Earlier today I rolled out the first real update to the site in ages.  The big change was of course, finally doing away with the idiotic cap/chat button.  There are now separate fields for captions and chat comments – so you don’t have to tell the site what you’re doing. And when you launch the mini-chat window, you can actually chat from there, instead of just reading other people’s comments. Other smaller improvements include fixing the profile links to the wiki, removing the bug that allowed the recent grabber freeze, plus some under the hood stuff that you probably don’t care about. Sorry for letting the chat/cap button linger so long.

Let me know if you see any new bugs that the changes might have caused, or any old ones I can try to fix while I’ve got the site open. I’m considering making some other improvements to the site, but there’s a lot of junk I want to clean up in the code before I add any more big pieces.

Some of you may have noticed we had some down time at the end of 2011. That was indeed negligent of me to let it happen. I’m investigating solutions to prevent it from happening again now, from the mild and inoffensive to the more severe that may entail another day or two of downtime.

By way of apology, here are some stupid sound clips to sneak onto friends’ (ok, acquaintances’) playlists.   What, why are you looking at me like that?

Century 21.1 Calling! [ 0:15 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Good old fruit [ 0:04 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Solid! [ 0:02 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Everybody knows [ 0:02 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

When you put it that way... [ 0:04 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It’ll just be a four day affair, Thanksgiving to Sunday. As usual, there’ll be screengrabs from the original versions of films that were featured on mst3k for everyone to come and riff on their own. You can see the list of movies here, but you’ll have to guess when your favorites are airing. I like the element of surprise.  Sorry for not making a bigger production out of it, but (a) the kids at Rifftrax  and Cinematic Titanic have re-lit the torch sufficiently that I don’t feel as much of a need to keep it going and (b) because.

This past weekend a few of us cappers got together to see Cinematic Titanic‘s live shows in Philadelphia. Before Saturday night’s movie JoeCrow was kind enough to take us into his Jersey lair aka The BotCave, where he builds Servos, Crows and other bots for common fans and even folks like Joel Hodgson (pictured at left with me at my goofiest).

We got to see the wonders of how a bot is built, and Joe even made us some Servo heads that we were able to be goofy with at the show (hoisting them when Servo was mentioned or alluded to).

Anyway, the show was excellent, and I’ll be running some of the pictures for your capping pleasure Monday June 22 @ 8 PM Eastern on Inventing Situations. You can preview (and well, caption) them by clicking the image here (that’s the end of the stream, the start is here).

I know about the new strange stuff with handles and images getting mixed up. It should be fixed by, oh, about April 2nd. So have fun with it while it lasts.

And do let me know if there’s any other lingering bugs from the improvements.