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April 8, 023 How time flies. I nearly forgot about my poor abandoned site. I almost was unable to log in until I found an old notebook with the information. I heard the sad news about the musical closing on Broadway. This comes about a year after I had to relocate due to an overheated housing market making it too expensive to remain where we were. With a terminally ill husband and a special needs teenager to care for as well, I have been exhausted and overwhelmed and I am not getting any younger myself. I came with intentions to go ahead and delete the site once I remembered it was still here and I found the login information. People don't visit one another's fan pages like the early days of the internet. The rise of social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, Reddit, etc has all but killed that old activity. I am not saying that out of anger or bitterness, just an observation that it is what it is. If by some chance there are still lurkers wandering here on occasion, just consider this for all practical purposes an old memorial mausoleum with me in a role like the caretaker in the 1960s soap opera "Dark Shadows." I suppose I could still add a musing here and there but that will be about it these days. (Speaking of "Dark Shadows," that will lead me to another musing later down the road.) I am sad to see the show close but unfortunately all things, even the good stuff, eventually comes to an end. I was originally going to delete the site after the twelfth year of that Chinese horoscope, which would have put it at 2020 just as the Covid 19 pandemic happened. During the move, I also wound up donating a lot of my old phantom stuff to Goodwill, some intentionally and some by accident in all the hectic busy work and confusion. How things have changed since I first launched this site, but that is another rant for another place and I suppose it is time to get quiet now. By the way, I never did get to a musing I wanted to address. Ages ago, when my site first launched, I had a search engine feature just for this site. Someone made an inquiry about the origins of Erik's first name. That was in 2009 and apologies for not staying current on this site. It is strange that Erik was born in France yet his name is spelled with a "k." He also did not like talking about it when Christine asked, per Leroux. Also it seems the Persian simply addressed him as "monster" a lot. I was watching a movie about Ghengis Khan, who prayed to Tengri. I looked up Tengrism and it seems there is another being that is sort of the rival and foe to Tengri, like Satan vs God, and Erik traveled further east for a while before returning to Europe. I wonder if someone saw him and shouted the name of that being in terror because of Erik's appearance and he simply dropped one letter out of the name. That being is named Erlik. I know it belongs in the musings section and I will put it there eventually, some time after Easter I suppose. April 18, 2018 I have a few musings I'd like to add, although not certain why. A compulsive urge, I suppose. Anyway, made one minor, but important, correction. Important to me. All these years, never realized I had posted the wrong year, I listed it as a year earlier than it actually happened. At the time I wrote it, there was little or no information available and I had to rely on an old childhood memory. Eh well. Fixed it at long last. July 29, 2017 Long time no update. I am surprised this poor abandoned site is still even up. Something happened with the link to the trivia section. It keeps going to some voice ad no matter what I do, so I renamed the trivia index page. Good news is, that page comes up now. Bad news, I have to update links to it from other pages. As though anyone really visits this site. These days people want to post selfies on Facebook or engage in bickering matches on YouTube. Sad. Meanwhile I have discovered the beautiful, talented Dimash Kudaibergen. What a sweet wonderful voice and a knockout vocal range at such a young age. He has the most beautiful smile too, one to totally die for! He must be living proof Erik is still alive and well. Check him out on YouTube. PBS needs to use his talent for their next pledge drive. Yes I am aware there is another animated Phantom movie. It was made some time in the past few years but unfortunately I have not seen it yet. (Bad me right?) I am in between being snowed, burned out, and getting too old. Again, people go to places like Facebook now anyway. Web surfing and web page building hobbies are obsolete it seems. Why learn HTML when you can just open a blog or a Facebook page? :0) Pardon digressions. In any case, I think the time is coming when I should turn the locust on my site for the second time, not to return. Not sure yet but from the looks of things, it may be time. I sold most of my phantom stuff in 2012 after a lot of financial hardship and have been involved in other things now. I still love the phantom though, so don't get me wrong. A youtuber seems to know my quirky temperment and attempt at mostly self-derisive humor. The channel is called PhantomReviews. and he has done an awesome job on collecting every single little thing humanly possible, no matter how bad or painful. :p Good bye for another indefinite amount of time, my friends. Back to the catacombs once more. November 7, 2013 No I have not abandoned my site. I've just neglected it. FYI, I have seen "Love Never Dies" and "The Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall." I watched them both last summer, in fact, I had stumbled upon them by accident while channel surfing. PBS was doing one if its pledge drives and aired these two productions. Yes, I loved them and for a long time I could not stop playing "The Beauty Underneath." I'll see about reviews but sorry right now it seems I am always short on time or energy or both. Anyways I did make some updates but not with any new content. Maybe it is the structure of these laptops vs my old desktop computer, or I am just getting old, but these days I can barely read my own web site because of the small font. It seemed like the thing to do at the time but I spent part of today making the font larger on some parts of the site including this page. Hopefully over the course of the next few days I'll be able to complete that project. April 17, 2012 Well, I was going to specify where in Leonard Wolf's book I had read what I did concerning the Siren as mentioned in Leroux. I am 100% certain I read it in there somewhere and now cannot for the life of me find it anywhere! Weird. In any case, I found a story about the Siren of the French Broad with is worth a look-see. In light of what happened in my life recently, I also added a little rant at my musings section titled Do Not Overspend on the 1911 Novel. I hope this article helps other phans who are strapped for cash. If I offend anyone, forgive me. I am specifically angry at one book dealer in particular and yes, I have some very unforgiving butt-hurt over it. Sorry to my phriends, I wanted to cut one of you a break only to be taken by this greedy little creep. So I am hoping this information will help you. March 29, 2012 I am in the process of adding an art section. Currently all I have up are the five illustrations by Andre Castaigne which accompanied the original novel published in 1911. These are public domain so any phan who wants a copy is free to take copies from my site to his or her heart's delight. I encourage it, in fact. The collectible 1911 edition has become too ridiculously overpriced. The story is the same whether you read a $600+ edition published in 1911 or the current free Kindle edition offered by Amazon or even the beautifully translated edition by Mysterious Press. One of the only things they may have (book sellers who charge so high a price) are the illustrations which are public domain anyway and were re-published in the Mysterious Press edition as well as at this site so take mine as much as you please instead of feeding and encouraging their greed. Don't be a jackass by overspending on an over-priced book. The illustrations are my gift to fellow phans everywhere. February 12, 2012 I've decided to remove a few of the sections: Poetry, Quizzes, and Fiction. There has only been one story and one quiz since I launched this site in 2008, so nobody missed much. I just do not have the time, energy, and talent to build up on those sections. I also decided to take down a couple of pages from Phunny Phantom. They were just YouTube videos anyway and in both cases, YouTube removed them for one reason or another. I won't be trying to find a new upload for them. I also gave the reviews on the musicals a little "makeover." The layout had been created when I had a much smaller computer monitor and everything looked very... off... on my new computer. Apologies to anyone who had wider monitors and/or newer computer systems who stumbled upon that section. I noticed there have been a few more kind words in my guestbook and I also have received a few kind emails about my site. I much appreciate it. Every time I think I should just take down the site, it is kind comments such as those that encourage me to keep the site up, even if I have not done any updates as of late. Real life is just bogging me down too much these days. When I do get a few minutes of quiet time, by then I am usually too tired to do much for my little site. It won't be going anywhere, but I probably will not be doing many updates for at least a year. Sorry. November 24, 2011 Sorry, folks. I know this site needs another makeover and a few updates just to show signs of life. I know the layout is all wrong and I did not realize the error of my ways until I got my new laptop. This site had been originally built using a very old desktop with a small monitor, in case you cannot tell already. :) I have developed a bad habit of abandoning this site for months at a time. Sorry again. If it't not one thing, it's another. Burnout, busy with offline life, you know the drill. I still love Erik, always will. I have more ideas for musings and trivia but again first things first. YouTube and its drama...If it's not one thing, it's another. Walking that gauntlet can be tiresome. I know some of the videos I embedded here were removed at YouTube for one reason or another. I'll be fixing that, too. May 30, 2010: I have plans for this site, but have a lot of offline issues to handle first. In any case, I discovered just last night that the wax museum Castle Dracula had burned down back in 1987. I updated My First Encounter accordingly. (Up until last night, I was not sure what had become of the wax museum.) April 25, 2010: Poor neglected site. Almost been a year since I have done anything. For whatever reasons, the Leslie Nielson video I had posted in Phunny Phantom from YouTube had been removed. I have replaced it with another YouTube video which I call Opera Cat, in which Erik is filmed giving his cat singing lessons. :) May 16, 2009: Time flies when you are having fun. (Note sarcasm.) Have not had the energy, time, or resources to work on this site for the past few months. Finally came back today to post a few more YouTube videos. One of them is in the Phunny Phantom section. It is a short skit from the old TV series Night Gallery, titled The Phantom of What Opera?. I also posted YouTube videoclips to The Church Scene and Phuzzy Phantom Moment. February 3, 2009: I've decided to take down all of the ads at my site and close those accounts with the advertisers. I was hoping I could earn a little extra cash but this web site aka "cyber-museum" was, and still is, just a novelty and my hobby. I'll just stick to the way things were in the old days (1999-2002) and keep the Phantom a fun hobby and my "home school front" of sorts. With the way things are right now, it is best. At least I feel more free to post lovely photos and artwork again. Nobody cared as long as it was not for making money. I'll keep the charity ads up, though... Those I got from the Animal Rescue Site, the Rainforest Site, etc. I won't be making anything off of those, but the revenue that any click will generate goes to those charities. November 14, 2008: I've decided to give my web site back its old name from years ago. From here on, it is back to plain old "Erik's Dominion." I just like it better that way for my own quirky reasons. November 11, 2008: Created a new layout for the Movies section and changed the wallpaper on the Front Page of the site from the red curtain look to the red roses. Also started on one of a series of sister sites in the works. This mini-site contains some information on Making Money at Home. So far I only have a some warnings about the types of scams out there based on my research and experience. People fall prey to these scams a lot and it will happen even more so with the economy the way it is. If I can stop just one person from making a big mistake with what is left of their hard-earned money, then this mini-site has served its purpose. September 24, 2008: How time flies when you are having fun. (Rolls eyes in sarcasm.) I have so much I'd like to do with this site, but time and energy keep escaping from me. I finally did manage to add a few more pieces of information to My First Encounter. People who read it were asking me where this place was, if it still exists, etc. So I hope it answers their questions. I also added a few tidbits of other fun information surrounding that moment. July 1, 2008: I renamed "The Erik in my Closet" to "The Saga Continues," then rearranged the order of the titles in my Musings section. Hopefully this gives it a better sense of "flow." June 25, 2008: At long last, I finally completed the Phantom Musicals section. Each musical I've seen now has its own page, complete with cast information, song lists, and a brief review. June 13, 2008: I really am working on more content, instead of just tweaking the layouts! Speaking of which, I moved the Hairbrush Song parody from the Phunny Phantom section to the Children's Adaptations section. It just seems more at home there. May 26,2008: After playing with layouts all month, I finally added something new! It is a page titled The Phantom goes to Hell, a collection of Phantom video adaptions I found at YouTube created to the song "Hellfire" from Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I also added a YouTube videoclip of Will Ferrell trying to sing "Music of the Night" on Late Show with David Letterman. May 6, 2008: Typed out the cast, song list, and brief review of the musical by Yeston and Kopit. April 29, 2008: Typed out the cast, song list, and brief review of the musical by Ken Hill. Similar content for ALW and Y&K musicals are still in the works. April 6, 2008: The monotony of my otherwise lovely red silk background was getting to me, so I decided to do things like the old days and add color variation. Some pages will have blue, some green, some violet, etc. Also, I added a song list to the page about the CD recording of the musical by Theatreworks. April 4, 2008: I changed the layout on the front page/index so that the introduction to my site and Erik's story are side-by-side with the links to the other sections of my site. It is better that way. Of course, that meant spending about two hours deleting the "intro" link off of the other pages of my site to avoid broken links. April 3, 2008: I cannot seem to make up my mind. I am keeping the old layout with the red silk (satin?) graphic in the background. March 20, 2008: With so many offline issues keeping me busy over the past month, all I had time to do was play with the layout on some pages, correct a few minor errors, and join some fanlists and web rings. I added a search engine courtesy of Freefind. I did not expect it to work so quickly. It crawled my site in a matter of minutes! After all that work on the "right" silky red curtain background, I decided to change it anyways. With some rare exceptions, I prefer keeping it all basic black or starry sky background. Most pages will be changed as time permits. February 14, 2008: Last year, I heard on the radio that the Year of the Pig on the Chinese Horoscope was about to begin. An astrologer warned that, unless you were born on the Year of the Pig, it would be a very hard year. Like any horoscope, I took it with a huge grain of salt. How I hate it when these things turn out to be right. It was a very hard year, but I hope it brought about the difficult changes that had to occur in order for my new family and me to go on with a new, prosperous life. It also brought me back to my old Phantom site. I spent a lot of time off and on, since April 2007, giving my old site a "makeover" and trying to update it before launching it into cyberspace. I have so many plans for it still, at the rate I am going, it would never be launched. Today seemed an appropriate day to launch it, and I will add more as I make new pages. February 7th was a day of the new moon, and also the beginning of the Year of the Rat. It is the first sign on the Chinese Zodiac. Valentine's day is exactly seven days later. The number seven has often been associated with good luck and angels. It is also on a Thursday, associated by some with prosperity. Here's to better years in love, luck, prosperity, etc. May my new life have many happy days. |