About the Site/History

ABOUT THICK AS THIEVES

A retelling by Jinx “T-Unit” Flair.

Thick as Thieves is a part of Xan’s and my infamous “Project Some-Random-Chemical” series, and the first of these to surface and become known to the general public. Affectionately known and hyped as “Project [Na]” (read: sodium) during the development stages, Thick as Thieves is a unique blog run by a group of friends, with posts structured around a series of writing prompts. In this way, we are able to stay in touch with each other from our respective universities from different coasts of the country in a special way.

Two new prompt is posted by God Anonymous II at one minute past midnight (GMT) every Monday, and contributing authors write responses to at least one throughout the week. Our prompts range from serious to ethical, silly to whimsical, even strange to murderous! Inspiration for prompts are drawn from a variety of sources, such as current events, random ponderings, and even articles from New York Times columnist Randy Cohen’s The Ethicist.

HISTORY

Thick as Thieves is run by Xan and Jinx and is temporarily hosted on Jinx’s domain castrophany.net. It went online and became established as Thick as Thieves on Monday, July 7th, 2008 with its five original authors, Alexandra (Xan) “Chaos” Englehart, Jinx “T-Unit” Flair, Count “I Eat Women Fo’ Breakfast” Mein, Regina Phalange, and Asuka “Japanese dictator” Kisaragi.

The idea came from an idea that the two of us had a couple years back about creating a group blog. While the blog never came to be, Xan started a short-lived livejournal community in fall 2007 called Questions to ponder…. In June of 2008, I realized that I missed humanities and writing for fun (as I attend a technical school), and had a brainwave about combining the two ventures and inviting a couple more authors. This would accomplish the purpose of keeping in touch in a very unique way, fulfill our nerd quota for the week, and force us to keep our creative juices flowing, both in terms of writing and creating new layouts. Xan loved the idea, the two of us recruited three other authors, Count Mein, Regina, and Asuka. And the rest, as per the popular idiom, is history.

Also, here is an except of the conversation, after I explained my rationale behind the idea:

Jinx: some things that went through my mind when i was coming up w/ the idea:
Jinx: 1. you like to write, so it’s harder for you to flake =P
Jinx: 2. i haven’t written anything creatively in a year and its sucking and i can totally tell
Jinx: 3. it’d be FUN
Jinx: and more stuffs
Xan: 1. hehehehhe
Xan: 2. and then we can help each other improve and stuff
Xan: 3. HELL YEAH
Xan: can we brainstorm blog prompt ideas
Jinx: hahahaa hell yeah
Xan: hold on lemme finish blogging
Jinx: kk let me know when cause i’m reading harry potter 7
Jinx: DEATHLY
Xan: HALLOWS
Jinx: DEATHLY
Xan: I SAY MICHAEL, YOU SAY BYRNE
Xan: MICHAEL
Jinx: BYRNE
Xan: HEHE <3
Jinx: uhm why are we awesome?
Xan: that’s the first blog question
Jinx: hahaa fuck yes
Jinx: i’ll take notes

RATIONALE BEHIND THE MADNESS

The name “Thick as Thieves” comes from the proverb, which is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary to mean “close in confidence; intimate; familiar.” We liked the idea even more after we came upon a song of the same name by alternative rock group Dashboard Confessional (listen to it HERE). The song talks about friendship, yet has a more rebellious and sneaky factor than other friendship songs, so it’s not super sappy. It’s about having each other’s backs and helping each other in tough situations, not just emphasizing a generic “cookie-cutter” friendship.

On a nerdier note, the two of us love the way that the name looks and sounds really good on its own, and you don’t need to know the song to get the meaning behind it. Also, it’s really balanced and almost symmetrical, and it contains alliteration ^_^ And it’s just got a nice ring to it.

We named the administrator “God Anonymous II” just because it had a nice ring to it. (We like nice rings.) Also it’s open to jokes such as “I received word from God last night” and “Yesterday God asked me to plan a murder. Should I be worried?” The main reason we chose to have an administrator type author was to keep the prompt posts nice and organized. (We also like organization.) In the planning stages, we foresaw a heated argument between the authors over whether to put the posts in Pacific Standard Time or Eastern Standard Time, as we were split between two different coasts. We solved the problem by deciding to put it in Greenwich Mean Time, to make it simpler (this is debatable) for everyone. Then we found out that some countries in GMT observe daylight savings time while others don’t, so we are specifically going by the time in non-daylight savings, and we chose Reykjavík, Iceland because it sounds cool. It was originally planned for posts to be put up every Sunday, but we changed it to Monday when I pointed out that Sunday is God’s day off, and we can’t expect God to take time from his day off to come up with amazing prompts for us. Understandable, yes? Very.

LAYOUT – VERSION 01 – AN INVASION OF MECHANICAL MINDS

This layout, An Invasion of Mechanical Minds, is a joint layout created by Xan and Jinx. Jinx came up with the color scheme and concept and drew the robot, and Xan animated the robot and did all the coding and wordpress setup in Wordpad and various other text editors (including a short stint in Adobe Dreamweaver when the stylesheet got too gigantic). The banner was made in Adobe Photoshop CS, and the robot was animated in Adobe Flash CS3. The fonts used were Bauhaus 93, Tahoma, Georgia, and Verdana. No brushes were used in the layout.