Bad site slowdowns

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Okay — if you’re reading this, you may (or may have not) noticed that for some reason, my website is responding incredibly slowly at the moment. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to figure out just why this is happening yet. Things were working fine earlier tonight, but when I came back to my computers after watching Enterprise, something’s obviously going on — some pages are taking as long as a minute to load, when it should be nearly instantaneous.

I’m banging my head against things right now to try and figure out what’s going on, but so far have yet to come up with any solid ideas or leads. Hopefully it’s just a temporary thing, but I really have no way of knowing whether it will be or not. I’m just kinda lost and flying blind at the moment…(sigh)…grrrr. Bleah. Pfutz.

Resurrections

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I’m slowly but surely getting all the old posts that disappeared when I borked things up put back in. It’s kind of slow going, since I’ve got to do it mostly by hand (at least I can cut and paste the HTML — if all I could do was re-type it, there’s no way it would get done), but so far I’ve got the Featured Posts working again, and all posts from today back through December ’01 back in. It’s a start, at least.

Another quote

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All we may say is, that the more purely an aesthete a man is, the more likely he is to prefer cats; since the superior grace, beauty, manners and neatness of the cat cannot but conquer the fancy of any impartial observer emancipated from mundane and ethical illusions.

— H.P. Lovecraft

Spooky…

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

— H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

Tron

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Very, very cool. I just picked up the Tron Special Edition DVD during lunch today, and got to watch some of it after I got home. I jumped around a bit in the film itself just to take a look at it, then bounced over to the second disc for all the special features and watched the ‘Making of Tron’ documentary. Turns out that Disney’s DVD department has done their usual stellar job, and the documentary is a full 90 minutes long! Much better than the 15-minute fluff piece that seems to be the norm for so many studios. I didn’t get through any more of the special features tonight, but I plan to soon.

Oh, and possibly one of the coolest things about this disc — right at the end of the documentary (around the 1:23:00 mark or so), there are a few quick glimpses at concept art for a possible Tron 2.0! There’s also a very cryptic teaser when you load the disc that ends with this web address — www.tronkillerapp.com. I’m not sure if it’s early promotion for Tron 2.0 or not, but it’s a very interesting site…will be fun to see where this goes in the future.

In any case, if you’re at all of the age to have been as entranced by Tron as I was, this set is a definite must-buy.

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Quotebook updates

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Well, when I nuked a fair amount of my site, one of the things I managed to kill was the random quote generator that displays a randomly selected quote underneath the quotebook link in the contents bar and on the quotebook introduction page. So, I’m working on going through my quotebook and re-creating the list of quotes for the generator to pull from, and as I do so, I’m adding hyperlinks where appropriate to the attributions. In so doing, I believe Royce may end up with more links to his site from mine alone than from the rest of the ‘net in totality. Never let it be said I never do a friend a favor — no matter how completely goofball it may be.