I probably could have gotten to bed earlier last night; however, I have been meaning to start work on a project for a while, and at the last directors meeting this was given some impetus, and I recently saw that it was not going to be so difficult as it would have been a few months back.  I am organizing the Game Ideas Unlimited articles into a book, or more likely a collection of books, which will be available over the Internet and at conventions.

As part of this effort, I am going through the old articles on this site, connecting those to authors as I am able (not just my own), and repairing links in my old ones.  This is more work than necessary merely for releasing the book, but I have long wanted to fix some of those links (in fact, the links in the thirteenth installment in August 2001 were all bad by November 2001 due to a site restructuring, and I’ve wanted to fix them since then) and it is easier to do it all at once.  I’ve lost my own copies of many of these articles due to system crashes at my end, and this rebuilding will make the book possible finally.

Also as part of that, another thing that I have been meaning to do for much less time than either of those is reintroduce the old articles for the new audience.  I hope to keep on top of cleaning up the articles, and reposting these here, not as new posts but by means of mentioning them here and in threads on the forum, one at a time over the next four years.  That’s a substantial commitment, but I think I can stay alive that long, and it requires only that I take a few minutes to fix old links (it doesn’t even really require that–the articles themselves are quite readable).  I intend to do this on Fridays, the traditional day on which the articles were originally published, but as long as I’m talking about it let me point all of you to where the series began, Game Ideas Unlimited:  Introduction.  That’s in some ways a very brief one, and in some ways a very long one, because by way of introduction it links to several of my articles elsewhere, all of which I still reference from time to time, and well worth reading.

Also, I have finally repaired the problem with the Dandy mailbox, the one connected to my Internet service provider.  The big deal was a capitalization error in my password, now resolved.  Perhaps it is because while I was typing this I was also downloading three hundred forty-seven e-mails, three hundred two of which I have already deleted as Spam and a substantial number of those which remain either probably Spam or notices from the mail server that it has captured suspected Spam for my review (it’s usually right, and doesn’t catch enough of the stuff), but the connection to Gaming Outpost has gone quiet.  It appears to be just this site, but it’s been inaccessible for long enough now that I’m inclined to save this on my drive and reboot to see whether that clears the problem.

Whether or not that was the problem, it seems to have been fixed.  I’ve a bit more work to do on articles, it appears, but I’m on it.

–M. J. Young