It’s probably a little late to mention it [especially since this is to my knowledge the first time an upcoming show has ever been mentioned; usually, shows get mentioned here after they've occurred], but the film’s playing again at the Esquire in a couple days. Still, you’ve got a bit of time left to go grab your tickets.

But, enough about the future; let’s talk about the past….

Given that I just discovered a total lack of links to the Esquire, it lends nicely to my next point. And that goes like this.

Once upon a time, someone invented the internet; it wasn’t Al Gore. At the time, it was actually the arpanet, and it was kinda boring. Then it went more internetty in the late seventies and, in 1990, a guy you’ve never heard of [there are those who call him Tim] wrote a tiny subsystem acronyming various terms he was pulling out of his ass, like HyperText Transfer Protocol and World Wide Web into initials like HTTP and WWW. This is the boring part of the story.

Ten years later, the ‘net was vastly enough known that everyone had a site somewhere. Including CEI. It was a freesite, at a lesser competitor to geocities.com [to put this into perspective, geocities.com died out last year], but it was a site. And thus, people in darkest if WiFied Africa were able to keep up with the antics of Colorado’s Elusive Ingredient.

CEI going through managers faster than SpinalTap go through drummers, a regime shift occurred, and the new manager hated the freesite. So the new manager brought me in to design a massive flashsite everyone absolutely loved…everyone being, you know, the manager, who neither cared whether anyone else loved it, nor fully grokked that a site doing a fair impression of a DVD doesn’t work too well late in the twentieth century when most people are slugging about at 28.8kbps.

More regimeshifts; more sites; rinse; repeat.

Which brings us to…like, 2008. Ish. The the new SpinalTap PR Manager—who at least gets the concept of bitrates and downloads and that, by 2008, most people who have heard of dialup merely remember it in a sort of diseased lament—directs toward pretty much what you’re looking at right now, in January of 2010. Unless you’re not; in which case you’re either blind and using text2speech, or you’re seeing this later in the future [which we're not talking about right now], once the site’s likely changed. Again.

Technically, the current design is pretty cool, if a bit old and outdated and uglyish and lacking in a bunch of newly available neatness. So it’s not that he had the wrong idea; it’s that he had this idea a couple years ago, and has since quit the cast. Which means we could probably talk about redesigning the site a little. Again.

Because things have changed since 2008. We closed Gitmo and bugged out of Iraq and Afghan—okay: nothing’s changed. But: new systems and technologies have emerged, none of which are factored into this prehistoric site. CEI have moved from Lannie’s to the Esquire, as evidenced only by the newly missing link to lannies.com. The links we have got are all at the bottom, where no one apaprently ever looks for them. A website essentially about a film made in 1975, itself made in 2008, has become more antiquated and ridiculous than the film itself. In about a week and a half, Plan 9 from Outer Space is gonna become younger; and I’m not talking about the remake.

So. Still reading this? Suckers…. But also: so I’m kindasorta plotting out a major revision to this thing. Of course: that’s necessarily something of a freetime activity, so it’s not happening real rapidly; but it’s technically underway. One trick has been that the blogueware is just a heavily modified WordPress port, heavily modified enough that modifying much more without deleting everything has been something of a problem. That said, I just modified the same baseware at my own site, using the latest version, like Lucas going after Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Retcon, and it magically let me do some things it used to puke over. So this clever plan might actually work. Without deleting everything. That would be good.

I don’t really have an ETA yet. Technically, I don’t even have a real plan. The ‘net being fastish now, we’ve talked about everything from a glorified twitterfeed to a full, cinematic site with goofy flashgames and timers counting down to the next showing; I’m thinking things’ll end up somewhere in the middle of those.

So: watch for that, whenever it happens.

On a loosely related note: I got the board locked down to prevent spambots from getting in. It kinda prevents meatbots Our Valued Fanbase from getting in too, so you’ll need an access code available in the throwbags at the show itself or online through the messageboard before you can post anything; it’s a couple bucks because the scriptkiddies throwing spambots at messageboards won’t pay a couple bucks to throw spambots at messageboards, and not because I’m saving up to buy the island I’ve picked out in the South Pacific. Probably.

I think that’s it for now. See you at the show….