Back in the Long Ago, before the Terrible Times, there lived a quixotic software engineer and his precocious nieces and nephews. Brimming with creativity, this crew liked building things with words or with interlocking plastic bricks, exploring remarkable ideas, and playing the sorts of games that were both fun and made you smarter. They built a website that tried to put a lot of these pursuits together.
Even back in the Long Ago, before the Terrible Times, most of the best domain names had already been taken. The creative crew came up with some random, fun-sounding nonsense names, and the grown-up on the crew looked on the internet to see if they were available. They weren’t. Worse yet, he discovered that what seemed to be a random, fun-sounding nonsense name could sometimes turn out to be a nasty euphemism. You had to be careful. They eventually settled on the domain name Bzzwords.com. It’s more of an inside joke than a great name for a website.
The site took form, parts of it anyway. Unfortunately, the quixotic software engineer wasn’t specifically the type of software engineer who built websites. He implemented most of the functionality using something called the Adobe Flash Player, popular at the time, which basically allowed you to run a desktop-type application in a web browser. This turned out to be a mistake.
Several years later, the Inexorable Powers That Be1 took a dislike to the Adobe Flash Player. It was Deprecated, which meant that everything that used it stopped working, including most of Bzzwords. The site sat forlorn and barely functional for years. The quixotic software engineer put, “take down Bzzwords” on his to-do list. He never got around to it. That’s good, because Bzzwords is back.
All of the original functionality will be revised, updated and improved. New stuff will be added. The Trivia Training portion of Bzzwords University is already up. This site is never going to be slick, but it will be good for your brain, and unlike anything you will find anywhere else on the internet.
Enjoy.
- Who are the Inexorable Powers That Be? Here’s a hint: one a day will keep the doctor away. ↩︎