I built my first website in the fall of 1995. I was a freshman in college that year, and among the random documents shoved into my hands upon my arrival was a half sheet of paper explaining that I had an email address and 20 mb of web server space. It had rudimentary access instructions, and a password printed at the bottom.

Considering that it was the first year they’d offered this futuristic technology, free of charge to every student, they were unusually nonchalant about it. Almost none of the professors wanted to use email, few students had enough money to own computers, and there wasn’t an established way to cite the internet as a source in 1995. The internet had no place in everyday university life.

For most, that paper was quickly forgotten, sorted to the bottom of a pile of intake papers that would never again see human eyeballs.

Not me. I seized on the idea immediately. Maybe I could make a website and post some of my writing? How hard could that be?

Within a few weeks I’d discovered the 24-hour computer labs, and my fate was sealed. All at once I’d found my future profession, and the primary distribution method for every creative project I’d ever be involved with ever again.

By Christmas break, the first version of this website was live. It is mercifully lost to history, only ever available at a university subdomain with an index so many folders deep that the URL extended across the entire length of a standard sized business card.

In 2004, that site became brainpanonline.com. It exists now for the same reason that it existed then. I felt like making it, so I did. Sometimes I feel like making music. Sometimes I write. Sometimes I create other things.

It’s how I landed on the name Brainpan. It would be a sort of skillet that would combine the things bouncing around in my brain and transform them into something else. Art by way of Hamburger Helper. A nonesene jambalaya.

The “online” suffix is there because in 2004, the internet was old enough for all the good domain names to be taken, but young enough that it still made sense to indicate that something existed online.

I’m not very good at naming things. The only reason I haven’t changed it to something better is so that it can serve as a warning to you, the consumer. These things aren’t here because they’re good, they’re here because I decided they should exist, and things that exist need somewhere to do it.

Every painting needs a wall, so I made both.