I'll post this a bit early, so I don't have to time things by a matter of seconds....
The year two thousand. The final year of the twentieth century. The final thousandth of the second millennium.
The end of times.
Not the armageddon, of course. We should be okay until about 23.00 GMT Wednesday 14th August 2126, when Swift-Tuttle smashed into the Pacific and--
Look, nevermind....
This is a different sort of end of times, in which the geek shall inherit the Earth. Or, at least, try to assume he has.
Yup. For the next three hundred sixty-six days, we get to hear the ninety-six percent go on about having reached the third millennium. Or, more accurately, The Millennium. Three is a slightly higher number than the ninety-six percent feel comfortable counting up to.
Of course, they’re a bit late. Some of us acknowledged the true beginning of the third millennium at the beginning of 1996--2001 years after the old judist calendar was abandoned. That was mostly just Swyndle and Charon and me, but....
In terms of the numeric calendar, the fun can now truly begin. Every time one of these primates suggests that they’ve entered The Millennium, the rest of us can point and laugh, or kill them in a display of applied darwinism, or whatever. So that has a lot of potential, I think.
Things would be so much simpler if people were smarter. But then, it would be harder to take over the world, I suppose.
What else is new....
Yutz is posting again. I thought he might be that dumb. What he doesn't seem to realise is that no one cares about him. Anything he posts merely solidifies the belief that he's the dumbest loser on the 'net. And, of course, he serves to fill up the boards and inspire some really funny insults from the regulars. So that's not really a problem. There's no way he can get me into any trouble, after all. Yutz is one of those funny little anomalies in nature: if he supports you, he's just a strange little fan who gets overly excited about things; if he lashes out against you, he's disregarded as an idiot who conjectures really dumb things and obsesses over strawmen. He's got his own board out there somewhere, and he could post all the conspiracy theories he liked on it; but no one ever goes there, so he comes here to groundlessly accuse us all of being even dumber than he is. He's immaterial. And, thinking about it, underqualified to impersonate Pinky Mouse: at least Pinky is capable of fucking up Brain's plans.
As for banning him: no point. Of course I've got options. I could gremlinise the PERL script a bit more and have it automatically change all occurrances of 'UTAHRAPTOR' [and inadvertant anagrammes thereof] to 'Yutz the Raptor', or whatever. Hell, if I really wanted to put the time into it, I could have the script bestguess all his spelling mistakes into real words. But I have far better things to spend a month doing. And, of course, a single EMail could ban everyone from his ISP from hitting any of my websites; he's dynamic, so I'd have to ban a hundred different numbers; but that would be easy enough...until he signed on through AOHell, anyway.
On the subject, I've got an interesting option here. The secure server is halfway set up. I know where it's goingt to be, anyway. And I've got the option of moving gremlin.net and wastedinc.com, and the third subsite and budhafest.com, over to this new server. And that could have potential, I suppose. Right now, I've got a few rules I'm not supposed to break on this server. I break them anyway, but there's a sort of danger to it. If I shift everything over to Logan's server here in Des Moines, there are no rules at all. And no boundaries. That is: there's no upper limit on traffic, storage, et cetera. Worst case, I could just buy an extra drive and put all the websites onto it. So that's a thought: a nice megabit server which can handle more hits per day than microsoft.com get. And it's free--or, really, included in the secure setup. So I'm thinking about it.
Oh, and: videogames. We were thinking about these a few years ago. With DreamCast and the forthcoming PS2, the technology is catching up to what we had in mind. So we might be moving into that field a bit. More on that later.
Let's see...I finished EBooking LK1; we know that. I'm still not sure about the release date yet. After NotS, in any case. Possibly after FC2K. Probably before the PBook is released.
Not that I've EBooked LK2 through LKLast yet; they're kinda longer than LK1.
I've been looking over SB95 again. I'm still not sure what to do with it. If anything, I might update it a bit. It could be better than it is. I don't know yet.
I should probably mention something about Yutz, while I'm thinking about it. I think it was Vigo who started calling him JarJar, but I was the one who always referred to him as Yutz the Raptor IRL. While Utahraptor ostromaysorum was a fairly neat animal with a really dumb name, I didn't bother calling him that; Yutz seemed to fit him a lot more closely. That Imp and Vigo picked up on that and started using it online is fine, but if he wants to blame someone for his name, he's looking in the wrong place. And I'm not sure what this WoodenHead thing is about; apparently it's some sort of insult in Yutz' sad, lonely, oepidal little world. And I don't think that's unreasonable to assume; he impresses me as the sort who never quite moves out of his mother's house. Sure, it begins with the theory that it's only until he gets out of school, but that time has passed. Now he seems to sit there watching television for several hours per day. I'm thinking that Mom and Dad have just enough money to support him, as long as he doesn't ask for too much, and realise that if he were ever unleashed to the real world, he'd be quickly killed and possibly eaten. So he sits there and watches the SciFi Channel, groaning when Mom vaccuums or tells him to throw out the empty ELFudge wrapper; and he really hates it there and wants to move out, but he majored in something useless, just to get a degree, and is almost qualified to run the fryolator for minimum wage, but doesn't really have to, because he never quite gets kicked out of Mom's place; so he spends a lot of time online, managing his sad little website with the teddy bears, wishing he could sneak a chick past his parents' door without the floor creaking too much, and, for that matter, wishing he could get a chick to agree even to that. Or, I might be wrong. Who knows.
Man. What a geek.
Oh yeah, speaking of anagrammes, I figured out what Yutz has been trying to type that keeps turning into 'utahraptor'. 'author trap'. Wayward loser, sent to Earth to trap us authors. And not very good at it.
Heh. Here's where Yutz really wishes that the R in Gremlin were an M, so he could build it into Lemming. Or that the E were an A, for GirlMan. Oh well....
I guess that The Gremlin works out to Elmer Thing...which, to me, suggests gluestick...which keeps things together...despite the author trap...I dunno....
Lots of anagrammes from glinter.men. Um...gremlin.net.
Like this one: in jeopardy, John ardently means to rack, or scar. Which Swyndle might figure out, and really begin to wonder what JTP are planning next....
Which reminds me also: I think I figured out why Swyndle seemed a little surprised by 'a year to shut down'. That was in LK6, which he only got to read the first chapter of back in 1998. Which...I guess it's kinda timely, right at this exact moment. Here's how it begins--but, as a warning, it might conatin a few spoilers for LK1 through LK5. LK6
I guess that's it for now.
Elm are rot...
--Gremlin