Lair of the Swampthing
Once again you have sought him... The intense heat is almost deadly. As you reach for your handkerchief to wipe the almost steady stream of sweat coming from your brow, you notice that the persistant cloud of tiny tse-tse flies that has traced your every step has grown thicker. You begin to worry about fever, about malaria... no, you must seek him out! Suddenly a renewed strength wells within you and you carry onward through the nearly opaque path of swinging vines and moss-covered tree trunks. A man determined, you plunge deeper and deeper into the dark jungle. Your heart is thumping so hard with anticipation that if almost feels as if it's going to burst...
In your wild frenzy, you are suddenly gripped with a fear that you are lost. Your shoes, already thickened with clay brown mud, are now ankle deep in hot, stench-filled waters and feeling quite soggy. You've reached the edge of the swamp! As you look for clues to reach your final destination, you hear something. Yes... a faint clicking sound coming from somewhere in the mist draping over the swamp, and it beckons you to press on.
You're being cautious now, but as you enter the waters you realize just how calm they are. It doesn't seem natural! The stillness of the waters are broken by a long snake swimming along the surface toward you. His rigid eyes are trained on your frozen form as the clicking in the distance stops. Your mouth feels very dry and you fight the urge to move. Your life begins to flash before your eyes, and you ask yourself why does it have to end like this! Then from beneath the water's surface rises a large green muck-encrusted hand and pulls the snake underneath the waters...
And then it slowly rises from the waters. Although it resembles a human form in shape, the huge wretched creature appears to be entirely composed of roots, weeds, mud, and slime. It stretches a dripping wet hand out toward you while the other one continues to hold the writhing serpent. "Take my hand. All visitors are welcome in my lair, friend." Its voice is quite raspy and sounds as though it has enormous difficulty speaking. You can't believe it, but you've finally discovered what you came here for... what you've only heard tales about... Swampthing!
Almost casually throwing the writhing serpent into the distant waters, it takes your hand and carefully guides you to a clearing. It tells you that its name is Swampthing and he lives here in this hot remote swamp. You ask him if he's alone and he points to an iMac DV Special Edition with 256MB RAM and HP970Cse printer. "These were left by others. It is my only means of communicating with others outside the swamp. Fortunately, it's hooked up to the Internet with a 1.5Mbs/384Kbs RADSL connection through an alliance between Speakeasy.net and Covad. It allows me to share my thoughts throughout the world." Only then do you realize it was the iMac computer keyboard that made the clicking sound you'd heard earlier.
Your left foot bumps a small gadget on the dirt beneath you , and as you peer more closely, you notice that it's a small Casio pocket television set. As you click it on, Swampthing checks the time on the waterproof Casio watch strapped to his wrist and urges you to quickly turn to the Sci-Fi Channel. Once there, you begin to hear the theme song from the old Swamp Thing televisions series. "Yes, the show was based on my reality," he said. "The producers wandered through here several years ago, and that's what gave them the idea."
Becoming curious, you ask the shambling mockery of a man just what exactly he does for enterainment. Instead of simply answering, Swampthing leads you to an old shack near the edge of the jungle. Inside the shack , connected to the television set, was a set of videogame systems and handhelds. The systems you can make out are a Sega Dreamcast, Sony Playstation, Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Sega Game Gear, Sega Master System, Coleco ColecoVision, Nintendo Color GameBoy, Nintendo Gameboy, Commodore 64, Atari Jaguar, NEC TurboGrafx-16, Mattel Intellivision, Atari 2600, Tamagotchi, and DigiMon! You ask Swampthing just who lives there, and he begins to weave an odd tale of a group of curious young boys who conceived the idea to look for Swampthing after watching the movie, The Blair Witch. Upon meeting the muck-encrusted creature, they were so overcome by fear that they stumbled over each other to get into their pickup truck and dust the place. Everything here was left behind. After he found their cabin, Swampthing figured out how to work the videogame systems and soon began playing. Now Swampthing considers himself a fan of gaming, and frequently visits gaming websites through his RADSL connection to the Internet.
Inside the cabin there was a Sony VCR, videotapes, and books. Swampthing watched Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, read Michael Crichton's The Lost World, Robert Bakker's Raptor Red, and dispelled many notions he had about slow moving dinosaurs by reading The Dinosaur Heresies. As a result, Swampthing developed a keen interest in dinosaurs, their lifestyles, and behaviors. Among some papers in the cabin, he found an old press release from 1991 detailing the discovery of the UtahRaptor, probably the most vicious killer of the early Cretaceous period. Swampthing often wondered if the visitors to his swamp perceived him to be as vicious a monster.
What's Swampthing's worst vice you ask? He tells you that it used to be his daily devotion to the soap operas General Hospital and Port Charles. Other television shows that he regulary emerges from the swamp to watch include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Felicity, Roswell, D.C., Early Edition, Making the Band, The Corner, and Ally McBeal. Nothing, however, can take the place in his heart for his favorite TV series of all time, Homicide: Life on the Streets.
After lunching on some hot stew made from the odd shaped vegetables growing on Swampthing's back, he produces a tattered and torn small slip of paper with scrawled writing on it. He tells you these are his favorite websites on the Internet:
Television/Media Pages
Swampthing gets a kick and an occasional smile out of the testosterone-filled, brass balled writing in Don Pendleton's The Executioner. He even constructed an information-packed web page filled with everything you ever wanted to know about the series for other fans.
Want to listen to CD quality music on your iMac but don't know where to look? Try going to the Rapster website to get the Mac version of the popular Napster MP3 music trading software. It will allow you to locate over 1,000,000 CD quality songs on the net and download them to listen at your pleasure. A very good MP3 player is Audion.
The best written cop drama ever on television, the late Homicide: Life on the Streets, has a very good site called Homicide: Life on the Web with a bounty of information on David Simon's novel and Barry Levinson's television series.
The Ultimate List of TV Shows can bring you to just about any other show site on the Web.
Movies, movies, movies! Swampthing has already had two movies made about his exploits in the swamp, and he loves to sneak in through the exit doors of the theater to see the latest ones. He's found a source on the web that gives him the most current information on hundreds of movie projects by major film studios - including movies only rumored to be in development at Coming Attractions by Corona. If you check real closely, you'll notice that Swampthing even contributed informaton to the site under the movie, The Jackal and Deep Impact.
Computer/Videogame Pages
Get all the latest Macintosh news at Mac Central. If you are interested in games for the Mac, you can check out the following: Inside Mac Gaming and MacGamer's Ledge for the latest gaming news. They also have reviews of many older titles.
Are you getting envious over Swampthing's 1.5Mbs/384Kbs RADSL line? Well, some version of DSL just might be also available in your area. Check out DSL Reports to see if you qualify for DSL. This site is akin to a Consumer Reports for DSL with all sorts of ratings, reviews, and line speed test comparisons. Believe me, with the right combination of provider and ISP, it's an Internet guy's dream come true. And don't bother with cable; the more people who get on the line in your area, the slower your service gets. DSL never gets slow no matter how many users in your area have it! If you just want a quick check of your line speed, you can also check out MSN's Computing Central site. Your line speed is shown on a thermometer-like device. Right now I get between 1200-1500Kbps!
Having problems with your iMac and need to get a solution? Check out MacFix-it for all your software updates and bug fixes.
The best videogame newsite has to be ZDTV's GameSpot. They update their site daily with new information, pics, and movies of games for all systems as well as PC/Mac games. Check them out! Another good site for gaming news that will hopefully return to its former mature lusture one day is Next Generation .
Various Web & USENET Search Engines
Search over 30,000 Amiga shareware programs on AmiNet. Yes, I admit I am a former Amiga owner. Unfortunately the Amiga hasn't kept up with the times enough to keep me satisfied. Now with an iMac DV Special Edition everything has come alive: multiplayer gaming, java, mp3, and DSL!
Search for movie & television information including actors, actresses, directors, character names, etc. at The Internet Movie Database. The best thing about this database is that it's put together by everyone. You can even contribute your own ratings! If you have enough hard disk space, you can also download a version for offline use.
Are you one of those folks that think the WWW is all there is to the Internet? Start getting into newsgroups (aka Usenet) to see how people really feel about issues and subjects close to their hearts. Download the newsgroup list from your server if you are using Outlook Express, or you can search for old Usenet news postings that you may have missed while sleeping at DejaNews.
Searching for information on a particular country or city? Try the Virtual Tourist 2.
Searching for the telephone number or address of anyone in the USA? Try searching Switchboard.com.
Searching for a map of a specific area? Try searching MapQuest! for a customized map of any location in the United States. This site will also give you detailed driving from any two locations (right down to the street address) in the United States.
Still looking for something else? How about trying Dogpile, Google, Excite!, Alta Vista, SavvySearch, Lycos, or HotBot. If all else fails, there's always the old stand-by Yahoo!.
Miscellaneous Web Pages
No list of links would be complete without the Garlic Survival Company! Swampthing says that visitors from as far away as Gilroy, California and Amherst, Virginia have come and left him delicious samples of freshly grown garlic products. In return for their generosity, Swampthing plucked some of the odd-shaped vegetables which grow on his and offered to trade. Funny, these visitors have never shown up again!
How about using your computer to save tonsof money on groceries? Priceline.com allows you to pre-purchase groceries over the Internet at substantial savings. Swampthing frequently uses them to buy his groceries and has had the following success stories: the first time he paid $16 for $40 worth of groceries, the second time he paid $23 for $55 worth of groceries, and the third time he paid $38 for $75 worth of groceries!! There are no catches, loopholes, or surcharges at the moment and none are foreseen. This is definitely worth the small amount of effort it takes!
During late nights the shambling creature sometimes drifts on his back in the waters of the swamp and gazes upwards at the stars in the cool, dark sky wondering if aliens have ever visited Earth? To help search through the enormous amount of radiowaves entering our atmosphere, Swampthing participates in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) at Home Project. If you have an iMac DV Special Edition, please join the iMac DV Special Editions group on that site! Go Graphite Power!!!
Swampthing has heard rumors of other bizarre creatures roaming the earth. He's found a wealth of information of the infamous ape-like creature of the woods known by many as Bigfoot as well as its Himalayan counterpart, the Yeti. The Scottish Loch Ness Monster and its cousin Champ the plesiosaur that lurks deep within the waters of Lake Champlain, as well as the Ogopogo monster swimming in the Okanagan Lake also have official pages. Even stranger, yet lesser known, creatures include the legendary odd "goat-sucking" creatures called the Chupacabras that run havok in Puerto Rico (recently portrayed on NBC's Unsolved Mysteries) and the Jersey Devil that has terrorized the New Jersey Pinelands causing schools and factories to close down! Many of these creatures have been featured in the very interesting periodical publication, Strange Magazine.
You talk with Swampthing well into the evening, and before the night is over you realize that he really isn't a monster after all. He's just frequently misunderstood. Although he would love to live among humans, his muck encrusted body needs the constant nourishment and wetness of the swamp to stay healthy. Just before daybreak, you leave the swamp and look back to watch him slowly submerge into the depths. His last request was that after you return to civilization, you pass along his email address, Swampthing@mac.com, so that others could contact him after you've left...
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