Why I gave Ospiro the axe
When I was ten years old, I wanted nothing more than a company to call my own. So I made one. "DAC, Inc." I called it, creating a logo, motto, and jingle to accompany the name. The shortcomings of this venture were immediately apparent: flashy branding, not profit, topped my priorities, and the few "real" products I had were tongue in cheek. But I loved it just the same.
As I grew older, my company grew with me. I renamed it "Ospiro Enterprises" and began to develop it into an outlet for my various endeavors, both serious and unserious. Its website soon contained niche inside jokes and fake bureaucracies side-by-side with real products and services. It was also a satire of corporate culture, employing meaningless buzzwords and obnoxious posturing in its messaging. Ospiro, in short, was a wonderful amalgam of my sense of humor, my talents, my interests, and hundreds of hours of my life.
But unless observers were personal friends of mine, they didn't have the context to understand what Ospiro was about or to discern its many fictions from its hidden truths. What I saw as fun and cheeky was confusing to others. My high school math teacher once came across the website and told me that the company looked fake. He wasn't wrong.
Ospiro, for all of the joy it has brought me, has become an entangled mess of my juvenile persuasions, my adolescent attitudes, and my aspirations for how I seriously want the world to view myself going forward. While I will forever cherish the memories I made with Ospiro, it increasingly feels like an element of my past hopelessly and harmfully intertwined with my present. As I enter the next chapter of my life, I want clarity in what I do and who I am. I've decided it's time to cut the Gordian knot.
Today, with a heavy heart, I am announcing the end of Ospiro Enterprises and all of its subsidiaries, brands, and services. Ospiro.com and its subdomains will be retired. In the interest of preservation, its archives will be hosted on the Internet Archive (thanks to the Archive Team) and on ospiroarchive.gabeclasson.com and its corresponding subdomains.
Ospiro's legacy will not completely disappear, however: certain products and services that I feel should be maintained will be documented on my personal website, gabeclasson.com. There, I'll also keep track of what I'm doing to make the next decade of my life even better than the last one. I hope you can join me in that journey.