For one thing, I managed to break the damned Formula the other day. Or, really, a couple of months ago. It just didn't become particularly evident that it was really broken until a few days ago.
A couple of months ago, there was this blizzard here in Denver; that's probably not news: it's been known to snow here in August; strange town.
Anyway: once the snow started to melt [roughly thirty seconds after it had stopped snowing], I was driving along at a casual seventy-five or eighty miles per hour; the roads were generally devoid of snow, except for this fucking iceberg in the middle of my lane.
The SUV SpeedKeeper in front of me drifted exactly over the thing. The WingMan next to me wouldn't let me over, and the TrunkMonkey behind me was only happy when he was trading electrons with my damned bumper. So I hit this fucking glacier and tore the front spoiler in half.
That much was simply annoying. Technically, the thing is only useful once you hit about one eighty or so; and, in this town, that simply never happens.
However: it turns out that either the iceberg or the spoiler happened to catch a radiator hose and rip the thing. I'm guessing the spoiler got it. Several times. If this thing had been any holier, it would have walked on water, instead of just leaking it.
So the car's been running a bit warm lately; but, since that coincided with the weather running a bit warm too, I wasn't too concerned about it. Until the other night when the thermostat jumped up to four hundred degrees and the car shut itself down.
So I replaced the hose. I'm trying to replace the thermostat too; except the thing seems to have welded itself in there. I may try shooting it a few times to loosen it.
In any case: the car is essentially working again. Although I really need a new muffler. And a new engine. And a new transmission. And possibly a new car. As it is, the only original parts on this thing are the odometer and the oil filtre.
That's not really the big news though.
The big news is...well, there are a couple of things.
We're currently in negotiations with Hot Topic here. What we know so far is that they really, really, really want to sell the Wasted, Inc. shirts. What we haven't quite concluded is how much they want to pay us before they can do that.
If we can get that part worked out, you should start seeing these things in Hot Topics throughout Duhmerica sometime this summer.
In a related story, I'm working on some merch for the forthcoming HGD subsite. A lot of the same people who have been asking me [or, more often, asking Hunter to ask me for them] to bring back the deinosaur subsite have also been asking for roughly anything with decent-looking deinosaurs on it. So this is actually pretty good timing.
Obviously, there are the shirts and coffeemugs and everything else to your right. We're also setting up for everything from posters to wallclocks to frisbees to skateboard stickers. One thing I'm currently working on is a poster of a Velociraptor mongoliensis. Actual size.
Before you get too excited about that, bear in mind that actual size is actually 207cm by 50cm, which is about 83" by 20". Which is still a fairly large poster.
Specifically, we're looking at something like 92" by 35".
Personally, I've been meaning to make one of these for myself for years. So I'll probably be the first to buy one.
If I can time things right, the new merch should be available at about the same time that the new subsite goes online.
On the subject: let me know if there are any deinosaurs I should concentrate on here. It's going to take a while to get through all fifteen hundred known species. I'm obviously working on the velos already; I'm also working on a few of the more generic animals. So if it's somehow critical that Plateosaurus engelhardti or something shows up right away, tell me about it. Otherwise, I'm not in a big hurry to get to some of these guys. Yet.
Of course, I'm still working out the format too. I was thinking about doing lots of different little files, like gremlin.net/hgd/saurischia/theropoda/carnosauria/tyrannosauridae/tyrannosaurus/rex.html, but I'm not sure that's the best way to do this anymore. I'll probably just file them like gremlin.net/hgd/tyrannosaurus-rex.html or something.
The actual index.html is going to be thre really tricky part, since this will never be truly finished; new species are discovered every six weeks or so. So if I write the index.html menu thing too rigidly, it's going to suck to update it.
I'll figure it out eventually.
Otherwise, I switched out gremlin.net/index.html for a while. Just to be weird. I'll come up with something else someday.
I think that's it for now. Until I have some real news, maybe.
More later....
--Gremlin