So, first off, before anything else, today I posted thee 500th strip to jargon. Only a year and 3 months late from when I'd intended to, but it's finally arrived.
For a comic that started off as a joke on FreeAlways, hand drawn black and white sketches by a single person, it's certainly evolved since then. Nowadays jargon can be anything from a photoshop job gone wrong (although I use The Gimp, not Photoshop) to a hand drawn and digitally manipulated traditional comic strip. Plus anything in between. Over the years we've had JP, sicPuppi, Revan/JT, Seethe Seraph and most recently, Kalden Sorrow as contributors to the comic. Congrats to everyone who has contributed, hope to see most of you throw in a few in the next 500. :-)
Next up in terms of big news, I finally finished A Snake in the Garden of Eden, only took just shy of 4 years. It's only 35 pages, not the 40 or 50 I was estimating. Sure, I could keep adding to it to try to flesh it out but honestly, it's done. The story is complete, and I don't really have any inclination to make it longer simply for the sake of having a longer story. 35 pages is good enough.
As posted in my last article about writing, I have already planned out some additional series. Actually, there are several others I had planned, and others I'd started and posted on the scrawl page, but have since withdrawn. Anything I figure I'm never going to finish, has been removed from scrawl. Maybe one day some of the content will be re-used, but that's yet to be seen.
Anyway, out of the two pitches, I'm going to start work on The Ark first. While I really like the premise of Gates, I'm not quite ready to start writing it yet. There may be a few crossover stories between Gates and The Ark as well. Expect the first few episodes of The Ark to start arriving in the next few months.
Finally, just over a year ago, I announced a massive change to this website. I planned to migrate the whole site over to a new Perl 6 powered platform. Well, this hasn't happened, and isn't likely to for a while. The reason? Performance.
Currently, ww5 takes half a second to render a page. On the other hand, ww6 takes several seconds (up to 30, even with SCGI being used).
I am looking at doing something similar to Carl Masak, and using ww6 to generate a static website, which can be browsed at lightening fast speeds. It's not as cool as running the site live from Perl 6, but it would be a lot faster.
So stay tuned to see what form the ww6 migration takes, most likely it will be the static site first, and when Perl 6 is up to a reasonable speed, I may activate the live SCGI powered application.
Till next time, have a great Christmas season!