Click here for the full story, and if you do not feel like scrolling all that much!
Click here for the full story, and if you do not feel like scrolling all that much!
Heya folks! John here.
Just a little note that Greg and I are still planning Chronillogical’s return AND that we still don’t know when that will happen AND the possibility remains that Real Life will rear its terrible maw and devour CI in one gruesome gulp. We don’t want that to happen! But it’s hard to know what will happen in the future.
(unless you have a time machine)
For those of you still with us, I thought I’d share a quick pic of Jen, who appears to be out of her element, because hey! It exists and maybe people would enjoy seeing it.

Stay tuned! The contact channels are always open, and you may very well hear more from us in the future. Or maybe we’ll both die from a horrid case of Andorian shingles! Life is dangerous!
So a guy walks into a bar and says, “I need to put my webcomic on hiatus.” The bartender looks puzzled and says, “Sir, are you going to order anything?” The guy says, “No, no.” He touches the bartender’s hand and looks in his eyes. “I just wanted you to know.”
With a heavy sigh, the man leaves.
Here’s the important stuff: the website isn’t going anywhere (nor are the archives) and we both want to return to the comic eventually. This isn’t a full-blown abandonment by any means, but both Greg and I have our reasons for halting comic production for the present.
For me—me who is John, who is not Greg—this comic has been more of a crutch than a hobby in the past few months. I’ve used it as an excuse to avoid investigating and pursuing What I Really Want To Do, and I don’t have the emotional discipline to go on a spiritual journey and make comics at the same time. More predictably, Chronillogical has become more of a chore than a pleasant pasttime, and that sort of defeats the point of having a comic in the first place! In order for Chronillogical to be Fun and Meaningful again, it will need to change radically—and so will I—and that takes Time.
“Time”, you see? Oh ho ho, how ironic!
Greg has also been experiencing Life Events of his own that have had an unfavorable effect on comicking, but he’s decided to leave his thoughts in the comments (so as not to dilute my Thoughtful Prose).
If you’re subscribed to the RSS feed, then you will know perfectly well when the two of us decide to start posting things on the internet again. If you’re not subscribed to the RSS feed, then I recommend that you subscribe to the RSS feed! Otherwise you will miss out when our dramatic comeback descends upon the earth!
So, goodbye for now, but not forever (such is our intent, anyway):
Greg ‘n’ John
The Funnytalkers
Did You Know?
Greg is currently in the process of Moving and Founding a New Life, which means that the main story will take a little break while he sorts out his affairs. Furnishing his den, touring the ‘hood, scouting the local beetle farms—it’s all a very complicated process. So we’ll cook up a four-strip detour, after which we’ll see what Jen ‘n’ Roy are up to and whether they’ve had any Meaningful Conversations. About feelings. Or time travel.
In other news, it is raining outside!
See you next week!
As in This Week! The week we are all living right now. What a time!
Man, don’t you love it when cliffhangers remain unexplored for days and days and days? So do we! In that spirit, we’ll indulge in another one-off with the citizens of Owl’s Rock tomorrow, before finally discovering what happened to Milo come Friday. Imagine the hats that man has witnessed.
I am not sure what else to mention right now. Up-to-the-minute Exciting-Brand News can be had at our respective Twitter accounts, if you are 100% Starved for Greg ‘n’ John tidbits. And—honestly now—who isn’t?
A new webcomic appeared not too long ago, and it is unusually Full of Promise.
So far, Guilded Age—illustrated by animation professional Erica Henderson (Sluggy guest artist and former-Phenomenauts-animated-TV-show-pilot-maker) and co-written by T Campbell (who has done many things) and Phil Kahn (who I must admit I am not very familiar with)—features a medieval band of warriors who say funny things while battling the world’s evils. Action-packed and sass-tastic, aww yiss.
I recommend you start reading now! Before it’s too late. (There are five pages, it is not a big time investment. Yet.)
Two days, friends!
Firstly: September 12th approaches! What day is that, you ask? Why, it is…
Click the link above for more information. What be your time traveler of choice? Utopian? Dystopian? Victorian? The power is yours. Do not choose poorly.
We Chronillogical folks would have planned something breathtaking (bodacious, even) if only we weren’t busy planning other things—Greg especially. He has been jetting across the country in search of fame and fortune, which has hampered our comic-writing abilities somewhat. So, secondly:
Until then, you’ll just have wonder amongst yourselves: did they really have curtains like that in ancient Anatolia?
I hope everyone is having a bang-up Labor Day! (For our non-American readers, I hope you are having a bang-up Day!)
To celebrate, here is a video of monkeys:
Monkeys Being Ridiculous from Greg on Vimeo.
Two things:
[EDIT: After trying out the site, I must say I'm impressed. But I have concerns. First, everything is funneled through their site: you need to register to use the service, which creates a barrier to use. Also, the selection of feeds is somewhat limited (though they already have some heavy hitters like Wondermark and Dr. McNinja). This isn't too surprising, given how young the site is (1 day old). I hope and expect that the number of participating will strips increase substantially.
However! The process for adding your site to the list is not painless. From the FAQ, they need:
A way to figure out the URL of the web page containing each strip, given the strip number. This can be done three ways:
- If you can give us a sprintf format string, into which we can just plug the number, that's great.
- If your comics are indexed by date or some other method that doesn't map neatly to strip number, then we need a list of the strip page URLs, in order. In most cases, a simple directory listing should suffice.
- If your site structure is obvious enough to us, we can probably just work it out ourselves. We'll let you know if we can do this.
I'm not sure how many creators are willing to do this. Furthermore, a ton of webcomics nowadays are using ComicPress, which creates page URLs in a way that seems rather incompatible with Archive Binge's system.
My verdict: Archive Binge seems like a service geared more towards the hardcore webcomics reader than the average user. It's definitely a useful tool, and I heartily commend David Morgan-Mar (and co.) for being leagues ahead of me on this one. But I still think something like a Wordpress plug-in would be extremely valuable to creators. Directing readers through a third-party site is not the most user-friendly proposition. A simple link on the front page of a blog/comic would be best.]
A thought: Reading blogs through RSS or Atom feeds is a great way to get chunks of information delivered on a daily basis. I think that this format is amenable to delivering something like a textbook: every day you could post a subchapter-sized chunk of information. Since I’m already setting aside time in my day to check Google Reader, the marginal cost of adding one new feed isn’t very much.
Compare this to the cost of getting a textbook and finding time in the day to read it regularly. Adding a new task to one’s routine is always a tricky proposition, and I doubt I’m the only person who has difficultly committing to these sorts of things. For example: how many people stick to their New Year’s resolutions after the first month? Or even the first week?
But let’s say you shimmy the new habit into an existing routine (e.g., delivering a textbook via a web feed). That is, trick yourself into doing something new by making it look like something old. Well then, my friend! You might just have a higher success rate.
I’ve seen a few blogs that kinda do this. One example is James Tauber’s Poincaré Project, which walks you through the mathematics required to understand the famous Poincaré conjecture1. However, if a reader comes to the site after the project has started they potentially have to read an archiveful of articles to get up to speed. In this case they have essentially the same barrier to entry as with a textbook.
To get around this problem, users should be able to sign up for a personalized feed that gives them asynchronous daily updates drawn from the blog’s archives.
Let me explain. Let’s imagine a blog that attempts to teach its readers computer science. Like a textbook, the first post starts by covering the absolute basics (“What is a computer?”); over time it builds to more complicated concepts (oh, let’s say… concurrency). Unfortunately, by this point the blog’s RSS feed is useless to new readers: they won’t understand the most recent updates without having slogged through months of archives. The big idea behind the blog-textbook2 is basically bupkus.
To resolve this problem, what if there were button on the front page that said “Subscribe from the Beginning”? New readers subscribe with this link just as they would any other feed. But unlike a regular feed, when they go to Google Reader they don’t see the newest post about concurrent programming. Instead it’s the first update, the one explaining what a computer is. And the next day, they won’t see some incomprehensible post about locks and semaphores. No—it will be the second update ever, perhaps a brief overview of the history of computer science. And so on and so on: the new reader continually receives updates—just offset by a few months. It’s as though they stumbled across the blog right when it began.
Incidentally, such a personalized asynchronous feed could work beautifully for webcomics. Comic archives can become intimidating pretty quickly, and many require several hours’ commitment to pore through. (*cough* *cough*) Some people might enjoy such marathon sessions, but it takes time and I often find myself rushing through things, not enjoying the strips as much as I should, becoming desensitized to the jokes and art after hundreds of doses. The “Tag This Comic” functionality (now ubiquitous thanks to ComicPress) is a step in the right direction since it helps break an archive crawl over several sessions—but it’s still not quite there.
But if I could have comics delivered to me one day at a time from the very beginning—as though I’d subscribed to the comic right at its inception? I’d definitely be more amenable to reading some of the long-running webcomics I’m currently missing out on.3
You know, I assume that archive intimidation is a big problem for long-running story-based strips. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the single biggest barrier to growth for well-established webcomics. If I were making my living off my strip, I’d be hugely concerned about it. That’s why I’m surprised to see so many big webcomics still relying on story guides and “New Readers” tabs.4 Aside from the “Tag This Comic” innovation, what else is there?56
I’m not saying this personalized asynchronous doohickey idea of mine is a panacea. For one thing, its use would necessarily be limited to people who know what the heck it is. Few enough people understand (or choose to use) regular feeds, so I don’t know how many new users this idea would snag. Then again, if someone were to code up a solution—say, as a handy Wordpress plug-in—it would be trivial and cost-free for a blogger or webcartoonist to add to their site.7
And now, only after having written this long manifesto, the possibility that I am not the first person to have conceived this idea has finally crossed my mind. If anyone has heard of something that does this sort of thing—well, that’s what comments are for.
1 “Every simply connected, closed 3-manifold is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere.” I know what each of those words means independently. I only have trouble when you put them all together like that.
2 If this idea catches on then we absolutely need to start calling them blextbooks. Oh my god yes we need to do that.
3 Oh, and here’s an added bonus: if the comic in question updates less-than-daily, then your personalized de-synched feed will gradually catch up with the main strip over time! For example, if I’m subscribed to the archive of a Monday-Wednesday-Friday webcomic, my personal feed will update from the archive every day. The strip itself, on the other hand, updates only three times a week. Thus, I’m gaining ground on the newest updates by four strips a week. If the archive has 200 strips, I’ll be caught up in about a year.
4 No, I’m not being a hypocrite. (1) I agree that a well-written story guide/cast page page is definitely a bang-up idea and can go a long way. (Look to Octopus Pie for stellar examples.) (2) Chronillogical’s archives aren’t that daunting (relatively speaking). (3) It’s a matter of incentives. John and I don’t make a living from Chronillogical. I’m merely surprised that people with strong incentives to attract new readers aren’t innovating more. (Of course, it could be that the problem is to some degree insoluble.)
5Well, there’s always the possibility of a reboot. That’s what Kris Straub did at the beginning of this year with Starslip, when (among other reasons) he felt that the strip’s complicated backstory was discouraging new readership. And John Allison cited archive intimidation as one of the reasons he’s replacing Scary-Go-Round with a new strip. That said, there are obvious problems to this approach. John Allison runs the risk of abandoning a story, characters, and a brand that he’s spent years building up. Kris Straub’s reboot was definitely a success, but many readers will still probably see the large archives and be intimidated. Regardless of whatever assurances you may give them, some people just don’t like jumping into a story mid-stream. Heck, I’ve been unwilling to jump into gag-a-day strips without reading the archives. It’s irrational, but some people just like being completists.
6 You can always tell when my thought processes become muddled and befuddled because the footnote density increases dramatically.
7 “Greg!” I hear you say. “Greg! Are you not a recently graduated computer scientist? Could you, perhaps, be the one who codes such an ingenious diversion? Is that not a possibility?” True enough, dear reader. True enough. However, I have much on my plate at the moment (read: job search) and I am not at all familiar with the intricacies of feeds. That said, if anyone is interested in collaborating with me on such a project, feel free to get in touch.