Eight years.
Don't ask me how this happened, but gremlin.net is now eight years old. I went online with this thing on 25th January 1997. Not that I've done much with it since, really.
It occurred to me the other day that getting a website to remain extant for eight years is a bit of an accomplishment. I don't think I could keep a kid alive this long. Probably because I'd feed a kid about six hundred times in eight years, too. A website is more like a virtual pet and a GameShark: update one of these things once or twice a month, and it can still kinda survive.
Of course, I've got lots of good excuses for having avoided various updates over the years. Well, not really good excuses; but they worked at the time. The latest excuse is actually somewhat valid: I've been resting a lot.
We've been here in the new house for about a month now. We actually got the thing halfway through December, but that didn't do a lot of immediate good since all my stuff was still back at WorstPacific for a while. By 25th December, most of it was here, so things were functional again. Since then, apart from a couple of days in the final week of 2004 in which we got the last of the stuff out of the flat--minus whatever WorstPacific broke in and stole--things have been somewhat calm. Comparatively.
Oh wait. Lemee amend that statement. WorstPacific didn't break in and steal anything they were witnessed breaking in and stealing; their story is that myriad transients with keys to the flat were breaking in and stealing things. So the neighbours were clearly wrong to have thought anyone from WorstPacific was doing this, simply conjecturing the transients' identities by their uncanny resemblances to WorstPacific criminals. Which is arguably less weak an excuse than the one in which the boiling water coming from the pipes in the ceiling was actually from a melting glacier upstairs.
So much for resting. I still get driven to the edge of that hopeless laughter over the idiocy of the WorstPacific criminals every time I think about it. Something my lawyers like to call Mental Anguish.
Not that the last month has been entirely restful anyway. There were a few moments of stress while playing through Resident Evil Four. Particularly the new Mercenaries endgame. I'm still unlocking characters in that one. Mostly because the game keeps throwing two ChainsawNuts at me at once, which just isn't fair.
That aside, I'm pretty happy with the game in general. I should probably update my review on the board, at some point; when I reviewed it, I'd got about ten minutes into the twenty-hour game. In retrospect, the first ten minutes weren't really enough to judge the thing by. Though, having got to the end, I'm a little disappointed with the utter lack of Wesker. More accurately, I'm a bit disappointed with Capcom's idea that Wesker can't appear in a game without Redfield, though he's the only remaining hint of Umbrella now. Although: it looks as though Wesker is the fifth unlockable character in the endgame, for whatever that's worth. Probably not much.
Okay. Actual updates.
Not many.
There is an update to NewsoftheStoopid.com this month. Something I've actually been meaning to write for a couple of years now; I finally got hit by the proverbial Last Straw and went public with it. Got Brain? is currently at the index.asp over there.
Loosely on that subject, now that it's been five years since the literary release of NotS, I've been playing around with the idea of a V2 again. Largely because any book with News in the title, discussing the future letdown of all the morons counting on the Y2K 'bug', becomes an anachronism. Hence what's currently calling itself N2 in its headers, though I'll eventually decide on a better title for it.
I'm not sure when I'm expecting to have that done. I suppose it could be done in a matter of hours. But half the stuff I keep thinking of adding into it is too large to fit within the pagecount. The WorstPacific mess, for example, is convoluted enough to get a book of its own. Which is also a possibility, given the sheer number of people following along with that little saga. Something like JestBuy, on the other hand, could probably fit into a dozen pages; that might be more viable.
There's something almost daunting about the fact that I could accumulate too much bullshit to fit in a book over the course of five years. And something worse about the excuse for waiting five years to release the book: that, up until now, I've been too busy getting slammed by said bullshit to write anything cogent about it. Ironically enough, the idiocy back in NotS was pretty tranquil--enough so that I was able to ignore it enough at the time to discuss it. N2 is likely to be somewhat longer than its prequel was.
Speaking of books...I probably shouldn't. I'm not sure what in hell is going on with Pandemic, at this point. Except that I've written enough to fill an encyclopaedia while actually hanging onto about fifty pages. It's not really working. Worse: I really am. Which is death to a novel. The instant in which the act of writing a book mutates from fun to effort, things get bad. I still suspect that the book could be fun to write, later on, once things actually start happening; at the moment, though, I'm still in that quirky setup phase--the one Lucas dodged out of by starting with Episode Four. There's nothing quite as taxing as writing the Phantom Menace part of a story in order to get to that Return of the Jedi uberbattle in the end. Which is something I've got to concede now: for years, my largest gripe with zombiefilms was the utter lack of explanation behind the plague; I get it now--explaining how and why this sort of thing could occur, particularly near the beginning of the story, kills the story itself. Hence hundreds of deleted pages, to date.
Maybe a better analogy is that horrid scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the goons are trying to hire Indy to go do something entertaining by going on about biblical mythology for thirty-seven hours. Or, worse, the bible itself. You think reading about this moron begetting that one is boring? Try writing it sometime. You'd have to be a drunk goatherder to pull that off. Although, today, the drunk goatherder would just stare at CSpan all day. Thanks to Richard Jeni for that little morsel of truth....
So anyway: Pandemic's not done yet. I'm still playing with it, but it's not leading anywhere quickly. So I'm also taking time off from it to play with N2, which is fun, just to remain sane and largely wrinklefree. Ultimately, I'd bet on N2 being released first, for better or worse. Though I'm still hoping to get Pandemic done and released sometime this year, easy as it is to say that in January.
Which reminds me: over to the left, and probably a screen or two upward, depending on your resolution, you'll find a new link to mistersloth, which is rapidly becoming amusing. The basics: some failure who claims to have written something called Death or Glory and had his agent--the line director on 1971's Klute and now the CEO of Paramount [he says]--sell this filmscript to the line director on Klute, being the same guy, and shelf it out of pure suction. Which goofy little assertion is meant to imply that he's doing far better than I am in all possible capacities. Which is to say that the guy is a drooling moron. Which isn't much of a surprise.
Now. Based on all that, no one would ever care. But, since no one ever cared, the twit went to the next level, formerly occupied by BangBang, and threatened to kill me to death, apparently with a shotgun. Though, given his acute illiteracy, I guess that would actually be a shitgun. Which still sounds oddly unpleasant and which still violates the living hell out of everything from state laws to the USCode to the PatriotAct.
That said and known, the idiot is currently getting round to remembering his newer threat to have me arrested for the 'crime' of exposing his idiocy. Which is to say that this imbecile regards written facts and quotes to be 'criminal slander', for which he's in the reported process of having me arrested, tried, and sentenced.
Which is to say that mistersloth will likely appear in N2--probably somewhere near Banger himself. Until then, mistersloth's frequently-mutating subsite covers the story as it unfolds.
I think that's about all I've got for sitewide updates, sadly enough. I'm plotting out a couple of surprises here, but, historically, mentioning surprises before they're ready to surprise anyone A) defeats the purpose of surprise, and B) somehow tends to jinx the whole plan in the first place. So I won't go into any details yet. But, now that the site's eight years old, I'm thinking about, uh...doing something with it. Especially now that I've actually got a little free time, even between N2 and Pandemic. Which is to say that I might have a shot at getting started on something without having a 'glacier' rain boiling water on it, or the very morons assigned to fix the 'glacier' breaking in and stealing it. And that, after two and a half years of pure suck, is a neat concept, to me. We'll see what comes of it in the next few weeks.
I think that's about it for now. Unless I've got anything here I'm not aware of yet....
Yup. Found a good Spam of the Day:

Forgot to add tags for this stupid entry.