User:Chris2342
Chris2342 is the most commonly used online name for Chris Cox of Austin, Texas. He has kept up for years a blog on Livejournal and occasionally mirrors bits of it on his public Myspace blog. Popping up all over the internet in unexpected places for years, his most recent and highest profile appearance has been as the character Cyrus at the animated comedy movie review site Spill.com.
Background[edit]
Chris was born in 1970 in the then-small town of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Although a childhood interest in Dinosaurs led to an obsession with being a Paleontologist for awhile, it quickly became clear that his real interests lay in the creative arts. Throughout his childhood and early teens he participated in children's community theater playing the romantic lead in abbreviated musical versions of "The Prince and the Pauper", "The Mikado" and "Babes in Toyland" amongst others. In several of these plays, he acted opposite Holmes Ives who was generally cast as the villain. Despite their thespian roles, Chris and Holmes were close childhood friends but who unfortunately grew distant as they grew older. Holmes ended up being a successful electronic musician in Washington DC
Chris's active interest in performing, dancing, singing and writing were brought to a dead stop by his interest in basically just having a good time. Years of focusing on his hedonism in Fredericksburg, Richmond and during his private schooling at Sandy Springs Friends School in Maryland significantly damaged his schooling and in fact, after only two years at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, he dropped out.
After an aborted attempt to move to California, he finally moved in 1992 to Austin, Texas. Despite pressure from family to return to college there, he wasn't very interested. For his first two years in town he cohabited in a warehouse on the east side of town that also served as a practice space for bands including such minor notables as "Shoulders" and "Swine King." During this period he met and got to be friends with quite a few well known musicians and performers as well as most of the cast for Richard Linklater's Slacker.
There were several years of small jobs for small pay and no real involvement with the artistic community until 1997 while working as a bartender at the now extinct Waterloo Brewing Company he met Korey Coleman and Martin Thomas who were hosting a comedy movie review show on the local access station called "The Reel Deal." A member of the group, Bryan Smith, was leaving to move to Washington DC and Korey had decided to end the show. Chris talked him and the others involved to stick with it by quitting his Wednesday night shift so that he could join the show and take Bryan's place.
"The Reel Deal" continued to positive support from the Austin community and several awards from the local paper The Austin Chronicle until 2006 when it was decided to quit the public access stage and try something different. Korey, an animator and cartoonist, had drawn all of the cast members of the show in comic form for a weekly strip about them in The Austin American-Statesman. It was decided to try to take the humor and chemistry of the old show, and put it into shorter animated video clips which went on for almost a year at Reeldealreviews.com.
Mysteriously, a company in New York City discovered the online show, most likely on Youtube where Chris was cross-posting their clips, and contacted Korey about doing it as a bigger project. The project evolved into Spill.com where although the site is fully accessible, it is considered to still be in testing stages. A formal and large launch of the site has been promised by the company who owns it, so hopefully soon this entry will need updating.