Category Archives: Life

Once upon a time, I worked at a fish store.

Specifically, I was once a manager-on-duty and African cichlid expert for a shop that bred and sold pet fish. The shop wasn’t a run-of-the-mill mall-based pet shop. It was a place for aquarium super-nerds. We had about 30 employees on staff, with 6-7 working there at all times during the weekends, because the place would be elbow-to-elbow packed with customers. We worked our asses off there.

I worked there for many years.

Wikimedia Commons

It was today’s post at The Oatmeal that got me thinking about the fish store today, because we got mantis shrimp in the store all the time. As noted in The Oatmeal’s strip, a mantis shrimp is a gorgeous creature that can smack the holy hell out of you. It can deliver 1,500 Newtons of force with its front legs, in a motion that causes water to boil by supercavitation. It can kill prey without even touching it. It can also easily shatter a glass tank.

We’d sometimes order the mantis shrimp deliberately from our suppliers. They’d come to the store very well packaged, and we would carefully place them in little acrylic tanks. Acrylic could withstand their abuse, as it is not prone to shatter. It might crack, but it wouldn’t shatter.

Sometimes, though, we’d accidentally get a mantis shrimp. They would hitch a ride on the organism-coated reef rock, which we would buy and sell by the pound. Every once in a while, an employee would be looking at our (glass) reef tanks and they would cry, “AAAAA MANTIS SHRIMP!”

And then we’d have to try to catch the shrimp — out of a tank full of rock-made hidey places, mind you — without pissing it off.

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Waaaay back in the foggy mists of time, I used to run a web site named Cthulhu Coffee. The site is still out there, laying dormant in the darkest wayward corners of the Internet, looking very… HTML3. I stopped updating regularly somewhere in 2003, but for several years after, I kept thinking I’d get back to it. In 2006, I finally said, “Fuck it.” I made a final update, and let it go.

The site was a ton of fun for a few years. The project was a sort of group-effort comedy thing, and about 15 people contributed in some way. We made goofy Internet widgets, posters, movie reviews, pieces of fiction… whatever. If it somehow related to comedy, Cthulhu, or horror, it was fair game.

The inertia of the site fell apart when I no longer had time to manage it. Back then, each page had to be hand coded. Adding a link to a sidebar meant that hundreds of HTML files had to be altered one by one. (Thankfully, Adobe GoLive eventually automated processes like that.) I was the only person who had access to the site itself, so if anyone else wanted to upload content, it was up to me to do the dirty work.

These days, such a group effort would be so much easier. Set up a WordPress site. Give everyone accounts. Everyone gets to add their own content, whenever they want, and all they need to do is type and then hit post.

Every once in a while, the thought haunts me: I could resurrect Cthulhu Coffee so easily. I could probably pull a lot of the same people back into the fold. I know a bunch of new people who would fit in perfectly. All I’d need to do would be to install WordPress on the server I already pay for.

So seductive.

But then I look back at all of it. Yeah, it was good. Yeah, it was really funny at the time. But does any more really need to be said?

I keep thinking of Internet humor, memes in particular. The popular ones are hilarious when they first appear. And then the first variants appear, and a lot of them are hilarious, too. And then the flood happens. A few of the later variants are great, but most of the rest is noise. And then it all fades away. The reason this happens is that you can only carry one joke for so long. At some point, the joke goes into a coma, and all you’re doing is keeping it on life support. At the end, it’s better to stop the CPR and move on.

The funny Cthulhu thing has been done. A lot. By us and by others.

So, I just let the site sit out there. Every once in a while, someone stumbles across it, and e-mails me about something that made them laugh. Not bad for a site so ancient that it still references a webring.

Also, I’m still kind of proud of that blinking eyeball navigation bar.

According to my records, tomorrow (March 16th) marks the one-year anniversary of the Tin Lizard Productions blog. Since 2012-03-16, there have been:

• 208 posts (including this one)
• 144 comments
• 366 pings from people searching Google for “Laurel and Hardy“
• 1 ping from someone searching Google for “mr beetle should have guessed that the aggressive grasshopper was a movie cameraman”

Given that I’ve been trying to post about once per weekday, that’s about an 80% success rate on my part. Go, me!

Thank you all for occasionally glancing away from your Facebook / Twitter / Google+ feeds in order to read stuff on this external blog. May we have another lovely year together, you Beautiful Internet People.