Housekeeping -The Toast

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Home: The Toast

welcome3Previously: an introduction.

There is a doc — a Google doc — that you have never seen, covered in page after page of truly terrible possible blog names that Nicole and I created back in the heady, champagne-fueled days of late May. They’re as bad as you can imagine, and then some. Someday, perhaps, we will allow you to see the names this website almost had. But that day is not today; all you need to know is that we settled on The Toast.

“It’s convivial without being twee,” Mallory said. “Everyone likes toast. And clinking glasses. This is a truly universal concept. Let us become The Toast, and become inordinately wealthy, and spend our declining years ordering men about.” And it was so. And the next step, we found, was buying a domain name, so that we existed in more than name only.

“Sure,” we said blithely to ourselves, “let’s buy TheToast.com for our new venture. This isn’t 1999. No one’s making millions of dollars selling Pizza.com to some idiot who thinks owning “food noun.com” is the fastest ticket to success. TheToast.com! We’ll buy it this afternoon. Then we’ll have a website, somehow.”

So we look around at domain-hosting sites and we find TheToast.com, and the suggested asking price (we asked GoDaddy, because apparently viral marketing works, even when you hate it) is $300 to $700. Which seems reasonable, inasmuch as our ability to conceive of something intangible having actual monetary value is fairly limited. “Sure,” Mallory says to Nicole, “$700 seems like a reasonable amount if we get to own the word Toast at the end of it.”

So we made an offer of $700.

Dear Nicole Cliffe,

The current registrant of the domain THETOAST.COM has indicated that they may be willing to sell the domain, however, they declined your maximum offer and are asking USD$90,000.

Please respond to let us know if you would like to accept this counter amount, increase your maximum bid to continue negotiations or that your current maximum is all you are willing to offer at this time. We look forward to your response and will proceed accordingly.

And we said HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

…and despaired. The Toast was such a great name, coming as it did at the end of a string of not-quite-right, clever-at-first-but-increasingly-less-so possibilities. “Maybe–” Mallory suggested.

“No,” Nicole said firmly.

“I just think if we talked to him and tried to bargain him down–”

“I am not spending any amount of money that ends in “ousands of dollars” for INTANGIBLE RIGHTS TO THE CONCEPT OF TOAST.COM,” Nicole said.

“Right-ho,” Mallory said.

And we wound up buying the janky-looking domain you know and love today. Bless you all for putting that hyphen in there.

It’s going pretty well so far! We like all the stuff we’ve published, and we have lots more in the tank. It seems a little weird not to have short posts during the day, just features, but not too weird, not yet, so we’ll keep on keepin’ on. We’re thinking we might have one post a day, though, where Mallory and Nicole just talk about what stories we’re following and you can discuss them too, although you might grow weary of Nicole’s unflagging appetite for more information about the impeding Royal Birth (Will it be a changeling? If so, will it be William or Kate who takes the risky journey under the Iron Hill to battle the Unseelie Court for their stolen child?). We’ll see. What do you think? It’s summer, so we know you’re mostly just hot and quiet.

We’d also love to know a bit about you few, you tidy few, you winsome and rule-abiding few. What brings you here? What kind of topics would you like to see us cover in the future? Are there writers or books or people we should be talking about that we haven’t gotten to yet? Does your boss know how much time you spend reading us? When you visit us, do you pretend you’re eating toast or drinking champagne? Do you think we’re attractive, or have good personalities? Because when someone is not that attractive, they’re always described as having a good personality. Do you think we’re not attractive? Or just because we happened to mention that we might have good personalities, we could be either: attractive with a good personality, or not attractive with a good personality?  Be specific.

We’re going to be kicking off our advice column next week, and we’re not going to pretend ours is so different from all the other advice columns in the world. You’re going to send your questions to submit@the-toast.net with the word “Advice” in the subject line, and you can specify “Nicole,” or “Mallory,” (Mallory’s answers will almost always involve a paean to Kristen Stewart) or “Mallory and Nicole” or “A Dead Poet,” in which case we will provide advice to you in the form of a quotation from a dead, ideally public-domain poet (Not Sylvia Plath. Never Sylvia Plath. Surely you don’t want to hear more about Sylvia Plath). Okay? Otherwise, it’s just us, and our boundless wisdom.

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