One dark, miserable day in June 2003 the fatherland of The Online Net was taken offline by the evil corporation FreeNetName* and held at ransome until we met their ridiculous demands*. For a while nobody noticed, which infuriated the two employees and their mother no end. However after a while, somebody noticed TON had become slightly too yellow and brought it to my attention - apparently it had something to do with the amount of something, I was too busy drinking apple juice to notice - anyway, I knew from the beginning something had to be done.

The Online Net after FNN took control - it's the small differences

Which was a lie of course, for a while I didn't do anything. People came up to me in the streets, people sent me letters, even Pandy came and expressed his views on the imminent decline of the site and Hardcastle suggested I cut my losses and started from scratch. The latter couple of these motivational talks were to eventually be the catalyst for it's revival, but not for a while yet. I was determined to tweak the nipples of sobriety for a little while longer.

On Tweaking the Nipples of Sobriety
[20:56] Me: what is it about tweaking the nipples of sobriety which makes it so devilishly tempting
[20:56] Rawson: not sure
[20:56] Rawson: maybe to do with raging against the machine
[20:56] Rawson: in a sexual way
[20:56] Me: so nothing to do with theonlinenet.co.uk then

Once we had temporarily (or permenantly as most people thought) lost the domain, there was a surprising increase in productivity with 100% more articles the day after than the day before. For more information on such an occurence please see Why I can't Write An Article by Rawson.

[20:59] Rawson: not unless you want it to be, i always envisioned that to be the thing that TON does

I set about establishing some kind of fiendish rehabilitation to thwart FreeNetName's plan to send me into an early retirement. I approached Kenneth on relaunching the site at http://www.theofflinenet.co.uk/ and made a deal with Hardcastle to get my own section on ihatemyself.org, but none of it was good enough. At the end of the day I was still lying in bed on my own or sitting naked infront of the computer, but without the feel-good feeling of domain ownership which had accompanied me before. Times were desperate, and there was only one man I could rely on to get me out of this mess. Myself.

So after sitting around doing nothing for a further week or so, I finally hit my breaking point when I went to the bathroom try and find a flannel to clean my desk. After an exhausting 10-15 minute search of the room, I discovered we didn't own a flannel and passed out on the landing. When I came to, I was sitting back in my chair with credit card in hand filling in the details, I clicked confirm and a message told me that my domain had been reactivated. This wasn't China I thought, before putting down my chopsticks and making my way to the sauna.

^{*. Freenetname are a pitiful excuse for a company, they have never provided any real support since I began using them and the only contact we have ever had with them has been with a woman. Now i'm not saying I don't like women, I just don't think they should be given jobs where they can piss me off by being shit.

*. There were many demands including the sale of Rawson to the japanese in exchange for some weapons grade plutonium which we were then to store in 1000 seperate locations around the UK for 10 years and await further instructions, they also wanted a pencil sharpener, but amongst the TON crew we couldn't come up with one. In the end this didn't matter as they ran out of pencils.

Written by Jay}