The History of Funeratic (2018)

Vigentennial

February 4: For Celebrity Goo Game's 20th anniversary, Scott decides to revisit the past: He recreates the 20 goos that he believes have been the most influential on the game, such as those that inspired new rules and new features in the game. This includes the first goo created by a player (Jackie Mason's Aaron Burr), the first goo to be part of a theme (Penélope Cruz), the first goo inspired by current events (Elián González), the last fictional goo (Long John Silver), and more. It culminated on the game's 20th anniversary by recreating the very first goo (LL Cool J), 20 years to the day from its first publication. Not every goo was popular (the theme required revisiting some of the least liked and least solvable goos to remember why the game stopped publishing goos like those), but by and large it was a hit, a landmark celebration worthy of the occasion.

Biblioclasm

October 12: Disaster strikes for Scott when an OS update scrambles his computer's hard drive, with no backup of the files. A hired professional cannot restore the contents. Except for what's online at the time, Funeratic's entire 22-year history is gone: Whole sections of the site like Pirate Paradise and The Weekly Curiosity are lost, as well as all photos and screenshots and saved backups of the site dating back to its very first version. Scott is distraught, and mad at himself for the series of mistakes that led to this event, but he has no choice but to go ahead with what survives online from the web server. Further complicating the mess is that Scott is left without a computer for over a month, unable to do anything but basic maintenance on Funeratic until his new machine is finally set up. He immediately schedules automatic backups on the new machine, and pleads with site members not to make the mistakes that he made.