I don't know, maybe the Dredge is kind of a mistake right now. It's just making me want the kind of online connections and interactions I had back then, and honestly I don't need to get any more wistful and/or depressed. Still, we persevere. I can't get rid of these files until I clean them out.

Eventually I'll dust off the Circular Cruises, but they weren't as brilliant or insightful as all that. Al Capp deserted liberalism for asshole politics. Coincidentally, so did Lileks a few years after this was written, though it's unclear in retrospect exactly how leftist Lileks was in the first place. (I've learned in recent years that a lot of leftists aren't actually left at all. Of course, my definition of "leftist" is pretty far left.) We were all very naive then, and we thought that the Lewinsky business was a cheapening of politics and a corruption of the dialogue and so on. We were not in any way prepared for what Trump would do to the place.

See the comments about the stamps in the previous set of Dredged entries.

The Millennium Game was a project to track hype, media, advertising, et cetera using the word "millennium" (in reference to the then-upcoming year 2000). Information density killed it; in 1998 it was manageable but by 1999 it clearly was not. Also, I was beginning to get seriously worried about Y2K bug (because in 1998 nobody but a handful of programmers was taking the level of danger seriously). When I lost the fourth page of updates while trying to create the fifth page, I called that a sign from above and scrapped the whole thing.

Once again, this entry is depressingly naive when viewed through the 2026 lens. You can tell how bad it is because Netanyahu is still around and still corroding the mideast with his policies, and hasn't been jailed or executed. If you'd told some of us in 1998 that he'd still be pulling this shit nearly thirty years later, we'd have either slapped your face or jumped off a cliff.

The story will eventually get Dredged, but not until 2005, which is where it eventually landed. To not keep anyone in suspense until then, Worldcon was in Baltimore that year and I suddenly got a wild hair to go down and attend a day of it. I talked the spouse (who was not yet the spouse, but we were definitely A Thing by then) into going. We went, we had fun, we came back, I had my usual mixed feelings about the SF community and fandom (which is the 'wistful' middle portion of the essay).

I clearly need to go find that Al Capp piece, already alluded to once above, and reread it. (Uncle Aussie is explained in the previous set of Dredgery.)

The most fascinating thing here to 2026 eyes is that I apparently was not prepared to concede that I was keeping an online journal. I don't think it was because of the "I don't update often enough to qualify" reaction -- I suspect it was because I thought of them as being, y'know, here's what I had for breakfast this morning, here's how my day at work went ... because a lot of them were. (There's a little more about that below when I discuss Anita Rowland.) I didn't want to have that kind of journal. I was posting my reactions to events of the day, my allegedly deep thoughts about things, etc. The minutiae of my life were not interesting, and they still aren't. The difference now is that sometimes I think I'd better record some of those minutiae for my own reference.

And in 2026, mirabile dictu, those pages are still up, should you want to go read them. Tripod has changed hands many times and the URL will redirect, but they're there. I wonder if Jette knows that. A word about Jette (who has now been going by that handle online much longer than she ever went by 'lanalee'). Jette and I knew each other -- in fact, we were a couple for some years -- well before any of this writing ever appeared on the web. We are still friends, and every so often (not as often as we'd like) the two of us get a chance to see her and/or her lovely wife in person. As I sift through these piles of ashes, it's nice to reflect on the things that do remain intact. As for Christmas ... well, my joke is that the best part of marrying someone who was raised Jewish is that I no longer have to bother with any of it. My relationship with my family in Louisiana also isn't what it once was, but that's a story for another day.

We mostly haven't slept in the same bed for many years. It's not because our relationship has chilled. It's simply that we keep very different hours -- about three hours' difference in our waking-up and going-to-sleep times -- and also I am a restless, fidgety, snoring sleeper.

I've grown more charitable about Linda McCartney over the years, especially after Heather Mills made her look so much better in comparison. (Linda McCartney died in April 1998; Paul married Heather Mills in June 2002).

I am sorry to say that in the intervening years, the market has gotten even worse -- to the point where it is now considered a crisis, as young people flee the state because they can't afford rent, much less buying property. Much ink has been spilled, but no one has done a damned thing about it.

"Mary Anne" is Mary Anne Mohanraj, about whom I'm thinking there will be more later in the Dredge. I'm not going to explain who she is; look her up. She's probably going tobe the only person mentioned anywhere in this little group of weirdos who has her own Wikipedia page. We've been out of touch, semi-deliberately, for many years. I am now reasonably certain the project alluded to here (and in the previous Dredge installment) was Clean Sheets. I suspect there'll be more words about that later in the Dredge too.

Incidentally, my habits have changed substantially over the years. Realizing that I really can give only one thing at a time the focus it deserves, I try to structure life so that I'm only working on one thing at a time. I do, however, still find that sometimes -- especially for my day job, where the work is not fascinating -- an impending deadline is the only thing that can motivate me. So I do still often let projects come down to the wire. As I write this, I have something that has to be finished by early June. I'll probably look into it on the last day of April.

Remembering to go outside remains very important for my mental and physical health. More so, since I now work from home and thus spend even more time with my butt in this chair in front of these computers than ever before.

My thoughts on Saving Private Ryan are further down this page. It coasts on a couple of brilliant moments, but it is undeniably a great movie ... unlike The Avengers, which looks like a worse and worse mishap with every passing year, especially if you are as deeply into the fandom of the 1960s television show as I became a few years later. I've never again watched the film in its entirety.

Stay Tuned was an intermittent column on things in advertising and marketing; it was a lot of fun and bits of it will surely surface in the Dredge.

Kymm Zuckert we shall surely discuss at some point in the near future.

Oh goodness. This is what was alluded to when someone (further up) said I might have a few too many irons in the fire at the time. Let's take them apart one by one.

Stay Tuned and Millennium Game have been explained further up this page. The former will resurface in the Dredge; the latter will not.

I was apparently working on a novel ... but at this point I'm not sure which one; I don't know whether it was the one that I eventually published (the first of three; another long sad story) or one that I abandoned.

The Limbo Diner story -- which was intended to be first of a series -- is particularly amusing for me to read about now, first, because I've completely forgotten it (I still have it, of courses; I need to dust it off and reread it and see if it's fit for rescue), and because it was originally intended to be a comic. Of course these days almost everything I do is a "comic," after a fashion, simply because I can't get anyone to read long prose. Who knows: maybe I'll read it and I'll do a comic of it.

The "bio of sorts" got moved a few times, and will appear much later in the Dredge. It's kind of an important entry in its way, so I'm sure I won't forget to mention when we get there.

And that was before I learned about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

That URL has been removed, because Wired completely changed the way they stored articles some years ago. It's probably either "Kenneth Starr as Mr. Weatherbee" or "Freedom From the Press." I can't tell you which because when I try to re-read the second one Wired pops up their "You've reached your free article limit" message (something that didn't happen in 1998) and they get a hearty fuck-you from me.

As I've noted several times in this process, this all feels so naive now in the Trump era. On the other hand, the paragraph about Clinton setting the bar for future presidential conduct now looks like one of the rare times I was both accurate and prescient.

It fascinates me which information I thought best to conceal at the time. I have changed a line above to say "ye spouse" instead of giving her actual first name. I have left in "the Institvte" even though, these days, I would cordially invite you to shoot me in the face rather than reveal anywhere on the web where I actually work. There is an enormous and deliberate wall of separation there. (It's OK here, though, because I haven't worked for MIT in a long time and the statute of limitations has expired.) As for Clinton: see comments on naivete above.

I do not care to go to workplace social events, then, now, or ever, but I make an exception when there's good barbecue. Sadly, my current workplace does not understand the virtue of barbecue.

This is the first mention of mouth organ (alas for coherence, properly rendered in all lower case), which was the column about sex and gender which posted on, IIRC, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and garnered some attention (probably undeserved) and led to some opportunities and contacts and so on, and which we eventually killed when the overhead and impostor syndrome got too harsh to bear. I will tell the full story of that some day when it gets Dredged, as it surely will.

I don't use "Columbine" as much as I used to because an incident in Colorado tarnished it forever, and anyway, people didn't quite get that it wasn't originally supposed to mean the flower at all; I picked it because of the Commedia character. So later I changed to her variant spelling "Columbina," which helped avoid both kinds of confusion.

Child of Fortune has not aged well for me; when I reread it a few years ago, it struck me that there was considerably less there than I had originally thought met the eye. I have no recollection of actually reading Bug Jack Barron.

Al Schroeder was a journaller and is almost certainly no longer with us, but the name is common enough, and my memory faint enough, that searching the web to try to find the right one is impossible. I know, because I tried.

I have nothing further to say here in 2026 about naivete, standards of presidential conduct, unexpected bombings, thinking with one's penis, etc. I have said all I can bear.

The essay on religion is somewhere in the archives waiting for me to unearth it. I am a littl hesitant to, honestly.

Thinking Aloud was a webring. If you don't know what a webring was, kid, I'm not going to explain it to you. It was run using my webring software, called Nibelung, which I maintained for years and years (until well after the heyday of the webring was over, in fact).

Diane Patterson is still around; she's mostly on Mastodon these days and does not, to the best of my knowledge, keep any kind of online journal per se.

Lizzy, of course, is Beth (whose last name I suppress here because she has never used it on the web). Beth is very definitely still around and we snark at each other regularly, though she also hasn't kept any kind of online journal for quite a while. Life ensued. It's a shame, though, because both of them were better writers than I am.

Of course these days, in order to avoid that messy business of our people dying (we don't seem to particularly care about their people dying), we conduct wars via drones and bombing so no boots are ever on the ground and no moral responsibility ever need be taken. Bloodshed without guilt. I can't say I like that any better.

Inu, of course, is no longer with us, but the web domain named for her still stands, and she still has her own about page there. I will never, never tke it down.

When I edited this entry in December 2004 for reposting, I noted "Anita carries on faithfully," followed by her journal URL. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. Anita Rowland died of cancer in 2007, age 51.

The "essay linked above" is no longer linked above because it's in the Circular Cruises and those have not been Dredged yet. One day. But you have enough here to get the gist.