Happy Birthday, HFP!

Happy Fun Pundit is a year old this week, and to commemorate the event I thought it would be fun to share a few snapshots from the HFP family album. Of course, back in those halcyon early days of 2002, things weren't quite so evolved as nowadays... none of the fancy technology you youngsters take for granted existed yet, but we pioneer bloggers were a hearty lot, and weren't afraid of a little hard work when it meant sharing our ever-so-important opinions with the masses.

Dan and I work on the first incarnation of Happy Fun Pundit, which covered 400 square feet of floor space and consumed hundreds of megawatts of power. Dan (seated) works on his "Kang's Classroom" graphic, hoping to complete it before another vacuum tube exploded and showered him with bits of glass. Luckily, he and the image survived, and the post went on to become one of HFP's most beloved moments.

Back then, we used a tool called "Blogger" to create posts. It was primitive and unreliable, but it was the best we had, and you couldn't beat the price -- FREE. Nowadays it's fashionable to talk a lot of trash about Blogger, but let me tell you something --- if you smacked somebody over the head with a Blogger post, you knew they weren't going to get up again. You try that with one of these "modern" blogs, and you're going to look pretty silly standing there in a puddle of ASCII with a broken-off post in your hand.

We experimented with several different input methods before settling on the "type it in with a keyboard" standard, and I often wistfully wonder if we went the "write" way

Dan cracks wise on Democrat fiscal policy.

Our early readers were not faint-hearted either. Whether it was the 110 baud dialup connections, the cryptic message formats, or Dan's bizarre capitalization style, you had to have moxie to read HFP back in the day. Most of those trailblazers are gone now, having choked on their own vomit one too many times, but we all would've been poorer without them. Or lonelier, anyhow.

Braille readers had an advantage while trying to read HFP's early postings.

OK, actually, we don't know if they actually existed... honestly, I don't think it's reasonable to expect us to figure out who's reading the crazy-ass smoke signals we send out. I mean, what the hell, if I was psychic, I'd be down at the dog track, not sitting in front of a computer. What do you people want from us, anyway?

Early HFP readers were a diverse lot.

The first content on Happy Fun Pundit was, uhm, an eclectic mix of high-spirited commentary heavily spiced with blatant hit-whoring and flattering remarks about Instapundit and Jonah Goldberg. As the blog matured, the range of people to whom we sucked up widened to encompass bloggers other than Instapundit and Jonah Goldberg, although who exactly remains a bit fuzzy. That tall girl, I think, and the hamburger guy in Colorado for sure. And then National Review set up a blog to be more like us, but with Jennifer Lopez and the Buckley's Cough Mixture guy instead of Dan and I. What a bunch of copycats.

Reader mail has always been an important part of Happy Fun Pundit. From day one, the inbox runneth over with kudos, suggestions, threats, and cease-and-desist orders. And we will get back to all of you guys who took the trouble to write, one of these days, just as soon as work slows down a bit.

And the future? Well, not to say too much (we here at HFP never say too much)but if you've been waiting for a blog to be given the full Gilbert and Sullivan treatment, there's something very very wrong with you, and please stop sending us email. More dancing, more singing, more outrageous antics, more kickin' it Bob Fosse style --- these are not going to happen, sicko, so just forget it. Instead, be on the lookout for: