I was born on a Friday, so whenever my birthday lands on a Friday, that year’s calendar matches up (or mostly matches up if a leap year) to the 1983 calendar.

Hey! My birthday was a Friday this year! So 2011 and 1983 match up!

This year also has the same calendar as 2005.

So, today, December 28, 2011, is a Wednesday, just like December 28, 2005 was.

I feel like that date rings a bell…

I feel like the days leading up, once Christmas was out of the way anyway, I was putting something together and fixing it up.

And on this day, six years ago, it went live…

Of course! You’re looking at it!

HAPPY 6TH ANNIVERSARY, EIGHT MINE FORTRESS!!!!

Yup, I have a five-year-old. Sometimes cranky. Sometimes ranty. Sometimes sweet. Sometimes thoughtful. Sometimes bored. Sometimes sad. Sometimes joyous. Sometimes excited.

Always colorful. Always awesome. Always full of whatever info or influence I happen to provide. Poor thing! Hehe.

Maybe I don’t give as much attention as I once did, but always there when needed, still there all these years. On to the sixth.

HAPPY 5TH ANNIVERSARY, EIGHT MINE FORTRESS!!!!

It was Christmas Eve, and well-known mean moderator Katrina wandered through the snow-covered streets to the familiar building. Outside the door hung a sign: Moncure and Miller.

“Ah, Kathleen Miller,” she sighed. “Gone seven weeks today.” She knocked the snow off the sign and entered the building.

I made Kathleen my “Marley” seeing as she wanted tighter control over the forums than even I did. About a month before this was first posted, she finally said “screw it” and left the forums pretty much, not quite seven weeks though.

“Fuck, it’s cold in here! Svend!”

Her only employee, Svend la Rose, emerged from the other room. “Yes, ma’am?” he asked meekly.

“Would you turn the heat up in here?”

“I would, ma’am. It is cold, yes. But it seems whenever the heat gets turned on, you get a massive heating bill and you take it right out of my salary.”

Katrina scowled at him. “Well, what’s wrong with that? Aren’t you enjoying the heat as well?”

“Oh, but I can’t afford it. You see, it’s my friend Rory. He’s very small. That’s why we call him Tiny Rory. We fear he may be sick or something, but we can’t afford to take care of him, so he remains so small.”

I wasn’t sure who should be the “Cratchit” for a while. Originally I had picked Oren, but changed my mind, so went with Svend. This story beginning with Svend being verbally abused does give it some points. As for “Tiny Rory”, well, Rory Stolzenberg joined us when he was like 13, and judging from pictures of him, had yet to have a major growth spurt. So he’s the Tiny Tim.

“We’re running a charity, actually,” Joia stated.

“Oh, crimony,” Katrina grumbled with an eye roll.

“It’s a charity for victims of forum moderator abuse,” Pam explained. “There are so many victims of tyrant mods, and their plight is too often overlooked.”

“You have a list of victims with you?”

“Sure,” she replied, handing her a list.

Katrina scanned it. “Haha! I remember her… Oh, yeah! I totally pwned his sorry ass…. Banning him was sweet… Hell, yeah, those two got what they had coming.”

Pam and Joia exchanged worried glances. “Well, they’ve suffered terrible hardship.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?!”

Hehe. I enjoy my role of being cold-hearted and dismissive. The Berkeley members were fairly new to our whole community at the time, so I especially tried to be sure to include them, and in this and a few other stories, by choices ended up being Pam and Joia.

What’s a little sad, of course, is seeing the names of people who used to be so active back then and nowadays we don’t hear from them anymore. Some of them come back periodically, such as Joia and Adam, while we haven’t seen nor heard anything from Rory in years.

“Kathleen?! I thought you were g-g-gone!”

“Yeah, I’m gone,” Kathleen said with a sigh.

“But you’re here. You’re not gone.”

“Hehe. Well, I’m a ghost. A chained ghost as I’m sure you can tell.”

Katrina grimaced when she noticed the very many heavy chains attached to Kathleen’s arms and legs. “Wow, that sucks.”

Just like Marley, Kathleen shows up as a ghost somehow, despite not being dead, bearing chains from some never-identified misdeeds.

“Tonight, you will be visited by three ghosts.”

“So two more after you?”

“No, I meant three ghosts excluding myself.”

Seriously, wasn’t Scrooge technically visited by four ghosts that evening rather than three as is often said? Counting fail.

Katrina looked at him. “Oh, hey, Ken. What are you doing here?”

“I’m the Ghost of Christmas Past!”

“My past?”

“No, long past- Nope, wait, you’re right. Your past. My bad.”

This Scrooge version of me seems awfully cool about finding Ken Boring unexpectedly in my room at 1am. Hmm.

“Hey, relax. I’m a ghost. I can make you fly.”

“Really?”

“Give it a try.”

“Well, okay,” she consented, going to the window. Hesitantly, she climbed through the open window… and fell straight down into a big snow drift!

Laughing, Ken went out the front door and found her scrambling out of the snow.

“Ken, you bastard!” she spat.

“Of course, I do. That’s me! A young me. There I was last year, at the tender age of 21. Not like me now, at the old, senile, frail age of 22.”

Hey, message for 22-year-old Katrina from 27-year-old Katrina… STFU.

There was Jess Caralize standing in the middle of the room. “Hi, Katrina. How’s it going?”

“Heh. Hi, Jess. What are you doing here?”

“I’m the Ghost of Christmas Present!”

“Ooh! Christmas present!” She grinned excitedly.

“No, no. Present as in present time. Now. Currently. At this moment. You know.”

Katrina folded her arms. “Aw, man.”

Ever see the Jetsons Christmas Carol? Where the Ghost of Christmas Present is an actual gigantic present? Lulz. Or the Animaniacs one where Dot is this Ghost and she pops out of a wrapped box, says who she is and then says to the audience “it’s a pun, get it?”

They came to one window.

“Look through and tell me what you see,” Jess instructed.

Katrina went up close to the glass and gazed in. “Uh, looks like Mags and Carden sixty-nining.”

“Oops! Wrong house. Let’s keep going.”

They came to another window.

“Try this one,” Jess said.

Katrina peered through the window. “I see Shinzo dancing with his mop to ‘Jingle Bell Rock’.”

“Damn it, wrong again! Let’s keep going.”

After several more houses, spotting Crimson Might singing show tunes in a Goofy costume, Kevin and Darius sharing a joint, Sufferagist inspecting the room for termites, and Jeff adding to his long-ass “Why I Hate Christmas” list, Katrina and Jess at last came to the right house.

I’ve played around with the idea of making this part so much longer, with more crazy shit I’m seeing various NYRA members doing late at night. And, once again, so many named people who left us years ago. Though, in the case of many of the ones listed here, good riddance.

“What is the cause of all the violence and suffering in the world?” Svend read from a card.

“Katrina!” Joia piped up.

“Correct,” Svend confirmed.

(”Oh, Lord,” Katrina sighed.)

“Who is responsible for the Iraq War?” Alyson read from a card.

“Katrina?” answered Rory.

“Right!”

“Who hurts innocent people every day?” asked Pam from the card.

“Katrina!” replied Adam. “After all, she did just give you and Joia the wreath I gave her. That heartless bitch!”

The game pretty much went on like that.

Needz moar “who destroyed New Orleans?”

“Well, I realize the Ghost of Christmas Future isn’t supposed to talk, but you think you could maybe, you know, get on with it? I’d like to get back to sleep sometime before dawn.”

After staying silent and still another minute or so, the cloaked figure walked away slowly. Katrina followed.

“So are you going to show me my grave?” Katrina asked. “With all the NYRA members standing around cheering that I’m dead? That’d about fit the impression I’ve gotten so far. Or maybe just show me in the future, at the ripe old age of 23. Oh, wait. Did Rory die? That’d suck. Being so small doesn’t mean he’s sick. He might just be way overdue for a major growth spurt. Or perhaps he’s a midget. Midgets are people, too. Reminds me of a joke. Okay. Three midgets are having a discussion…”

“Grrr,” emitted the Ghost.

“Oh, sorry, am I talking too much? I do that when I’m cold, and I’m fucking freezing out here!”

Why the “grrr”? I assumed it was because I was talking too much. Or perhaps the Ghost of Christmas Future is already familiar with that midget joke.

All of a sudden, while gazing off at the distant gravestones, the Ghost accidentally stepped on an ice patch. The cloaked figure slid, staggered, and fell back flat on the ground.

The hood slid off.

Katrina gasped.

“ALEX!”

The Ghost, none other of course than Alex Koroknay-Palicz, stood up, leaving the hood off. “Yeah, it’s me,” he grumbled.

“You, Alex, are the Ghost of Christmas Future?”

“I am,” he stated proudly.

Katrina nodded. “All I needed to hear.” With that, she turned around and ran as fast as she could away from him. “Help!” she shouted. “I’ve reformed! I’ll be nice. Kathleen! Get me out of here! Please!”

I suppose up until this point, Alex seemed conspicuously absent from this story. Originally, I considered having him be Scrooge and I’d be Ghost of Christmas Future, but this way seems better. It’s also symbolic of my moderatory tyranny at the time, though, as Alex, being the forums admin, was in a way “the only one she fears”, seeing as his mere presence as Ghost of Christmas Future, without us seeing a damn thing, made me turn around and run back! Dick.

“Come on, Jeff,” Katrina invited upon spotting him. “Join us at Adam’s for Christmas dinner.”

“I hate Christmas,” he said flatly.

“Do you hate free food?”

“Eh, you talk the talk.”

At the time, Jeff Odgis was being a dick to everyone on the forums about Christmas, taking the War on Christmas to astronomical levels. In fact, right after this was posted, we discussed in the mod forum that he’d probably start shit over it. Actually, he was strangely cool about it. *shrug*

“I’ve brought food for our NYRA community, dining together at Adam’s,” she told him.

“How much food?” he asked.

“Two whole packages of Oscar Mayer bologna!” She held them in each hand.

“Oh.” He took the bologna and looked at it despondently.

“And!” she went on, wheeling in a lot of carts full of food. “A big-ass turkey! And a big-ass ham! And a big-ass roast beef!”

“Wow!” Adam reacted.

“Not to mention about a zillion baked potatoes,” she went on. “Lots of carrots and corn. Rice and gravy. Turkey stuffing. Green beans. Cranberry sauce. Rolls. And a huge ass load of pies! Pumpkin. Apple. Cherry. Lemon meringue. You fucking name it!”

“Holy shit!” Svend cried when he saw the food she brought. “I don’t believe it. It’s a miracle!”

It’s like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter all rolled into one!

So everyone in the happy little NYRA town, of all religions, gathered at Adam’s for the big ass Christmas feast. Katrina glared with a slight smirk when Ken, Jess, and Alex all arrived and joined everyone at the table.

“Where were you three last night?” she asked them suspiciously.

“Why?” they all asked in unison.

“Oh, nothing.”

Even Kathleen showed up!

“I thought you were dead!” Katrina asked her.

“Dead?” she said. “No. I was just gone for a while. Didn’t die. Thought I’d come on back and join the feast, though.”

“Okay, great! Where’s your chains?”

“What chains?”

Because this story totally needed to be any more WTF.

Say, where’s Galen?”

“He’s fulfilling his holiday tradition,” Andrew replied. “He treks to the North Pole so he can fuck Mrs. Claus while Santa is out distributing gifts.”

“That’s our Galen!”

My little consolation to our Sniper Lord for his otherwise absence from this story.

“God bless us, everyone.”

“Hey, stop that!” Jeff snapped. “I don’t believe in God. Don’t say stuff like that around me.”

“Bite me.”

Don’t you long for the days when “Jeff from Boca Raton” was some long-post-writing asshole rather than the awesome youth rights hero today’s “Jeff from Boca Raton” is? Yeah, me neither.

I actually wrote the whole thing over the course of a night, since at the time I was unemployed and hopelessly nocturnal. As you can see in its original thread, it got some rave reviews from everyone! Yay! It’s perhaps my personal favorite NYRA Tale, though actually the newer Christmas one from last year, How NYRA Saved Christmas, I think I like better. They’re both good. In any case, we’re NYRA, and sometimes crazy shit happens within us and just randomly happens, in real life and in fan fiction, but we manage to persevere and continue to pretend we like each other! For that is what Christmas is all about!

They won’t shut up. Chatting away on their cell phones, even while they’re driving. I try to talk to one of them, yet they keep yakking away on the phone. So rude.

Even when I invite them to dinner, they take their places at the dining table, yet they keep talking and talking on their phones, while I’m just sitting there awkwardly, as if in another world. Lame.

Eventually, the four calling birds went away, still running their mouths to the unknown being on the other end of their calls. Oh, well. Best of luck to them.

Happy 4th Anniversary, Eight Mine Fortress!!!

Today we wish a Happy 3rd Birthday to… Eight Mine Fortress!

Moving along like before, despite a rather sparse year of entries on here and even sparser on new content for the other sections. More than half of this year’s entries are this month alone!

Here’s to year four!

This is the 257th entry in Sure, Why Not?, by a wide margin the most often updated section (and what many believe to be the only thing on this site). The other sections I update whenever I feel like it. So they aren’t a whole lot different from poor, all-but-forgotten Science Village. Oh, well.

Time for a third year! Yay Fortress!

I tell you, was a gorgeous Christmas Day here. Sunny and clear and quiet outside. Better than last year when it was raining. Made me think of the Emerson, Lake, and Palmer song “I Believe in Father Christmas”. First line goes: You said there’d be snow at Christmas, you said there’d be peace on earth, but instead it just kept on raining, a veil of tears for the virgin birth.

But, yeah, that was last year. This year, was a nice day. True, snow would have been way better, but not a bad day still.

Just one little issue. Grandma got sick about five days ago and hasn’t been well since. And after this morning she fell down after getting out of bed, and was too weak to pick herself back up and was on the floor for THREE HOURS, something was really wrong. Don’t know yet. Also been running a fever.

Could be something. Could be nothing. This afternoon, my dad and aunt and the rest of us decided it was time she went to the hospital. Dad, aunt, sister, and cousins took grandma to the hospital, and I stayed home to keep track of things here, plus I’m the only one who has work tomorrow and can’t do the late night if it came to that.

Interesting thing, though. I still feel like this was a good Christmas. If you’d told me before that we’d have something like this happen on Christmas Day, I’d shudder at the thought, feel like that would ruin it for sure. But it doesn’t feel ruined. Nor do I feel like this happening today made this any worse in particular. Magic of Christmas right there, I guess. Christmas still came all the same despite some adversity. I feel like a Who!

And, like the last two years, here’s my Christmas videos!

UN: xmas
PW: tree

Yeah, I know, it’s the same as last year even though I had said it was temporary. Whatever.

Just a heads up. I’m going to have to upgrade this stupid thing. So if you come by in the next couple of days and everything looks weird, then I’ve started but haven’t finished yet.

Another heads up, and this pisses me off. I discovered the theme I chose for this thing isn’t supported in the current versions! Which means things will be looking a bit different. Probably. I’ll try to see if my current theme will work anyway, but if it has problems, I’ll just find another one. I’ve seen some promising ones, so no trouble there. Nothing exactly like this one, though. Even though I’ve torn apart this one’s stylesheet so much it’s hard to remember what it even looked like originally!

So that’s the deal. Probably won’t irritate you as much as it does me. Upgrading will hopefully cut down the ever increasing volume of comment spam. Seriously, you should see the disgusting crap in these spam comments! But you don’t. Because it all goes into moderation and I delete it before it ever even thinks about occupying publicly visible pixels.

We’ll see how it goes.

YOU SUCK!

So today is New Year’s Eve. It is the night people around the world watch the clock and when it strikes midnight, they cheer, get drunk, and try to sing Auld Lang Syne. Well, except for some people. People who irritate me to no end. So who sucks today? People who don’t stay up until midnight tonight.

And they get all cocky about it. “Oh, I didn’t want to do that. I was tired. I don’t need to do that. I’m better than you.” Whatever, loser.

So stay up tonight and watch the clock strike twelve. I command you!

On another note, I did it! I have made an entry every day of December now, as I promised. Thank God for Christmas. It has lots of stuff worth an entry. If I were trying to do this in like September or something, it would be much harder. Now I’m worried I won’t have much to rant about next December. Shouldn’t worry, though. There’s always something.

Oh, and go, Detroit Lions, for humiliating the Dallas Cowboys at home today.