By now, you’ve probably seen the links here or elsewhere in the mainstream capper media, ArchHallJr has gone ahead and created a Capper Wiki. Since I’ve already sent Arch’s press release to the mailing list, I’ll just offer a few of my own thoughts on this project. This is a very cool chance for the cappers to turn the fuzzy legends and inherited stories into something a little more solid. If it’s gonna happen, I hope everyone pitches in to make sure it happens well. Especially the folks who’ve been capping since the early days. If you remember capping Amplewoman, Land of the Giants, The Six Million Dollar Man, and the days when it was just “Caption This!“, think the word is captioneer, not capper, or are still pissed you never won a demmy get over there and make sure the story’s straight before somebody decides “Oh Hell No” was the first thread.

Of course, this place isn’t just about history - it’s about remembering all the people who’ve made capping the vast arctic wasteland that it is and sharing your profile info to prove you’re cooler than they are.

But of course, since it’s a wiki, who knows exactly what it’s gonna be? So, get over there now and help make sure it’s shaped by clever sweet smelling people.

And while I have your attention, go get our fancy new buttons so you can link to IS and WPT in style (and find out how to get your own site linked from this blog)! And there’s a button available from the capper wiki too. How conveeenient!

And vote in the Wasting Precious Time poll on the right, so I can actually make it a decent site.

Just a quick note to let you know that Round Robin #10 will be delayed a few hours — from noon to 7 PM Eastern today. Chances are you won’t notice any difference, but this does mean there’s a little extra time to sign up and play along.

I’m pretty sure we had this “who’d win” debate in college, and decided it’d end with the clown prince serving Nick and Nora a terrier stew. Anyway, our first new picture set this week at Wasting Precious Time features Cesar Romero and David Niven in Happy Go Lovely. Go start a story now.

Our second set is just another random assortment of images. This time from the AV Geeks Archive. Again, make me happy and start a story.

I’ve also set up yet another non-binding, unscientific poll to help me try to figure out how to make WPT a better site. Be brutal folks, and feel free to elaborate on your requests here.
And don’t forget you have until noon on Tuesday to sign up for the round robin.

First off, don’t forget to vote in the “what images should Gerson be grabbing” poll to the right. It’s a little vague I know, but if I will use it a guide of where I should concentrate my image acquisitions. I will probably have another poll on how much I should be showing from each of my categories.

On to business - here are some of the changes I’ve made to the site lately - lemme know if you have any questions or thoughts on them:

*IS: Fixed the problem of captions getting attached to different images than they were meant for.
*IS: Got grabs for the entire Drive In Movie Ads collection at archive.org.
*IS: Added protection against missing/corrupt screengrabs.
*WPT: Combined the picture set previews with the list of stories for the picture set. Minor layout changes to take advantage of this.
*WPT: Added navigation between picture sets on stories.php.
*WPT: Fixed the moving menu item bug in IE that could keep items on the edge of the window from being clicked

At the very least, I drastically reduced the occurrence of “wrong images”. It’s probably a day one bug that’s gradually occurred more often as I changed the site (eg - stopped using live grabs, used randomly picked grabs more). This isn’t a true fix, but unfortunately, neither the computer I test the site on or the one I run it on support the features I need to stomp it out fully. Ironically, the guards against bad grabs are probably part of what made this happen more often. Of course, if it hadn’t stated getting worse, I’d have probably never seen it and actually believed it. Thanks to TyranosaurisRex for bringing this one to my attention.
The drive in collection will be sprinkled into rotation as part of the features and shorts in the 4 PM and 10 PM hours. Between the fact that they’re less than 1% of the images in that collection on top of the tricks I used to keep them from all running as a unit, it may be a week or two before anybody actually spots one.

Round Robin #10 is starting soon. If you’d like to get in on the fun — and, really, who wouldn’t? — sign up today. In an effort to get more people to sign up, and in light of the upcoming Memorial Day weekend, the story will begin at noon Eastern on Tuesday, May 30.

(UnReality, filling in for UpSky in his absence)