sp'a is back, baby![UPDATE-FROM-THE-FUTURE]'lo archives reader. You may be thinking "What are all these 'Nothing Happened Today' posts about?". If you are then you're in luck as I am going to tell you!

You see, back in 1999 I was a bit of a dick. "Really Errol? You?" Shut up. Anyway, I was getting quite full of myself with the development of South Park'ageddon as it was the biggest and first total conversion for Carmageddon 2. I was getting so big-headed that a number of "founding" members of the Carma community decided to teach me a bit of a lesson.

On Friday the 4th of June, 1999 I received the following email:

Greetings:

This is in reference to an email concerning the posting of "South Park'ageddon" on your web site.

We received a tip indicating the possibility of copyright infringement on your site.

As you are aware, all rights and copyrights pertaining to South Park and its associated characters are wholly owned by Comedy Central (as joint venture of Time Warner Communications and Viacom International) and we take any instances of infringement very seriously.

After reveiwing the material on your site, we have determined that you are in fact not making a parody of our intellectual property, and furthermore, are in fact using our good name in order to generate exposure for yourself and yourself only.

As such, we hereby demand that you CEASE and DESIST any further downloads of your "South Park'ageddon" file and immediately remove it from your site and also remove any possibility of further access to this file. Your ISP will be notified of this decision shortly.

Furthermore, if we discover that you have not taken these steps within 48 hours, our legal department in the United Kingdom will contact you and demand answers as to why you are refusing to comply with this order.

Needless to say, our copyright is applicable WORLDWIDE and you can be held liable both financially and criminally.

Once again, we have reviewed your material and have deemed it detrimental to our product and ask that you IMMEDIATELY CEASE and DESIST further publication and access to the material in question.

Sincerely,
Issac P. Terwiller
Legal Affairs Department
Comedy Central


Suffice to say this scared the bejeebus out of me. I had no knowledge of international copyright law or any money to defend myself should I end up in court. So... I over-reacted and deleted everything from the site. Permenantly in the case of the news posts. A few days later on Saturday the 5th of June, 1999 I received this email:

can't take a joke very well, can we?

we sent you that fake email about the south park file.

you can put it back, ...comedy central never sent you that email...its all been a carefully crafted parody to get you more attention for your cool download since you were the first one to make a complete conversion for carpocalypse now!

its all been a big game to fool people...all was part of a master plan to bring attention to your fantastic site

some of the long time members of the carmageddon community suggested it (by that we mean really long term as in the "founders" of the carmageddon web sites) though their names remain anonymous (since we don't know their real names anyways), and we orchestrated it according to their plan

however, it kind of got out of hand, no harm was ever intended, but unfortunately some people took things too seriously, so now you know the truth

please forgive a joke gone astray, had we realized that it would have been taken seriously we never would have let them talk us into it and never let it go on so long.

sincerely,

a few (sorry) members of the carmageddon community


I never did find out who sent the mails and I did what any 15 year old angsty teen would do: I was an even bigger dick to everyone.

So, to save you all the angst, all the drama and all the posturing I'm going to heavily edit all the posts my past self made until this fades away. I think about July '99.[/UPDATE-FROM-THE-FUTURE]

Anyhoo, all that trouble is cleared up now and so, thanks to my mate Reaper (insert "BIG MENTION HERE" here) for uploading all the files again and thanks to CoffeyCup from over at Mac Carpocalypse for being a mirror SOUTH PARK'AGEDDON IS BACK. And can be downloaded HERE!0 comments12:00am - Saturday, June 5th, 1999 - Errol
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