a little over a month ago, right in the middle of your standard vecna/zeromus debate concering whether or not midgets on welfare are entitled to government protection from swarms of diabetic locusts, the long-lost loretian suddenly popped up in the dev hangout, explaining that he'd been living in the hollowed out belly of a whale for the past year, surviving by chewing slowly on the exposed mammalian bone marrow. or, he'd just been working 90 hours a week at IE...I forget which.

at any rate, it looked as if lore had much more of the laudable Free Time on his hands, and had decided to spend some of his newfound chronological wealth on vrpg itself. we wet ourselves collectively. lore deleted zeromus's update scripts, so that he might code new ones, and script up ~all~ of vrpg, not just news/files/contacts. it was like the berlin wall coming down all over again.

the next day, loretian vanished. apparently the undead carcass of the whale had returned for revenge, or something. for whatever reason, he was gone, and we were without update scripts. we spent the next day or two crying, waiting patiently for him to pop back up online, but it wasn't happening. mcgrue, who had been away for a few days, returned, and upon having the situation explained to him, grue swore that he'd not only script up all of vrpg himself, but he promised to do a few other things people have been asking for quite a bit. the condition, however, is that he wanted a new non-frames design, which we have more or less finished. however, grue's got quite a bit of scripting left to do, so don't get too excited just yet.

secondly, an instruction:

now. without update scripts, the only way to do it is by hand, and let me tell you, it's not too fun going through php-warped html. so, until the new stuff is up, just send mail to either me or zeromus, and one of us will update.

thirdly, an oath:

As soon as the new design is finished, the final design will also be finished. I'm not touching this thing for at bare minimum another year. unless vecna cries.

fourthly, the belated news:

(1) the verge source is finally up. it hurts my eyes after a few minutes, but before the high contrast design and scrunched up file descriptions raped me of my precious sense of sight, it looked like there was already a fairly decent wealth of assorted stuff to file through. turn down the contrast on your monitor and check it out.

(2) I finally saw blair witch project. if I had seen it when it was released, I might have labeled it the most compelling comedy of the year.

(3) celas, tatsumi and some other people held a 96 Hours of Verge contest, which had a pretty good turnout. they then decided not to release the results.

(4) um...well. I guess that's it.

finally, the end:

it was supposed to be a fun summer, a summer to get things done, a summer to see lots of goodies. for nearly everyone I know, it was a pretty shitty summer. too much work, not enough time, and assorted bad things happening. new responsibilities popping up, and a few mishaps. now the semester's starting back up, everyone's heading back to college, everyone's glad the summer's over.

but don't be sad. the bad part's almost over. vrpg will no longer be delapidated, and we'll all update a bunch more. we were starting to pick up steam again until this little spurt here. there are more good things on the horizon as well. winverge1, which needs only sound support. winverge2, which is only missing a few things as well.

P.S. a reminder or two: