sickening.

The Onion famously did not accept any unsolicited submissions. So when people connected me to the Royal Journal and the Onion I started to get tons of unsolicited — and utterly unfunny and crappy — headline and story idea pitches from random people.

So by 2001 I was very burned out from my thankless day job at the Onion and I was equally burned out by a “solo” project with the Royal Journal so I pulled (ripped out?) the plug.

Not only did I purge the Royal Journal from my digital life, I also looked at my physical archive of found stuff and decided, “Why am I archiving other people’s discarded notes and pictures? Isn’t that creepy?” So with that, I ripped all of that “found art” up at tossed it in the trash.

Yes, there is something personally cool — and sometimes funny — about finding someone’s discarded notes and such. But sharing such stuff online? Nope. At least not for me anymore!

The Creative Void (2001-2025)

The explanation is fairly boring: I just never had a reason to update or maintain a web presence in this age of social media.

That’s it!

The Future (2025 and beyond)

So hopefully that will fill in the blanks on my online presence! As for why I haven’t written or said anything online on my personal website for 24+ years? Life happens, and I haven’t had the creative urge until recently.

As the kids say: Watch this space!