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.

Here’s to You!

So I raise my glass and say, “Here’s to you, Eight Mine Fortress!”

That’s right, folks. Today the Fortress is one year old! Began with Sure, Why Not? entry This Is Eight Mine Fortress, Miscellaneous short story Crisis in the Pool, NYRA Tales song parody 88 Lines about 44 NYRA Forums Members, and Goodies Reposted list Top 10 List: Computer. And from there it went. Crowd pleasing. Pissing off self-righteous idiots. Opening Eights. Raising my glass in a toast to stuff that is awesome. Calling out stuff that sucks for how much it sucks. Sacred decrees. Chasing buses. All kinds of good shit.

So hang on tight. You’re in for another year.

Took forever to upload, but whatever.

http://www.eightminefortress.com/xmasvideo

It’s password protected so bots don’t download them and run out my bandwidth. They are huge files. You’ll need Quicktime to see them.

UN: xmas
PW: tree

This will only be valid for about a week, too.

And, yeah, there are two videos. For also included is the NEVER BEFORE SEEN video from last year’s Christmas!

But that’s my present to you. So rather than just reading my ramblings, you can see and hear my ramblings in my horrible voice. Enjoy!

I was in the store ten years ago today, on December 22, 1996. During that visit something special happened, a special event I cherish to this day, even if rather trivial at a glance. But I don’t care. It matters to me.

It’s the story of a 13-year-old me, having begun the year on a great note, but then befallen with broken friendships, plummeting grades, and a just plain darker outlook. Dark it was into the dark days of December, until about the winter solstice, when the days would get longer again, I was caught up in a bit of a quest. While everything else in my life still sucked, I had this if nothing else.

What the hell am I talking about, you ask? Don’t worry. I jotted it all down. Copied (almost) exactly from a little notebook where I wrote it all back in 1997, so to preserve the feeling of the times, even if my writing style made retarded monkeys look brilliant. The newest addition to the Miscellaneous section of the Fortress, a true story, I bring you…

The World I Know

Perhaps I’ll go into further detail someday about what I discuss in this piece. Funny to think how much of the events surrounding these songs shaped my life or were signs of my times. Cool, though.

Not to mention it explains my emotional attachment to the lost Twin Towers of Manhattan. Sigh.