If you're looking to say something to me, you can send me a note to "golem" at this domain name. (I'd provide a direct link if it weren't for all the auto-spam I get these days.) But before you do, you may want to have a gander at the things other people have said and asked (below). It might save you a click or two.

Golem

USED-TISSUES.COM

PASSWORDS

WHY DO I NEED A PASSWORD FOR THE NON-ADULT STUFF?

WHY CAN'T I ACCESS THE ADULT STUFF?

CELEBRITY SUGGESTIONS

CONTACTING CELEBRITIES

WHERE CAN I GET THAT MOVIE?

SEX/MARRIAGE PROPOSALS

THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT THE VIRGIN MARY

HOW DARE YOU SAY THAT?!

WHO OR WHAT THE HELL IS GOLEM?

MOVIE CLIP PROBLEMS

EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES

Well, I suppose it's time I fess up to what's been glaringly obvious to many for some time: The Iconophile and Used Tissues are run by the same geek. While The Iconophile was and is my main focus, Used Tissues was created as a kind of backup site, just in case something bad happened to The Iconophile. (With all the threats and sting operations I was dealing with, it seemed a pretty good idea at the time to maintain a separate site, identity, and taste in celebrities.)

Sorry, but I just make the pictures and the dopey comments; I don't know anything about the mysteries of CGI or whatever AVSs use to make the passwords work, so wouldn't know how to do you a solid even if I wanted to. (Besides, the whole point of having an AVS is to ward off the stupid legal entanglements that plague other celebsites, and also to cut down on the bandwidth usage; letting you in through the backdoor would be defeating the whole point.)

I love your _______ page ... in fact, it's the only "adult" page on the entire net that I have any interest in. I know that getting a password will give me full access to yours and a bunch of other adult sites, but it doesn't make much sense for me to fork over my money for a password I'd only ever use for that one page. Can't we work something out? A pix exchange, perhaps?

For the same reasons as the previous question, no. Besides, sooner or later there'll be other password-protected sites you'll want to see, and you'll be glad you have your E ticket already.

I just noticed __________ on TV last night and fell in love, and it took a little work to find her name, but eventually I found your site. I'm not asking for a password or a backdoor ... I'm not even interested in your "Adult" pictures. If passwords were free, I would just sign up. I was wondering if you could, well, e-mail them to me, possibly. There are only 17 of them, and assuming an average of ~80k/jpg, that's only about 1.4MB, less zipped. If you have a slow internet connection, I would understand your reluctance. I don't suppose you believe I'm 18, but I also don't think there's any nudity in the pictures I'd like (based on what I know of her limited work), so if I'm lying it doesn't matter (legally, at any rate). It wouldn't cost you bandwidth on your website, so I wouldn't be defeating the purpose of the password block or anything. Please think about it. I'm not just some kid trying to get nudity. Whether or not that makes a difference in your book, I don't know, but yours is the only site with good info on __________ that I've found and I'm asking, humbly, for a favor.

Well, that certainly sounds like a reasonable request, and a doable one, since it circumvents my eternal problems with lawyers and impossible web hosting fees. But here's the problem: my mailbox is full of such reasonable requests, and to oblige even a handful of them every day would leave me no time to work on the site itself. (The day job and night job required to help keep this site afloat leave only a small window of time for screwing around with The Iconophile, and rounding up and sending off picture care packages on demand would not only shut the window but brick it up as well.) So as much as I'd like to be Santa Claus to every humbly written request I get, there just aren't enough hours in the day to make such time-consuming tedium practical or worthwhile.

From what I have seen so far you have a great site. Since I wanted to see more but didn't have password, I tried to apply for one. The process didn't work. I've sent an email to them about the problem. You might want to contact them as well ... imagine how many subscriptions you may have lost because of their screw up.

Like most sites using some sort of cgi, the password sign-up page might hiccup from time to time. Don't worry — it usually works just fine, and if it screws up, just try it again.

I have been trying for over a week to sign up for an AdultSights password so I can access your member areas, and I keep getting this message:

We are currently performing System Maintenance.

Your transaction was not processed.
Systems will be back online shortly.

Thank You,
Adultsights Support Team

Do you know if the problems they are having are permanent? Also, Is there any other way that I can be granted access to the member areas of your site? Any service that takes over a week to perform system maintenance makes me worry -- and besides I don't really care about access to thousands of sites. The only reason I was signing up for AdultSights was to have full access yours. Any help is much appreciated.

The root of the problem you're having is probably one of the following:

• Your computer is using a firewall, or firewall-like software like Norton Internet Security or NetBarrier. Depending on what your set-up is, you can either temporarily switch off the firewall, or add "www.homunculus.com" to the firewall's list of trusted sites.
• You're using some sort of mass-downloading program to access the pictures and clips. For whatever reasons, most of these programs do not properly pass referring URL information, with the result that they seldom get along well with my site. (They also use up a lot of bandwidth all at once, and make things slow for other visitors.)
• You need to empty your browser's cache. This may sound lame, but it's actually worked. Once I couldn't get into my own site, but after clearing out the cache, all was right again.
• You need to access the site with a newer or different browser. If you already have the latest and greatest version of whatever browser you're using, try accessing the site with Netscape (if you're using Explorer) -- don't ask me why, but people who can't access the site with one browser have no trouble when they switch to another.

The sad truth of the matter is that I've already got such a huge backlog of beautiful women and ugly comments to upload -- to say nothing of keeping the ones already online up-to-date -- that the chances of my getting around to uploading celebrities I haven't yet considered are pretty slim. (Plus, although it may not seem like it, I actually tend to be pretty finicky when it comes to additions to my little cyberharem.)

Summary dismissals of some recent suggestions:

• Amina Annabi: Don't know her, and couldn't find her on the web anywhere. Apparently she's in The Sheltering Sky, which I did see, but I must not have been paying much attention.
• Laura Antonelli: The only thing I've ever seen with her in it is Satyricon some years ago, but all I remember from it now is the picture on the video box, which doesn't include her.
• Marina Baker: I'd actually meant to put Marina up some time ago, but for some reason she kept getting postponed. Nowadays, of course, with Playboy scouring the net for people to sue, Marina's day on The Iconophile will likely never come.
• Ellen Barkin: I have no idea what her actual age is, but even when I saw her in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension back in 1984, she seemed old enough to be my mom. Moreover, her main "hook" -- her crooked smile -- too often comes off to me as a little contrived.
• Lara Flynn Boyle: Between the severe freckling on her chest and back that almost looks like some sort of fatal skin condition, her bloodless, death camp physique, and her overdone vamping whenever she plays the seductress, she strikes me not only as unsexy, but undead as well.
• Lisa Boyle/Cassandra Leigh: Lisa is someone I might have added to my site years ago if she had not also been one of my first boob-job disappointments. Her face was enough for me when I first started seeing it in episodes of Married ... with Children and in Playboy lingerie specials that her obvious implants weren't too much of a distraction, but later, when I saw them briefly unveiled in a chance episode HBO's awful Dream On, their helmet-like hardness and immobility were a bit of a turn-off. (Bad implants always look better in still photography than on TV.) Between that and the fact there's so much Lisa Boyle material on the web already, it never seemed really worth it to add my own two cents on her to my site.
• Christy Carrera: One of the many Playboy-affiliated models from this last decade that I've never heard of, her face didn't do too much for me when I saw her on the web, and the distracting artificiality of her chest rivals that of the big ears of Star Trek's Ferengi (or whatever the hell they're called).
• Lacey Chabert: Nice bod, cute face -- no reason not to put her on the site. But then she ruins all that when she smiles and exposes that Gary Busey-like monotooth. I don't care how hot the rest of her is -- if Gary Busey or Timothy Stack's face start superimposing themselves in the picture when I'm thinking about her, well, that's just not a direction I'm prepared to explore yet. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
• Donna D'Errico: While I agree that Donna looks pretty good in all the usual ways, somehow she never really did it for me. Perhaps it's just that I, like most of the country, got burnt out on the whole Baywatch phenomenon by the time Donna and the rest got on the show. Perhaps she seemed too much a Pamela Anderson clone for me to take seriously. Or that her chest is not entirely convincing once the clothes come off. Whatever the reason, it's unlikely I'll post her on the site.
• Camille Donatacci: If I remember her right, I'd have to say that I'm really not into the current Mrs. Kelsey Grammer any more than Kelsey will be in a few years.
• Linda Doucett: Sorry, folks, but as much as I loved The Larry Sanders Show (for me one of the best shows ever on TV), and as much as I liked Linda's character on the show (and mourned her leaving it when her off-camera relationship with Gary Shandling came to an end), I was never much moved by Linda herself. Great body and all, but I would never remember her face if I didn't keep watching re-runs of the show.
• Kristi Ducati: I liked her when I first started seeing her in Playboy lingerie specials, but by the time she made it to those "Bikini Carwash" flicks my interest in her started to wane. Maybe it was her permanently wide eyes that bugged me. Maybe it was seeing those armor-plated implants not move in motion pictures.
• Anita Ekberg: She looks a little like the evil, floating Baron from Dune nowadays (assuming she's still alive), although she certainly had a fantastic figure once. I'd have no problem putting her on, except that there are already a few web sites that've climbed that mountain first.
• Linda Fiorentino: Good actress, and one that I always enjoy seeing onscreen, but as much as she seems to love (perhaps even insist on) getting nude in her films, she's never really had much sex appeal for me.
• Maria Ford: A familiar name on late-night cable TV (she was almost emblematic of 90s erotic thrillers and other Skinemax flicks), though for me not an entirely familiar face, given that it looks different in nearly every movie I've seen her in. Not that it matters: Maria may have a thousand faces beneath her bottle-blonde hair, but so far I haven't seen one that I like.
• Nikki Fritz: No offense to her fans, but if I saw only her face and nothing else, I might've thought "Nikki" was short for "Nicholas".
• Joanna Going: I didn't know who she was before looking her up on the web, but it seems she was the Abbott I fast-forwarded through to get to Jennifer Connelly in Inventing the Abbotts. Between her fragile features and waifish body, I'm afraid Joanna will have to look elsewhere for internet immortality.
• Jonna Lee: Looking over her credits at IMDB.com, I think the only film of hers I might have seen is Chained Heat, which I can scarcely remember, and despite a quick jaunt on the web I've not been able to find any pix of her anywhere, so for the time being the whole Jonna Lee question is for me a moot one.
• Heidi Klum: I refuse to believe anyone who tells me they're into Heidi for anything above her neck, where things run a little plain and harsh-featured. All the same, that was some bounce she treated the world to on that televised Victoria's Secret show a while back.
• Hudson Leick: While Hudson is pretty hot as far as the world at large is concerned, for me she looks far too much like an obnoxious sorority sister to take seriously. I think the problem is the bleached hair -- her thick, dark brows and big, dark eyes together make the fakeness of her hair stand out all the more. Her knobby cheekbones and pointy chin don't do much to reel me in, either.
• Janet Leigh: No offense to Psycho fans, but to me Janet looks like most every other actress from that era.
• Lindsay Lohan: Don't get me wrong -- I like cute, cleavagey teens as much as the next perv. Maybe more so. Indeed, I might even have a problem. But as much as I want to like "It" Girl of the hour Lindsay Lohan, I've seen too many pictures of her in which she looks like a chunky hausfrau in her thirties. I don't know, perhaps I'll be more enamored of her when I get around to seeing Mean Girls.
• Julia Louis-Dreyfus: No matter how much cleavage she treats us to at awards shows, she still radiates about as much sexuality as Janeane Garofalo but doesn't have Janeane's personality or anything else that might make her more interesting.
• Leslie Mann: She's reasonably attractive and everything, I suppose, but a wee too delicately WASPy-looking for my taste.
• Jayne Mansfield: For the most part I was never much into the Marilyn Monroe clones, and Jayne in particular never did much for me.
• Athena Massey: I may or may not have seen her before I looked her up on the web. Perhaps I have to see her in a film before I come to any conclusion.
• Kenya Moore: I'm not at all familiar with Kenya Moore, but after looking around the web it seems there are two Kenya Moores: the Maxim era one, where she looks like a guy with great tits (which surprised me, since Maxim is usually where actresses and models look better than they ever have), and the (presumably) post-Maxim era one, which looks more feminine but blander, perhaps because of the straightened out nose.

  UPDATE: I just caught part of a movie Kenya's in called Trois, and much to my surprise she looked pretty good there. I'll have to keep an eye open for her to see if she looks that good again in anything.

• Madelyn Night: Apart from my usual aversion to unconvincing boob jobs, there's something about Madelyn's head that disturbs me. Even in her prime it was kind of squarish and Julie Strain-like -- although there are some older pictures I've seen where she managed to soften the harder edges -- and now, judging from the picture on her official site, well ... I don't know what you'd call the shape of her head now, but it doesn't look like anything that appears in nature.
• Hayden Panettiere: Cute kid, I guess. At this point, a little underdeveloped for my taste. Would probably help if I could bring myself to watch Heroes.
• Mary-Louise Parker: I think I've only ever seen her in Grand Canyon, which I only faintly remember now, and her even less.
• Heather Elizabeth Parkhurst: I've seen a lot of the films she's in, but I couldn't put a face to the name until I looked her up on the web. Didn't do much for me.
• Barbara Parkins: I'm not too familiar with her, but from the one or two pictures I saw of her on the web, she looks like another actress that I might be into more if I had seen her on TV and grown accustomed to, but whom I'm otherwise not particularly impressed by.
• Kimberly Paul: I used to like her back when I first saw her in Playboy's "Lingerie" specials, but since then I think I've gotten bored of her.
• Melody Perkins: I must confess I'm not too familiar with Melody Perkins, but after finding a few pix of her on the web, I think she's a wee too generically cheerleaderish for my taste. (I'm told she looks better in an episode of Malcolm in the Middle, but the modelling pix and Power Ranger vidcaps on the web are all I've got to go on for now.)
• Aishwarya Rai: I've never heard of her myself (I tend not to be up on my Bollywood celebrities), but from the pictures I've seen of her on the web, she seems to me a reasonably attractive fusion of Mila Kunis and Paulina Porizkova. Unfortunately, as delightful and popular as all three women are, I personally don't have much of an interest in any of them.
• Lisa Raye: Only ever saw Lisa on the web, but nice rack for a guy.
• Mimi Rogers: Maybe it's that I've never seen Mimi before her later years, but while she's been holding up remarkably well from the neck down, (and the ample chest is certainly a plus), her eyes are a little disturbing sometimes (they look like they've been sewn open or painted on her eyelids), and quite frankly I wasn't at all surprised when her Crying Game subplot revealed itself in Weapons of Mass Distraction.
• Betsy Russell: Sorry, don't really know her.
• Rhonda Rydell: I've only ever seen one picture of her (that I'm aware of) on the web, but my thoughts on her are pretty much the same as for the countless other blonde models that look just like her: If the quality of breast implants is such that I can't suspend my disbelief in them, then the face is going to have to be so exceptional as to compensate for their distractingly freakish appearance. Rhonda's is not such a face.
• Emma Samms: In pictures her face is unremarkable, but maybe I'd be more into her if I saw her on TV and got a sense of her screen "personality". I kinda doubt it, but it's happened before.
• Tracy Scoggins: The former icon from Dynasty and The Colbys has always annoyed the hell out me. I'm not sure why. Surely the mannish jaw and shoulders alone -- while certainly unappealing -- wouldn't provoke such a reaction. I think it must have something to do with her expression, which for some reason always came off to me a pretentious sneer.
• Sofia Shinas: I've actually seriously considered adding her. My only reservation is that so much of her nude work looks like it was probably done by a body-double.
• Pamela Susan Shoop: Looking over her pix at a website I've found, she certainly looks familiar (I would have been a kid when I saw her in things like Battlestar Galactica), but apart from the tiny pix I found on the web I have almost no memory of her. Nice rack, though, from the look of one or two of her photos.
• Elizabeth Shue: I really liked her when I first saw her in Adventures in Babysitting, but my interest in her has since dropped off a bit -- partially because I haven't seen her in very many films this last decade, and my interest wasn't strong enough to survive her absences from the spotlight. Out of sight, out of mind.
• Helen Slater: I guess she was sorta cute in Supergirl, in a bland sort of way, but it wasn't long before she hit the wall and quite frankly started looking a little homely.
• Yeardley Smith: Probably the most interesting request I've received so far. And while I'll acknowledge that Yeardley (aka "Lisa Simpson") is cute in her own way, for me she's cute only in the way that a puppy might be cute.
• Brenda Strong: Small cup size for such a broad chest, and a face that looks like it had a lot more hair on it once.
• Rochelle Swanson: When I first saw her in an episode of Married ... With Children I searched everywhere to find material on her, and only years later did I find a "Grapevine" item from Playboy that had a picture of her. Nowadays she's pretty hard not to find, but somehow she doesn't look like I remember her from way back, and this new and surgically improved Rochelle doesn't much hold my interest.
• Julie Tawney: No offense to her fans, but I'm not convinced that she wasn't born with a penis.
• Veronica Varekova: I had no idea who she was until I looked her up on the web. Quite possibly the most non-descript blonde I've seen in a long time.
• Estella Warren: Actually, no one's asked me to put Estella on my site, although that may change with the release of the new Planet of the Apes re-make. Unfortunately for me, as much as I'd love to induct her into the hallowed halls of The Iconophile (I see her as a sluttier-looking, English-speaking version of Laetitia Casta), a webmaster friend of mine already has her on her own site.
• Raquel Welch: I don't know what's wrong with me, but unlike the rest of the known world I've never seen what the big deal about her is.
• Kim Yates: Looks a wee too much like the real "girl next door", the one that everyone ignores. Could do with a smaller nose, or, alternatively, longer hair and more of a chin.

I am a model (or stripper, or cable access show host, or whatever). Although I am not famous, I feel strongly that I should be featured on your site. Once exposed to me, visitors to your website will drop whatever they are doing to worship me like the goddess I truly am.

Thank you.

Sorry, but I don't have the software, space, or time for sending entire films or breaking them up into bits. You'd be a lot better off just buying them online. The best place for that used to be BigStar.com (they often had some pretty hard-to-get stuff), but they left the video-selling biz, which pretty much leaves Reel.com and Amazon.com. The nice thing about the latter is that they also sell books, posters, and other stuff relating to whatever celebrity you're looking for, and to make things easier I set up links on most of my pages pointing to whatever Amazon has for that particular actress or model.

First of all, I am not Uma -- or Tamara, or Cristy, or Racquel, or any of the other women on this site. Like most people who visit this site, I'm your average, heterosexual male geek with way too much time on his hands. And way too many proposals from slow but horny teens who seem to think that these fan pages are the celebrities' own personal home pages.

It is very offensive and insulting to the majesty of the most Blessed Virgin Mary to take an icon of hers and fill here face with the images of prostitutes. Please be so kind as to remove it, or face the consequences of eternal punishment in hell for insulting the Mother of God.

The purpose of my site's title graphic is not to insult the Virgin or Catholicism, but to satirize the idolatry of celebrities. Obviously, the actresses (who are not prostitutes, by the way) whose faces appear in place of the Virgin's are not the Mother of God or are otherwise divine or semi-divine, and that's the point. It's social satire, not religious polemic.

I would say that it's the fan who can recognize his idol's shortcomings and hypocrisies and love him or her all the same; it's the sycophant who pretends they aren't there and expects everyone else to also.

But even if I weren't a fan, what difference would it make? Are you suggesting that only fans are entitled to their opinions and can write about this or that celebrity? There are plenty of sites on the net where famous folk are lauded to the heavens and hailed as a gods and goddesses among mortal men; you would do well to confine yourself to those sites.

I'm not sure what your ideal female form is. I mean, you call Kata Kärkkäinen a holocaust survivor, then you have a go at Michelle Williams for being what you think is fat. Give me a fuckin' break, mister perfect. I bet you're a fat, sad internet geek with a massive fear of intimacy and low self respect as judging from your putting down everyone. To top it off, you're a fuckin' hypocrite. "Iconophile?" Why not call your site "Show us yer fuckin' celeb tits before I get bored because I've got the attention span of the dysfunctional"? Check your attitude.

I think the source of your puzzlement over my "ideal female form" is this: there are the standards of beauty we reserved for "real", everyday people, and the standards reserved for the Beautiful People on TV, stage, or whatever. Any of the women featured on this site would easily be the most beautiful woman in the room if you had the fortune to meet them in real life. But on TV, where attractive people are a lot more common than in real life, you have to adjust your standards accordingly. To put it another way, imagine you're asked to pick your favorite of ten women randomly picked off the street. Naturally, you'll pick the one that comes closest to your "ideal woman". But then imagine that you're asked to pick your favorite of ten Playboy Playmates, and they all look like your ideal woman. Now you have you have to start getting pickier than you would normally be: this one's tits are too far apart, that one's forehead too big, and so on. So if I say that Michelle Williams is looking a wee chunky this season it's because, relative to everyone else on TV whose role it is to be the show's sexpot, she is. She's still a beautiful girl, and one of my favorites on TV, but she can stand to lose a few of those ten pounds the camera always adds just the same.

As for the hypocrisy of the site's title, I'll just say this: "Iconophile" means any lover of images; web shrines venerating a single celebrity's image tend to see their celebrity as the very definition of beauty; polytheistic sites like mine can afford to be more unbiased, since whether they mean to or not they invite the viewer to compare one beautiful celebrity with another, to discriminate between ten Playboy Playmates like in the example above. Besides, "show us your fuckin' celeb tits" is still asking for images, so "Iconophile" is neither inappropriate nor hypocritical.

And what right do I have to say anything if I myself am less than perfect? Imagine that I look like Jabba the Hutt and am violently misogynistic. What difference would it make? If I wrote that Calista Flockhart is looking a wee undernourished, would my own Jabba-like proportions make it any less true? Besides, whether I look like Jabba the Hutt or Pee Wee Herman, I don't get paid to look gorgeous; the women on this site do.

Why do you have to be petty and mean to celebrities on so many of your pages? What purpose does it serve? Every little effort made to contribute a bit of positive energy makes this world a better place. Would you rather the world get worse, more superficial and uncaring or become a better planet for all and those to follow? Maybe I'm being naive, but I'd rather be a naive, happy camper then a hypercritical curmedgeon.

Harry Truman once remarked about his epithet "Give 'em Hell Harry" that it wasn't that he was out to give anyone hell, "I just tell the truth and they think it's hell." The truth in The Iconophile is pretty subjective for the most part; I just calls 'em like I sees 'em. Sometimes what I have to say about this or that celebrity is more critical than not, sometimes fairly complimentary. Sometimes it'll start off as one, then end up as the other. In any case, the whole point of the site would be lost if I turned it into the E! channel and blew sunshine up everyone's ass. Why offer my personal two cents at all if I'm not going to be honest about it?

You do a service to Netizens by posting pictures so we can remind ourselves of our favorite celebs' allure. You wouldn't have put them there if YOU didn't like them. Why contradict that by leading it with a salicious comment?

True, I wouldn't put pictures of anyone on my site if I didn't like them. And I do like them. But just because I like them in some photos and movies, it doesn't mean that I like them in everything. The rule of thumb is: the older they get, the cuter they ain't. They might be fine actresses, but when they start turning 50 years old, I say it's time to shift gears and stop auditioning for those sexpot roles. No one's beautiful forever. To pretend that they are is just silly.

Do you think _______ would be happy if she stumbled across your site, as I did, and read that comment about her? How would you feel if someone posted your pic out there and said "this guy is a lousy programmer and doesn't know jack about HTML"? Don't tear her apart when the morons I work with in Hollywood have a hard enough time appreciating her talent let alone her beauty.

It is not the function of this site to be a delight to the celebrities it features; I am not a volunteer publicity agent. There are plenty of other sites that are, though, if that's what you're looking for; this site more represents the talk about celebrities one hears at the watercooler.

In essence, what you're asking of me is: "Judge not lest ye be judged". Which is basically saying "Don't think", since judgement -- being able to discern what's good from what's not so good -- is the whole point of thought. And even without thought, the body is programmed to judge for you. You can't escape it even if you wanted to. You judge when you pick the quickest route to go to work every day. You judge when you get horny in the presence of some people but not in the presence of others. A plant judges when it re-directs its leaves to face the sun.

As for how a celebrity might feel if they came across my site, what of it? Obviously, no one can escape being evaluated. Imagine you're a TV repairman. As long as people deem you a good at fixing TVs, you'll continue to have work. But no one cares about your looks, because they're irrelevant to your job. An actress' job, as long as she plays sexy roles, is to look beautiful. No one cares if she can fix a TV, but God help her if she starts getting crows feet. Everyone gets judged according to the sort of work they do. To make an exception for your favorite actress or model is logically and morally absurd.

As for how I'd personally feel if I found my site being critically evaluated on other sites, well, what can I do? It might bother me if I felt the comments were unwarranted, but as long as I maintain a website, I obviously have to accept that not everyone's opinion of it will be all that rosy. That's life.

How dare you write what you did about _______?! And in a public forum like the net! How would you like it if someone wrote that about you? How can you call this a "fan" site? You should remove your nasty little comments and post an apology immediately.

Deal with it, punk.

Second, assuming "Golem" isn't your real name, does this mean you are into JRR Tolkien, or just are maybe kind of like that slimy little froggy creature in The Hobbit?

Question the First: Intereresting theories all (I especially like the Soft Cell one, and might just adopt it as my official christening story), but no, my domain name's origins have nothing to do with any of that.

No, anyone can view the clips; it's just a matter of telling your browser how to access them, as Windows browsers seem unable to do this on their own when it comes to my site. The first thing you'll want to do is make sure you have your browser set to use the QuickTime plug-in, which allows your browser to play clips in the browser's window. One can do this, I think, by opening the QuickTime control panel, selecting the "Plug-in" tab, clicking on "MIME settings...", and then clicking on "Use Defaults".

Then make sure you LEFT-click the links to the movie clips -- for some reason right-clicking the clips doesn't work well with most Windows users. The clips will then load and play right there in the browser, after which you can either save it to your hard drive or click the back arrow to view another clip.

If you still can't download the clips, then the problem might be:

• Your computer is using a firewall, or firewall-like software like Norton Internet Security or NetBarrier. Depending on what your set-up is, you can either temporarily switch off the firewall, or add "www.homunculus.com" to any list of exceptions your firewall might have.
• You need to empty your browser's cache. This may sound lame, but it's actually worked. Once I couldn't get into my own site, but after clearing out the cache, all was right again.
• You're using Explorer, which seems to have problems handling certain information, with the result that a lot of people who can't access the site properly with Explorer seem to have no problem when they use some other browser. Accessing the site with Netscape or some other browser you're not used to is a big inconvenience, I realize, but as far as I know my site isn't doing anything out of the ordinary that would trip up Explorer or any other browser.

I use a download manager program and/or Windows Media Player to download files from sites like yours. On your site, though, the program often says that it can't find the file at such-and-such URL. What's the problem?

Download manager programs, besides slowing everything down on my site, very often have problems passing "referring URL" information, without which my site is wired to boot visitors back to the home page. I would recommend turning off any download manager programs you have and either left-clicking the links to my movie files and (letting the QuickTime plug-in handle the files) or right-clicking them and downloading them to your hard drive without first seeing them play in your browser. (Be advised, though, that right-clicking the clips doesn't work well for most PC visitors to my site.) Either way, you'll have to download each clip one at a time. Sorry.

I have QuickTime, but I still get an error message every time I try to download your movie clips. Or I don't get any sound. What should I do?

Hmm. To start, check to make sure you have the latest release of QuickTime, and that your browser is set to use the QuickTime plug-in to process movie clips. Then just click on the preview thumbnails (don't right-mouse click) like with any other link; the clip will start to load and will eventually begin playing right there on the web. Let it finish loading before attempting to download it, and when you do, just use the pulldown menu provided and select "Save as source". When you watch the movie offline, use QuickTime's Movie Player, not Windows' Media Player, which may or may not work with the newer ".mov" files.

On the other hand, the problem might simply be one of permissions, in which case you'll want to take at look at the appropriate section above.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what to tell you; I only use a Mac, but all the people with video problems are PC users. Your world is strange and frightening to me.

UPDATE June 2005: I recently upgraded to QuickTime 7 and have been posting clips that require it in order to play, but, as more than one person has pointed out to me by now, Apple has not yet made QuickTime 7 for Windows. The Apple site assures would-be downloaders that a Windows version is coming soon, though, so hopefully the world won't have to wait too long to see the newer clips on my site.

I've never had problems viewing AVI clips before, but there are a few on your site that say "Can't find the right codec" when I try to play them. How do I get the codec that it needs?

Some of the newer AVI clips use a format called DivX, and to play them you need a DivX player, which is available for both PC and Macintosh.

I can't see some of your newer QuickTime movies ... I re-downloaded QuickTime but the video stream doesn't work. Please help!

I've been using a couple new codecs in my QT movie clips, namely "On2" and "ZyGoVideo". If QuickTime doesn't automatically download them, you can download them yourself through the QuickTime control panel. Simply click on the "Update" tab, check the "Install new 3rd-party QuickTime software" box, click "Update Now...", click the "Custom" button, select "On2 Support" and "ZyGoVideo Support", and click "Install". Or you can get them from their sites at on2.com and zygovideo.com. Other codecs frequently used on this site are DivX and 3ivx.

I appreciate your reply in this matter.

I can't believe I had to make an FAQ topic out of this.

I'm not sure what's going on out there in cyberland, but for some reason there's always a throng of people rushing to Angelina's defense on this issue every time she has a new film out. Curious.

Anyway, the source of my information regarding Angelina is simply my own observations. Just as one doesn't need a plastic surgeon's receipt to see that Anna Nicole Smith's stuffing her bra with Confederate money, one has only to check out Angelina's nude scenes in Hackers and Cyborg (page 1 on the Adult Pics section of my Jolie site) and compare them with her post-op physique in Foxfire and Gia. Somehow she went from an A cup to a C on the way to her next movie set. And even if you haven't seen her early movies, her breasts, beautiful as they look, scarcely so much as jiggle in her all-nude dance/modelling scene in Gia. Like roaches and Australians, they'll probably survive the next war.