Let’s get the link out of the way first:

To see the slideshow, click HERE!

Now for some rhetoric.

Flush2x.com was registered in early May of 2003. A day or so later I registered FlushTwice.com as well since that was exactly how I phonetically pronounced flush2x in the first place. The main reason why I registered flush2x.com was because it was shorter, and I thought the whole flush2x thing was a cool shorthand that would catch on. In retrospect it wasn’t one of my better ideas, but they are both domains I maintain, and Flush2x.com now forwards to FlushTwice.com, so get over it.

In the beginning the whole point of the website was to post the jokes people were forwarding to me in my e-mail. The idea being that I got so much shit in my daily e-mail that you’d have to flush twice to get it all down the sewer pipe.

It may be hard to believe, but in 2003, most people did not have internet. Even those who did weren’t exactly the most computer literate on the face of the earth, and worse yet, dialup was still the primary means of delivery for the internet. Weblogging was still very young, and the general public had no idea what the heck a blog was anyway.

So Flush Twice was to be a weblog revolving around jokes. It was just the copy/paste text, so I started to throw in the pictures I had been forwarded as well. Google’s search engine fell in love with Flush2x.com and before long Flush Twice was the #1 search result for the “bigass.jpg”. It was also the  #1 search result for a series of “passed out” images as well.

Flush2x.com was constantly getting hits from Google search results based on the jokes and images that were being posted daily. I kept my HTML extraordinarily simplistic, and there was no advertising either, so that probably also contributed to the high page ranking.

One other factor that kept me on top of the search engine game was the fact that I posted a lot on “Slashdot” and dropped that flush2x.com link into my sig as well as posted next to my username. Since I know how to form complete sentences and make valid points, I was frequently modded up and enjoyed more than a few +5 interesting, informative, and funny karma boosting moments. Sadly, “Slashdot.org” is not as influential as it used to be, and the IQ of your typical Slashdotter has sadly declined making it less likely to use reason, logic, or facts to gain any respect within their echo chambers. I don’t post in online forums very often these days. This is sad, because I used to enjoy it quite a bit.

Now about those images I was posting… It dawned on me that there might be some “intellectual property” issues that could arise from including those pictures. While no one ever contacted me and told me to take them down, I didn’t really want to take that chance anymore. The problem was, that without a few images scattered about, the site looked really, really dull. The obvious answer was to create my own original images, but somehow I couldn’t see taking pictures from around my house and posting them as being a fantastic idea. You know, it probably would have turned out pretty cool now that I think about it.

So I made a wisecrack about replacing the pictures with stick figures in my blog, and that made my friend Darin laugh. Well a couple of weeks later after the paranoia had really started to sink in, I decided to do it. I was going to make a daily panel comic featuring stick figures, and the punchline was to be completely optional.

Webcomics weren’t quite so prolific back then either. There were probably fewer than 2000 back in 2003. Today there have been well over 10,000 documented webcomics that have come and gone. While it’s true that there were some well established webcomics from a much earlier point in time, they simply did not have the strong online presence that we enjoy today. To be honest, I knew about a few webcomics, but my early offerings was not a “me too” attention whoring stunt. It was a pathetic attempt to decorate the pages with eye candy so people who visited wouldn’t go blind from staring at the sans serif font.

It hadn’t been quite a year when I finally poked my head out of my ass to see just how original my particular webcomic was. Surprisingly, I can still say that to this very day my character style is still quite unique when compared with anything else out there. No one ever made stick figures quite like I made them, and no one else’s characters look quite like mine do now. I feel fairly confident that Flush Twice is, without an argument, mine.

But I also saw something else out there… I saw that while my webcomic had originality in the style department, it was quite grainy and pixelated in quality. It also wasn’t really that funny. You can probably tack on the part where it was getting really difficult to maintain, and to sum it all up: It sucked.

Yes, after all is said and done, I admit that when Flush Twice is held next to the top 500 webcomics, it is still not in the top 500 webcomics. Heck, it’s not even worthy of being in the top 1000! No… Flush Twice is simply not that great. It never was, and it never will be, but it does have a history, so let’s give it credit for staying in the game.

So I want to thank you for visiting my site and for taking the time to read all this. Hopefully you’ll like what you see enough to come back once in a while, and hopefully I’ll have something new up here for you to see as well.

In case you missed the link to my ancient archive, I’ll repeat it HERE. It’s a nicely scripted slideshow that should play well.

Now click and be happy!

-D. Sauer
Creator and Author of Flush Twice

Contact: flush2x@gmail.com
(Yes, you can e-mail me. Go ahead and try it. I promise don’t bite.)