20 April 2005

For most internet dwellers it all started with a comment on this post at The Spin Starts Here. Reader “Blah Blah” wrote:

Look up http://samuelgordonstewart.com. It’s the worst blog you’ll ever find.

From that moment, Samuel Gordon-Stewart’s highly unique, quiet and personal corner of the internet would never be quiet and personal again. As visits to his blog increased exponentially, so did attacks on his character from a number of websites and commenters. Some said he needed to “get laid” and “get a life.” The more vicious attacks accused him of being “retarded.” At the start of this internet bunfight Samuel gave as good as he got, publishing counter-attacks against his main antagonists, but recently he has been happy to sit back and let it all wash over him. In the insular world of the Australian blogosphere, Samuel has become somewhat of an internet phenomenon. But who is the real Samuel Gordon-Stewart, and why has he attracted so much negative attention? Samuel spoke to The Editor.

Childhood and school
Samuel Gordon-Stewart was born on 2 June 1987 in Canberra, nearly two months premature. After spending some time in intensive care his parents took him home to the inner-north’s run-down Bega Flats. It was here that the family lived until 1991 when they moved to a nicer house in the same area — their home to this day. Samuel is an only child due to his mother’s epilepsy, a condition that makes further pregnancies dangerous.

Samuel’s early childhood was largely free of social interaction with other children, and for this reason his parents enrolled him at Reid Pre-school six months early. In 1993 he started at Ainslie Primary School, so beginning a choppy school career. Samuel enjoyed kindergarten until he was moved to another class where the teacher was “mean” to him. Here started a pattern where Samuel’s clashes with mean teachers saw him misbehaving and acting “naughty”. After attending behaviour management classes in year one Samuel completed primary school largely without incident, getting work done but being easily distracted and fidgety.

Samuel entered high school in 1999 very much an outsider. With secondary school being an environment where conformity is necessary to avoid undue attention, Samuel was a prime target for bullying. Weighing only 25kg and with little grasp of popular culture, he was “teased and tormented” mercilessly. As a result, Samuel became disruptive and anti-social, with an extremely short temper. In class Samuel did little work and drifted into a “fantasy world”, emerging only to play games of Wheel Of Fortune with his few friends. His most harrowing memory of high school is having to dress for P.E. classes in communal change rooms where bullying by other students peaked without the presence of teachers.

In the middle years of high school Samuel’s bullies mostly gave up and his studies improved. He began to enjoy classes where the teacher liked him such as music, art and computing; also classes where the teacher was accommodating towards his preferred learning styles, such as drawing instead of prose. However, in year ten Samuel became a “vicious monster” on the school’s computer network leading to a ban from computer use and a “semi-expulsion” that allowed him to complete assessment tasks necessary to graduate grade ten without attending classes. Grades 11 and 12 were completed at Dickson College where he undertook the minimum amount of work required to graduate with a high school certificate.

After school Samuel took a job with an I.T. firm, only to be retrenched weeks later. He is now studying towards a Diploma of Network Engineering at the Canberra Institute of Technology.

Family
Family is very important to Samuel, but his family is more than just his mother and father, it includes his little jack russell terrier, Nattie. Nattie entered Samuel’s life in 2000 when his year seven coordinator recommended to his parents that the responsibility of looking after a pet may be beneficial. It seems to have been good advice with Samuel rating it as the most defining event in his life. “Nattie is the single most important event, as having a dog has changed my life significantly, and given me somebody to confide in who I know will never betray my confidence.” Nattie is so pivotal to Samuel’s family that he won’t move out of home until she’s passed away. “I couldn’t willingly part with her, and I couldn’t make her part with anybody else.”

Radio
Samuel loves listening to his local AM radio station 2CC, and his knowledge of the happenings at that station and its Sydney sister 2UE is encyclopaedic. The love of radio started quite early. “When I was about three or four years old my parents started putting the radio on in my room to help me get to sleep, it was on 2CC which were a classic hits type station at the time.” But it was the discovery of John Laws in 1995 that introduced Samuel to talk radio. “Up until then I had found people talking on the radio to be very boring, and I do have a recording where I had the radio on and I turned it off at news time because of the ‘boring very boring boring news’. I liked Lawsie’s voice, and I found the various people talking to be entertaining, although I didn’t understand what they were talking about, they (Lawsie and his callers) all seemed very interested and happy.” When 2CC adopted a talk format Samuel became a loyal listener. “I was one of the first regular callers to their gardening show, although I was really just a time filler, and was eventually booted off the show by management because I kept appearing at 7:05am every Saturday and Sunday.”

In 1999 Samuel switched to another Canberra AM station, 2CA, because he disliked 2CC’s Stan Zemanek “screaming at people through the week.” He became friends with some of the 2CA presenters but switched back to 2CC after listening solidly throughout a period spent bedridden with sickness. Since then Samuel has become a regular on John Kerr’s show and enjoys the companionship of his program. “For some reason it provides me with a bit of an escape from my immediate surroundings, and also some ‘de facto friends’ in the regular callers who I don’t know in person, but enjoy listening to their calls anyway.”

Samuel is aware that he is ridiculed for his enjoyment of talk radio, but denies it is just for old people or those who want to yell and slander. “I really think that the people who apply those labels to it should sit down and listen to half an hour or so of daytime talk radio… they might find it boring and they might disagree with everything said, but they certainly won’t be labelling it with stereotypes.”

Interests
Other than a love of coffee (”I just love the taste”), Samuel enjoys developing systems for real and imaginary problems. Perhaps the best example being the system for his famous patchwork art, as featured in the Samuel In Dolgnwot series.

[This is] the first episode to use a mechanical random number generator to decide the number of horizontal and vertical lines. In this case it went for 9 vertical lines and 8 horizontal lines. The random number generator I am using is a mini roulette wheel (standard type, not the american version which adds a 38th spot containing “00″), and instead of using a ball on the wheel, I use a marker at the top of the wheel holder to decide the number. I then use the last digit of the number, and take “0″ as “10″. The number on the wheel used for the vertical lines (which are drawn first) cannot be reused for the horizontal lines, however it is possible to have the same amount of horizontal and vertical lines as many numbers on the wheel share the same last digit.

Another system was developed by Samuel to ensure that Nattie always sees a fresh section of neighbourhood on her walks. “[It involves] rotating central blocks and rotating blocks surrounding them and standard, extended, super, extended super and mega blocks. It is complex, but it ensures that Nattie gets to see a different area every day, which is good as we used to regularly do the same walk without even realising it.” These systems extend to game and contest formulation with Samuel currently developing a number of television game show ideas that he plans to eventually license.

A keen sporting fan, Samuel regularly watches AFL, NRL, cricket, golf and occasionally bits of tennis, motor racing, netball and lawn bowls. He doesn’t regularly run onto a pitch himself but recalls a humourous occasion playing high school AFL when his touch of the ball won the match. “I can’t say that my memory of it is too clear as I smothered a kick by having the ball hit me in the head.” However, his participation in sport in high school, despite his lack of athletic ability, earned him a degree of respect from his peers.

Technology and blogging
Samuel rates getting a computer in 1997 as one of the defining moments of his life. With his own computer he could better pursue his interest in technology. “I suppose it was just a natural fascination and ability to self-teach.” During the 2005 Australian Linux conference Samuel wrote his first blog post on 17 April, with stories about the Linux conference developing eventually into his present posts about life-in-general. “I enjoyed blogging so much that I kept going after the conference. It quite happily rolled along with me posting about things of minimal consequence to anybody other than me, and maybe one or two issues of some significance.”

When his site was linked from The Spin Starts Here, Samuel was angry at first, especially at the incredibly ferocious and derogatory attacks launched against him. But quickly sensing the pointlessness of retaliating he mostly ignored the stream of abuse and went on blogging just as normal. “I just decided that it was a waste of time and left them to their own devices.” There is an element of respect to be found in parts of the blogosphere at the way in which Samuel didn’t crack under the scrutiny and try to present a different view of himself. “As time has gone on I think it has helped me develop a thicker skin, and I find some of it amusing now.”

Politics
With the next Federal election being the first that Samuel is eligible to vote in, he is carefully considering his vote. Far from being a cut-and-dry conservative as some detractors would think, he sits somewhere in the centre of the political spectrum and would even have considered voting for Mark Latham if he were able. “I favoured Latham, albeit with some trepidation as he did seem a bit over zealous… in hindsight perhaps it is a good thing he didn’t win.” But what about ‘07 and Howard vs. Beazley? “Could you go back to before AWB and ask me… I might have had an answer for you then. Back then I was favouring the Liberals, but with AWB I’m becoming a wee bit skeptical of them and thinking that it might be time for a change. That being said, I don’t like Beazley, I think he is a windbag and a fool, I would much rather see Kevin Rudd as leader as I think he has some leadership potential… although he needs to work on his interview technique as he is a bit repetitive and long-winded and therefore self-defeating through sheer boredom when left to babble.”

Samuel’s opinions on political matters are, as with all of his opinions, carefully considered. He has praise and criticism for John Howard’s government in equal measure. “I think GST was a good thing, it simplified the tax system slightly. VSU is [good], if I want to join them I’ll happily decide for myself. And the money I save on union fees should pay for the lost discounts.” However, “I think the whole asylum seeker thing has been handled poorly [and] I don’t think privatising Telstra is a good thing, not when they own the telecommunication infrastructure and charge everyone else to access it.”

Samuel is Samuel
With school recently finished and a TAFE course underway, Samuel has started to look to the future. In the short term, he has no other wish than to complete his study and enjoy life — just like any other young adult. In the longer term, it’s a small family and a career in either I.T. or the media.

Many aspects of Samuel’s blogging content and style set him apart from the pack, and it is this that attracts most of the criticism. He spoke openly about crying at his desk after losing his job (”my blog is really about what is on my mind, and my dismissal was a very big thing on my mind”), he recounts his dreams in extraordinary detail (”I’ve always been interested in my dreams, they often provide good story lines”), he publishes his very unique artwork (”I like them and I’m not fussed if [others] don’t”), and many of his posts are about the mundane minutiae of life. These factors lead to the main charges against Samuel, being that he doesn’t have enough life experience, that he’s too insular, that he’s old before his time, that he’s too different. However, could it all be a matter of perspective? As the perpetual outsider, could it be that Samuel is, in fact, the normal one? Regardless, it is probably true to say that Samuel holds the same attitude today as he did in high school. “I gained satisfaction from knowing that I remained me, and didn’t change just because everybody else thought I should.”

Comments about this story can be viewed/ submitted here.
(All images copyright Samuel Gordon-Stewart. Reproduced with permission.)