SpinnWebe - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

SpinnWebe is the personal website of Greg Galcik, also known as "spinn." It gathered the most fame as the home of the Dysfunctional Family Circus

Dysfunctional Family Circus

The Dysfunctional Family Circus is the name of several long-running parodies of the syndicated comic strip The Family Circus, featuring either Bil Keane's artwork with altered captions, or original artwork made to appear like the targeted strips...

, which ran in the late 1990s. Additionally, the site has been and continues to be the showcase for a number of Galcik's other projects, which generally have interactive humor as the unifying theme; in this respect, it anticipated the development of later sites such as Fark

Fark

Fark is a community website created by Drew Curtis that allows members to comment on a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites. As of June 2009, the site boasts approximately four million unique visitors per month, which puts it among the top 100 English language websites...

and Something Awful

Something Awful

Something Awful, often abbreviated to SA, is a comedy website housing a variety of content, including blog entries, forums, feature articles, digitally edited pictures, and humorous media reviews. It was created by Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka in 1999 as a largely personal website, but as it grew, so...

. The name SpinnWebe comes from an infamously bad machine translation of the German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

word for "spider web."

Origin

In March 1993, Galcik started an FTP site on a machine called "spider," named after the song Spider
Apollo 18 (album)
Apollo 18 is They Might Be Giants' fourth studio album. It was released in 1992 and named after the Apollo missions, the last of which was Apollo 17....

by They Might Be Giants

They Might Be Giants

They Might Be Giants is an American alternative rock band formed in 1982 by John Flansburgh and John Linnell. During TMBG's early years Flansburgh and Linnell were frequently accompanied by a drum machine. In the early 1990s, TMBG became a full band. Currently, the members of TMBG are...

. This site began as a way to serve files for various personal projects, including audio samples from TMBG songs. As the site continued to grow and as Web technology began to emerge, he began to phase out the FTP site in June 1994 and created "The Spider WWW Site."

Galcik later shortened the name to "SpiderWeb", but after receiving a letter from a company called Spiderweb Communications warning they carried a trademark on the name "Spiderweb", he changed the name of the site to "SpinnWebe" in April 1995. Galcik also derived his Internet alias, "spinn", from this word.

Dysfunctional Family Circus

In 1995, Galcik started the SpinnWebe version of Dysfunctional Family Circus

Dysfunctional Family Circus

(DFC), an interactive Family Circus parody

Parody

A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...

where visitors were invited to submit alternative captions for the widely-syndicated Bil Keane

Bil Keane

William Aloysius Keane , better known as Bil Keane, was an American cartoonist. He is most notable for his work on the long-running newspaper comic The Family Circus, which began its run in 1960 and continues in syndication, drawn by his son Jeff Keane.-Biography:Born in Philadelphia,...

comic strip. Galcik and a group of editors hand-picked the best captions for publication on the site. This curated approach is unusual, especially for a website with as much traffic as the DFC: the pool of submissions often exceeded a thousand captions per comic, and were generally edited down to around sixty. Fans of the DFC claim that this editing process helped maintain a higher standard of humor that other Family Circus parodies could not reach.

Bil Keane

Bil Keane

has stated that he was initially unbothered by the parody, but he began to become uncomfortable with it due to the prevalence of blue humor in the published captions, and because readers were complaining to him. In September 1999, King Features Syndicate, the distributor of Family Circus, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Galcik. While the case could certainly have been contested on the basis of fair use

Fair use

Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders...

, Galcik elected to honor the request out of courtesy toward Keane.

Other highlights

SpinnWebe is home to many different features, some of which have their own domain names. Current projects include:

A-1 AAA AmeriCaptions and its earlier incarnation It's a Dysfunctional Life), a feature similar to the DFC where visitors write captions for candid photos
Trapezoidal Inclination, or Brainshots, a blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

that has run, on and off, since December 2000
amusing.org, which presents a different visitor-submitted sentence or phrase six times a week, often of a surreal
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

or absurd
Absurd
Absurd or The Absurd may refer to:* Absurdity, general and technical usage - associated with extremely poor reasoning, the ridiculous, or nonsense....

nature, and also allows users to submit illustrations of past entries
abevigoda.com, a site that shows Abe Vigoda
Abe Vigoda
Abe Vigoda is an American movie and television actor. Vigoda is well known for his portrayal of Sal Tessio in The Godfather, and for his portrayal of Detective Sgt. Phil Fish on the sitcom television series Barney Miller from 1975–1977 and on its spinoff show Fish that aired from February 1977 to...

's current "status" (alive or dead)
Scribs, a webcomic
Webcomic
Webcomics, online comics, or Internet comics are comics published on a website. While many are published exclusively on the web, others are also published in magazines, newspapers or often in self-published books....

that also has a "reader mail" section, in which readers submit questions for the two central characters to answer

Notable past projects have included the Nipple Server (in which users rated pictures of Galcik's left nipple based on a rubric of panache, color, perkiness, and overall impression), and 1-900-ZWEBLÖ (an advice column in which web-submitted questions were answered by members of a fictitious secret cabal

Cabal

A cabal is a group of people united in some close design together, usually to promote their private views and/or interests in a church, state, or other community, often by intrigue...

or shadow government

Shadow government (conspiracy)

The term shadow government besides its party political meaning can also refer to what is sometimes called "the secret government" or "the invisible government" , an idea based on the notion that real and actual political power does not reside with publicly elected representatives but with private...

Origin

Dysfunctional Family Circus

Other highlights

Further reading

Dysfunctional Family Circus controversy