"A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...."

Okay, so actually about 5 months ago in a city about four hours from this computer and probably farther away for you... a senior in high school had a vision.  He was an ambitious man... with high goals... a man with a dream....

Ha!  I know what you're thinking.  "Stop shamelessly promoting yourself Mariner, we all know its you."  But it isn't.  That senior has never gone by the name Mariner.  Anyways, this man's name was Paco.  He dreamed of building a website about pretty much everything that he liked.  Obviously, this was a pretty large endeavor, especially considering the fact that he did not know html and had never made a site before.  He told a few of his friends about his idea during a programming class.  These friends were Mariner and (not wishing to defame the other person for being mentioned on this website, I will use an alias) Shivan.  Shivan had made a few websites already and knew html.  Mariner, who had only recieved internet acces a few months before, had already toyed with this possibility himself.  But when Paco brought it up, Mariner volunteered to help.  Mariner didn't know html either.  It was a start, sort of.

Shivan suggested a place to build the website.  Paco and Mariner logged on there (I'm not naming the site, because I might get sued for libel.  I really hated it).  Paco started with the general stuff, but Mariner wanted to be specific.  Having recently learned of Zelda Gaiden (as it had been called) Mariner had a rekindled love of his favorite gaming series.  He figured a Zelda site would be an easy start, and got to work.  He named it the Book of Mudora.

Unfortunately, they both ran into problems.  The stupid web page server would not allow Mariner to log on at times.  Besides that, they had few services and a pathetic pagebuilder.  And the web page didn't seem to exist.  Frustrated, Mariner was pretty much ready to quit.  However, since he was new to web page building, he was unsure if these problems were due to the provider's incompetence or his own.  So, as a test, he signed up for Geocities.  It looked much better.  Finally, Mariner quit working on the Book of Mudora (which never actually got anywhere in the first place).

But he did not work at Geocities.  If it wasn't for friendly emails from Yahoo, he would have forgotten it entirely.  But after he graduated, he realized he should do something over the summer.  And he started work on a new Zelda website.

Actually, he didn't intend it to be Zelda only at first.  That is why we now have the index page for seemingly no reason.  But after working he realized he would probably use up all of the space (ha!  At the moment I've used less than one meg (quick loading time!)) and it took a lot of time.  Anyway, now he had to figure out the content.  He had already made up his mind to add a history section (and Paco told him to as well) and he had a few other ideas.  This is the point where Mariner became independant of Paco.  He chose a new name for some reason which he promptly forgot.  Maybe because it was easier to find a Triforce picture than a Book of Mudora picture.  This was no longer going to be a part of Paco's vast web sites, but his own.  Yay for Mariner!  He had looked around at a LOT (ask me anything, I'm now an expert on Zelda sites) of Zelda sites, and realized that they all contained the same things.  Sure, some of it was necessary (like game help), but couldn't they do original stuff as well?  (Yes, I know, a lot of sites had a lot of original stuff, and each one was unique in its own way, but this is my story, and I'll generalize as much as I feel like.  Stop whining.)  But there were many ideas that did not seem to catch on.  He found one dead Zelda site with Z64 challenges, and Mariner liked the idea.  He had some idea of this already, but that site made sure the challenges would be here.  So many sites copied off of each other in their history section (if they had it at all), and none bothered to explain themselves.  That is, except one other site, The Legends of Zelda (Mariner hopes he doesn't mind my promoting his site, it is very good), and Mariner used its idea of adding articles for his own use.  The poll, which Mariner takes great pride in (so go vote) came about through reasons you would not understand.  Anyways, Mariner worked hard on his site, even if it was only an hour a day, 2-3 days a week.

By the end of the summer, it was almost ready.  Zelda 64 was only half way done, and Mariner had only completed 2 chapters of the history.  But he was getting impatient.  He joined a couple of webrings (one of which still hasn't responded.  By the time you read this, it will probably be gone), but did not have time to put in links.  You see, he was leaving for college.  Anyways, the site took a break for about a week as he waited for his brand new laptop (which is cool)  Once he got it, since he had a lot of free time, he started to add links.  Because he hated seeing dead links and sites that have not been updated for years, he resolved to link only to sites that update at least once every 3 months.  This has been frustrating, but it is rather nice.  The rest, as they say, is history.

As for Paco, he quit making his website.  Mariner believes he quit using the evil provider and logged on to a different one.  He said he quit because he did not know html.  Too bad.  Seeing as Mariner is now far away from him, Mariner does not know about his plans.  Shivan was nice enough to answer a few html questions for Mariner (when it was absolutely necessary to use html), but other than that he played no significant role.  In fact he does not even know that this site exists. (Hi Shivan!  Tell me if I'm wrong on that part!)  Mariner decided not to tell anyone he knew about this site for some unknown reason, except Paco.  But there is no point to my ramblings at the moment.

You can tell I'm bored, right?