I've been so busy this month that I completely forgot to even put up anything to commemorate the 8 year anniversary of this site. It was in August 1996 (I wish I had kept track of the exact day) that I put up an ugly yellow page with one picture on it: a screen capture of the library ghost from the long-gone GB1 illustrated script project (raise your hand if you remember that site). I think I also had one link to Bill's site and one to Sheila's RGB page, and that was it. There were only a handful of GB sites back then. I really wish that I, or the
Internet Archive, had kept a copy of that original page. It would be cool to see the difference between then and now.
That little page grew and grew and eventually got too big for Geocities whopping 2 megabyte size limit (any one remember Geocities arcane, and insane, FTP upload system?). So, the site moved somewhere else ... grew larger ... moved again ... grew some more ... repeat until you get to 1998. By that point the site got so large that I couldn't use any free web hosting services anymore (plus they were all getting to be very unreliable, causing major downtime for the site and headaches for all those who were trying to access it ... including myself!). So I had to start paying for a hosting service. That wasn't much of a problem (I found some good deals), until I ran into financial difficulties. I was able to keep this site online thanks to financial assistance from Tamara Yollick, "ElctroWolf", Ellen MacIsaac, Norman Gagnon, Adam Bertocci, and Art Chacon. To them I will always be forever grateful.
You could literally fill a couple pages in a book with a list of all of the places/hosts/servers that this site has resided on. Names like Dragonfire, Interspeed, and Hispeed spring instantly to mind (though there are MANY more). Plus there were forwarding addresses like PoBoxes.com and CJB.net. And let's not forget about the free urls I got from the lame (read: rip-off) NameZero service: realghostbusters.com and therealghostbusters.com (plus one of my name: paulrudoff.com).
We're now more than halfway through 2004 and, thanks to Raffaele Ruffaldi, it seems that Spook Central has a stable home where it can sit in semi-retirement for the foreseeable future. Would I like to do a major update again? Of course! Do I have enough new material to keep this site fresh. Oh, hell yeah! I have stuff that nobody knows about and would make lots of people drool if I even hinted at it, but right now it would require more work than I want to give it to take everything I have in print and in video/audio and get it into the computer. Plus some of my equipment isn't as good as it used to, which would make some things harder to do than they should be, if not impossible.
I started this little journal as a way of giving visitors to this site a reason to come back every so often. Although it isn't updated as frequently as GBHQ & Proton Charging (mainly because I
never get any news at all, much less before they do), I hope that the odd things I've posted have been enjoyable, and will continue to be so. I've noticed that some of you have posted feedback comments on a few of these posts. Even if I don't reply to them (which I don't feel I should, since that's meant to be YOUR space, not mine to carry on a conversation), rest assured that I do check for them and read them, and I appreciate it.
In putting together this last minute 8th anniversary entry, I was really racked as to what to include. I wanted to upload something special, and not just type up a bunch of words (and I didn't even know what to type when I started), but I have nothing on my computer that you haven't already seen elsewhere. So, I decided to give you a look at an unfinished project that I started a few years ago: Ghostbusters - The Complete Illustrated Screenplay [link deleted] for Windows. As you'll see if you download it, I tried to mimic the format of the Making Ghostbusters book, but with images within the script and the margins, and soundbytes that play when you run your mouse over the colored dialogue. (Ignore the placeholder text on the splash page.) The problem is that if I actually did the ENTIRE script like that, the exe file would be extremely large, and most people would not want to download it. Heck, I may not even want to upload it. Then there's the whole issue of it being only compatible with Windows. I don't want to punish all those Mac users simply because they bought a crappy system (just kidding). I wouldn't want to do something that requires that much work if it couldn't be enjoyed by everyone. I tried to do it online, but every time I finally got the words in the margin aligned just right with the script text in one browser, the word wrap in the other would be off-line and mess it all up. That's why I never bothered any more with it.
