« World Toilet Summit | Main | Turn Down the Heat »
September 30, 2005
It's a Small World in the Land of Squip
From my backlog of topics I've meant to write about but never got around to, one of them is the email I received from a guy by the name of Ned Vizzini. He wrote:
Funny coincidence: I wrote this book called Be More Chill about a kid in high school who gets a pill that makes him
cool called a "squip." I wanted to know if you'd ever Google'd "squip" and seen the "squipiverse" that we set up.
I'm interested in how you came up with the name and what it means to you. I assume that we both just pulled "squip" out of the collective
ether...
My initial reaction after reading Ned's email was to laugh out loud. I had indeed Googled the term "squip" based on the searches that showed up in my stats back in the day when I was using the squipper.com domain. Though I didn't do all that much research on it, I did come across Ned's world of squip web sites and never made the connection that a book was involved. I responded to Ned's email and explained to him the origin of my use of the name "squip." Squipper was a nickname given to me in 1995 that eventually was shortened to squip. I'm sure Ned was surprised to learn that someone out in the webiverse actually had that as a nickname.
Now about the book of squip, aka Ned's book titled "Be More Chill" ...
On October 21, 2004 the New York Times wrote:
IMAGINE a pill that could make you cool. Ned Vizzini did, and the squip -- a tiny ingestible supercomputer that gives you social
advice on the spot (''Be jaded and profane'' or ''Keep looking her in the face'') -- became the centerpiece of his novel for teenagers,
''Be More Chill'' (Miramax, 2004).
To market the book, Mr. Vizzini, 23, asked a friend who is a Web designer, Adam Collett, to help him build a tongue-in-cheek Web site promoting squips as if they were real. ''Adam said, 'One Web site?! Why not create a world of Web sites?'' Mr. Vizzini recalls. So with $13,500 from Miramax -- along with contributions by a growing number of online followers -- Mr. Vizzini and Mr. Collett built the Squipiverse (iwanttobecool.org), a constellation of 14 Web sites devoted to all fictional things squip: squip news, squip viruses, even squip detractors. And while the teenagers involved control their computers -- as opposed to vice versa -- there's a sense in which the creativity and community of the Squipiverse makes them, well, cool.
"... as if they were real." hehehe. They are indeed, only not in pill form. A tiny ingestible supercomputer called a squip and recollection of my own high school cool/not cool status was enough to get me to buy Ned's book. I really enjoyed the read. And hey, they have SQUiP? stickers. Me? I want a SQUiP? t-shirt. Only mine shouldn't have a question mark at the end simply because I am, and always will be, the original "Squip." :-)
Cindy
Comments
I'd *love* one of those little supercomputers to give me advice on the spot - as long as it wasn't running on Windoze!
Oh and we've done our podcast! See - you're influence rubbed off on us.
Brain matter deposited by: Piggy and Tazzy on October 3, 2005 6:39 AM
That's just cool.
Brain matter deposited by: BLUE on October 3, 2005 10:09 AM
Hey Squip, thanks so much for writing this and combining forces on our Google-ability--trust me that your site will be linked from the new NedVizzini.com, which is currently under development (and has been for a month) at www.squip.org.
Brain matter deposited by: Ned Vizzini on October 3, 2005 5:59 PM