From Somewhere, Volume Two

A bit about what I’m working on….

FROM SOMEWHERE- Started column in 1994 in the pages of a local entertainment mag out of Florence called “Stuff”. Moved column to the Tibby’s Bowl website in 1996. Moved Column to randomwerks.com in 1999. Started “From Somewhere” blog in 2002. Killed “From Somwhere” blog in July- when it became appearent the mix of personal, journo, fic, and other posts soured the flavor of the original intent of the “FS” column.

Rapid fire “quick cuts” version of “From Somewhere” began on NEED COFFEE.COM (http://www.needcoffee.com) in August.

Long form “From Somewhere” may replace the “quick cut” at random intervals at NEED COFFEE.

WORLDS TOUR- Multi media short form fiction series. Currently scheduled to run 14 “episodes”. Tentatively Begins Fall 2006 via RANDOMWERKS.COM.

MERIDIAN BARDIC COLLEGE- Design and Maintains Homepage for Bardic College for the Kingdom of Meridies (Society for Creative Anachronism)

And no, not the Simpsons. The other Springfield- the one mentioned in the last post. Yeah, the soap opera…

An Avengers storyline will cross over with CBS’ Guidling Light- with characters from the soap appearing in the comics over the next month or so and characters from the Marvel comic eventually appearing in an November episode of the daytime soap.

There goes the nieghborhood….

The two Sci Fi franchises have thrown down in a dispute with the Guiness Book of World Records over which of their respective series has had the longest consecutive run.

The trouble started with the publication of the latest edition of the Book of World Records, which had proclaimed recently-canceled Sci Fi Channel series Stargate: SG-1 as the “Longest Running Sci Fi Series”.

Then the BBC weighed in, crying foul math. Posting to the official Doctor Who series website- the Beeb mentioned Stargate’s record and then openly noted that Guiness had failed to take into account Who’s 1963-1989 run (which itself was incorrect- as the Beeb had put the series on ‘hiatus’ after its 1985 season).

Guiness performed a recount and Stargate kept a slightly altered record : Longest Running (Consecutive) Sci Fi series. Doctor Who got the “Longest Running” honors. And it seems everyone is happy….But let’s go back to that “Consecutive” thing for a minute.

To come up with the “Longest Running Sci Fi Series” record, Guiness went by episode count. And counted all five incarnations of Star Trek as one show.

With that in mind, let’s go over this again….

Doctor Who ran consecutive series every year from 1963 to 1985. That’s 22 years.

IF we going to go by Guiness’ standard, you’d count all incarnations of Star Trek as one show. That makes the run which began with the premiere of Next Gen in 1987 to Enterprise’s 2005 cancellation proper fodder. And that’s an 18 year run.

By its 215 episode count- SG-1 comes in third. 10 years.

The X-Files is fourth by virtue of being a mid-season replacement. 10 years, 203 episodes.

But the Doctor, Starfleet, and members of Stargate Command are nowhere close to being in longest running scripted TV series of all time- that honor goes to CBS’ Guiding Light, The televised version of the daytime soap (which had a long run on radio prior to its TV Debut) has been on the air since 1952, and is still in production.

Welcome to Records of Note- the new blog of randomwerks.com.

I’ve been wanting to retool the site for a while now- and with the impending conclusion to three years of design and content work for other folks, and not to mention FINALLY getting around to making WORLD’S TOUR a reality- now seemed like a good time.

But for the most part, this is a signal of (a)Rw’s return.

Yes, I did lanuch a radio station. Yes, I did join the Society for Creative Anachronism(in fact-that’s my “device” in the corner). And Yes, I did design websites for Ren Faires. I also did design, graphics, and PR work for quite a few (non-profit AND for-profit) organizations.

No- I don’t think it affects my cred at all. Should it?

Unfortunately, did not become independently wealthy on this path. Got real wobbly at about 27 as I recall, and mostly ran off and got a life.

Three years later-I still have that life, thank you. But I missed having my own thing going. So I pared down, I moved to Georgia, got engaged, and went about getting this site and my werks back in order.

There will be new things of a journo nature over at Need Coffee (and maybe a few other places) soon-including the from somewhere column.

Meanwhile, here at the ranch- we’ll be kicking the fic. We start with a little ditty called WORLDS TOUR- in which the old world and the modern world get all mashed up for no real good reason. And did I mention the reality TV camera Crew?

It’s a new kind of road trip. It’s the new serial fic- should start rolling out in a few weeks.

And somewhere in the middle of the TOUR, the “Defenders of the Realm” series returns to the site with the first story And the Doors Opened…. presented in it’s original serial format and available in PDF for the first time. Bad Company will get remixed at the completion of the TOUR.

Oh yeah- and it’s all FREE.

And finally- YES, the place is still called (athens) RANDOMwerks. It’s called a homage- let’s move on, OK?

So, to sum up: the experiment continues. As it should……

A story I tend to repeat a lot is why I strarted doing websites in the first place. So, for the first time on interwub- the (a)Rw origin story.

(And also, I can now just forward people HERE instead of repeating this tale again.)

1995. I was writing mainly for print pubs, when AOL was looking for folk to moderate and write content for their ‘communites’. For this- you got free AOL, the value of which at the time (and this was when the service still charged by the hour) was equaling what I was actually being paid at the local ‘zine- only with way more exposure. And-through the drip of dial up-at some point I could also have my own internet pitstop.

I did this for three years- moderating a variety of forums on AOL’s Entertainment Community/ Channel (at one point or another holding various mod/ chat host posts at the service’s music, soaps, games, comics, SFTV, BABYLON 5, and Cartoon Network areas).

This was the period when America Online was exploding- litterally (and now, somewhat unbelievably), AOL was how most of us in that time got to the internet.

Another early internet phenom I lucked into was Harry Knowles’ AINT IT COOL NEWS. They had an open door submition policy at the time (so long as you came up with your own stupid ‘Studio Spy’ handle) and I fed Glenn Oliver’s COAXIAL part of the site a few animation items.

It was through researching a bit for AICN (when, silly me, I mistakenly thought one needed to research for anything being posted on AICN) I came upon Ken Plume and- in the midst of entering a contest- became a writer for his TIBBYS BOWL site.

At some point AOL decided to go further in creating its own content- broke up the communities, adopted the “Channel” format. The centerpiece of the AOL Entertainment Channel was a news service called Entertainment Asylum-high powered, high budget, high concept vehicle which was part original written content and part streaming video.

The Asylum was part of Greenhouse Studios- AOL’s in-house connection to Hollywood before Warners bought them. Greenhouse teamed recently former NBC programming wizard Brandon Tartikoff with Scott Zakarin and Troy Bolotnik (the duo behind the internet’s first original program- the interactive soap opera THE SPOT) to head up the entertainment site and set up the first internet broadcast studio. At the time, was a big deal.

The Cache part of the deal was that Asylum would also be the first AOL content to be made available to the Internet at large. So-when offered the choice-I went for getting my written content on the mega Asylum site as opposed to trying to tell 12 year olds how to behave in a chat room.

This change led to two rather interesting early lessons about the Internet:

1) All sites made by AOL look like shit. Still true to this day, in fact…
2) When it comes to the Internet, Hollywood is fickle.

It is on this second point that in 1998, I found myself out of work at Entertainment Asylum. Tartikoff died in late 1997- and without Tartikoff’s TV titan cache, Greenhouse Studios soon followed. Entertainment Asylum was slowly taken offline and buried deep with the AOL service-where it too eventually died.

It was during this process – while I was kinda still with AOL but writing for other people- that I got it in my head that maybe it was time for me to go off and have my own thing. The thought went that I could go and do the jorno stuff for other people, and have my own place for fiction or other ideas that fall into what I’m already doing somewhere else.

And, most importanly-I could control how my work actually looked. This was important- again- because most of my work at that point was seen through AOL’s horrible colors.

Built up a little bit of lead time, and about a year later- randomwerks.com was launched, with Part One of …and the Doors Opened (which will re-appear in it’s original format in October).

So, that’s your origin story- I appologize for the lack of radioactivity…….