Ten years ago, in June, it was almost exactly a couple plus years after Halley's Comet streaked through the night sky.
Ten years ago, in June, a small publication appeared in the back of Ronnie's Seafood [1], in Charlton, Mass. and it was called, for wont of a better title, The Quiet Insanity Newsletter. And it was delightful, and juvenile, and all that good stuff. They were the sort of issues that mentioned a novel (or two), that hadn't been written yet, and, due to popular demand (all right, demand of one or two people, in the case of one of them), one of them got written.
Time, a novel (subtitled "Jean Buridan is Throwing Things Again") didn't exactly storm the literary world. It didn't even rattle many teacups. It may have caused a little indigestion in a few agents in New York City.
Spurred on by this branching of Sane Magazine-like properties/endeavours, we were driven [2] to create a series of fables, a screensaver (which we're not entirely sure works anymore) and desktop pictures, and almost, a set of tshirts (not just a set of tshirts, but, you know, like, enough for all of you).
That is not, of course, an accurate chronological picture, which also brings into question the notion of the causation of all these things off the back of a novel which, to be honest, makes a bit of a schplopping noise when you drop it in a puddle.
Which is fitting, maybe, as Time is all about, well, time. And a fairly distorted sense of it. Which is fun. Excellent material for summer reading for the kids. Hell, for the longest time, we were the sole link anywhere on the web with anything to do with that lovable 13th century French philosopher Jean Buridan, of whose legacy is a hypothetical experiment with a donkey that has consigned his name to the history books in the mildly unflattering "Buridan's Ass." This situation (our being the sole source of information in a vast tank-full of stuff that's supposed to be information) might have been distressing for more than a few medieval studies professors. But the bulk of them were incredibly gracious and sometimes even amused upon our reply that our Buridan studies didn't go much further than what we needed to make a few lame jokes about gravity and the Earth being the center of the Universe.
Okay, so, as is our habit every few months or so (weeks, if we're in the mood), we're going to nostalgise.
Or have, as you might have noticed.
So now here we are, out to the west coast of the United States, to follow the software guys. After all, software is the new fiction.
Ten years, man, we're talkin', like, ten years.
disclaimer:
Disclaimer and thanks over the years go to;
- Ronnie's Seafood, Charlton, MA, the first point of distribution for all Sane Magazine (then The Q.I. Newsletter) back in June, 1993. (They're in the category for best fish and chips.)
- Michael Joyce - It's his fault this is all on the web. And we are where we are today (okay, Los Gatos we can only blame on ourselves, but I meant figuratively). Thanks, Michael, thanks a lot.
- Mark Bernstein - Mark is largely responsible for StorySpace, for which we're eternally grateful.
- Carolyn Guyer - Carolyn just gave us interesting work when we needed it, and is an amazing woman.
- mix-world - Mix was fun, albeit it strange. Damn strange. It was probably all the doughnuts that boy ate.
- The Wayback Machine - For letting us find a few of our old issues, at one point. They seem to be a bit broken, at the moment, but here's hoping...
- Jon - All right, Jon, here it is, I've linked to you. Happy now? Thanks, anyway, for the beers.
footnotes
[1] Names not changed, not out of any obligation to truth or notion of making the innocent stand up and fight for themselves, for once. Names not changed because, well, we didn't really think of it until after we'd written the name down and had thought of this footnote, which we like, so we left the names as is, because if we changed them this footnote would be factually awkward and might involve us rewriting one or the other, which might then have a knock-on effect, and the whole article might just disappear in a haze of editorial wizardry, which none of us wanted.
[2] I realise we were spurred and then driven, and that this might raise eyebrows. Mixing horse and car metaphors may be considered a bit of a nasty rub in the face to the greater horse population. Then again, it might not. It might affront the literary/grammatical purists. This institution, however, has made a point of being an excellent place to rip off new and daring grammatical styles and juxtapositions for a pretty damn long time, much the way some sites are popular with web developers if only for their cool new way of laying out things on the page with CSS or dynamic html or anything along those lines.
Yer Weekly Horoscopes.