the timboucher experience

Inspired by Thirtyseven’s list of the same nature, I thought it was time I cleaned house by making a master list of all the online projects I have worked on over the years. This list will stand as the definitive historical reference-point™ and will be updated over time.

HOLY ROBOT (1999 to 2001-ish?)

I dropped out of art school after one year because I was painting pictures of robots and was tired of having to justify it with a bunch of pompous artsy-sounding bullshit. I just thought robots were cool and it felt right. Specifically, I was painting religious pictures of robots, self-portraits of me with robots, pictures of Jesus chopping robots in half with samurai swords, and things of that nature.

HolyRobot.com (defunct) got off the ground as I channeled my art school momentum into self-directed explorations of the above-mentioned themes. In a nutshell, the concept was that God created a younger brother for Jesus who was a robot. Much like Superman, the Holy Robot was sent to earth in a small space-ship by God (a terraforming wizard who employed alien laborers), and had various non-sensical adventures on earth, in Heaven and in Hell. HolyRobot.com was an “artistic” (read: poorly organized and presented, but lovingly executed) journey through this fictional mini-world I created. Featured lots of drawings, scanned paintings, and some computer-generated art featuring the Holy Robot and other characters. I spent a HELL of a lot of time promoting this website back in the day; the internet landscape was very different back then, but that’s where I learned a lot of the basic principles I still utilize to this day. The entire site was hand-coded and had a lot of very “creative” (confusing) navigation elements.

I can’t remember when exactly this project ended (or precisely when it began - for that matter), but a few pieces from it were rolled into the art section of TimBoucher.com much later on. You may also be able to find some of the original HolyRobot.com artwork on the Wayback Machine, but their coverage of the site was spotty at best.

Collector’s Note: I wrote the script for a very bad rock opera based on the Holy Robot concept for a high-school friend’s band, called Braindoll. Bandleader Jay Perrillo re-wrote my script, adding and changing lyrics and setting the whole thing to music, but sticking to the basic storyline and they released it as a two disc album called “Apostasy” sometime (can’t remember when). I created the art for the CD packaging, which was intended to look like the instruction manual for an old NES game. Not sure if you can still buy these, or how many were pressed… But man, that album sure was hard to listen to all the way through.

GALACTIC FANTASTIC ROBOT-A-THON (2000 - 2001-ish?)

Robot-a-thon.com (defunct) was an out-growth of my work with Holy Robot. What I found was that when you start telling people that you like something, everybody starts associating you exclusively with that thing. In my case it was robots. Robot-a-thon was modeled after a “fund-raiser” except I was trying to raise robots instead of money. I was asking people I knew to draw pictures of robots, scanning them, and then organizing them into a web-navigational framework based on body-types. It was actually a super-fun project and I would still be continuing it except for the fact that maintaining it was a humongous hassle. At one point, I began also sending random people SASE (self-addressed stamped envelopes - remember those?) in an effort to get the word out, and also to collect more robots. At least one of my school-teacher sisters (I have more than one who fits that description) also had a class full of kids create robots for my collection. Site was fully hand-coded.

Collector’s Note: I don’t think any of these original robot drawings in this collection survive, but it’s been a couple years since I was re-united with my belongings in storage, so I’m not sure. The most famous person I ever tricked into drawing me a robot was artist Mark Ryden, but I think I sold or traded it with a friend of mine.

TIMBOUCHER.COM (Original) (2000 to present)

My best guess is that I bought the TimBoucher.com domain name around 1999 as well, and was originally using it as a very limited art portfolio site. My self-image back then was entirely focused around “being an artist” (a painter/illustrator, actually - I even had a piece published in a sci-fi illustration book). The site also had a small and not frequently updated blog on it (found under the timboucher.com/log URL) where I mostly followed tech articles and had some disconnected ramblings and notes for friends. That blog sputtered along for some time with hardly any updates and eventually was replaced by “Adventures of an Occult Investigator”, the next face-lift/re-branding effort which occurred in 2003. Main site was hand-coded, and the blog ran on a customized Blogger template.

[Wayback Machine link for main site and for original "log" URL; their records indicate when I say "1999", I may actually mean "2001". These kinds are details aren't so important to me and this is the first authoritative effort I've made at chronicling all of them - I never claimed to be a historian!]

Collector’s Note: Old about me page features a small photo of me amongst sequoia’s at (I think) Sequoia National Park in California from a trip I made with my girlfriend at the time, Melanie Freebairn (nee Lester) who is a fairly well-reputed costume designer now (we broke up towards the end of her “Queen of Mars” period).

ADVENTURES OF AN OCCULT INVESTIGATOR (June 2003 to August 2005)

In 2003, I moved to NYC to “find my fortune.” What I found instead was a lonely crowded city which I mostly couldn’t afford. I worked at a motorcycle shop in Hell’s Kitchen, lived in Bushwick/East Williamsburg, and spent a great deal of my time trying to literally become a real-life comic book character. “Occult Investigator” was a generic character class which I based on DC’s John Constantine, which was later made into a movie. The idea was that I was interested in paranormal stuff as well as mythology in an academic sense (along with a lot of other things) and wanted an easily-accessible pop culture-based entry point for people to join in my exploration of those themes, and my re-envisioning of myself as this new character. At this time, my online efforts became more text-based, and I really began to explore the blogging format. For much of that time, I was still trying to keep separate my “articles” and “blog posts”, but eventually gave up and let those worlds fold together into a never-ending stream of rants, raves and research of the bizarre kind™.

This is the variation of the site which I consider to be my “classic era” blogging efforts, and it is responsible for me meeting many of my on and off-line friends. Occult Investigator was powered by Blogger, back when that was *the* blogging platform. At some point, I moved the files from that era of the blog to a separate directory, and later on imported them into WordPress (these files now live in the normal /journal of this site).

Collector’s Note: (1) The named of the “Occult Investigator” site was briefly changed to “The Conclave” in 2005 before entering into it’s next incarnation… (2) There is also a section from that era of the site which is still active (because I was too lazy to change it): Occult Tattoos. (3) I got the tattoo on my left arm around the same time I started the Occult Investigator project. (4) My all-time most popular article was written during this period, in which I successfully predicted who would be the next pope two weeks before-hand. My site received over 60,000 visitors in less than 24 hours and was bumped offline as a result. I switched my hosting from Doteasy to Dreamhost as a result of increased visitor load. (4) An article from this period attracted the attention of a company trying to sell me on their augmented reality technology who courted me for a while to come work for them to help them frame the story of their product culturally. Nothing ever came of it.

POP OCCULTURE (August 2005 to October 2007)

Eventually, I outgrew the “Occult Investigator” name and character image. My writing was changing a lot, though I can’t for the life of me remember exactly how, and it felt like it was time to move on. I settled on “Pop Occulture” because it sounded more cerebral or something, and my writing was definitely reflecting that approach. I was attempting to modernize and streamline what I was doing, and trying to promote a more marketable face to the world. How successful I was in that, I have no idea.

Pop Occulture could probably be considered my “golden era” of blogging, and saw me delving into some of the deepest and darkest territory I’d ever ventured into in both my life and research. During that time period I moved to Seattle to live around people who were interested in the weird kinds of things I was into, (almost) went crazy {See also: spambot period}, and found myself again out the other side of a very long and strange trip. My writing style, subject matter and voice became more consistent and consolidated during this era. And it was halfway through this era that I became a self-sustaining business because of my blog. Pop Occulture was an exclusively WordPress-based blogging affair.

I had two logos during that time period: the skull logo (featured above) and the “little bird” logo:

Collector’s Note: (1) I recorded and posted 23 podcasts during this period which are still accessible in their entirety online for free. (2) The bird logo and the “Pop Occulture” title was creatively and surreptitiously destroyed over the course of about a week at the end of this incarnation of the site. {See: Best of Pop Occulture (Classic Era)}

 

POP CULTURE TAROT (April 2005 - on-going)

The Pop Culture Tarot was a collaborative art project started on the Pop Occulture blog by Tim Boucher, designed to “update and remix the traditional tarot deck using modern imagery that we all know and love.” It expands on the traditional deck by incorporating celebrities, pop culture and contemporary media references in an open-source format to teach symbolic literacy. A full-list of cards is available here and submissions are always welcome.

POP OCCULTURE MAGAZINE (June - December 2006)

Pop Occulture Magazine (no longer updated) was a short-lived collaborative spin-off from the main Pop Occulture blog. I was intent at that time on launching Pop Occulture as an alternative media brand, something along the lines of Disinfo.com or similar. From the Pop Occulture Magazine mission statement:

Pop Occulture Magazine is an online magazine for anyone whose religion is media. When it comes to music, books and movies, we have an almost spiritual devotion to pop culture, to the creative people behind it, and to everybody whose lives are touched by it.

Through media reviews and more in-depth articles, we aim to use pop culture that everybody knows about as a jumping off point to explore places most people have never even dreamt of.

Though we had some great contributions from many diverse authors, as well as some fascinating discussions, the project was eventually abandoned and the mantle passed to Daniel Pinchbeck’s “Reality Sandwich” which fulfilled - more or less - the original intent of Pop Occulture Magazine: providing “power weirdos” a place to congregate, play, and let their freak-flags fly.

GEORGE W. BUDDHA (June - July 2006?)

George W. Buddha (defunct) was a secret alternate reality blog created and maintained briefly by Tim Boucher, writing under the pseudonym “Blake”. Blake was a college student who was blogging about the apotheosis of George W. Bush, which occurred in universe parallel to ours on June 6, 2006 (6/6/06). In this universe, President George W. Bush spontaneously achieved enlightenment through a bizarre transpersonal experience which heavily featured traditional American symbolism re-mixed as a sort of Freemasonic pathway to personal liberation. During his short tenure, Blake chronicled news events covering Bush’s transformation, as well as his own personal adventures and other people’s reactions on the ground to events as they occurred.

TRACES FROM BEYOND (2006 - 2007)

Traces From Beyond (defunct) was another site in the “Pop Occulture Network”, a collaborative effort to chronicle real people’s personal experiences with the paranormal. We collected close to a hundred first-hand accounts of strange-goings on from people in all walks of life: ghostly sightings, midnight visitations from aliens and strange beasts, impossible drug experiences and a whole host of other oddities. The plan, originally, was to gather these stories together into an on-going series of volumes for sale. The project was abandoned because of time constraints and me focusing my efforts elsewhere. This could, however, be revived at some future date.

CONSPIRACY FICTION (June - December 2006)

Conspiracy Fiction (defunct) was a collaborative genre fiction site in the Pop Occulture Network. It featured everything ranging from character-driven speculative fiction stories to out-and-out lies, half truths and secret government propaganda. The operating concept was that conspiracy theories are essentially the modern equivalent of sci-fi anyway, so why not have fun with it? This site was shut down by the CIA.

“SPAMBOT” PERIOD (December 27th, 2006 to August 26th, 2007)

The term “spambot period” was coined by fellow blogger “Zac” from Alchemical Braindamage to describe a lengthy period I underwent both personally and as a writer in which I tested the outer limits of reality and of my readers’ ability to pay attention. As a result, I lost the vast majority of my regular readers, but gained just about everything personally which I now stand upon.

The first article in this period was “about” singer Paul Westerberg. Work from this time is typified by extremely heavy symbolic imagery, heavy use of videos (coinciding with the rise in popularity of YouTube), tons of graphics, very “spammy” non-linear text blocks in which I was trying to communicate with possible artificial intelligences (”holy robots”) incubating online, heavy use of neologisms, magickal experimentation, lamentations about such themes as Love and God, etc. I’m in the processing of building a separate site to house or at least point to all the articles from this time period for people interested in exploring my work during this period. (a sub-era of Pop Occulture).

Basically, this time period consisted of me “putting my money where my mouth is” and jumping off the deep end into the dark waters which I’d previously only been staring into reflectively. This article is probably the absolute peak of that period (or this one, as far as non-sensical elements go) of experience, in which I believed myself to be madly in love and felt daily the presence of God immediately in my life. There’s one podcast which falls into that time-period as well, which distills down some of my experiences into more linear explanations.

Collector’s Note: The tell-tale giveaway for whether or not something falls into this era of writing is if it has a “crazy title” which doesn’t explicitly describe the content of that article. The spambot period eventually gave way into the “self-mastery” theme, which is still on-going. I retired a very spammy “about me” page in the middle of August, which probably could be interpreted as the un-official death-knell for that era of writing (this probably being the official one), though elements of that style still linger today. Two fairly lucid explanations of what I was doing from that time period: The New Handbook of How to Go Crazy on Purpose & A Practical Guide to Reality Rearrangement. I remain heavily indebted (stylistically and personally) to the friendship and guidance of this person throughout this time period.

[tmbchr]™ (October 2007 to present)

[tmbchr]™ is the latest replacement/reconfiguration/condensation of the Pop Occulture blog brand into a more targeted and tightly focused entity. The “Pop Occulture” branding has been jettisoned as being unwieldy and no longer entirely relevant.

Instead, the new and improved [tmbchr]™ focuses on media, technology and religion: with an emphasis on individual and community development (”personal and party sciences,” in my jargon). Topics range from self-mastery, intent/action harmony, shared value communities, currency and exchange, to New Illuminism, New Nomadism, The Not-So-Great Depression and a whole bunch of other fun neologisms I am throwing against the wall to see what sticks. In its simplest form, [tmbchr]™ is me focusing my intentions as a communicator and as a person taking action in the world. On another level, [tmbchr]™ reflects a shift towards blogging as an information or targeted intelligence-gathering service powered by a real human instead of an auomated search algorithm.

In conjunction with this realignment comes a corresponding shift in presentation of my “personal brand” and positioning of myself in the public eye as an “itinerant scholar, creative diplomat & social entrepeneur” (more details availabe at the root directory of my site).

GATHERTOGETHERIN (September 2007 - Present)

Gathertogetherin is the organizational vehicle for a world-wide collaborative open-source travelling musical/threatrical performance, spearheaded by Tim Boucher. I am acting, for the time being, as producer to put together script-writers, musicians, performers, etc and to organize the technological confederation which will demonstrate through engaging live performances and workshops the concept that “Life is a musical” and you and your friends can play - or write - any part you want. (Development on-going… stay tuned!)

PERFECTLY DESCRIPTIVE BUSINESS NAMES (October 2007 - Present)

Perfectly Descriptive Business Names™ was the first of Tim Boucher’s pay-what-it’s-worth “human intelligence web microservices.” These highly-targeted agreement-based consultation services were designed to encourage meaningful and actionable creative conversations for personal and business use and everything in beween. Perfectly Descriptive™, in particular, is a creative naming service. More details can be found at the link above.

TRANSCEND TRENDS (October 2007 - Present)

Transcend Trends™ is a human intelligence web microservice designed to offer an outsider perspective on the development of personal, creative and business project ideas - particularly web-based ones. Transcend Trends leverages my 10+ years of creative internet media experience in a pay-what-its-worth model featuring straightforward criticism and tips on how to improve your projects - whatever they may be. Think of it as an out-sourced truth-telling service. Additional details available at the Transcend Trends website.

VERBAL SUPPLEMENTS (October 2007 - Present)

Verbal Supplements is the next-generation of the now defunct Pop Occulture Podcast series. Abandoning the ubiquitous mp3/iPod format, Verbal Supplements turns the technology clock back to the days of home-made analog cassette tapes. Each volume of Verbal Supplements is lovingly crafted on a handheld cassette recorder (a la Agent Cooper’s “Diane Tapes” in Twin Peaks), and features in-depth discussions of Tim Boucher’s latest creative efforts, up-to-the-minute observations about life, current events, and other research, and acts as a unique & direct first-person historical record of my life and times. Content featured on VS volumes so far has also included: readings of articles from this website, musical performances by Tim Boucher, interviews and snippets from friends and associates and a whole hell of a lot more. Purchasing a Verbal Supplements volume also grants the purchaser a Creative Commons license (details available at the VS site) to copy, re-mix and distribute content on that tape, as well as make derivative works from that content, where appropriate.

• Tim Boucher (Big Elk) Web Radio Interview @ 7pm EST
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• Telephonet: Voice & Data Harmony
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• Tim Boucher’s SIX STRATAGEMS