1/31/00--The SPECIAL THANKS section has a few new names added to the list and a brand new look.


1/28/00--"Dee Snider's Strangeland" now appears in the REVIEWS section. Also, a new puzzle ("Origami") has been added in the PUZZLES part of the Worm-Hole. Check them out!

Some of the poems have temporarily disappeared due to some technical difficulties, but they should be back online soon.

One more thing: "Mr. Wonderful" from my MESSAGE BOARD is responsible for creating a sequel to "Zombie Nightmare". This is for anyone who has seen "Zombie Nightmare": JOIN ME & SPELLING BEE IN FLAMING THIS GUY!!


1/23/00--The graphic for the WARP ZONE entrance is animated now! Admittedly, things look pretty rough in there, but, never fear, the places on the other side are well worth the turbulent trip.

Also, an AWARDS section has been added, and now the graphic layout on the main page looks like a pyramid!


1/22/00--For those of you who have $2 modems, the home page has been reduced in size by about 40% so it should load noticeably quicker. Meanwhile, everything looks the same as before! Nearly all of the table, tr, td garbage (from my earlier days using WYSIWYG editing) on the home page file has been removed, and with some clever usage of blockquote, br, and p tags, the appearance of the page still looks the same. Also, most of the graphics on the page used to be saved as 256-color .gif files, but thanks to Jasc Paint Shop Pro 6.0, I found out that they will look exactly the same if they were instead saved as 16-color .gif files. After converting the files, they now take up about half as much space as before. Jasc Paint Shop Pro is a great graphics program, and I've also used it to customize backgrounds. All too often, those free flashy backgrounds are too bright or have too much contrast to be useful, but with some minor changes, they can be made useful.

Okay, I know there's about a million websites that tell you how to design a website, but here's a little tip when picking backgrounds: stay away from the patterned, medium to bright green ones (solid green backgrounds are ok). It's not that I dislike green (actually, green and black are my favorite colors). It's just that these backgrounds are difficult or impossible to contrast effectively. Black text often doesn't show up very well on patterned backgrounds (it might be hidden in the darker portions of the backgrounds). Although reds, oranges and purples are complementary or near-complementary colors of green and should theoretically be THE colors to use, they just don't contrast on the monitor very well (perhaps it's because the human eye is more sensitive to green light than red). You could use white or very light colored text on mid-greens, but that's about it. Perhaps that's why there are a lot fewer green backgrounds out there than red or blue ones.


1/21/00--The POEMS & STORIES section has been revamped and the dead links have been removed. The section used to be made from a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Editor, but I redid the page by typing the HTML tags directly. Just to demonstrate how inefficient WYSIWYG editors are, the new version of the POEMS & STORIES section takes up five times less space than the old one!


1/20/00--"Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is now in the REVIEWS section.

I got a nice e-mail from the folks at Quantum Muse, who were apparently impressed by the Worm-Hole and asked if I wanted to exchange links with them. Quantum Muse is actually a pretty big sci-fi/fantasy/horror site; so I gladly took up on their offer.


1/19/00--"Slaughterhouse Rock" is the latest addition to the REVIEWS section, which incidently has been revamped with the latest in Worm-Hole technology, the Ki-Board. Check it out!

The menu page to the PUZZLES section has also been revamped with a new background and introductory blurbs.

Also, there are some amusing sound files at Tracey's Fart Farm. One of my favorites has Homer spanking a girl while singing his version of "We Are The Champions".


1/16/00--Bert, the unibrowed pigeon-lover from Sesame Street, seems like a harmless guy, but there is one webmaster who believes Bert Is Evil.

In addition to the find mentioned above, there is now a REVIEW for "Scream 2", with more to come in the near future...


1/14/00--After a two-week drought of updates, there are now REVIEWS for "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer" and the 1999 version of "The Haunting".


1/3/00--Two more slasher movies--"Friday the 13th, Part 2" and "Prom Night"--have been added to the REVIEWS section.

Getting to what the next decade might be called, I have found some information about the nicknames applied to the first decade of the 20th century. According to Triumph of the Straight Dope, these are the nicknames for the first decade of the 1900s and the number of literary citations where each nickname appears.

1900s (5 citations)
First decade (9 citations)
Opening/first/early years (19 citations)
Beginning of the/this century (20 citations)
Turn of the century (38 citations)

As for aughts, aughties, naughts, naughties, hundreds, zeroes, zeds, zips, zilches, ohs, and double-Os, no citations have been found. Perhaps people nowadays are more apt to use these nicknames than those from the early 1900s.

But perhaps people will opt for something else. When someone tells you to get with the times, maybe they'll say, "Come on, it's the new millennium!" or less frequently, "the third millennium". That seems likely considering how often the words "the new millennium" are used already, and this is one year before 2001, when the new millennium actually begins (remember, 1 B.C. is the year immediately before 1 A.D.)!


1/2/00--Starting off this last year of the 20th century and the second millennium are a couple reviews: "Friday the 13th, Part 3: 3-D" and "Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter".

A little note on the side: Now that we've survived Y2K with flying colors (so far), what are we going to call the next decade anyway? It's easy to name decades when the last two digits start with 2 through 9 (i.e. the Roaring 20's, the Gay 90's), but what about one and zero? Do we call it the 2000's? The zeroes? The naughts? The turn of the century? What?!

Click here to see the updates for December 1999.

Click here to see the updates for March 1999, the humble beginnings of the Worm-Hole.

Or click here to return to the Worm-Hole home page.

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