I almost died in a horse fire.

Fourteen years, guys. FOURTEEN EFFING YEARS this site has been up and running. And that doesn’t include the slash tilde days before I even had a domain name. You know how long that is? That’s long enough to have a child, watch it grow up through the diaper and talking-back phase and hit puberty. That’s long enough to own a dog, watch it grow old and have to put it down. That’s long enough to own several cars. In short, that’s a long ass time.

Maybe you would think that should mean I have a thousand columns on here. Well keep in mind, that during the early days of the site I had up to six writers at a time (including myself) sending in columns for their publication. So I didn’t write every day. But if you count all those columns other writers wrote, and all the columns I trimmed off as being no longer relevant, plus all the four hundred fifty something I have currently, yeah, you get real close to a thousand columns.
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BrewHouse Site Gets a Facelift

Cross-Posted from Tapped Relic Brewhouse

Have you noticed that all these beer websites ask you for your birth date before they’ll let you in? I find myself wondering what the point of that is. Is there a growing concern for the number of children and adolescents visiting beer sites and getting drunk? I understand not letting underage peeps into the liquor store. Or not selling them alcohol. But they can’t even look at your site? And if they really want to see it, what keeps them from rolling the year down a few notches? Nothing. It’s a waste of time, and it’s ridiculous. Trying to make your beer or brewery website look responsible like you care about kids is better accomplished by other means. Well, you’ll never see an age block on SpacePort. No way, ho, say!

But we’ve been brewing a lot of beer lately, friends. That’s what good breweries do, right? And with all the new beers and recipes we’re brewing up, I thought we could use a new logo. So I designed a new, more robust and colorful logo set. You can click here to see the new logo in full size. The Untappd page got a modified version, and there’s a small one at the bottom of this page. Let me know what you think!

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I Hate Websites That Suck

It seems that in this age, everyone is required to have some sort of web presence. Even if it’s just to tell everyone what your name is, that you have a cat and you like listening to the Jonas Brothers. Everyone has a Facebook page. I don’t even know what happened to MySpace, but it has very clearly been supplanted to the far less flashy Facebook. Everyone has a Twitter, from which they let all of their followers know exactly what they’re doing all day long, every single day. The ridiculousness of all this is getting ridiculous. And there’s your opening paragraph.

First of all, no one cares about you and your stupid cat. No one cares that you like Justin Bieber and James Blunt. You don’t need to take up space on a web server hard drive somewhere just to tell people about your pathetic existence. Nor does anyone care that you’re STANDING IN LINE AT PIGGLY WIGGLY AND IT’S TAKING FOREVER OMG LOL WTF!!!!1 Do something useful with your life. Take down your stupid alliteratively titled website (e.g. Hannah’s Heaven, Carol’s Closet, Mykynzy’s Mansion) and post instead, something useful.

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Happy Monday, Planet Earth

There are several things on my mind this morning, all of which I intend to share with you. Well, except one of them. One of them isn’t appropriate for this website. But the rest of them are. In fact, the rest of them are part of the core values upon which this website was founded! Humor, entertainment and a good dose of pissed offedness.

First off, I’d like to award the SpaceBrew Movie of the Week award to Despicable Me. If you haven’t seen it, you should run out and rent it. Or buy it, hell. You’ll end up watching it several times. The other day my kids and I watched it in the morning. We then ended up at my Pop’s house and they wanted to see it so we watched it again. And I still laughed at all the funny bits. I’m still not bored by it.

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SpaceBrew in Hibernation Mode

Good morning, SpaceBrewers! Just a quick note to let you all know that we’re coming into the winter season here at the Brew. It sort of lines up with the winter season the weather patterns follow. But what that means is that we spend less time in front of the computers and more time in front of a fireplace, or wrapped in the stinky, rotting carcass of a Tauntaun.

In the end, and in the interest of sparing you all from minutae and random hogwashical white noise, we will be cutting back our writing to once a week apiece. I’ll be writing on Mondays, Haycomet will write on Wednesdays, and we’ll continue to write our award-winning collaborative column, Bacon Talk, on Fridays. So just basically cutting out Tuesdays and Thursdays gives us, well, something like two days we can relax.

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Bacon Talk: Video Games

Dude. It’s time we talk about video games. Seriously. Why haven’t we covered this yet, Haycomet? We’ve had how many Bacon Talks now? Welcome, friends, fans and enemies, to this week’s edition of the award-winning feature we call Bacon Talk. For those of you wondering what we mean by Award-Winning, let me give you a list of the awards this feature has won:

  • SpaceBrew’s Best Features of 2010 presented by SpaceBrew
  • Brandon Spacey’s Favorite Blogs presented monthly
  • Haycomet’s Recommended Reading a very prestigious award
  • Jessica Simpson’s “You Gotta Have Someone Read This To You!” presented by Space

So there are a few of the many awards this feature has won. I mean, we’re not trying to brag or anything. Trust me, friends, the Bacon Talk is not near as good as the Bacon we eat while talking! Ain’t that right, Hay?

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Bacon Talk: Nicknames

Hi Space!  How’s it it going?  And hello out there in blogland!  This is yours truly, Haycomet, and I hope all of you have a big plate of meat candy and a cup o’ Joe in hand, because today we are talking about nicknames.

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Things sure have changed around here.

Welcome back, friends, family and – well, and I guess you too, foes. Welcome to another edition of the Daily Brew. Or at least Weekdaily. Unless I get lazy and don’t write anything, which most of the time, someone else steps up and knocks one out real fast, in which case you don’t (hopefully even notice anyway), wait, where was I going with this? Oh yeah. Welcome back. There’s someone I’d like you to meet.

CatinaThis here is Catina. Say hi to Ca- — wait. Where the hell did she go? Well actually, I’ve never met her, you see. But I’ve known her for almost twelve years. And what makes Catina so important that she should be introduced here? Well, she’s been here a lot, lot longer than you. Catina has been reading this site since 1999.

When Catina started reading the site, it was still Moon’s Crater. That was the first domain name under which we all wrote. And this site has been through many phases, changes, color schemes and domain names. Well, she’s been here through all of it. And I think that’s pretty damn cool.

So what is your earliest memory of the site, Catina?

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A New Forum for Old Taste

I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to the links over there on the right side of your screen. The little orange ones in the box titled ‘Navigate’. If you haven’t noticed, there are two new links there. Stories takes you to the short stories page, which is something I will be concentrating on pretty heavily over the next few weeks. And Forums is a brand new project. I opened up the SpaceBrew forums so people have a — well, a forum in which they can rant, rave or just read. When the comments section of a column isn’t enough, go open a new thread in the forums.

There are two categories right now on the board; one is the Discussion area, and the other is tentatively titled Media. I may or may not keep that one in place. But for now, it’s there. Inside the Discussion, there are three forums. Your Dose of Humanity is the main one. This is a place where you can post a new topic about anything you want, and get your own responses and interaction going. It’s pretty much an open forum to post whatever topics you want. The SpaceBrew Review is a home for site discussion. If you have something to say about a column someone wrote, or about the technical and design aspects of the main website, this is where you post. The third is Your Chance To Shine, which is a place for those who would like to try their hand at writing.

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Techmophobia

Have you ever had to provide technical support to anyone? Namely someone in their 40s or 50s? Well, if you have, you have probably noticed they had what I like to refer to as ‘Technophobia’. The root word of that is ‘tech’, which comes from the Latin word ‘teach’, which means to show someone how to do something. The ‘phobia’ part comes from the ancient Korean word ‘phear’ which means you’re afraid of something. So basically they’re afraid to teach something. Wait. I messed that up. You know what? Forget it.

What I’m saying is that most 40- and 50-year-olds are “afraid” of “techmology”. And I don’t mean they think the computer is going to wake up at night, start saying “PAK CHOOIE” and push grandma down the stairs. What they’re afraid of is that they will mess something up if they even dare click the Tools menu with the mouse button. And what this results in is technical support calls, wherein I am called upon to perform a rudimentary service on a machine to which I have no physical access. Usually when I’m sitting on a beach with a can of Corona in my hand and several pretty ladies dancing in their bikinis (or out of them) for me. Or when I’m on the back patio with a can of Bart’s Backyard Brew in my hand with my wife and all her hot friends dancing for me in their bikinis.

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