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The image that appears in the heading of my home page (as well as the heading above) is actually a Dweenle. So what exactly is a Dweenle? Well, it comes from a computer game called StarFlight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula created by Binary Systems in 1989 and marketed by Electronic Arts. By today's standards, the graphics would seem very primitive, but it was still a very fun game. The game involved exploring a region of space, collecting information and trading goods with various sentient species. There were several space faring races you could encounter, of which one was the Dweenle.
The Dweenle represented the oldest living race in the region (in fact, later in the game, your space ship travels through a time rift and encounters the Dweenle of the distant past). The Dweenle inhabited a few icy planets orbiting cold, dying stars, and their planets were apparently running low on valuable metals because their spacecraft were made mostly of lead. One wonders how they even got the ships off the ground. In any case, when you made contact with the Dweenle, you soon discovered in your conversations with them that the Dweenle were easily the most pathetic, depressed, self-loathing race in the galaxy. They would say things like "I bet you don't really want to talk to me. That's all right. I understand. I wouldn't want to talk to me, either."
I don't know why, but for some reason, out of all the aspects of the entire game, the Dweenle were my favorite part. I even at one point got an opportunity to obtain a Dweenle crewman for my own ship. Every once in a while, completely out of the blue, I'd get a message from the crewman saying "Captain, I just thought you should know that I'm feeling very depressed today."
Anyway, so now you know what that little creature
in my heading is. And knowing is half the battle. The other
half of the battle tends to be more bloody.
