Thursday 4^th January 2024

Happy New Year...and stuff.
I haven't got a lot to mention today—or even this year, to date—but it seems moderately important to come in and write something, simply because the site is now twenty-seven years old: I started it up on January the Fourth in 1997.

Current Events

And then twenty-seven years went by.
It borders on amusing that, just at the moment, everything's pretty much offline. It's actually not; it just looks like it is while I make things more portable. Less ContentManagemental. Because, though I've fixed the immediate problem of the wormvirus that got into the whole server a couple weeks ago, and while I'm futureproofing against another one by making everything simple hypertext that I can reupload in a matter of seconds if it ever happens again, I actually haven't yet made much of an effort to move everything to a new server where people might bother clocking in overnight and do something serverside to fix the sort of problems websites can have in the first seven hours after I EMail someone about it.
Switching servers would multiply the number of things I need to do about it all, right in the middle of doing it. So it just sounds exhausting.
I'll get around to it.
In What'sNewsier News: 2024 began. You probably already heard about that. And therefore the appointment I'd set up a couple weeks ago for an eye exam happened. More or less.
Things have changed about those. Most notably, having gone in and seen whether I can see, I've now got the ability to have glasses made iN aBoUt aN hOuR, starting in a couple weeks when the lenses get mailed down from whatever hyperadvanced lab is no longer onsite. So, until probably the end of the month, I've got the same RayBans with an intolerable scratch that I've had since about a month into the pandemic, and some marginal fuzziness when I drive around at night wearing sunglasses.

It's more than 106 miles to Chicago though.

So that'll be fun, whenever it happens: driving down to LensCrafters—presumably during the day again—and handing over my RayBans before wandering around outside without them in the cold sunlight. I've still got Gargoyles here; they're just not terribly corrective.
On the other hand, as confirmed by the exam, I barely need glasses at all: I can see most of what's across the room without them, on the topic of myopia; on the topic of hyperopia, I can hold something against my eyes and damned near see its molecules. So it's more about keeping enemy headlights from blurring up too big as I'm driving around at night and wondering why people need headlights in a city artificially brighter than the sun.
So that's going on.
Otherwise...there's not a lot that I can really mention right now. I'm working on a couple of relatively complicated things that, if I mention them, will probably stop being anything I'm working on for a decade or two—that's just how it always works when I announce things before they're ready. And I wrote a book in November; but that's just sitting here being whatever it was until I'm in the mood to read through a hundred thousand words to see whether they're actually the right ones after all. Once it's actually ready to release, I'll mention it somewhere.
So that's about it for twenty-seven years into this. See you in 2051, or possibly sooner....
Have a webcomic:

More later....
—Gremlin