This issue of Swallow is deliberately intended to confuse everybody, particularly myself, by being early rather than late, for the first and possibly last time.
We've been roundly disappointed by a number of things in the last little while, not least of which the fact that the current wave of Leonid meteorites have so far failed to turn out to be a bunch of alien spaceships come to pick up a few of the lost stragglers from some previous expedition. Like us.
It was while I was picking up some toilet paper from the garage at 5am this morning (don't ask - oh - you didn't) that I looked up at the angrily grey-black sky and failed to see even a single unexpected tell-tale streak of coloured light, or rotating cigar shaped object. In fact, I haven't seen a rotating cigar shaped object since I last saw a Marx brothers film.
But I digress. I'm trying to talk about Microsoft, the fact that they have just bought the LinkExchange banner advertising network, and the related fact that Swallow has just left the LinkExchange. Not that it did us an awful lot of good, providing something less than 15 click-thru hits in over a year and a half.
We are beginning to suspect that we may have taken that 'Worlds Largest Collection Of Crappy Ad Banners' thing a bit too literally. In fact, we know we did. We enjoyed it, while it lasted, but not that much.
In other news, we now have a superduper public extreme statistics generator, so you can go and see exactly how badly Swallow does in terms of Unique Page Views (Excluding Reloads), to say nothing of the fact that the single most popular page that people come to Swallow from, so far, is the holding page we put up when we rearranged our directory structure. Which is fine. What we don't get is why everyone is using IE4 in this peculiar fashion.
Anyway. Sod Microsoft, and sod the LinkExchange. We have nothing further to say about them at this time. What we do have to tell you is that this issue of Swallow contains another winner from mez, plus something stonkingly marvellous from James McCabe and a fine poem by Howard Covert. I wouldn't bother too much with the rest of it, though.
losing what plot?
The Internet Is A Lot Bigger Than It Looks
The Hexagon Series by James McCabe
The American Crappie Association
Speak In Fonts by Howard Covert