They are arranged from newest to oldest.

December 30, 2001 ... I don't feel like the year would be complete without posting one more feature -- after all, it's been months since I made any significant non-journal additions to my site. So what did I pull out of the ol' Baxilian grab bag for you today? An essay about ... uhm ... salt. And military expenditures. Go ahead and read "The Price of Vengeance"; you might even learn something.

Also: Do you want to link to Tomorrowlands? Is a simple text link not sufficient? Then you may also want to check out this cute banner ad that I made a week or two ago. Drop me a line if you use it; I hope to set up a page of reciprocal links someday.

October 16, 2001 ... Response to Chibi Jesus has been curiously subdued, so I figured that -- with my typing ability returning -- I might as well get around to one of the things that I've been promising people I'd do for months. Namely, upgrade my forums. They're far more powerful, secure, and ... well, okay, maybe not prettier. Yet. But that's coming.

That's been pretty much the sum total of my waking hours the last two days -- which isn't to say that I haven't been doing other things of consequence as well. For example, Orion (a draconic friend and Tomorrowlands reader) attempted a 24-hour comic last weekend, in the same spirit as my "Shadows", although ultimately more successfully -- Orion did get through a full 24 pages. I helped him out by posting the finished comic here on Tomorrowlands, and you lucky people can go and read through "Matte Black."

My wrists are feeling better; they're not painful any more, but they are still somewhat stiff and sore. Hopefully I can keep myself away from the keyboard enough to clear up the problem for good; I don't want a repeat performance.

October 7, 2001 ... I'm still dealing with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome; I know, I'm a bad person to be on the computer at all, doing more typing and keeping my arm from healing at full speed. But sometimes you just gotta do what you've gotta do.

In this case, artistic inspiration kicked me in the pants; for some reason, I seem to be in quite a drawing mood lately. ... Well, it wasn't really artistic inspiration, actually. It was more just a random moment of wrongness that somehow became a web page.

Chibi Jesus. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

September 25, 2001 ... After spending all of Saturday and some of Sunday doing such highly amusing and engaging things as "drawing", "inking", and "scanning", I have finally finished all of the back-end work necessary to get the finished product -- a 24-hour comic I'm calling "Shadows" -- online. Huzzah!

For those of you who have been earnestly waiting for years to laugh at my art, here's your chance. 13 (well, 13 1/2) pages of happy Baxilian sketchy joy await. Go! Go read it!

September 14, 2001 ... FYI: I'm away for the weekend. I'm driving down with Angi to California, where I will express my best wishes to Rose and help my sister move into college. I expect to be largely without Internet access.

See you all Tuesday-ish.

September 12, 2001 ... In recognition of yesterday's tragedy, I have temporarily changed the front page for the site. There's a movement going around the Internet to shut sites down for a day and provide that image in its place; as I don't have enough time before work to properly shut down my site (mostly involving figuring out a way to deal with the 404 errors if I removed all of the pages that everyone has inevitably bookmarked), I'm at least doing what I can.

The person who I got the image from (here) said that the image is available to all; go ahead and copy it to your own site if you want; and that there's no link to anywhere necessary. If you've heard different let me know.

July 22, 2001 ... Blah. Tiredness. Extreme fall-out-of-chair tiredness. Brevity:

A whole bunch of pointless PERL hacking under my belt, and I have accomplished the grand and backbreaking task of ... moving a bunch of files from one server to another. Yay. The practical upshot is, Erin's section of the site has been updated -- including a page of her necklace designs, some of which are for sale, and (if I do say so myself) are really pretty.

I also posted a precision short story -- 250 words, no more, no less -- to the Tomorrowlands Universe section; it's amazing how much you can cram into 250 words, really, and I think "Birthday Present" came out rather well.

And I'm so tired I won't even write a journal entry tonight. (*falls down, goes thud*)

July 17, 2001 ... A few random site update announcements -- something new, and some large tweaks. I've added a few paragraphs to the "vanilla, non-offensive" Tad homepage, and finally gotten around to organizing the news archive -- well, okay, not organizing exactly, but I split off last year's news onto its own page, to get things loading faster.

However, the previous two tweaks are practically guaranteed to be the most boring possible updates to the most boring possible sections of my site. I mean, who reads that stuff, anyway? Biographical information and archives of site announcements? No offense to Antwon, but I don't think that the TwonCam is even in contention for the "Most Useless Page on the entire Internet" title, with these bad boys in the running. I mean, the TwonCam at least has pictures. The closest I come with my two pages is the nifty background image thingy in the news archive, which has the primary effect of making things harder to read.

However! Not all is deadly boring here in Bax-land. I got a few rolls of film (remember them? Those things that people used to use before digital cameras? Little cylinders filled with plastic coated with light-sensitive silver ions? Oh ... never mind) developed recently, including two rolls of fireworks pictures, and ended up throwing together a photo essay of sorts. Take a look, and be marginally more entertained.

June 18, 2001 ... My California trip went well ... and I wasn't even offline as much as I'd anticipated. Be that as it may, I'm home now, and can continue posting at my usual turtle-like rate.

In other news, here's your Horrible Pun of the Day, lifted straight from a conversation occurring just minutes ago:

Dave: ... Everyone needs "memory weasels."
Bax: Even people who have "memory hamsters"? Wouldn't the weasels just eat the hamsters?
Dave: Well, if you've got "memory hamsters", you need to upgrade, anyway.
Myles: But "memory weasels" are outdated. If you're going to upgrade, go for "memory otters."
Bax: "Memory otters"? Aren't those the things that put "memory urchins" on their chest, and bang them with rocks?
Erin: Only if they're programmed in Sea.
Everyone: *GROAN*

June 15, 2001 ... I'm off to California for the weekend. My sister Sarah is graduating from high school. (Yay Sarah!) I'll be back Sunday night.

I'm not feeling much better yet. I need a full night of sleep, and to stop living between the Pit of Finance and the Pendulum of Deadline.

regardless, life goes on. see you in three.

June 7, 2001 ... Added Hamlet's Cat to the "Humor" section.

Were any of you aware that my mate Erin -- who has a website on Tomorrowlands here -- has started her own online journal? Check out Tangential Icebergs. If not because you know and love Erin/Jia/Elynne too, then at least because it's a great second perspective on what goes on in my life. (She's been writing a lot more about our household's continuing financial crisis than I have.)

While I'm at it, mad props go out to all of the other people whom I exchange journal reads with. These largely fall into one of two categories. In the dragon community: Rene, Tser, Ssthisto, Lonita, Keh'tel (though he's on hiatus for the summer). In the alt.poly community: Kylee, Rose. Special mention goes out to Antwon, whose "online journal" is a hell of a lot more intricate than simply writing about his life; and Linn, who I can'tentirely remember where I know her from, but who has mentioned me by name, so I'm sure we've talked one-to-one at some point.

I know some people deride public journals as the feeding of one's ego, and this may be the case, but that outlook ignores one very important fact: it takes a lot of courage to expose one's life to the world, to talk about what you do with no regrets or fear. So, props to tha skillz of my journal homies, yo.

(It's late. Can you tell?)

June 1, 2001 ... Just a quick note to let everyone know that, despite all appearances, I am still alive and well.

Between the job interview and the auto collision (no injuries involved, thankfully), today has rather left me stressed out. Thank goodness it's a weekend and I can sleep it off.

-- Bax

May 20, 2001 ... Wow. It's been a month since my latest news update. Well, you know what they say: Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana. *drum beat*

Ha ha ha. Okay, now for something genuinely funny: I've added the adventures of the Bastard Knight From Hell to the Humor section. Enjoy.

April 16, 2001 ... Sometimes it's just good to set aside time for maintenance.

I browsed through Tomorrowlands today, finding broken images and fixing them, finding images I hadn't yet created and making them, finding links that didn't work and editing them, and trying to ensure that everything was, in general, up to date. Nothing major to report except that the site looks a whole lot spiffier.

Well, okay, I lie. The "Humor" navigation button in the sidebar, which has been broken for ... uhm ... since I added it, now links to a humor index page. Yay! I've moved "The Essay Throughout Your Life" and "What I Learned From Cable TV" over from my old website, and added a riff on Undead Tech Support by that most prolific of authors, Anonymous. (Not the one on the Tomorrowlands forum, though.)

Why is it that every time I sit down to do any significant work on the website -- or a journal entry of any significant length -- I'm up until at least 5 AM? Bleagh. I go to sleep now. *thud*

April 11, 2001 ...

I'm leaving tomorrow morning for California, to celebrate my parents' 25th wedding anniversary and -- two days later -- to attend the wedding of a high-school friend. Good weekend for relationships, I guess. I'll be back Sunday night.

I don't expect to be without Internet access in the meantime -- I can get online from my parents' house (barring some sort of weird California rolling blackout power outage thingy). On the other hand, there's still that little bit of doubt, so I stayed up all extra late tonight and wrote a whole buncha new content to keep everyone occupied until I can post again.

First of all, there's the write-up of the hiking trip I took with an old friend to Smith River National Recreation Area, in far northern California, last last month -- a transcription from the paper journal I took with me on the trip (sorry, I haven't had the funds available to develop my trip photos yet. Not that anyone's going to be interested in vacation pictures :-)).

Secondly, new content for The Tomorrowlands Universe; the news writeup explains the details.

Thirdly, although I can't take personal credit, the forums have been buzzing with activity lately. Check 'em out, and meet your fellow Tomorrowlands surfers!

April 3, 2001 ...

Just wanted to let y'all know that I'm back from the aforementioned camping trip. I took a notebook with me and was fairly diligent about keeping up on a daily journal (far more so than usual, anyway); I'll be posting those soon.

I also got to run through FC's Tomorrowlands story with him, and we sat down to finish up the final edit; the story will be up in the TTU section as soon as he sends me a copy. ("Therianthropes: A Classification" is still on the front burner; I haven't been doing much writing lately.)

It's good to be home.

March 27, 2001 ...

It's been a long but fast-moving week. Truth be told, the time's rather ran away with me. I'm rather shocked to see that I haven't updated the journal in five days.

Don't expect much out of the next week, either: I'm going on vacation!

Those of you who read the forums may have had some advance warning; my old friend FC and I are hooking up for a nice long hiking trip on the California coast. Given that my plans over the last week have conspicuously NOT included "buying a wireless modem and thirty battery packs for my aging laptop, and then stuffing them all into my pack for ballast during the hiking trip", this means that you won't be seeing much of me until my return on April 2.

I'm taking along a good old-fashioned paper journal so that I can write if the urge strikes me. Any journalizing that gets done over the course of the trip will end up here, backdated to when it was originally authored. (Unless I write a story, as I've been meaning to, for Terra Tales, in which case I'll refer you over there.) I'm sure FC will keep me honest about content production. In between rest breaks, anyway. ;-)

Anyway, have fun, y'all. Don't let the world get destroyed in my absence ... I've still got half a tube of prescription toothpaste I need to finish off.

March 8, 2001 ...

OUTAGE NOTICE

Tomorrowlands will be offline for an unknown length of time this Saturday, March 10. Please bear with us.

The machine's owner explains its necessity thusly:

... There is an extended power outage scheduled this coming Saturday. Because this outage effects the entire building and much of the internal wiring is being switched over to new wiring, there's no possibility of getting a generator to run the systems when the power is out.

February 28, 2001 ... March: In like a lion. They really aren't kidding about that, are they?

I'm sitting here, shaken but not too stirred, in the basement of my Seattle home. It's now about 30 minutes after an earthquake that the radio is claiming was felt as far away as Salt Lake City. Magnitude 6.2. You'll probably be hearing about this on the news soon.

I'm fine. The house is fine. The neighborhood seems OK. Everyone's bracing for aftershocks, but the TV reporters haven't found any scenes of mass carnage or collapsed buildings to cover, so it looks like actual damage was minimal. I'll take that as the blessing it is. The quake was centered about 30 miles southwest of Seattle, they say, so we got just about the worst of it.

I have to admit, my first thought -- aside from scrambling out of bed once the quake hit my "danger, this might actually be worth reaching a doorway for" register -- was that Mt. Rainier had gone volcanic and that getting out of the city might be a very smart move. Once I managed to stumble out of the house in my bathrobe (having just gotten out of bed), and didn't see any skies dark with ash, my train of thought immediately shifted to, "Oh, just an earthquake. I'll go get ready for work then."

I guess that there are some signs of being a Californian that no acclimation will ever shake out of you.

February 8, 2001 ... Hmmm ... site news? Well, the Tomorrowlands Forum is approaching 300 posts after less than a month of uptime; that's something. I've just recently received a story submission for TTU, which may (depending on the author's wishes) be posted shortly; I'll keep y'all informed there. I'm still cleaning up "Therianthropes: A Classification" for that same section myself, and furiously scribbling notes on Dragon Essays I Need To Write.

Part of the problem here is that my creativity comes in bursts. I'm between bursts at the moment. I can't realistically expect much out of this weekend, either, since I'm going to be spending most of it role-playing. I guess the watchword around here, as usual, is "Wait and see." :-)

January 18, 2001 ... If Tomorrowlands was inaccessible this morning, you know what to blame: California's wacky electric "deregulation".

I'm in Washington myself, but the server is in California. And I couldn't access Tlands earlier today, myself. So I figure that the state's power woes were probably the cause. It does help that I also got a notice from the server admin:

In case you haven't heard, there are rolling blackouts (or "involuntary firm demand reductions" as the power company puts it) throughout the state of California. ... I'll know if anything's happening only when the power goes out, so this is likely all the warning you'll get. :>

You know, if the state had just known better than to mess with the law of supply and demand by "deregulating" the power companies (read: "forcing them to charge consumers a flat rate unrelated to the actual costs of electricity"), the firms wouldn't be broke, and the market wouldn't be correcting itself quite this severely. "There ought to be a law", indeed. "Hey, people want to use lots of electricity. Let's just promote our economy by artificially lowering the price on it, until people are demanding and using far more than an unregulated market will supply. Never mind that this will inevitably cause a crash as electricity suppliers start losing profit incentive to actually produce the stuff. Never mind that if people were forced to pay what electricity actually cost, they'd be doing sensible things like turning down their thermostats five degrees and turning off all of their lights at night."

As a former California resident, I'm awful pissed right now. Not at the power companies, but at the government that has prevented them from doing their job.

<end political rant>

January 12, 2001 ... Woo hoo! It's done! Maybe I'll be able to get some sleep now! [NOTE: 14 hours later, and I still haven't moved from the computer. Blame the forum, DoA2, and today's journal entry. -Bax] ... On the other hand, I've got a weekend coming up, and more massive tweaks to make and an AD&D session to attend, so it's not likely ... how ironic. (Or just sad.)

... Uhm. Ahem: The forum is operational! Weigh in your opinions on the site; ask questions about the Tomorrowlands universe; make weird, pointless posts in the Guestbook about how you're not wearing any pants; ... whatever. It's all up to you!

As seems to be the norm with this site, I'll keep tweaking it as time goes on; it is, however, functionally complete, and I'm proud of that.

January 11, 2001 ... A few quick notes as I come up for air:

* CGI is working again. My contact script is running. You can mail me again! Yay!

* No journal entry today. I've been hacking for about 24 hours straight at this point -- minus sleep -- on The Next Big Thing for the site, which I hope to roll out tomorrow.

* The forum is on its way. I'm almost afraid to post the URL, because given the recent deluge of responses to some of the things I've posted, I halfway expect a stampede. I have a few things to tweak, first. It's working, but it doesn't look like I want it to look. If you want a preview, I'll say this in advance: I'm running YABB v1 final, albeit with a massive makeover. Go check out their forum to get a feel for the software.

* I'm taking a break soon. I've put in a truly herculean amount of time on this website in the last week and a half. I plan to declare a brief vacation mid-month just so I can spend some time with Erin and so I don't fall behind at work.
    On the other hand, someone leaked word of the Tomorrowlands universe on alt.lifestyle.furry; I'm bracing for a bunch of visits, and while that section of the site has no gaping holes, it's looking awful thin to be getting so much attention. So I have a lot of work in front of me to clean that up.

January 8, 2001 ... That "WHAM!" you heard late last night was me hitting a wall. I'm not terribly surprised, after all of the work that I did. I rolled out an entire section of my website -- eight brand new pages, from scratch -- in just under 12 hours. Hurrah for weekends, sleep deprivation, and the new Tomorrowlands section!

In a nutshell: Tomorrowlands is a fictional universe, much like the world of today, that I've been kicking around in my head for several years, and am now bringing to the Web as a "shared world" for myself and other writers to contribute stories to. I've already written several stories in the setting, developed a handful of characters, described the history of where the Tomorrowlands diverged from the world we recognize as Earth, and provided contribution guidelines for those who want to write their own stories set in the T-lands world.

I'm still working on fixing the "broken CGI" thing; once that's cleared up, my next addition to this site will be a public forum (bulletin-board style), which should also help prospective writers link up with each other and trade ideas. Plus get me responding to contact a little bit more promptly -- posting a response on a BBS is a little easier for me than trying to manage my e-mail.

Anyway, that's Tomorrowlands news. I'll keep on servin' y'all updates, fresh off the pipeline, 'til ... uhm ... Little Timmy falls down the well. Cause then I'll have to go bark at his parents. Or something.

January 3, 2001 ... I've been very good about not getting all self-conscious and whiny about my site's incompleteness and lack of content. Haven't I? Don't I deserve a pat on the back? Good me, have a cookie.

Well, unfortunately, I've also been just as good at "not posting new things" and "getting distracted by Vagrant Story and Chrono Cross instead of updating my journal." But wait! Stuff is happening.

First of all, I gave the journal index a new, festive trim to go with the new year. All organized and everything! And that'll keep me from having to cram too much onto any given index page. So yay.

Secondly: Yeah, yeah, there's still all those broken links in the sidebar. I spent most of Tuesday typing frantically, and have a whole bunch of New! Original! Content! to fill in one of those three gaps. It didn't get HTML-formatted tonight because I was tinkering under the hood of the journal index, but you don't have long to wait.

Nope, sorry, not "Draconity." You'll still have to visit the Draconity FAQ at my old site for that. But I think you'll like the new stuff. It'll be here shortly.

Thirdly, the mail script for my Contact page has been down for a while. (Thank you to the anonymous person over at Our Place who brought it to my attention.) Actually, all CGI for T-lands seems to be not working. Something wrong with the config files, I guess. I've given the server admin a holler. It will be working soon, really, it will.

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