A Couple of New Web Sites

The other day I got to thinking about how much fun I had with The Springfield Fragfest (via archive.org, it was offline by 2004). It was a site I built that was centered around the game Quake, back at the turn of the century, from 1998 to about 2003. Life got in the way, and I started writing more seriously, and discovered that people didn't just enjoy the humor and silliness, but that I could actually write.
Slashdot, about the same age as The Fragfest and also older than Google had become annoying, and I found kuro5hin.org. The first thing I posted there was What a long, strange trip..., which later became the first chapter in The Paxil Diaries. The comments raved, and they were discussing whether I was some famous author "slumming" with an assumed name. That was when I realized that not only could I write, but people liked reading it.
I retired from my paid job when I was old enough for Social Security, and devoted my time to writing seriously. By "seriously" I don't mean for money, I have an ample retirement income. But again, occasionally I would think back to Quake, especially after I bought a PlayStation for use as a DVD/Blu-Ray player. Too bad it doesn't have Quake, or even DOOM. I hate how the billionaires have enshittified gaming, obsoleting buying a game and now renting them by charging for online play. It's evil.
The Fragfest had become a very large site, thanks to free hosting from my internet provider at the time, famvid.com, but its front page with "Quake Nooze" was the fun part. It struck me that I could do it again, without Quake. The Nooze was a parody of all the other gaming news sites, I could do it with real news. Real news has almost become a self-parody in the last decade.
So last December I snagged nooze.org, and uploaded a parody 404. It went live January first and I've updated it almost daily. I'm having as much fun as I did with The Fragfest. I even used Rority, the time traveling space alien from the future from Nobots occasionally. I've been having a lot of fun with it since January.
Also, Several years before I retired I started reading a random chapter from the King James Bible every morning while my coffee was perking. I realized that as much as I have read in my life, including all twenty eight volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica when I was twelve, I had never read the entire Bible cover to cover. I had converted it to HTML back when I first got on the internet, copying the text from a university web site and adding formatting. It was live until I changed ISPs and got DSL, incredibly fast internet at the time. I've forgotten what DSL stands for.
Now, I've been reading from the Bible since I learned to read. I was a grown man before the King James version wasn't the only English language Bible that existed. There are at least a dozen these days, but the one I had since Grandma gave it to me in 1976 was the King James version. I saw no reason to change.
Until, that is, I made the decision to read it cover to cover. There are words that even Google is clueless about and I had to look up those passages in a new Bible version just to figure out what Old King James was blathering about. But most churches these days are using a new Bible, usually the NIV. Unlike the King James, it's boring. All of the new ones I've seen are, it is entirely possible for poor writing to ruin a great story. An example is True Grit. Both movies made from that book were excellent, but the book was a poorly written slog.
The new Bibles' creators didn't bother hiring real writers, so its writing is abysmal. Yes, the grammar and spelling are correct, but it's boring.. As boring as any government or research screed.
The King James isn't. I also discovered that very often, the new Bibles don't say what the Bible I've grown up with said. One preacher used a Bible I'd never heard of in his sermon about shame. The chapter of Genesis he quoted from follows the chapter that ends "they were naked, and were not ashamed". It is the only mention of shame in the KJV of Genesis, but his version continued with shame, shame, and more shame. In the King James, Adam said "we were afraid" because God told them they would die if they ate from the poison tree. In that preacher's weird Bible he says "we were ashamed". Obviously, someone is putting his own spin on at least some of these new Bibles.
So I decided to Edit ol' King James for the modern reader, changing only the spelling of words whose meanings or spellings have changed, and moved a few words around here and there so it doesn't sound like Yoda. Occasionally what was proper grammar five hundred years ago no longer is, and punctuation usage has changed considerably.
An example of a word changed in the last five hundred years is spoil. Five centuries ago it was a noun that meant "violently stolen goods" or a verb that meant to violently steal. Today it means to rot, so I changed "spoil" to "loot".
After working on it for a year, I ran across an article titled 18 Alterations Made to the Bible and its Consequences. I had noticed some of them.
Today, rather than reading a Bible chapter first thing in the morning I edit one. I've been at it for a couple of years now, and its unfinished alpha version has been online all the time, at mkjv.org, I hate typing long URLs. That short one stands for Modern King James Version. I started with Genesis and am now only up to Ezekial. The New Testament will follow the Old Testament, if God allows me to live that long, then the Apocrypha.
I thought that the Apocrypha was one of those weird Catholic things, like calling the Priest "Father" when Jesus said to call no man Father. I was incorrect, and found out that all Bibles had it until the seventeenth century when publishers hated all the paper and ink expense, and came up with the excuse that since these books weren't in the Jewish Torah they could leave it out, despite the fact that it is from other Jewish religious texts.
Both of these sites, mkjv.info and nooze.org are now online, the Nooze for months and the Bible for years. The Bible is updated with a new chapter daily, the Nooze nearly daily. When and if the Bible is finished, I'll have another round of proofreading.
Perhaps I'll live long enough to finish it.
6/3/24