That’s a very good question, I’m glad you asked it. Actually, I asked it of myself. I was using your voice though. That’s right, you’re a voice inside my head. Everyone who reads this thinks I’m talking to them, but really, I’m talking to you. Only you are a voice inside my head. The others only wish they were inside my head. You alone are the one who is truly special.

So what’s the point of this site? Well, quite simply, we’re just four friends who thought it would be cool to have a website. We liked what we saw on the internet and we wanted in. Webcomics, blogs, podcasts, video shorts… we consumed this sort of content on a daily basis and to be honest we were sort of sick of passive consumption. We wanted to give back, to contribute to the internet (as though it needed our help), to create a little instead of solely consuming. We could’ve gone the easy route and just contributed to other sites, but fuck that. We built our own site. A site we’ll fill up with the kind of shit we love finding on the internet and hopefully you’ll enjoy some of it. Maybe not all of it, but hopefully some of it. Tell your friends! Who are we and what do we hope to do? Read on true believer.


Ok, here’s the deal. You will notice that currently there are no ads up here at 9to5 (dot cc). If at all possible, we’d like to avoid plastering the site in advertising and constant obnoxious pop-ups demanding that you like us on facebook or share us on twitter. If we ever do make the decision to sell off some space for advertising, we promise to make it the least annoying as possible. You may also notice that we don’t even have a way (as of yet) for you to give us any money. No tip jar or merchandise or anything like that is currently available. Right now, everything that we do is out of love. Love for you. We eventually will probably create a way for you to donate to us or to buy merchandise or something like that. Shit ain’t free people. That does mean that currently we’re paying for everything on our own out of our own pockets.

So for now, if you like what we’re doing, we only ask one thing from you that will cost you absolutely nothing.  Would you kindly share our page with your friends? This will be the only place where we straight up ask you to do so. Tell them about it, link to us, whatever you want to do; just do it. We’re just four people on the internet trying to entertain you. If you’re really lazy, just use that share button that we’ve handily provided on all the posts (we made it small and unobtrusive since that’s how we roll), it’s got all the big sharing services in there. You know, Facebook, Twitter, reddit, Baidu… what the fuck is Baidu? Who even uses Baidu? Oh I see, it’s Chinese. I guess Chinese people use Baidu. You learn something every day.

TL;DR: If you like us, share us. We can’t afford advertising.

Keith, despite suffering from the occasional crippling spell of attention deficit disorder, is sort of the drive behind the 9to5 (dot cc) empire of gum and toothpicks. As days turned to weeks, to months, to years, he kept on. Organizing evenings to ‘work on the site’ which usually boiled down to evenings of ‘getting drunk and talking louder than everyone else’, demanding additional sketches and comic layouts from Scott and Sophie even though there was no actual site yet and continually sending lists of ‘cool shit we could do with the site’ to Jorn. Keith was that guy, the guy who never gave up. He currently writes his weekly column “WTF World”, will likely be hosting on all of the podcasts, and is 1/3 of the cast and creative team behind 9to5 (illustrated).  He also does a lot of the Fuck Mondays. He also put the site together visually, forging the “look and feel” of it all. That look and feel of course being “poorly thrown together and photocopied mid-90’s zine.”

Scott is the muscle. Sometimes he likes to pick up a lot of small people at once, especially when he’s been drinking. “Climb on my back” he’ll say, with a deep laugh, “allow me lift you!” It’s pretty good times. He’s also the computer graphics guy, lots of Photoshop experience and whatnot. In addition to contributing whatever blogs and stuff he can come up with and working the layout and lettering of the comic, Scott will also have a weekly visual piece where he showcases the combination of his artistic talents with his unique sense of humour. The first of these? Pictures of Kanye, Words of Noam. An exploration of hip hop and philosophy juxtaposing imagery of the iconic rapper Kanye West with the philosophical thoughts of Noam Chomsky. I’m excited, you should be too. Eventually he’ll probably be doing something equally entertaining when he gets bored of that too.

Sophie is probably cooler than you are. There’s a good many reasons for why I can say that with so much confidence. I’m not going to share all of them with you, but here’s a few: she’s an awesome artist who listens to heavy metal all the fucking time, has a huge mural (that she painted) of Hellboy in her bedroom, throws axes on a weekly basis just for fun . See? You can’t possibly compete with that sort of awesomeness. Just give up now. Also, Sophie does all the hand drawings for the site, she’s cool like that. Hopefully she’ll also pop up from time to time with her own articles. They’re sure to be awesome.

Jorn is the computer guy of the site, as I already mentioned. I also mentioned the fact that he has an inverted sleep schedule and works overnight and sleeps during the day, right? Man, I gotta come up with something better for the guy. Geek, stays up all night… geek… who stays up… all night. Wow, this is harder than I thought. He plays a lot of videogames, shit I said that already too, didn’t I? Ah ha! He also watches a lot of movies! I knew I had something. Right now he’s playing a whole lot of League of Legends. He does a lot of the back end coding stuff on the site, so I’m told. In all fairness, until he came on board we had something resembling a cross between a MySpace page and a Livejournal. He also suggested the most productive thing we ever did, which was to delete the entire site about 2 weeks ago. Now look at us! He’ll probably be contributing a lot of movie and videogame reviews eventually, since like I said, that’s what he does.

Mondays is time for Fuck Mondays. 9to5 (dot cc) is not our day jobs. Like you may have just read, we’re basically footing the bill for all of this ourselves. So you know how it sucks to go into work on Mondays? Imagine if before going to work you also had to work on your fucking website. That’s why whatever we do on Mondays, it’ll likely be pretty half assed. I suppose any one of the four of us will update it, but so far it’s mostly been Keith.

Tuesdays and Thursdays are when we do 9to5 (illustrated). In its current form our comic is actually based on real e-mail conversations had by the people featured in the comic (most commonly Scott, Sophie and Keith). Strictly speaking, we all sort of collaboratively ‘wrote’ these awful things. Sophie does a couple of little doodles of us for the artwork and Scott does the layout and the lettering. Eventually we’re going to move towards a more put polished, less raw version of the strip (illustrated 2.0 if you will) but for now: enjoy our raw, bareback approach to webcomics.

Wednesdays are for WTF World. Keith has spent most of his life being woefully ignorant of the world around him. No longer! Each week he will keep tabs and comment on popular worldwide web searches, major world news and whatever the hell else happens to be big at the moment. Sort of a blend of real news, celebrity gossip, gaming news and other stuff that for some reason people care about. Sometimes he might even be misinformed! Fun!

Fridays is when 9to5 (dot cc) gets in touch with its artistic side. With two artists on the site (Soph and Scott) we’re gonna try to showcase something that’s a little artsy and hopefully at least a little funny. Scott works a lot in digital arts and Sophie is a more traditional pen and paper kinda gal. Between the two of them they’d better be able to come up with something once a week or I swear to God…

Podcasts are something that we already love to do even though we’ve barely done any.. Basically, when we get together we talk about random shit that we love (the same shit we base this site around!). We just added microphones and we call them podcasts. There’s going to be 3 of them all told (and maybe a fourth if you finish your plate), keep an eye out in the podcast section to see them slowly crawl into existence.

Comics are not to be confused with 9to5 (illustrated). 9to5 (illustrated) is our comic. 9to5 (comics) is where we write about comics. It’s confusing I know. It stands to reason that people who would get together and write a comic would be into comics right? That’s where we’re coming from. In various degrees all four of us dig comics, both the web and the printed variety. We’ll talk about them. Not on a daily basis, but certainly from time to time.

Movies. Seriously? You need us to explain what movies are? Ok, fair enough, you never asked for this. I’m just writing this on my own. We watch a lot of movies. What kind of movies? Horror, Sci-Fi, Super Hero movies. Geeky movies. We’re actually going to try and lean towards films that are a little off the beaten track as much as possible. Movies that you may have never heard of. Movies that you might not even want to see. Movies that in some cases, you’re probably a better person if you actually never see them.

Music. We’ve had a hard time contributing to this section, but I think it’s important that it exists. All four of us have musical tastes that are about as eclectic as they come and are pretty distant from typical Top 40 fare. We’re gonna try to share some of our best finds and favorite bands with you, the reader. Or the listener. The reading listener. The reading rainbow. Great song. Great show too. I always that it was weird that Geordie LaForge was in Roots. Not THE Roots though. The movie Roots. I wish he was in the band The Roots now, it would’ve made more sense in this section.

We love sports. Ok, that’s not true. Sophie doesn’t give a shit about sports and Jornathan is a casual fan at best. Scott and Keith love sports. Scott loves all sports and that’s weird. Keith loves hockey. We both (and Jorn too) love the Montreal Canadiens, so not to mislead anyone I think I should provide fair warning. We will mostly be writing about the Montreal Canadiens. Important topics of discussion may include: The best place to watch the parade when we win the Cup.

Video games! This may come as quite a shocker: Sometimes people who are really into comics, listen to non-popular music and love horror and sci-fi flicks also really dig videogames. Sophie’s sort of a casual gamer, Jorn is really into PC gaming (although he also plays a lot of PS3 stuff too), Keith owns more consoles than almost everyone he knows (except this one guy) and Scott likes playing games from 7 or 8 years ago, games that are not even old and hip enough to be considered retro.

9to5 (presents) is where we hope to have a few little probably black and white short skits and movies. We’ll try to be funny, we really will. Sometimes we will just try to be annoying. We’ll probably succeed at that with a greater ease than being funny. That’s a good idea, we should just give up trying to be funny and just start trying to piss people off. I hear that’s the best way to get famous on the internet. Piss enough people off and you’ll get all the hits.

Vagrants is where people who are not important get to post things. Basically, if our friends want to post something, we’ll post it for them here. There’s two reasons for this. One reason is that it makes the site a little more diverse. The other is that they’ll be less likely to start their own sites in direct competition to ours. Until Jorn and Sophie start churning out content on a regular basis, their articles will probably pop up in here too.

A whole lot of thanks in advance goes out to anyone who eventually contributes anything to this site, helps us with articles, co-hosting in podcasts, etc. You’ll all get proper credit when you actually do something for the site, for now, you get empty thank yous at the bottom of the About page. HA HA! Take that.

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