What do you think of the new staffers?

Hey everybody! Guess what? For once, Dr. Jelly Donut is going to do a serious letter! (Crowd: *gasp!*) I know I know...impossible! But here it goes anyway!

There are 3 new staffers...but so far ( my letter may be off a litttle, forgive me if this part is wrong. I submitted this early)only two have updated. Don't ask me where the SSBM staffer is, but he better update soon.

But as for the new staffers who actually chose to update, Pappy Cat has been doing a great job so far, and it's great to see the articles living instead of dropping dead. True, I did apply for this job and I'm angry that I didn't get it, but I'm sure Pappy Cat will do a better job than I could've done (fake smile) hehe, just kidding about the fake part.

Shadow seems to be doing good, and the SSB section looks a lot better than before. It's pretty barren, true, but at least he added a title screen and a few cheats for those of us who have SSB.

As for the idea for the contest, GiS has trashed this idea twice before in previous articles and I'm not surprised if he does again, but here it is: Everyone has ideas of what SHOULD have be in earthbound, right? A Mr. T commercial, some sort of item, a diffrent party member besides Jeff...well, why don't we make something where people can tell those ideas? Each week would be something like: 'What other phone numbers could Ness have called, and what service would they supply?' or 'Choose any enemy from EB and change one thing to make it more powerful'. People could then send in fanfics, fanart, fangames (if they got carried away) or a simple explaination written on notepad. It's sort of a mix between AoE and Mailbag.

Well, I guess that's my letter's end. Oh, and if you didn't like my idea, well, I'm not surprised.

--Dr. Jelly Donut





Congrats on writing a Letter of the Week!
Did I really trash that idea? That's surprising, 'cuz I actually like it. Well, actually what really impresses me is your ability to think up good topics for said contest. In fact, I'm going to steal one of your really good ideas and make it this week's Mailbag topic. To thank your letter, I branded it. Congratulations!

It's definately about time Shadow got a job, and it'll be very interesting to watch the SSB section flourish under his command. It might actually become a frequented section!

--GuyInSummers

I honestly wish certain people would STICK TO THEIR JOBS so Tomato and reidman wouldn't HAVE to keep hiring. [/rant]

--Mansion Maniac





The Staffer Cycle here is inevitable. It's essentially a process to weed out those souls worthy of permanent custody. Besides, staffers just have to quit some time. ...actually, that's an interesting subject. What's the longest anybody has ever stayed on staff? I'm going to see if I can stay on staff until Sm.net dies. Or until my brain no longer functions. Whichever comes first.

~GiS

Right now I'm wishing that I could have had been a bit earlier in coming back to here, when more positions were open. Also, I'm wondering if the Staff will start taking on helpers like Reid suggested.

--Unacat





It's hard to say if any staffers will take on helpers. The easy sections to update probably won't, but the hard ones require much more personalizing and therefore probably won't either. For instance, Mailbag is one of the more difficult jobs, but I couldn't really have a helper help me much, since the bulk of my job is my personal responding. The easier jobs, however - such as polls - are likely much quicker and thus those staffers wouldn't bother hiring a helper. Sections which I think would be likely to get helpers are Merchandice and Links.

~GiS

Considering I ever visited their sections, they're doing okay. And I'm thinking of a webcomic contest. Several artists draw a comic, and have people fill in the balloons! emilio, Jonk, Meeellla, and all the rest!

--SuperSpeedy





Actually, that could be pretty cool! We need something fresh and new around here.

~GiS

I think PappyCat is doing a pretty good job with the articles section, better than anyone since Ultimoo, in my opinion.

Keep up the good work!

In the lines of a new contest, possibly who can spelunk the most penguins the fastest, but that's not really EarthBound related...

--Leeman





Yeah, Pappy's the best thing to ever happen to Articles in my opinion. She's happy with her job and determined to help the section grow, and I greatly look forward to the reawakening of Sm.net debates.

In regards to your second comment, I'll have you know that there is in fact a mysterious bond between penguins and EarthBound. You see, EarthBound has Mr. Saturn in it and Mr. Saturn is named after a planet and a planet is big and big rhymes with pig and a pig is pink and pink is the color of flamingoes and flamingoes spend time in marshy areas and marshy areas contain a lot of water and water freezes to become ice and ice is abundant at the South Pole and there are penguins at the South Pole.

See the connection?

~GiS

A new contest idea?!?! heres what I think

Okay It takes a few weeks, plus theres a catagory for everyone!

You make a game some how Earthbound related,

So lets say the first week you have to submit the title.
The next week the main charicter's spirte.
the third and fourth week you write the story-line.
and so on.....

Each week the person running the contest choses the best entrie.

After about two-and-a-half months you have A game.

p.s.
All the times it says Carmino thats my name, its pronounced
car mino (like the fish) NOT!
car me no.
thank you.

--rividkid





And there's another idea. The more the merrier!

~GiS

Well, I've only seen a few of their updates. However, it seems sometimes on the day of NEW staffers' updates, there's 2 times as many submissions!

About the contest, I think it should be an event where the contestants make a fluke of the camera man taking pictures, but making it as funny as possible.


*Dodges items thrown at him* Just a suggestion.

ANd, If you're reading this SimonBob: I'm not a newcomer! :D

--Moochie





We should actually turn Flukes into a contest. Funniest fluke wins. We could actually start to see some decently entertaining flukes that way. And the flukes that lose get RUTHLESSLY FLAMETHROWERED.

~GiS

So... new staffers, eh? That's it? No dares, or e-hazing to initialize the right to join the Starmen.net fraturnity? For shame.

--Da Foo





You should see the initiation ceremony. The Pokey-Gas infusions, the gradual exposures to Giygas...and the soul removal. You see, the method in which reid removes the soul of his victims is

This message has been truncated by reidman. Have a nice day.

I feel a bit like 'ol Rip Van Winkle right now but instead of sleeping for a few decades i just stop visiting the site... and i come back some few months later and look what's changed... I was unaware there were even plans to change staff much less that it had actually happened, and also other weird things, such as Flukes being Updated, i bet that was one of the staff changes huh owell well geuss i got some stuff to get used to, cause that there are regular updates there is reason to stick around. until the next subject (hey maybe i'll actually know whats going on) Lataz

--Rootbeer Kid





Exciting and new stuff happens all the time! However, Flukes currently has the same staffer it always did. Wampa was not fired, he just woke up from a long and well-deserved hiatus.

~GiS

OK, OK, I get the idea. Everyone's tired of reading my loooooong mailbag entries, and probably no one has read any of my entries since November. So this one will be shorter. I promise.

We had fun one snowy day. I melted, but I am still real in your memory.

As I recall, Shadow was supposed to be the Mother 2 section staffer before they settled on KindarSpirit (or it was some other section; my memory is failing me miserably) but never responded to Tomato's emails or something. So Tomato evidently likes him. I dunno what to think about SSB... I have two different long FAQ-type documents I wrote about that game two years or so ago, but I don't think they'd be of any use to the SSB section. And besides that, does anybody go to the SSB section anymore..? Well, I don't own a gamecube and I still played SSB regularly on my ol' N64 before I went to college *sniff*

PappyCat is doing wonderfully with articles, so far. Problem with articles is sort of like the problem with, say, Presidential scandals... when it's fresh and new, it's fun to keep track of, maybe even participate in. But once a few weeks go by and everything settles down, no one writes articles anymore, which frustrates the articles staffer du jour, which in turn causes him or her to go into an updating funk and then disappear. I hope this doesn't happen to PappyCat. I also hope she revives debates, because I REALLY like debates, as you might have guessed. (I challenged H. Ross Perot, whose name can be rearranged to spell "SHORT POSER", to a debate two years ago, but he never returned my calls.) Anyhow, other than debates, I'm not in the business of writing articles, but my buddy cwill just wrote a dandy and is planning to write some more. So maybe there is some hope for the articles section, after all. The problem is that cwill's articles are long, complicated and ! probably boring, but check it out for yourself.

I don't know anything about this Pi fellow. I bumped into him once in Moonside and he said, "I'm pretty forgetful. I even forgot why I'm here. Hmm... I just forgot something... Who am I? Am I a man?"

From the Harrison Bergeron Memorial Department for Random Thoughts (HBMDRT):

- I love my ergonomic keyboard. In case you care, I can type around 100 WPM on this thing, albeit with low accuracy. Taking into account time to fix typoes, my true speed is in the 75-80 WPM range. I've grown to loathe old-fashioned 1976 keyboards.

- I'm making flukes now. I'm going to pitch in on my self-declared effort to for the love of all things holy get some half-decent flukes into that section. You should make some good ones too.

- As for the contests, I really think we ought to consider the return of the hideaway contest. We have probably twice as much stuff on the site now as we did two years ago, and we could re-implement one of Mars's few good ideas, which was an easy hideaway link and a hard hideaway link each week. Of course, the one major problem with this contest is that it requires someone with the root password to be around to hide the links once per week. But it IS extremely fun. Also, I think we should have a contest wherein we post an extremely bad fluke and people have to guess whether it was one that we made up, or whether someone actually submitted it.

Why don't you buy something? I've got a family to feed!

OK, this is already too long, but you have to admit that I'm getting a little bit better... gimme some time here.

--The Artist Formerly Known as CPTCrunch





Heh, despite your attempts to shorten your letters, yours was in fact still the longest one I recieved this week. It doesn't really bug me, though. Last week I was sick and had a downright nasty headache, and had it not been for the three-weeks-dormant status of Mailbag I most certainly would have been asleep, not updating. To this moment I honestly have no memory of writing the words that were in my main page update that week.

"Flukes" seems to be the word on many people's tongues as of recently, for one reason or another. You've thoguht up a very creative way to poke fun at flukes, though implementing that contest might actually encourage people to make crappy flukes in hopes of being the focus of the contest. Then again, it might also encourage them not to. Either way, it's an intersting idea.

Hideaway, oh hideaway. I never did find a single stupid hidden link on this site, never ever ever. I'd love to try again. It'd also be fun to be on the hiding end of the barrel. I actually probably could...I have access to the whole Mailbag archive, so that's a lot of space in which to hide a link. It would also encourage people to read old Mailbags. I should try that some time, assuming I ever get anything good to hide.

~GiS

Hey GiS

The new staffers? Oh, I like this topic! ;)

Shadow was well overdue. He has been deserving of a job for a long time and I am glad he got one.

I don't know PiMcloud(SP?) very well, but I do know that he spends an lot of time at the SSB boards, so he was deserving of a job as well.

As for myself? Well, I am still too much in shock to comment. I am truely honored that I got this chance and I am very excited to start Fantasticizing the articles section. Look forward to some fun stuff!

Im looking foward to seeing an article from YOU, GiS. :)

--PappyCat





Article...from me? Heh, it might happen, it just might happen. I actually had a lot of articles planned about a year ago when I considered going for the Articles job. Unfortunatley I forgot all of them. :( Don't worry, though. I vow to someday send you an article. Keep up the good work!

~GiS

Coming up with conclusions gets very annoying. This may be my last stupid conclusion. Who needs conclusions? It's the body of the message that matters.