Coming soon from The Millennium Museum...

Well, 2014's days are numbered, even more so than they were when I last posted. The days are getting colder, and it's started snowing. I don't hear any Christmas songs on the radio just yet (our preferred station at work is 104.3), which is a good sign. (Hey, I love the season, but there's only so much Christmas music one can stand before going completely insane.)

I suppose now is as good a time as any to tell you about what's going to happen in the foreseeable future.

First, I can say for sure that we're going to take our first official Side Trip with Ben Bova's novel, Millennium, a science-fiction thriller set in 1999 but written in 1976. I've been reading it for a while, but I just need to get my thoughts on it together. That's probably a good one for New Year's Eve, a holiday which I've always associated with science fiction.

Also, we'll be celebrating Christmas with a continuation of last year's Joy of Collecting article on Millennium-themed ornaments. I may include another part of the magazine, an article on collector's-edition Nativity sets.

I'm also reading another book called Millennium, unrelated to the Bova novel. This one bears the subtitle A History of the Last Thousand Years, and it's written by historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. ("Light reading," he said with a slight leer.) I'm not even going to begin reporting on that one until I've finished it, and that may take a while.

I also have a video from National Geographic about modern explorers such as Robert Ballard, and it's explicitly marketed as a Millennium-themed video.

Next weekend I'm heading to the Chicago TARDIS convention, and I'll see if I can pick up anything for the blog. I think there's a novel called Millennial Rites, and another called Millennium Shock.

November 2nd, 2014: Parting thoughts on the day after Halloween.

"This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that 'The War of The Worlds' has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo!" (http://jeff560.tripod.com/script.html)

Radio, film, and theater legend Orson Welles spoke those words at the end of his Halloween 1938 broadcast of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, as a way of taking off the costume and restoring order after a moment of controlled chaos.

I'd like to think I'm doing much the same, but in this case, the "controlled chaos" was much more artificial. It was intended to be the online equivalent of a "Halloween Horror Nights" event at Universal Studios, but that kind of got lost in the translation from concept to post.

What the heck! I'm perfectly satisfied with it. This past October has seen me at my most productive as far as the Museum is concerned, and it's been a learning experience.

I learned how to use GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) to create many of the visual effects, like the background art and the subtle "video distortion" on the Bug images. My skills are still fairly rudimentary, but it was a lot of fun to learn, and I look forward to furthering those skills in the future.

I also learned how to create an HTML "mouseover" effect, and while it only worked once, I'm proud of it. ("Storm of the Century" would have had one, but it just didn't work.)

All in all, the experiment wasn't entirely successful, but I had a lot of fun coming up with ideas and bringing them to life.