HOW NITETIME GREW
=================

Nitetime.net did not arrive with a finished business plan or a clean
product roadmap. One experiment suggested another.

  A stream needed station IDs.
  A station needed music.
  The music suggested artwork.
  The artwork suggested a fictional universe.
  A retro Internet site suggested a BBS.
  A BBS suggested IRC.
  IRC suggested Gopher.
  Gopher suggested archives.
  Archives suggested damaged files and recovered transmissions.
  A fictional station suggested an explorable MUD.
  A MUD needed rooms.
  The rooms became the Garage, Studio 608, transmitter rooms,
  archives, and strange locations around Lake Koshkonong.

There is no clean border between the technology and the art. The
server itself is part of the project.


A YEAR OF PUTTERING
-------------------

After roughly a year of continual experiments, the financial result
was not a sudden major success. The material result was more
interesting: a real place had accumulated.

Dan could turn on a station he controlled, watch footage move through
it, and hear his own music beneath it. There were strange movies,
paintings, servers, programs, services people could enter, and a
fictional mythology connecting them.

No single component had to carry the meaning of the whole project.
A logo, song, server, painting, video, or MUD room might look small
alone. Hundreds of such pieces, allowed to refer to one another,
begin to make a world.

The satisfaction was not only in a spectacular finished object. It
was in being able to say:

  I built all of this.
  This place exists because I kept working on it.


THE WORLD AS A CREATIVE ENGINE
------------------------------

Creative work often stalls at the question, "What am I supposed to
make?" Nitetime supplies an answer: make something that belongs on
Nitetime.

That might be a song, poster, transmission, painting, short story,
fake commercial, MUD room, radio experiment, recovered document,
video, terminal interface, or piece of fictional history. Once it
enters the same world, each experiment gives context to the next.

The project grows by accumulation, association, and return.