What's New on the Site

Here you can see what I've added or changed recently. The links will take you to the relevant part of the site. Entries are in reverse order, ie newest first. All of the links should still work, but the content of the pages that they point to might no longer be as stated here.

07-02-2008. Another video on my YouTube channel. This is Grand Junction Ninety, a documentary about a Cornish beam engine. It's also linked from the video downloads page.

02-02-2008. After much procrastinating, I got myself a YouTube account last week. It's at www.youtube.com/pembersbcc. (The username "pembers" was already taken. The "bcc" refers to Borehamwood Camcorder Club.) Currently, three of my shorter videos are there: Cold Snap, Highlights from the Life of a Gasometer, and A Dragon Devours the Moon. These are also linked from the video downloads page on this site.

25-03-2007. Two updates in six weeks? This is becoming a habit... I've put a new picture in the Other Digital Images gallery. It's called The Temple of the Winds. Unlike a lot of my Bryce images, this one came together quite quickly over an afternoon when I was supposed to be on call.

11-02-2007. A couple of new links on the Links page.

02-06-2006. A new picture in Scifi Images Gallery 2. This is Racing the Storm. It's another one that I had lying around for a while and decided to dust off and finish.

14-01-2006. Gawd, has it really been more than a year since my last update? I've been busy trying to finish my fantasy novel The Price of Hope - currently it's something over 275,000 words. Anyway, the reason for this update is to tell that there's a new picture in the Analogue Images gallery. Curiously enough, it's connected with the novel, and is a kind of study of some of the main characters.

29-08-2004. I've put another T-shirt up for sale, this time of Jigsaw. You can buy it here. I've also added a page that lists all of the stuff that's for sale, which you'll find here.

27-08-2004. Finally, my legion of fans (that's you :-) can buy official Steve Pemberton merchandising. At the moment, the only thing for sale is a T-shirt of my picture An Appointment to Keep. You can buy it through CafePress here. Enjoy!

29-06-2004. There's a new picture in Sci-Fi Gallery 2. This is Sunfish Class Timeship, which is another type of ship in Timecops.

15-06-2004. I've put another video in the downloads section. This is a trailer for our still-unfinished video Timecops: The O'Grady Incident.

01-05-2004. Having found a way to create half-decent MPEG files on Linux (mpjegtools), I thought maybe I should upload some of the videos I've made over the years. There are two short videos for download here. These are The Capitalist Exploitation of Self-Organising Systems, which almost takes longer to say than it does to watch, and Rotoscoping Experiment 1. They're not necessarily my best, but they are among my shortest.

13-03-2004. After nearly six years of being online, I finally have my own domain, http://www.pembers.net. I've copied over everything from the old site at http://home.clara.net/pembers/. The plan is to keep both for a while, but redirect visitors from the old site to the new one. After some time (probably a couple of months), I'll close the old site.

08-01-2004. I've rearranged the digital images galleries to be organised more by theme than by date. After careful study of the pictures in those galleries, I decided to categorise them into (a) science fiction and (b) everything else. The "everything else" gallery is what used to be called Newer Digital Images. It's now called Other Digital Images.

The science fiction images are split into two galleries, imaginatively titled Scifi Images Gallery 1 (older pictures) and Scifi Images Gallery 2 (newer).

There's a new picture in Scifi Gallery 2, called Ammet Fleet. This is connected to my video Timecops: The O'Grady Incident. Speaking of that, we've finished shooting, and I've put together a rough cut. There's still some tinkering to do on the visuals to make it flow properly, but the broad outline is there. I've done a little of the picture post production and some CG, but there's still quite a lot of that to do.

07-01-2004. I've added three drawings to the Illustrations for The Times & Life of Lucifer Jones gallery. I'd planned to use them as cassette covers, if and when the shows ever got released on tape.

23-11-2003. I've added another picture to the Newer Digital Images gallery. This is called Fountain. (I seem to be using a lot of one-word titles lately, don't I?) I've also added a few sites to my links collection.

15-10-2003. Another new picture in the Newer Digital Images gallery. This one is Tourists.

13-10-2003. There's a new picture in the Newer Digital Images gallery. This one is called Pendant.

02-02-2003. I've put a new script in the Screenplays area of the Video section. This is Timecops: The O'Grady Incident. It has no connection with the film Timecop, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, other than having a similar title. Unlike the other scripts in the Screenplays area, this one is partly finished. We've filmed all of the scenes that take place in Ireland, but haven't yet filmed the scenes on board the ship. I think there's the potential here for a series of four to six episodes, but we'll see how we get on with this one before making a decision about that.

24-09-2002. There is a new release available of my unfinished comic fantasy novel, The Times & Life of Lucifer Jones. The words and the pictures are exactly the same as before. The difference is that it was previously in about 50 short HTML pages, and is now in four longer ones. Since four pages are much easier to download by hand than 50, I've removed the ZIP file that contained all the HTML. See the fiction page for more info about the book.

04-09-2002. I've recently resumed work on my fantasy novel The Price of Hope after a long break from it. As yet there's no new text to read, though you can read the first couple of scenes here. The reason for this entry is that I've done a new version of the map. This one is a lot more legible than the old hand-drawn one. The image file is also about five times bigger...

24-08-2002. There's another picture in the Newer Digital Images gallery. This one is The Dock.

11-05-2002. It's been six years in the making, but it's finally here. My science fiction novel Respect for the Dead is now available as a free download. It's about 68,000 words, or 450K, so you might want to take a look at the main fiction page to find out a bit more about it before you dive in at the deep end.

27-04-2002. I've uploaded lyrics for all the songs on the site. Lyrics are important to me, so I try to sing in such a way that you can easily tell what the words are. I don't pretend that I always achieve this, though, which is why this page is here. The other benefit of the page is that you can read it before you download a song, which might help you decide whether you really want to download it.

23-03-2002. Another couple of Bryce 5 images in the Newer Digital Images gallery, Blimp and Blimp Close-Up. These are stills from a short film I'm making about a holiday on Mars (!)

24-10-2001. (I'd forgotten to add this item to this page until 23-03-2002.) Another Bryce 5 image in the Newer Digital Images gallery. This is Abstract Spiral, which is, well, an abstract spiral sort of thing.

04-09-2001. There's a new Bryce 5 image in the Newer Digital Images gallery. This one is called The City in the Forest, and actually has a bit of a story to it.

05-08-2001. Bryce 5 finally arrived yesterday, and I've put my first image with it into the Newer Digital Images gallery. This is Lonely Rock.

06-07-2001. I've added some screenplays to the videos section. These are of videos that we haven't yet made.

There's a new picture in the Newer Digital Images gallery. This is Surveyor T93 in Clouds.

04-07-2001. I've split the "Pictures Drawn with a Computer" into two, as it was getting a bit large to scroll around comfortably. The pictures are grouped by date into Newer Digital Images (2000 and later) and Older Digital Images (1999 and earlier).

The Pictures Drawn by Hand gallery is renamed Analogue Images.

The gallery front has a new interface, 'cos I got bored of looking at the old one, and I got fed up of having to scroll to get to the bottom of it.

Finally, there's a new picture in the Newer Digital Images gallery. This is a second still from Surveyor T93, a short animated film that I'm slowly moving from pre-production to production.

16-06-2001. There's a new picture called Faded Glory in the "Pictures Drawn with a Computer" gallery.

02-06-2001. There's a new picture in the "Pictures Drawn with a Computer" gallery. This is Jigsaw. I could try to impress you by saying it was a year in the making, but you'd probably think there wasn't much to show for that much work. I'd also be lying. The truth is that I started it about a year ago, did a few evenings' work on it, couldn't decide how to finish it, and put it aside until yesterday.

23-03-2001. There's a new picture in the "Illustrations for Respect for the Dead" gallery. This is Camrun and Trant. Some of my pictures happen very easily: my previous one, Nobody Could Ever Take His Place, almost took longer to render than it did to create. Other pictures are rather more difficult, and Camrun and Trant was one of those. The difficult ones generally get to the point where I'm fed up of fiddling with them, and either shelve them or decide to put them on the site anyway.

19-02-2001. There's a new picture in the "Pictures Drawn with a Computer" gallery. This one is called Nobody Could Ever Take His Place.

12-02-2001. Borehamwood Camcorder Club (whose site I host) won the Joe Kay Trophy Competition 2001. More about their victory  More about the competition

Also, now that my secret admirer (see entry below for 06-01-2001) seems to have got bored (or, more likely, had his crayon taken off him and been sent to bed without any supper), I've removed his last few clichés and my devastatingly witty assassinations of what little character he has from the guestbook. Over the last few weeks, I've come round to the view that children should be supervised while using the Internet - not so much to prevent them from seeing harmful material as to prevent them from irritating the adults...

11-01-2001. I've redone the buttons on the front page and amended a link there, so that you can get to this page from that page (!). I changed the guestbook background, after it occurred to me that having it fade from dark to light and back to dark again isn't really a good idea when all the text on it is the same colour.

The buttons and both backgrounds are available for free download on the Resources page.

06-01-2001. This hardly counts as "What's New", but for the record, I suppose I'd better mention that on 23-12-2000, my guestbook was subjected to some prolonged, extensive and apparently motiveless vandalism.

On that day, beginning at about 20:00, an individual connecting from a LineOne dialup account spent about an hour and 10 minutes scrawling various crude and unimaginative obscenities in it. This person had evidently heard of me, because he or she typed my name into a search engine (dogpile.com) to find my site. (It's frightening what these web access logs tell you, isn't it?) You needn't bother looking at the guestbook to see what this individual daubed. I've deleted it all now, though not before notifying LineOne and getting the account terminated.

I was going to write a long diatribe on the general subject of what an immature self-abuser this person must be, and how he or she must be very cowardly and insecure, given that he or she has to skulk behind the supposed anonymity of a guestbook, rather than sending me an email to explain precisely why he or she doesn't like me or my website, and how he or she must be semi-illiterate and/or possessed of a below-average IQ, given that he or she can't express a point of view without a swearword in every other sentence, and how all of this is really nothing new to me, given that I've often aroused jealousy in people who are less comfortable with who they are than I am (Aha! So suddenly all this abuse is my fault? Very convenient.)... but I don't think I'll bother.

Wiser people than me have tried and failed to change anti-social behaviour in others. People who insult you generally want some kind of reaction from you. Failing that, I imagine that they'll settle for tying up a lot of your time in dealing with their abuse. Well, the vandal has a reaction: I saw to it that his or her account was terminated. The vandal has also succeeded in tying up a lot of my time - at any rate, more of it than I'd have given this non-entity had I passed him or her in the street. The matter is therefore closed, except for one unanswered question: what sort of pitiable, desolate life does this pathetic individual lead, that the most appealing thing he or she could find to do on the evening of the Saturday before Christmas was vandalising the guestbook of somebody he or she had never met?

10-11-2000. I've added a ratings feature to the Pictures section, so you can let me know what you think of the pictures. You can rate each picture on a scale of 1 (bad) to 5 (good). Once you've rated a picture, you can see the average rating that other people have given it. The averages don't update in real time, unfortunately. Doing this would require me to run a program on ClaraNet's webserver, which they don't allow. I plan on updating the averages once a week, or more often if I get a lot of hits.

Last update: 25/7/2020 17:09