THE MAKING OF STALIN ISLAND PT 1

We don't often talk about how Time Cheetah came to be, but let me tell ya: this page has been many years in the making. I'll paint you a picture:

Cut to the fall of 2013. Beyonce caused a blackout at the Super Bowl, the Harlem Shake came and went in about 5 months, and Miley Cyrus ground her butt on Beetlejuice, which traumatized more people than the Red Wedding. My brother Alejandro and I sat around a table, discussing some Time Cheetah. Specifically, how the hell are we supposed to start this thing? We needed to introduce people to the idea of a dude with a cat head who doesn't talk and can travel through time—in a fun, ridiculous adventure. Not a lot of precedent for that, unfortunately.

My brother and I brainstormed for a while, before I mentioned numbers stations, of all things. That led to some random conspiracy talk, which led to mentioning lost Russian cosmonauts. Seemed like a good idea: Time Cheetah fighting dudes in USSR spacesuits. But where does he run into these cosmonauts?

That's when my brother brought up some history: apparently, there's a set of islands known as the Kuril Islands, part of which have been under dispute by Russia and Japan ever since WWII. What if a bunch of cosmonauts crash landed on one of the islands—lost to the history books due to some territorial disputes—and Time Cheetah arrives to fight them? So far so good, but nowhere near ridiculous enough...

And that's when we hit it: the cosmonauts aren't the only threat on the island! The island is a full of abandoned Russian labs and facilities, a place full of crazy, secret experiments! And the craziest secret of all: Stalin A.I.! A computer intelligence imbued with the mind of Joseph Stalin. He'd be a pixelated face on a computer screen, complete with ridiculous mustache. And this rogue A.I. would command the cosmonauts to take our hero down!

But if Stalin was on this island, then he'd want everything to be communist: communist labs, a communist theme park on the island, and even... a mountain with his spittin' image carved on it like Mount Fucking Rushmore! And that became Stalin Island.

There were still A LOT more hurdles to clear and changes to make before the story you're reading now came to be (spoilers: there's no cosmonauts anymore and the communist amusement park also fell by the wayside). But you could trace a direct line from that moment of moronic inspiration to this very page that you can read now. On the internet. For free.

Back then, I don't think we could imagine how far we'd get on our Time Cheetah journey. Looking back now, I don't think we knew just how fucking stupid the idea of a Stalin computer really was. And let me tell you: it's not even the stupidest idea in this story. Please keep coming back, faithful readers, and continue to be surprised at just how dumb Time Cheetah can get!