John J. Galbo

Sure did — middle school, right at the hinge point where the typewriter lab was being phased out for Macs.

Honestly? I've spent 24 years hesitating to use the word. I started a fan site about a cartoon made of talking fast food when I was a teenager, and at some point — somewhere between the convention floors, the interviews, and the 2 AM premiere recaps — the habits became the job: show up, get it right, name your sources, correct it when you blow it, and never pretend you were somewhere you weren't. Nobody handed me a credential for that; I just kept doing it until the receipts piled up. So to me it means being a reliable witness. Not the biggest outlet, not the fastest aggregator — the person who was actually watching, wrote down what happened, and cared enough to get the details right for the twelve people who'd notice and the twelve thousand who wouldn't. If you do that long enough about anything — even a block of weird late-night cartoons — it turns out that's the whole job.

The unglamorous truth: WordPress, running on the Classic Editor, which they will pry from my cold dead hands. Under the hood it's a small army of plugins doing the heavy lifting — Rank Math for SEO, Wordfence standing guard against a surprisingly persistent stream of villains, MailPoet for The Test Pattern newsletter, Formidable for forms, WPeMatico quietly herding five podcast feeds into place every night. Beyond the site: Google Workspace for the editorial side, Discord for the community, OBS for Twitch nights, and a Pixel that's taken every convention photo I've published for years. But if I'm honest, the most important tool in my kit lately is the Internet Archive — I've spent this year excavating two decades of my own work out of the Wayback Machine after various hosts and partners took it to the grave. Ask me about that sometime. Actually, don't; we'll be here all day.