Wee Hamish A. Sanderson was born in a small coal mining town in the north of Scotland. His father, a blacksmith for the coal mine, was a huge man with large ham hands and a deep booming voice that could be heard through 400 yards of bedrock. His mother on the other hand was a small, fragile and frightfully beautiful woman with a high tinkling laugh who was known far and wide for her bonny haggis. Hamish inherited his mothers high tinkling laugh and his fathers deep abiding love of scotch. Many were the times that Hamish and his father would get snot faced and flatten crap on the massive company anvil. These were happy and influential times and would return to shape the psyche of an older Hamish. Young master Sanderson had 12 older sisters which is usually credited by historians as the primary reason he left home at the tender age of 7 and why, to this day, he sits to pee.

By the age of 11 Hamish realized that he was getting nowhere in his career of selling rat whiz to drug addicts and alcoholics who were taking urine tests for employment at the Glasgow Atomic Power Plant. Consumed with greed and an avarice for herring, young Hamish went to sea. Little is known of these years and Hamish sure ain't talking about it so lets just skip the parts where he gets the limp, lost his teeth and started barking like a seal and go right to the part where he first played Marathon.

In those humble days young Hamish had only a Mac Plus with maxed out memory, a turbo mouse and a custom keyboard that had all the letters he was not familiar with removed. The political landscape of Scotland was ruled by an elite clan of highland forest Pixies and the only way to get a decent computer was to blow each and every one of them. Our valiant Hamish, even sans teeth, resisted the temptation to upgrade and to this day songs are sung about him in Scottish pubs all the way from the Butt of Lewis to Peterhead.

Much is lost of the record of those days, it just seems to skip to the part where one day Hamish comes home with a shiny new blue 300MHZ G3 PowerMac with 512 Megs of memory, a 30 gig HD, a built in zip drive, 18X CD, 33K modem, color laser printer, track ball, a copy of Marathon Infinity and a big heart shaped box of Pixie chocolates under his arm.

The young and impressionable Mr. Sanderson played the entire Infinity scenario in one long 2 night session that involved lots of underwear changes, reboots and intense scream fests with his new bride of only 2 days. When he sat there trying to figure out what the hell the closing screen was trying to tell him and what the hell the whole story was supposed to be about, it suddenly occurred to Hamish that he could do better. Doggedly he opened the Infinity CD, and went straight to the one folder that rang and echoed in his ears with childhood familiarity, the Anvil folder. He swigged down the last pint of scotch from the open bottle and sucked the cork out of the next bottle (something he had learned to do in the forested highlands recently) and rolled up his sleeves.

The very first thing Hamish did was to spend the next few months, hardly sleeping or eating, mastering the "Last minute Tips" file in the Anvil folder. From there he became the first known expert in the "Note to Online Marathoners" file. HAS was on a roll and he knew it, soon he was deep deep into Anvil, the shapes and sounds files and all the mysteries that have driven lesser men as mad as Lh'owon loons.

Now, out of the kindness of his black and blistered heart, he wishes to share with you all the knowledge he has gained and up till now horded like an evil, demented Silas Marner. Keep in mind that these files are a work in progress, and that the progress halted when HAS' head exploded. If you have any questions about this information then you are urged (by me, not him) to contact him, the attending nurse will show the relevant parts of your email to the corresponding portions of his brain.

Besides having his head explode, HAS has had many problems relating to his experiences with Anvil. It is his contention that the information he has forwarded to me for presentation here is stand alone, baseline, bug ugly EVIL and will drive any man insane who attempts to make sense of it. Read, if you will, this excerpt from an email to me from this pathetic wretch:

"Hmmn, I noticed today that a large, gaping, sulfurous hole has opened up in the bathroom wall. At first I thought it was just the mildew at work, but the flickering flames and hellish baleful red glow it casts across the room are making me wonder otherwise. Something in the Faustian small print about non-transferable licenses. Do you think I have anything to worry about, or should I just try to polyfilla across it and hope the landlord won't notice next time he's around?"

At first I thought this was just the slavered ravings of a lunatic but from my own personal experience I have come to realize that I too have started down that road. HAS had just offered me his Edit Notes and was trying to brow beat me into starting this God forsaken Anvil Tips department. Just thinking about it had set the demons loose on me as is documented here in this email excerpt of me accepting HAS' offer.

"A lot has happened since we last communicated. First off I became fixated on things related to anvils, at first not understanding what was happening. I bought a big flat piece of steel at the junkyard and started hammering small pieces of hot malleable metal on it with a big honkin momma jammin ball ping hammer. My wife could not get me out of the garage and eventually everything metal in my house became flattened and reshaped. I had the cartoon of Daffy Duck dropping a 500 lb anvil on Porky Pigs head cut out of the cassette and spliced into a loop playing on both of our VCRs all day and all night. I lost my job because I spent all my time in the garage hammering or in my den carving my oak furniture into wooden anvils with tools I had created in my garage. The walls in our house became covered with images of anvils scribbled directly on the walls, some drawings were many many layers deep so that they were peeling off like old bark and floating to the floor like autumn leaves. She finally took the cats and left me after I made a huge 1,000 gallon mashed potato anvil sculpture in the dining room. At least it used to be the dining room, I had long since redecorated it into a 17th century blacksmith shop. All of this was happening in a dream like state but suddenly I have woken up. I know what it all means. I am ready to accept the challenge. I do not have my sanity to worry about, hell for years and years I haven't had THAT to worry about. I don't have my job to worry about. I don't have the wife and cats to worry about. Send me the damn-ed Anvil Archives."

And so, mortal, you have been warned... Abandon hope all ye who enter here!