How an Aside Became a Five-Year Plan - Features

mike tazman siewert

Mike "Tazman" Siewert -- Goatees: the trend may officially be dead now.

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How an Aside Became a Five-Year Plan

Five years. Damn. When I saw the email from Aaron “Omni” Simmer about the upcoming celebration of AE's 5th Anniversary, my first inclination was to count the years backwards and think… “Haven’t we been doing this longer?” It certainly seems longer.

Back when Aaron and Jeff “Mr. Nash” Nash were finishing high school and I was a country away, they would discuss their varied plans: design a video game… then make a video game from design to implementation… then the radio show… then a website. The name: Armchair Empire. Good name, but I wish they had recycled the name that they used on the school paper: The Propaganda Machine – I always loved the dark humor of that name. At the time, I was impressed (and still am). An actual plan about the future that seems possible. I was so scatterbrained at the time that I almost couldn’t get my mind around the concept – make a plan, follow it through and then execute it. When the plan started, it is actually started and you can’t walk away from it and ignore it. It was a very different way of thinking and working for me and I really couldn’t focus my mind enough to do that sort of thing.

Initially when Aaron asked me to join, I refused (not that he would remember). I didn’t feel as though I had the dedication that he and Jeff had, and I didn’t think that I would be a good addition. One month later, Aaron asked again, and after talking me down, he convinced me to be a part of the team. With the suggestion, I started to treat my early work as a hobby – it was a nice break from technical writing and university homework to be able to write something fun and generally not be serious. The early years were a lot of fun – Aaron kept me on a short leash initially so I always felt as though I had a safety net, and Jeff always made sure that my articles looked great when formatted. Nothing like having a strong team of supporters to help make sure that you don’t fall flat on your face.

As the website started to grow, I managed to remain completely ignored by everyone else on staff and don’t think I conversed with any of them except for passing emails congratulating each other for really good articles. Not that I really feel as though I really talk with the other members of the site, at least I go to meetings now. I make it a habit to read the other writers’ articles now, there are a lot of talented writers on staff and it certainly is a good incentive to write better.

When Aaron asked me to actually be a leader around the website and become the anime editor, I was more than a little surprised. It’s been great to have the clout of the website to feed one of my baser addictions… Japanese animation and lots of it. It’s not as though I’m anyone’s boss yet, but to not have to figure out how to get companies’ attention certainly made this job more palatable, now to figure out how to review large amounts of cash and models (female... not plastic... nor plastic females). It’s been a fun tenure at the website, and here are a few stories that are clean enough to tell you about:

The mystery disc from Square.

This story is so funny to me that I can’t forget it. For a while, I was receiving almost all of my media directly from companies instead of through “central Armchair Empire” like now. Well, one day a “mystery package” arrived at my house while I was at work, it was a single parcel from Squaresoft that was just a small padded envelope (just like every other PS2 game that I’ve ever received). Apparently, this disc arrived by courier service instead of typical US Post, so my Dad signed for it and left it with the rest of my mail.

In those days, I was working kill-shifts. 5 – 12 hour shifts a week plus overtime, and so when I got home I SLEPT. Instead of checking my mail, I went to bed for some sleep before my next shift. Over the course of 6 hours, I had 7 phone calls from Aaron and the PR representative from Square (all long distance) but my dad was screening the calls and wasn’t going to wake me up for anything unimportant. So, he didn’t pass the call along until Aaron called for the 4th time at 1:00 in the afternoon. Feeling that Aaron was sufficiently freaked out, he woke me up from a deep sleep and put me on the phone.

Aaron on the phone “MIKE! THANK GOD! WHAT EVER YOU DO, DON’T OPEN THE PARCEL FROM SQUARE!!”

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Me – “…who is this? … was trying to sleep… what’s so important?”

After about ten minutes of Aaron coaxing consciousness out of me, he told me under no uncertain terms to open the package and that the PR representative from Square would be contacting me soon. He also suggested that this could have dire effects on the website if I opened it. Not two minutes later, she calls and gives me all

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of the information to send it back through Fed-Ex which I end up doing that day. As a “reward”, they sent out a bunch of cool promo stuff over to my house for the next few years and a ton of games. The incident probably helped our standing in the PR community, but I can’t get over how much noise went over a little parcel.

Aaron’s pep-talk where he actually listed off the traffic numbers for the website. The ending line… “so people are actually reading what you write. You might want to consider that.” That is the moment that sticks out in my mind the most. I’m pretty sure that was him channeling Mr. Bouwman, our high school English teacher.

Jeff and I arguing about anime on the old message board. Having to argue with the picture of Jeff in my mind instead of seeing his face is really difficult… damn, I don’t think that I’ve seen his face in about nine years!

My first media event. The trip to Toronto for Sony was definitely a blast. I can’t believe that they flew me out, let me play new games, eat, drink, and watch the Roots perform live. That was probably the most fun.

The hate mail. After I wrote the most venomous review ever (*cough* Undying *cough*) the amount of nasty responses that I drew was staggering. Within the 1^st week, I had 50 emails from people ranging from praising in my vicious attack to people who claimed that I was the coming of the anti-Christ. Initially, I took it in stride and everyone who answered got some sort of a response, until the bulk of responses became angry. At that point I went into defensive and began returning fire with both barrels. Anyone foolish enough to respond had to handle the barrage of questioning of their heads orientation on their body, the sexual orientation of any pets, the genus of their mother, and if they wanted to have a Nike swoosh imprinted on their colon. It took a little while until I grew thick enough skin to take criticism in stride.

The international requests for CD codes or help buying a video game. At one point, I thought it would be really funny to have a “military title” just like Aaron and Jeff, and so I chose the title “Director of Mis-Information” which made me sound like the official PR guy for the site. For the 2-3 years that we had that up, I received all sorts of requests from every corner of the earth for CD codes for their games (not cheats, I’m talking copy-protection) or requests to buy products off of our site in broken English with fake credit card numbers.

All in all, the last 5 years have been a lot of fun for me and I’m looking forward to being around here for a while longer.

- Mike “Tazman” Siewert

(August 6, 2005)

“Only adults like us are allowed to say damn, bitch, ass and hair. So get your helling danging ass back in that bitching damn room dammit! What? Damn! I was just helping you out bitch.”

- Meatwad (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)


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