This is the new, current, latest and greatest web home of Excuses. The reality of it is that the real work is going on elsewhere, the page you are currently looking at is more like an archive.
Excuses V has the following links associated with it:
The main site on tumblr: http://excuses.cantplaypiano.com
Twitter page: http://www.twitter.com/excuseshq (There’s an RSS link on the page)
RSS feed of new editions only: http://excuses.cantplaypiano.com/tagged/Excuses_V/rss
YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/excuseshq
On to the archival material; Excuses is a publication that I’ve done off and on since 1998, it has thus far had five renditions:
Classic Excuses was published from January through March 1998 and had 9 editions. Of the 9, one was an insult generator that I tried out and it was terrible.
Excuses 2000 had 26 editions from October 2000 through May 2001. I tried out a few new things, and settled on the basic layout that has persisted to this day. Excuses 2000 ended when my computer blew up that spring.
Excuses 3 had 20 editions from September 2001 until February 2002 and was distributed via email, which turned out to be a lot more trouble than I had hoped. I simply had too much life going on at the time, and wound up canceling it prematurely. Edition 15 was somehow lost along the way and I somehow recovered most but not all of it. If anyone still has the original Edition 15 of Excuses 3, I would be forever in your debt. This version of Excuses debuted Embarrassing Ways you could Die, which seems to be a very popular part of the publication. Also added were a Quote of the Week, as well as a little more color.
Excuses Four had 18 editions beginning in September 2004 and ending in February 2005. It ceased production for much the same reason as the previous run did. Excuses Four was simply posted to the web, and this was a fair lot easier than trying to email the darn things. This version added Irony of the Week, which has since been removed because it was dumb. And I’m having difficulty fitting it on one page any more. Since it was designed for the web, no attention was paid to fitting it on paper, so when I archived it as a PDF I had to use legal sized paper. Technically I should have done this with Excuses 3 also, but the only part that was getting cut off was the same on each page so I didn’t worry about it.
The current version of Excuses is Excuses V, which had it’s first edition published in August 2006. The second was published in July 2010. Hopefully the next 28 will be spaced out a little more closely than the first two. At the outset the only new technology in Excuses V is the layout, done with Adobe InDesign. After a while, and some grumbling by people trying to read it on a mobile device, I (with an assist from the lead-grumbler) cobbled together a system that outputs a web page and actually looks good. Going forward, Excuses V will be done as web pages once again, but with a new and more productive spin.