The t-shirts are in the mail

In a week that saw Apple announcing (and shipping) a $500 mini mac, a iWork application bundle, a new version of iLife, and new $99 flash iPods, the real news scoop is how, after three years of waiting, Amiga club members have received their membership t-shirts from Amiga.com! Details at Amigaworld.net, ann.lu, and amiga.org. Next step, world domination!
What happens when a scene has moved beyond pathetic? What do you call that? A state of vaporous, ironic flubberdubber foolishdom? Have Amigans reached the same point that Star Trek trekkies did when they got dignified and changed their names to Trekkers? No, not even close. Star Trek really exists as a going franchise; Amiga exists as a mere shell of a website and not much more. Their desks, file cabinets, and computers were auctioned off long ago. Last I heard the company president was hiding from creditors, stashed somewhere between Idaho and Montana.
The Amiga was once the Ferrari of personal computers. It could multitask and explode with 4096 colors and stereo sound. It could handle desktop video. It was the cool computer for renegades circa 1989. But the platform couldn't survive the bankruptcy of Commodore, and its demise has come agonizingly slow since. Although the dream survives through emulation and vainglorious attempts to revive the platform on PPC chips, the development outsourced to European game coders, I must confess to humming tunes from Man of La Mancha whenever I sweep by an Amiga scene outpost, where the true believers stand off and scratch one anothers' eyes out. (A lot like Matthais (sp?) and his followers from Omega Man). This is how the Amiga world ends, not with a bang, but a t-shirt....