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November 19, 2007

It's official

Ghostbusters Video Game coming in October 2008.

Murray, Aykroyd, Ramis, and Hudson will provide the voices of their characters. Annie Potts will return also, but Weaver and Moranis have "passed" on the project. William Atherton (Walter Peck) will appear. And apparently they accomplished the impossible, and got Bill Murray's likeness rights (his brother will also do voices for the game)

(sigh) I gotta get this out of me.

I don't know why this doesn't excite me at all yet. I look around and everyone on all of the other boards is just splooging all over themselves over this, and it just leaves me cold.

Maybe it's because I'm not really a video game person.

Maybe it's because, while everyone else is going "OMFG Murray, Aykroyd, and Ramis are doing this one1111111!!!1111one111" I can't help but remember that their batting average with me is .500, meaning that it's just as likely this will be a lame attempt to cash in again as it's likely to be an inspired and worthy addition to the franchise.

Maybe it's because we got burned so bad by 88MPH and iBooks.

Maybe it's because with Sony's obvious mostly blasé attitude to this property, I have trouble believing they'll go all-out for it.

Maybe it's because I'm old, and battling depression, and feel so little joy anymore.

Maybe that will change. I admit the screencaps of the ECTO-1, basically the ECTO-1A with the original logo, does provide this slight sense of validation. And Rick Moranis not being in it does provide the slightest, teeniest ember of hope that Ramis will correct his biggest characterization misfire in GB2.

But on the other hand the whole concept of the game depends on some "Player Avatar" character shoved into it, which could be a very very bad thing.

All I know is that honestly, right now with everyone else raving about "THIS IS THE BIGGEST NEWS IN YEARS!!!" I have trouble caring much.

Keep up with Proton Charging and GBHQ for updates


--Fritz V. Baugh

October 1, 2007

One of the whole reasons I wanted to switch to stylesheets almost a year ago was because they would let me change the look of the entire site pretty quickly.

I didn't do a lot of that last year, other than the message board, because it was all new and I didn't want to confuse people any more than usual.

But this year, I'm gonna try and get with the program.

For the entire month of October, the Ectozone will be orange instead of red. Okay, maybe this was easy, as I basically reused the stylesheets from the Ghostbusters West Coast site, though their page is now orange and dark blue instead of orange and grey.

And even though the PhpBB3 board is new, I've uploaded a new stylesheet to it too.

And of course you probably noticed the Sam Hain logo, modified from the one I used on the Ectozone board last year (and just for the fun of it, the Archived Board has been switched to it's Halloween skin too)

And just wait until after Thanksgiving...

--Fritz V. Baugh

August 24, 2007
I've had the Ectozone hosted with Angelfire.com since the very beginning. It was almost six months after the day the site came up before I purchased the Ectozone.com domain name from Lycos. (in between, it was Ectozone.tk for a while)

I purchased the Ectozone.net domain from GoDaddy.com two and a half years ago, originally to be the url for my Digimon site; I did notice some blurb about "Free Web Hosting With Domain Purchase" but I looked around the web site and saw their "WebSite Tonight" program and thought it didn't look any better than Angelfire or Cyberturf (then the host of the Digimon site) or Freehomepages.com (the host of the GBWC site since before there was a gbwc.net) I set the domain url to redirect to cyberturf.com/digimon and left it at that.

Of course, the Digimon site never really took off, and later I tried to use Ectozone.net as a bit of a webring. That didn't really do a lot either, and since earlier in 2007 ectozone.net became a redirect to the Ectozone forum

Recently, whether it's an actual upgrade of GoDaddy's service, or I just read the wrong stuff, I've discovered I was very very wrong. It's a "real" web host program, with at present 5GB of web space, 250GB of bandwidth, MySQL database capacity, the works (maybe not as good as something I'd have to pay $20.00 a month for, granted, but it's frickin' free with something I'm already buying from them!!!) In four years I've filled about 12 MB, but that was through constantly trying to keep my file size down, and deleting some stuff I didn't need anymore.

Well, after some soul searching, some hard work, and some input from everybody who actually gives a flying leap what I do, I've decided to make the jump.

The Ectozone is all brand new, even though, at first glance, it may not look any different. Maybe not Ectozone 4.0, but Ectozone 3.5. The Timeline, the Fan Fics, the Fact List, it's all still there, pretty much exactly as you remember it (in fact, if you have Ectozone.com bookmarks, it'll take you to the exact same page on Ectozone.net) But with Ectozone.net, a lot more things will be possible, and probably will happen as my knowledge of web mechanics slowly grows.

Like, for instance, even two months ago if you'd started to talk about config.php files and MySQL databases, my eyes would glaze over (and admittedly, I still know jack shit about php programming or how MySQL works for the moment). But after some diligent research and a leap of faith, I have the first genuinely improved feature of Ectozone.net to announce:

The all new Ectozone Forum. And it's all mine. Not Proboards'. Not Netsolo's. Mine Uploaded, configured, and installed by Your Truly, utilizing the latest version of the popular PhpBB program.

So feel free to sign up, take a look around, and maybe help fill the new place up with the same insight I got used to at the old board.

And in case you were wondering, the "old" Ectozone is still there. While through the magic of IP pointing and Domain Aliasing Ectozone.com now redirects to Ectozone.net, if you feel like touring the old place just go to http://archive.ectozone.com. The url is different, but other than that it's pretty much just like you remember it.

The original Ectozone Forum is temporarily unavailable until I get it reconfigured to be disabled for new posting. As soon as that is finished, it will be reopened as an archive, and everybody should be able to retrieve their PMs if they so chose.

Thanks as always for your support.

--Fritz V. Baugh

July 2, 2007
As the guys who visit the Ectozone Forum know, I have a younger brother named Al (actually, he's one of three younger brothers I have, but that isn't important right now), who posts there under the user name OgreBBQ. He doesn't post very often, mind you, because 4chan has lots of porn for him to download and I don't, but he pops up once in a while.

What is not as well known is that Al dabbles in writing too. In some ways I still think he's better than I am, but he's even less motivated. Al's my first spellchecker, has given me more zinger ideas than I can count, and (under the pen name Jim Harley) is the creator of the Inquisitors, the team of characters seen in Shadow Of The Inquisitors.

Well, after a very long wait, I finally have something he's done ready to show the rest of you. If you've been wondering what happened to the brutal vampire hunter Anatole Vashnivski after he was Embraced...well, time to find out.

Blood Feud: Prague

It's darker and more intense than most of the stuff I do, but that serves the subject matter pretty well. I hope everyone else has as high an opinion of Al's work as I do.


--Fritz V. Baugh

May 13, 2007
Well, it's the fourth anniversary of the Ectozone, so I feel like I gotta write something deep and eloquent about it. Or, failing that, something self-important like "in this day and age lasting four years means something blah blah blah..."

I don't really have a lot to talk about though. All the Ghostbusters stuff is stuck in a rut. No news on the (supposedly) upcoming video game and (supposedly) upcoming CGI Ghostbusters 3. I'm not much better off on a personal level--my interets sometimes ebb and flow, and Ghostbusters is kind of at an ebb right now.

I've been spending more time lately playing around with Digimon stuff, especially after it was made official that the fifth season of the show was going to be coming this fall on Toon Disney. I was even inspired to rebuild my Digimon site, The Digital Ectozone, and am even in the process of writing a Digimon fan fic based on the Digimon Adventure (Season 1-2) continuity.

But not all is lost if you remember that I did once try to bring both of those interest together in a fan fic called "Digibusters" And the one new tidbit I have today (I try to have a new story ready for the anniversary) is, after a two year hiatus (like I said, my interests ebb and flow), Digibusters, Part 3

I'm not giving up on the Ghostbusters, though. "Pandora's Box, Part 3" is well under way, and "Digibusters Part 4" is almost done. And I keep intending to get "Chronicles of Gozer" done one of these years.

Thanks for your patience, and your four years of support.


--Fritz V. Baugh

March 12, 2007
Ghostbusters 3 at last?

So here's the deal, kids...

Back in February, there was a sensation on GBN and GBHQ. After a radio DJ inverviewed Dan Aykroyd and Shannon/Zedd made a post on GBHQ the Ghostbusters community was on fire like it hadn't been since late 2002/early 2003.

Ghostbusters 3 might finally be made! It would be in CGI and Bill Murray had agreed to be Venkman's voice, but since he wouldn't let them use his face "The characters will be based off the cartoon rather than the movie" (which, as you can expect, caused more than one movie purist to whine)! We were finally going to get it at last!!!

Or maybe not.

We had already heard that a Ghostbusters video game was in the works (go to the Proton Charging .com Archives for more on that) but now, what it looks increasingly like, as there has been no official announcement from Sony or any of the other actors who would likely be involved, that Aykroyd may have gotten his terms confused and the talk about GB3 was really about the video game

I admit I just couldn't get terribly excited after all the false starts the Ghostbusters community has had the last several years, but it also feels like a bit of a let down nonetheless.

Still, who knows? To keep up on any breaking developments:


Proton Charging. The Hardcore Ghostbusting News Site

Ghostbusters Headquarters Movie Forum

Ghostbusters Central Ghostbusters III Forum

And of course **cough** The Ectozone Movie Forum


--Fritz

January 1, 2007
I spent the last two New Years talking about how the previous years sucked. Well, 2006 still sucked, but not quite as bad. I did some successful stories that drew a lot of attention, like Where In The World Is Chelsea Aberdeen?, the mind-bending Gemini Rising, and the much anticipated wedding of Egon Spengler and Janine Melnitz, Forever. No real life triumphs, but no failures this time. And in the larger world, people woke up enough to the colossal clusterf*** of the Constitution and our troops being committed by the Cheney junta that his lapdogs suffered an electoral "thumpin' "

So what's in the works for 2007?

Chronicles of Gozer In the summer, Vincent Belmont bowed out of writing the finale of this long-delayed epic; he sent the plot outlines to Kingpin and me, and now that the big stories I was working on (ie above mentioned "Gemini Rising") are done, I plan to get together with Ben, Iain, Jeff, and a few others to see about finally getting this sucker done.

Ghostbusters: Pandora's Box In 1992, Now Comics began this story but never finished it. The Peoplebusters are loose in New York and the mystery of Ian Epimetheus is hanging over the Ghostbusters' heads...so how did those things turn out? Time to find out.

Ghostbusters West Coast Two new members have joined the team. Fritz and Chelsea adjust to married life. Kyle Stevens deals with the heartbreak dealt him in United Darkness. And in the shadows, the Necromancer sets up his dominos, waiting for the right time to knock them down...

Ghostbusters International Bo Holbrook has proposed some fundamental changes to the GBI operating paradigm, ideas that may lead to a big story with big reprecussions for every Ghostbusting franchise. It may even have Andy Harness's fateful title "Legends of Ghostbusters"...

And we start off with a satirical Apocrypha piece, in which I blow off some steam after the long, involved stories, and have a little fun with the excesses of fandom. If the title The Legend of Mary Sue doesn't tip you off what you're in for, be very afraid...

Have a safe and happy 2007
(The Seventeenth Year of Aquarius to you Hermetics. Though that doesn't start till March)

--Fritz

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