Sophomore hopes Internet will take him far

By day, 20-year-old Ryan Dyer is technically a sophomore at IU, though he's currently taking some time off to play online poker professionally. By night, he's "Dozer Makaveli, Expert Zombie Slayer and Unofficial Protector of America's Collective Yumhole."\nDyer, a native of Washington, Ind., is the Webmaster and main creative force behind www.duckmustard.com, a humor Web site in the same vein as www.ebaumsworld.com or the site of Internet humorist Maddox.\nThe inspiration for www.duckmustard.com came from Dyer's work on a blog for student-run www.thehoosierweb.com.\n"Everyone kept telling me I should write a book, so I decided to be lazy and just make a crappy Web site instead," he said.\nIn its first month online, the site has seen moderate success, receiving about 100 hits a day and generating enough revenue to maintain it for the next year or so.\n"We have loyal readers. Those loyal readers just happen to be hermits like I am, thus they have no friends to share the site with," Dyer said. "Also, our readers don't really contact us. I believe this is because of the extremely awkward nature of our content. What exactly does one say after experiencing the insanity that is duckmustard.com?"\n"Awkward" and "insane" are two of the more common terms to describe the site, mostly composed of bizarre, blog-like entries.\n"So about 10 months ago I was at Kroger at about three in the morning. I always do my shopping late at night, and since I live in a college town, all the stores stay open 24 hours a day," reads the beginning of one of the site's articles. "Anyways, as fate would have it, Satan was vacationing. Seems he has pretty much seen the entire world, and now he is hitting all the really lame spots he hasn't seen. I caught him in the middle of his Midwest vacation, as he was on his way to Odon, Indiana to go possum-beating with the locals."\nSophomore Danai Bastin, a fan of the site, believes the articles are much deeper than just the surface laugh-out-loud humor.\n"Even in the strangest stories that he writes, there's always some kind of message that seems to be there, usually political," Bastin said. "The key is to open yourself up to that different kind of humor and realize what's really being said."\nWith such surreal imagery and experiences, it's difficult to understand exactly where Dyer gets his ideas, even he doesn't know where they come from.\n"Really weird things just pop into my head out of nowhere," he said. "For instance, the other day I went into the bathroom (completely sober), and as soon as I opened the door, I saw Roseanne on the floor by the toilet. She was wearing sweatpants and a Tweety Bird sweatshirt. She had a giant ladle, like people use to dip soup with. Anyways, she was using the ladle to eat cereal out of my toilet bowl. Yes, she drained the toilet bowl and filled it with cereal because she couldn't find a big enough cereal bowl in my kitchen. I knew it wasn't real, but the image was so vivid I nearly wet myself. Sometimes I'll write stories around such experiences. In this particular situation, however, I just cried."\nDyer is currently taking time off from IU to pursue a career of online poker, where he estimates he makes about $30 to $40 an hour, and has even won several prizes of more than $1,000.\n"I am a mathematical genius and really good at figuring people out," Dyer said. "I began to realize that with enough practice, I could make a profession out of poker, which is totally awesome. Aside from being a pirate or a fighter pilot, I can't think of anything else a man would rather be."\nDyer plans to return to school eventually, though he will not major in psychology as he originally did; in fact, he doesn't even have a set career goal.\n"I guess my ultimate career goal is to never have to force myself to work. Almost everyone I know whines about their job. At the moment, I don't really work unless I feel like it. I think that is the way life should be. Most people spend 40 hours a week at a job they hate so they can get money to buy things they simply don't need. I don't have those kinds of goals. I want to be happy, that is it. Oh, and I want there to be a 'Ghostbusters 3.'"\n-- Contact campus editor Chris Freiberg at wfreiber@indiana.edu.