When I got into the Ghostbusters online fandom fourteen years ago, the thing that got me noticed--that made the fan fic and everything else seem like something worth doing, that made Ludicris and SpecterHarness decide to invite me into the Ghostbusters West Coast--was the Ghostbusters Omnibus Timeline. At the time, before Youtube and the DVD set, it was about as comprehensively researched as I could manage...and encompassed virtually all of the entire GB lore at the time, this being before the "revival" which made the (to me) dumb decision to jettison 97% of the lore of the franchise to that point.

Anyway, that's all over and done and re-litigating it is a waste of time. That being said, over time as Youtube and the DVD set and the GBWiki came into prominence, a few things started to need revisions as more information came to light. Remember the flap about Charlie/Jim Venkman a few years ago?

But I think more than anything the thing that really started to bug me was a problem with Extreme Ghostbusters...I'd somehow written myself into the position of having all forty episodes occur in the space of about three months (September through December 1997). That seemed a bit crowded. And more, there were references in the show itself that indicated events that took place throughout the year.

So just fix it, right?

Not quite that easy, as the characters' birthdates were based on an assumption of age 18 in September 1997 (except Roland, who I set as 19). Numerous references in the Timeline and in Ectozone fan fic were based on those dates.

Well, recently I decided I really needed to take that plunge. More than anyone, it was the work of Rosey "EGBFan" Collins (a longtime collaborator, beta reader, and moderator at the Ectozone message board) and her brother Jake at their web site that prompted it. She'd done a lot of the work of "spreading" the events of all forty episodes over the course of 1997. I didn't follow Rosey's list 100%--I interpreted, for example, the contradictory dating cues from "Home Is Where The Horror Is" differently than she did--but a lot of it's her work and I credit her appropriately.

Along with that, all of the Extreme Ghostbusters are one year older. I carried the changes over onto the Ectozone Fanon Timelne, which means that there will inevitably be some in-story references I will have to revise, but I think this is a change that, in the long run, it made sense to make.

While I was at it, I ran both Timelines through a spellcheck--so there's a lower number of dumb spelling errors than before.

--Fritz V. Baugh