Wednesday 11th November
Webrings, webrings, webrings... sometimes the world seems to revolve around them (or along them) ... anyway LucasArts Fiction has decided to sign itself up to the LucasArts Webring. Given the fact that this site has a lot of non-MI stuff, this webring is probably more appropriate. However... there seems to be a large backlog at the signup area for the LucasArts Webring, and it might be a week or more before this site gets admitted (if it does). So in the interim, the webring controls on this site won't work. So don't come complaining to me.

Monday 9th November
Just some housekeeping, nothing much to worry about. First, someone surfed in here on a search engine query of "indiana jones fiction" (!) Glad to be of service. Less good was a piece of mail I received, from someone who shall remain nameless, wanting to know if I could help them find an MI2 code wheel. To put it gently, I'm not sure I believe their extremely convincing story.

I may as well say it now: I'm not in the business of pirating LucasArts games. If you want pirate copies of games, or cracks, or code wheels or anything, don't ask me. And I know some of you do want this stuff - probably about fifteen percent of the search engine queries have had "download" or "warez" in them. So please, no future requests.

Thursday 5th November
The counter should have clicked over to six hundred by the time you read this, so it's time for the Second Annual LucasArts Fiction demographic survey. All stats as usual courtesy of TheCounter.com.

Here's the breakdown. TheCounter.com gives out more statistics than you could ever want to know, split into several key areas. We'll take these one by one.

• OS: It should come as no surprise that the average LucasArts Fiction reader uses Windows 95: in fact, sixty-nine percent of you do. That's followed by Windows 98 (13%), Windows NT (11%), Windows 3.1 (2%), misc Unix (1%), Macintosh (a whole 3 of you), and 2 unknown.
• Browser: The browser wars, as recorded here, are turning into a quite thrilling event. The lead often changes hourly. At the moment, it's Netscape 3.x leading the way with 32%, and IE4 only one hit behind on 32%. Bringing up the rear are Netscape 4.x (26%), IE3 (8%), and a single solitary Netscape 2.x user. On a two-party-preferred basis, however, Netscape is well in the lead with 60% of the vote.
• Hour: Peak times, as seen from my perspective in time zone GMT+10, are 7-8 am and 11-12 pm.
• Weekday: This is more useful. There's a clear pattern here, in that most of you tend to visit LucasArts Fiction on a weekday. On the weekend I get barely half the traffic.
• Monthly: Won't be of much use until about eight months have passed.
• Resolution: Another clear winner, this time it's 800 x 600, with 61%. 640 x 480 and 1024 x 768 are neck-and-neck at the moment, and there's one nutter with his screen set at 1600 x 1200 (don't blame me if the text's too small).
• Color Depth: By far the majority of you (54%) are on sixteen bit colour. The tussle for second place is more interesting, with eight bit vs. twenty-four bit both even on 18%.
• Last ten hits: Who were the last ten people to come browsing along? This section lets me know. By far the most regular visitor is someone on the host Cust151.tnt19.at12.da.uu. Who is this guy? Please mail in.
• Last ten refs: This is where TheCounter.com really comes in useful. Looking in here, I can find out who's been linking t o me. Mos t of the time it's just the webring, although I've picked up a few other sites recently. Of course, the courteous thing to do is immediately link back to them (that's how most links pages grow).
• Search engine: It just gets better. This section logs every single hit the site gets from a search engine. At the moment Webcrawler is being the most generous, with 35%, but Yahoo is catching up quickly on 27%. Expect Yahoo to grab the lead in the next few weeks. Metacrawler (25%) and Excite (11%) bring up the rear. Most intriguing of all, however, is that what people actually typed to bring up my site gets recorded here too. For the record, here are the last ten queries:

  monkey island 2 walk-thru
  monkey island 2 walk-thru
  Monkey Island 2 walk thro
  monkey island
  Indiana Jones 4 Search Fo
  Indiana Jones 4 Search Fo
  Indiana Jones 4 Search Fo
  Monkey island 3 walk thru
  lucasarts
  lucasarts express
  

  (Queries get truncated to twenty-five characters). There aren't any on the list above, but a disturbing number of people come to my site looking for warez or Monkey Island II download (an actual query). So I better say it now: don't bother me with requests for games.
• Domain: I saved the best for last - the domain information. In the weeks following the first Demographic survey, LucasArts Fiction has been visited by people from all over the world. Taking a look at the bottom of the list, we have Germany, Brazil, Chile, Denmark, Poland, Belgium, Uruguay, Greece, Indonesia, United Arab Emirates, Macedonia, France, Austria, Portugal, Singapore and New Zealand. Wide variety. Of course, the top domains are US-internal. Thus we have .NET at the top with 34%, followed by .COM on %12 and 10% unknown. Then comes the first country - Australia, on 9%, followed by Canada on 4% and Sweden on 2%. The remainder is taken up by the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Norway and Argentina. Two domains, however, deserve special attention. Firstly .MIL, the US Dept. of Defense, has logged up two hits. And in the last week there's been a single hit from a US Government (.GOV) server. Should I be worried...?

Tuesday 3rd November
We're back, and we're bigger than a breadbox. Three breadboxes, even. The big news of the day is that a novelisation of Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders has been uploaded. It took about a month to write, and it's about as long as Last Crusade. Enjoy. Also, I couldn't let the occasion of LucasArts Fiction reaching five hundred visitors go by without some celebration, so here it is: Whoopee!

Next, some interesting Monkey Fiction news. The maintainer of the site, Mr.Threadbare, has asked that his name be removed from all websites in connection with Monkey Fiction. So, if you go browsing downwards through the updates, that's why there's been a few changes. As for what reasons Mr.Threadbare has... I don't know.

And one final note. This post would have gone up yesterday, along with Zak McKracken, but Fortunecity was feeling a little flaky. Ah well... when it's good it's good, but when it's bad its bleeding terrible...

Monday 19th October
Well, what do you know: the Fortunecity counter is finally back on. And guess what! They haven't been counting a single hit for the whole three week period they were off. And it doesn't look very good, either. So it's goodbye FC counter.

Also, I've signed up for the Luc asarts Newsletter. What is it? It's a newsletter, about Lucasarts games and Monkey Island in particular, which gets sent out weekly to members. That's right, weekly. In return, members can contribute articles, reviews, trivia, just about anything. Plenty of people have joined up, not that I'm about to go name dropping. So sign up.

Friday 16th October
Here it is, as promised: the first LucasArts Fiction demographic survey (courtesy of TheCounter.com. These are the stats of your average LucasArts Fiction reader:

• OS: Windows 95 (63%), followed by Windows NT (26%) and Windows 98 (10%).
• Browser: Netscape 3.x (41%). After a brief lead, IE4 has been brought back to the pack by Netscape, which holds a combined share of 61%.
• Screen res.: 800 x 600 (60%). The next most common is 640 x 480, with (24%).
• Color depth: 65K (80%).
• Most of you are browsing from a server with a .NET domain (32%). Most common non-US domain is Australia (24%), along with single hits from Canada, Singapore and the Netherlands. Most interestingly, there are two hits recorded from the .MIL domain, which as everyone knows is dedicated to the US Dept of Defense. Hmmm....

Where's all this heading towards? I don't know. Maybe we'll find out in a few months, when the usage logs will be big enough to indicate peak periods of the day, weekly patterns, and even monthly patterns. Stay tuned...

Tuesday 13th October
Fixed a small problem on the index page (sorry if your sensitive aesthetic was jogged). And, having only used TheCounter.com for just over a day, I can't praise it enough. I'm learning a lot of things about you people, statistics I'll share with you all in the coming days. For now though, I've just got one question: how do these pages look in IE4? Come on, own up: some of you are using it. There's nothing fancy or flash here, but the unusual layout might cause trouble.

Monday 12th October
Not a whole lot to report. Monkey Fiction has its 25th story up, which is so mething of a milestone. And I finally got fed up with the endless Fortunecity delays (still no working counter), and put another one in. The relevant service is TheCounter.com, a free, no ad banner counter service. It also lets you set the initial number of visitors... (don't worry, I didn't cheat).

Thursday 8th September
Apologies to everyone who's been having trouble getting through to LucasArts Fiction - Fortunecity has been suffering from a never-ending series of crises and troubles. Sam and Max have finally been fixed (no more of that unsightly centred text).

Monday 5th October
He's back... LucasArts Fiction is now a bona-fide (what does that mean?) member of the Monkey Island Webring. And to celebrate, I've uploaded a new novelisation, Sam and Max Hit The Road. This was both pretty hard and very easy to write, mainly because the CD version, which I have, doesn't run under Windows 3.1 unless you disable sound, and even then it more than likely will crash anyway, so I wrote a small p rogram to farm the swapfile for dialogue directly from the game. Using this method I was just about able to write the whole second half without referring to the game. A drawback to this is that I couldn't always be sure who's talking, so you may see some lines attributed to Sam when they should be attributed to Max, and vice versa. It's not really a problem.

Also added another tiny MI2-based story to the Other LucasArts Stories section - this one's called Oscar. Also up in there is a complete list of the things Guybrush says when reading the books from the MI2 library catalogue (look, I had some spare time on the weekend, okay?)

Finally, some interesting email from Mr.Threadbare, who, as you all know, is the man behind Monkey Fiction. Apparently he's got himself a new copy of CMI, and so we might be seeing more progress on his novelisation soon. Monkey Fiction is putting together a new site outlook, so head over there.

Thursday 24th September
Put up another fragment of short story in the Other LucasArts Stories section - Pirating on Land. Plus, Fortunecity's counter has gone all pear-shaped for no apparent reason. Yet another system-wide failure on the rapid but slightly flaky Fortunecity servers.

Plus, I'm going on holiday. There'll be no updates for about a week. Cheers...

Tuesday 22nd September
Mr.Threadbare has posted the first part of his Curse of Monkey Island adaptation up on Monkey Fiction. Unfortunately, it looks like we won't be seeing the rest for a while. And... LucasArts Fiction notches up 200 visitors! Woo hoo!

Thursday 17th September
All right, email! Michael, from, er, wherever he lives, has sent along a nice congratulatory email and two questions, namely: 1) Any plans for a CMI adaptation? and 2) Do you write each story yourself?

Well, to answer the second query first, yes. Everything on this site has been written by me. As for the first, well, sorry. No plans for a CMI adaptation at the moment. I'm working on DOTT, Sam and Max, and Zak McKracken, and you can expect to see each of these in a few months. But unless someone's willing to loan me a new computer (he said in pathetic hope), no CMI.

Later that day...
More email from Michael Alahouzos. Mike has written his very own Monkey Island novel, The Quest of Monkey Island, which has now gone up in the links section. Go take a look - unfortunately, it's only half finished. And apparently, people are printing out copies of the stuff online. Go right ahead - although it'd be a good idea to download them first and weed out the typos (there are no spelling mistakes on this site, but plenty of typos).

Wednesday 16th September
Fortunecity has introduced a new, slightly more compact area addressing scheme. You can still access LucasArts Fiction at the old URL:

  www.fortunecity.com/meltingpot/neches/158/

  meltingpot.fortunecity.com/neches/158/

Added a new section - Other LucasArts Stories. Since I contributed a few stories to Monkey Fiction, they're going up here as well. Don't send me your LucasArts fanfic - send it to Mr.Threadbare, the guy behind Monkey Fiction

Monday 14th September
Added the Guybrush death scene to Monkey Island 2. MI2 aficionados will know that there's a way to kill Guybrush - sort of - in LeChuck's Fortress. Well, that's in now.

Wednesday 9th September
Plenty happening today. Counter clicked past one hundred! Awards! System failures!

Ahem. Today sees the debut of the new Updates section, which will log all the changes to LucasArts Fiction, any interesting emails I get, site news, and anything that isn't actually a story.

Fortunecity was down yesterday for a few hours. This may happen a lot. Fortunecity is a great web server - it doesn't have the popup windows of Geocities or Tripod, and is far more reliable than Xoom. But periodically it will go belly-up, so bear with me. Mein self is not yet rich enough to afford thine own domain.

Also happening yesterday, Mr.Threadbare, the guy behind Monkey Fiction awarded LucasArts Fiction the Lucastory Writer Award. That's what that graphic is on the front page. All I can say is - thanks very much!