I kinda want to say something about the site, but I don't want to
clutter up the page with my dumb thoughts that the vast number of
visitors wouldn't care about. But you're looking at the source because
you care about something, which probably is not my dumb thoughts, but
here they are anyway.

When Abe was alive, people would ask, what are you going to do when he
dies? Well, the secret's out: I updated the status. Only 25 minutes
after he died, as far as I can tell, but didn't prevent people on
twitter from bitching about it. Years ago I did plan to write some sort
of automated updater, like maybe something that would poll IMDB every 15
minutes, get their status, and autoupdate maybe? But there'd still be
the hassle of updating that automated script every so often to account
for changes in whatever I was polling, and I couldn't get the
motivation. And as it turned out I did manage to update within a half
hour, so that 5 minutes of consternation every few months or so were all
for naught.

And in some naive way, Abe was one of those guys who you figured would
never really die. Partly because of the death hoax he had in
199something, and that was decades ago, so it had the feel of the
universe having its joke and probably having the good sense not to
bother with it again. And partly because he played this old slow guy on
Barney Miller, and some eons later he's on Conan being some old slow
guy, and you'd get the feeling he'd be alone in the post-nuclear 23rd
century wasteland looking for roaches to poop on.

I'm writing this about four hours after he died, and I've already been
asked this a number of times: what are you going to do with the site
now? Well, you're probably looking at it. It's still the same joke, just
the other side of it. The site will continue to give the Abe Vigoda
status, and you can still reload the page for the update. And I wanted
to write this now because it seems like I don't really have the interest
in maintaining features like this anymore, so if I write this now, this
is probably how this text will remain until the site no longer exists.

But that's what's getting me a bit. I hadn't really thought of that
until a couple years ago when a guy with a defunct podcast asked me how
long I would maintain the site after Abe died. And I said, "Uh...well,
until I die, I guess." Which suddenly put a shot of personal mortality
into a thing that had been a vague, safer concept of mortality. Someday
Abe would die, but celebreties are barely real, so a celebrity's death
is just the kind of thing you can make a one-page joke site out of. But
I like the joke, the simplicity of it, the unpretentious but slightly
odd honesty of it. The fact that it's essentially been the same joke for
15 (!) years adds to it, for me. Now, as it's the other side of the same
joke, the longer I maintain it, the more it ages. It has depth and
character and probably an oaky finish if I knew what that was. And 10
years from now, 20 years from now, it'll have that same quality. I mean
it's not a deep belly laugh kind of joke, but could you imagine how it
would feel to look at this site giving the Abe Vigoda status after it's
been online for 35 years?

So I want it to go on forever, but of course it won't. What am I, a rich
guy? It's not like I'm going to hire a lawyer to maintain a trust for
hosting provisions to be maintained after I die. So probably the status
of Abe Vigoda being dead will continue until I myself am dead, and the
reality of that is unexpectedly making me think about the finality of
death more than usual. I kinda feel like it'd be a funny meta joke if
some kid being born now were to grow up and eventually register
abevigodacomstatus.com which would go on for decades after I die, but
I'm just now thinking that's possibly actually a metaphor with
implications that I'm not currently interested in exploring.

But for as long as this goes on, it'll amuse me. And actually I'm
putting this in a hidden div rather than comments, to increase the
chance that it's picked up by web archivers. And that's even a bit of a
fool's errand anyway, because if very few people are going to read this,
how many are going to read the source of this page in an archive after
the site is gone? But somehow just putting the words here and knowing
it'll be saved Somewhere Else actually feels a little better. It's not
that people will read it, but just knowing there's a possibility that it
will continue to exist.

Well, thanks Abe. I know I'm writing all about me here, but thanks for
being who you were, and thanks for having a sense of humor about
yourself which inspired this. I have no idea if you were any good with
technology or if you ever saw this site, but I am sure people around you
knew about it and told you about it. Either you didn't understand it, or
didn't care...and while I'm inventing a conversation with you, I'm also
going to invent the scene where someone showed it to you, you were
puzzled, but laughed, shook your head, and appreciated that it was just
a harmless fun bit of crazy.

--Greg 
26 Jan 2016