Aquarionics

Ten years ago, I had a website.

I find it vaguely amusing that for the first few years of the site’s existence, I have copies of the entire site. One such is for January 1999.

I was running a monthly newsletter called “Grey Areas”, created as a fansite for Lionhead Games’ forthcoming genre-changing wonder, Black & White. I was also running “Follow That Game” a kind of multi-game fansite for the five games I was most interested in at the time. At the time that snapshot was created, those games were Sid Meier’s Alpha Centuri, Black and White, Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun, Simcity 3000 and Quake III.

Every single one of those games was released and generated at least one sequel, although SC3000 changed quite a bit before it was actually released.

In the archived site, the front page is just a jump page to several subsites, including a photo tour of my bedroom, and a record of which bits were updated. This is ten years ago, I’m in the process of screwing up my last year of my A-Levels. I’m involved in usenet a bit, but not as much as I will be really quite soon. The site was hosted on netmanor.com. Within a couple of months, the image-based side navigation would be replaced by a javascript include so I only had to update it from one place. Soon after that I went to university, and started putting a little more personal stuff into the front page updates.

Between Christmas and New Year 1999, I was attempting to come to terms with the whole “end of the millennium” thing, beyond the “It actually starts next year” refrain, I wanted to start something with the new millennium, mostly to see if I could.

So, ten years ago today, I signed up with “Pennyhost” for pretty much their cheapest hosting service, which came with a dot.com. I wasn’t really expecting them to do anything about it until they got back into the office in the new year, but the domain was registered automatically, all I had to do was upload my site.

So I did, and what was “Aquarion: The Website” became what it is now, less the Exocet font I was so attached to back then.

Aquarionics.com.

So, today I’m going to talk to you about the True Meaning of Christmas, because right now it’s that or the True Meaning of Art, and there’s a seventeen floor drop outside my flat, and I’d hate to have to throw anyone or thing off of it. Not least because it’s specifically in the Tenant’s Agreement for the entire block, Part Two, Subsection Seven, Thou Shalt Not Throw Projectiles From Thy Balcony. One small paper aeroplane, no matter how tempting, will cause the entire residents association to stop squabbling about the colour of the stairway to the laundrette; the TV Aeriel in the gym and the Legend Of The Missing Sinking Fund and instead come down upon my head like a ton of – tastefully repainted – building blocks. Presumably not ones thrown from a balcony, however.

Anyway, where was I before I started talking about throwing people from tower blocks?

Ah, yes. Respect For Your Fellow Man, and other themes of Christmas.

I’m going to be Privileged here, in the internet liberal sense of the word[1], and entirely redefine a word based purely on my perception of it. I am not religious. I have had the standard British education, which is carefully non-denominational, but is Church of England non-denominational. I sat though a large number of family services while a cub scout and later a scout, and my enduring memories of church are a) standing in the cold and frosty morning waving a flag, and b) not getting the decent parts in Joseph because I didn’t go to Sunday School. I have, over the last couple of decades, carefully formulated my own personalised form of religion which has the useful properties of supporting what I believe to be the case anyway, providing me with a personal moral compass, and being entirely uninteresting to anyone else in the world. In these three things it lacks only the community aspect a more mainstream religion would give me, and this is offset by the fact that I know every follower of my set of beliefs personally.

(I especially like comparing atheism to other kinds of religion. If only I could find some way of drawing electrical power from boiling blood, I’d be set for life. This is filed alongside the idea of attaching basic dynamos to coffins, so that if we’re going to do things like, for example, allow people to publish Hitchhikers Guide fanfic we should at least reap the rewards of Mr Adams’ post-respiratory revolutions).

So, for me the concept of “Christmas” has little to do with the celebration of the Nativity, Lights, Lack of light or anything more specific than “We, and people we like and are related to, and combinations of the above, have survived into the depths of winter. Long may this continue. I’ve thought of you, and would like you to have this gift. Now, lets eat”. Everyone else in the world is free to celebrate whatever they like. Enjoy whatever you celebrate, whoever its with. Even if you’re not in the depths of winter.

Bastards.

We sit, and we watch.

Today is the 25th December 2009, although it’ll be boxing day by the time this is posted. It’s five to midnight.

Today I woke up early when I got a text message saying my server (which hosts this site, for example) was down. Turns out I haven’t fixed the thing that makes the backup process explode and go crazy. I think I’ve done so now, if you can read this it’s possible.

Shortly afterwards I discovered that Christmas day is the one day a year my girlfriend becomes a morning person. There were small presents, and then there was “wait until sunrise”, and then there were more presents. We got a slow cooker, which will be handy. I got Clare a pony, a kitten and an elegant manor (Well, a hornby model bookshop. It was the closest Hamley’s sold). This is what happens when the answer to “What do you want for Christmas?” gets taken literally.

Once again, I left my Christmas shopping until the last minute, only this time the 23rd instead of Christmas Eve. I recommend it, in a way. It means that “I must find the perfect gift” gets sidelined for “I must find *a* gift”, and since in almost all circumstances the existence and applicability of the gift is more important than its worth and/or contents, this all works out fine.

After that we played co-op Borderlands for a while. Eventually we hit a point where the mission we were on was very obviously over our level and gave up in favour of bacon sandwiches and a walk down the canal that runs close to our flat. Then more games until I went to cook Christmas dinner, which was roast pork with a vast array of trimmings. This worked quite well, slightly overboard on the trimmings, and the crackling didn’t, but it was tasty.

This evening we watched “Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra“, which I highly recommend for the redoing of the William Tell overture alone. While Bailey’s classic song material does work well with an orchestra backing, I think I would have preferred more “Guide” and less older “Bill Bailey”. It’s still both funny and well worth watching.

Then I updated my weblog. It’s ten years old soon.

Let it snow

Originally uploaded by Aquarion

Since there’s no place to go.

Okay, so I’ve stopped writing.

It’s not just here, it’s everywhere, really. I’m not making any progress on any of the things I should be writing or doing, the stuff, the actual *plan* that means I’m not turning computers off and on again for thirty more years. The plan. (Er, I’m sorry if you’re one of the people I turn things off and on again for on occasion, especially if you pay me to do it). Code, fiction or anything else, it’s all got lost in the turnaround the last year or so’s been.

I need to make the clackity noise happen again. (TL;DR: Typing makes a clackity noise, and then words appear. Stories come out of words. Real, pretend or a mash of the two).

I managed to rewrite the first part of The Story last week, which has served me well. Unfortunatly it’s the same bit of the story as I had before, only this time with a better idea of what it is, which helps, but doesn’t actually advance me any. It’s still, when you boil down to it, the story of a man on a train.

In just under two weeks, Aquarionics dot com will be ten years old. It is already the single longest project I’ve ever worked on, and contains a lot of stuff I want to continue to exist, and continue to do. The way to make this happen is to try to do what I was doing back when I had actual readers, which is write stuff.

So, there may be a few more boring stories here, instead of me trying to make stuff interesting, and I’m sorry about that, but it’ll get better. Or, at least, I hope so.