Four years ago today, I announced that I was launching the webcomic Doomed to Obscurity. While it's had some modest claim to a few links and comments and some cult popularity, it's still pretty much lived up to its title. So by the end of this year, my self-imposed commitment to posting every odd-numbered calendar day for five years will end.
Note that this doesn't necessarily mean that the series will be dead forever. Maybe I'll keep it up if it gets more popular. Maybe I'll only publish ebooks. Maybe I'll only post it sporadically.
But more likely, I'll turn my energy to other things. The series has sapped a lot of my creative time. I did this as an experiment to find out: "Can I create an extensive work of fiction on schedule for an extended period of time?" The answer is apparently, yes I can, and even pull a few stunts and have some fun along the way. It's been a great outlet for random snarks, jokes, and goofy thoughts, even though it's sometimes also been a drag and some days appears to be running on fumes and desperation.
But I'm capable of a heck of a lot more. Some other stuff I've drawn in the past, for instance:
...so how long should I go on puttering on a newspaper-style strip? I'm curious to see what I could produce in a graphic novel published twice per year rather than ~180 so-so strips per year.
And then there's much more I could be writing, and programming, and designing...
Anyway, enjoy the last "official" year of DTO. Strange things may happen yet. And thanks to you few, loyal fans out there! I'm glad a few of you appreciated my weird little universe.
Title says it all; the wallpaper gallery portion of this site will be radically pruned. As always, it's licensed Creative Commons 2.5, so if you can use them for scraps for something, this is your last chance. I will be putting up new work, also licensed as such, but most of what you see there now is getting thrown out.
After all, I have wallpapers there from the days when 640x480 was the average screen resolution! Most of that gallery is ancient, hoary old drawings from my earliest experiments with 3D ray-tracing. 95% of it is outdated and cheesy. New art going there will focus on a much more modern style of vector art and minimalism, and the lowest resolution for the screen will be 1600x1200. A few pieces there which meet modern tastes will remain, the rest is getting thrown out because, frankly, I can't stand to look at it anymore and I can't believe anybody else can either.
Update: As of 09/20/12, the project is complete. While the new selection is sparse, the important thing is that I can add to it over time. I wasn't for a long while there, because I needed to get rid of the hodge-podge.
The tiny handful of regular readers to my webcomic will be thrilled to see that the New Reader's Guide got a badly needed update. I've been meaning to do that for at least a year, but everything else kept getting in the way...
Characters have all gotten shuffled around into new categories. There's now the "core four" main characters, major characters, supporting characters, and satellite characters who only peek in once in a while. As the series evolves, I'll try to keep things current. There's also a new section for most of the shamelessly deux-ex-machina plot props running around now.
Anyway, now those new to the strip will have a place to catch up. But be warned, some profiles necessarily contain spoilers if you're concerned about that kind of thing.
Hello, true believers! My online operations and productions have grown like creeping charlie, and I'm realizing that many readers might have a hard time finding their way to everything. Here is one, updated post linking you to every project I currently have my hands in:
#2. My webcomic, Doomed to Obscurity. Soon to enter its third year. It's a comic about technology and geek culture in general. It updates every odd-numbered calendar day.
#3. My Tumblr blog, Penguin Pete's Daily Funny. Just dumb, silly, goofy caption pictures, advice animals, Gimpz, the occasional cartoon, etc. For those who want to see the lowbrow side of my humor.
#4. My new weird-stuff blog Mind--Blown. It's basically a museum of curiosities, paranormal, fringe culture, avant-garde, outsiders, historical oddities... weird stuff. No purpose there, just something amusing to play with.
#6. My site's outside link directory: Linux sites, other FOSS sites, code sites, and other miscellaneous stuff. I still dump new stuff in there whenever I think of it. It's as much for my own convenience as it is for yours, because I always have a small, fast-loading web directory that I control, accessible from anywhere I can get Internet on whatever device is nearby.
#8. My poor, neglected eZine article account. Those articles are free for anyone to repost, by the way, as long as you keep the attribution, which is the concept of eZine. I mean to add more there. Any ideas for eZine articles you'd like to see there? Please suggest them! That way it'd be like Penguin Pete doing a guest-blog for you for free!
#9. My Delicious bookmarks. Public profile, added to all the time. These don't necessarily have anythign to do with any of my other interests, just plain old bookmarks that I want to keep but don't want to have cluttering up my Firefox menus.
#10. I also have one client who's nice enough to give me attribution on every post I write for his site. That site is Lyric Interpretations, and it's a site about music, and I'm one of the writers on the music blog. The whole place is fascinating, and you are guaranteed to learn things about music that you'd never encounter anywhere else.
Finally, here at last is my Twitter account. Follow me there, and I will try (really hard) to tweet every time one of the above projects updates, with the exception of Lyric Interpretations, because there's other writers there besides me... but sometimes I tweet about it anyway.
Can you see now why I did this? It's almost getting to where I need to clone myself just to keep up with me! No doubt, you stop by the blog and go "No new posts all month? What the heck is Penguin Pete doing with his time, anyway?" Well, now you know. If you're looking at any one site by me or account of mine, you're only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
I'll be getting back to this technology blog shortly - I'm training for the come-back! But in the meantime, with no real fanfare about it, I have another blog to add to my increasingly diverse portfolio.
It's just called "Mind Blown" and it's about... hey, wait a minute, I'm tired of explaining myself! So far, its posts consist of one trippy Gif, a list of every kind of animal I've eaten so far, an animutation video, a sci-fi mag cover, a sorta-review of Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, a video of a busker, an invention, a UFO cult, a video of Mr. T's singing, and a story about a nudism activist. There, you figure out what the blog's about! I know exactly what it's about, and what that is will become clearer with each post, but it can't be put into words, y'dig?
Oh, and I won't have any regular posting schedule for it. I'll shoot for once a day, maybe more.
Not terribly big news, but I've added a "random" link to the navigation bar under the strip on my webcomic Doomed to Obscurity. Click link, random past strip comes up, just like you'd expect. It's about time I caught up with the zillion other webcomics out there and added this.
I should add, a White Knight reader pointed out that there was a problem with my failing to check the input to the "$strip=" parameter in the URL, so some smart-ass could have typed "index.php?strip=0000001.jpg ' <and a bunch of code tags here>" and given it to someone else as a link to click. That is what we call a "code injection vulnerability" and it's a naughty, naughty thing for a variable to do. I did check trying to get Javascript to execute that way and always got a 403-forbidden, so my system is apparently too smart for that (or God knows, I coded something else back there and forgot about it), but I closed that loophole now by rigorously checking the variable's contents before using it.
And then tossed in the random-link feature. See what it takes to get me to update something around here?
Well, I guess I've sat on this one long enough, so this is the official launch of Penguin Pete's Daily Funny, a home for whatever cartoons, macros, advice animals, and other image jokes I cobble up.
Now you might be thinking, Tumblr... isn't that that place where everybody re-blogs everything posted by everybody else in an endless parade of the same tired memes 4chan got sick of last month? And that's what makes mine so special: it will always have 100% original content by me only! I'll leave the re-posting to you!
And it will post every day, instead of that complicated posting schedule I have for my "Doomed to Obscurity" webcomic.
By the way, if you've noticed another icon on this site's front page linking to a Blogger blog... I'm not announcing that one, because the idea just isn't gelling for me yet. So no guarantees if that other thing will pan out or morph into something different. I threw it at the wall, but it's kinda not sticking.
But the Tumblr one is all-systems go! Many happy re-blogs!
This blog will be in hibernation for awhile. But...
Relax, I'll be back to it later, and plus the webcomic Doomed to Obscurity will continue posting on its regular schedule, for possibly years yet to come!
There's a number of reasons that blogging on technology just isn't firing my rocket right now. For one thing, I'm kind of burnt out. After all, I've been doing this for five years, and there's a whole archive of posts to explore, which I don't think most of you have even checked out. As I write, this is going to be post #710, which, given a conservative estimate of an average of 500 words per post, makes about 350,000 words... that's a whole book's worth of content.
For another thing, there's other projects I want to try my hand at. I will be posting here to announce other things as I launch them. For instance, what if, instead of posting the occasional funny cartoon here in the humor category, I launched a daily Tumblr with original content, as opposed to the five million Tumblrs out there reposting each other's copypasta? Another instance, what if I took my fine-honed skills at web research and turned them to a blog about the most popular news topic of the day, or took advantage of my junk-house collection of odd-ball knowledge and made a trivia blog out of it?
Also, I hope and pray to restart on Flash games, adding a whole section to the site. My programming side is sorely neglected; my soul cries for code. It's been so long and I've grown so rusty, I'm going to have to start at square one again. There's dozens of other things I've been hankering to try my hand at, and if there's one thing I get tired of it's talking about an idea endlessly without ever implementing it.
I will be updating here as needed, introducing new projects as I get them set up, or other new announcements. Watch this space.
Anyway, here's to new horizons on the web frontier, but always with the Tux penguin on my shoulder.
As much as I dearly love hearing from all of you out there (even if you're just telling me to get stuffed), I'm going to have to turn off comments for an indefinite period of time.
Comment spam has become more and more of a problem over the years, to the point where I sit down every morning to delete the spam over coffee. Lately I'm running out of coffee before running out of spam. Recently this last week, I've been hit by a Russian botnet, one of those relentless Terminator-style ones apparently powered by Hal9000 and a nuclear reactor. They blow right through the CAPTCHA like it wasn't even there.
I'm going to try one or more of the following methods to solve this:
Come up with a new kind of CAPTCHA. Yeah, right, like that'll help.
Go to moderator-approved comments. Almost just as much hassle.
Go to registering to comment. I like this for some of you regular visitors anyway, because now you could own your own screen name.
Switch to a completely different blog software. Five years ago, I saw Wordpress and B2Evolution and shrugged 'eenie meenie miney moe.' Five years later, I am aware that I am riding a dead horse while the world has gone on with Wordpress, everybody raving about how great it is. My stupid.
Whatever it is, it will be a lot of work, either to code my own solution or find the right one to install.
Anyway, just sit tight out there, I might get this solved by the end of next month...
Hey, in the meantime, you can always talk to me or about me on Twitter!
